I'll Be Watching You (40 page)

I

“Pure evil,” David Zagaja said. “I see nothing but pure evil.” Later, “Edwin Snelgrove sets himself apart from many individuals who commit murder. He has embodied a desire, an
obsession,
and a
purpose
to kill, and that is really what we saw through the trial.”

II

Ned could not allow the prosecutor he now loathed more than anyone—except maybe the judge—to have the last word. He had to say
something.
On October 31, 2005, the state’s attorney’s office received a letter that sparked a shakedown of Ned’s cell. Ned’s new cell mate wrote to say he’d had a bizarre conversation with Ned recently. The new cell mate said Ned had admitted to him “that he killed Carmen Rodriguez [and] that he had committed other crimes in Connecticut and Bergen County, New Jersey, and that he would never get caught” for those additional crimes.

But he didn’t stop there.

The cell mate was intrigued, to say the least. After describing how he had killed Carmen, he said Ned came right out with it: “[I’m] going to kill superior court judge Carmen Espinosa because she allowed [my] prior New Jersey convictions to be part of [my] Connecticut trial.”

Ned said he knew where Espinosa lived. He had the right address.

The cop interviewing the cell mate asked him if there was anything else he knew about Ned. He thought about it. “He keeps his personal papers and violent pornography hidden in an envelope among his personal possessions.”

Ned must have smelled something, because when they shook down his cell sometime after receiving the tip, prison officials found nothing.

I

One of the last times I heard from Ned, he started to do to me what he had done to just about everyone else: play the control game. In one letter, he proceeded to tell me how to write my book: whom to interview, whom
not
to interview; which documents to explore and which
not
to pay any attention to. He questioned my integrity. He questioned how I was going about (re)investigating his case. He accused me of using his past—big surprise—to prove he killed Carmen Rodriguez.

I had contacted Ned’s former attorney from New Jersey, John Bruno. Bruno and I talked. He had many informative things to say. But what he made clear from the very start was that he would
not
discuss Ned and his prior case without Ned’s consent.

I respected that.

“Get Ned to OK it, and I’ll visit him with you,” Bruno said over the phone. And that was about the end of our communication.

I wrote to Ned and told him. I asked Ned to put Bruno and myself on his visitors list. This upset Ned. Riled him. I was breaking a golden rule: looking into his past. Bruno, he wrote back,
doesn’t have anything to do with me being convicted of something I didn’t do (the Rodriguez murder)….
From there, he went on to crush Zagaja and his “theories.” It was the same rhetoric Ned rattled off during his sentencing: everyone that doesn’t agree with him is wrong.
I did not kill Carmen Rodriguez,
I began to see, was turning into, as I had been warned,
They didn’t prove I killed Carmen Rodriguez.

He then began to make the claim that I was in cahoots with Bruno—that we were writing this book together and I was paying him.

Ned knew I worked alone and paid no one. I had explained this to him.

He then wrote I had a
blockbuster bestseller
on my hands. But without him, I had nothing. No one would buy my book because it would be all lies.
When your book is done,
he wrote to me on September 14, 2007,
I would be very anxious to have you tell me if you’ve ever seen such clear-cut instances of prosecutors lying. Not “cutting corners” or “shading the facts a little.” Lying.

It was things like that, that made me wonder,
What in the world is he talking about?
I had found no such thing.

My bestseller, Ned suggested, would be based on a
dishonest prosecutor,
a
flagrantly biased judge,
on top of the
many witness statements that don’t make sense.
He encouraged me to
expose Connecticut’s judicial system for what it is: arrogant, incompetent and dishonest.
He said this type of book would make me a household name. I’d be a true investigative reporter then—and only then, he said.

I sent Ned a blistering letter back, telling him, primarily, that I wouldn’t be bullied. That he could take a hike if he thought that I was going to jump aboard the Snelgrove train of lying and cheating and manipulation. I opened that letter, writing,
Your last missive disturbs me. I thought we had an agreement. I thought you understood that I have a job to do and part of that job includes digging into every single aspect of your case in order to present the facts as I uncover them….

But it wouldn’t be the last time we spoke.

II

The bottom line regarding Ned Snelgrove is that he
will
kill again if he is ever released. The jury knew it. The judge understood it. And everyone in that courtroom applauding on the day he was sentenced experienced it. Heck, even Ned Snelgrove—at forty-six years old, writing to me during the winter, spring, and summer of 2007, telling me that the state of Connecticut never proved he killed Carmen Rodriguez—knew it.

I keep thinking back to his letters from Rahway during the 1990s when he warned everyone that he would kill again—a promise he, in fact, had kept.

I

The thing about Ned is, just when you think he’s done, he invites you back into his sandbox, hoping you’ll continue to play. He had exhibited this aspect of his character throughout his trial. In the fall of 2007, as I was beginning to think about finishing my book, after not hearing from Ned for well over a month, I received a letter, which was once again written on Ned’s preferred stationery: the back side of a “religious articles” prison order form. Was he exposing his stinginess by not purchasing plain paper from the prison commissary? A bit of irony, however, had always been one of Ned’s trademarks. Was this Ned’s subtle idea of turning his nose to organized religion, or just a way to save a few bucks? Who knows? The guy is as unpredictable as a storm.

In a short note I had sent to Ned two weeks prior, I had asked him,
Are you done talking to me?
I knew that my last letter, where I had prodded him a bit, made Ned salivate with fury. His gargantuan ego wouldn’t allow him to answer me right away. He had to give in, of course, because whether he admitted it, the book I was writing was something Ned had wanted for the past fifteen years.

Ned wrote he still wanted to talk, but he had been busy working
laboriously
on his appeal, which was
taking up all of [his] time.
While reading this, I couldn’t help but think:
What is there for Ned to do?
Besides driving his new lawyer crazy, no doubt controlling every aspect of the appellate process, was there any work for him?

The answer is no. His lawyer handled it all.

He also said he was working on a chronology of his life that I had suggested in my first letter the previous winter.

And so I waited.

Ned’s history finally came in, which allowed me to add some minor detail throughout the book, beyond what I had found out on my own. Detail that makes little difference, mind you, to the grand scheme of his life. Ned spent ten pages, for example, outlining his work history, his love for the Boston Red Sox, and the most memorable baseball game he had ever watched on television. I was hoping he would come clean. You know, tell me what every law enforcement official I had spoken to about him suspects: there are unsolved murders with his name attached. I was looking to offer several families some closure. But Ned never extended me—or them—that courtesy.

And really, why should he? Part of knowing he is the only person who can close the book on those cases must feed Ned’s ego, and certainly falls in line with what Ned’s so-called mentor, Ted Bundy, believed: if you tell law enforcement
anything,
lie just enough to throw off the scent.

I

I received a letter from Ned in late September 2007, which sparked a rather straightforward, finger-in-the-chest response from me. This latest letter from Ned was four pages long; but was accompanied by a half-inch-thick “stack of notes,” to which Ned titled: “Common Sense Replies to the State’s Brief as Was Submitted by Harry Weller [the state’s attorney handling the appeal].”

Common sense.
Perhaps an ode to Thomas Paine, but more likely Ned’s sarcastic, belligerent way of once again addressing his grounds for appeal.

Back to square one:
I didn’t kill Carmen Rodriguez.

Some of it, or maybe a majority of it,
Ned wrote to me,
will illuminate some new points if you consistently refer to the specific transcript pages I cite throughout….
Ned opens his “Common Sense” rebuttal with:
[T]he “packaging,” as described here [in the state’s brief], has nothing to do with anything Ted Bundy ever did.
By “packaging,” Ned is referring to how Carmen Rodriguez’s body was bound and found.
Somehow, however,
he continues,
the State still maintains that the Carmen Rodriguez homicide is a manifestation of a Ted Bundy “wannabe.”
Ned then asks the justices, those appellate judges reviewing his case, to have a look at the actual dummy heads, those two Styrofoam heads Ned had dolled up, according to Zagaja, and used in a pinch when a real victim wasn’t available. Ned wrote to me,
Not only did the police make sure not to test the mannequin heads for fingerprints (finding fingerprints of someone other than the Defendant would have ruined this opportunity to use them for their melodramatic effect), but there is nothing in the Defendant’s previous convictions, nor is there anything in his writings…that involves this ridiculous idea of rehearsing with props or using mannequins as a substitute for an actual woman.

This is an important statement from Ned. He likes to use his previous convictions and behavior as a means to prove how different his previous crimes were from the Rodriguez homicide. But when the state uses those
same
cases to prove its case, to show intent and a developing serial killer in action, Ned claims it’s all irrelevant.

In his rebuttal, Ned goes on for page after page, describing each of his points where he believes the state’s experts either lied during his trial or the prosecutor failed to prove his case with evidence. The problem Ned runs into, however, is that he doesn’t offer an antidote, any refuting evidence, other than his opinion, to back up his claims.

Reading this, I thought,
As if I hadn’t heard all
this
BS before.
Like Ned hadn’t told me—time and again—that the plot against him was all there in the trial transcripts. As if he hadn’t told me ten times already that all the lies law enforcement and the prosecution had told stood out, if only I could see them through the sociopathic lens he had been looking through himself for the past twenty-five years. Regarding the state’s argument on appeal, for example, Ned asked me:
I would really be interested to know if you are as
dumbfounded
as I am that the prosecutor who wrote it
(Harry Weller)
can so easily lie about what was said at the trial, and/or simply go against the prosecution’s
own witnesses? Obviously, David Zagaja is no longer Ned’s target; now it’s Weller.
Am I just imagining all of this?
Ned asked me.
Am I just stamping my foot, crying “foul” for no good reason? Please tell me what you think.

People who know me will agree that I rarely hold back when the conversation pertains to certain issues—that I sometimes say
too
much. In any event, with Ned asking me for my direct opinion, I couldn’t resist. So I read his comments two or three times, over the course of a few hours on the night I received the letter. I sat and thought about things before sleeping on it (something my manager and my father have always encouraged me to do). The next morning, I sat down to finish up work on this book and began writing Ned a letter. I’d had it with his back-and-forth, “beating around the bush,” “blame everyone else for his crimes” diatribes and rants. His arguments were weak and unsubstantiated. He had been convicted of Carmen Rodriguez’s murder. The state proved its case. This
fact
was
never
in dispute. Calling the case against him a conspiracy (my word, Ned never went that far) was, at least to me, the same as calling Ted Bundy a considerate human being for sitting down and explaining (lying, actually) some of the details behind his crimes before he was executed. Like so many other serial killers, Ned Snelgrove thinks the world revolves around him. That by telling a lie long enough, it becomes a truth.

I’d had it.

With all this in mind, I began to write a final letter to Ned, thinking,
It is about damn time he faces the truth.
At least the truth as I had uncovered it throughout my research.