Lethal Guardian

by M. William Phelps

  The same scenario played out twenty-four hours later when Despres called Buzz again from the same pay phone.

  “I’m too tired,” Buzz repeated. “Try me again tomorrow night.”

  Dee Clinton had recently turned forty-seven. She owned a successful kennel and had raised three beautiful children. She never wanted anything more. Buck Clinton was the wrestling coach at Wethersfield High School. He had been involved with the sport his entire life. His kids respected him. The Clintons had had their share of troubles, but they always came together as a family to overcome whatever obstacle was put in their way. Since Dee had gotten to know Kim over the past year and a half, she began to understand that Kim was one of the main reasons why her son had changed so much lately. Buzz seemed ready to settle down. Now, with this issue of custody almost behind them, Dee surmised that Buzz, Kim, Rebecca and Briana could begin their lives together as a family—but, more important, without any meddling from the Carpenters.

  On March 9, 1994, Dee had been over at Buzz and Kim’s apartment because Briana had been ill, which was likely the reason why Buzz had told Despres for two consecutive days that he couldn’t meet him. Buzz wanted to be home with his daughter. She was sick. Everything else could wait.

  Dee brought a pair of shoes for Rebecca and some medicine for Briana when she showed up that night. Buzz was on the couch. Kim was sitting on the floor holding Briana. Rebecca was her old self, “buzzing around the living room,” having a grand old time, Dee later recalled.

  While she was there, Buzz had taken a call. When he got off the phone, he told Dee it was “the guy I’m going to meet. He wants to look at my wrecker. When you get home tonight, Ma, put my battery on the charger. I need to charge it before I meet him.”

  Dee said she would.

  “I’ll bring the battery back here tomorrow,” Dee said, and explained that she was coming back over anyway to pick up Kim so they could go shopping. Dee said she’d be there around 6:00 P.M.. By her bringing the battery, she added, it would save Buzz a trip.

  “Sounds good to me, Ma.”

  Around 5:30 P.M., on March 10, Mark Despres drove over to Fremut Texaco with Chris. Catherine White, along with a friend of hers, was at the garage hanging around.

  “I’m going to call Clinton about the wrecker,” Despres said after pulling Fremut aside for a moment.

  “I’ll come with you,” Fremut said.

  Mark and Chris, after talking with Fremut for a few moments, got into Despres’s car and hightailed it out of the parking lot. Fremut and White followed.

  About fifteen minutes later, near 6:00 P.M., with Fremut behind him, Despres pulled off Exit 64, on Interstate 95 in Westbrook. One of Connecticut’s many state police barracks was up ahead, not more than half a mile away. At the end of the exit, Despres pulled into a commuter parking lot where there was a pay phone.

  As White watched, Fremut and Despres got out of their cars and walked toward the pay phone. But before they approached the phone, Fremut grabbed Despres by the arm.

  “I can’t come with you,” he said. “I have something else I need to do tonight.”

  “So I’m supposed to go by myself?” Despres had planned the murder with Fremut from the start. Here it was, show time, and Fremut was bailing out?

  “Just go do it! It’s no big deal.”

  “What the fuck, Joe?”

  Just then, Chris came walking up.

  “Bring Chris with you,” Fremut suggested, pointing at him. “Have him do it for you.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  What at first seemed like an idiotic suggestion became one of the only options Mark had left.

  So he asked Chris if he wanted to go along.

  “I want three hundred dollars and a gun,” Chris said.

  “I’ll throw in a bag of weed, too,” Mark said.

  Mark later said he would have given Chris the money and weed anyway. It didn’t matter that Chris had agreed to go along.

  Fremut then got into his car and took off. A disgusted Despres watched Fremut barrel out of the parking lot. Then he picked up the telephone and called Buzz.

  “So, can I take a look at the wrecker tonight, or what?” Despres asked when Buzz answered.

  “Sure. I can show it to you anytime tonight,” Buzz said.

  “How is it? In good shape?”

  Buzz had painted it recently. It was old, but it looked as if it had been well taken care of.

  Despres later said he then made small talk with Buzz so as to make the call seem legit.

  “It’s bad on gas,” Buzz offered.

  They then agreed to meet at the Howard Johnson restaurant parking lot, in Old Saybrook. HoJo’s, as it was called, was at the intersection of Route 9 and Interstate 95. The Connecticut River, which runs parallel to Route 9, dumps into the Atlantic Ocean at the same intersection. The Baldwin Bridge acts as somewhat of a town line between Old Lyme and Old Saybrook.

  “How’s seven o’clock?” Buzz asked Despres.

  “I’ll see you then.”

  Shortly after Buzz hung up with Despres, Dee phoned to tell him that she was running late and wouldn’t have a chance to drop off the battery until later on that night when she picked Kim up to go shopping.

  “I’m not going to make it by six, Buzz,” Dee said. “There’s no way I can finish all of my work. Sorry.”

  “I need that battery. I’m meeting this guy.”

  “The earliest I can do is seven.”

  “Just leave the battery out. I’ll pick it up on my way out.”

  When Mark and Chris arrived at Despres’s Deep River home after talking to Buzz, Mark pulled his .38-caliber Saturday night special out of the drawer where he stored it, loaded six rounds and put it in his shoulder holster.

  The gun, bought sometime in early 1994, had been purchased by Jocelyn Johnson, Despres’s girlfriend, at Ron’s Gun Shop, in Niantic. Despres was with Johnson when she purchased it, and had even picked it out.

  After loading his gun, Mark sat down next to Chris to watch television. It was about 6:45 P.M. They didn’t have to meet Buzz until somewhere around 7:00 P.M. With HoJo’s about a ten-minute drive south on Route 9, there wasn’t much left to do except wait.

  Despres had traded in his white Buick Skylark and purchased a blue Buick Regal for the specific reason of killing Buzz. The plan was to meet with Buzz and tell him he wanted to take the wrecker for a drive to check it out. Despres would then tell Buzz that Chris would follow them in the Regal. Once they got going, Despres would pull off somewhere in the woods and blow Buzz’s brains out in the truck.

  As Chris and Mark were getting ready to take off for Old Saybrook, Chris asked what they were going to do. The boy still seemed to think it was, perhaps, all a joke.

  “We’re going to kill that guy,” Despres said matter-of-factly.

  If Chris had thought his dad would never go through with the actual murder, now it was clear that he was serious. Chris watched as his dad loaded a weapon, shouldered it and made several calls over a two-day period to hook up a meeting with Buzz. There was even one time a few days back when Despres and Fremut were fanning through the Bargain News, a local newspaper that sold cars and trucks, and came upon a For-Sale ad Buzz had placed for the wrecker. Mark recognized the phone number in the ad as being the same as the number on Buzz’s tow truck. When Mark and Joe began discussing the notion of calling Buzz and luring him away under the guise of buying the tow truck, Chris’s name came up as being the possible triggerman.

  Then, as Mark walked away for a minute as the three of them were sitting around and joking about things, Fremut put his arm around Chris and, slapping him on the back as though he’d just whacked a two-run homer for his Little League team, said, “I’m going to make you a hit man, Chris!”

  They all laughed.

  Chris could do nothing else except look at Fremut and wonder what he was getting himself mixed up in. What seemed at first like a plot for some sort of twisted game of Dungeons & Dragons was now ma
terializing into reality.

  When Buzz showed up at his parents’ house in Old Lyme to pick up the battery, Buck was cooking dinner. In the foyer, to the right, on the wall, were photos of Buzz and all the kids. The Clinton home wasn’t by any means one of the larger homes in Old Lyme, but it was a warm place of solitude and strength for Buzz Clinton. He knew his family loved him. Buck and Dee, although they were tough on their son when he needed it, would have done anything for Buzz—and usually did.

  “You stayin’ for supper, Buzz?” Buck asked.

  “No. I’m in a rush, Dad. I’ve got to get out of here as soon as possible.”

  As they were talking, Suzanne, Buzz’s sister, came running into the kitchen. There was a play area off to the side of the kitchen where Suzanne had been playing when Buzz arrived. Suzanne looked up to her much older brother as though he were a movie star. She adored and idolized him.

  “Buzz was her everything,” Dee recalled later.

  Buzz had always found the time to stop whatever he was doing and give his sister a hug and kiss on the cheek, or maybe even play with her if he had enough time. Tonight was no different.

  After Suzanne hugged Buzz and kissed him on the cheek, she said in her comforting and well-mannered voice, “I love you, Buzz Clinton.”

  “I love you, too, honey. But I have to get going now.”

  With that, Buzz walked out the door of his childhood home en route toward a death sentence for which he had no idea he had already been tried, convicted and sentenced.

  Chris and Mark showed up at HoJo’s early, about 7:05 P.M. As soon as Mark pulled into the parking lot and spied who he thought was Buzz waiting for him, he knew he would have to scrap his previous plan of killing him in the wrecker—because Buzz was driving the old beat-up Firebird he and Kim had just bought.

  Curious as to why Buzz wasn’t driving the wrecker, Despres pulled up alongside, rolled down his window and asked, “Are you the guy with the wrecker?”

  “Yes,” Buzz said. “I want you to follow me to Niantic, where my house is. I’ll show you the wrecker there.”

  Despres looked at his son for a moment without saying anything. Then, turning to Buzz, he said, “That’ll work.”

  Buzz pulled out of the HoJo’s parking lot and began heading north on Interstate 95. Despres, his mind racing, stayed right behind him.

  Despres was stuck. How the hell was he going to do it? He hadn’t made a contingency plan.

  After Buzz drove over the Baldwin Bridge and continued on I-95 for about three minutes, he put his blinker on to get off on Exit 72, the Rocky Neck State Park Beach connector.

  For Mark Despres, it was the perfect spot to commit murder.

  “It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,” Despres later said. “No cars were coming.”

  As the two men drifted off the exit and began merging onto the connector, Chris, as Mark began flashing his lights at Buzz, asked what was going on. Buzz’s apartment was only miles down the road; they were going to be there in a few minutes.

  “I’m going to kill him right here,” Mark said.

  About midway down the connector, Buzz noticed that Despres was flashing his lights, so he pulled over.

  With his car still running, the driver’s-side door wide open, Buzz got out and began walking toward Despres’s vehicle. Chris, looking down at the floorboards, knowing what was about to happen, froze. Reality and fantasy had now merged into a seamless blur of what Chris had thought all along was some sort of joke.

  “What’s going on?” Buzz asked as he moved toward Despres.

  “I need to get some gas,” Despres said as he got out of his car.

  Without even thinking about what he was doing, Despres used his driver’s-side door as a rest to steady his .38, pointed it at Buzz and fired.

  It took only seconds. Chris never looked up. He only heard the shots and saw flashes of light, like lightning, out of the corner of his eye.

  Despres, quickly getting back into his car, watched as Buzz fell to the ground like a rag doll. Stunned, Chris turned and saw headlights coming over the crest of the hill in back of them.

  A witness?

  As the car came closer, Mark put the car in reverse—he had to back up a bit to get around Buzz’s body—hit the gas pedal and sped away.

  “He backed up a little first,” Chris remembered later. “Turned left and drove off. I believe he ran over [Buzz].”

  “I heard a thump under the car,” Despres added later, “and realized I ran [him] over.”

  Chapter 28

  In what seemed like only seconds to Chris Despres, he and his father had driven from the Rocky Neck connector back to the Baldwin Bridge. When they had left the scene, Mark said later, he thought he was “going about eighty or ninety miles per hour.” Making a hard right at the end of the connector, Despres’s car went into a four-wheel slide as he twisted and turned the steering wheel to keep the vehicle on the road.

  “Dad,” Chris screamed, “don’t crash it now!”

  When they arrived at Despres’s apartment, Mark pulled up alongside the garage. Scared, Chris took off inside while Mark went into the garage.

  Once inside the garage, Mark took out a ball-peen hammer and, with violent strikes, began thrashing at the gun as small portions of it broke off and scattered. Then he got out a die grinder. The gun had no serial number, but he still needed to, as Clein had suggested, dismantle it.

  By 9:00 P.M., Mark had the gun broken down into several pieces, some of which he placed in his coat pocket. After sweeping what he could off the floor, he grabbed Chris and took off to Fremut’s apartment. Catherine White was there when they showed up. She remembered later that Mark was “frantic” and manic when they arrived.

  “I did it, Joe,” Despres said in front of White.

  Fremut didn’t say anything. Instead, he grabbed Mark by the arm and pulled him into the hallway.

  “I didn’t know when to stop, Joe. I didn’t…I…,” Mark said, talking fast.

  “What?”

  “It was a rush, Joe.”

  At that point, Mark and Joe took off, most likely to get rid of whatever was left of the gun. Fremut had tools in the garage, and investigators later found pieces of the weapon in the Dumpster out back of Fremut Texaco. Although White didn’t see them do it, it was possible they had gone into Fremut’s garage and cut the gun into smaller pieces.

  With Joe and Mark gone, Chris sat with White inside Fremut’s apartment and talked.

  “Have you been with your dad all night?” White asked.

  “My dad’s cool,” Chris said. He was smiling and seemed unmoved by the night’s events. “He said he’s going to buy me a motorbike and take me camping.” Then he added, “I feel like smoking some drugs about now.”

  Forty-five minutes after Mark and Joe had taken off, they returned. Without saying much, Mark motioned to Chris that it was time to go.

  While driving south along Route 9, Mark pulled off Exit 3. Down at the end of the exit, to the right, was a Sunoco station.

  Just off the exit ramp, Mark stopped the car, had Chris roll down his window, and told him to throw a few pieces of the .38 into the woods behind the Sunoco station.

  After that, Mark hopped back onto Route 9 south and eventually ended up back on Interstate 95, heading north, in the direction of the Rocky Neck connector. Mark had decided to drive over to Jocelyn Johnson’s house in Old Lyme and hang out for a while. He was confused. He had just killed a man. As with most inexperienced murderers, Mark had planned everything up until the time of the actual murder. Now he was scrambling around, trying to get rid of evidence, wondering what to do next.

  While crossing the Baldwin Bridge for the second time that night, Mark stopped midway over the bridge and threw the remaining pieces of the weapon into the Connecticut River below him. Less than a mile away, state police, local police and several bystanders were standing over the dead body of Anson “Buzz” Clinton. Dee Clinton was sitting in traffic only yards from where her son
lay dead in the road—and she didn’t even know what was going on. Kim, seven months pregnant, unknowingly now a widow, was at home waiting for Dee to pick her up so they could go shopping.

  When Chris and Mark arrived at Jocelyn Johnson’s house, Mark spied Johnson’s brother working on his car in the garage. Chris stayed in the car. Mark walked past Johnson’s brother without saying a word.

  After only about five minutes, Mark emerged from Johnson’s house, having only made “small talk” with her, he later said, and he and Chris drove back home.

  When they arrived, Mark turned on the television. And after watching the nightly news, he and Chris went to sleep.

  Early the next morning, March 11, at about 6:30, Beth Ann called Haiman Clein at his home. Clein was in bed with his wife. They had been sleeping when the phone rang.

  “Buzz has been killed,” Beth Ann said in a nervous slather of words. “Come over right away. I’m afraid. Scared. Come now!”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  While Clein was pulling up his trousers, Bonnie Clein woke up.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Buzz Clinton,” Haiman said, “has been killed. I’m going over to Beth’s to see if anybody needs me.”

  Clein had been urging Despres for about the past two weeks to get the job done. Driving over to Beth Ann’s, Clein now knew he had but only a few things left to do—the first, of course, was to pay Despres the remainder of the money he owed him. If Clein had had the upper hand on March 10 and the days preceding it, Despres now controlled the situation. Clein wasn’t stupid. He knew Despres would be calling him shortly for the money.

  As if it were just another day, Clein stopped first at a doughnut shop down the street from Beth Ann’s condo to pick up coffee and doughnuts. But as soon as he opened the door to her condo, he could tell Beth Ann had been devastated by what had happened.

  “She was scared out of her mind,” Clein later said.

  Setting the doughnuts and coffee on the counter, Clein tried reassuring her that everything was going to be all right. “You don’t have to be scared,” he said. “No one can know about anything.”