And that was Zagaja’s point exactly: Ned had, in fact, honed his craft. He had gotten to know his victim. In choosing Carmen, in getting to know her personally, Ned thought he was choosing the perfect victim. The victim no one would miss. The victim Bundy had taught him to choose. But, of course, Ned had no idea members of Carmen’s family would be combing the streets that night, looking for her.
“In Karen Osmun’s case,” O’Brien argued, “he followed her home. [In] Renard’s case, he followed her home, and, in this instance, Carmen Rodriguez, she asked for a ride.”
In truth, that was what Ned had claimed. No one knew for certain if Carmen had asked Ned for a ride, or if Ned forced her into his car. He had been seen leaving the bar with Carmen. Beyond that, anything was possible. He’d allegedly tried to grab Christina Mallon outside Kenney’s weeks before Carmen disappeared. Who’s to say Ned didn’t convince Carmen to walk outside with him and when (and if) she refused to get into his car, he forced her.
“…The medical examiner kind of left it open that you can’t rule out various factors,” O’Brien argued. “You can’t rule out strangling, it could have been strangling and stabbing. But you also can’t rule out a number of other factors, electrocution being one, suffocation, those factors, any other causes of death….” O’Brien then began to lay out how far apart each murder was, trying to explain that there was no pattern. “In terms of remoteness, Your Honor, this occurred—’83 was the killing of Osmun, I believe, ’87 was the attempted murder of Renard. So we’re…we’re twenty-two years post the killing of Osmun, and, at the current time we are, we’re twenty years post, let me see, eighteen, eighteen years post on Osmun and Renard—”
Sitting, shaking his head, watching his attorney struggle to do simple addition, Ned couldn’t take it. He blurted out: “Eighteen.” Eighteen years, for crying out loud.
II
Connecticut case law had a long history regarding the admissibility of prior misconduct evidence. It was “well established,” Judge Espinosa explained as she began to hand down her decision on the morning of January 13. “All right,” she said pleasantly, confidently, “the court has reviewed the arguments of counsel, the relevant case law…. The court rules as follows…. Evidence of prior acts of misconduct, because of its prejudicial nature, is inadmissible to show that the defendant is guilty of a subsequent crime. However, evidence of acts of misconduct are admissible for the purpose of proving many things—such as, intent, identity, motive, a common scheme, or a system of criminal activity.” And this was Zagaja’s main point: Ned had provided a blueprint for future behavior that was relevant to not only the murder of Carmen Rodriguez, but how he had chosen Carmen as his victim. “To be admissible,” Espinosa continued, “such evidence must also be relevant and material.” She explained that the eleven-page letter written by Ned “is relevant and material to the issues of intent, motive, and knowledge. It is relevant to prove what the defendant’s intent was on September 21, 2001, when he left Kenney’s restaurant with Carmen Rodriguez. It is also relevant to the issue of the defendant’s motive for killing Carmen Rodriguez that night. The defendant admits, in this letter, that he has a longtime compulsion to kill women for sexual gratification by rendering women helpless and posing their bodies in seductive poses. He admits getting pleasure and sexual arousal when he kills rather than by having sex with his victims.” Ned shook his head. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing as Espinosa continued, saying, “Accordingly, the defendant’s letters…the court finds that evidence of these two prior acts of misconduct are relevant and material to the issues of intent, motive, common scheme, and identity. All three women were friendly with the defendant and had a speaking relationship with him, they all interacted with him socially.” But, “…at this time, the court will not allow the testimony of Mary Ellen Renard. The court finds that the prejudicial effect of her live testimony, at this time, would outweigh its probative value…. The letters to George Recck. The court finds that the letters…are relevant to the issues of establishing a course of criminal activity culminating in the murder of Carmen Rodriguez, as well as to the issues of common scheme, intent, and motive.”
Zagaja wanted to pump his fist in the air. He wanted to stand up and say thank you. Yell and scream. But, of course, he sat and took it all in. He hadn’t won yet.
On the other hand, Ned looked as though he had been told he had terminal cancer.
“The court further finds…that these letters to George Recck describe the defendant’s compulsion to kill and were consistent with the statements to the sentencing judge. They are relevant to show the development and progression of his compulsion to kill, how he learned from his mistakes, how he learned from Ted Bundy’s mistakes, all of which culminated in the murder of Carmen Rodriguez….”
As for the movie The Deliberate Stranger, the judge said she had watched the movie the previous night. She believed—and rightly so—that the “prejudice of showing it to the jury outweighs its probative value.”
Nonetheless, Zagaja could not have asked for a better judgment.
Ned’s hatred for the process grew as he sat and boiled. He believed without a doubt that the judge was now entirely against him. He kept quiet, but promised himself that before the trial was over, there would come a time when the judge truly got an earful. It was just a matter of when the proper time for such an outburst would present itself.
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The admission of the letters essentially sealed Ned’s fate: he was finished. He knew it. O’Brien knew it. And Zagaja knew it. No matter what else the state had, the jury would see, in Ned’s own words, the callous sociopath and remorseless killer he had been in the past. They would judge him on his previous acts—exactly what he was afraid of. He had killed before and had promised to kill again.
Guilty!
II
And so David Zagaja began his parade of witnesses to talk about the letters and Ned’s previous crimes—and the noose, as each witness stood, raised his or her hand, and testified, got tighter and tighter around Ned’s neck. No matter what he said or what he did now, he was a convicted murderer. He couldn’t escape his past. His past, in effect, had become his future. His present.
Hartford PD detective Timothy Shaw testified how he logged all of the evidence—there wasn’t much—from Ned’s car. What was significant about Ned’s car was not what investigators found, but what they didn’t find. DNA is ironclad science, some might contend. Finding DNA or trace evidence—a cigarette butt, hair, saliva, anything that can tie or trace back to a person being in one place at some point—inside a car is generally a way for a prosecutor to say, She was in his car. We have the DNA to prove it. What does one do, however, when one finds nothing? Not once piece of trace evidence to prove Carmen Rodriguez was in Ned’s car. Well, for starters, he points out the most important fact gleaned from such a find: Ned admitted Carmen had taken a ride with him. With her nest of long and flowing hair, it would almost be impossible for her not to have left one hair in Ned’s car. From Zagaja’s perspective, this meant that Ned had swept that car clean. Totally wiped it down from bumper to bumper. “There will be much said about the lack of forensic evidence,” Zagaja explained to jurors, “the lack of scientific evidence. And in a very eerie sense, we have to give Ned credit for that…. It’s not for a lack of testing or a lack of want or a lack of analysis…. Based on the state of decomposition of the body, the late time in its detection, this is the evolution of a killer. And we, unfortunately, have to give him credit for that. It’s a sick statement, because I don’t mean ‘credit’ in the sense of ‘you did a good job.’”
III
CSP detective Thomas Murray testified about items the CSP found when they served a search warrant on the Snelgrove property. Addressing the jury under Zagaja’s questioning, Murray said he and his colleagues seized maps. Several staple guns. Ropes. Notebooks of Ned’s mileage. Gas receipts. And inside the Snelgrove garage were several coils of rope hanging from se
veral hooks, all of which were accounted for—except one.
Next, Maria Warner, a scientist for the State of Connecticut, Department of Public Safety, Forensic Science Laboratory, was asked about a hair found on one of the staplers in Ned’s basement bedroom. Could it be Carmen’s? “And on any of the staplers submitted,” Zagaja said, “were you able to identify anything attributable to any person?”
“Yes.”
“And what was that?”
“On one of the staplers…there was…a human Caucasian pubic hair.”
“And by that point, had you received known samples from Edwin Snelgrove and Carmen Rodriguez?”
“Yes.”
“And did you engage in a comparison of those items?”
“Yes. I did a microscopic comparison [and] they were dissimilar to Carmen Rodriguez, and the hair was similar to that sample sent in from Edwin Snelgrove.” In other words, one of Ned’s pubic hairs was found on his stapler. No one ventured to ask why.
Filling up the rest of the day were more cops and more testimony describing searches and warrants and seizures. And then it was on to the next day, when Warner returned briefly to explain a very important fact for Zagaja: there had been no seminal fluid found on or near Carmen Rodriguez. Sexual intercourse or rape were, apparently, not part of the motivation behind Carmen’s murder.
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In preparation for the trial, David Zagaja read many of the books written about Bundy. He didn’t expect to find some sort of groundbreaking revelation; but he was hoping for, at the least, a bit of insight, anything that could help him understand Ned more than he already did. He was closing in on the end of his study when, suddenly, he realized something he had overlooked all along. In one of the books, as Zagaja read it, a sheriff, a “good old boy,” Zagaja called him, goes in to see Bundy after he is caught. “He starts interviewing Bundy,” Zagaja told me, “beginning with something to the effect of, ‘Now, who are you again?’” A tactical move, of course. Because “Bundy explodes,” Zagaja said. “‘How dare you? Don’t you know who I am?’ The entire country had been on edge because of Bundy and his crimes. His image had been plastered all over the media. And in walks this cocky sheriff asking who he is.” The nerve. “It was the biggest deflator for Bundy,” Zagaja added. “That this sheriff walks into the jail and tries to say he doesn’t know who he is.”
While reading that section of the book, Zagaja truly saw Bundy through Ned’s eyes, understood the hero worship. They were alike in what was a common hubristic sense of self. It was all about the individual. Call it narcissism or self-reliance. They both work. But Bundy and Ned had lived lives centered around their crimes. Their crimes defined who they were as human beings—which was to become important to Zagaja as he headed for the homestretch.
II
Ned’s past became part of the trial on January 14, when Judge Espinosa addressed the jury, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to say a few words to you now about the evidence you are about to hear”—which alone made the imminent testimony even more powerful than it probably was, but Espinosa had to say it. She explained the law, adding near the end of her speech, “The evidence is not to be used by you as evidence that the defendant had a propensity to commit the crime with which he is charged in this case, or since he did these things, he must have committed the crime alleged in this case. Such evidence is being admitted,” the judge warned, “solely to show or establish a common plan or scheme in the commission of criminal acts, the existence of the intent….”
Yeah, OK.
III
Dennis Watson had been employed by the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office in New Jersey for the past thirty-two years. He had investigated Karen Osmun’s murder. He had been a witness to the tragedy of Ned’s handiwork. And it had haunted him ever since.
Zagaja was smart to bring in Watson. He could give the jury an image of what Ned had done to a human being. In a metaphorical sense, the prosecution could say: That man, the one over there with the necktie and sport coat and slacks and perfectly combed hair, the one who refuses to wear glasses because he thinks it makes him look like a serial killer, he strangled a woman, stabbed her, and posed her body. And then, when faced with committing a similar crime, he admitted to both.
Watson cut whatever tension was in the room and replaced it with horrorlike images of a woman who had lost her life to the man sitting center stage. Karen’s name was rarely mentioned—one would have to imagine by design. And when you sat and you closed your eyes as Watson spoke, you could almost see Carmen or Mary Ellen—or God knows who else—struggling for life. “She was lying on her back,” Watson explained. “She was naked from the waist up. On the lower part of her body, she had a pair of jeans, which were secured, zippered, snapped, and there was a belt that was buckled. She had socks and underpants on…. I saw numerous injuries. There were, I believe, six, what appeared to be stab wounds in the center, lower chest area. I noticed two superficial apparent stab wounds in the lower neck area. There were abrasions and bruising on her neck and there were numerous petechial hemorrhages all over her face…. My understanding—and, again, I’m not a medical person—they’re small hemorrhages of the small blood vessels…in the face.” The detective paused for effect. Always a brilliant move. Then the selling point: “They’re indicative of asphyxiation.” He didn’t need to say anything more.
IV
George Recck walked into the courtroom, and under Zagaja’s questioning, he authenticated the letters he and Ned had exchanged. This allowed Zagaja to make the letters part of the court file and available to the jury during deliberations. Zagaja didn’t need any dramatic re-reading of the letters, although he did get as much of them as he could into the record. The letters, of course, would speak for themselves. In his own words, Ned explained to jurors what he had done in the past, what he had learned throughout his incarceration, and what he intended to do in the future. Putting Carmen into the context of the letters, one could argue that Ned had fulfilled a promise to himself to kill again.
Recck sustained questioning from both sides throughout the afternoon and into early evening. In the end, he came across as a believable ex-friend of Ned’s who, at one time, was talking about writing a book with Ned and producing a movie about Ned’s life. Ned listened, perhaps quite alarmed by the words he once wrote—so profoundly eerie and so obviously vile—to a trusted friend, which were now going to be in the hands of a jury deciding his fate.
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When the state’s attorney’s office called Ned’s former psychiatrist to ask if he’d participate in the trial as a witness, explaining what they believed Ned had done to Carmen, he dropped the phone. He couldn’t believe it. Ned had gotten out of prison and killed again. “I use Ned as a case study for one of my classes,” Ned’s former psychiatrist said over the phone. He was noticeably distraught. Quite upset, in fact, that Ned could have killed again. Still, he said he couldn’t help. He and another psychiatrist who had interviewed Ned when he was incarcerated in New Jersey couldn’t testify for the state. He believed the doctor/patient confidentiality agreement still existed.
But the state had access to those reports. “Ned proclaimed that he was a breast man in those reports,” a source who had access to them later told me, “and intercourse had nothing to do with his desires.” Ned gloated when he explained this fetish to his doctors. And “he was proud of the fact that he was able to get a twenty-year sentence for his crimes in New Jersey and how he had duped the police all those years.”
One of the reasons why Ned was so open and honest with the doctors in New Jersey, my source speculated, was that he knew when he was talking to those psychiatrists, his words would later be protected.
The point was, look at Karen Osmun, look at Mary Ellen Renard, and then look at Carmen Rodriguez: even after they were attacked (or killed), they all had their undergarments on. “[Sexual intercourse] has nothing to do with his motives,” my source added. “Mr. Sne
lgrove wanted to make sure the [victim’s] top was off—and that was it.”
II
The trial had taken a four-day break. By January 19, Judge Espinosa had her courtroom back on track—and Zagaja made the announcement before the break that his star witness, Mark Pascual, the jailhouse snitch, was next in line.
III
As a prosecutor, Zagaja later explained, you don’t take someone like Mark Pascual, when he comes to you, and “run with him. You have to put him through a number of hoops. Because, as far as we’re concerned, if we don’t believe him, a jury’s certainly not going to.” So Zagaja and Rovella, after Pascual came forward, simply let him talk. “There were certain pieces,” Zagaja said, which Pascual brought to the table, “that were never out there.”
“He had information that was only known to the killer and the police,” Rovella added. “That was what really kicked the jury.”
After Pascual came forward, claiming Ned had confessed to him, Rovella sat and listened to hours and hours of telephone conversations Pascual had made from prison to various people. “I listened to find out if he’d ask his girlfriend, ‘Hey, can you send me this article or that article?’” It was O’Brien and Ned’s contention that Pascual had merely read the newspapers and offered up Ned as a sacrifice so he could, in turn, cut a better deal for himself. “But I never heard any of that from those calls I listened to,” Rovella claimed. “Pascual had never asked for any newspaper articles during those calls. Pascual, you see, knew something that could have only come from Ned: taking Carmen to breakfast.”
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