No one had ever known that until Pascual had come forward.
101
I
It was an unseasonably warm autumn afternoon the day I drove up to Suffield, Connecticut, to meet with Mark Pascual for the first time at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution. Pascual had answered a letter of mine. I had asked him if there was anything he wanted to add to his testimony and the various statements he had made to police. I didn’t think there was. I had a lot of material on Pascual and believed he was, largely, telling the truth about Ned (whether Ned was being honest with Pascual—well, that’s another story). I had studied his statements and testimony and put them to the test, matching everything up to the newspaper articles written about Ned’s case that Pascual could have had access to. I didn’t find any significance to Ned’s argument that Pascual had used the newspaper articles as a resource. There were too many variables.
I can tell you more, Pascual wrote in that first letter to me.
Reading, I wondered, More? What more could he possibly add? Reading further, I found the answer: More bodies, Pascual suggested, promising to tell me where, when, and how many.
I was interested, to say the least. So I drove up to the prison and signed in.
102
I
Dr. Henry Lee walked into the courtroom during the afternoon of January 19 to inject a bit of adrenaline and celebrity into a trial that was, honestly, dragging on. For many, Lee was easy to recognize. He’d starred in several shows on Court TV over the years and was a regular pundit on any number of networks when a major crime story broke. He had also testified during several high-profile murder trials throughout his career, O.J. and the like. He was pleasant and kind and walked with authority and confidence.
After going through what was a long list of esteemed credentials, Lee began to talk about his main course of study and present occupation—the reason so many law enforcement agencies around the world seek him: crime scene reconstruction. “Last year around October, November,” Lee said, “I receive a request from state’s attorney’s office to conduct a reconstruction. I received original crime scene photographs, autopsy pictures, and initial crime scene investigative report. Also, I received some evidence, the plastic bags and ropes and tapes….”
Zagaja had Lee go through and identify several secondary crime-scene photographs. Lee talked about leaves and foliage and the time of the year, working his way into a discussion of Carmen’s body. How she was found. What the scene had told him. “When I exam all those materials, first thing I found [was] the body was original had ropes tied to the body. When I examined the rope—it actually have six group of the rope—based on the description provided to me, some are tied on the wrist, some are tied around the ankle, some tied around the body, I was able to measure each piece of rope, look at the knot, look at the ending.” As Lee spoke, it was hard to understand him. His English was not so clear. Still, it didn’t prevent jurors from understanding the facts as Lee explained them. It just took a little bit more time and patience. Lee talked about the length of the ropes. How Carmen’s body was tied up in a fetal position. “When you do that,” he suggested, “which means the body rigor haven’t set yet. If the person becomes stiffing, very difficult to tie like that,” he added, waving his hands in the air to emphasize his point, “which shows the body still fresh, was tied up.” Carmen was murdered and tied up almost simultaneously. Very little time had elapsed in between (a subtle, however vital, point Mark Pascual would soon back up).
“Then you have a white plastic bag. The white plastic bag is smaller, the black plastic bag is forty-four inches long, so the white plastic bag was put in first and you staple—staple some of the bag together. I notice a list…a dozen of staple holes. Because I wasn’t the first one exam, some of the staple already removed from bag for tool mark analysis, but I was able to look at staple hole, it’s over a dozen little holes…. Then some more ropes was tied and made like a handle, like material so, of course, they have black bags. Five white bags, four black bags. Black bags was put lower the body, top the body, middle, then have three-quarter-inch of plastic tape was taped the bag together.”
Methodical. Well-planned.
“Approximately about fourteen inches long, those pieces, put in, joined the bag together. It’s a very elaborated long process. Also have a handle of the rope, not bond over rope, it’s almost two hundred ninety inches long all wrapped together. So the total length of rope, in this case, approximately sixty feet long. That’s a lot of ropes. A lot of—you’re marking a lot of knot, cutting. So this case, basically, takes a little while to complete all those tasks.”
“Based on [your] observations,” Zagaja asked, “do you make any other conclusions as to the extent to which the body was wrapped and stapled and taped?”
Lee’s answers were a good foundation upon which Mark Pascual’s testimony would stand. Lee was putting a professional spin on it all, thus setting the stage, if you will, for Pascual to come in and tell the jury how Carmen was murdered. “Yes,” Lee said. “When I look at the material need to complete a task, you need white plastic bag, you need black plastic bag, you need almost sixty feet ropes, you need Scotch tapes, you need some sharp instrument, could be knife or scissor, to cut the rope, [and] then you need staple, you need a vehicle to transport.”
Carmen’s killer had planned her murder like packing for a vacation.
“And one additional thing,” Lee smartly noted, “is the tape and the bag—our fingerprint examiner report to me they did not find any fingerprint…. There couple reasons. Maybe aging too long? Maybe some other reasons, such as wearing glove without leave any fingerprint? Especially if a Scotch tape, adhesive side, usually if somebody finger touch, we usually see a couple ridges, maybe not enough to compare, but he did not find anything. Maybe it’s a suggestion somebody wearing a glove or avoid to leave fingerprint. So all of those, in totality, this case, preparation work and the actually manipulation tying the body, putting in the bag, it’s a very elaborated activity.”
The guy might have been hard to understand, but he was a pro.
II
After several hours of discussion regarding what Mark Pascual could say, and what Mark Pascual couldn’t say, he was brought into the courtroom. No doubt Pascual was Zagaja’s most explosive witness of the trial, thus far. He looked uncomfortable and nervous while sitting in the witness stand across from his old cellie. It was clear that turning state’s evidence wasn’t one of Pascual’s favorite things to do. He would forever be branded a snitch. Rat. Not necessarily the cloud you wanted hanging over your head when you were spending the rest of your natural life in prison.
Zagaja started with money questions: “You’re presently incarcerated?”
“Yes, I am.”
Bond? One million. He then had Pascual explain why. “Murder for hire.” But Pascual told jurors he wasn’t trading testimony for a lighter sentence, but that he, of course, knew it might help him in the long run. Which all sounded good. But the bottom line was: Mark Pascual had cashed in. Why else would he take such a risk but to hope for a lighter sentence?
Zagaja soon worked his way into how he and Ned met. When. Where. What they talked about.
Carmie… Ned called her, Pascual said. That’s how Pascual referred to Carmen.
“Could you relate…what he told you happened?”
“Yeah. He said he was at, um, Kenney’s Bar in Hartford. And when he walked in, he saw her sitting there and he went up to her and asked her if he could buy her a drink and she said yes.” This statement didn’t gel with what other witnesses had reported: they said Ned was sitting in a booth when Carmen walked in and sat down next to him. “And then,” Pascual continued, “he asked her if they—if [she] wanted to dance and she said, ‘Yes.’ So they danced and they drank for the greater part of the night. And then when it was time for them to leave, she said she’d like to have a ride home, and he said, ‘How would you like to go to breakfast?’ And she said, ‘OK.’…An
d they went to have breakfast at a place he said wasn’t too far from his home in Cromwell….”
During an interview with police on April 30, 2003, Pascual claimed Ned had explained to him that as he strangled Carmen, Ned had his first orgasm that night. Afterward, because Carmen was still making “noises,” Ned told him, he “stapled her mouth shut.”
This was likely untrue. Insofar as there was no evidence—other than a newspaper article—of Carmen’s mouth ever being stapled shut. But then Carmen’s body was decomposed to a point where the medical examiner could not have explored whether her mouth was stapled shut or not.
III
One day in early spring 2007, I checked my PO box and found ten newspaper articles Ned had sent me inside a package of other documents. In his note attached to the package, Ned spoke of Mark Pascual as nothing more than a murderer looking to cut a better deal for himself. Ned said Pascual had “patched together” from newspaper articles the story he told police and, subsequently, the jury. Ned cited several references from those articles, which he believed juxtaposed perfectly with Pascual’s “story.” He highlighted the most obvious phrases he claimed Pascual had lifted from those articles. Sentences such as: Stuffed in a plastic bag…Kenney’s Restaurant on Capitol Avenue…Saw Snelgrove dancing with Rodriguez at the bar…Strangling girls and carrying the limp body onto a bed. And so on.
Next to each highlight, Ned had made notes for me. For example, underneath American Frozen Foods, Ned wrote, the meat guy, quoting Pascual from the witness stand, insinuating that Pascual knew Ned sold meats only because he had read “American Frozen Foods” in the newspaper. Underneath the newspaper quote preoccupied with sex, Ned believed this was the passage that sparked Pascual to take a leap from “preoccupied with sex” to “as Snelgrove strangled the girl to death, he related that he had an orgasm.”
The newspaper had printed Ned’s address. Ned’s note to me next to that quote said, Close to the Berlin Fairgrounds…. He believed Pascual had put together that entire scenario of Ned taking Carmen to the Berlin Fairgrounds based on where Ned lived. Many later told me that Pascual is not that smart. Interviewing him myself, I’d have to agree.
The newspaper read: He’d stripped her to the waist…half-naked….
From Ned: [Pascual said I] took off her shirt and posed her….
The package Ned sent goes on and on with many of these same references. At best, Ned is obsessed with the fact, many close to the case later insisted, that the prosecution failed to prove he killed Carmen Rodriguez, but instead they were able to get a conviction based on his prior bad acts. At worst, Ned accused the CSP and David Zagaja of fabricating evidence (and police reports), along with making false claims in order to convict him. At one point, Ned talks to me about the warrants and affidavits prepared against him before his arrest. He asked me why Pascual’s name is never mentioned in any of them. Answering himself, he said the statements by Pascual to police were put together and back-dated by Detective [Stavros] Mellekas…. In other words, Ned wants me to believe Mellekas fabricated reports and notes and put his career on the line to help convict Ned.
Ned fails to mention the simple fact that Mark Pascual was a confidential informant (CI). His information was extremely fragile, sensitive. If inmates knew he was a “rat,” Mark Pascual’s safety would be jeopardized. Still, in all the pages of documents Ned sent, along with his letters and notes, not once does he show me any evidence pertaining to his innocence—instead, he carries on and on about how the prosecution failed to prove he killed Carmen and how Zagaja and his posse of law enforcement prepped Pascual, wrote reports that were untrue, and propped Pascual up like a puppet to convict him.
IV
On the witness stand, Mark Pascual continued to tell his story, relating to the jury what Ned had admitted to him, saying at one point, “[Ned told me he and Carmen] then had breakfast and after they had breakfast he asked her if [she] wanted to take a ride and get to know each other. And she said, ‘OK.’ So he took her not far from where the diner was. He said it was a place where he used to hang out when he was younger, the back side of Berlin Fairgrounds. And he stopped the car and he made a move on her and she got out of the car and ran. So he said that he got out—he stopped—shut the car off, and ran after her and jumped on her and choked her.” At which time, Carmen stopped breathing. (Luz Rodriguez and her family members gasped. The courtroom went silent.) “Her body went limp,” Pascual continued. “And, at that point, he went back to his car and got a tarp, and a bag and went back to where she was and rolled her body onto the tarp, and she started to come to, and…as she was coming to, she bit him on the wrist and he got really upset with that, and he just killed her right there by strangling her.”
Which was it? Pascual had said months earlier that Ned used a pair of scissors and stabbed Carmen to death. (Pascual told me he was certain that Ned used a pair of scissors. “I don’t [know] how that got all screwed up. He told me scissors. Definitely scissors.”)
Zagaja didn’t go there, however. Instead, he stuck to Pascual’s narrative, asking, “And did he say what he did after he killed her?”
“He said he taped up her arms and her legs and he took her top off and he posed her body in certain sexual positions…. After that, he basically stuffed her in some garbage bags and took her to some place in Rhode Island and dumped her off.”
“Did he say anything about that area in Rhode Island?”
“All he said was that he had some customers up there, where he worked, and he used to drive around there while he was waiting for them to get home from work, so he knew the area.”
“Did he tell you the specific location in Rhode Island?”
“No, he did not.”
103
I
Donald O’Brien began his cross-examination of Mark Pascual with a bit of sarcasm, asking Pascual the most obvious question, getting the witness to admit that he faced capital felony murder charges, which could result in a death sentence. Then O’Brien made the assumption that the only reason Pascual had come forward to begin with was to save his own life. “And you went to the police and told them the information about what my client supposedly told you, correct?”
“Correct.”
“So you knew that if you did that, you could work yourself a deal where you wouldn’t get a lethal injection—”
“Correct.”
“So you’re testifying to save your own life, correct?”
“Yeah, I’m not denying that at all.”
“Uh-huh,” O’Brien said smartly. Then, with a shudder of cynicism, “You’d admit to the Kennedy assassination, too, to save your own life, wouldn’t you?”
Zagaja stood: “Objection. Argumentative.”
“Overruled.”
O’Brien picked up where he left off, asking Pascual, “Right?”
“No.”
“No?” A pause. Then more scorn and ridicule: “You’d say that your brother killed somebody in order to avoid the death penalty, wouldn’t you?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Objection,” Zagaja said. “I’d ask counsel not to respond to the witness’s responses.”
“All right. You know that’s improper.”
“I’m sorry,” O’Brien apologized, rolling his eyes.
And it was this type of back-and-forth, cross-fire-like exchange that took place between O’Brien and Pascual throughout the remainder of the afternoon: O’Brien questioned Pascual on everything he had told the police, and Pascual stuck to his story. O’Brien tried confusing Pascual, but Pascual slowed the testimony down, said he didn’t understand, and answered all of O’Brien’s questions without missing a beat.
Ned kept leaning over and, with his finger, motioning for O’Brien to come to him, whispering in his ear. But O’Brien didn’t have much to work with—he was left with what Ned had told him. He went through Pascual’s statement to the police, line by line, and asked him to repeat what he had already testified to on direct
. In some instances, he’d catch Pascual on minor things—things that, in the grand scheme of how much of an impact Pascual’s testimony was going to have on Ned, added up to absolutely nothing.
Pea splitting and bean counting. The jury looked uncomfortable and restless.
“Did he tell you what the lighting conditions were in that open field?” O’Brien asked at one point.
“It was dark.”
“It was dark?” (Attorneys love to repeat answers.)
“Yeah.”
“This was, what, one o’clock in the morning, two o’clock in the morning?”
“I don’t know.”
“But it’s the back side of the Berlin Turnpike—of the Berlin Fairgrounds, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Did he have a flashlight?”
“A lantern, he said.”
“He had a lantern? Was it a flashlight or a lantern? Do you know?”
“He said a lantern.” (You could hear the frustration in Pascual’s voice.)
“But did you tell the police it was a flashlight or a lantern?”
“I believe I said it was a lantern.”
“If you can take a look at your statement and see if it refreshes your recollection.”
“Yeah, it says ‘flashlight’ or a ‘lantern.’” (Zagaja shook his head.)
“And that’s what you signed, correct?”
“Correct.”
The day was long and it was clear Pascual wasn’t budging. As early evening approached, O’Brien asked, “Mr. Snelgrove…sorry, it’s been a long day. I mean, Mr. Pascual, you never—in all your discussions with the police, state’s attorney—you never mentioned to them that Mr. Snelgrove had mentioned Ted Bundy, did you?”
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