I'll Be Watching You

by M. William Phelps

  Merry-go-round. “With my attorney present. I’d never do it without an attorney.”

  “And you provided some information to the police, correct?”

  “In New Jersey?” Ned asked.

  “Yes!” Zagaja said.

  “With my attorney present, yes.”

  “And you’ve lied to the police in the past, haven’t you?”

  There it was: Ned had told lies all his life. To his parents. His lawyers. The court. The women he interacted with. Those patrons at Kenney’s. And the police. Yes, the police. On the record, in fact. But suddenly Ned couldn’t remember. “Um, I don’t recall. It’s possible, but—”

  “You don’t? OK.” Ned’s selective memory, in fact, worked to Zagaja’s advantage. “Do you recall telling the police,” Zagaja asked, “back in New Jersey, that you accompanied Karen Osmun, by coincidence, outside of a party? You walked with her—”

  O’Brien had heard enough. “I’m going to object to the purpose of this questioning.”

  “Credibility,” said Zagaja.

  “It’s impeachment. Overruled.”

  “You walked with her past her car and left her at her car. Do you remember?”

  Ned became incensed: “No! I told the police that I left at the same time as Karen.”

  “Yes,” Zagaja cleared up, “and you walked with her to her car and then drove—”

  “And then,” Ned said, interrupting Zagaja, “she got in her car and then I got in my car and drove, and that’s the truth. I did not lie when I said that.”

  “Right. And you never saw her after that point, you told the police also. Correct?”

  Beaten. “Correct.”

  “And that’s a lie, correct?”

  “Right.”

  “Because you did see her?”

  “Yes.”

  “You killed her later that night, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t wish to cooperate with the police…in New Jersey, did you?” Zagaja asked.

  “I don’t recall.”

  “And you said, up front, you told the police you wanted to leave at Troop H?” Zagaja asked.

  “Absolutely. I told…I told the—”

  “There’s no question pending, sir.” It almost pained Zagaja, it was evident on his face, to call Ned “sir.” But it was more sarcasm than respect.

  “After they read me my rights, I said, you should take me—”

  “There’s no question pending, sir,” Zagaja repeated.

  “Just answer the question,” the judge piped in. “If it calls for a yes or no, then it’s a yes or no.”

  “You’ve been convicted of three felonies from New Jersey, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “You recall speaking with Detective Kershaw and Detective McDonald for about two hours?”

  “They tried to get me to talk to them, I did not talk to them.”

  “And that was for about two hours you said?”

  “Yeah. And then I was—”

  “There’s no question pending, sir.” Zagaja took a breath, perhaps waiting for the judge to chime in again. When she didn’t, he kept it going, asking Ned, “Did you make notes of anything that was said?”

  “Did I make notes of anything said on that day?”

  “Yes. Or anything done?”

  “I remember what was said.”

  “You do? You recall everything that took place for those several hours you were at Troop H?”

  Sharply, “Much, much better than McDonald, yes.”

  “Who transported you back home?”

  “Sergeant Patrick Gaffney, of the Connecticut State Police. And in his report, it actually speaks—”

  “Objection,” Zagaja said, “there’s nothing pending.” A pause. No one said anything. So Zagaja asked: “Did you speak with Patrick Gaffney from the state police on your way back home?”

  “He asked me—”

  “Yes or no?” Zagaja said loudly.

  “Well, no. He attempted to ask me questions and I didn’t answer.”

  “You didn’t say anything?”

  “No.”

  For the next twenty minutes, Ned and Zagaja sparred on many of the issues that had already been covered. Ned stood his ground, Zagaja fired back. But beyond the fact that Ned was adamant regarding how he was (mis)treated by the police, nothing new came out of the verbal exchange.

  93

  I

  Barbara Delaney had been through the worst that life could toss her way. No one could kill her sister again. Yet, that wound was open-ended, she said. Seeing Ned arrested for another murder was like hearing a tape of that day when she found out her sister had been murdered. She had been up late watching the news one night and saw a reporter interviewing Mary Ellen Renard, getting her reaction to Ned’s arrest in Connecticut. “Oh, my goodness…that’s Ned,” Barbara said aloud, staring blankly at the television screen.

  II

  The drive north from New Jersey was tiring. Here was Barbara once again heading into a courtroom as her sister’s killer faced a judge and jury. Barbara had thought she’d seen the last of Ned Snelgrove when she wrote that letter to the parole board more than six years earlier, warning its members that if they let him out of prison, well, they’d all be doing exactly what they were doing: trying to put him back. The guy was a murderer, Barbara knew. Nothing was going to stop him.

  Since arriving in Hartford, Barbara had met and bonded with the Rodriguez family. Death could do that: create an instant connection and unite by tragedy.

  Sitting in the back of the courtroom, watching Ned, she was sickened by his cocky mannerisms and “I’m in control” attitude. Knowing exactly the type of person Ned Snelgrove was, Barbara wanted to stand up and shout, “I’m here representing Karen. She is here in this room, too.” Don’t anyone forget about my Karen.

  The fact that Karen had been killed by the same maniac who was now trying to convince a different court that he had been rehabilitated, cured, that he wasn’t a menace to society any longer, was unnerving to Barbara as she sat and watched the proceedings. She couldn’t stay for the entire trial, nor could she help the prosecution. But she could make her presence known for the sake of Karen’s memory. Let Ned know that she was never going away. That she would always be in his face.

  III

  Jim Rovella was pacing in the state’s attorney’s office, a spacious piece of real estate located in the same building as the courtroom. Rovella was nervous, as was Zagaja. One of their main witnesses, the one person who could describe Ned’s use of the past tense when talking about Carmen, was still missing. No one could find Jackie Garcia.

  Jackie had a warrant out for her arrest. She had violated parole. Jackie had strayed since Carmen’s death. She had fallen into an abyss of behaviors that were born out of the tragic loss of a loved one. Murder can have such a ripple effect on families. Now she was set to testify and the prosecution couldn’t find her.

  So Rovella called Luz. “I need your help.” He didn’t tell Luz there was a warrant out for Jackie’s arrest. “We cannot find Jackie, Luz, and we need her on the stand.”

  Luz had an idea of where she was. “OK.”

  “Can you help us?” Rovella asked.

  “Yes, of course, of course.”

  IV

  Dr. Jennifer Swartz, the Rhode Island medical examiner who autopsied Carmen’s remains, testified on January 10. Through Swartz’s testimony, Zagaja showed the jury what were dozens of photographs that O’Brien had objected to—photos that truly depicted the brutality of the final moments of Carmen’s life and the result of her remains decomposing for months inside garbage bags.

  The ropes.

  The plastic bags.

  The bones and skin tissue (what was left, anyway).

  Carmen was no longer a fun-loving, roaming spirit, whom family members memorialized as the beautiful woman on the front of their T-shirts; to the jury, she was a bag of bones and decomposed tissue rotting in the woods.r />
  Zagaja called Detective Kevin McDonald, who explained how the body was found, where and what transpired afterward. Zagaja was smart to put up large aerial maps of the region. Through those photos, it was apparent that Carmen’s killer had dumped her body at the first possible wooded area over the Connecticut–Rhode Island border. From this unique bird’s-eye view, jurors could see that if Ned was driving along the road, looking left and right, coming into Rhode Island from Connecticut, there was no other utility road on either side of the main road until this one area near Peter Mareck’s house. Through testimony and photos, it was all clear: Ned had crossed the border, trolled along the main thoroughfare, spotted Grassy Pond Road on the left, turned, driven for a few moments, pulled over, dumped Carmen’s body into an area twenty or so yards into the woods, and driven back home.

  V

  Luz made a few calls. Asked around. Jackie had seemingly disappeared. But then she ran into Jackie’s boyfriend. “If you see her, or she returns home, call me.”

  He said he would.

  Heading toward the end of the first week of trial, Luz got that call. She was sitting in the courtroom at the time. “Jackie’s here,” the boyfriend said. “She’s taking a shower.”

  During a break—Zagaja had been questioning Ned’s boss at American Frozen Foods—Luz pulled Zagaja aside. “We found her.”

  “Great. Where?”

  “We’re heading over to her apartment now to go get her.”

  Rovella and Zagaja thought for a moment to send a few black-and-whites. After all, there was a warrant out for a parole violation. But then they thought against it. They needed Jackie to testify. They didn’t need her to run. (Luz still had no idea that there was a warrant out for Jackie’s arrest.)

  When she got to the apartment, Jackie was in the shower. Luz sat directly outside the bathroom door and waited. Jackie had no idea she was there.

  As soon as Jackie opened the door and saw Luz, she quickly closed the door and locked it. “Jackie,” Luz pleaded, “let’s sit down and talk…. This is for your mother.”

  Jackie unlocked the door and let her aunt in. She was crying. Luz was gentle, sincere. “I can’t go,” Jackie said.

  “This is to make justice for Carmen, honey, they need you.”

  “Auntie, Auntie,” Jackie said, “but they’re going to arrest me.”

  “You need to tell them about that day you confronted him at Kenney’s and what he said to you.”

  “Auntie,” Jackie said through tears. She had just turned twenty. She was a mother herself. She had been running. Not from the law. But from her own demons and feelings about her mother’s murder. She missed Carmen. Missed her tenderness and kind touch. Those mother-daughter times they’d shared.

  Luz said, “Jackie,” putting her arm around her shoulder, “they are not going to arrest you. I promise on my kids’ lives.” Luz was speaking the truth from her heart. “It’s hard for me and Sonia to sit there every day…you can help.” Jackie started to get dressed. Luz continued, “It’s going to be all right.”

  “You promise?” Jackie asked.

  “I promise. Listen, girl, it’s not easy for you, it’s not easy for us being there every day. Now they need you. We need you.”

  Jackie thought about it.

  “Come on, honey,” Luz whispered.

  VI

  Zagaja finished questioning Ned’s boss and there was a little break in the day’s proceedings. He looked over at Rovella while he was collecting his files and paperwork. “I hope they found Jackie. She’s up next.”

  94

  I

  When Luz and Jackie arrived at the state’s attorney’s office, Zagaja looked as though he had been given a shot of adrenaline. They were inside a room at the courthouse: Zagaja, Rovella, and a uniformed cop. Jackie was nervous. Shaking a bit. Crying. Luz didn’t know what was going on. “You see, Auntie,” Jackie started saying through tears, “you see, you see,” adding quickly, “Now they’re going to put me in jail.”

  “What?” Luz said, a belt of confusion whipped across her face.

  “I swear to God,” Jackie said, “I didn’t do nothing. Swear to God.”

  “Hey,” Luz said, “what’s going on?” She felt betrayed.

  “I don’t ever want to see you,” Jackie screamed, “Sonia, or anyone else, ever!”

  “David, what’s going on?” Luz asked, looking toward Zagaja.

  “Well,” Zagaja said, “she’s under arrest for a parole violation. We have a warrant.”

  “Tell her I didn’t know. Tell her. Tell her I didn’t know that, David!”

  “I will,” Zagaja said.

  “Jackie,” Luz said, “remember when I said on ‘my kids’ lives,’ I meant that. I didn’t know.”

  In the end, Jackie was OK with things. Zagaja promised to send her to treatment, instead of jail, and everyone was happy. But she had to testify first.

  II

  Zagaja and Rovella believed that some of the best evidence they had was Ned’s own mileage records. It was that one comment Ned had made to Luisa St. Pierre as he lay in a hospital bed. That bell Ned had rung himself. That one “mistake” he had made in offering up his mileage books. Zagaja and Rovella had spent hundreds of hours studying Ned’s mileage records, matching his mileage up against the gas receipts they uncovered in his basement. They’d hired an outside firm, North Eastern Technical Services (NETS), from Fall River, Massachusetts, to sift through the mountain of records and come up with some sort of way to explain it all in layman terms. (“Those records were important,” Rovella told me later. “When you looked at them, and studied them, it was so obvious.”)

  Still, you had to know what you were looking for. Zagaja had spent hours creating charts and graphs to illustrate how Ned had tried to cook his books to make it appear as if he couldn’t have traveled to Rhode Island on that weekend Carmen went missing. Ned thought he was smart. He believed he had it all covered. And yet, like the maps he kept in his house, and perhaps allowing Mary Ellen Renard to live, he had made another in a series of mistakes: thinking he was smarter than everyone else. His biggest downfall, after all: his ego. It was all coming back to him now—and although he’d soon try, there was very little he could do to stop it.

  III

  It was safe to say that Jackie was a mess. She had been booked and was now being housed in the women’s prison in Niantic, Connecticut, where she would stay until she saw a judge and was given a bed at a hospital. In court, facing Ned, Jackie looked fragile and on edge, as if the slightest mention of her mother was going to make her crumble. Zagaja got her arrest record out of the way first, then had Jackie talk about where she lived with Carmen in Hartford at the time her mom went missing and how she had phoned the Hartford PD the following morning. Then, after some discussion between O’Brien and the judge over the time frame, Zagaja established when Jackie had gone to Kenney’s with Miguel, Cutie, and Jeffrey Malave to confront Ned. He had her explain how she was summoned to Kenney’s by a call from the bartender. “And did you end up meeting with this person, you said, Edwin?”

  “Yeah,” Jackie said. So far, so good. Jackie was holding her own. She was getting stronger, apparently, as she talked her way through that day when she was frantically searching for her mother, who had been missing, by then, for almost two weeks. And after establishing how they flushed Ned out of Kenney’s and into the side street and, finally, out to his car, Jackie said he ran back into the bar, which seemed awfully suspicious to her. “He took a bill out of his pocket and started running into the bar again and he screamed, ‘Whoever [will] stop those people, I’ll give fifty dollars.’”

  “Where were you when you saw that?”

  “After him.”

  “Were you in the bar, at that point?”

  “No. Two people came right away to the door and they block us.”

  “What ended up happening then?”

  “I tell the guys, ‘I just want to speak with him ’cause my mom was the last person they
see with…it was him. And I just want to ask where he left my mother.’”

  “And did they let you in?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jackie described how they sat down with Ned—except Miguel, who was seething and squirrelly and wanted to kick Ned’s butt, so they kept him back. “Can you describe what happened once you sat at the table?” Zagaja asked. “Did you ask him any questions?”

  Jackie paused. Recoiled a bit. The memory of it all was getting to her. She was back there that day in her mind, and it was hard. She was no longer telling the story—she was reliving it. “I asked him,” she said, “where he left my mom.”

  “And did he respond?”

  “He told me in Shell, in the gas station.”

  “In the Shell gas station? And did he say anything else?”

  “No. Oh, and then [he said] my mother asked him for—for twenty dollar—for twenty dollar, and he was like, ‘Get out the car.’”

  “Did he say anything else after that?”

  “No.”

  “Do you remember if Jeffrey [Malave] said anything about you being her daughter?”

  This seemed to spark a memory for Jackie. “That I was pregnant. I was pregnant about that time. [Jeffrey] was like, ‘If you got her mother, just let her go, and, you know, or call the cops if you see her.’ Something like that. And he told me…and he, right there, when Jeffrey tell him that I was her daughter, he looked at me in my eyes”—Jackie started to breathe heavier—“and told me, ‘I’m sorry. That was your mom?’”

  It was all in the way she said it. How Ned had said it: “That was your mom?” Not, Carmen is your mother? Or, I have no idea where Carmen is. Instead, Ned had used “was.” How telling that one past-tense verb had become to Jackie.

  “Did you take that to mean anything when he said that?”

  “Yeah…because he could have say—he could have say, ‘I’m sorry, that’s your mom.’ For me,” Jackie added, crying now, “he killed her already when he told me that.”