“There’s no way,” one of the detectives chimed in when Dee began insisting that one of the Carpenters had killed her son, “that Dick Carpenter had anything to do with your son’s murder.”
“Whatever,” Dee said. “But I told you last time to watch the signs. Buzz will lead you to his murderer.”
The way Dee saw it, her job was to keep her family intact and be the force of strength that held them together through their horrible tragedy.
“[The detectives’] job,” Dee later said, “was to find my son’s killer.”
If Charlie Snyder thought his days of being interrogated by the ED-MCS were behind him, he thought wrong. On the afternoon of March 23, Snyder looked out the cracked front windowpane of his office and saw Reggie Wardell and another detective walking from their state-issued blue Crown Victoria into Blonders for a third time.
As they walked in, Charlie once again stopped them at the door and led them outside, thinking, What the fuck is this?
Standing atop of the hood of an old Chevy Caprice lying on the ground in the parking lot, Wardell looked Charlie squarely in the eyes and said, “We want you to take a lie detector test.”
Charlie became incensed, but he kept his anger in check, smiled coyly, then started walking toward his office door without saying anything. Then, “Come with me,” he said, gesturing with his hand as he opened the door. “Come on. Let’s go!”
The office Charlie kept was a tomb of stacked books on car parts and old customer files piled anywhere there was available space. There were alternators and distributor caps, old air cleaners and carburetors lying on chairs and filing cabinets. It was hard to tell what color the carpet had been because it was black and soiled with grime, oil and dirt. On the wall there was a gun rack with one shotgun set up in it. Charlie kept his .38 revolver in his top, center desk drawer, right next to a stack of cash, counted and banded.
Sifting through the rubble, he found the phone.
“Hold on one minute, gentlemen,” he said.
Wardell, undoubtedly knowing what was going on, just looked at his partner without saying anything.
After a few brief pleasantries to his lawyer, Charlie said, “Listen, this is the third time these cops have been here and they’re questioning me on a murder. What are my rights?”
“You don’t have to tell them a fucking thing! Hand the phone to one of them.”
Charlie gave Wardell the phone.
“Unless you have a warrant, leave the premises right away.”
Wardell motioned to the other detective and they left without another word.
Later, Charlie remembered how he felt that day.
“After two meetings with them, they still didn’t ask to do forensics on my thirty-eight, when they knew damn well it was the same caliber that had killed Buzz. They knew I didn’t have anything to do with his murder. They were just seeing what they could get away with. After that day, I never heard from them again.”
“The questioning of Charlie Snyder,” Reggie Wardell said later, “became more intense every time we spoke to him. We looked at Charlie as someone who was possibly involved in the murder of Buzz. We’re not just working on one case. We’re always worried that something will slip through the cracks. So it makes us be more thorough in our investigation. That’s why we interview so many people. We had to scratch people off our list. When Mrs. Clinton said she thought it might have been the state trooper who Buzz got into a skirmish with, even though he was one of us, we had to check it out. When people told us Charlie Snyder had threatened Buzz, we had to look at it.”
Asked if his final interview with Snyder had gone the way Charlie later described it, Wardell said, “Not quite.” Wardell had a smile on his face. “Charlie was much more cooperative.”
Days later, however, after talking with Charlie’s therapist and getting a statement that proved his alibi, the ED-MCS steered away from Charlie and set its sights on two other suspects who had recently been put on their radar screen.
Chapter 8
Deep River, Essex, Old Saybrook, Old Lyme and East Lyme are located at the tail end of Route 9, a two-lane highway system that begins in Elmwood, Connecticut, a suburb of Hartford, and ends at Interstate 95 in Old Saybrook. On the Old Saybrook end, the Route 9 and I-95 interchange is shaped like the eye end of a fishhook, with arteries jetting out north and south, as well as into downtown Old Saybrook. These are small seaside communities. Everybody knows everybody.
As the interviews piled up, it was beginning to look more like Buzz wasn’t the likable life of the party his family and some of his friends had been trumpeting. There were people who didn’t like Buzz. There were people who had some pretty bad things to say about him. And, notably, there were people who had motives to kill him.
Mark Marion, the assistant manager of the National Automotive Parts Association (NAPA), in Old Saybrook, had known Buzz for ten years. At one time, the two used to see each other at the local bowling alley in Old Saybrook. But other than a bit of casual conversation, and the fact that Buzz had used NAPA as one of his parts suppliers, they really hadn’t hung around together much.
When Reggie Wardell showed up at NAPA to talk to Mark Marion on March 23, his goal was to find out about the other side of Buzz. Wardell had gotten several bits of information leading him to believe that NAPA was one of Buzz’s hangouts. He’d even order parts from NAPA from time to time and charged them to Blonders’s account.
After Wardell explained to Marion that Buzz had been murdered, the thirty-year-old manager said it was the first time he’d heard about it. The last time Buzz had been in the store, Marion said, was about one month ago.
“He had called one day around the same time period to ask a question about a distributor cap. But that’s it.”
Wardell wanted to know what Marion thought of Buzz.
“He was a pain. I think he not only used drugs, but dealt drugs.”
“What about Kim and the kids?”
“He generally ignored them when they came into the store with him.”
Marion then said he remembered how Buzz used to come into the store dressed in his white nurse’s uniform and complain about all the bedpans he had to change during his shift at Pettipaug Manor. Buzz had worked at this convalescent home in Essex shortly after graduating from nursing school up until about one month prior to his death.
“Tell me about the tow truck.”
Marion didn’t know Buzz was selling the truck. But there was someone by the name of Marc Stevenson, Marion added, whom he thought Buzz had started working for recently. Stevenson ran a service for exotic dancers called Dance Club. Buzz, Marion added, used to dance for Stevenson’s service once in a while.
It was a totally different portrait than what had surfaced during the past two weeks. But that’s how these types of investigations went: there were always two sides to a story. And as more information poured in over the next few weeks, yet another portrait of Buzz emerged.
The first bit of disconcerting information came from Susan Murphy, a forty-year-old former classmate of Buzz’s at Vinal Tech, in Middletown, where Buzz had studied for his CNA. Murphy and Buzz had attended classes together. She said Buzz used to “brag” about using prescription drugs he’d obtained from a “male relative…an uncle or cousin,” and thought the drugs might have been “Xanax and codeine-Tylenol.”
Buzz was seen as a loudmouth in class, Murphy explained. A class clown. He would bring in photographs of himself, ranting and raving about his life as a male exotic dancer. She said she’d stopped riding to school with him because he liked to drink beers while he drove.
The next logical place for detectives to visit was Pettipaug Manor. It had been Buzz’s first job as a CNA after graduation and his last-known place of employment.
John Turner and Marty Graham interviewed Louroy Manning, the maintenance supervisor at Pettipaug. Manning had been working at Pettipaug for about ten years. He said he had met Buzz at another nursing home in New London about ten ye
ars prior to Buzz’s working at Pettipaug, but Manning couldn’t remember the name of the place. This was highly unlikely, considering that Buzz would’ve been only seventeen or eighteen at the time and just out of high school.
“Buzz was a bragger and liar,” Manning asserted. “The last time I spoke to him was shortly before he was fired.”
Fired? No one had mentioned up to now that Buzz had been fired from Pettipaug?
There had been many women in Buzz’s short life. And they all had a story to tell. The big difference, however, was that the stories detectives were getting now weren’t peppered with saccharine anecdotes of hiking trips and walks along the beach. They were filled with violence, threats and dysfunction—a trio of ingredients that when, coupled with rage, anger, marital jealousy, could lead to murder.
Richard Silva, a fifty-three-year-old warehouseman, was next on a long list of people with whom detectives wanted to talk. When Wardell and Szamocki tracked him down on April 8, 1994, at his house in Clinton, their purpose was to see if Silva could put them in contact with his daughter, Tina, whom they knew to be one of Buzz’s many ex-girlfriends.
The town of Clinton is about ten miles south of Old Lyme. The Westbrook state police barracks is nearby. When Turner and Wardell showed up on that Friday afternoon, Silva told them that his daughter now lived in Ivoryton, a small, rural town just on the outskirts of Essex, with her new boyfriend, Chris Rook. It had been years since she’d dated Buzz, Silva said. And he hadn’t heard from him since.
“What can you tell us about him?” Turner asked.
“Tina and Buzz lived together in Lyme. They argued a lot. I believe Tina told me that Buzz had hit her once. After they broke up, Buzz called me a couple of times looking for her….”
“What is it?”
Silva hesitated.
“Well, I remember that Buzz called one time and threatened to kill himself. He even threatened to bring a bomb over to my house so it would explode and kill Tina.”
Young love. Romeo and Juliet. It meant nothing.
Presumably, Buzz was probably drunk and stupid at the time he made the threat, bitter over the breakup and just wanted to get back at Tina and her family by making idle threats. Nonetheless, it was a frightening thought to Silva: someone calling his home and threatening to blow it up to get back at his daughter.
Tina Silva lived in Ivoryton, but she wanted to be interviewed at Jon’s Brickoven Pizza, in Old Saybrook, her financé’s restaurant. Attractive and slim, twenty-five-year-old Tina Silva was an unemployed hairdresser, pregnant with Rook’s child. She remembered the last time she saw Buzz was at the Variety Bar, in Old Saybrook. “He introduced me to a blond-haired female that he said was his wife.”
If it was Kim with Buzz that night, he and Kim hadn’t gotten married until January 17, 1993, about eight months before they ran into Tina.
Why would he lie?
Tina and Buzz had met in high school. They had moved into an apartment together back in 1991 for about six months. Before that, Tina explained, Buzz had lived at the Baldwin Bridge Hotel, in Old Saybrook, which had recently been turned into a Howard Johnson’s.
“He punched me in the face one night when he lived there,” Tina offered.
“Did you fill out a complaint?”
“No.”
Still, Tina Silva said she wasn’t taking it. So she moved back with her parents after the incident, she said. And that’s when Buzz, she claimed, threatened to kill her and her family if she wouldn’t see him again. He had even entered Stonington Institute, in North Stonington, she claimed, to get help with what she said was a “substance abuse problem.” The threats continued even while Buzz was in Stonington. At one point, Tina said, she made a complaint to the Clinton Police Department, but Buzz was never arrested. The threats finally stopped, she added, but not until a year later.
So, Buzz wasn’t a member of the 4-H club. His own mother was the first to admit that. He had run with some shady people at certain points in his life. But as far as all the other accusations against him, detectives knew they had to be looked at through a cautious lens. A dead man, after all, had a hard time defending himself.
“If my son was doing the things he was being accused of…I would have killed him myself,” Dee Clinton later said.
At about 1:30 P.M., on April 12, Reggie Wardell and Marty Graham drove to Wallingford, Connecticut, a small industrial town just north of New Haven, to interview Buzz’s ex-wife.
At twenty-eight, Lisa Chenard had already been through the wringer. Her short-lived marriage to Buzz, as Graham and Wardell were about to find out, had been riddled with dysfunction, violence and accusations of the worst kind.
When Lisa met Buzz, she was living in West Haven, in an apartment below Buzz’s cousins. When Buzz had attended school in New Haven, he usually stayed at his cousins’ apartment. Old Lyme wasn’t far from New Haven, about a twenty-minute ride, but Buzz was always having problems with his vehicles. Staying at his cousins’ apartment assured him that he would always make it to class.
In March 1989, after courting her for a while, Buzz moved into Lisa’s West Haven apartment. Three months later, in June, they took off to Las Vegas and got married. When they came back to Connecticut, they moved into Lisa’s parents’ house in Wallingford.
Following the construction boom during the late 1980s, Buzz and his new bride moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where Buzz had family and friends. Like his father before him, Buzz soon found work as a union ironworker.
From almost the first day, the marriage was doomed, Lisa explained to Graham and Wardell.
“I had Buzz arrested three times while we lived in Phoenix for beating and threatening to kill me. Two months and five days after we were married, he raped me and dumped me at the airport.”
Graham and Wardell were silent for the moment. Rape? Threats? They took notes like college freshmen.
In August 1989, Lisa arrived back in Connecticut and moved into her parents’ house. Weeks later, she said, Buzz returned to the state and, surprisingly, Lisa’s parents allowed him to move back into their house.
“He returned from Phoenix,” Lisa recalled, “with a venereal disease. In October, he choked me.”
“Did you have him arrested?”
“No.”
According to Lisa, Buzz used cocaine, alcohol and pot. She’d even gone with him on occasion to buy drugs, she said. It didn’t matter if Buzz was high, drunk or sober, Lisa insisted he liked to beat on her. And if he wasn’t physically abusing her, he just wasn’t available emotionally. When she gave birth to their son, Michael, on February 8, 1990, she said Buzz had taken off for four days with a married woman.
The divorce was finalized on October 7, 1990. Four years later, a few weeks before Buzz was murdered, Lisa Clinton married Dan Chenard.
“Michael calls Dan ‘Dad.’ And he’s done it in front of Buzz,” Lisa said after Wardell and Graham asked how the relationship between Buzz and Dan had been. “He handled it well and got along great with Dan. Within the past year, actually, Buzz seemed to be much more civil to us and Michael.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Christmastime last year. We were all at Buzz’s parents’ house.”
The relationship between Buzz, Lisa and Dan was a no-win situation for Buzz, Dee Clinton later said. Lisa was going to sour Michael on Buzz no matter what Buzz did. Lisa wanted Buzz to give up full custody of Michael, which Buzz gladly did. Michael never even knew that Buzz was his father. Lisa wanted it that way. Buzz didn’t argue.
Wardell asked Lisa why she didn’t attend Buzz’s funeral. “I didn’t want to be a hypocrite.” Showing up would seem like false sympathy on her part. Her mother, she added, and her husband, Dan, did go, however.
Lisa’s attitude and accusations against Buzz riled Dee Clinton. For one, Lisa had told Dee that the reason she didn’t attend Buzz’s funeral was because she was in the hospital with pneumonia. On top of that, the rape allegations against Buzz made
little sense to Dee. Why would Lisa’s parents allow a man who had purportedly just raped and beaten their daughter to move back into their house right after the incident? What kind of mother would go along with such a thing?
It was a fair question. Lisa’s mother, according to Dee, had been on the phone with Lisa as Buzz had been allegedly abusing her that night. Later, she had told several people that, on top of everything else, Buzz had also thrown her daughter down the stairs that evening.
Would any mother allow this kind of monster to sleep in her home?
These were strong allegations and put Buzz in a much different light as far as law enforcement was concerned. If he had done to his ex-wife, who was pregnant at the time of the incident, what she had claimed, a good question might be: what had Buzz done that no one knew about?
Was it possible that Buzz could have enraged someone so much to cause him to commit murder as an act of revenge?
Graham and Wardell were beginning to think so.
In regards to Lisa and the Clintons, here were two conflicting stories, each family undoubtedly protecting his or her own interests. But regardless of who was right and who was wrong, why would Lisa lie about such a horrible thing? What could be her motive—to smear the memory of a dead man, or to cover up a murder?
The ED-MCS would have to look at it all. They would make a few calls to Phoenix and see what—if any—police reports existed.
After a careful check, there were no reports of Buzz’s having been arrested.
It would be the beginning of a set of new questions that—while puzzling investigators—would eventually have little, if nothing, to do with Buzz’s murder. At this point, however, after about five weeks of what seemed like never-ending interviews leading nowhere, detectives were no closer to solving Buzz’s murder. They’d zero in on someone, and then exonerate him. They’d think they had it all figured out, then talk to someone and realize how much they didn’t know about the case. It was frustrating. Confusing. Time-consuming.
Lethal Guardian Page 7