Lethal Guardian

by M. William Phelps

  Days later, Fremut and White went over to Despres’s apartment. Despres wanted to show Fremut a .25-caliber automatic pistol he owned. For the past week or so, Fremut and Despres had been discussing making a silencer and even purchased a handbook on how to do it. Despres had called Fremut up to say he’d made a silencer for a 9mm Fremut owned. He wanted to show it to him.

  After showing Fremut how the silencer fit perfectly on the weapon, Despres said, “Let’s go out back and try it out.”

  Despres also brought a .38-caliber Saturday night special he’d owned and a .22-caliber rifle. The .38 had a brown handle, White later recalled, and a black frame. The serial numbers, she noticed, had been filed off. In their place, Despres had engraved FUCK YOU PIG.

  “Where’d you get that?” Fremut asked Despres.

  “A biker friend of mine I buy my cocaine from.”

  As they took turns firing the various weapons, White listened as Despres explained to Fremut how he had been stalking Buzz lately.

  “I’ve been standing behind his house, watching him at night. But the person who wants it done doesn’t want any of his kids around when I do it.”

  Sometime later, Despres finally confessed to Fremut that he was getting paid between $5,000 and $10,000. This time, Fremut believed him.

  When Fremut heard the amount, he laughed. “It doesn’t seem like a lot of money to shoot someone, Mark,” he said.

  Mark Despres called Haiman Clein a few days after he and Joe Fremut had practiced firing weapons and told Clein he was having trouble finding Buzz. He thought he had seen him a few times, but he just wasn’t sure it was Buzz. He didn’t need to tell Clein that it would be a disaster if he killed the wrong guy.

  “Come in today! We need to talk,” Clein said.

  As Despres sat down in Clein’s office later that afternoon, Clein began pacing. Then he started yelling at Mark. It was obvious from what Clein had to say that Beth Ann was putting the squeeze on him to get the job done.

  “Why the fuck is this not done yet?” Clein asked in a rage. “Huh? It’s taking too fucking long. Just get it done!”

  “I’ll give you back the money if you want,” Despres offered.

  Turning red, Clein began walking out of the room. But before opening the door, he said, “You stay right here, Mark. Don’t move.”

  When Clein returned, Beth Ann was behind him.

  “He drives a black Firebird,” Beth Ann mumbled in a whisper, looking at Despres. Then, without saying anything else, she handed Clein a photograph of Buzz, Kim, and Rebecca. They were standing, Clein later recalled, in “front of a hearth.” Clein recognized it immediately as being the one in the living room of the Carpenters’ Ledyard home.

  “It was a wooden hearth, not a big fireplace or anything like that,” Clein said later. “If you walk into the house, it’s to the left.”

  Clein had been over to the Carpenters’ house several times. Beth Ann had told him previously that she had gotten the photograph from her parents. Many later speculated that the photo must have been taken when Buzz and Kim went over to the Carpenters for the 1993 Labor Day picnic. In all likelihood, it was the only time the Carpenters would’ve had a chance to photograph Buzz at their house. They had been fighting with the man for nearly a year by that point. Taking family photographs didn’t seem to be at the top of their priority list.

  With Despres sitting patiently, not saying much, Clein pulled a pair of scissors out of his desk drawer and cut Buzz’s face, from the neck up, out of the photograph. The new photo was about the size of a nickel.

  “Here,” Clein said, handing Despres the cutout. “Now you go find that motherfucker!”

  Chapter 26

  During the afternoon of February 20, 1994, Catherine White and Joe Fremut were hanging around Fremut Texaco when Mark Despres pulled into the parking lot, parked his car by one of the garage bays, got out and walked casually over to where they were standing. As was generally the case lately, Chris Despres was right behind his dad.

  “Catherine, go do something,” Fremut said, wiping his hands off with a rag.

  “I can’t find the opportune time to do him, Joe,” Despres said in frustration. “I’ve been following him around but just can’t seem to get him alone.”

  “Continue to follow him around,” Fremut urged. “The moment will present itself.”

  Later that night, White finally confronted Fremut about what she suspected.

  “Mark picked up this contract for eight thousand dollars to do this guy from Old Lyme,” Fremut said without hesitation.

  This was the first time White had heard directly from Fremut that he and Despres were going to kill someone.

  Things abruptly changed one day near the end of February. Clein and Beth Ann had gotten into, Clein later said, a “petty argument,” and Clein got so upset at her that he called the murder off.

  “Forget about it,” Clein told Despres over the phone the following day.

  At first, Despres didn’t say anything.

  “You hear me?” Clein said again.

  “Okay,” Despres said. Then, thinking about it for a moment, he asked, “Do you want me to lower the price?”

  “No! It’s off.”

  Later, Clein explained that it was possibly his moral compass on that day beckoning him to look for a reason to call it off. He said the argument had been so trivial it shouldn’t have been enough to make him mad enough to cancel the contract. “I reasoned with myself that I shouldn’t be doing this for her—that why should I do this for her? I might have just been looking for a reason to call it off.”

  Somewhat amazed by the recent turn of events, after realizing how serious Clein was, Despres said, “Fine, no problem.”

  Later that night, Clein showed up at Beth Ann’s condo and explained how he’d called it off.

  Beth Ann didn’t say much of anything one way or the other, Clein later said, and just let it go.

  At least for the time being.

  Haiman Clein and Beth Ann’s life together stayed pretty much plain and simple for the next week or so. They continued sleeping together, dining out and working together, but the subject of Buzz’s murder, according to Clein, hadn’t been as much a part of their conversation as it had been in recent months. Throughout the past few weeks, Beth Ann had noticed an increase in Clein’s anxiety, though. He would sweat profusely, she later said. He would shake. His skin was pasty and clammy. There were times when he would become enraged for no apparent reason. They might be driving down the road and Clein would snap and begin banging his head against the windshield. She suspected he was abusing drugs, but she never called him on it.

  A short time after they had first slept together back in November 1993, Beth Ann went to Clein and explained how ashamed she felt about the relationship. He was married, for heaven’s sake. He had children. He was her boss.

  “Bonnie and I,” Clein admitted, “haven’t had sex in three years. She criticizes me for all of my business failures. Anyway, she’s having an affair with a Connecticut college professor!”

  By then, Beth Ann later admitted, she was in love with Clein.

  “I was impressed by his stature.” He was an older man, a professional. “He was the board director at a local bank. I looked up to him.”

  She said she could learn things from Clein that she couldn’t from anyone else. Since the affair had begun, Clein had made a key to Beth Ann’s condo. He would leave work early and go cook for her. While she shopped or worked out, he would prepare gourmet dinners. He would show up the next morning with doughnuts and coffee.

  But now, three months later, they were planning a murder together. Gourmet dinners, trips to Florida, working out at the local spa and shopping excursions seemed like some domestic fantasy. They were in this thing together now. Unless Beth Ann wanted to call it off completely, as she had said, there was no turning back.

  Beth Ann was on the phone one afternoon near the end of February talking to someone in her family, when suddenl
y she broke into tears, crying as if there had been a death in the family. Hysterical, Clein later remembered, she began shaking, mumbling things he couldn’t understand.

  Something had happened to Rebecca, Beth Ann said after hanging up—something really, really bad.

  “What is it?” Clein asked. “Tell me.”

  “Buzz locked Rebecca in the basement…. She had a burn mark on her back. The whole family is upset.”

  Indeed, the entire Carpenter family, Clein soon learned, had been in a frenzy over the incident ever since they’d picked Rebecca up for the weekend.

  Moments later, Clein and Beth Ann took off to her Norwich condo. As they drove, Clein picked up his cell phone and called Cynthia Carpenter. Beth Ann, sitting beside him, was panic-stricken and crying; she was carrying on about how bad the situation still was for Rebecca.

  “It won’t go on much longer,” Clein promised Cynthia over the phone. “It” wasn’t stated, but it was certainly implicit: “it” meant the alleged abuse Buzz was perpetrating against Rebecca.

  Locked in the cellar? A burn mark on her back?

  When they got to Beth Ann’s condo, she asked Clein if he could “call Mark and tell him to go ahead with it?” Looking into his eyes, as serious as she had ever been, she said, “I’ll pay for it if I have to.”

  “I will,” Clein reassured her. “Don’t worry about it.”

  At the office the next day, Beth Ann repeated her previous offer. “I’ll pay the remaining three thousand. You have to get Mark to go through with it.”

  Buzz was never charged with any type of abuse against Rebecca. Neither DCYS, the Family Services Unit, which had investigated every allegation made against Buzz, nor the state’s attorney’s office ever brought charges against him for abuse of any kind. It was all lies, many later said, made up to convince those involved to kill Buzz. This most recent event arose from an incident that took place at Buzz and Kim’s new apartment. Rebecca, Dee Clinton later said, had fallen against a space heater and burned her back. The entire Clinton family had heard about it. Buzz had never locked her in the basement or burned her with a cigarette. The story had been fabricated, many later claimed, to get Clein back into the mind-set of rehiring Despres to kill Buzz.

  “What did Haiman say about that incident that led him to reinstate this murder?” Kevin Kane, Connecticut State’s attorney, later asked. “It was those phone calls in which [Beth Ann] was so upset from talking about Rebecca having been burned.”

  The issue of Rebecca’s being burned quickly worked its way to the murder team. Within days, Clein told Despres, which only solidified Despres’s personal theory that Buzz was a “scumbag” who deserved to die; then Despres told Fremut, who told White, and finally Chris found out.

  After explaining to Chris that Buzz had to die because he was abusing a child, Despres said, “He’s putting cigarettes out on [her] back, for Christ’s sake.”

  What more proof was needed? Despres reasoned. The courts weren’t doing anything. The Carpenters weren’t doing anything. It was time Buzz Clinton paid for his repulsive acts against children.

  Despres had been game since day one; he needed very little convincing. To him, Buzz was a child molester. So when Clein called him back and told him to go through with it, Despres said, “No problem.”

  Still, Mark had to convince Chris that they were doing the right thing.

  A former friend of Mark Despres’s recalled later how Mark had justified the murder to Chris; told him how he had proof that Buzz was sexually abusing Rebecca.

  “Chris told me that Mark played some tape for him that had the child being abused. Whoever had approached them to do this said it was awful that there was a screaming child on the tape…. The reason they were going to do the hit was that there was this child screaming on the tape.”

  According to that same friend, Mark believed the tape was of Buzz raping Rebecca. He said Clein had played the tape for him one day when he was in his office. Clein insisted that the man on the tape was Buzz and the screaming child was Rebecca.

  This seems almost impossible, however.

  If Mark believed that a person would record himself raping a child, or that a third party would record it but not do anything to stop it, then Clein could have probably talked Mark Despres into anything. He was as gullible as a child.

  Nonetheless, regardless of the truth, this tape was positive proof to Mark that Buzz “needed to be taken off the face of the earth”—and murder, in Mark Despres’s twisted mind, was the only justifiable way to accomplish that task.

  By the beginning of March, seven different people—Mark Despres, Haiman Clein, Beth Ann Carpenter, Chris Despres, Catherine White, Jocelyn Johnson, and Joe Fremut—knew of the plot to murder Buzz. Yet no one went to the police and, subsequently, saved Buzz’s life.

  Chapter 27

  If he had his way, inside of the next few weeks, Mark Despres would be basking in the sunshine of Florida, living off the blood money he was being paid to kill Buzz—that is, providing he could get Buzz alone somewhere.

  During the first week of March, Despres had even called Pettipaug a few times from a pay phone across the street from Fremut Texaco to see if Buzz had been working. But he never seemed to be there when Despres phoned.

  With that, Despres’s frustration began to mount.

  On March 6, 1994, Despres picked up Fremut, and they drove to Pettipaug for the second time that week. This was it. No more screwing around. They were going to find Buzz Clinton, stuff him into the car and, on some remote stretch of road, blow his brains out—the same way they had rehearsed.

  Before they got to the parking lot, Fremut took the wheel. Then he pulled around into the rear parking lot of the building, dropped off Despres and drove around to the front of the building, where he waited for Despres to give him the signal that Buzz’s tow truck was parked out back.

  “We were just looking to follow [Buzz]…so we could get an idea where [he] goes…so we could shoot him,” Despres later recalled.

  But Buzz wasn’t anywhere to be found.

  The following day, Clein called.

  “Have you found him?”

  “Nope.”

  “Come into the office!”

  Later that day, Despres drove to New London.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Clein demanded. He and Despres hadn’t spoken for some time. Clein assumed Despres was close to finishing the job. He expected to pick up the newspaper any day now and see that it had been done.

  “He must be driving something else. I can’t locate him,” Despres said.

  Despres’s instincts were spot on. Buzz had been driving a Pontiac Firebird he and Kim had recently purchased. The tow truck hadn’t been running well.

  Clein had always been unsparing and strict, like a scolding parent, when conveying his demands to Despres. Despres, whose own father had hit him repeatedly and left him, perhaps looked to Clein as the father figure he never had. In one way, Despres, a man certainly capable of snapping Clein’s neck as if it were a twig, was frightened of Clein. If Clein was capable of commissioning one murder, why not two? Despres even went to his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Jocelyn Johnson, one night and admitted how scared he was. He told Johnson Clein had given him a photograph of Buzz, but he was still having trouble identifying him from the photograph alone. He told her that Clein was “aggravated” that the murder hadn’t yet been carried out, and Clein had even threatened his life, saying at one point, “You’ll be next if you don’t carry out the murder.” Despres gave Johnson the “impression,” she later said, that he “didn’t want to go through with” it. But he was terrified and felt he had to because he’d already spent the down payment Clein had given him to buy a gun and car.

  As Despres shuffled a bit in his chair, watching Clein grow angrier because Buzz was still alive, Despres said, “I called him a couple of times, Haiman—”

  “What the hell for?” Clein asked, interrupting.

  “I was thinking of asking
him to tow a car for me.”

  “You’re making me look like an asshole!” Clein screamed.

  “This isn’t something you can just do anywhere, Haiman.”

  During one of their first meetings, Clein had been very specific regarding how he wanted Buzz killed, making a point to tell Despres not to kill Buzz in front of his children or near his home. He wanted it done privately, he said, with no one around. But things were clearly different now. Something had dramatically changed the stakes.

  “Do it on the fucking sidewalk,” Clein said. “On the road. Anywhere! Just fucking do it!”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Despres could see Beth Ann through the door window in Clein’s office. She was peering in from her office, undoubtedly curious about what was being said.

  Despres then asked Clein if he wanted his money back.

  “No. Just get it done.”

  “How?”

  “His wrecker is for sale. Just call him up and tell him you want to look at the wrecker—and then…get rid of him!”

  Since being hired by Clein, Despres had made it a habit to stop and let Fremut in on the latest details about the murder plan. So after leaving Clein’s office, Despres drove to Fremut’s to talk.

  “His wrecker is for sale,” Despres told Fremut as they stood outside in the parking lot. “The best way for us to get rid of him is to make believe we’re going to buy the wrecker.”

  “Sounds like a good enough idea to me,” Fremut said.

  Despres then walked across the street, called Buzz and explained that he wanted to look at the wrecker.

  “I’m too tired to come out,” Buzz said. “Call me tomorrow night.”

  Despres hung up and walked back to the garage.

  “So?” Fremut asked.

  “He said he’s too tired.”

  Despres was clearly disappointed. Things had gone on too long. It seemed the longer they waited, the harder it was becoming.

  “Keep trying,” Fremut urged.