I'll Be Watching You

by M. William Phelps

  70

  I

  Sonia Rodriguez received a call from the Hartford PD during the afternoon of January 13, 2002. “The Rhode Island police found a body.”

  She knew. She didn’t need a “positive” identification. She didn’t need dental records. It was there in her heart: that sinking feeling…Titi.

  “Is it her?” she asked the cop as a formality.

  “We don’t know if it’s Carmen or not.”

  “Is the person alive or dead?” Sonia asked. The cop hadn’t mentioned.

  No answer. “We’ll have someone call you at your mother’s later tonight.”

  When Sonia arrived at her mother’s house later that night and explained the phone call, Luz said, “They must know something.”

  Luz explained to everyone that she’d had a feeling throughout the day. Something was off. When she walked out of the bathroom after taking a shower earlier that day, her husband was standing there. “I got a feeling she’s dead,” he said.

  The hair on her arms stood up. And then when Luz called Sonia on her way to the house, and she explained that the cops hadn’t explained much, she knew. “She’s dead,” Luz told Sonia over the phone.

  Sometime after 5:00 P.M., a detective called Carmen’s mother’s house. “It’s her” was all he said. “We want to meet you somewhere to talk.”

  Sonia suggested Petra’s house, one of Carmen’s sisters. Luz lived next door. The family split up and agreed to meet at Petra’s.

  II

  Kevin McDonald and his team stopped at Broad Street in Hartford to obtain Carmen’s dental records. From there, one detective drove back to Rhode Island to deliver the records to the ME’s office, while McDonald and several detectives and CSP troopers met at Troop H in downtown Hartford to discuss where the investigation was headed. With Carmen’s body now found, everyone believed they had enough to serve a search warrant on Ned’s house. Ned was the only suspect at this point. There was enough from a prosecutorial standpoint to at least search Ned’s home. Quite particularly, McDonald later said, they were looking for any clothing Carmen might have worn, the jewelry she was said to have been wearing that night, rope, plastic bags, a stapler and staples, and adhesive tape—all items that were part of the Rhode Island crime scene.

  The judge signed the warrant and a team of investigators from both states raced to Ned’s house in Berlin. It was dark out, however, when they arrived, so McDonald suggested they wait until the following morning.

  III

  Sonia called Luz to tell her they were all next door. Waiting. Luisa St. Pierre was there with her partner. She wanted the entire family together.

  Luz’s heart started racing.

  Everyone was sitting at the table when Luz walked in. When she looked at Sonia and saw the sense of loss in her eyes, Luz didn’t need to hear any more. “I was out,” she said later. “I don’t know nothing else that happened after that.”

  When she came out of that fog of pain, Luz and her sisters told her father and uncle. Then they drove to her mother’s apartment. Rosa Rodriguez had just gotten out of the hospital. She’d had cancer surgery. She was on the couch. Her stomach was stapled. She was taking it easy.

  Luz’s uncle walked into the living room, where Rosa was resting, while the others waited in the kitchen. “She’s dead, right?” Rosa said in Spanish.

  Her brother sat down next to her. “Calm down,” he said. “It’s going to be OK.”

  “I told you…I told you she was dead,” Rosa started to scream. “I knew it!”

  IV

  On January 15, 2002, first thing in the morning, several members of the CSP Major Crimes Unit (MCU), Kevin McDonald and his partner, Arthur Kershaw, in addition to several other officers and Hartford PD detectives, arrived at Ned’s home to execute a search and seizure warrant. Entering the house, CSP detective Stavros Mellekas and HPD detective Mike Sheldon walked toward the basement door and opened it.

  A figure was standing at the bottom of the stairs. It was dark. The detectives couldn’t see anything. Mellekas said Sheldon drew his weapon and pointed it at Ned’s head. But when they realized it was Ned and he wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary except wondering what was going on upstairs, Sheldon holstered his weapon.

  “You know, you’re the first cop to ever point his gun at me,” Ned said.

  Sheldon and Mellekas told Ned not to move.

  V

  If one is to believe Ned’s version, Arthur Kershaw and Kevin McDonald grabbed him from downstairs and—without allowing him to put his socks on—dragged him up the stairs and placed him in a police cruiser. “What are you doing?” Ned claimed he said as he was wrestled into the backseat of the vehicle. “This is harassment!”

  “You haven’t seen harassment yet,” McDonald snapped at him, according to Ned.

  VI

  CSP trooper Daniel Crowley was on hand as a liaison between the police and Ned and Ned’s parents, Edwin Sr. and Norma, who were home during the execution of the search and seizure. Crowley sat with Edwin and Norma in the living room as other officers began to search the house. It was going to be a long day. As Ned was in the cruiser outside, Edwin Sr. asked Crowley what was going on. “What are you looking for?”

  Crowley indicated that they were serving a search warrant.

  “I can locate whatever you’re looking for,” Edwin offered.

  “The court issued this warrant, Mr. Snelgrove, we’re going to be here most of the day. The items we’re interested in are clearly listed on the warrant.”

  Edwin and Norma were visibly shaken. They were in their late eighties. Ned was worried about them. But sitting outside in the cruiser, alone, he couldn’t do much of anything to assuage their trepidation.

  As they sat, Crowley mentioned Carmen’s name. “We’re familiar with her name,” Edwin said, speaking for his wife, too. “The Hartford police have been investigating Ned. They suspect he had something to do with her disappearance.”

  “He told you that?”

  “He saw her at a bar, I guess,” Edwin explained. “He gave her a ride to a gas station and she asked him for money and he told her to get out of his car.”

  “What else did he say?” It seemed like a convenient story. Scripted and rehearsed.

  “He left her there and hasn’t seen her since.”

  Officers were walking by as they spoke. Static from radios blurred the background. Crowley noticed that as he and Edwin got further along into their conversation, Edwin became “more and more agitated.” It was odd, Crowley thought, because Edwin had been “very cooperative at first.”

  Ned lived in the basement. Ned had always talked about himself as being a meticulous guy, clean-cut, his life in order. He had a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers. He believed he was smarter than the average Joe. With the search centered in his room, it wasn’t hard to tell that Ned was, for lack of a better term, a slob. There were clothes all over the place, papers, knickknacks, and other personal items all in disarray. Ned lived like a teenager.

  While officers were going through everything, Edwin left the living room, where he and Norma had been sitting with Crowley, and walked hurriedly downstairs, saying, “What are you doing? Why are you searching his room?”

  “Please go back upstairs, Mr. Snelgrove,” a trooper told him. “Leave this area. You’re not to interfere with the execution of this warrant.”

  Edwin said something.

  “We’re going to arrest you, sir, if you interfere.”

  When Edwin returned to the living room, Crowley looked out the window and saw several television news crews pulling up to the front of the house. Norma looked panicked.

  As the cameramen began to set up their equipment, Norma began crying. “What have we done to deserve such treatment?”

  “Please relax, Mrs. Snelgrove,” an officer said.

  “Ned could not have done something so wrong to deserve such embarrassment.”

  “It’ll be fine,” the officer said. “We’ll keep
the news crews back.”

  “Ned had problems in the past,” Norma continued, almost talking to herself more than the trooper. “We thought he was finished with his problems.”

  “What problems?”

  “His former girlfriend in New Jersey. Ned was in the wrong place at the wrong time after having a few drinks with her.” The way she spun it, Ned killing Karen Osmun didn’t sound so bad. Norma was obviously in denial. Protecting her son.

  Crowley got both Edwin and Norma to relax a little bit. They were in the back of the house now, talking about Ned. “He’s a workaholic,” Edwin said, shaking his head. “He works every day.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “He’s a good salesman.”

  “He must have a lot of money saved, living at home here with you guys since his release from prison in 1999?”

  Edwin laughed. Norma too. “Huh!” said Edwin. “Ned hasn’t saved any money—that’s why he stays here with us. [He says] that company he works for as a salesman doesn’t even pay him for his mileage or expenses.”

  “He travels a lot?” Crowley asked.

  “All throughout the state,” Edwin said.

  Norma chimed in, adding, “He was fired. He was just fired. The Hartford police detective told Neddy’s boss about his ‘problems’ in New Jersey and that he was being investigated in Connecticut. He then tried to kill himself.”

  Crowley took it all in. He understood the best thing to do was to allow them the space to talk. Once Norma got going, she didn’t stop. Continuing, she said, “Ned had a growth removed while he was in the hospital after his suicide attempt. He even met with a therapist, but refused to continue.”

  “Is he working now?”

  “He just got hired by a promotions company to travel around the state.”

  71

  I

  Downstairs in Ned’s room, detectives bagged and tagged what they believed would best help them prove Ned had murdered Carmen: staple guns, staples, hair fibers, magazines, videotapes, and several other items that seemed out of place for a grown man living in the basement of his parents’ home. Among Ned’s personal possessions was an article published in the magazine Crosstalk. Written by Joshua Fischman, titled “Arson: A Chemical Fire?” the short piece dealt with the mind and how different chemicals in the brain reacted under various situations. Mainly, the writer argued that arsonists had lower levels of a certain chemical that made starting fires an “uncontrollable urge.” But then the article went into the differences between arsonists and violent offenders and how different their brain chemistry was from one another. In red ink, someone—investigators guessed it was Ned—had underlined several sentences relating to murderers. One described a certain chemical found in abnormally low levels in murderers who killed their sexual partners in a sudden rage. Further along, someone had underlined a sentence that, in part, said, researchers believe that low serotonin levels are associated with poor impulse control.

  Another article, in which nothing was underlined, was even more telling. Leslie Lothstein, the director of clinical psychology for the Institute of Living, a mental hospital in Hartford, had written an opinion-editorial for the Hartford Courant titled “Changes Must Be Made to Control Sexual Offenders, Reduce Risk.” The piece was interesting to investigators in the fact that it dealt with, on some level, the extremely high recidivism rate for sexual offenders. This was not breaking news in itself, but place that article in the home of a guy who has been convicted of two extremely violent sexual attacks and it’s worth considering. The main quote of the piece was, at the least, a description of Ned’s past life: “An inmate’s contained behavior might be confused with ‘good behavior’ by prison officials who, under the law, can approve early release.”

  By cutting the article out of the newspaper and saving it, was Ned taunting the system? Laughing at it? Was he mocking the Department of Corrections in New Jersey for releasing him from prison nine years early?

  And then there was a copy of The Deliberate Stranger, the television movie starring Mark Harmon as Ted Bundy. There was Ned’s personal copy. Sitting there on his desk, the box tattered and torn as if he’d watched it a hundred times.

  II

  Detective Thomas Murray had been with the CSP for thirteen years, assigned to the Central Major District Crime Squad in Meriden. As the search continued, Murray walked the site as the search scene officer. His job was to collect the evidence seized from Ned’s house and make sure it was processed appropriately. In back of a couch in Ned’s room downstairs, Murray found a box of maps. Of particular interest was a detailed map of Rhode Island (which seemed newer than the others, as if Ned had just bought it). On the edge of a large bookcase by Ned’s bed was a “coil of line or rope,” fashioned into a hangman’s noose.

  Erotic asphyxiation?

  As they continued going through Ned’s room, it seemed everything was important. Ned had kept extremely detailed records of all his travels. There were boxes of receipts and notebooks with mileage and fuel fill-ups, along with where and when. Inside a child’s toy chest, just to the right of where Ned slept, was perhaps the most bizarre discovery of the day: two Styrofoam mannequin heads with Magic Marker drawings on them. Both female, one was dolled up with a blue marker to look pretty, pleasant, perhaps even lovely. The other, however, was quite eerie looking. Its eyes were wide open—as opposed to its sister, which had its eyes closed, her long lashes perfectly drawn—and bulging, as if she had been frightened by someone or something. Around the Adam’s apple area, she had what appeared to be a target marked in a crisscross, gridlike fashion, with a round circle drawn on the money spot—the area someone would, with their two thumbs together, press inward to perform strangulation. In addition, there was an X drawn in the bull’s-eye. On the cheeks and forehead and chin were various markings, maybe like scratches or pretend knife wounds. On the forehead was also a large cross or X, marking an obvious sensitive area. David Zagaja later said: “And the Styrofoam heads, the heads…do you know what these heads are for? These serve in a pinch when there’s no woman available for Ned. This is for sexual gratification…. Just look at the [slash]marks on the neck. X marks the spot…. [He] is reliving his fantasies…he’s reliving his past. And, as I said, they serve in a pinch when there’s no woman available.”

  Someone found a manila envelope in a filing cabinet that contained a note Ned had written in 1993 (while in prison). It was clear from the note that he had read an article about how to change one’s identity. “It’s another piece of consciousness of guilt,” David Zagaja added, “that Ned held on to in case he ever became involved in further criminal conduct…a way he knows of by changing his identity and avoiding detection.”

  III

  Outside, as the search and seizure wound down, Trooper Daniel Crowley continued talking to Edwin and Norma. “Do you think,” Edwin asked Crowley at one point, “that Ned would be stupid enough to bring something back from Rhode Island to tie him to the body of Carmen Rodriguez?”

  Crowley was shocked by the question. It wasn’t asked for the purpose of an answer; Edwin was more or less mocking the search.

  As they talked, Edwin and Norma continued to explain how their Neddy liked to sleep on a couch downstairs in the basement. “It reminds him of the prison cot he got used to sleeping on,” Edwin said.

  Norma said they refused to answer the phone when it rang, because “it was always for Neddy.”

  “He had a lot of friends, did he?”

  “No,” she said, “Neddy did not have friends, just coworkers that would call him at home all the time.”

  “Has Ned brought any women home since he’s been out of prison?”

  Norma said, “Neddy is not interested in women, or men for that matter.”

  “Have you ever seen him with any pornographic magazines, found any pictures or dirty books in Ned’s room or the basement?”

  “Neddy would never,” Edwin said sternly, “bring any of that stuff into this house.”

&nbs
p; “He’s not interested in pornography,” Norma added.

  As the afternoon progressed, those television crews camped out in front began airing live reports. The search was big news: a former killer involved with the disappearance of a woman. The Rodriguez family had been putting pressure on the news organizations to cover Carmen’s disappearance. “Mr. Suburbia” was being investigated—a search was going on in a middle-class neighborhood.