I'll Be Watching You (17 page)

I

After getting caught for attacking and attempting to murder Mary Ellen Renard in 1987, Ned signed a plea agreement and was sentenced on June 24, 1988, in front of superior court judge James Madden. Most of the sentencing was a structured mass of mandatory motions that everyone in attendance had to suffer through. Each side had its chance to speak, and Ned’s attorney, John Bruno, offered a bit of an apology for his client, seeing that Ned, who had numerous opportunities to say how sorry he was, chose not to.

“It is not my function,” Bruno told the court, “to apologize to anyone for my client’s acts, but I want to publicly indicate to the families of the victims that my heart goes out to all of them.”

A collective wince.

“Judge,” Bruno continued, getting to the core of what he wanted to put on record, “Mr. Snelgrove has a very, very serious medical problem. He needs help. He did not have to plead guilty to a charge in Middlesex County”—Karen’s murder—“because he was smart enough and cunning enough to know that the state had no evidence against him. He kept the secret with him for four-and-a-half years now, but he couldn’t live with himself anymore and that is the only reason he pled guilty…. He couldn’t handle the secret anymore and he knows how d
esperately
he needs help and he knows how
desperatel
y he’s needed help all of his life, but never sought it.”

Bruno wanted the judge to consider that Ned had people lined up to back up his character: letters from different family members. “He had no prior criminal record. And had grown up in a fine, fine family.”

“Come on,” someone sitting close by said, “are you serious?”

Bruno continued, adding that Ned was “a person with the best education money can buy, and a person who does not even understand the reasons for his own sick acts.”

In defense of John Bruno’s rhetoric, he did say at one point that the entire case had “weighed heavily on him.” But he was there doing his job. The best he could.

Addressing the court, Bruno revealed that Ned had cried uncontrollably while sitting in his office over the past few weeks. “…And it won’t bring anybody back or heal any wounds, but Your Honor’s entitled to be aware of the feelings of remorse that Mr. Snelgrove has shown me.”

Bruno said Ned did not wish to be heard, but had spoken through that eleven-page letter he had written to the court—that narrative of his ailing mind and his obsession with women. That narcissistic missive of self-pity Ned viewed as a confession.

II

Prosecutor Thomas Kapsak talked first about how Ned had killed Karen Osmun, attacked Mary Ellen Renard, then tried to play cat and mouse with cops, and, to that, enjoyed
every
minute of it. Indeed, Ned’s weak attempt at explaining himself in what had turned out to be such a vile letter had backfired. Instead of acting as an apology, the letter proved to the court who the real Ned Snelgrove was.

Kapsak pointed to Ned’s signature: he liked to strip women down to bare breasts after working his way into their lives and viciously and brutally attacking them. He said Mary Ellen survived because she was bigger than Karen and was able to fight back, or she would have been killed, too. “The absolute lack of remorse by the defendant…comes,” Kapsak spurted with directness, “from the psychiatrist who spoke to him. The pride and pleasure he apparently took in outwitting the authorities. The regret he expressed concerning his choice of victims, and by that, I assume that he felt that the second victim was not a good choice because she lived. The complete absence of excuse or justification in his background. And the physical, psychological, and sexual pleasure he derived while strangling his victims.”

Posing them. And, some claimed, pleasuring himself by masturbating into a condom or towel so as not to leave any DNA behind.

The man wasn’t sorry for his behavior; he was only sorry he got caught.

“Judge,” Kapsak reiterated, “…we all try to predict a defendant’s future behavior, given various sentencing options. And my conclusion after eighteen years is that we’re not really good at it, even though we all tried very hard, but in this case every indication,
every
indication, Judge, that this is a very dangerous man, and that if given the opportunity, he
will
”—allow that word to hang there for a moment—“do again what he has done before.”

The judge spoke for a few minutes and laid out the charges and his sentencing guidelines. The bottom line was that Ned had made out: ten to twenty years. It was a slap on the wrist. As a source working for the state of New Jersey later explained to me, “The judge knew it, the prosecution knew it, and, certainly, Mr. Snelgrove and his lawyer knew it.”

“It” being the light sentence Ned received for taking a life and torturing another. The way the law was written, considering the commutation credits (good behavior) Ned received on the
day
he took the plea, he was guaranteed to be out in a little over ten years. “Commutation time is an incentive for them to behave—it’s the carrot and the stick,” a corrections source told me. “With any misbehavior while in prison, then they lose the commutation time.”

What’s more, another source explained, “corrections apply the credits
ahead
of time as preemptive, or proactive, credit for good behavior, but then would only take them away from you if you misbehaved.”

Ned already had jail credits of 150 days heading into sentencing, “good time,” in other words, built up from his days in county jail. His commutation time, awarded to him the moment he was sentenced, was a whopping 2,268 days.

Nearly seven years off the top for just agreeing to be a good boy.

“As long as they do their jobs and don’t cause any problems, they get that time taken off the front end,” a source added. Furthermore, according to another source inside the prison system, a medical staff from corrections examined Ned shortly before his release and found “no problems with his mental health.” His file says that he was a “low risk for committing another violent crime.”

Huh?

III

And so Edwin “Ned” Snelgrove was off to prison. He was going to spend at least eleven years, perhaps more, behind bars at East Jersey State Prison (EJSP), just plain Rahway to cons, for killing one woman and attempting to kill another. It seemed such a light sentence, so abhorrently wrong, that this man was going to get out of prison one day, walk the streets again, and still be a fairly young guy.

I

Elizabeth Anne Osmun Bilger didn’t take the sentencing too well. Karen’s mother knew what was going to happen beforehand; yet after it was done, it seemed as though the years would pass too quickly and Karen’s killer would be out of prison once again and back in her face. Her health weakened as the years passed. She continued to fight for the rights of victims, but the loss kept on coming back to haunt her.

Karen. My poor Karen.

Elizabeth Anne had one wish, she often told Barbara, that Ned Snelgrove would serve those twenty years and not get out a moment sooner.

Arthur Bilger suffered, too. That image of Karen as he found her with Philip plagued the man and sent him spiraling into a deep depression.

And then Elizabeth Anne was in and out of the hospital: congestive heart failure. The loss kept coming back at her. She couldn’t seem to shake it.

For Barbara, she said it was one of the toughest times of the entire ordeal. She had two young kids. Her mother’s health was failing, and she was still trying to deal with the loss herself. With court dates and the sentencing and Karen’s murder as front-page news, it was easy to get lost, easy to push that pain aside and focus on the judicial end of it all. But when it was all over and she had to face her own pain, it became overwhelming.

In a sense, Ned was in prison still victimizing the Osmun family.

II

The incident that took Karen’s life, Barbara Delaney has always said, killed two people.
In July 1994,
Barbara wrote to Ned’s parole board ten years after he was sentenced,
my mother died of a massive heart attack.
It was Elizabeth Anne’s second since Karen’s death.

Elizabeth Anne had finally succumbed to her broken heart. She was dead. Karen’s mother was, Barbara wrote to the board,
another victim of Edwin Snelgrove.
Oh, how it hurt her to write that name, even ten years after the fact.
My family is gone,
she wrote.
My daughters see pictures of Auntie Karen and know her only from my childhood memories. They are victims, too. Many friends of Karen continue to mourn her untimely passing. She had touched so many lives in her twenty-three years.

Could it get any worse for Barbara Delaney? She had lost her sister. Then her mother. Now, as Ned sat in prison, could her life, ten years after her sister was murdered, still be affected by Karen’s killer?

Barbara didn’t think so.

III

Heading into prison, Ned had his own set of problems to contend with—that is, if one is to equate excuses for being locked up with the same gravity as losing a loved one to the hands of a maniac.
I hate myself…,
Ned wrote shortly before entering Rahway. He talked about having it “made” before he found himself facing twenty years, before going through a list of accomplishments in his life that he was giving up in lieu of now being labeled a felon.

Summing up his life in a letter, Ned ended with a few sentences that led everyone to believe there was no possible way he was ever getting out of prison before he served the entire twenty years. He qualified his wonderful words of misguided wisdom by first stating,
This is going to sound ridiculous…[but] as long as I am not allowed to be alone with a female, I am not a threat to society.

The guy was warning the court
and
the public.

Don’t let me out of here.

Don’t let me be alone with a woman.

Inside these walls, I’m safe.

You’re safe.

Outside, well, a time bomb.

I

Outside the walls of East Jersey State Prison in Rahway, the knee-high grass ebbed and flowed with the wind, gently swaying back and forth like sea algae, as Ned went about his daily routine of writing letters, checking stock market quotes in the newspapers, and reading books about his favorite serial killer, Ted Bundy. Ned was just about ten years into his ten-to-twenty-year sentence for the “aggravated manslaughter” of Karen Osmun, back in 1983, and the attempted murder and aggravated sexual assault of Mary Ellen Renard four years later. He was young. Only now heading into his thirties. He knew he’d be out,
without
good time served, at the latest, by the time he was forty-eight, which left him plenty of quality years.
With
good time, well, Ned knew he could hit the streets inside eleven.

As the mid-1990s approached, Ned was thinking about sitting in front of the parole board and pleading his case for early release. One of his first parole hearings was due to come up in 1998. He’d had years to think about what to say, how to act. Now, years after writing that eleven-page letter, when he sat down and thought about it, Ned could see himself on the outside again.

Getting a job.

Getting an apartment.

Starting over.

II

Many of Ned’s fellow inmates referred to him as “the professor.” He was a bookish, smart con, one who was perhaps too intelligent to stay locked up. The other inmates liked Ned. They knew he had gone to Rutgers and studied business, and they knew his advice regarding stocks generally paid off. Still, where was this convicted killer from? What kind of childhood did he have?

Ned grew up in Berlin, Connecticut, a rural town outside Newington, near Cromwell, heading south from Hartford, the state’s capital. In the 1970s, when Ned hustled his way around Berlin High School, the town was a suburban refuge on the rise.

They called him “Snedley” in high school. He had brown hair then and a small, geekish frame. He wore thick, “Clark Kent,” horn-rimmed glasses that made him look absurdly “nerdy.” But Ned was accepted. His unwavering love for the Boston Red Sox, even though the team continued to be held hostage by, some claimed, the Curse of the Bambino, kept Ned’s focus on sports. Several of his teachers later claimed that Ned, like most students, hated “running laps,” but loved “Ty Cobb and eating at McDonald’s.” Not that it mattered. Ned was one of only a handful of students at Berlin High to make the honor roll. “He was a good kid,” one of his former teachers told me. “Kind of serious, though. I remember the glasses that he wore—and that laugh. Oh, that laugh of Ned’s was unmistakable.”

Ned’s tenth-grade honors English teacher called him “small, impish, maybe a little sneaky.” Ned always sat near the front of the room. One teacher said the glasses he wore made Ned look like the character Piggy in the classic film
Lord of the Flies.
“He was bright and funny, but I cannot remember that he got into any trouble in my class or was ever a behavior problem,” she added.

In his Berlin High School yearbook, Ned’s peers voted him “Class Headache” his senior year. He was in the service club and on the wrestling team. He was part of Berlin High’s National Honor Society. The Honor Society is not something to overlook. Not every student that tries gets in. During Ned’s day, there were only fourteen members out of a class of about 275 students. Those who make it are selected for their high academic averages, leadership qualities, extracurricular activities, and service projects.

Ned was active in, and had mastered, all of them.

Ned quoted Benjamin Franklin in his yearbook space underneath his senior photograph:
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that’s the stuff life is made of.
According to Ned, his likes included willpower, Legion Baseball, ’75 World Series, A,B,C…Z, gaining weight, McDonald’s, and “Hey, Big Guy!”

Whatever all of that meant.

His dislikes were easier to understand: 128 lbs., “ninny,” running laps.

His ambition was college.

By all accounts, Ned Snelgrove was your average kid.

On the outside, anyway. Inside, Ned was harboring some pretty evil thoughts.

III

Sports kept Ned busy. He wrestled and tried playing baseball, but didn’t have the size or the build to excel in either. It was the piano where Ned looked and felt the most comfortable. Like some sort of savant, he could sit for hours and belt out a tune he had heard only once.

In some ways, Ned
was
the class clown. He soaked up the attention. It made him feel important. But then, there was a serious side to Ned—a formidable aspect of his character that fellow students hardly ever talked about or brought up to him. Ned’s intelligence stuck out. Academically speaking, he excelled at whatever he set his mind to. According to its history, Cook College, a subschool of Rutgers University, was conceived between 1967 and 1970 for the purposes of “teaching, research and outreach,” with a “theme of ‘Man and His Environment.’” How Ned fit into Cook’s mainly agricultural curriculum and focus on the environment was never quite clear, but he was accepted into the prestigious school during the fall of 1978 and seemed to embody the prominent status that came with attending, what some believed, was one of America’s foremost universities.

Since leaving high school, Ned had grown out of the acne-faced kid he was into a “handsome, polite, and extremely friendly” man. Immediately his classmates and the recruiting officers for Fortune 500 companies with offices on the Rutgers campus noticed Ned’s gifts. His GPA was 3.8, far above most. The thing about Ned during those formative college years, so many of his female peers later said, was that he seemed so harmless. He was crass sometimes, liked to use his hands with the girls, sure. But what did that mean? For the most part, he was a pleasant person to be around. No one had any idea that Ned held such ill feelings toward women, or that he was battling thoughts of wanting to strangle females into a coma. And yet, there was always an unknown feeling some women had about the guy who, every once in a while, would act strange and say and do inappropriate things.

IV

One woman came forward to talk about Ned in this regard. It had been over twenty-five years since she’d even set eyes on Ned. They had met in upstate New York before Ned began his first full year at Rutgers.
I’m sorry I opened this can of worms,
she wrote after I had asked for her phone number so I could interview her. She said she didn’t want to revisit that time in her life after all. “I’m sorry for contacting you—I didn’t hang out with Ned. He was just a guy at a pub who asked me out all the time. Luckily, I said no. Case closed. I don’t want to think about what ‘might have’ been. It also might not have been. I feel bad for the victims of this man. I once thought he was an OK guy.”

I asked her if she had any advice for women in general, seeing that she knew Ned personally, even though she refused to talk about her experiences with him. “If there was one thing” she had learned by knowing Ned, it was to “be afraid of everyone. Why? Because Ned seemed ‘normal,’ like a guy your mom would want you to date.”

V

But now, in late 1998, that same lunatic was planning from the prison he had called home for the past ten years to sit in front of the parole board and plead his case. It seemed almost impossible that the state of New Jersey would even consider letting a man out of prison who had, from that same prison, written a letter that expressed a desire once again to pick up where he left off, once he was out.

But here they were. Preparing to consider Ned’s freedom.