Lethal Guardian

by M. William Phelps

  “Only professionally,” she’d say. “It’s all work-related.”

  In March 1995, Beth Ann and Jose took a trip to Key West. As soon as they arrived, Beth Ann began acting edgy and nervous, as if she were looking over her shoulder waiting for something to happen. Two days later, to Joses’s surprise, Clein showed up at the hotel where she and Argarim were staying. After Clein left, Jose went crazy, demanding to know what the hell Clein was doing in Florida at the same time they were.

  “Haiman has a house in Key West,” Beth Ann explained. “I didn’t know he would be here.”

  Jose, of course, was livid. He didn’t believe her. Beth Ann, however, brushed off Argarim’s contempt and continued to say she had no idea Clein was going to be there. Later that night, they began fighting more loudly and aggressively. Argarim wanted to know straight up: “Did you or did you not invite him down here?”

  “I didn’t know he was going to be here, Jose. You have to believe me.”

  As the night progressed, Argarim became more angered by the “coincidence.” She had dissed him, made a fool out of him. So the next day, he drove back to Connecticut while she stayed in Key West.

  According to Jose, a month went by before he heard anything from Beth Ann. Then, unexpectedly, she called.

  “Upset and crying,” Argarim recalled later, “she [said] she’d had a fight with Haiman.” Argarim said he acted as if he didn’t care. He had been duped once—why chance it again?

  “But he pulled my hair,” Beth Ann said through tears. “He kicked me around and punched me.”

  “I’ll be right over,” Jose Argarim said.

  When he arrived at her condo, he said he saw bruises on her arms and legs. When he asked her why Clein had hit her, she only said, “I’m never seeing him again.”

  One of the people who had, as far as Turner and his colleagues could see, a close connection to Despres and Fremut was John Filippi, Fremut’s old friend who had been commissioned once by Fremut to find him a silencer. Turner and Graham knew if they continued working on Filippi, they could possibly find out either where Fremut was or what he knew.

  Filippi, on the other hand, just couldn’t keep himself out of trouble. In February, he’d burglarized a home in Norwich and confessed to it a short time later. Then in March, he broke into an office building in Essex, and cops found his basement full of the stolen merchandise. When detectives interviewed him about the burglaries, Filippi mentioned that he might have more information regarding Buzz’s murder.

  Back on March 12, a former girlfriend of Filippi’s phoned the state police with some rather shocking news. She said Filippi had just called her and said he was on his way to her house to “take care of her, her two kids and then himself.” He said he didn’t care anymore about anything.

  When the woman pleaded with him to remain calm, Filippi said, “Anson Clinton got exactly what he deserved. I gave him what he had coming. He deserved to die! You’re a whore, a pig, a loser. You’ve ruined my life.”

  Chapter 35

  While Haiman Clein spent his time trying to rebuild what little relationship he had left with his wife, Mark Despres continued hiding out in Florida.

  Beth Ann, however, began making plans for her future.

  Ali Bagherzadeh, at age thirty, had met Beth Ann back in 1987 when the two were classmates at Catholic University. Ali, born into a wealthy Middle Eastern family, had dreams of becoming a lawyer but had since abandoned them to work in his father’s bank in London. After the family sold the bank in early 1995, Ali bought a company that made “steel pipes and tanks.”

  Beth Ann and Ali had barely kept in touch throughout the years. Months, even years, passed without a phone call or letter. But in the spring of 1995, Beth Ann called Ali in London and told him she was jobless.

  Clein was talking about closing the Old Saybrook law office, she said. Things weren’t going well for him financially. His employees were beginning to notice that clients’ funds were disappearing more regularly, in bigger denominations. With all his finances drying up, at first Clein had objected to a severance agreement he and Beth Ann had agreed upon when she left the firm. But after meeting with her one night, perhaps falling victim to lust and temptation, Clein agreed to a healthy $1,000-per-week package.

  “I’m having problems with my boss,” Beth Ann explained to Ali during the phone call. “There’s some internal problems. I need a job, Ali. Can you help me?”

  “I can offer you a job in London as an independent contractor. You’ll be self-employed. I think you’re going to have problems getting a work permit, though.”

  By the time they finished talking, Ali agreed to give her a job for three weeks. After that, he would evaluate the situation. Beth Ann never mentioned when she would be coming. She said she wanted to secure a job so she had options once she made a decision.

  It was odd that she had inquired about a job so far away from home, because on November 28, 1994, she had sent a letter to her landlord requesting an extension on her Norwich condo lease. Her landlord sent a letter back saying he would gladly grant the extension.

  The question many would later ask was: why would she extend a lease on her condo if she was moving to London?

  By July, John Turner had enlisted the help of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to help keep tabs on Mark Despres as he hid out in Florida with his juvenile girlfriend. Turner wanted the Major Crime Squad in Florida, if it could, to get the girlfriend, Jackie Powers, alone and ask her some questions.

  Back on May 26, 1994, after Catherine White called, Detective John Szamocki had interviewed Jackie at her home. She said she didn’t know much about the murder. Despres had been smart enough not to include her in any of his discussions with Fremut. But she did know a lot about Mark Despres. She had been living with him and Chris for some time.

  “Mark has one gun he keeps in his bedroom,” she told Szamocki. “He keeps it next to the bed on the floor.”

  She also said Despres usually carried a gun on him because he had “a lot of enemies.”

  “Like who?” Szamocki asked.

  “The only one I know of,” she said, “is…my mom’s boyfriend.”

  Szamocki could certainly understand how the boyfriend could be upset over the fact that a thirty-five-year-old used-car salesman was sleeping with a fifteen-year-old girl.

  Another important fact from the interview was that Jackie said Mark had owned a used-car business in Florida that his sister ran for him when he wasn’t around.

  Before Szamocki finished, he asked Jackie about Mark and Chris’s relationship.

  “I know from being with Mark that both he and his son Chris believe in the Devil. They try to bring ghosts in the house and talk to them. I was never there when they did this because it scares me. Mark wears jewelry with the sign of the devil on it.”

  When Special Agent Michael Driscoll interviewed Jackie Powers in Florida on July 25, she didn’t really have much to say, but she confirmed that Despres was still in Punta Gorda, where he had been all along. She also said he was receiving money via FedEx from someone in Connecticut, but she didn’t know who. When SA Driscoll asked her if they had made plans to leave the state or were moving anytime soon, she said they were getting ready to return to Connecticut because they were out of money.

  After Beth Ann told Jose Argarim that Clein had been hitting her, Argarim rekindled the relationship. And by the summer of 1995, they were closer than they’d ever been.

  “We started doing things,” Jose said, “with her niece Rebecca, who Beth was very fond of.”

  Argarim then began to get to know the entire Carpenter family, spending time at the house. Argarim assumed that Buzz was Rebecca’s father because of the way they all talked about him. Curious, Argarim would ask what happened to Buzz, but he could tell it was a sour subject.

  “It was obvious to me that this bothered [Beth], so I didn’t talk about it again. She would tell me that she didn’t want to talk about it.”

  Wh
ile Jose believed that Beth Ann had little or no contact with Clein, friends were telling him different. When he pressed them for more information, they told him they’d seen Beth Ann around town with Clein on many occasions. Again, when Jose confronted Beth Ann, she wrote it off as business. She and Clein were partners once. They had matters to wrap up.

  By the end of summer, Beth Ann told Jose she was thinking about moving to England. He asked why.

  “I want to start over again, both professionally and personally.”

  When Argarim heard she was leaving, he began to suspect again she was seeing Clein intimately, so he retreated from the relationship.

  In many ways, Beth Ann was conflicted by the end of summer 1995. She was going out of her mind, worrying about her relationship with Clein. She had told different people different things about her future. One minute, she was talking about leaving; the next moment, she was staying. Nevertheless, where it mattered, Beth Ann made every attempt to indicate she was staying in the country; in fact, in early October, she got hold of her landlord again and demanded a second extension on her lease, to which he agreed.

  In truth, after news spread that capital felony murder warrants were going to be issued for Despres and Fremut, Beth Ann left the country without telling her landlord or any of her friends where she was going.

  Word had hit the street by the end of the summer that Despres and Fremut were back in town. On October 27, 1995, a Friday, Turner got both arrest warrants signed.

  The ED-MCS split twelve troopers and detectives into two teams of six. At the same hour, when word came down, both teams served both warrants simultaneously. It was about surprise. They couldn’t give Fremut or Despres a chance to warn the other about what was going down. It could mean life or death for a cop.

  By Sunday, October 29, Turner got word that Despres and Fremut were both home. Since Despres had returned from Florida, he’d ditched Jackie and had begun seeing Jocelyn Johnson again, his longtime girlfriend—a woman who had helped him purchase guns in the past. In fact, Turner had recently found out that Johnson had purchased not one, but two, AK-47 rifles. He had to believe that one or both were for Despres.

  Early in the morning on October 29, Turner and Graham got word that Fremut was seen at his mother’s house. So a last-minute decision was made to grab Fremut while they had the chance. Besides, Despres hadn’t been seen for a few days, and they weren’t sure where he was. If nothing else, Fremut might be able to assist in finding Despres.

  Protected by full-body armor, Turner, Graham and several troopers arrived at Fremut’s parents’ house in Essex at about 8:00 A.M.

  No one answered the door when Turner knocked. But after hearing movement inside the house, Turner signaled he was going to kick the door in.

  As soon as Turner and his colleagues entered, Fremut’s mother began screaming at them to get out: “There’s no one here!” Turner, carefully eyeing the inside of the house, spied Fremut running across the balcony upstairs.

  “Hold it, Joey!” Turner yelled as he identified himself. “Stop.”

  Fremut kept running and quickly disappeared.

  When Turner got upstairs, he heard Fremut scrambling around inside a closet. He had no idea if he had a gun, so he slowly went up to the door. A moment later, after Turner made it clear there was no chance of an escape, Fremut opened the door with his hands raised and gave up without incident.

  An hour later, thirty-four-year-old Joe Fremut was charged with capital felony, conspiracy to commit murder, and murder. His bond was set at $500,000, with an arraignment date set for October 31.

  One down, one to go.

  With Mark Despres being the woodsy, outdoor type, having fished, hunted, camped and worked outside his entire life, the thought of being behind bars was something he later said he would never submit to. No matter what, he would do everything in his power to escape even one day behind bars. With the arsenal of weaponry the ED-MCS had unearthed during an earlier search of Despres’s apartment, it was almost certain that Despres was going to be armed. Jackie had told the ED-MCS he slept with a gun under his bed. He had been seen around town on occasion carrying a gun in a holster. He had killed someone, according to Catherine White. Why would he give up now without a fight?

  After Turner and his team left Fremut’s house, they went directly to Despres’s apartment in Deep River. First they checked with Despres’s mother to see if he was in the main house. Esther Lockwood indicated that the last time she saw her son he was in his apartment. Turner motioned to the troopers behind him that there was a good chance Despres was inside the apartment.

  “He’s probably armed….”

  Within minutes, the apartment was surrounded, and cops were barking out orders for Despres to come out with his hands up.

  Little did they know, however, that Despres had grabbed an AK-47 Johnson had purchased for him and took off out the back door as they were converging on the scene. To his surprise, Despres made it to the woods in back of his mother’s house and sat for a while on a hill watching as Turner and his crew surrounded his apartment.

  “The reason he did that,” Turner later said, “was so he could watch us. If we started to follow him, Despres told me later, scared he’d get caught, he was going to ‘start shooting’ us ‘one by one.’”

  Turner further explained that they were all vested, but a bulletproof vest was no match for an assault by an AK-47.

  As it turned out, Despres watched for a few minutes and then retreated into the woods, a place where he surely felt he had the upper hand.

  After troopers and detectives searched Despres’s apartment, Turner put out an APB, tagging Despres as armed and dangerous.

  Now the hunt was on for Deep River’s most notorious and dangerous hired hit man.

  Chapter 36

  The news of Buzz Clinton’s murder was a constant story in area newspapers and on television during the past few weeks as the ED-MCS moved closer to solving the case. Whenever there was a break in the story, it would be picked up by local media. WVIT TV-30, in West Hartford, Connecticut, was a staple in Connecticut households for decades. It had a large audience that included every town in the state.

  Dave Kraus, a Jolly Green Giant of a man at six feet four inches, three hundred pounds, had worked at WVIT for the past year as a cameraman. During the morning hours of October 29, Kraus and WVIT reporter Angela Ryder, a well-known on-air personality, were in Derby covering a story unrelated to the Despres matter. When news broke that the state police had tried unsuccessfully to arrest Despres, someone at the station called Dave and Angela.

  “This guy is on the loose in Deep River. The cops are looking for him. You need to get to Deep River now.”

  Angela was aware of the case; Dave had just moved into the area and hadn’t heard much about it, so he didn’t know what was going on.

  They drove immediately to Despres’s home in Deep River. As they were pulling up the driveway, they saw WFSB TV and WTNH TV, the two competing stations, leaving.

  “Great,” Angela said, slapping her hand on the dashboard. “We missed it. Shit.”

  Since they were already there, they asked Despres’s stepfather to answer a few questions.

  “Yeah,” he said, “the cops were here, but Mark took off. They’re looking for him now.”

  Driving away from Despres’s house, Dave and Angela began talking about their next move. Neither had done much research on the case, so they had no sources in the area from whom to obtain leads.

  “Let’s go to the Westbrook [State Police] barracks,” Angela suggested. “See if we can’t get a cop to give us some background to pad the story a bit?”

  “I guess it won’t hurt,” Dave said.

  As the ED-MCS searched for Mark Despres throughout the morning and into the afternoon of October 29, word had spread that Despres was on the loose. Since Chris Despres had moved back into town, he had taken a job at the same Sunoco station in Essex where he and Mark had discarded part of the murder weapon. On oc
casion, Chris’s girlfriend, Margaret Long, brought him dinner and sat outside and ate with him.

  On October 29, as Margaret and Chris were eating, they heard over a police scanner in the garage that there was a major problem going on in the Winthrop Road area.

  “Hey, let’s go down there,” Chris suggested.

  Route 145 runs from downtown Essex, near the Sunoco station, down to Route 80, or Winthrop Road, and connects in a T formation. As Chris and Margaret approached the intersection of Route 80 and 145, they saw a line of troopers blocking the road. Cars were being pulled over. Drivers were being asked questions and then allowed to proceed. The state police had a fugitive on the loose who could very well be armed. They knew how dangerous the situation appeared and how desperate Mark Despres was, and the police hadn’t put it past him to take a hostage.

  When he pulled up to the roadblock, Chris had no idea that all the commotion was about his dad.

  “What’s your business here?” a trooper asked.

  “I want to check to make sure my grandmother’s okay,” Chris said. “She lives right up the road. We heard on the scanner that something’s going on. Is there a fire?”

  “Who’s your grandmother? Where does she live?”

  “Esther Lockwood. [At] Winthrop Road,” Chris said. He looked over at Margaret, who now wondered if there was a problem.

  “Really,” the trooper said, backing away from Chris’s car. “Could you step out of the vehicle, sir?”

  Margaret began to shift in her seat as Chris got out and walked away with the trooper.

  “At first,” Margaret later said, “I thought for sure it had something to do with Mark. I didn’t know anything at that point about Chris’s or Mark’s involvement in the murder, but Mark was always into something. Yet, I was also scared that something happened to Esther. I liked her very much.”

  When Detective Marty Graham heard from one of the troopers that Chris Despres was sitting in a cruiser at the roadblock, he walked over to the car and sat down next to Chris.