I'll Be Watching You

by M. William Phelps

  77

  I

  Carmen’s body was released by the medical examiner’s office in late January. The Rodriguez family was getting nervous because Carmen’s brothers and sisters in town from Puerto Rico had taken a considerable amount of time off from work to support other family members and be there to bury Carmen. The theme of the burial—if the horror of losing Carmen under such violent means could have one—was “¿Madre, por qué me dejas?”

  “Mother, why you leave me?”

  For the family, telling Jackie, Carmen’s daughter, was the most difficult. Luz had called Jackie the day the Hartford PD confirmed they made a positive identification. Jackie, who was still living in the apartment Carmen had rented with Miguel, rushed to her grandmother’s house where everyone had gathered. That line “¿Madre, por qué me dejas?” was from one of Carmen’s favorite songs. After the family had told Jackie what happened, she rushed out of the house, drove home, grabbed the CD, and rushed back. Walking in, she didn’t say anything. Instead, she put on the CD.

  “It was a bit surprising,” Luz remembered, “because if someone is dead, or murdered, we never play music for like one month. Supposedly, it’s bad luck.” Respect the deceased. It was a tradition the family valued. Carmen’s mother had brought it to America from the old country and the family continued it.

  But Carmen’s death had changed everything. It was no ordinary celebration of life, as most funerals are.

  As the song played, Jackie walked into the kitchen where everyone was standing, sat down at the table, and just let it all out. “Listen,” she said, referring to the lyrics, “it’s about me and Mommy.”

  From that day on, the family played the song over and over. At the wake. The funeral. Anytime they visited Carmen’s grave site. There were those words: “Mother, why you leave me?”

  II

  The Rodriguez family was more united than ever. Since Carmen was buried, Luz, Sonia, and Kathy Perez had made T-shirts with a photograph of Carmen on the front. She was smiling her radiant glow. Those eyes. That sincere happiness flushed across her face.

  Titi.

  On the T-shirt, Carmen was surrounded by a red rose and pearls and baby’s breath. In Spanish, the family wrote a message in big block letters on the top: NUNCA OLVIDAREMOS.

  “Never forget.”

  A dedication more to the court and Ned Snelgrove than to themselves.

  III

  On February 5, Ned was scheduled to be back in court. Inside the courtroom, as the day progressed, twenty of Carmen’s family and friends sat patiently in the first three rows and waited to see the man they believed had killed Carmen. (“We knew he did it,” Luz later told me. “We wanted to show our strength. Our unity. That Ned had picked the wrong victim in choosing to murder Carmen.”)

  What they learned, however, was that Ned had been released nine years early on a prior sentence of twenty years. (“We were furious,” Luz added. “He never should have been out on the street to begin with. But we were united. We were planning on seeing this through until the end—that is, until he was put away for good for the murder of my sister.”)

  They waited all morning.

  No Ned.

  Lunchtime came and went.

  No Ned.

  Finally, near three o’clock…there he was: the monster.

  During his five minutes in front of the judge, Ned never looked at the Rodriguez family as his case was continued to the end of the month.

  Sonia was most troubled by the events. The oldest female of Carmen’s siblings, Sonia had not taken her sister’s murder well. She’d had her share of problems with Carmen—they butted heads—but the relationship was on the mend when Carmen disappeared. Still, most heartbreaking to the family was that Esmeralda Garcia, a name Carmen had given to Jackie for her first grandchild, was born after Carmen’s death. Carmen had never got to see, or hold, or play with, her only grandchild.

  78

  I

  One would only have to assume that Detective Stavros Mellekas, who had been with the CSP since 1994, was feared and hated by the bad guys he went after on any given day. At six feet one inch, 280 pounds, the Rhode Island transplant could be considered massive by any measure, with hands like catcher’s mitts, a grip like a vise, and a knack for police work that very few had. Mellekas had been with the Major Crimes Unit since 1999. He had seen his share of death and murder and rape and all things evil. It was Mellekas who had been in the Snelgrove yard one day when a neighbor walked up and lobbed the George Recck lead to him. “Anything you want to know about Ned,” said the enthusiastic neighbor, “you talk to George.”

  The next day, Mellekas and Detective Tom Murray took the drive up to northern Massachusetts, where Recck was now living with his wife. (“Squirrelly guy,” Mellekas recalled. “A statistics guy, you know. Nice person, though. Educated.”)

  Mellekas’s intention was to extract from Recck a few details that could help the CSP locate more evidence. Maybe Recck could recall a place where he and Ned used to hang out as kids. The woods. A party spot. Maybe he’d remember places Ned liked to visit. (“We had nothing,” Mellekas recalled. “No weapon. Nothing. We were looking for a killing spot. Obviously, it wasn’t Hopkinton.”)

  “So, George, you spoke to Ned on the phone while he was in prison?”

  “Yup,” Recck said. In the years that Ned was in prison, his only outlet to the outside world was George Recck. “I would send him socks on his birthday.”

  Mellekas was surprised. He wanted to hear more. If the guy was sending him socks, it was more than just a casual friendship.

  “We kept in contact,” Recck continued, according to Mellekas’s reporting of the conversation. “Underwear too. I sent him shorts.”

  “What about your conversations?”

  It was 2002. The conversations Recck had had with Ned, mainly, took place in 1997 and 1998. He didn’t remember—who could blame him?—much of what had been said.

  “I have all these letters,” Recck said.

  What? Letters? Mellekas’s interest piqued. “Sure, let’s see them.”

  “You can have them, but I want them back.”

  II

  Inside the car. Heading toward Connecticut. Mellekas. Reading.

  I cannot believe this. “Some things were just jumping off the pages of those letters.”

  There it all was in black and white—rather, blue pen ink—staring at Mellekas as Murray raced down the Massachusetts Turnpike toward Connecticut: Bundy.

  “He compared himself to Ted Bundy.”

  Murray shook his head.

  It was the first time anyone in law enforcement had been privy to the Bundy connection.

  Could we be dealing with a serial? Mellekas wondered. Was Ned like those killers with whom he was fascinated? Was the CSP going to start finding bodies all over New England? As much as the letters didn’t reveal, in Mellekas’s opinion, they made one important point: Ned Snelgrove harbored sick intentions. Wrote them down. And wasn’t afraid to admit his fantasies and impurities. Can you believe this?

  But then—there it was: that one line. Everyone talked about it later. That one line that sent chills. Made things so real. So evil.

  Gooseflesh.

  There was Ned writing to George that it would make a much more exciting book if, upon his release from New Jersey, he could pick up right where I left off. It was the first time the CSP had heard this.

  Mellekas read it again: pick up right where I left off.

  79

  I

  Seemingly innocuous letters on a page, put together to make up words, can tell you a lot about a guy. A lot about what is going on inside his head. A lot about how the mind and the hand are connected as the person writes. There’s a relationship. Some sort of subconscious id, as Freud might call it, coming out through the process of thinking and writing at the same time. For Ned, the act of writing became his only link, his only connection, to the outside world. Most definitely, it was his only way of feeling
a sense of normalcy around what he saw as deplorable, rancid conditions in the New Jersey jail, where he was housed before being sent away to Rahway back in 1988.

  For some reason, Ned felt safe talking to George Recck. As the CSP went through what we’ll call “the Recck Letters,” investigators saw how Ned joked with Recck in one letter, wanting to know if he was “still” Recck’s second-biggest hero besides G. [Gordon] Liddy? It was June 20, 1988. Ned said he was sorry that it had taken him such a long time to write. He was being shuffled about the system like a file. Finally, though, he had made it into his cell block. It was hot, he explained. Hot and sticky and smelly. He hated it and despised the people around him. Thought he was better than all of them. And struggled to find the survival skills he knew he was going to need. If it weren’t for this…fan, Ned wrote, just outside his door, [the heat] would be unbearable.

  The electric fan blowing on him all day took Ned back down a nostalgic road as he sat in front of it and dreamed of being back at his apartment on the front porch…enjoying the summer breeze…. He spoke of baseball, giving Recckhis predictions for the season. Ned liked the Orioles. Tigers too. He was honest with himself about his favorite team, the Red Sox. He knew they weren’t going to have a great season.

  While Ned was out on bail the previous winter—1987—he had seen Recck, according to this letter. It was shortly before he cut the deal for the attempted murder of Mary Ellen Renard and manslaughter of Karen Osmun. He wanted to tell Recck his “secret” when he saw him. But it was something, he wrote, I couldn’t tell you [or] my parents on the outside. But now he wanted to confess and wrote the incident with Mary Ellen wasn’t the first time he lost control of myself with a girl.

  Investigators were amazed at how easily Ned sugarcoated the entire incident.

  Then he warned his friend. Prepare yourself. It’s coming. You’ll never believe [it]…. I had actually gotten away with murder….

  As Ned continued writing to Recck, he explained how he hoped Recck knew that he had been doing everybody a favor and postponing a lot of pain by not admitting to any of his transgressions sooner. Ned had not come clean, he insinuated, for the sake of his friends and family and the turmoil that would ultimately come with his admission. He also said that once the cops had him on radar for the attack against Mary Ellen, he knew it was all over, and that he’d then have to admit to the other thing. He praised his lawyer, John Bruno, for getting the damage down to twenty years.

  “Damage”: the result of a murder and an attempted murder.

  He explained to Recck he’d be eligible for parole in ten, encouraging him to call his parents and talk to them about the “bomb” he had dropped. He was sure everyone back home knew, and it was all very humiliating to him.

  Not once did Ned apologize for the pain he had caused his victims and their families. It was all about Ned and his ultimate embarrassment of being caught. It was all about Ned and how the crimes he had committed would affect him and his friends and family. It was all about the waste of his life. He never once, in all the years of causing other people pain, said he was sorry for what he had done.

  II

  As he did with everyone else in his life, when Ned wrote to George Recck there was a thread—no, a certain inherent charm—of control in the tone of the letters. Ned often told Recck what to think, when to write, and how to live his life.

  Recck must have asked Ned about Bundy, because in the letters, beginning in 1992, Ned began to talk about Bundy and the comparisons between his life and the infamous killer’s. Ned had served four years by this point. He was a seasoned con now.

  “Whenever Ned went to jail,” a CSP investigator explained, “he grew a mustache. We called it his ‘bad boy’ mustache. Ned was a little guy. He felt small and weak in prison. He was smarter than just about every other inmate—that much we gave him. But he didn’t have the strength. He grew the mustache, hoping to look more masculine.”

  In his 1992 letters, Ned praised Bundy for planning out his crimes with a methodical sense of awareness of the police. Ned insisted that the crimes he committed were “impromptu acts.” He said on the nights he committed his crimes, he simply—his word “simply”—convinced myself that now was a good time. Hurting females was never something he had awoken and decided to do on that specific day; although, he was quick to add, I was always thinking—his underline—about it…. Moreover, he wrote, he never…went out and, prowling around, looking, scoping out bars and eyeing females, tried to find a situation…. When he did decide to act out on his urges, he wrote it was a matter of convincing [himself] that now was a good time. He called getting away—(temporarily)—with the homicide of Karen Osmun nothing short of a miracle. But still, it was nearly impossible for him to resist Mary Ellen Renard, he explained. Meeting her that night, Ned wrote to Recck, was the perfect situation.

  III

  There is no doubt that Ned Snelgrove got a kick out of toying with law enforcement. Just about every investigator I spoke to said Ned loved the idea of thinking he was smarter than those who were tracking him. He loved the entire catch and release, “I make a move/You counter” aspect of committing crimes and seeing if cops could figure him out. “He and Recck,” one investigator told me, “played chess via letters. This is the type of guy Ned is. He had the patience for that.”

  You make a move.

  Now it’s my turn.

  What tickled Ned’s funny bone during the Karen Osmun investigation in 1983 was the fact that he had, at least then, a squeaky clean reputation, he wrote to Recck. Ned wrote the cops were sure [he] did it. He insisted law enforcement was sending him anonymous notes, thinking I might “crack.” But little did Ned know that it was actually a friend of Karen’s who was sending the notes.

  Near the end of this particular letter, Ned talked about how Bundy liked to keep mementoes of his crimes, chiding the famous professional killer for doing so. This leaves a documented trail for police…, Ned wrote to Recck, adding that they would know where you were & where you were headed on any given weekend.

  That one line—the one about leaving a trail of evidence—sent Detective Stavros Mellekas down a path of suspicion. As Mellekas read it, he knew it had been written some ten years prior, but what did it say, actually, about the case Mellekas was investigating now?

  Mellekas looked at what the CSP had. Scores of maps found in traveling salesman Ned’s basement bedroom. Not in his car, mind you, where one would think the maps might be kept. Additionally, it was the end of that sentence—where you were headed on any given weekend—that stuck out to Mellekas.

  Carmen disappeared on a Friday night. (Ned chastised Bundy for purchasing gas with credit cards and saving the receipts.)

  Hasn’t Ned done the same?

  80

  I

  When Ned returned to court in March 2002 after his February date was postponed, the day’s proceedings didn’t yield much in the form of insight into the case, or even when Ned’s trial for attempting kidnapping would begin. And yet the day wasn’t devoid of drama.

  Carmen’s daughter Jackie Garcia was sitting patiently with Luz, Sonia, and the rest of the Rodriguez family, waiting for Ned to be brought in. The family wanted answers. They weren’t about to let Ned show up in court without having a presence there to prove to him that Carmen mattered.

  She was a person.

  They loved her.

  Never forget.

  As Ned was walked into the room, Jackie stood up quickly and threw a crumpled piece of paper at him as everyone watched.

  “What happened? What was that?” someone said out loud.

  Then Jackie screamed as she went for Ned’s throat, lunging, like a leopard, off the bench into the air. You bastard. “You killed my mother!”

  Ned turned. “What?”

  The marshals covered him and quickly escorted him back to his cell.

  The room cleared.

  II

  By June, the CSP returned to the Savage Hill neighborhood where Ned had
lived. David Zagaja had Ned in jail. But the investigation into Carmen’s murder was far from over.

  Detective Mellekas was at a neighbor’s house, again searching the backyard with his colleagues, when he spotted Mr. Snelgrove out in his yard. The old man was looking on. Curious, of course, as to what was going on next door. “Hey, Mr. Snelgrove, how are you today, sir?” Mellekas asked.

  Snelgrove nodded.

  “Listen,” Mellekas continued, “the court signed a search and seizure warrant for Ned’s car.” Mellekas had it in his hand. It was a second warrant for the car.

  The old man shook his head.

  “Could we make some room for a tow truck to come in and take it away?” Snelgrove’s car was blocking the driveway.

  “OK.”

  “The tow truck should be here shortly.”

  They stood. Talked. Not like old college friends. But Mellekas was happy with the way in which the old man was beginning to open up. He wanted to say something, Mellekas was sure of it. And within a few moments, they got on the topic of the registration and Mellekas wondered why it had been changed from Ned’s name to his father’s. It seemed strange. Especially for a guy who had claimed his innocence all along.

  “Well,” Mr. Snelgrove said (according to Mellekas), “Ned will probably be going away for a long time.”

  Mellekas thought about it. What a thing to say.

  “I think Ned killed this girl in Hartford,” Mellekas said casually. Why not toss that bombshell out to the old man and see how he reacts.

  Snelgrove looked at ease with the comment, Mellekas wrote in his report, as if it didn’t bother him. The senior Snelgrove said, “I would not be surprised if Ned killed her.”