Lethal Guardian

by M. William Phelps

  When they found her, she agreed to help, saying Clein had, indeed, been calling her, but he was reluctant lately because he was scared of getting caught. At one time, he’d even convinced her to write down various pay phone numbers in the area where she lived in London so he could call her at different numbers. Eventually, though, Clein ran out of money and gave her phone numbers to reach him, most of which were in California.

  When Scotland Yard asked, Beth Ann told them everything.

  Officials at Scotland Yard, on Sunday, February 4, 1996, indicated to the FBI that Clein had made plans with Beth Ann to call her the following day. Beth Ann had given them the number Clein was going to be calling from, which was traced back to a pay telephone booth outside a 7-Eleven convenience store in Long Beach, California, just sixty miles south of Los Angeles.

  Clein had been in Long Beach for about a week without anybody noticing him. The FBI had set up surveillance early in the morning on February 5 near the 7-Eleven store. They had a make on the car Clein had purchased in Indiana back in December—a blue Oldsmobile Ciera. Like the alias Clein used to check into several different hotels along his path, he used the name Ron Coleman to buy and register the car later.

  With FBI agents positioned in a way that allowed them to monitor the situation, all they had to do was wait.

  At about five minutes to noon, Clein pulled up in his Ciera, and FBI agents made a positive identification from a photo they obtained from the ED-MCS. A few moments later, Clein got out of his car and walked toward the phone booth. He looked scruffy and unkempt, like a homeless person, his hair matted and longer.

  It was obvious, FBI agents later said, he had been living out of his car.

  As Clein and Beth Ann spoke, Clein became impatient—his voice hurried and hoarse. For the first few minutes, they talked about menial things: how he was doing, how she was doing. Then, without warning, two FBI agents moved in without a word. Realizing what was going on, Clein said, “You set me up, didn’t you?” to Beth Ann before he was wrestled to the ground, handcuffed and led away.

  Chapter 40

  Detectives Reggie Wardell and James Brady arrived in California to collect fugitive Haiman Clein on February 9. Clein was facing multiple charges—the most severe being capital felony murder, punishable by the death penalty, and conspiracy to commit murder.

  Before they took off for the airport to fly back to Connecticut, Bob Axelrod warned Reggie Wardell over the phone not to talk to Clein.

  “Idle conversation only,” Axelrod said. “Nothing about the case.”

  Clein was handcuffed and his jacket draped over his wrists. When they got up to the airline counter at LAX, Clein asked Wardell where they were going to sit in the plane.

  “Prisoners usually sit in the back of the plane. We’ll board first, though,” Wardell said.

  “Well, I have frequent-flier miles,” Clein said, hoping maybe he could use them to upgrade the ride back home.

  Wardell didn’t say anything at first. He thought it was a joke. Clein, however, gave him the impression he was serious, so Wardell went with it.

  The airline knew who they were. Wardell, in a mocking fashion, asked the ticket agent if there was a chance they could get upgraded to first class.

  “Our perp has frequent-flier miles!”

  “Officer, I’m sorry, but we can’t do that.”

  “Oh well,” Wardell said to Clein, shrugging his shoulders.

  John Turner was waiting at Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, when Clein, Wardell and Brady arrived. From there, they drove to the Westbrook State Police barracks so Clein could be officially processed.

  Brian Carlson, a wealthy New York businessman with three homes—in Connecticut, North Carolina, New Hampshire—had met Clein back in early 1995. Carlson’s mother needed a notary, and Carlson happened to be driving by Clein’s Old Saybrook office at the time. Months later, when Carlson found himself in a battle with his mortgage company over its changing owners and not notifying him, he turned to the one lawyer he knew in Connecticut as having a stellar reputation for dealing with mortgage companies.

  “He was delightful,” Carlson recalled of those first few meetings with Clein. “He was a really nice guy. Farmer Brown type. Flannel shirts and jeans. Laid-back. Easy to talk to and get along with. I liked him.”

  When Carlson asked Clein where he stood with his mortgage company, Clein seemed excited. “We got ’em,” he said.

  “How much money are we talking about?” Carlson asked. If it were only a few thousand, what was the sense?

  “Probably about twenty-five to thirty thousand,” Clein said.

  A few weeks went by, then a few months. Carlson grew impatient and called Clein to see what was happening.

  “Don’t pay them any money,” Clein advised. Then, “But I need you to give me some money, just in case I have to make a quick deal.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, if they want to settle right away, you’re going to have to pay back all of those mortgage payments at once. I need to put twenty-five thousand in an escrow account so I can have it on hand if you’re out of town. It’ll just make things easier.”

  It made sense.

  Summer 1995 turned into fall 1995, and Carlson hadn’t heard a word from Clein. A letter would arrive from time to time indicating that Clein was still working the deal, but other than that, Carlson assumed Clein was making progress.

  Then Clein called Carlson one day and invited himself and Bonnie to dinner over at Carlson’s house. It was around Halloween, 1995.

  Carlson said sure. It sounded like a good idea. They could catch up on the status of his case.

  With Carlson and his wife sitting on one side of the table and Bonnie and Haiman on the other, Carlson watched as Clein’s glass of vodka seemingly never ran empty throughout the night. Clein had brought a bottle of vodka and polished it off himself as the night wore on. Bonnie, rather timid in that she only spoke when she felt she was allowed to by Clein, began talking about her background.

  “My father is an Episcopalian. He lives in New Hampshire,” she said. “My parents are heavily involved in the church up there.”

  “No kidding,” Carlson noted. “We own a home up near there. How ’bout that?”

  “I’ve converted to Judaism, though,” Bonnie made a point of saying. “I’m involved in a synagogue in Waterford now. All of our children are being raised under the Jewish faith.” Gloating, Bonnie put her arm around Haiman, smiled, then said, “And it’s all because of him.”

  This was an odd conversation. Only a few months before, Beth Ann and Bonnie were involved in a power struggle to win Clein’s love and affection. They were fighting and yelling and having showdowns at various times and places—Clein’s kids had even gotten involved. Moreover, Bonnie had slept with several of her husband’s friends throughout the years, many times while he watched. Furthermore, Clein had been involved in a murder-for-hire plot. Yet here the two of them were, living it up at Carlson’s house as though it were just another normal day.

  In a matter of a few months, however, Brian Carlson would find out why the dinner date was so important. Clein had to keep up the facade; he had to make it appear as if he were still actively involved in his clients’ legal matters, when he was actually robbing Carlson and several others blind.

  Carlson had a Christmas party at his Connecticut home in mid-December 1995. Friends, neighbors, family and business associates all came. It was festive and friendly. People were caught up with the holiday spirit. At this time, Carlson had no idea that Clein was robbing him. Because the bank hadn’t called looking for mortgage payments, Carlson trusted that Clein was taking care of everything.

  The day before the Christmas party, Marilyn Rubitski called Carlson at his Manhattan office to tell him that Clein couldn’t make it to the party. Something had come up, she said.

  The next morning, Carlson snuggled up in his favorite chair by his fireplace and unfolded the morning newspa
per, and there it was: HAIMAN CLEIN WANTED FOR MURDER; POLICE SEEK OLD SAYBROOK LAWYER.

  “Honey,” Carlson yelled into the next room, “someone finally has a good excuse for missing one of our parties.”

  “What?”

  “Haiman Clein is wanted for murder!”

  After the initial shock set in, Mrs. Carlson asked, “What about our twenty-five thousand, Brian? What do we do now?”

  The night of the party, neighbors and friends teased Carlson about his involvement with Clein. He was embarrassed, sure; but in truth, what could he do? Carlson was one more on a growing list of financial casualties Clein had accumulated throughout the years.

  “It pisses me off that I gave his kid a five-hundred-dollar savings bond at his bar mitzvah. I trusted this man. He used me.”

  In the end, Carlson hired another attorney he had chosen out of the Yellow Pages. By chance, it happened to be Richard Paladino, a former partner of Clein’s. First Paladino fixed the real estate problem Carlson had gone to Clein for in the first place; then he recouped the $25,000 Clein had stolen from his client.

  In the forty days Clein had spent on the run, he traveled from Connecticut to Indiana to his boyhood home of Miami to, finally, California, where he was set up by his former lover and arrested. But now he was back in New London, facing a judge as—ironically—a criminal instead of a lawyer.

  As Clein was brought into court to be arraigned, Bonnie, his loyal wife of two decades, exposed her unrelenting admiration and codependency as she smiled, waved and even blew him a kiss as he sat down next to his attorney, Bob Axelrod.

  By the end of the proceedings, Judge Joseph Purtill set Clein’s bond at $1.5 million. With little or no assets left—Clein had $2.81 on him when the FBI took him into custody back in Long Beach—and the bank close to fore-closure on his Waterford home, Clein certainly wasn’t going to make bail.

  At an intimidating six feet three inches, Assistant State’s Attorney Paul Murray, at fifty, had a reputation in Connecticut for being one of the toughest prosecutors the state employed. He was stern in his arguments, forthright in his beliefs and convictions, and determined to win cases other lawyers might otherwise give up on when things didn’t go their way. In his two decades as a prosecutor, Murray tried the worst of the worst: drug abusers, murderers, sexual predators.

  Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, Murray went to Sacred Heart High School and the University of Connecticut; and served in the Vietnam War. Some said Murray learned his hard ways as a prosecutor working the ghettos of the state’s capital, Hartford, as a police officer for five years while at the same time earning his law degree.

  In the early 1980s, the chief state’s attorney had formed a “five-person government corruption SWAT team” that set its sights on organized crime and corruption in state offices. The head of that committee was none other than Kevin Kane, who was now working with Murray and Peter McShane on the Buzz Clinton murder case.

  When Kevin Kane went to work for State’s Attorney Robert Satti, who ran the operation in New London before Kane took over in early 1995, he never thought that Murray would one day end up working side by side with him again. After both graduated from the University of Connecticut Law School in the late 1970s, they started out together in Middletown. Since then, they always seemed to run into each other somewhere along the vocation pathway.

  Where Murray wore a hat of contempt for rogue cops, serial killers and child predators, at times speaking openly of his determination to rid the streets of such filth, Kane worked in the background quietly, rarely ever speaking out. When Kane went to work in New London as an assistant state’s attorney in 1986, Murray went to Hartford as a special drug prosecutor. But here they were once again, together, getting ready to prosecute one of their own: Haiman Clein.

  Recently Detective John Turner had uncovered a source that would eventually help the ED-MCS bust the case open even further.

  On March 21, after carefully piecing together Beth Ann’s role in the murder, contacting old friends and relatives, seeking to develop a motive, Turner got hold of Tricia Gaul and ended up with a four-page statement that moved the case into a completely new realm. Tricia and John Gaul were at the forefront of the custody battle between Kim and Buzz and the Carpenters. Tricia could offer an independent source of information not only to reinforce what Cathy White, Mark Despres and Joe Fremut had already stated, but also shed light on Beth Ann’s role.

  Around the same time John Turner took Tricia’s statement, he and Reggie Wardell drove over to Dr. Matthew Elgart’s office in Old Saybrook. They had gotten Elgart’s name from someone close to the case who, by sheer coincidence, knew a patient of Elgart’s. Mark Despres had also told them that Clein was hanging around with a “doctor in town” with whom he had snorted cocaine. Turner and Wardell knew that Elgart probably didn’t know much, but he and Clein had been friends. A few simple questions wouldn’t hurt. Maybe he could offer something.

  After Elgart’s receptionist alerted the doctor that Turner and Wardell were waiting in the reception area, Elgart appeared and asked them to walk back into the office area.

  “I don’t have long…. I have to pick someone up,” Elgart said as they walked.

  After walking down a short hallway, Elgart led them into an examination room that held two patients.

  “Can we go somewhere a little more private?” Turner asked.

  Loudly, so the entire office could hear, Turner and Wardell remembered later that Elgart then began shouting: “I hate cops! I have a real problem with authority figures because they abuse their authority and they pick on minorities.”

  Turner and Wardell were beside themselves. Here was a doctor shouting at the top of his lungs in his office at two detectives. It could mean only one thing: Elgart knew more than they thought; he was hiding something.

  “We’re just here,” Turner explained quietly, “to get some background information on Haiman Clein. We’ve conducted interviews with people that led us to you. Relax.”

  “Maybe I should call an attorney.”

  “Who’s your attorney, sir?”

  “What are the questions you want to ask me?” Elgart demanded to know. He was still being loud and obnoxious, roaming now from room to room to make communicating more difficult.

  “Just some background on Haiman—”

  “What specific questions do you want to ask me? The police, you know, like to twist things.”

  “Well, sir, since you’re so adamant,” Turner said a bit more sternly now, “we want to know about your cocaine use with Haiman Clein. And if you have any info about the murder.”

  “I do not know anything about Mr. Clein. Haven’t seen him in a year and a half. He was out of control.”

  “We know that,” Turner said.

  “How was Mr. Clein out of control?” Wardell asked.

  “You see…you see how you twist things around,” Elgart shouted. Then he walked into the area where his two patients were sitting, shouting along the way, “I hate cops! I hate cops!” Looking directly at both patients, he added, “See, they’re threatening me!”

  One patient laughed.

  “I want an attorney present before I answer any questions,” Elgart said more seriously.

  “Well, maybe you should call one.”

  “I will consider this.” Then he added, “I hate guns.”

  “I hate murder,” Turner shot back immediately. “We are still going to have to speak to you.” Turner handed Elgart his business card. “Call Paul Murray when you’re ready to talk.”

  As Turner and Wardell walked out of the office, Turner stopped, turned and offered one last comment: “You’re going to talk to us, Mr. Elgart. You might as well call your attorney and get it over with.”

  A few days after Turner and Wardell first spoke to Elgart, Elgart’s lawyer phoned the state’s attorney’s office and indicated that Elgart was ready to talk.

  Elgart’s attorney was a small woman. Petite. Docile. Soft-spoken and frail. When
she walked into the state’s attorney’s office, Turner explained what they wanted to talk about with her client. She agreed to let Elgart speak, just as long as she could monitor the interview.

  Elgart sat at the head of the table, his attorney to his right, and Turner and Wardell to the left. For the most part, Elgart spoke of his personal history, his marriage and why he had been so attracted to having Clein as a friend.

  “I was fascinated with lawyers. I was enthralled with Haiman Clein and his business and the way he worked.”

  In the end, though, Elgart could shed little light on the murder of Buzz Clinton.

  With Tricia Gaul’s statement in hand, just as Clein’s probable cause hearing was about to get under way, Kevin Kane, Peter McShane and Paul Murray’s main focus somewhat changed. They now strategized that they wanted to put on record evidence of Beth Ann Carpenter’s participation in the crime, knowing they were likely going after her next. After several preliminary hearings, where a judge hears what evidence will be brought in, the judge allowed just about everything the state’s attorney’s office had requested.

  This, of course, changed Clein’s position entirely. Now he had to think about how he could cut a deal and maybe save his life, but he went ahead with the hearing anway.

  To set the stage, Murray called Joe Dunn, the first officer on the scene the night Buzz was murdered, Reggie Wardell and Dee Clinton, on March 28, 1996, the first day of the hearing.

  Dunn, Wardell and Dee Clinton held no surprises. They were there to give the judge some background of the murder scene and Buzz’s final moments.

  By the end of the day, Murray called Chris Despres. As Chris spoke, a bit nervous and weary at times, he gave the judge a good indication as to why Clein should be brought to trial in the death of Buzz Clinton. Chris spoke of his father’s plotting and planning Buzz’s murder under the direction of Haiman Clein. He gave details. He talked about hiding the murder weapon and explained how his dad had met with Clein on several occasions.