I'll Be Watching You

by M. William Phelps

  “What is she doing?” Luz asked her aunt as they talked on the phone.

  “She’s hitting on the kids. I’m going to call the cops.”

  By the time Luz got home, her aunt had already phoned the police. As the police were on their way, Luz and Carmen began arguing.

  “What are you doing, Titi? You don’t push the kids around!” Luz said. As much as Luz and Carmen got along and loved each other, they also fought more than any of the other siblings. “Calm down, Titi, calm down,” Luz said as Carmen screamed at her. Carmen was outside on the porch. They were going back and forth. Luz was trying to keep Carmen cool. Then, at some point, Carmen hit Luz. Pushed her down to the ground and started punching her.

  The police arrived. Carmen and Luz were on the ground fighting. But Luz refused to hit back. (“I would never hit my own blood. That’s just me. Never. Never. Never. I don’t care what she did to me.”)

  The police took Carmen away and arrested her for domestic violence and child abuse. She ended up spending ninety days at York Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Niantic, Connecticut. When she got out of York during the spring of 2001, she was a changed person. She started to watch her drinking. She was doing great, according to Luz, Sonia, and Kathy. She still liked to go out on the town as a means to blow off steam, but she didn’t come home drunk, plus those days of binging were over. Dancing provided an atmosphere for Carmen to let loose and relax. For the most part, she liked to hang out at Portillas’s Palace Café, on Park Street, which in Hartford is made up of largely a Spanish community. So Carmen felt at home. “Little San Juan,” some called Park Street. The International, on Capitol Avenue, near Kenney’s Restaurant and Bar, was another club Carmen frequented.

  IV

  One night, while Carmen was dancing at the Portillas’s Palace Café, she met Miguel Fraguada, a rather nice-looking, somewhat older man. Miguel fell for Carmen immediately. She liked the way he treated her and her children. He was always putting their needs before his own. A real man, the family called him. Miguel worked hard. He wanted to see Carmen do well. He was good for her.

  Carmen had always been rail thin, maybe 110 pounds at any given time. While in prison, however, for just a few months, she had packed on some extra weight and it showed. Miguel didn’t mind. He loved Carmen the way she was. “When I saw her the first time [after she got out],” Luz said, “she looked huge, because she had always been so skinny.”

  The weight didn’t seem to bother Carmen. She’d waltz around, laughingly saying, “Ahora conseguí la carne” (“I got meat now”). She loved the idea of having some “meat on her bones,” as she put it. She thought it made her look sexy. By no means was Carmen fat. She was heavier, sure. But it felt good.

  In photographs of Carmen with Miguel during this period, she looks content, happy to be with him. Somewhat of a ham whenever a camera was pointed at her, Carmen smiled and stared into the lens, as if she had a connection with whoever was on the opposite end.

  V

  In July 2001, Carmen finally found an apartment she liked. It was on Grand Street, right off Capitol Avenue, not too far from the safety net of her mother’s place on Putnam. Before she and Miguel moved in with the kids, they spent days and nights painting and fixing the place up to make it more homey. In both their minds, they were starting a family together. They wanted everything perfect.

  It was funny to Luz, Sonia, and Kathy that they’d come home and see Carmen transporting her personal belongings in a shopping cart from Putnam to Grand. She had no car—not many did in the city. But nothing was going to stop her. That first time Carmen went grocery shopping, Luz and her mother took her. Carmen was like a kid in a candy store. This was the first apartment she’d had on her own. She had never, in all of her years (she was thirty-two then), had a place she could call her own. She either lived with a guy or stayed with family. Ever since she put the deposit on the place and started fixing it up, she had even stepped away from the booze. She still drank, but not to excess.

  As they were trolling the aisles of the supermarket a day or two after Carmen officially moved into her apartment, Luz recalled, Carmen was excited about the prices of food. “She’d grab boxes of pasta and say, ‘Three for a dollar, I’m getting these.’ My mom and I would laugh. We used Goya products for everything. But it didn’t matter to Carmen.” She’d pick up a bottle of tomato sauce, a different brand that was on sale, and throw it in the cart.

  “But we don’t use that,” her mother would say in Spanish.

  “But it’s cheap. I’m getting it,” Carmen countered.

  It was the first time she had ever really been grocery shopping for herself. “It was like two hours in that store,” Luz remembered, laughing at the memory.

  VI

  Carmen had finally cut the cord. She was out on her own with Miguel. She had found her place in the world with a guy who loved her for who she was. As the summer went on, she called her sisters every day, stopped by to see them, or invited them over for dinner. They were a family. A close-knit group living within a few miles of one another. Miguel fit into the mix perfectly. Carmen was proud to call him her boyfriend. She’d even filed papers to divorce Jesus and pledged to marry Miguel as soon as she could.

  As fall came, being in the apartment day after day, night after night, began to wear on Carmen. She wanted to go out dancing, maybe have a few drinks. She wasn’t going to disrupt what she had with Miguel, she promised. The only way she’d go out was with his absolute blessing. She had stopped at Kenney’s, a local restaurant/bar around the corner from the apartment, once in a while to have a drink and play pool. But she hadn’t made going out or Kenney’s a habit. Luz knew she had stopped at Kenney’s, because Carmen had gone to her one day with a check from a Kenney’s patron, “Ned something,” Carmen called him. The check was for $25. Carmen said she had taken a survey for the guy and he paid her by check. She wanted Luz to cash it—which she did.

  VII

  On the evening of September 21, 2001, Carmen was at home with Miguel. Things had been going “great” between them, family members said. Because Carmen had been doing so well with her drinking, she had spoken to Miguel about maybe going out that night. Her aunt and uncle were heading to a club to go dancing. Carmen wanted in.

  “Can I go with them?” she asked Miguel.

  Her uncle and aunt were in the apartment, standing there.

  “I’ll watch her,” said Carmen’s uncle. “I bring her home early.”

  Miguel thought about it. Carmen was standing in front of him. It was almost as if she were saying, Please, please, please say yes.

  “OK,” Miguel said.

  Carmen’s daughter Jacqueline called her into the other room and helped her put on her makeup and get dressed. Putting on some flashy clothes and sexy makeup was all part of the atmosphere of going out.

  Afterward, they piled into Carmen’s uncle’s car and headed into the north end of Hartford, to the Goravena, a popular nightclub, where Carmen danced, drank, and had fun.

  It was around 9:00 P.M. when Carmen’s uncle said, “It’s time to go. I promised Miguel I’d get you back early.”

  To his surprise, Carmen didn’t bark. “OK,” she said.

  In the car on the way back, however, Carmen became a little impatient and wanted another drink. They were somewhere near Capitol Avenue, just a few blocks from Carmen’s apartment on Grand, when Carmen started arguing with them, saying she said she wanted to stop for “one more.” Just one.

  “No,” her uncle said. “You need to go home.”

  “I don’t want to go home.” Carmen kept repeating herself. She was in the backseat. She sounded a bit tipsy.

  “Come on, Titi. I gotta take you home.”

  Carmen opened the door when they pulled up to a stoplight and got out of the car. “No,” she said, “I’m not going home.”

  There was a cop sitting on the corner watching them. Carmen’s uncle, family members later said, didn’t want to get out of the car
and cause a big commotion. The cop would get involved. It would turn ugly.

  So her uncle let Carmen go. He figured she’d walk home. She was maybe two blocks from her apartment.

  Instead, though, Carmen walked straight down Capitol Avenue and went into Kenney’s Restaurant and Bar, which was right around the corner from her apartment, while her uncle drove to her apartment and roused Miguel.

  “She took off on me,” he said, “when I stopped at a light.”

  “Let’s go looking for her.”

  By now, it was close to 10:00 P.M. Carmen was sitting inside Kenney’s having a drink, talking to Ned, whom she had met once or twice over the past few weeks. To her, Ned was a harmless white nerd who liked to hang around the bar after work and play pool. She could finagle a few drinks out of him, call it a night, and walk home.

  Miguel, Jacqueline, Carmen’s uncle, and her aunt drove around the Capitol Avenue area looking for Carmen, never thinking to stop at Kenney’s, simply because Kenney’s wasn’t one of Carmen’s preferred hang-outs. They spent hours driving around the city stopping at the bars she liked to dance at. The thing was, no matter where Carmen went, how drunk she got or how late it was, she picked up the phone and called home. “‘Mother,’” said Kathy Perez, mimicking what Carmen might call and say when she was out, “‘I’m staying at a friend’s.’”

  After returning home, early the next morning, Miguel and Jacqueline waited, but the call never came. No one could find Carmen.

  55

  I

  After Ned was released from prison, he traveled straight back to Connecticut, settled into a seedy motel on the Berlin Turnpike in Newington (not far from his parents’ house) for a few months, and then moved back home. Several things were significant to Ned as he integrated back into society for the first time in over ten years. For one, getting the hell out of New Jersey as fast he could before the Department of Corrections decided to find a reason to keep him behind bars; two, starting over without being pressured from people (the dirty looks, the whispers behind his back); and three, if what Ned had been writing from prison to his former high-school friend George Recck was any indication as to what he had planned postrelease, planting his feet firmly in Connecticut, a fresh location, would provide new faces, new people, and, per Ned’s own words, new victims.

  Ted Bundy had driven into faraway counties and states to hang out at bars and choose the perfect victims. Ned had even mentioned Bundy’s MO in one of the letters he’d written from prison to his old high-school friend George Recck. There’s no way to tell for sure—Ned wouldn’t admit to it—if he had chosen Hartford in response to what he learned from studying Bundy, but Ned started hanging out at Kenney’s Restaurant and Bar, downtown, after he got settled into his parents’ house and found a salesman’s job at American Frozen Foods. Ned was an expert at what he did; he could sell milk to a cow. As a “food counselor” for American, he excelled. His job was to go into customers’ homes and pitch frozen foods his company would later deliver.

  Kenney’s was a popular local restaurant and lounge mostly populated by blue-collar workers, a few stray Hartford businessmen and locals, and several hookers working the area. As Ned’s job performance took off, he began showing up at Kenney’s every other day. Not to get drunk, mind you, but more or less to meet new people, scope out the scene, enjoy a few beers during happy hour, and maybe catch a Red Sox game. During the summer of 2001, Ned began asking his new friends at Kenney’s to fill out credit applications for American Frozen Foods. “Ned asked…this whole neighborhood to fill out a credit application or contract,” a former Kenney’s regular who knew Ned later said. “He wanted people with bad credit to fill out a contract to agree to buy frozen foods based on a credit check. Ned explained that he would put up a twenty-five-dollar fee (out of his own pocket) for any applicant, who would get a check in the mail.”

  Carmen had filled one out herself that summer after stopping in Kenney’s one night. Luz had cashed the check for her.

  For the neighborhood barflies who frequented Kenney’s, Ned’s offer was a free night out. For Ned, he would get a bonus for every contract he signed, whether the credit check went through successfully or not. Primarily, Ned had asked only the females. Alice Nevins (pseudonym) had hung around Kenney’s for many years and knew Ned as a traveling salesman, the somewhat taciturn, clean-cut geek with the enormous growth on the side of his neck—a benign tumor Ned had picked up with age—who liked to sit on the same stool and make the same stupid sexist jokes. Ned wasn’t feeling too good about himself these days. That tumor the size of a grapefruit protruding out of the side of his neck was benign, yet it caused him a great amount of discomfort and, of course, shot down his self-esteem even lower than it was.

  II

  Alice and her friend Tina were approached by Ned that August. Tina had introduced Ned to Alice. Ned knew all the neighborhood girls. He was even friends with several of the hookers. Tina was quite eccentric. She was thin, had short-cropped hair, with reddish brown highlights, and “very distinct” eyes, Alice later told police, which “seemed sunken in and very dark.” She was a chronic drug user, Alice claimed, like many of the prostitutes Ned knew.

  On the day Tina introduced Alice to Ned, he asked her if she wanted to help him out with the scam he was running. “I’m paying girls,” Ned told her, “to fill out an application. You’ll get a twenty-five-dollar check in the mail.” So Alice filled out the short application, but failed to put down an address.

  “What’s your address?” Ned asked, staring at it. “I need an address.”

  “I live at the YMCA, right up the street.”

  Alice liked to stop in Kenney’s every day. As the summer of 2001 wound down, she began to see a lot of Ned. He was always with one of the “girls” hanging out in the bar. Prostitutes were safe companions for Ned. Talking to them made Ned feel superior. Perhaps he could snatch one off the street and no one would notice. No one would care.

  Alice’s friend Kendra (pseudonym) lived above Kenney’s in a small apartment. Kendra and Alice would see Ned several times during the week, sitting at the bar, nursing a beer, trying to charm the girls. There were “several times,” Alice later said, when Ned asked her to dress more sexily.

  More provocatively.

  “Wear a low-cut skirt and boots,” Ned would demand.

  “Huh?”

  “Dress like Carmen,” Ned suggested one night, smiling, giving her the “Groucho Marx eyebrow” raise. It was obvious Ned liked Carmen. He hadn’t seen her much. But during those few times, according to sources, she had stopped in Kenney’s since moving to Grand Street with Miguel, she had run into Ned. At thirty-two (preparing to celebrate her thirty-third birthday that October), Carmen was an attractive woman, with long, flowing, curly brown hair, a shapely, girlish figure, and that Dentyne smile her sisters later spoke of so lovingly. She was five feet three inches tall. Although Latin by heritage, Carmen had a paler complexion—she looked Caucasian.

  Beautiful skin. Velvety. Plush. Soft.

  She hadn’t been partying too much the last few months, ever since getting out of jail. She looked good. Even felt good.

  For Ned, it had to be Carmen’s voluptuous chest that first drew him to her—Carmen was huge.

  With her sixteen-year-old daughter, Carmen and Miguel were happily situated and comfortable two blocks south of Kenney’s, one block east, on Grand Street, in that new apartment they had spent weeks cleaning and painting. Carmen talked to everyone. Ned didn’t have any other friends to speak of that he hung around or did things with. Ned had settled into his new life after prison as a loner—a man who lived in the basement of his parents’ suburban home, worked a professional job all day, and hung out at a city bar talking to prostitutes and locals at night.

  Carmen was different from the other women Ned had met. She had a way about her that Ned obviously found attractive. On some nights, Carmen wore her long hair up in a ponytail, like an Egyptian goddess. She strutted into the bar, wear
ing high-cut black leather boots, sporting bling around her neck, wrists, and ankles, a flashy skirt, and sexy, low-cut, tight blouse. She had likely come from one of the dance clubs in town, and as she had on the night of September 21, 2001, a Friday, when she had stopped at Kenney’s for a nightcap.

  Ned loved the way she dressed and the simple fact that she paid the slightest amount of attention to him. He never realized for one minute that she was probably just talking to him so she could get a free drink.

  When Alice showed up at the bar that night not dressed like Carmen, Ned got mad, Alice said later. (“He would be upset with me when I didn’t dress like her.”)

  Alice had no trouble shunning Ned. And she certainly wasn’t going to dress in the manner that a man told her. But the conversations she’d had with Ned made his relationship with Carmen—if it could be called such—stand out. Alice was the first to notice when Carmen and Ned were talking or hanging around together. And also the first to notice when they left together.

  56

  I

  They could always tell when she was in the bar. Her favorite song was “Suavemente,” a romantic Latin ballad by Elvis Crespo that took Carmen back to her roots in Puerto Rico. (“That’s how we knew she was there,” a woman who worked at Kenney’s said.) Like a starlet from an old 1950s musical, Carmen would walk into the bar, plunk a quarter into the jukebox, and…hit C-4…. That’s it…click.