“Suavemente.”
Ah, yes.
She would sit at the bar, sipping her drink, whispering the lyrics to herself.
II
The night of September 21 was cool in Hartford. The leaves on the trees in Bushnell Park were still dark green, ready to change any day now. Hartford is a two-and-a-half-hour ride on a bad traffic day from New York City. Only ten days after the worst terrorist attack in American history, the people of Hartford shuffled about the city with a certain amount of fear, uncertainty, and trepidation.
Inside Kenney’s on that night, the talk wasn’t centered on the recent deaths of over three thousand people in Manhattan and the fact that two national landmarks had crumbled to the ground. Instead, the talk at the bar in Kenney’s, at least between Kendra and Alice, was how Ned was schmoozing with Carmen all night long after she had strolled into the bar somewhere around 10:00 P.M. after jumping out of her uncle’s car a few blocks away.
As soon as Carmen walked in, she saw Ned sitting in a booth. Unlike a normal night where he’d sit bellied up to the bar, he seemed to be waiting for someone. And according to witnesses, Ned and Carmen hugged when she arrived at his table.
After a while—and a few drinks—they danced.
Played pool.
Janet Rozman, the bartender, even saw them kiss a few times.
Carmen was really tipsy. Well, maybe even drunk.
She and Ned kind of hung around together most of the night. It was loud in Kenney’s. Lobsterfest night. More people than usual. Carmen was dressed in those black leather boots, short skirt, and flamboyant blouse that Ned had begged the other girls to wear. Ned had on his typical business attire, but he had loosened his necktie, a red-white-and-blue cheesy sort of homage to the events in New York. At some point during the night, he took his tie off and gave it to Rozman, who put it around her neck, saying, “Check me out….”
Kendra and Alice walked around the bar several times and spotted Ned and Carmen laughing, talking, dancing, both the girls later reported to police. But after going out into the back of the bar late into the night, they lost sight of them. And when the girls returned to the bar area a short time later, Carmen and Ned were gone.
Alice was curious. She knew Ned was weird and could be a bit overwhelming and even violent, but at the same time, she understood why Carmen was hanging out with him: free drinks.
“Anyone seen Carmen?” she asked around the bar.
Several people said the same thing: “Carmen and Ned left together.”
III
Carmen’s daughter Jackie was pregnant. On the morning of September 22, after a night of looking around the city for her mother with Miguel, Jackie awoke to find that Carmen hadn’t returned home—or called. Jackie hadn’t gotten much sleep after spending half the night searching for her mother.
It was odd she hadn’t called, Jackie thought. Jackie’s baby shower was slated for Sunday, September 23. “Carmen had put the shower together,” Carmen’s niece Kathy Perez later said. “Every month,” Luz added, “she used to give me money to hold for the shower. It was at my house. She was so excited about the baby and the shower.”
The baby shower had to go on. With Carmen being gone now for nearly a full day, with no word, there wasn’t much to celebrate. However, life had to continue as if she was coming home. Think positive. She’ll be home anytime now.
After the quick shower on Sunday morning, Jackie and the others went back to handing out flyers around the city and calling people. The family got hold of the local newspaper, which happened to be directly across the street from Kenney’s, and asked if it would publish a photograph of Carmen with a note. But, like the local television station, editors declined, saying they needed a police report or some sort of acknowledgment from law enforcement that there was an actual problem. After all, Carmen was an adult. She could have taken off.
With no help from the local “English-speaking” media, family members claimed, Sonia, Carmen’s oldest sister, went to Telemundo, the local Spanish TV network, which agreed to immediately air something about Carmen’s disappearance.
Kenney’s was a quick stop off Interstate 84, a major Connecticut highway cutting a path directly through downtown Hartford. Above all, locals filled Kenney’s bar stools. Men and women who called one another by their first names and sat in front of bartenders who knew more about their lives than their own family members did. That afternoon, the family called the HPD. When an officer showed up, Jackie explained that Carmen was happy the previous night. She had gone out with family members and then took off on her own. She drank, sure. She probably hung out at the local bars more than she should have, but Carmen always came home at night. Or, Jackie explained, she always called. “She’d never miss my baby shower. Never.”
Besides a rather artful tattoo on her right leg, Carmen had an I Love You tattoo on her left leg, Jackie told the police officer, before describing her features: height, weight, hair, eyes.
“What was she wearing, do you recall?” the officer asked.
“A burgundy blouse,” Jackie said. She was sure of it. She’d watched her mother get dressed. Even suggested what to wear and helped her pick it out. “Two gold wrist bracelets, a gold-and-silver necklace, and double gold earrings.” Jackie also explained that Carmen had a tattoo on her ankle that said “Tarzan.”
On top of that, Carmen also wore those black knee-high “Nancy Sinatra” boots—the ones Ned had been so fond of and demanded the other girls at Kenney’s wear.
“Where’d she go last night?” HPD officer Jeffrey Rohan asked next.
Jackie was visibly upset. Something was wrong. She could feel it. “At about nine o’clock,” she said, “my mom’s uncle dropped her off on Capitol Ave, I think she was going to the El Camerio Bar on Walnut Street.” The El Camerio was a bit farther east, on the opposite side of Interstate 84, and Carmen had sometimes stopped in to see friends and have a drink. She never thought about why she had said “dropped her off” when she knew her mother had run from the car when her uncle stopped at a light.
In truth, Carmen could be anywhere. She was a grown woman. She had been known to stay out all night in the past and show up the next afternoon. What made today any different?
Jackie realized something was amiss. She knew her mother was in trouble. She couldn’t explain how. She just knew. “She always calls home if she stays out all night,” Jackie told Officer Rohan.
Rohan asked Jackie for a current photograph, adding, “It’ll be filed as a missing persons case today.” He didn’t want Jackie to worry. Someone would be on it. If Carmen didn’t return home by the end of the day, an investigator would be back. (“The Hartford police,” family members later said, “were very helpful. They did all they could for us.”)
Later that day, Carmen’s family posted more missing persons flyers around the Capitol Avenue region near Kenney’s and downtown. The Hartford PD had generated the eight-by-ten posters. Carmen’s radiant smile and expressive brown eyes—so guarded and yet calm and charming—shined on thousands of Hartford residents as they went about their lives unshaken by this beautiful woman in the poster staring at them. Her image was wrapped around telephone poles, hung up on the bulletin boards of Laundromats, convenience and liquor stores, gas stations and local businesses. Indeed, there was Carmen’s beautiful face: now a part of the “Milk Carton Class of 2001.”
57
I
As the Hartford PD put together a missing persons file on Carmen, Ned was in Cromwell, Connecticut, just south of Berlin. He had to put on a presentation for a client. The client had arranged for a babysitter so she could dedicate her full attention to Ned and his frozen-food pitch. In actual fact, the woman later said, she had already made up her mind to purchase the service before Ned arrived. She was impressed by Ned during the few times she had spoken to him on the phone.
Ned’s client and her husband sat in their dining room while Ned began. He seemed relaxed, ready to make his pitch. “He was dresse
d casual,” the woman later remembered, “but not in jeans. He may have worn a golf shirt. He did not appear hurried or bothered, but his presentation was very pre-rehearsed.”
Ned had done the pitch so many times that he could recite the thing while thinking about something else. As he carried on, almost sounding robotic, the woman interrupted, “Do you need a fan?”
Ned was “sweating profusely,” the woman later told police. So badly, in fact, that she brought out a fan to “cool him off.” The house wasn’t overly warm or cool, the woman noted. It was one of those perfect fall days. “I did not think it was too hot to be sweating so much, but I just thought Ned was a person who sweats a lot.”
II
One of the investigators who later studied and interrogated Ned told me that Ned was likely sweating so much because, at that moment, as he gave his frozen-food pitch, Carmen’s body was likely inside the trunk of his car out in the driveway. Ned was not known to be someone who sweat a lot. But when he got nervous—extremely nervous, that is—he had a propensity, several people later reported, to perspire like a long-distance runner. Still, although they never confirmed it through forensic evidence, ASA David Zagaja later said, “I believe, as well as my investigators, that Ned Snelgrove had Carmen’s dead body in the trunk of his car while he made that sales call.”
III
At some point that weekend, Jackie called one of her aunts and said she was worried that Miguel had taken Carmen. There was no motive anyone could decipher, but more or less a feeling Jackie had developed after thinking about the night she and Miguel searched for Carmen. After police told Jackie they believed Carmen had been at Kenney’s on the night she disappeared, Jackie thought back to when she, Miguel, and Carmen’s uncle had gone out looking for her. Jackie swore they had stopped at Kenney’s and Miguel took a walk inside the bar. If he had indeed done something to Carmen, he would have acted as if he had never seen her, especially inside the bar. Beyond that, Jackie reported that Carmen’s state card—she was on state assistance, food stamps, and welfare—was missing. Luz called Carmen’s social worker and explained the situation. She soon found out that $300 was missing from Carmen’s account and that it had been withdrawn from an ATM that Saturday afternoon, a day after Carmen was reported missing. Moreover, the surveillance video showed a man wearing a ball cap pulled down over his face, a man similar to Miguel’s height and weight. (“Miguel always wore hats,” Luz and Kathy Perez said.)
At this point, the family was sure Miguel had done something to Carmen. Maybe they didn’t know him the way they thought they had? Had they misjudged him?
As Luz and Kathy were driving down Park Street, looking for Carmen later that day, Miguel crossed the street in front of Luz’s car. “Miguel, do you have Titi’s card?” Luz yelled out the window. Miguel was standing on the sidewalk.
“No, I don’t got her card. I don’t got her card.”
“Miguel, somebody took out her money. She didn’t take it out. We want to know who did.”
Sometime later, Miguel showed up at the apartment and handed Jackie $300. “Where is she?” Jackie asked, crying. Hysterical. Scared. She started yelling, “You took Mommy’s money out…. You took Mommy’s money out!”
“I didn’t take her,” Miguel shot back.
“Someone took her money. Was it you?”
Miguel went quiet.
“Miguel?”
“We need the money for the rent,” he said brusquely. “I had to get it. We need to pay the rent so we can stay here.”
58
I
When Carmen’s friend Tina saw the missing persons posters strung up around Kenney’s and throughout the city, she became unnerved by something that had been bothering her ever since it happened.
As Tina and Alice sat at the bar one night talking about Carmen, Tina brought up Ned. “He tried to rape me,” Tina said. “Look at this.” She pointed to her neck.
“I don’t see anything,” Alice said.
“Look!” It was gone now, but Tina said she’d had bruises around her neck where Ned had tried to strangle her. “I hate him.”
“Everyone at the bar feels Ned did something to Carmen,” Alice told police later that day, “but no one knows for sure.”
These reports of Ned getting physical with some of the females who hung around Kenney’s began filing in as the Hartford PD started digging. One man who lived across the street from Kenney’s had a story to tell that became quite common where Ned and the girls of Kenney’s were concerned. “I used to work as a bar back at Kenney’s,” the man said. “I met a guy named Ned (back in March 2001). Ned was a ‘regular’ at the bar.” Ned showed up always between 9:00 and 11:00 P.M. “[Ned told me] he got up at four-thirty every morning for work.” So he had to leave the bar early.
Ned’s routine changed, however, during the first week of September. He started closing the bar with the other patrons, the guy said.
The bar back said he knew Tina. “She used to flirt with everyone for a drink.”
He kept an eye on Tina because she was a relative. One night, the bar back slipped out into the back alley behind Kenney’s to have smoke. Ned was sitting in his car, he recalled, talking to Tina, who was standing by the driver’s side door. Ned had his window down. “I could not hear what they were saying,” the bar back recalled. “But [Tina] walked away” and began heading for Capitol Avenue. She was obviously upset at something Ned had said. So Ned got out of the car, yelling, “Come back, Tina. Please.”
Tina turned and walked back. They talked a little bit more near Ned’s car. He was trying to get her into his car, the bar back could easily tell, but she didn’t want to go.
“Stop it,” Tina said.
Ned grabbed her forcefully by the arm.
The bar back walked toward Ned’s car to see if Tina needed help. But she had “quickly” pulled her arm away from Ned and he had taken off hurriedly.
“Hey, you OK?” the bar back asked Tina.
“Yeah.” They headed back into the bar.
“Why’d he grab you like that?”
“He wanted me to get into his car and ‘go out for a date.’ I didn’t want to.”
II
Luz, Sonia, Kathy Perez, and the rest of the Rodriguez clan were beside themselves with concern and confusion. They had gotten together and talked about the many different scenarios that could have taken place, to see if, perhaps, anyone knew anything. By now, it was clear that Miguel didn’t have anything to do with Carmen’s disappearance, so they all apologized and he understood. Tempers were fragile. Feelings raw. Miguel was the new kid on the block—it was easy and convenient to accuse him.
Luz had a thought: There was a guy back in 2000 who had been obsessed with Carmen. She had dated him for a few days, realized he was a freak show, and told him never to come near her again. During their last conversation, the man snapped. Raped her repeatedly and then beat her so severely she wound up in the hospital. “She was in bed with the covers over her when I arrived at the hospital,” Luz recalled. “I thought she was dead…. When she lifted the covers off her face, I gasped.” Carmen was covered with welts and bruises and blood. Luz couldn’t believe it was her sister.
“My God, Titi,” she said.
Carmen was quiet. She didn’t speak. Eventually she was released from the hospital and a report was filed. Sometime later, the guy—a serial rapist—was arrested and charged with a host of rapes.
III
Living with the unsettled notion that a loved one is out in the world somewhere in trouble is an ugly feeling, the Rodriguez family explained. There’s a part of your spirit dormant, lost. In purgatory. Nothing in your life is quite right. You wake up every day thinking this is it, someone is going to come forward with that tip that will lead you to her. You hang on every word from law enforcement. Your heart races whenever the phone rings.
At one point, after Telemundo ran Carmen’s photo and a description, Luz got a call from someone in Willimantic, Connecticut. “T
here’s a woman hanging around here that fits the description of your sister. She doesn’t know her name or where she’s from.”
It was a Laundromat. Could it be? Luz wondered. Maybe Carmen fell and wandered off and had amnesia? It happened.
“We’ll be right out there,” Luz said. Then she called Sonia and Kathy, and they all rushed out to Willimantic, about a thirty-minute trip. (“We got there,” Kathy said, “and it was like, ‘There’s nobody here. Yeah, there’s a lady here, but we know who she is….’”)
“But we received a phone call from here,” Kathy asked, “that you had someone fitting the description.”
“No one from here called,” the woman said.
Hope was all the Rodriguez family had left, and they weren’t about to give up. “The thing was,” Luz explained, “and it started to bother me as time went on, that no matter where Carmen was, she had always called one of us. Always, always, always. She called. That was in the back of my mind.”
59
I
Ned had been a fixture at Kenney’s during the spring, summer and early fall of 2001. During the first three weeks of September, he was at the bar nearly every other night: sitting and drinking, playing pool, talking to the other regulars about baseball, politics, and the terrorist attacks. And yet, since the night Carmen had disappeared, no one at the bar had seen or heard from Ned. He had stopped showing up altogether.
By the end of the first week of looking for Carmen, the family was determined that if Carmen was around Hartford, they were going to find her. Twenty-three-year-old Jeffrey Malave grew up in Hartford. He was a “lifelong friend,” he later told police, of the Rodriguez family. Malave’s best friend, Hector “Cutie” (pronounced “koo-tee”) Velez, was Carmen’s nephew. Malave also hung around with Carmen’s daughter Jackie. On the Wednesday afternoon after Carmen disappeared, Jackie and Cutie explained to Malave that Carmen had vanished the previous Friday night. No one had seen her since. They were worried about her, he explained, and wanted to help any way they could. Everyone felt the Hartford PD was working on the case, but then, what did they have to go on at this point? Just the other day, an officer had called Jackie and confirmed that the last place Carmen had been seen was at Kenney’s, not the El Camerio, as Jackie had initially believed. In the interim, Jackie and Miguel, who had been climbing the walls, calling the HPD, combing the neighborhoods around Kenney’s, asking locals if they had seen anything, had not stopped searching. Miguel hadn’t slept in what seemed like days. He was prostrated with grief and worry, same as Jackie. Miguel had spoken to a bartender at Kenney’s who explained she was certain that Carmen had left the bar at about 2:00 A.M. on September 22 with a regular. (“The bartender told us,” Jackie said in a statement to police, “the man’s name…[and that] he left with my mother that night…after drinking and dancing with her.”)
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