Lethal Guardian

by M. William Phelps

  “When was the last time you saw your father?” Marty asked.

  “On Saturday,” Chris said. “What is this? We went out and rode three-wheel ATVs from about one to seven.”

  “You know your father is wanted for murder?”

  “Listen, I have no idea where my dad is now or where he might go. Can I go now?” Chris began getting defensive. “I don’t know anything about the murder. I don’t know where he is. Can I go?”

  “Well, I guess—”

  Before Graham could finish, Chris got out of the car and began walking away.

  “I don’t have to talk to you guys,” he shouted. “I’m not under arrest.”

  When Chris returned to his car, he looked scared and confused, Margaret later remembered. “Something was obviously wrong—something he was keeping from me. I could feel it.”

  “My dad is in trouble,” Chris said without hesitation when Margaret asked. “They’re after him.”

  “What? Tell me what’s going on, Chris.”

  “Well, they said they’re going to shoot him if they catch him.”

  Chris didn’t need to say anything more by that point. She knew that whatever Mark had gotten himself mixed up in this time was serious. It was written all over Chris’s face.

  Dave Kraus and Angela Ryder arrived at the Troop F barracks at about 6:30 P.M. They had spent the day tracking down a few false leads and filming some backstory footage, but nothing of any real importance turned up. Now they were hoping to get a trooper to say a few things on camera that would tide viewers over until a break in the story came.

  As Dave began setting up his camera in a trooper’s office, the phone rang.

  “Excuse me,” the trooper said while Dave and Angela continued prepping for the interview. As Dave looked on, eavesdropping on the conversation, he noticed that the trooper was becoming animated. “What?” the trooper barked into the phone. “Where is he?”

  Then the trooper slammed the phone down and began running out of the room. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Sorry.”

  For the moment, Angela and Dave stood there in the empty room in awe at what had just happened.

  “Shit,” Dave said, “maybe we better follow him, Angela, huh?”

  When they got outside, they spied the trooper speeding around the corner of the building, heading for the exit of the parking lot. Troop F is on a little incline. If one is standing in the parking lot, once cars go over the crest of the hill, it’s impossible to tell which way they went, left or right.

  So Angela and Dave hopped in their van and began to chase the trooper. He was onto something. It wasn’t necessarily concerning the Despres matter, Dave surmised, but there was a good chance it had something to do with it considering the chaotic nature of what went down as they were talking about Despres while setting up equipment.

  When they got down to the bottom of the hill, however, the trooper was gone.

  “Left or right?” Angela asked.

  “Right,” Dave said instantly. It was a hunch.

  An avid lover of horseback riding, Jocelyn Johnson had gone to North Haven to ride on the morning of October 29. She was supposed to go over to Esther Lockwood’s house for dinner later that night, but when she checked her phone messages after her morning ride, she found out her plans had been changed.

  “Don’t come over tonight,” Lockwood said into Johnson’s answering machine. “I’m at the police station. Mark is in trouble.”

  Johnson recalled later that after a day of running errands she went home and watched television. At around 8:00 P.M., Mark Despres showed up unannounced at her back door. This, however, doesn’t agree with what detectives later surmised. When pressed, one detective said he felt that Jocelyn Johnson helped Mark Despres throughout the entire day on October 29, perhaps even picking him up on the road after he ran through the woods and escaped capture.

  “She had bought him guns in the past—even an AK-47, for crying out loud,” that same detective said. “Was it such a stretch to think that she might have helped him hide out all day, too?”

  Despres was not welcome at Johnson’s parents’ house. Like many people in town, they simply didn’t like him. That’s why, Johnson later said, it shocked her to see Mark standing at the back door.

  “I’m in trouble,” Despres said when he arrived. “I need to get out of here right away.”

  “Why are you in trouble?”

  “I need to get out of here,” Despres said again.

  “He was very unstable, and I was afraid to say no,” Johnson recalled when detectives questioned her later. “I also did not want Mark [at my house] when my parents got home. So I agreed to drive him out of town.”

  As Johnson, who was holding a flashlight, and Despres approached Johnson’s vehicle, a green 1966 Buick LeSabre, Despres whispered, “Open the trunk.”

  Despres then got in the trunk while a trooper surveying Johnson’s parents’ house looked on from up the road.

  Watching Johnson’s every move as she got into her car and pulled out of the driveway, the trooper called it in.

  “I have a vehicle registered to one Irving Johnson traveling south on Route 156. There’s a female operating the vehicle and a second person, I believe a male, was seen getting into the trunk of said vehicle.”

  That one phone call to dispatch set off a frenzy of calls to troopers in the area. Within a few minutes, as Johnson made her way onto Interstate 95, three more troopers had arrived and were following her.

  When Johnson made her descent off Exit 66, troopers hit their lights and lined up on both sides of her car. By this time, as Johnson put on her signal and retreated to the end of the exit ramp, several more troopers had arrived.

  Approaching the exit to the interstate where it intersects with the main road, Dave Kraus and Angela Ryder, after taking a right turn on Dave’s hunch, stopped the van and saw eight to ten cruisers, lights on, sirens blazing, surrounding what they learned later was Jocelyn Johnson’s car. It was pulled off to the side of the road near the exit ramp. As Angela and Dave pulled up, a cop came running up to the driver’s-side window of their van. He had a shotgun in his hands.

  “Get the fuck off this road. Get out of here…right now!”

  To the left of where Dave and Angela were parked was the entrance to a self-storage company, so they pulled the van into the lot and shut it off. The cop, now approaching Johnson’s vehicle, left Dave and Angela without saying anything more.

  “What the hell is going on?” Dave asked Angela.

  “I don’t know. But get your camera ready.”

  One of the troopers walked up to the driver’s side of Johnson’s car and told her not to move. “Throw the keys out the window, ma’am.”

  When Johnson got out with her hands up, he asked, “Where’s Mark?”

  “He’s in the trunk,” Johnson said without hesitation.

  The trooper motioned with the barrel of his gun for Johnson to walk toward the back of the vehicle. As soon as she started walking, another trooper came up from behind and cuffed her. There were now six or seven troopers, rifles in hand, pointing toward the trunk of the car, standing about ten yards away.

  Dave Kraus, about thirty yards away, was stooped down low to the ground, camera in hand, facing the trunk of Johnson’s car.

  Show time.

  “Every single cop out there had their guns drawn,” Dave recalled. “Shotguns. Handguns. You name it.” One unit even had dogs with them, and the dogs looked like they were ready to attack on command.

  “They were going crazy, barking and jumping around.”

  With his camera rolling, Dave watched as a trooper walked over and, in a bellowing, deep voice, shouted, “You coming out—or what?”

  Despres said something, but no one could understand him.

  “You coming out or what?” the trooper asked again.

  Nothing.

  “You got a gun in there?”

  “No!” Despres said loud and clear.

  The
trooper asked, “How do we know that?” and began backing away from the trunk. There was some noise, as if Despres were opening the trunk from the inside.

  “That was intense,” Dave Kraus recalled. “As the trunk opened, we didn’t know what the hell was going to happen.”

  With the trunk opening slowly, a trooper stood right there ready to poke Despres in the head with his shotgun once he was in sight. When the trunk popped open, more troopers approached with their rifles pointed toward Despres’s head. Despres was fully visible now. One of the dogs was sent in. While the dog began barking and snapping, four or five other troopers grabbed Despres by the hair and jacket, pulled him out of the trunk and pinned him to the ground as if he were a teenage kid. While this was going on, another trooper ran up and shoved the barrel of his shotgun into Despres’s back.

  “Don’t move, motherfucker!”

  When the troopers made Despres stand up, Dave Kraus finally understood what all the fuss was about.

  “That’s when I realized how big this guy was. I’m a big guy—and even I was scared shitless at the size of this man. He was wearing a camouflage ball cap and fatigues, and his hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Just one huge bastard.”

  Things weren’t so festive and celebratory for Chris Despres now that his father had been arrested for a capital felony murder that he had witnessed. Dave Kraus’s remarkable footage of Mark Despres’s arrest was plastered all over the news, shown again and again. Chris couldn’t seem to get away from it.

  Margaret, however, began to worry. For the past several months, she had seen Chris withdraw from things that once interested him. Chris had always been quiet, Margaret knew, but lately he just wasn’t himself. With the story breaking that Mark was being charged with murder, Margaret began pushing Chris to tell her exactly what was going on.

  Finally Chris broke down one night. He began crying. He was, Margaret remembered later, a shell of the person he once had been. Clearly, something was eating away at him from inside his soul, and Mark’s arrest only enhanced whatever pain he had already been experiencing.

  “Tell me, Chris. What is it? I’m here for you,” Margaret said. She loved him. She wanted to comfort him. Oddly enough, despite Chris’s age, they had already discussed marriage.

  “Remember the murder in Old Lyme a while ago?” Chris asked.

  It was a small town. People talked. Margaret, of course, knew every detail about the murder. Who didn’t?

  “What is it, Chris?”

  “Remember the guy who got murdered on the Rock Neck connector?”

  “Yes, Chris. What are you saying? What is it?”

  “That was my father….”

  “What?”

  “I was there, too.”

  “You were there? What do you mean, you were there?”

  “I was there. I watched my dad kill that guy!”

  Margaret was devastated. “Totally shocked,” she said later. “Mark had done nutty things, but I never dreamed he could have done that—and then to take Chris with him?”

  For the next hour or so, they didn’t speak. Yet as the night wore on, fidgety and wired, Chris began getting anxious. He couldn’t sit still, wondering what was going to happen once the cops found out he was involved.

  “Chris, come on, try to relax,” Margaret said at one point.

  “He offered me the opportunity to commit the murder,” Chris admitted.

  As if it couldn’t get any worse for Margaret.

  Throughout the night, Chris told Margaret everything he could remember, as if purging himself of all the guilt he had stowed away.

  When cops searched Jocelyn Johnson’s car, they found a .22-caliber handgun in the trunk. Apparently, Despres was armed, just as everyone had expected he might be.

  Johnson was ultimately arrested for hindering prosecution and given a court date of November 11, 1995. After posting a $5,000 nonsecurity bond, she was released.

  With Mark Despres and Joe Fremut in custody, the ED-MCS could get down to finding out who else was involved in Buzz Clinton’s murder.

  Circe’s Path

  Chapter 37

  Dee Clinton and her family had been waiting for nearly a year and a half for some answers—and by early Monday morning, October 30, 1995, they had been informed that two suspects were in custody.

  When newspaper reporters located Dee and asked her what she had been hearing regarding the recent arrests, Dee said, “The police have been more than fair to me, and I have to honor their wishes,” she told the Hartford Courant. “I don’t want to make their job more difficult.”

  With Mark Despres and Joe Fremut locked up, John Turner and Marty Graham began plotting their next move. Would Mark or Joe be forthcoming with what they knew? Would they give Turner and Graham the one thing they wanted more than anything at this point—more names? After all, Despres and Fremut didn’t know exactly what Catherine White had already confessed.

  Joe Fremut was especially evasive during his first interview. He indicated he was waiting for his attorney, the highly touted F. Mac Buckley, a noted criminal defense attorney from Hartford. Buckley, who would himself later face charges of embezzlement and take off in a well-publicized flight from justice, told Marty Graham after meeting with Fremut that Fremut was reluctant to talk. He was going to ride it out. But Buckley, after meeting with Fremut a second time and explaining that he was facing a possible death sentence if convicted, convinced Fremut to begin talking. Buckley, according to Graham, told Fremut that the only way he could cut a deal for him later on was if he began cooperating now.

  At first, Fremut downplayed his role. He said it was all Mark’s idea, and he never intended to help him.

  “We knew damn well that Mark would never have killed Buzz if Fremut wasn’t involved,” one detective later noted. “Despres just wasn’t smart enough to do it himself. He needed Joey.”

  Despres was stewing while in lockup. He was in his worst possible element. Having no contact with the outside, he began to think of ways to get out of the trouble he now found himself in.

  At this point, Turner and Graham, based on a few off-the-record conversations they’d had with Despres, had a good indication that Haiman Clein and Beth Ann Carpenter were involved in the conspiracy, but there was nothing tangible yet linking them to the murder. At the same time, though, they knew Despres was that missing link.

  Despres, however, indicated he wasn’t interested in talking about anything more than what he had said already—although he told them Clein was involved.

  While Turner and Graham discussed how they were going to approach Despres a second time, they heard that Clein had driven down to the courthouse where Despres was being held. Acting as Mark’s attorney, Clein tried getting in to talk to him. Despres had already given Clein up in a preliminary interview Turner and Graham had conducted with him earlier that day. They knew Clein was trying to weasel his way in to see Despres so he could, most likely, warn him about talking.

  By late afternoon on October 30, 1995, Turner and Graham got a judge’s order to keep Clein away from Despres. Since that time, Despres had given them a statement to his involvement in the murder, fingering both Clein and Beth Ann, but would say nothing more about the details of the crime.

  Clandestinely watching Clein pace the hallway inside the courthouse, Turner and Graham enjoyed a moment of reprieve in what had been a long year and a half. They wanted Clein to sweat a little. Think about things. Maybe crack under the anxiety of not knowing what was going on or what Despres was saying.

  After twenty minutes of watching Clein rub his beard and wear a path in the floor tile, Turner and Graham emerged.

  “We’d like to talk to you, Mr. Clein,” Turner said.

  “I guess,” Clein said.

  Sitting down, Turner said, “We need to talk to you about the murder of Buzz Clinton.”

  Clein immediately began playing stupid, Turner later recalled. “I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know what to say to that.”

&
nbsp; “You can start by telling us what you know about it, Mr. Clein. We know you know what’s going on here. We know you have information that can help us out.”

  “Do you…” Clein began to say before stopping for a moment to rub his forehead. “Do you think…Are you looking at me as having had something to do with it?”

  John Turner rarely smiled. His seriousness and stern facial features were, however, what made him one of the best interrogators the ED-MCS had on staff.

  “Yes,” Turner said. He and Graham suspected Clein had had some type of involvement in Buzz’s murder. Then Turner added, “I don’t understand, please help me understand this. Why is a person of your social stature, Mr. Clein, hanging around with a guy like Mark Despres?”

  Clein then went into a long diatribe regarding his rise and fall in the real estate market. As he spoke, Turner and Graham kept looking at each other, wondering what it all had to do with Buzz’s murder.

  “I was on top of the world one day,” Clein ranted. “It all fell apart. You’re up; you’re down. That’s when you start representing different types of people.”

  “We can understand that,” Graham said.

  “People with shady backgrounds,” Clein continued.

  “What are we talking about here, Mr. Clein?” Turner asked.

  “Right! What the hell does this have to do with what we’re talking about?” Graham added.

  “Well, to be honest,” Clein said, “eventually you become what you represent.”

  “We knew we had him at that point,” Turner later recalled.

  “I have known the Despres family,” Clein continued, “for nearly twenty years, and have become close friends with Mark over that time. Mark’s mother called me when he was arrested and asked for my help.”

  “So that’s why you’re here?”

  “Yes.”

  Turner and Graham knew that Despres had been supplying Clein with cocaine, so Graham asked Clein if his connection to Despres was drug-related.

  “I am insulted by that statement. But, on the other hand, I can understand where you’re coming from.”