I'll Be Watching You

by M. William Phelps

“OK, then, we’ll go and get them.”

  Several thoughts occurred to St. Pierre as she left the hospital. Driving back to her office, she couldn’t help but think, This guy is either really stupid or really smart. Then again, why would he ring that mileage bell if it didn’t mean anything? He wanted the Hartford PD to focus on his mileage. Why would he divulge such information if it wasn’t important? St. Pierre was leaving when he had summoned her back into the room. He was offering evidence. Undeniably, she now knew, an important piece of the puzzle.

  64

  I

  Ed Bouchard called Ned in the hospital the day after St. Pierre and Garcia interviewed him. Bouchard had seen the newspapers. He knew of Ned’s prior arrest record. He wanted to know what was going on. “How are you? Listen, there were two detectives here—they came to see me about you.”

  Ned sounded groggy. “Yes, I know,” he said. “They were already here.”

  “What about the girl, Ned? Do you know anything about her?”

  Ned paused. “I don’t even know her,” he said. “She’s just some girl I gave a ride to.”

  II

  St. Pierre understood that catching killers was a science. There was good luck and persistent gumshoe police work involved as you tracked down new leads and followed up on old ones; but putting away a murderer required essentially patience and tenacity. She was sure Ned had had something to do with Carmen’s disappearance. She knew the mileage Ned had mentioned while in the hospital played into that crime somehow, but as ASA David Zagaja later explained, “We were all scratching our heads as to what it meant. The significance of the mileage receipts was that Ned had offered them to us. Why was he doing this? It’s a troubling clue to us. It tells us that he used his car in some way to take her, deposit her…but we don’t have any answers.”

  III

  Carmen’s family was painfully going through the process of accepting the fact that Carmen was likely never coming home. As much as they didn’t want to admit Carmen was dead, there was nothing to convince them otherwise. And with Ned being so evasive, if not cocky and playing games with police, it only made matters worse. Jackie had her baby and slipped into a world of numbing her feelings with alcohol. It was hard for the family to keep track of her anymore. Luz had taken Jackie’s child by this point.

  As ASA, David Zagaja had worked with St. Pierre on too many homicides to recall. On any given week, Zagaja was up to his neck in violent crimes of all sorts. Yet, having St. Pierre on the job was comforting: “Luisa,” Zagaja later said, “is pretty determined. When she locks her focus on something, she follows it.”

  When St. Pierre got back to her office after speaking with Ned, she called Zagaja, who, after graduating from the University of Connecticut School of Law, had studied Spanish at the University of Valencia, in Spain. If a case was going to be built against Ned, Zagaja would have to get involved. Search warrants were going to have to be written up and signed. In addition, St. Pierre generally ran her theories by Zagaja. They were good friends, colleagues, and supported each other. If Luisa’s instinct was wrong, Zagaja wasn’t afraid to let her know she was wasting her time.

  “This guy killed this girl,” St. Pierre came right out and told Zagaja during that first call. She just “had a feeling,” she later said.

  When St. Pierre heard from Ned’s boss at American Frozen Foods that he had killed a female in New Jersey, and then Ned himself admitted to it—seemingly without equivocation—St. Pierre considered the chances to be almost nil that Ned had simply dropped Carmen off at a gas station and she disappeared into thin air. “When we spoke to his boss and he told us, and then Ned said the same thing,” St. Pierre said, “I thought, ‘Oh, Jesus, this guy is dangerous, he did it.’”

  For Zagaja, all he would later say was “Ned’s prior history was a clue,” adding, with a laugh, “Let’s leave it at that.”

  As St. Pierre spoke to Zagaja, Ned’s entire arrest record was just coming off the wire. When they went through it, they couldn’t believe, number one, that he was out of prison, and, number two, that he had simply turned his violent behavior off like a switch. Here was a third female in Ned’s life who was victimized—a third female, in fact, he had met at a bar or in some social setting. He had been out of prison for two years. It wasn’t, Did he grab Carmen and do something with her? It became, How many more were there?

  After reviewing Ned’s history, learning of the eleven-page letter he wrote to the judge upon his sentencing in 1988, whereby Ned had described killing Karen Osmun in graphic detail, Zagaja made the determination that probable cause existed. It was time to draft up a search warrant for Ned’s car—and maybe even his home.

  65

  I

  Ned and his parents lived in a modest cape—white with dark green shutters—in a rural neighborhood near East Berlin, right off Route 372 and Route 15, which is more commonly known as the Berlin Turnpike. It’s a rather busy four-lane roadway, dotted with strip malls, chain restaurants, fuel stations, strip joints, and seedy motels with rooms that rent by the hour, day, week, or month. The area where Ned grew up and now lived, in the basement of the house his parents had purchased a half century ago, was twenty minutes from New Haven and the same from Hartford. The house next door had been abandoned in lieu of being sold. The grass was knee-high and the house looked vacant and lonely. At about 2:00 P.M., on October 22, 2001, Luisa St. Pierre and Jerry Bilbo drove to the Berlin Police Department (BPD) before heading over to the Snelgroves’. Pulling up to Savage Hill Road with that Berlin PD escort sometime later, Luisa saw an older man in the front yard raking leaves. “Must be Snelgrove’s father,” she said to Bilbo.

  Edwin Snelgrove Sr. stopped what he was doing and watched the BPD cruiser pull into his driveway with an unmarked cruiser behind it. He didn’t seem too surprised.

  After brief introductions, St. Pierre said, “We’d like to look inside your son’s car.”

  “Come with me,” Mr. Snelgrove said.

  The garage was set back a bit from the house at the end of the driveway. Snelgrove reached down and lifted up the garage door. Then he unlocked the door to Ned’s car, a 1998 tan Ford Escort. As St. Pierre, Bilbo, and the Crime Scene Unit (CSU), which had just arrived, began going through Ned’s car, his father went into the house and came back out with an itemized list recording of all [Ned’s] appointments and mileage dated from Saturday, August 11, 2001, to Tuesday, October 16, 2001, St. Pierre later reported. Ned had promised St. Pierre that his father would provide the documents, and here they were. Right on cue.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  What proved interesting to St. Pierre and the other detectives, who had since arrived on scene, was that there were several bundles of rope on the wall, hanging on hooks, yet there was one bundle missing. Inside Ned’s car were several interesting pieces of evidence. Among them, what St. Pierre described as vegetable matter (leaves & seeds), a set of partial latent prints on the passenger’s side of the vehicle from the window, several “stain swabbings” taken from various blotches on the inside of the vehicle, one leaf in the trunk, hair fibers, along with envelopes full of trace evidence that crime scene investigators had sucked up with a vacuum.

  II

  Andrea Collins (pseudonym) worked as a bartender at Kenney’s on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. She was familiar with Ned, who would sit at the bar by himself, she said, and drink Moosehead beer. On several occasions, Collins explained, she noticed how Ned sat in a booth with Carmen, talking. “He would always buy her drinks.”

  It was about the first week of October, Collins said, when she was working one night and a call came into the bar. Looking back, she said that it seemed “strange.”

  “It’s for you,” the bar back said.

  “Hello?” Collins answered.

  “It’s Ned.”

  “Who?” Collins didn’t recognize the name right away.

  “Ned—”

  “Oh…yeah?”

  “I heard you spoke to the police,�
�� Ned said.

  Collins told detectives what everyone else in the bar had: Ned left with Carmen on September 21, or early September 22, and had been dancing with her.

  “Yes,” she said, “I did.”

  “You spoke to them about ‘the missing girl.’” Another patron, Ned said, had informed him that Collins had talked to the police.

  “I did.” Collins didn’t see the big deal in talking to the police. “Why?”

  “I just gave her a ride to Capitol Avenue and Broad.”

  “OK…” And your point?

  “I’m calling right now”—Ned felt the urge to divulge—“from Rhode Island.” It was odd, thought Collins, that he would say where he was, as if she cared.

  “I’m busy, Ned, I have to go.”

  Similar stories came in as detectives continued interviewing Kenney’s employees and patrons. Paula Figueroa worked at Kenney’s and remembered Ned as the guy who ordered tuna steak salad with extra Russian dressing. “He usually dressed like…he had just left work…and sat at the bar and made small talk with me.”

  When she was interviewed by police sometime after Carmen’s disappearance, Paula said there was “something about Ned that was really weird—he gave me the chills. He was always polite, but would repeatedly ask me out. He even asked me if I would go away with him. I always refused politely.”

  III

  While all of the forensic evidence was processed—it would take weeks—the search for Carmen continued. As November approached, there was still no word from Carmen. Detectives investigating her disappearance expected the worst, hoped for the best. As Christmas neared, Detective St. Pierre and her colleagues heard that none of the forensic evidence collected in Ned’s car yielded any indication that he was involved in Carmen’s disappearance. Not one hair matched Carmen’s DNA profile—and not one stain was considered suspicious.

  Investigators were baffled. Yet, as Christmas and the new year came and went, the investigation was about to take a major turn.

  66

  I

  At about one o’clock in the afternoon, on Sunday, January 6, 2002, thirty-six-year-old Peter Mareck was walking on Grassy Pond Road, a dirt and gravel connector running along his property line. Mareck lived on the corner of Grassy Pond and Route 138 (Rockville Road), in Hopkinton, Rhode Island, a mile or so over the Connecticut border. On certain days, he’d grab his trusty pole with the spike at the end of it, a few trash barrels, and troll the area, picking up the garbage that young kids and litterbugs so rudely dirtied the beautiful landscape with. Mareck hated seeing the trash along the roadside. It took away from the splendor of the pond across the street on Route 138 and the vast wooded area in back of his home.

  Picking up other people’s garbage came with its share of surprises. On any given day, there was no telling what Mareck would find. “The most unusual thing I came across—until that day in January—was a bag of flounder skeletons,” Mareck said later.

  Finding the bag, he left it alone and called someone to have a look. It was the large fish vertebrae that piqued his interest. During the years he has dedicated to picking the garbage, Mareck knew there was nothing people didn’t toss out their windows. “I found a dog once,” he said. “Someone had put a dog in a bag and just threw it out their car window.” That kind of obvious disregard for life disgusted him.

  Whenever Mareck found something it was generally on Route 138, which is a fairly busy roadway, being a two-lane state highway. Grassy Pond was more of a byline to another dirt and gravel road and a few private homes out in the woods. As Mareck was walking along Grassy Pond that afternoon, about two-tenths of a mile from Route 138, heading toward Kenney Hill Road, a dirt path that actually led to Hopkinton police chief John Scuncio’s home, he noticed a large garbage bag off to the side, approximately three meters into the woods. It was the middle of winter. The foliage on the trees and brush was stripped bare, which made it easy for Mareck to see deep into the woods. He had seen garbage bags this size before. But this one was different. There was something about it. The shape. The way it was sealed up.

  The area was known to be a common region of the town for poachers to flash a light in a deer’s eyes at night and take a potshot. Some poachers killed the deer, took the meat, and then left the guts and rotting carcasses there in the woods, on the road, or placed them in bags and tossed them as deep as they could into the woods. With this in mind, Mareck walked a bit closer to the bag. Poking at it with his stick, he wanted to see what was inside. As the bag tore open, a putrid smell as potent as a Dumpster in the sun wafted up at him. Unlike the common smell of garbage, however, this aroma was vile and rancid.

  And very unfamiliar.

  Reaching deeper into the bag with his stick, Mareck opened it so he could see what was inside. A vertebra? A spine? he told himself. “It was large,” Mareck said later. “It looked human.”

  He was well aware of what the anatomy of an animal looked like, not to mention large fish. But this spine was a bit larger than Mareck had ever seen. “It didn’t look like an animal’s.” So he ripped the bag open some more. Clothesline…?

  The clothesline had been wrapped around the bones several times and tied into knots. Mareck stood and thought about it: This is a little weird. The only two things that would be distinctive are the skull and the pelvic bone. So he tore at the bag toward the end where he assumed a head would be—and there it was: a human skull. (“It had long hair on it.” And maggots, like thousands of Tic Tacs, slithering and sliding throughout.)

  Mareck knelt down and went in for a closer look. “The entire torso was decomposed,” he said later. “But I could make out the skull. I could see the little cracks and plates that make up a human head.”

  Once Mareck saw the skull, he lifted the bag from the opposite end and saw the hipbone. He then knew for certain it was a person—a woman.

  A flood of emotion washed over Mareck as he stood there. He had lost his sister in 1988. She was one of 243 passengers aboard Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, killing all passengers and sixteen crew members, as well as eleven people on the ground. A total of 270 people perished that day. That pain had never left Mareck. Something like this, seeing a dead body in the woods, all wrapped up in a bag, brought it all back. Standing over the bag, Mareck said aloud, “Sit tight…stay right there, you’re found now. I know what to do. I know somebody’s looking for you.” He had no idea why he said it. But he knew there was a family out there somewhere worried sick about the person in the bag. They had lost sleep. Wondered what had happened to this person. All sorts of scenarios were running through their minds. Mareck was familiar with these same feelings. It had been a week or more before his sister was identified, which made the agony of knowing—but not truly knowing—even more traumatic. As he stood there over the bag, it hurt him to know that another family was going through the same pain.

  Standing up, Mareck told himself, I need to call someone. He didn’t want to disturb (any more than he already had) what was now a crime scene. So Mareck took off, running. Heading for Kenney Hill Road. His intention was to make it to the police chief’s house, whom he had known for years, and tell him. In fact, Mareck had just seen the chief. They’d chitchatted for about ten minutes.

  On foot, the chief’s house was a haul. So Mareck turned around, ran back by the bag of remains, and headed for his own home. Once there, “John,” Mareck said over the phone, out of breath, “I think I found a body—”

  “Relax,” said the chief. “You sure it’s not deer remains or something?”

  “That’s why I’m calling. I don’t want to make a big deal out of nothing. I know you’re home. So, I figured, why not. You can take a ride down and check it out for me.”

  “I’ll meet you out there,” the chief said.

  II

  Lieutenant Mike Gilman arrived on scene first. Chief Scuncio used his cell phone to call it in. He advised everyone, at this point, to communicate via cell phone so a
s not to alert the local press. It was important to make sure it was a human body before news spread.

  Scuncio explained to Gilman what Mareck had told him. Then he showed him the bag. Gilman taped off the area and made a few calls, while Chief Scuncio contacted several members of the Rhode Island State Police (RISP) Detective Division and Bureau of Criminal Investigations (BCI) Unit. In about ten minutes, patrolmen were at the scene closing off the road.

  III

  As Mareck described to patrolman Brian Dufault what he found, Hopkinton Police Department detective Kevin McDonald was at home trying to enjoy a well-deserved day off. It was about ten minutes to two. For McDonald, during the winter months, Sundays weren’t scheduled around tending to the horses he and his wife raised on their sprawling spread outside Hopkinton, just south of Providence. Mostly, McDonald liked to sit in front of the television with his college-bound son and watch New England Patriots football. On this day, early into the game, the Patriots were trouncing the Carolina Panthers, on their way to a 38–6 victory.

  Growing up in nearby Narragansett, a port town close to the wealthy tidings of Newport, following the Patriots had become a way of life for the somewhat reticent detective. He kept one picture on the wall of his office: a poster of the Patriots.

  As a twenty-three-year veteran Rhode Island cop, however, McDonald was aware that any day could turn from the ordinary into the extraordinary with a phone call. And sure enough, about three-quarters of the way into the football game, McDonald’s cell phone rang: “We got a situation out there near the Connecticut state line,” dispatch explained. “Maybe a body in a garbage bag.” The chief was involved, McDonald was told.

  So he grabbed his car keys and flew out the door.

  When he arrived on scene, Mike Gilman filled McDonald in. After all, it didn’t take McDonald long to get out there. He generally drove one of the Hopkinton PD’s many confiscated sports cars. For years, McDonald had worked narcotics and drug detail, setting up major buys, busting the big drug dealers. There was always, McDonald said later, a boat or several cars involved in the raid. “I could drive a different car every day of the month if I wanted to.” A Hummer. A Porsche. Whatever.