I'll Be Watching You

by M. William Phelps

  Ned had met with his lawyer a day before his kidnapping trial started. When he came back from that meeting, he sat with Pascual and talked about it. He had been offered a deal, a lesser charge, in the kidnapping case, Ned explained. But “No way,” Ned told Pascual. He wasn’t taking any deal. “I’ll never admit to anything…. They’ll have to convict me or let me go.”

  Pascual thought, Why not take the deal?

  “You know what I’ll do,” Ned said, “I can sue them for defamation of character and wrongful incarceration. It’s all about a twenty-five-dollar check that she [Christina Mallon] received from American Frozen Foods.”

  Ned said the scam he was running in Kenney’s was designed for him to receive a $100 bonus every month from his employer. For every ten people he could get to fill out an application, whether they were approved or not, he received $100. Christina Mallon was upset with him after he burned her out of $25.

  “That’s why it took her so long,” Ned told Pascual, “to come forward and report her so-called crime.” She wanted to get him back for burning her out of the money.

  The point of the story for Zagaja wasn’t that Ned had told it to Pascual; it was in the details. Only Ned could have known these details. If nothing else, it told Zagaja that Pascual was maybe telling the truth.

  III

  Mark Pascual and prison were not a good match. Some guys are born to do time. They accept their sentences with a sense of street pride and content. They have no trouble being confined and being around men for years at a time. While others…well, others aren’t quite built that way. They have a tough time with just the thought of being corralled like steer and told what to do and when to do it. Not to mention the emotional and physical strength one needs to survive. Pascual was thirty-nine. He had grown up in Torrington, Connecticut, which, like any city, had its rough areas and even rougher people. Pascual ran a garage. He fixed engines: cars, bikes, whatever. In fact, part of his payment to the man he had hired to—as he put it—“whack” his adversary was a snowmobile. “I want five grand,” the guy had said when Pascual asked how much it would cost to have someone killed.

  “That’s too much,” Pascual responded.

  “Well, what do you suppose, then?”

  “Some cash and that snowmobile over there,” Pascual said, pointing.

  “That’ll do,” the killer said.

  And so, after negotiating the price of death, they made a deal: a couple hundred bucks and a snowmobile for a man’s life.

  This man now reaching out to the state’s attorney’s office to say that Ned Snelgrove—the same guy who spoke to no one, the guy who thought he had covered every base, the guy who had claimed he learned things from Bundy, the guy who thought he was always two steps ahead of law enforcement—had, in fact, told him all about the murder of Carmen Rodriguez. On the surface it didn’t add up.

  The conversations he’d had with Ned, Pascual claimed, had taken place over the course of eight months.

  Detective Mellekas and Jim Rovella met with Pascual. “Start at the beginning,” Mellekas suggested. “Take your time.”

  Pascual noted that the two cops weren’t offering him anything in return for his statement. No “get out of jail free” cards or reduced sentence deals. It was cut-and-dry: We’ll see what we can do. No promises. But, of course, if they all sat there and thought this guy was talking to them and wasn’t going to want something, they were kidding themselves.

  “I got to know Ned and talk to him,” Pascual began, “while we were at recreation.” They’d be out in the yard, buddying around, playing cards. One day, Pascual said, somebody walked up to him and Ned as they sat and played cards together. And that’s when things took a turn from friendly conversation to what each had done to get himself tossed in the can.

  “You’re the guy who killed them girls in Hartford,” an inmate said, referring to rumors that Ned had killed several area woman.

  Ned didn’t respond. What’s a guy to say? Silence beckons power.

  “After that,” Pascual told Mellekas and Rovella, “there were newspaper articles around.”

  Inmates started teasing Ned. Drawing cartoons of him with his “girls” and “posting” them up all over. “That’s how it all started,” Pascual explained.

  When Ned found the cartoons, he became angry. Stomping around, he ripped the cartoons down, rushed into the dorm, and flushed them down the toilet.

  But it never let up. Then Pascual, Ned, and two other guys were playing cards one afternoon and someone walked up and tossed a newspaper article on the table. It was an article about Ned’s case. Pointing, he said, “Look at that!” (“I felt that Ned had to say something to justify it to us,” Pascual recalled.)

  And so Ned spoke up about his case, according to Pascual, for the first time, saying, “F*** those cops. They got nothing on me. I’m good at what I do. I cover my tracks.”

  84

  I

  He was nervous. Rubbing his hands together as if it were a cold winter’s day and he was standing by a fire. But it was June. June 1982. Commencement day. Looking around. Fixing his hair. Checking his gown. Ned wore a black robe, white shirt, tartan tie, gray slacks. He was a good-looking kid, with the look of an innocent child with a business degree setting out into a world full of opportunity.

  What was going on in his head, however, wasn’t how nice the weather was for his graduation day. Or, if those wrinkles in his gown would show up in photographs? Instead, this kid, the one with the golden smile, one of the chosen officers of Alpha Zeta, the honors/service fraternity at Rutgers, the same kid who showed so much promise, was struggling with thoughts of violence against the women around him. He fought—in his own words—just about every day with the tug-of-war between acting out on those thoughts and controlling himself, which, for the most part, he had seemed to do.

  Indeed, the Ned Snelgrove of 1982—arguably not yet a killer: arguably because no one knows for sure if he had killed before Karen Osmun—was quite a different person from the man sitting in jail preparing his case twenty-something years later. Ned would soon stand in front of Hartford superior court judge Carmen Espinosa, a woman he would come to loathe more than perhaps anyone else in the justice system, a woman who would face Ned and say, quite sternly, “Sometimes people are just bad, beyond redemption, and you are one of them.”

  David Zagaja hoped Mark Pascual could put the final touch on a conviction. Detective Mellekas and Jim Rovella were back at MacDougall-Walker Correctional wondering if Pascual was the real deal as he continued to tell what was turning out to be one heck of a story. Essentially, it was a narrative, as hard as it was to believe, of what actually happened to Carmen Rodriguez on the night she was murdered. It was a story, Pascual insisted, straight from the horse’s mouth.

  II

  “Ned said he covered up what he did real well,” Pascual told Mellekas and Rovella. According to Pascual, it was Ned who called Carmen “Carmie,” that’s why Pascual used the same name.

  “What’d he say about how he did it?” Mellekas wanted to know.

  “He talked generally about the crime, telling us he was in the bar with her dancing and buying her drinks, saying, ‘She was a Puerto Rican girl in her early thirties. I was really attracted to her.’” As they partied, Pascual said, Ned asked Carmen to leave.

  “Can I get a ride?” Carmen asked. (Odd that she’d ask for a ride—she lived but a few blocks away.)

  If you believe Pascual, “Will you have breakfast with me?” Ned supposedly asked Carmen next, before suggesting a diner near his house.

  “Sure,” Carmen said.

  So they left.

  “After breakfast,” Ned told Pascual, “we went for a ride to get to know each other.” Ned drove to an area of his hometown where he used to hang out. The Berlin Fairgrounds. Wooded. Secluded. Dark.

  Ned found a spot and pulled over. He “made a move on” Carmen, Pascual said.

  After Ned made the sexual advance, Carmen opened the door and go
t out.

  Scared. She stumbled and ran. Fast as she could.

  Ned rolled his eyes. That burning he talked about in his letters began: that sexual compulsion, that need to render a woman unconscious and then strip her top off in a fit of sexual confusion and frustration. It was a powerful desire to play with her breasts and then sexually stimulate himself, and if she came to, take out a knife and start poking her with it.

  As Carmen ran, it was all too much for Ned. That “feeling” took control of him as he opened his door and started running after Carmen through the woods.

  And so the chase was on. Carmen. Drunk. Out of breath. Huffing and puffing. Falling. Slowing down…

  Ned. On top of his game.

  Within a moment, he leapt. Like a cat. Tackled Carmen in the brush. “Knocked her down,” Pascual said.

  Ned was in his element now. A hunter. That person Mary Ellen Renard had described when Ned walked into the bathroom a nice young man and came out Mr. Hyde was back. He was much more powerful than Carmen, who was running for her life, as though they were in some sort of summer Hollywood slasher flick, and so he took her by the neck and, without speaking a word, squeezed.

  Tighter.

  Harder.

  Yes. That feeling. Here it comes. It was part of the high.

  “Her body went limp,” Pascual said Ned told him. Ned had that look in his eye while explaining it. “That gleam,” Pascual told me. “That sense of pride that he was a murderer.”

  “‘I strangled her until her body went limp and she passed out,’” Pascual recalled, quoting Ned.

  Then Ned walked back to his car. Carmen was on the ground. Ned had a tarp and a bag, he admitted, in his trunk.

  Tools of the trade.

  He took the tarp out first. The bag—that was where he kept his goodies: rope, scissors, duct tape, flashlight (or lantern, Pascual couldn’t recall which, exactly), staple gun, and “other things.” And then, after taking his murder instruments out of his trunk, Ned went back and picked Carmen up and carried her to the car, before spreading the tarp out on the backseat. Placing her on the tarp, Carmen “came to and started to fight back.”

  Wild. Swinging. Screaming. She really didn’t know what was going on.

  At some point, Ned said, Carmen bit him on the right arm. “[I] thought the police may find something of [me] on her teeth,” he explained to Pascual.

  Then…he “finished her off.” According to Pascual, Ned said he took the scissors and stabbed Carmen until she stopped moving.

  Stopped breathing.

  But for Ned, the thrill—the best part of it all, perhaps—wasn’t over. As Carmen lay on the backseat of his car on top of a tarp, Ned pulled off her “top shirt and posed her,” Pascual explained. After posing Carmen, as he had reportedly done with Karen Osmun and Mary Ellen Renard, Ned then began to, as Pascual told it, “get off, meaning sexually,” by masturbating.

  When he was done, Ned told Pascual, he “taped her and stapled her and wrapped her in garbage bags.”

  III

  “What’d you do with the body?” Pascual asked Ned after he was finished explaining how he murdered Carmen.

  “I got rid of it,” Ned said.

  The way Pascual told it, Ned chose Rhode Island because he had customers in Jewett City, Plainfield, and Thompson, Connecticut, towns along the Rhode Island border, near Hopkinton. Ned knew the terrain. He knew the land was spread out and woodsy. He knew that at night you were lucky if you found a raccoon hanging around out in the open.

  “He would drive in these areas,” Pascual told Mellekas and Rovella, “while he was waiting for the customers to get home from work or whatever. Ned said the farther away from Berlin that the body was, the better off he would be about not being a suspect,” which was something Ned had bragged about learning from Ted Bundy.

  What about evidence? The tarp? The scissors?

  “Ned said he drove to Jewett City to a McDonald’s,” Pascual added, “and dumped the tarp and bag of stuff in a Dumpster. Ned was confident he covered his tracks.”

  85

  I

  In jail, Ned was what Pascual called a “pack rat.” He saved everything. Condiments. Newspapers. Request slips. Empty bags. Books. Letters. Envelopes.

  A real hoarder.

  “No one liked him,” Pascual told me during one of our many prison interviews. “I was his only friend. He’d get beat up all the time. My mother sent him money because no one else would. He felt he could trust me. He told me everything. He had this gloss over his eyes, a different look altogether, when telling me about the women—several women—he killed. He was certain the cops would never catch him. He got off on retelling me the stories, especially when he spoke about posing their bodies.”

  Ned would kill a woman, Pascual explained, rip her shirt open, tear off her bra, expose her breasts, and just stop and take it all in. “Looking at the girls all laid out like that, dead and posed,” Pascual said, “Ned told me, ‘That is the perfect woman.’” Ned’s idea of the perfect female was a dead woman posed in a compromising position: pants and panties on, no shirt or bra, her large breasts fully exposed. “While he was strangling them or stabbing them,” Pascual noted, “looking into their eyes, he told me that the erection he got from this was more powerful than anything he could ever explain. After he posed them, he [gratified] himself sexually, but turned away from the body so he wouldn’t leave his DNA at the scene.”

  II

  At home, Ned was the same pack rat. Ropes. Toys. Maps. Notes. Gas receipts. Oil change receipts. Logbooks of his mileage. In saving all of these items—which was perhaps a symptom of a more clinical obsessive-compulsive condition his mother had discovered in his teens—Ned had, essentially, tied his own judicial noose: because all of it (the maps and mileage, especially, those same items Ned had blasted and laughed at Bundy for keeping) was going to come back and hang Ned during his murder trial.

  III

  A day or so after Ned told his story to Mark Pascual, Pascual and the other inmate were not so sure they could believe him. It seemed far-fetched. Like maybe Ned was using them to plant a seed for trial. The story was too grandiose and Hollywood-like. Ned was bragging. Maybe he was trying to expand on his tough-guy image. He was going to be in jail a long time. Even if he won an acquittal, there was no telling when his trial would start. A few stories of how sick he was, dropped here and there, spread around the prison, would send a message to inmates looking to hassle Ned.

  This guy’s a wack job. Stay away from him.

  Inmates lied—even to one another. Pascual knew this. Ned knew this. In many ways, prison is a fictional world. You can be whatever you want to be.

  Feeling that maybe Ned had told them stories, the other inmate contacted his girlfriend and asked her to do some investigating based on the facts Ned had told them. “Check the Internet,” the convict suggested.

  About a week later, Pascual said, that friend showed up at his cell. “Hey, check it out.” His girlfriend had sent him a long article detailing Ned’s history and charges.

  “What is it?”

  They both sat and read.

  “This guy’s for real,” the convict told Pascual.

  Just then, Ned came by the cell. “What’s going on? Let me see that.”

  Pascual handed him the article.

  Ned was quiet. He read. Flipping through the pages. Then he abruptly turned and walked away with the article.

  A few days later, Ned returned the article to Pascual, but some pages were missing. So the guy asked his girlfriend to send another one.

  Matching up the two copies, Pascual was confused. Ned had taken out anything having to do with his crimes in New Jersey. It seemed strange. As if he didn’t want anyone to know about his past.

  IV

  Pascual was moved a few weeks later to another “pod,” a unit or cell block in the same prison. That same day, Ned was moved to the same pod. (“He was very suspicious,” Pascual explained, “that we were both moved at
the same time to the same pod.”)

  A month later, Ned and Pascual, living in separate cells, went up to one of the corrections officers. “You think we can room together?” Pascual asked.

  Sometime after that, they were put into the same cell. Not for a few days, or a month, but 159 days. It was here, during this time, that Pascual began to learn more about Ned and his crimes. And one of the first things Pascual noticed about his new roommate was Ned’s paranoia. Ned was the type to worry about everything. He wondered if investigators were listening to his every word, reading his mail, and watching him. (In fact, Ned was so paranoid that the prison was opening and reading his mail, when I started to receive letters from Ned in early 2007, he always sent me a subsequent letter in tandem a few days later, aside from his actual response to my particular questions, asking me to describe the way in which his letters had arrived in my mailbox. “Did you notice any tape on the back of the letter?” was a question Ned routinely asked me. In one instance, he even went so far as to send me a one-page letter with three questions and check boxes that he had drawn next to each question. Moreover, in all of his letters, Ned would put a staple in the corner that went through the envelope and his letter. Thus, if a prison official had opened his letter to read it, he or she would have to tear the letter.)

  “A month after [Carmen went missing],” Ned said to Pascual one day, sitting in their new cell, “the police came to speak with me. They took my car twice.”

  This blew Ned’s mind—the cops impounding his car. He believed there was a conspiracy, some sort of sneaky little con fleshed out by the cops to track his every move. “They attached a GPS [device] to [my] car to track wherever I drove,” Ned explained to Pascual.