Lethal Guardian

by M. William Phelps

  Clein told Despres that the bulk of the drugs were “for a doctor friend of his,” perhaps meaning Matthew Elgart. But Despres said later he found out that the drugs were mainly for Clein and his brother. Clein was laughing one day, Despres later said, when he told Despres that his brother couldn’t stop talking when he snorted cocaine. Clein thought it was the funniest thing in the world that his brother, an otherwise quiet guy, became this chatterbox, rambling on about everything from sports to politics, making no sense at all.

  In 1991, Clein had claimed a loss of $2.25 million on his tax return. The bulk of the losses came from property he owned in and around New London, Old Saybrook and Chester. By 1992, with Clein now splitting his time between his two law practices, he was in debt for more money than he had ever been, and his personal life was spiraling out of control. He had lost his extravagant home in Old Saybrook in 1991, and he was on the verge of losing his house in Waterford.

  Yet the question remained: if he was broke, where was he getting the money to sustain such an active life of drugs, booze and women?

  The answer would come later.

  Clein had been stealing clients’ funds for years, embezzling monies put in escrow for any contingency fees that might arise while doing legal work for clients. If there was no money in those accounts, he would steal from his clients’ personal accounts, credit cards and trust funds.

  Chapter 15

  When Beth Ann Carpenter—young, eager and ready to begin her life as an attorney—walked into Haiman Clein’s New London office in August 1992, she had no idea she was marching into a world that was about to crumble.

  Despite his failures and addictions, Clein was still living in a rather large colonial house in an upscale Waterford community, just west of New London. Built on a man-made pond, the house was an immense piece of real estate. He’d built an in-ground pool that dwarfed any YMCA pool in the area. He’d thrown holiday parties with hundreds of people, bar mitzvahs for his kids, dinners and cocktail parties. Things appeared—on the outside, anyway—to be going well for Clein. But it was all part of his perfectly manicured image. Underneath the facade was a businessman in dire straits. He’d even stooped as low as having business cards made up to say that he was a travel agent so he could get deals on rooms when he traveled.

  If all that weren’t enough, Clein had taken off on a binge one day to England because, he later said, he “could not pass up the opportunity to fly on the Concorde” after a friend offered.

  With all the chaos going on in his life, in walked Beth Ann. Here she was: young—just twenty-eight—pretty, hungry to begin her legal career and seemingly ready to do anything to land that ultimate job in law that had eluded her since graduation.

  Leaving Clein’s office after they first met, Beth Ann had a good feeling. The receptionist had told her she would hear something soon. She had even met Clein himself and gotten good vibes from the meeting.

  A short time later, Clein called and told her to come in for an interview. After two more additional interviews, Clein called one day and said, “You can start in November. We’ll give you your own office.”

  Beth Ann was ecstatic. She had finally scored what appeared to be the job of her dreams.

  Back in the spring of 1992, twenty-five-year-old John Gaul, a well-liked, hardworking, blue-collar man from Groton, asked his girlfriend of many years, Tricia Baker, a slightly overweight but stunningly attractive blonde who had grown up in Waterford, to marry him. Friends before they started dating, Tricia had known Gaul since 1986, and for the past few years, they had been living together. Noticeably taller than Tricia, John had short-cropped brown hair, militarylike, and a bit of a mustache. He was skinny. They resembled a plastic couple on top of a wedding cake—the perfect pair.

  Excited, Tricia said yes to John’s marriage proposal.

  Like many happy couples, John and Tricia announced their engagement in the local newspaper. Shortly afterward, while they were at home one day, a Honda Accord pulled into their driveway.

  “There were two women in the front seat and a baby in the back,” Tricia later said. “John went out to see what they wanted.”

  Returning after a moment, John came back into the house and told Tricia that it was Kim Carpenter and her sister, Beth Ann. The baby’s name was Rebecca.

  “They say I’m Rebecca’s father.”

  At first, John and Tricia didn’t quite believe it. Gaul hadn’t seen or heard from Kim in several years and had only dated her briefly. The last time they had spoken, Kim had informed him that she was pregnant and getting an abortion. She had been married when they had the fling. Now John was supposed to believe he was the father of a child he’d never met?

  After the introductions, Kim and Beth Ann left without incident. It was more or less a trip to inform.

  A short time later, John was served with papers. Kim, insisting he was Rebecca’s father, was coming after some long-overdue child support.

  Kim’s legal action had actually begun back in January 1992. Six months later, on June 26, a few weeks before she met Buzz, Kim filed a petition with the New London Superior Court seeking to “establish paternity of [Rebecca] by finding that John Gaul is the father…and order him to stand charged with the support and maintenance thereof….”

  A hearing had been scheduled to take place on July 31, 1992. Beth Ann and Kim were letting John know that they were going to find out, one way or another, if he was the father.

  Something didn’t seem right, though. It wasn’t as if John had disappeared. He had stayed in town and could’ve been reached by a simple phone call anytime. Why now? Why was Kim hell-bent on coming to him for money now?

  A number of factors were involved. For one, Kim was single at the time she filed the paperwork. She needed the money to support herself and Rebecca. Second, since Beth Ann and her mother had made up their minds to fight Kim for custody, she was obviously pushing Kim to take action wherever she could—but only if that action later benefited Beth Ann and her mother’s cause. Everyone was about to find out that getting John involved would serve several different purposes for the Carpenters.

  The fleeting relationship John and Kim had had was anything but sunset cruises on the Long Island Sound and candlelit dinners.

  John said later that while he had been dating Kim, he was driving around town one night in Kim’s Trans Am with a friend of his. As they pulled up to a local hangout, Kim’s husband came running up to the car.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.

  “Who are you?” John asked, having no idea who the man was or that Kim had been married.

  Without answering, the man grabbed John by the throat and began choking him. “You’re driving my wife’s car, asshole.”

  Later that night, John went to Kim and broke off the relationship. That was the last time he had seen her, until she and Beth Ann showed up in his driveway with Rebecca.

  As Tricia and John discussed the situation, deciding how to cope with the fact that John might be Rebecca’s father, Beth Ann sent John a letter, adding yet another element to an already confusing situation.

  Tricia had always opened John’s mail because she generally took care of the household bills. They were partners. They trusted each other. When she opened the letter from Beth Ann, Tricia couldn’t believe what it said.

  After explaining that she was Kim’s sister and an attorney, Beth Ann wanted to make it clear that she thought Rebecca had been living in a “deplorable situation” with Buzz and Kim.

  Tricia’s interest was piqued.

  Working at a hospital for most of her life and seeing how bad kids could be treated, Tricia had developed a soft spot for abused children. Her heart sank as she read on. Beth Ann described that there was a good chance Rebecca was being “abused.” She didn’t spell out if it was sexual or physical abuse, but it really didn’t matter to Tricia.

  Reading the letter, Tricia realized how different the stakes were now. She and John could possibly make a differ
ence in Rebecca’s life. With that, how could she turn her back on the child?

  Ending the letter, Beth Ann left a phone number and asked Tricia to call her right away.

  The next morning, Tricia phoned Beth Ann.

  “I’m John’s fiancée. This letter…Why are you sending us this letter? What is going on?”

  “We,” Beth Ann said, “think John is Rebecca’s father….”

  “Yes, and?”

  “Well, Rebecca lives in a shed, you know, with Kim and her boyfriend. She’s being abused by [Buzz.] The conditions she’s living in are horrible.” Then, after talking a bit more about Buzz, she added, “He’s not a nice person.”

  “What do you mean ‘horrible conditions’?”

  “They live in a shed! There’s no electricity. It’s, basically, like a dog kennel.”

  Beth Ann was either exaggerating the facts, lying or was confused. Dee owned a dog kennel, true. But Buzz and Kim didn’t live inside it. Their in-law apartment was to the right of the kennel, on the same side of the property, about fifty yards away. The buildings weren’t connected.

  Beth Ann then said, “Can you meet me at the town hall in Groton? Me and my parents have to go down there tomorrow. We have a custody case pending against Kim for Rebecca.”

  It was the first time Tricia had heard that Kim was being sued for custody.

  “What custody…what do you mean?” Tricia wanted to know.

  “My parents are taking Kim to court for custody of Rebecca because of the abuse, and Kim and Buzz being unfit parents.”

  Tricia had heard enough—one five-minute phone conversation with Beth Ann, and she was worried sick for a child she didn’t even know.

  “Yes. Of course, we’ll meet you.”

  As Beth Ann got used to her new job at Haiman Clein’s law firm, Kim and Buzz began spending nearly every moment they could together. They had been living as a couple now for a few months at Buzz’s house. Aside from the custody battle, Buzz and Kim’s life seemed ideal.

  With Rebecca living with the Carpenters, it was time, Buzz and Kim decided, that they brought her home where she belonged. As it was, when Kim wanted to see Rebecca, or spend any time with her, she would have to call the Carpenters and say she was coming to get her. It was getting old. Buzz was fed up with having to watch his girlfriend ask her parents for permission to see her own daughter. He couldn’t understand how family members could treat one another so despicably.

  “I want to take Rebecca to Riverside Park,” Kim said one night in late August when she called home.

  Cynthia later said the trip to Riverside would have generally been a good idea. But, she claimed, the company Kim was keeping at the time—“Buzz and his friends at the Café Del Mar”—were not the kind of people the Carpenters wanted Rebecca to be around. Riverside Park was a popular amusement park in Agawam, Massachusetts. Rebecca was only two years old. How much was she going to get out of a day at an amusement park?

  When the Carpenters found out Kim was going to Riverside with Buzz and a few friends from the Café Del Mar, they told Kim they were against the trip. But it wasn’t so much the company, Cynthia now claimed; it was that after the amusement park, Kim said she wanted to take Rebecca to a rock concert.

  “That’s an inappropriate place to take a two-year-old, Kim,” Cynthia said she told her daughter. “Rebecca’s not going!”

  By the Sunday of the long Labor Day weekend, 1992, Dee had pretty much accepted the fact that Kim, with all her baggage, was going to be part of Buzz’s future, like it or not. Dee had grown quite close to Kim over the past six weeks and thought she might be good for Buzz. But she still hadn’t met Rebecca. It was time, Dee insisted, that the Clinton family got a chance to meet this child they had heard so much about.

  “Bring Rebecca over to meet the family,” Dee suggested one afternoon.

  “Let me give my mother a call.”

  After the phone call, Kim came back to Dee and, beaming, told Dee her mother, surprisingly, had said it would be “all right” for Rebecca to visit.

  So Kim took off to Ledyard to pick her up.

  A few hours later, when she returned empty-handed, a puzzled Dee asked what had happened.

  “My mother changed her mind and wouldn’t let me take her.”

  Dee thought the situation was highly unusual. Here was a woman who couldn’t even take her own child to meet a family she had been spending a great deal of time with lately. Maybe Cynthia was being a little overprotective because she really didn’t know the Clintons?

  The Carpenters, Dee claimed, never took the time to get to know the her family; the Carpenters just assumed they were bad people, or people with whom they were too good to associate.

  Thinking about it, Dee suggested to Kim that perhaps she should take Suzanne on a second trip. She speculated that Suzanne’s presence would ease some of Cynthia’s trepidation about Rebecca’s spending the day with the Clintons.

  In the end, Cynthia decided it was okay to let her go, but only under one condition: she would go along, too.

  During the course of the day, Dee tried to make conversation with Cynthia several times, but figuratively speaking, Cynthia always pushed her away. She “kept Rebecca with her the entire time,” Dee recalled later. “She had complete control over her. Kim tried to be loving with Rebecca without overstepping her bounds with Cynthia.”

  Even afterward, when they went out for ice cream, Cynthia wouldn’t let Rebecca out of her grasp.

  But what bothered Dee more than anything was that Rebecca had no verbal skills whatsoever. The child had a hard time communicating. She was passive, like Kim, but in a more profound way. On top of that, Rebecca had kept her head down the entire time they were together and twisted her hair with her fingers to the point of nearly ripping it out by the roots.

  When they finished eating their ice cream, Cynthia stood up and abruptly said, as if something had gone wrong, “I’ll take Rebecca home now.” Then she left.

  To say the least, Dee thought it was a bizarre outing.

  By the first week of October, Kim and Buzz were officially living together, by themselves, on the Clintons’ property in Old Lyme.

  Back in early 1990, when Buzz returned home from Iowa after finding out that ironwork was just as hard to come by there as it was in Connecticut, he asked his mother if he could move back into the house. He had no money. No future.

  “No,” Dee said, “you’re not living in this house, Buzz. We’ve been through this before.”

  Dee and Buzz fought a lot. They were always going at each other when they disagreed. Both being strong-willed people—bulls—when they butted heads, it often turned into a full-blown argument. Dee worked hard in her kennel. She didn’t need the stress of Buzz around the house.

  Buzz had an idea, he said, that would help them both: “What if I fix up the shed out back and turn it into an apartment?”

  Dee loved her child dearly and disliked practicing tough love, but Buzz’s idea seemed logical. It might just work out.

  “Okay,” Dee said.

  Buzz broke out his tools and got to work.

  “Ever since that day,” Dee said later, “we just always called it ‘the shed.’”

  At about fifteen by twenty feet, it wouldn’t be the largest apartment in town, but it would suffice. Buzz insulated the entire building and installed electric heat, lights and a smoke detector. He put in two windows, wall-to-wall carpeting and he painted the walls. Again, it wasn’t the Ritz-Carlton, but it was a place to sleep.

  When Buzz and Kim took over “the shed” it became a lot more, however. In a sense, it was affordable living for a couple in love who were just starting out. Dee agreed to $100 per week in rent. As far as accommodations for Rebecca were concerned, the Clintons already had a crib and playpen in the house for when Buzz’s son, Michael, spent the night. Rebecca could use that until Buzz and Kim found a more spacious apartment in town. Dee had even given Kim bags of clothes she’d saved from when Suzanne was a t
oddler. They were hand-me-downs, sure. But again, the clothes, like the shed, would serve the purpose until Buzz could provide a better life.

  As Buzz and Kim settled in, they decided to announce to Dee that they were planning to get married after the first of the year. It would be a simple ceremony, probably held right there at the house. Dee wasn’t all that thrilled, but she knew she couldn’t stop them, so she pledged her full support.

  But it would be some time, Buzz and Kim decided, before they notified the Carpenters about their decision.

  Chapter 16

  Buzz Clinton was an extrovert. When he said he was going to do something, he did it, no matter what anybody else thought or said. For instance, when he said he was going to get a tattoo of a playing card on his left upper arm with roses on each side of it, he went out and got the ace of spades with an upside-down heart inside of it. When he said he was going to get another tattoo—a much larger one—he went out and came back with an enormous Bengal tiger inked on the entire section of his right shoulder blade. But the tattoo Buzz felt most proud of, one that he never got finished, was inscribed around the roses and ace of spades: DAY BY DAY WITH LOVE. It was a mantra Buzz learned from being in recovery from alcohol and drugs.

  So when Buzz told Kim they were going to get Rebecca back and keep her, he wasn’t just mincing words; he was making a promise he intended to keep.

  Day by day with love.

  With their living conditions in place, Buzz now pushed Kim to involve Rebecca in their relationship. He wanted to give Rebecca a life she’d never had. He wanted to be a father to her, perhaps because he and his son had never had that type of relationship.