“She worked a lot of hours [at the restaurant],” her former roommate recalled, “and always wore jeans and a sweatshirt. She did not have a lot of clothes…. I was puzzled over the fact that she lived such a plush life in the States, but now was living in a small room and working in a pub washing dishes and making sandwiches.”
One night, the relationship between Beth Ann and her roommate took a “drastic change.” Beth Ann had been on the phone all night long, up until about 4:00 A.M.
“She was pacing back and forth,” her roommate later recalled. “She was very stressed out.”
Noticing the sudden change in her demeanor, the woman asked what the problem was. She never had seen Beth Ann like that.
“Nothing” was all Beth Ann said.
The next day, Beth Ann left her room with all her belongings and never returned.
A week went by. Near the beginning of November 1997, Alex Fegutou, another female coworker at Marion, arrived home from work at about 11:00 P.M. and found Beth Ann waiting outside her apartment. Beth Ann was rancid, dirty and smelled.
“Can I stay with you for a week or so?” Beth Ann begged.
“Sure…what’s going on?”
“I’m not getting along with my roommate.”
Alex Fegutou said she later found out through friends that Beth Ann had been living on the streets of Dublin, not sleeping or showering, just roaming around like a homeless person. Others said that whenever Beth Ann paid for something, she used her mother’s American Express card.
During the week Beth Ann stayed at Fegutou’s place, she would leave and not come back for a day or two. Near the end of the week, she came home one night crying.
“What is it?” Alex asked.
Beth Ann just became “more hysterical” as Alex pressed her.
“Is there a problem back home, Beth?”
“It’s a lot worse than that,” Beth said. “My life is over.”
After finding Cynthia’s hotel room, the Garda was able to track down where Beth Ann had been working and staying. After watching her movements for about a week, on November 11, as Beth Ann was walking out of a local gym, the Garda moved in and took her into custody, where she was held without bail.
The arrest wasn’t anything dramatic or intense—just an ending to a long and frustrating time for the ED-MCS, which had been working on finding those responsible for Buzz’s murder for nearly four years now.
With Beth Ann in custody, the legal wrangling to get her extradited back to the United States could get under way.
To extradite Beth Ann Carpenter back to the United States to face charges of murder, Kevin Kane, Peter McShane and Paul Murray first had to go through the U.S. Justice Department and Office of International Affairs. The treaty the United States had with Ireland read that a person could not be extradited from Ireland if he or she was facing the death penalty. Since Beth Ann was being charged with conspiracy to commit murder, murder, and capital felony, she would indeed be facing a death sentence if convicted. But if the state’s attorney’s office was determined to hang the death penalty over her head, there was no chance it would see her in a U.S. court of law ever.
The first step in getting her back included Beth Ann’s right to a hearing in Ireland. Kevin Kane and Peter McShane were informed that they would have to fly to Ireland and testify under oath that the person they were seeking was, in fact, the Beth Ann Carpenter Irish authorities had in custody and that she would not face the death penalty once she was extradited.
After Kane and McShane testified, the Irish courts agreed that Beth Ann should be shipped back to the United States to face charges as soon as the paperwork was in order.
Beth Ann’s attorneys in Ireland, a barrister and solicitor, however, appealed the court’s ruling under the guise that the prison conditions Beth Ann would face in the United States were grounds to keep her in Ireland. She would be treated improperly if extradited, they argued. Prison conditions were deplorable.
After almost a year of arguments on both sides, in late 1998 or early 1999, a high court in Ireland confirmed the court’s decision, and Beth Ann was readied for a trip back home to face charges she had been trying to avoid for what amounted to almost five and a half years.
While she was being detained at Mount Joy Prison in Ireland, awaiting extradition, Beth Ann had several visitors, many of whom were her former coworkers at Marion. Charlie McCentee had met Beth Ann in 1997 while working at Marion. When he found out she had been arrested, he was curious about how she was holding up. During one visit, he came right out and asked if she was involved in the murder. It had been all over the newspapers. Before that, Charlie McCentee and his coworkers had no idea Beth Ann even had a brother-in-law who had been murdered. It was disheartening to McCentee to think she could have done it. The person he thought he knew wasn’t capable of such a thing.
“I’m not involved in the murder, Charlie,” Beth Ann said. “I was having an affair with my boss at the time. He was obsessed with me. He hired a junkie for thirty thousand dollars to the kill the man.”
“How did the junkie do it?” Charlie wanted to know.
“He ran him down with a car. I don’t know why.”
“Why did you run, then, if you didn’t have anything to do with it?”
“The finger was already pointed at me. My ex-boss is cooperating and turned state’s evidence against me. He was released from jail. He’s setting me up. My back was against the wall. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Unbelievable,” Charlie said.
“My ex-boss dropped me in shit—and I’m fucked!” she added.
“What was this over?” McCentee asked. He was still confused.
“It’s all over trying to get custody of a child,” Beth Ann said. “The child’s father was abusing her.”
By mid-1999, the high court in Dublin had made its ruling on Beth Ann’s appeal. It was time for her to pack her bags, and there was little that Hugh Keefe, her barrister or her solicitor could do to stop it.
When U.S. Marshal John O’Conner arrived at Bradley International Airport on June 19 with Beth Ann in tow, Marty Graham and John Turner were on hand waiting to transport her to Troop F barracks, where she would be booked, photographed, fingerprinted and sent to prison to await arraignment.
The ED-MCS had waited years for this day. Promises had been made to the Clintons that every last person involved in Buzz’s murder would be brought to justice.
Today was the beginning of the end.
When Turner and Graham arrived at Troop F, the media were there waiting like salivating hyenas. As soon as Beth Ann emerged from their cruiser, camera crews and newspaper photographers snapped away as one of the most high-profile murderers the state had seen in years was transported to her new home. Not that murder wasn’t common in Connecticut, but attorneys involved in murder was news…big news. People were shocked not only by the nature of the crime, but that it involved people who should have known better.
Lawyers.
It surprised Turner and Graham to see all the media waiting for them. It wasn’t as if it had been announced that Beth Ann was being brought in. To the contrary, it had been kept under wraps. Turner himself had made sure of it.
Beth Ann’s attorney, Hugh Keefe, later blasted Turner for, he said, parading his client, who had been shackled from wrist to feet, in what Keefe described as a “perp walk” for newspaper and television cameramen. Keefe was outraged that Turner apparently had tipped off reporters.
Turner, though, wasn’t the type to glamorize an arrest. In fact, many of the detectives from the ED-MCS had opted to stay out of the limelight, letting troopers and local police walk up front to get their photographs taken with perps. It struck Turner as odd that Keefe had been so defensive.
On the other hand, any good detective cannot sit on what he knows to be a bogus accusation or, better yet, an outright lie. So Turner did some checking. He called the public information office (PIO) of the state police and asked if it had
tipped off the media about Beth Ann’s return trip back to the States.
No, the spokesperson told him. But a reporter from the Hartford Courant, the PIO said next, had informed them that he had gotten a call from Hugh Keefe’s office about when, where and what time Beth Ann was going to be checking in at the “Troop F Hotel.”
Chapter 43
The first order of business in the State of Connecticut v. Beth Ann Carpenter was for the court to consider the evidence against Beth Ann and determine if it was sufficient to proceed with a murder trial. She was being held on a $1 million bond at York Correctional Facility for Women in East Lyme, and there was no way she was going to be able to post it. Hugh Keefe had fought to have bail reduced, but after hearing arguments on both sides, Judge Susan B. Handy denied the request, saying how “bothered” she was by Beth Ann’s having left the country at a time when suspects in Buzz’s murder were being arrested.
By December 17, 1999, Judge Handy ruled that the state had enough evidence to try Beth Ann, who had just turned thirty-six, for capital felony murder and murder. Leaving the courtroom, Dee Clinton, who had waited for five and a half years to see those responsible for her son’s death be brought to justice, told a newspaper reporter, “It’s another good holiday. This is like…thank you, God.”
Hugh Keefe began his campaign to undermine the state’s case by saying it was building the foundation of it on a witness who was nothing more than a “liar, cheater, thief and scumbag.” Indeed, Keefe knew his biggest asset was Haiman Clein’s lack of credibility as a witness. Clein had robbed clients of hundreds of thousands of dollars; he’d had sex with women while others watched; he’d allowed friends and clients to have sex with his wife; he’d admitted to conspiring with Mark Despres to have Buzz murdered; he’d been abusing drugs and alcohol for years. When Keefe got his chance to attack Clein on the witness stand, he vowed to rip his credibility apart, layer by layer, using every means possible to create doubt in the jury’s mind.
And from the outset, it didn’t appear like Keefe was going to have such a hard job doing just that.
Kevin Kane, however, who had taken over as lead prosecutor in the case, working diligently with Peter McShane, had his own thoughts about Clein’s credibility as a witness. He admitted that Clein “had more baggage than the Ghost of Christmas Past,” a trite analogy that would only grow with clichés as Kane began to present Clein to the court. But he also trumpeted the notion that if Clein was going to “manufacture a case” against Beth Ann for turning him in, he certainly would have “done a better job of it.”
It was a fair argument. Clein had every possible opportunity to say anything he wanted about Beth Ann’s role in Buzz’s murder. Yet he gave only certain facts that when matched up against Mark Despres’s, they only appeared to be more truthful. There were things Clein could have made up, and no one ever would have known—but when he didn’t remember something, he told detectives and the state’s attorney’s office he simply didn’t remember.
Kane viewed this as a positive sign of Clein’s truthfulness. He felt the jury would agree.
As the case moved forward, Keefe promised to smear Clein as much as he could and prove he had acted alone in Buzz’s murder because his obsession with Beth Ann had grown to such an uncontrollable level he would have done anything for her—including murder.
Be it fate or luck, during the last week of October 1999, Hugh Keefe received a letter from a convict named Paul Francis, who was serving a ninety-year sentence for killing a sixty-three-year-old Portland, Connecticut, woman and setting her house ablaze to cover up the murder.
At first blush, the letter turned out to be a defense attorney’s wet dream.
After introducing himself, Francis admitted why he was incarcerated and said he had five cases pending. But then he quickly said he was writing to Keefe because of something one of his cellmates—Haiman Clein—had said to him. “I know him personally,” Francis wrote. “I’ve talked with him at least one hundred times.”
This got Keefe’s attention.
“We were discussing his case,” Francis continued, “when he started to cry….”
According to Francis, Clein said he had “lied about Beth Carpenter and set her up because he was so in love with her and that in order to get out of the death penalty, he would do anything.”
If it were true, this was exactly what Beth Ann had been saying all along: Clein had taken it upon himself to kill Buzz; she had never asked him to do anything.
“Clein told me,” Francis wrote, “he took it into his own hands and set up the murder….”
Francis ended the letter by stating he was coming forward only to clear an innocent woman’s name.
“I have nothing to gain by this.”
Months later, Francis wrote to Keefe again—but this time he perhaps sounded a little bit confused by the recent turn of events. In the interim, Keefe had sent someone to interview Francis. But Francis said he hadn’t yet received a copy of that interview, which he had requested. Then he told Keefe he also wanted copies of newspaper clippings regarding Mark Despres, another cellmate of his, and “his willingness to testify….”
Francis wanted to learn, he said, about the “deal” Despres had cut with the state’s attorney’s office. He was also worried about being labeled a rat inside prison.
“Can you send me statements [Despres] made?…If I cannot obtain any statements, I will not testify.”
A week later, Francis, after receiving a letter from Keefe, wrote again. He said he had been shipped to Virginia because of overcrowding in Connecticut prisons. Then he indicated that he had received the clippings Keefe had sent him, and thanked him.
“I will be helping Beth and you…. I will be there for you.”
On July 20, 2000, Francis wrote Keefe yet again, letting him know he was back in Connecticut, and was “still [there] for Beth.” But he also mentioned, according to the state’s attorney’s office later, one of the main reasons why he was so interested in contacting Keefe to begin with.
“Mr. Keefe, can you help me with something? Soon I will be filing a habeas for my case….” Because of that, Francis said he wanted Keefe to look for a few law students who would work pro bono for him. “I need the best place in which to receive help, for I am truly innocent.”
The most pressing issue as fall 2000 approached was where the trial was going to be held. Keefe had argued that there was no way his client could get a fair trial in New London County. There had been too much publicity about the case. Keefe had submitted no fewer than three hundred newspaper articles, television news clips and radio news transcripts about the case to the court during a hearing that lasted about a week. The local newspaper, the New London Day, had covered the case as front-page news whenever something broke. The Hartford Courant, Connecticut’s largest newspaper, along with the mass media coverage the case received, had also turned Beth Ann Carpenter into a sort of cult figure, following the case every step of the way. How in the world, Keefe wanted to know, was his client going to be certain an untarnished jury would be chosen? Keefe even blasted Dee Clinton at one point during the hearing, noting that she continually had told media Beth Ann was guilty.
ASA Paul Murray countered with the argument that the case had not garnered nearly half the attention Keefe was proclaiming. The coverage, Murray told the court, had been “unbiased and fair.”
Murray added, “I believe the impact on New London County is virtually nonexistent.”
On Tuesday, October 10, 2000, Judge Handy ruled that Beth Ann’s right to a fair trial had not been jeopardized and a change of venue was out of the question. Later that day, Murray filed a motion to have Keefe disqualified from the case, arguing that Keefe had information about the case and might be called as a witness. With jury selection set to begin on November 14, nearly a month away, Murray didn’t want anything to hinder the case he, his staff and the ED-MCS had been working on now for six and a half years.
Keefe, so as not to cause any furt
her burden to his client, voluntarily withdrew himself from the case.
With Keefe out, Hubie Santos, from Hartford, a sought-after defense attorney cops feared when they got on the witness stand, stepped in and met with Beth Ann one morning. Santos was a special public defender. He wanted to talk to Beth Ann about how and why she should keep Keefe on the case. Keefe had been with her since June 1994. He knew the case; for another attorney to step in now would delay an already much-delayed trial.
Tara Knight had a movie star air about her and resembled Legally Blonde actress Reese Witherspoon in more ways than one. With her Marilyn Monroe–like figure, Knight, a stunning-looking blonde, was seductively attractive, charming, intelligent and crass—all in one package. Founder of Knight, Conway & Ceritelli, in New Haven, she had been appointed as Beth Ann’s co-counsel during her probable cause hearing in 2000.
Unabashedly honest, Knight, who had been on Court TV and MSNBC as a legal analyst during a few high-profile cases, had a reputation for being persistent, thorough and tenacious, especially when she believed she was right.
Immediately Knight filed a motion to have Kevin Kane disqualified. Kane, Knight argued, had himself worked with Keefe in getting Beth Ann to help capture Clein, and he could be called to testify at trial also.
To make matters even more confusing, on Monday, November 6, Beth Ann’s bail was reduced from $1 million to $150,000, which she quickly posted. Under the court’s order, she would be monitored by an anklet and mandated under house arrest.
For the first time in years, she would be able to go home.
The entire Clinton family, as one might expect, was appalled by the court’s decision. Beth Ann had already, in theory, fled the country once to avoid prosecution. What would stop her from doing it again?
From Beth Ann’s view, however, one of the main reasons why she wouldn’t run was that she was innocent—and a court of law, she vowed, was going to prove that.
Lethal Guardian Page 34