I'll Be Watching You (10 page)

I

Ned had always challenged himself to be the best at whatever he did. Sales. Studying stocks and bonds. Tracking the statistics of the Boston Red Sox. Or, of course, studying killers. Whatever Ned did, he prided himself that he was the absolute best. Writing to a friend years after attacking Mary Ellen, Ned could talk about himself—his letters were always about Ned—and encourage his friend not to buy a certain stock in one breath and, in another, describe killing as if it were like clipping hedges or washing his car. In one letter, after warning his friend that GM wasn’t a good buy that month, Ned explained how he had umpired Little League games for six or seven years. He enjoyed being around baseball, he wrote, even on such a young level of play. The money wasn’t all that good ($30 per month), but if he couldn’t play the game himself (he had a bum ankle), being around it satisfied the need to be involved. And yet, after talking about Little League baseball and helping kids, in the next sentence, he mentioned reading all of the books about Bundy he could get his hands on and watching (studying) the movie about Bundy starring Mark Harmon. Ned didn’t see the resemblance between Harmon and Bundy. He said Harmon looked like Lee Harvey Oswald—that is, before launching a detailed description of killing and how to avoid being caught.

Ned wrote that he
was always thinking about it.

“It” being killing a woman.

His point was that although it was always on his mind, he didn’t necessarily drive around town like Bundy and prowl for victims or, as he put it, “find a situation.”

What was clear from the letters was that Ned enjoyed the art involved in getting away with a crime as evil as murder. It was something he aspired to. Not a goal, per se, but more than a game. He liked playing. With his victims first. Cops second. Meeting Mary Ellen that night, he wrote, fooling her into inviting him upstairs into her apartment,
was
a perfect situation. When it was over, however, and he realized Mary Ellen had survived, Ned said he knew he was going to get caught. But even when the cops came and he was arrested—he beamed later when remembering the time period in his letter—he was thrilled how everyone the cops spoke to about him couldn’t say anything bad. No one really knew him. They talked of the man they
thought
they knew. But Ned had fooled them. And there they were, like fools, supporting him, when he knew damn well that his goal that night, the game he had played with Mary Ellen Renard, involved murder.

Ned loved it: the thrill of fooling all of them. It was part of crime itself.

I

By April 1988, Ned’s attorney, John Bruno, knew more about his client than he had perhaps wanted to know. An attorney from Middlesex County had visited Bruno’s office one afternoon, bringing with him information that didn’t bode all too well for his client. “The method of attack,” the prosecutor explained to Bruno, talking about Mary Ellen’s case, “is strikingly similar to an unsolved murder at Rutgers.”

There was that case again, hovering in Ned’s past. Even if he hadn’t committed the crime, the way in which the murder had been carried out, was almost identical to that of the attack on Mary Ellen. With that, Bruno wondered how he was going to get around explaining the case away. Ned was in trouble down the road when his case went to court. And yet, Bruno realized, Ned’s network of supporters seemed to grow with each passing week. People were coming forward to support him. Promising to walk into court and explain that he wasn’t some psychopath who could kill people and attack them with knives. It just wasn’t in his character.

II

What was it about that Rutgers murder that made investigators certain Ned had been involved? “He could be a likeable guy—piano player, salesman, captain of the softball team, a guy’s guy,” Bruno explained to me years later. “He was always organizing the parties, the softball games. He seemed like somebody who always wanted to have a company picnic. Not some quiet little nerd who sits in the corner and is afraid to face people socially.”

According to the women Bruno spoke to, Ned was “charming” and always “polite.” Bruno had to go to Ned with the allegations from Middlesex, explaining to him that the Middlesex murder had the parallels of a repeat offender, and was intrinsically similar in signature to the attack on Mary Ellen. Bruno explained that Ned had been on Middlesex’s radar for some time, but they had no evidence to arrest him. They had even questioned Ned a few times, but they had to release him due to the fact that they had nothing with which to charge him.

After Bruno went to Ned and explained the situation, Ned thought about it. The bottom line was this: What if, while he was in jail awaiting trial on the Mary Ellen Renard charge, Middlesex came up with some sort of new evidence? Ned knew he had killed the woman in Middlesex. He thought he had gotten away with it. He believed he left no evidence. But what if something surfaced?

Murder one. The death penalty. Add the Mary Ellen Renard attack to the Middlesex case and he would face death if a jury found him guilty.

“It’s something to think about,” Bruno told Ned.

On the other hand, with the right plea bargain, Ned realized, he could avoid a murder charge in Middlesex and walk out of prison one day—if only he admitted to it and accepted a lesser charge.

And so Ned came clean. He admitted to Bruno that he committed the murder, but, of course, it was the same old story: self-defense. The Rutgers woman had come on to him, and when he refused
her
advances, he had no other choice but to strangle and stab her to death.

But she had forced him to do it, of course. What was he supposed to do?

The murder had occurred in 1983. Same set of circumstances.

“He looks like a Boy Scout,” Fred Schwanwede told the court during one of Ned’s plea hearings. “He doesn’t look at all dangerous. He looks like he could be the boy next door.”

Wasn’t that what made Ned even more dangerous—that he looked like and could portray the friendly neighbor?

The Good Samaritan.

The salesman.

Softball player.

Life of the party.

Ned didn’t have that evil look of a serial killer, or the rough look of a multiple murderer. In public, he was warm and funny and forthcoming. Just a pleasure to be around.

Ted Bundy redux, in other words. Bundy, who chose mostly college girls and worked his way into their good graces with his all-American pretty-boy looks and charming demeanor, liked to sexually mutilate his victims. In one case, he broke into the dorm room of Lynda Ann Healy, a university student, knocked her unconscious, dressed her in jeans and a T-shirt, wrapped her in a sheet, and tossed her into his car without anyone seeing. Healy’s body was found about a year later—she had been decapitated and dismembered.

I

Fred Schwanwede—a name, he professes, that he shares with no one else in the United States—was chief of sex crimes with the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office. He knew from looking over the file that Mary Ellen Renard was, he said, “extremely lucky to be alive.” Most of the cases resulting in the injuries she had sustained hadn’t turned out so well. “Had Miss Renard not been so lucky,” Schwanwede speculated, “this case probably would have gone on unsolved. If he had killed her, chances are that unless he did something else subsequent to that and left a print or some other identifying forensic evidence somewhere else, Miss Renard’s homicide, if it had become that, would have never been solved.”

Ned had never been arrested. There was absolutely no connection between him and Mary Ellen until that night when they met at the singles dance. Aside from Ned and Mary Ellen’s chance meeting at Kracker’s, there would have been no way to tie them together. Even the print Ned left on Mary Ellen’s windowsill wouldn’t have done any good. There would have been nothing to compare it with.

Looking at the case, Schwanwede was fortunate, he knew, that Mary Ellen lived to tell her story. Going after a homicidal maniac and, with any luck, putting him away was what Schwanwede got up in the morning to do. If there was one prosecutor who could go after Ned, and pull in that Middlesex County case to make sure Ned’s jury knew the type of fanatic for blood he was, it was Fred Schwanwede.

As Schwanwede sat one morning and read the file on Mary Ellen, he was appalled by the sheer intimidation and manipulation Ned had obviously used to gain her confidence and trust.

II

To Mary Ellen Renard, allowing her attacker to skate on a plea of twenty years—suffice it to say after she was told he had also murdered a woman five years before in a strikingly similar fashion—made her sick to her stomach. The fact that Ned could be out in eleven years made her body ache, her mind race.

Mary Ellen later said the prosecutor’s office came to her and told her it was going to allow Ned to plead out his case. “At first, I was upset. It was
not
OK with me,” Mary Ellen later insisted.

She had explained to the prosecutor’s office that she was fully prepared to face Ned in court and testify. She knew the consequences to her already shattered emotional state, understood how tough it would be, but she was resolved to put him in prison, where he belonged. “They told me I had no choice in it—that it wasn’t up to me. But they did talk to me about it before they went ahead.”

Prior to the plea deal, Fred Schwanwede called Mary Ellen with a request. “Snelgrove’s attorney wants to meet you,” he said.

It seemed like an odd demand. “It’s very unusual,” Schwanwede said, “but I will allow it. I have to be present, and he won’t be allowed to ask you anything about the case.”

Ned’s attorney John Bruno’s strategy was to find out what type of witness Mary Ellen would make during trial. He wanted to see how she’d react on the witness stand, even though he had to keep his questions formal:
Where’d you grow up? Where’d you go to school?

Mary Ellen decided to do it. Why not? She could show Bruno—and Ned—that she wasn’t about to back down and curl up like a scared little girl and essentially be victimized all over
again.
Ned had violated her once. She wanted that control back. As it was, there were times when Mary Ellen would be forced to park her car as close to her building as possible and, after checking left and right, looking for Ned, jump from her car and race into the building as fast as she could. When alone, she was scared he was going to dash out from around a corner and grab her. Facing him, facing off
against
him, she would be able to take that fear back.

As they sat in Bruno’s office, Mary Ellen recalled later, Schwanwede and Bruno talked about the town of Newark, where the courthouse was located, and how beautiful the nearby cathedral was, which was when Mary Ellen spoke up, saying, “That’s where my brother was ordained.”

“Your brother’s a priest?” Bruno asked with shock.

“Yeah,” she said.

At another point in the conversation, Schwanwede asked Mary Ellen how her weekend was. “I went to visit my grandchildren,” she said casually.

“You’re a grandmother?” Bruno interrupted, again quite astonished by the admission.

At forty-five, Mary Ellen was better-looking than a lot of women half her age. She had an innocent beauty that went far beyond her stunning looks and shapely figure. Bruno couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Even more, he knew Mary Ellen had an ironclad reputation of attending church and living at home, added to a perfect professional work record, a brother who was a priest, and many friends who could vouch for her. Plus, she was strong-willed and spoke with authority.

The perfect witness.

Leaving, Fred Schwanwede said, “Everything you talked about in there said you were going to make an excellent witness.”

The jury would have bonded with Mary Ellen inside five minutes of her direct testimony. Bruno was a smart enough lawyer to know that although he would take a few shots at her while she was on the stand, he could alienate the jury by attacking Mary Ellen and her terrifying ordeal. Branding her in the newspapers as the instigator was one thing, but doing it in court would blow up in his face. They’d hate him—and his client—for it. He couldn’t blame Mary Ellen.

In the parking lot, showing Mary Ellen to her car, Schwanwede said, “Look, I have a hunch Bruno knows his client is guilty.”

Weeks later, when Schwanwede met with Mary Ellen again, he felt bad about having to plead the case out, but he explained to her that juries were funny. “You never know what they’re going to do. This way, we get him off the street.”

Mary Ellen was unhappy, but she understood.

Although most of the professionals involved knew Ned was a danger to society—and if he had the chance, he would act out on his perverted sexual fantasies again—Mary Ellen had no idea she would, some twenty years after that conversation with Schwanwede, be once again confronted by Ned and his sadistic behavior.

I

During a hearing before Superior Court Judge James Madden, Ned addressed the court. Standing in front of the bench, he looked like an eighteen-year-old high-school senior. With his blond hair and blue eyes, small frame and baby face, he embodied an innocence that showed how easily Mary Ellen could have fallen into his web.

Ned said he understood the charges against him, but didn’t “know why [he] assaulted the women.” He had no explanation. It was something that had come over him, he seemed to say. Some sort of change.

Mary Ellen had seen it. Ned had gone into her bathroom one person and had come out another.

Those in the courtroom were unaware that during the past week Ned and his lawyer had made a plea agreement with the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office. But that’s not what had stunned everyone in the courtroom that day. It was the word “women.” The plural form Ned had used while addressing the court.

Wasn’t it only one—Mary Ellen Renard?

Women? What is he talking about?

Ned said he had no words to describe his actions. No excuse.

But clearly, in saying so, he had admitted to both crimes.

Fred Schwanwede asked the court to order a psychiatric evaluation before Ned’s sentencing date, which was scheduled for May 13, 1988.

II

Under the plea agreement offered to Bruno, Ned faced a maximum of twenty years, minimum of ten, a sentence that, of course, shocked both Mary Ellen and family members of Ned’s first victim. Even more outrageous to both was that with good behavior, Ned could be eligible for release—not parole—inside eleven years.

Eleven years.

A little over a decade behind bars for murdering one woman and savagely, cruelly, attacking a second, nearly killing her, too.

Fred Schwanwede and the Middlesex County people wanted to close the Middlesex murder they believed Ned was responsible for. The problem with charging Ned with the crime—he had never been indicted for it—was that he knew the victim. He had dated her months before the crime took place. That meant, Schwanwede perceptively pointed out, that any trace evidence connecting Ned to the murder would ultimately be thrown out of court. Ned had every reason to be with the woman. All he had to say—and he was an expert at manipulating people and situations—was that he and the victim had reunited. They were talking about getting back together.

All that being said, there wasn’t a lot of evidence against Ned. Thus, the best way out of it all was to offer a plea. Having him admit to the crime would be a major coup.

“The family had suspected him all along, but they never had what they needed to close the book on it,” Schwanwede said. “To have him admit that he did that was helpful to them. For us, it wasn’t so much about closing out a cold case, but bringing some peace to the family.”

The thing that surprised Schwanwede most was that Bruno had allowed Ned to plead the case out the way it had been written: aggravated manslaughter. Generally speaking, as time goes on, a case against a suspect grows colder. The Middlesex case was already pushing five years. Ned was likely never going to be arrested for it. That was clear. Yet, he admitted to killing the woman, stabbing her to death. Why wouldn’t he fight for a lesser charge instead of signing the plea the way it was written?

This baffled everyone.

What no one knew, of course, was that Ned Snelgrove had a plan himself.