I'll Be Watching You

by M. William Phelps

  “I think Ned has a problem,” Mellekas said sincerely, keeping it going. “I think he needs psychiatric help.”

  Snelgrove shrugged. Whatever.

  “Ned supposedly,” Mr. Snelgrove said, “received treatment in New Jersey, but I guess it didn’t work.”

  Mellekas walked over to the car and stood by it. The tow truck was coming up the road. They could hear its croaky diesel engine, knocking and smoking its way toward the house. Soon the beeping sounds would start as the tow truck backed up and the conversation would be disrupted by the commotion. It was bad timing.

  “Why do you think the treatment didn’t work? What makes you say that, sir?”

  Snelgrove thought about it. He looked toward the truck. “Well, this makes three—and who the hell knows how many more are out there?”

  “What do you mean?” Mellekas asked.

  “Who the hell knows…maybe he thinks he’s some sort of goddamn superhero?”

  “How so?”

  “You know, drubbing out the dregs of society.”

  Now Carmen was a “dreg.” Had Ned told Mr. Snelgrove something about Carmen?

  “Why’d you say that just now?” Mellekas asked.

  “I don’t know. Just thinking out loud, I guess.”

  III

  Ned’s pretrial hearing on the charges of attempted kidnapping was continued to May 30, 2002. Then into June. The fall. Maybe September, someone from the court said. October, the latest.

  So Ned sat in prison. Waiting.

  No bail.

  IV

  As everyone waited for the kidnapping trial, Detective Mellekas stepped up his pressure on Ned. During the summer of 2002, Mellekas decided that the way to get Ned to maybe crack under pressure was to stay in his face as much as he could. Play Columbo with him. Ned liked to talk. The CSP’s only problem was that Ned liked to talk about everything except the investigation. The Red Sox. Stocks. Bonds. Food. Computers.

  Ned was being held at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, in Suffield, Connecticut. Whenever a cop goes into a prison to speak with an inmate, he understands the Department of Corrections has total authority over the prisoner and is in charge of that inmate. The Department of Corrections calls the shots, in other words: paperwork, interview rooms, times, and dates. All prisons require law enforcement of any kind to present the suspect with a waiver that delegates responsibility back to law enforcement for the duration of the interview. By signing the document, the inmate is saying he or she agrees to allow the police to question him or her without a prison official present. If anything happens during the interview, the Department of Corrections is off the hook. Most inmates have no trouble signing the form.

  Ned wouldn’t sign it, saying, “You know me, Mellekas, I’m willing to talk to you—but I’m not signing any paper.”

  So Mellekas had a prison official with him anytime he went in. On this day, July 12, 2002, Mellekas decided to try and match Ned at his own game. He knew it bothered Ned that he had disappointed his mother and father. Their feelings mattered to Ned.

  Mellekas closed the door. The room was comfortable. Anything other than cement walls and steel bars was a reprieve for a guy locked up.

  Mellekas read Ned his rights. Then, “How’s it going, Ned?”

  Ned was quiet. Yet, there was something, Mellekas noticed, different about him. Prison life was getting to Ned. Mellekas could see it on his face. The guy had done eleven years. Here he was again facing a long bid.

  “I believe you killed Carmen Rodriguez,” Mellekas came out and said. “I think you did it, Ned.”

  Ned wouldn’t speak on the topic. He shook his head.

  “You don’t want to stay here the rest of your life,” Mellekas suggested. “Come on, Ned. You’re sick. You belong in a hospital.”

  Ned wouldn’t budge.

  Mellekas stared at him. Ned was tearing up. His eyes welled.

  “You did it. You did it. You did it.” Mellekas wasn’t being pushy or loud or bossy. He was just talking.

  But Ned wasn’t. He was still teary-eyed. (“Crying?” Mellekas said later. “I wouldn’t say crying…. He was like a little kid getting caught for something.”)

  Mellekas needed to keep the pressure on: harder, more firm. Maybe bring in emotion. “Your parents, Ned,” he said next, “do want them to have to come here? To a jail. They deserve more than that. Wouldn’t you rather they visit you in a hospital?”

  Nothing.

  “They deserve more, Ned.”

  Head shake. Eyes. Welling up. But no words.

  “You’ve got some serious issues, Ned. Psychological problems. I know. I can help, though. I understand this is why you killed Carmen. You couldn’t help it. You belong in a hospital, Ned. I know that. You’re sick.”

  Finally, “They said this before to me.”

  “Your dad is a Yale grad, Ned.” Ned looked up. “Your mom is a PTA type of lady. Do you want them coming up here to the reception area of Walker, a prison, sitting with these common criminals?”

  More tears.

  Ned Snelgrove never once denied killing Carmen. He’d had every opportunity to slam his hands on the table and scream, I did not kill that woman! He had every chance to plead with Mellekas, You’ve got the wrong guy. I didn’t kill her.

  But he didn’t. Instead, he stopped crying and said, “I want to get out of here. This interview is over.”

  81

  I

  Mellekas walked out of the prison somewhat disappointed. Not in himself. But in Ned. He believed he could truly help Ned if he only came clean. But Ned wanted nothing to do with remorse or admission.

  On July 17, five days later, Mellekas went back to the prison. But Ned refused to even come out of his cell.

  Mellekas waited. Soon a prison official took another walk. “That detective is still here, Ned. He wants to talk to you.”

  Ned shrugged. “No.”

  Mellekas later said he believed then—and now—that after he interviewed Ned that one time, Ned smartened up. He was scared of being broken. So, in order to avoid being beaten by his own vulnerabilities, he decided he wasn’t going to talk at all. But Mellekas wanted another crack. So he went back to the prison a few days later. Prison officials brought Ned down to the interview room. Apparently, they hadn’t told him this time who was waiting.

  According to Mellekas, Ned took a look into the room through the narrow door window, saying, “No, no, no…I don’t want to talk to him.”

  Mellekas stood up. “Come on, Ned.” Waving him in. Pulling out a chair.

  “No.” Ned shook his head.

  On August 30, 2002, Mellekas went back for a third time.

  “No,” Ned said.

  II

  Christina Mallon had her day in court on October 14, 2002. Christina sat in the witness stand and told her tale of Ned trying to grab her in front of Kenney’s during that first week of September 2001. “Get in the car, you bitch,” Christina said she heard Ned yell at her before she threw a beer bottle at his car and refused to get in.

  Ned still hadn’t been arrested on murder charges. David Zagaja was prosecuting the kidnapping case while also leading the murder investigation.

  Christina was a tough witness. She had lived a hard life—evident from the way in which she carried herself and spoke. Jurors weren’t warming to her.

  To Zagaja’s dismay, he wasn’t able to get any of Ned’s prior convictions or crimes into the kidnapping trial. The jury never knew, for example, that Ned had served time for manslaughter and attempted murder and aggravated assault. Nor were they allowed to hear testimony related to any of the letters Ned had written throughout the years, where he had described thoughts of stalking women and hurting them.

  Ned sat next to Jack Franckling, his attorney. He knew how to play on the jury’s impulses. To every juror hearing the case, Ned was a hardworking salesman from the suburbs who stopped at Kenney’s to have a few beers after a long day’s work. And here was this woman trying to
say that he had tried to grab her off the street. Who was she to walk into the courtroom and accuse him of anything?

  Christina’s major problem was that she couldn’t pinpoint a date for the incident. If it had been such a traumatic experience, why couldn’t she recall the exact day?

  Zagaja didn’t look too worried.

  Luz Rodriguez and her siblings, however, didn’t seem so confident. They sensed—“Especially me,” Luz said later—the case slipping out of Zagaja’s hands, and, in turn, Ned walking out of the courtroom a free man.

  Luz looked at Zagaja: “What’s going on?” she whispered when their eyes met.

  Zagaja tried explaining with hand gestures—like a cop telling a motorist to slow down near road construction—to chill out, don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right. Trust me.

  Luz was furious. If she and her family couldn’t get justice for Carmen with a murder charge, they would accept, at least for now, a kidnapping conviction.

  III

  David Zagaja later said Ned was cocky and arrogant where it pertained to his crimes. “And it wasn’t my opinion,” Zagaja added. “It was the psychiatrist’s opinion that [Ned] really exhibited a certain pride for his conduct….” A hubris.

  Ned could be thinking about killing, in other words, but appear as if he were your friend, someone who would not hurt you.

  Poker face.

  Ned was an expert at deception.

  A pro.

  Ned thought like Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer, Ridgway (the “Green River Killer”). “Edwin Snelgrove,” Zagaja said later, “sets himself apart from many individuals who commit murder. He has embodied a desire, an obsession, and a purpose to kill….”

  This was the real Ned Snelgrove. Not some dude sitting in a courtroom wooing jurors with his smile and plain looks—knowing all the while that his prior crimes were not going to tarnish his reputation.

  IV

  The jury went back into the deliberations room, had lunch, and then announced its verdict.

  Watching them walk into the room, Zagaja and the Rodriguez family knew, then and there, that they were going to—“can you believe it?”—acquit this maniac of the kidnapping charges and allow him to walk out the door a free man. (“Chills,” Luz Rodriguez said later. Just the thought that Carmen’s killer was going to escape the system was too much to fathom.)

  Tears.

  Anger.

  Zagaja did that thing with his hands again. He was smiling. Well, sort of. Staring at Luz and her family. He seemed confident. “It’s OK.”

  Ned—well, Ned was smiling. That much was entirely obvious. There he sat next to his lawyer and realized what everyone else knew: the jury had bought his shtick.

  Indeed. “Not guilty,” the foreman said a moment later.

  A collective gasp.

  “Reasonable doubt,” Ned’s lawyer had argued during his closing. “You cannot believe this witness”—Christina Mallon—“because her stories didn’t jibe with her statement to police.”

  Luz sunk her head into her hands. And cried.

  Sonia did the same.

  Zagaja looked toward them: Don’t worry about it.

  Ned stood and thanked the jury. Smiling. Nodding his head up and down. Bless you all. You did the right thing. “Thank you, thank you,” he said out loud. He folded his hands together. Thanks, he gestured with a nod, as if bowing.

  V

  Luz, Sonia, and Carmen’s mother, Rosa, were outside the courtroom on the cement sidewalk crying. They couldn’t believe it. How could Ned’s lies win?

  Ned was downstairs signing out, collecting his things.

  Zagaja was upstairs in his office.

  Detective Mellekas, along with several other investigators working the Carmen Rodriguez case, were also downstairs.

  Ned soon spotted them.

  They were now smiling.

  Smiling?

  Right then, Ned knew. Mellekas had an arrest warrant in his hand for the murder of Carmen Rodriguez. Ned wasn’t going anywhere, except maybe from one cell to the next.

  “You’re under arrest for the murder of Carmen Rodriguez,” said one of the investigators, “anything you say can and will be…”

  Ned dropped his head.

  High and low. Up and down. One minute smiling. Tasting freedom like a raindrop on your tongue. And the next…well, the next…handcuffs and processing. Ned was going back to jail—only now he was facing murder charges and a $1 million bond.

  In a way, it was a game.

  If so, checkmate.

  “He had to know it was coming,” Mellekas told me later. “He saw me and [two other investigators] in the courtroom.”

  After serving the arrest warrant, Mellekas and his colleagues brought Ned across the street from the courthouse to Troop H, where he was locked up. Mellekas tried talking to him. But Ned didn’t want to hear it. (“He’d talk about everything,” Mellekas said, “but nothing.”)

  At one point, Ned went into a diatribe about politics and politicians. He was loath to think about what some politicians got away with. He couldn’t comprehend that they were better than him. What an incredible double standard.

  “You know, Ned,” Mellekas said, “you speak with such eloquence and you’re so articulate. You couldn’t have been a politician, [though].”

  “Politicians,” Ned said with a laugh, as if he could in fact be one, “have criminal records.”

  “Yeah, Ned,” Mellekas said, smirking, chuckling a little, “but they never kill anybody.”

  And then Ned mentioned that one guy, that one Washington politician under investigation…what’s-his-name? He couldn’t think of it.

  Gary Condit, Mellekas said.

  “Yeah.”

  Mellekas laughed.

  82

  I

  Ned was sharp. He remembered everything. There was one cop who had seen and spoken to Ned in January and then had to talk to him again three months later. Ned looked at him that second time. Smiled. (Ned liked to smile when he knew something you didn’t.) “That suit,” Ned had said. “You wore that same suit the last time you were here.”

  The cop looked down at himself. He couldn’t recall. Maybe it was.

  The suit comment was, one detective later said, a way for Ned to say, Hey, I’m smarter than you. I’m watching every move you make and I am the one in charge.

  II

  Ned was arraigned the following day. His bail was raised from $1 million to $3 million. There weren’t going to be any more Moosehead beers for Ned Snelgrove at Kenney’s for quite a while. While in lockup, Ned began to play chess with his cell mates. He talked to them, too. One claimed Ned was beginning to open up. It was apparent that Ned needed a reputation. He was a small man. Protecting himself in prison wouldn’t be easy. If he had “a rep,” well, that could mean a lot. Maybe save him some trouble.

  III

  A day before Halloween, Detective Mellekas knocked on the door of a rather attractive young female Ned had tried to get to sign up for his frozen-food sales pitch back in 2001. Mellekas had retrieved the name from Ned’s appointment book.

  “I had a sales appointment with him back last May,” she said, offering Mellekas a seat in her living room.

  “Anything strange about him you can relate?”

  She “vividly recalled” meeting Ned, Mellekas noted. Ned spent six hours at her house the night he came by for a sales call. “He wouldn’t leave,” she said. “He was very persistent.”

  In the end, Ned placed several orders for the woman without her knowledge or consent. She thought that to be both bizarre and unprofessional.

  “I later canceled the orders,” she said.

  “What did he do then?”

  “He kept calling and calling.” He wouldn’t take no for an answer. “He asked me out.” She said no way. She had a boyfriend. A big dude. Tough too. But “Ned would call back and say, ‘Casino tonight?’”

  No, she’d tell him again.

  “I love to gamble,” Ned h
ad told her. “You’re very beautiful.”

  Don’t call me again, she’d command.

  He called every day for a week.

  Then, near September 21, he stopped.

  Mellekas left, thinking, She is lucky to still be alive.

  83

  I

  A letter arrived. It was from a man facing murder-for-hire charges. Mark Pascual had initiated the murder of a foe, a man who, he claimed, had been hustling his girlfriend and had burned him on a business deal. “I want to say the reason why I had this guy murdered was partly because of my friend and the way he treated her and her kids, and there were…bad deals between me and him,” Pascual told police. During a jailhouse interview, Pascual told me, “I made a mistake. I realize what I did was very wrong. I’m sorry for it. I can’t change the past. Wish I could, but I can only move on from here and say how sorry I am.”

  Pascual was “cellies” with Ned for a time. He had written to his lawyer, who passed the letter to the state’s attorney’s office and told them his client had information about a murder—the murder of “Carmie” Rodriguez.

  Carmie.

  Yes. It was the first time law enforcement had heard the nickname.

  So Detective Mellekas and James Rovella, an investigator for the state’s attorney, took a ride out to see Pascual at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield, Connecticut.

  “I am always very [skeptical] of jailhouse snitches,” Rovella said later. “I don’t trust them.”

  The power the state’s attorney had over Pascual—and any snitch, for that matter—was that Zagaja and his investigators knew details about Carmen’s murder no one else—save for her killer—knew. Important facts they had kept to themselves.

  In time, they would see how accurate Pascual was.

  II

  On the day Ned left his cell for court (the jury in his kidnapping case was being picked that day), Mark Pascual sat down and wrote a second letter. He was nervous, he admitted, the last time he wrote, because “Ned was in the room.” But now he had a moment to himself and wanted to talk about a few things.