I'll Be Watching You (9 page)

I

The first assistant prosecutor in Passaic County, Dennis Calo, was in charge of indicting Ned Snelgrove. From a prosecutorial standpoint, the case against Ned appeared to be ironclad. Talking to the press after Ned’s arrest, Calo said, “He helped her start her car and then agreed to follow her home to make sure she got home OK. He then asked if he could come in and clean up [and] tried to rape her and she struggled. He stabbed her twice in the chest with a knife.”

The Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office, in which Calo was also the chief of the investigation unit, had photographs, Calo explained to reporters, of Mary Ellen’s—a name they were not releasing at this time—neck and the injuries she had sustained from the knife wounds. Calo had secured Mary Ellen’s medical records. She had identified Ned in a photo lineup. They had a latent fingerprint matching Ned’s. Even if the argument came down to whether Mary Ellen invited Ned in for sex, there was no doubt Ned had stabbed and strangled her.

And then there was Ned’s past. Four years ago. That
other
case haunting investigators who believed Ned was their guy. Ned had been questioned. Cops had him on radar. They had always believed he had committed the crime, but they didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him. Maybe now they did.

II

EPPD Detective Robert Kassai was a street-smart cop with seventeen years on the job when he met up with Mary Ellen Renard—a job that would span several decades by the time he retired in 2000 to run a successful campaign for town council. He had dealt with guys like Ned throughout his career. For a number of years, Kassai had worked with the Crimes Against Women and Children Unit, where, he said, his passion for law enforcement was deeply rooted. There was something about Ned that struck Kassai right away, he recalled. It was a feeling he had about him that led the veteran cop to believe Ned fit into a certain, rare category of serial sex offenders. Kassai relayed that he had a “sixth sense that we had a predator on our hands. Somebody that’s capable of doing it again and again.”

While going through Ned’s personal possessions shortly after his arrest, Kassai found a business card in Ned’s wallet. It was from a detective in Woodbridge, New Jersey, near Middlesex County, south of Bergen County, where Ned was living at present. Although it wasn’t a far drive for Ned, Detective Kassai wondered why he had the business card to begin with. So he picked up the phone and dialed the detective’s number.

“We’re looking at him for a murder down here,” the detective said.

Kassai sat back in his chair, shook his head. He knew it. Had sensed it. Ned was not some sort of random attacker.

She was a Rutgers student. Ned’s age. She had been strangled. Stabbed. And posed.

This victim in Middlesex County, like Mary Ellen, fit into Ned’s preferred victim pool perfectly. More than that, Kassai was onto something. Getting the investigating officer on the phone shortly after finding the card in Ned’s wallet, Kassai asked him why they never arrested Ned.

“We couldn’t tie him to the murder scene,” the cop said. They had questioned Ned. Followed him. Pestered him. But they couldn’t find any physical evidence to link him to the crime. In 1983, when the woman was killed, and even in 1987, as investigators began digging into the crime scene at Mary Ellen’s, DNA was not a major part of the investigator’s toolbox. “You had to do footwork,” Kassai recalled. “You didn’t have science the way you have science today.” So even if Ned had left a hair, skin tissue, or bodily fluids behind in 1983, there was no way to tie him to the crime scene.

This new information sent Kassai back out to speak with Ned’s coworkers and friends at HP. “All I heard,” Kassai told me years later, “as I began to try to get some background information on the guy was that he was a ‘lovely man,’ ‘nice guy,’ et cetera. His coworkers called him a ‘polite guy,’ ‘a gentle, kind person.’ It was almost as if you were dealing with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

III

Kassai began asking questions back at Kracker’s, where Ned and Mary Ellen had met. He was trying to find out all he could about Ned. He had heard Ned liked to brag about playing golf. That he’d talk to people in the bar about his swing, his handicap, boast to the females about how good an athlete he was. “The thing is,” Kassai said, “he had never golfed a day in his life. Ned was cool. Smooth. But when you started to push Ned’s buttons,
boy,
did he get annoyed.”

When Kassai and Textor interviewed Ned, he was careful about saying anything that was going to come back to him. But when Kassai made an accusation, Ned became a bit heated, like he wanted to say something, but he thought it better to control his emotions. For Kassai, this meant something. “He struck me as a [chronic BSer], but not in…how can I say this, not in [a] liar’s sense. He was a con artist. Smart. Very intelligent.”

In Ned, he saw a predatory nature. He could tell Ned worked hard at what he did. It wasn’t a random crime or something that happened on the spur of the moment (as Ned himself later said).

Ned was a hunter. He preyed on a certain type of female. He thought things through carefully, deciding on the best way to carry out his plans. “Ned reminded me of a serial sex offender I had just arrested,” Kassai recalled. “Staturewise, anybody pushed to a point can overpower anybody.” Ned was five feet nine inches tall. He weighed in at about 170 pounds, had blond hair then, and kept up an outward appearance of a pretty boy. Ned presented himself to the world as a clean-cut intellectual who cared about his hygiene and appearance. This was clear from his colleagues at Hewlett, who spoke admiringly of him.

“And yet, when we searched his apartment in Passaic,” Kassai remarked, “it was a s***house.” He lived like a slob. Stuff all over the place. A pack rat. “He gave the impression and dressed and maintained an appearance as if he was running a million-dollar operation, like you’d walk into his apartment and see thirty or forty expensive suits.” But Ned had hardly any clothes. His apartment looked as though a burglar had ransacked the joint looking for something specific.

The search of Ned’s apartment told Kassai a lot about who Ned was in his private life. But also, while digging through Ned’s things, Kassai found what was possibly the weapon Ned had used to stab Mary Ellen. It wasn’t a knife. Inside the apartment, they found an “awl,” Kassai said later, “like a seaman’s pocketknife—a knife that sailors carried, with a blade on one side and a pick of some sort on the other.”

IV

When word got back to Ned about the investigation, he went silent. He said he wasn’t going to talk to
anyone
. He demanded cops speak to him through his new attorney, John Bruno, a man Ned’s parents in Connecticut—including his father, a seafaring man who liked to tie knots and collect sailor’s tools—had recently hired and, according to one source, “had spent a
ton
of money on.”

I

Diana Jansen was overwhelmed by what had happened to her mother. When she went back to see Mary Ellen a few days after her second surgery, there were tubes protruding from her mother’s mouth and nose, IV lines sticking out of her arms. Diana was not happy about the care her mother was receiving at the hospital. Seeing her up and walking, she thought Mary Ellen was making great progress; but walking in that second time and seeing Mary Ellen bedridden was disturbing to Diana. She put both hands over her mouth and gasped. The bruises Mary Ellen had sustained during the attack had become more pronounced. Her mother looked beat up. There was one point when Mary Ellen’s oldest daughter—Diana’s sister—was in the room and Mary Ellen began falling in and out of consciousness, moaning in pain.

“Can’t she have more medicine?” her daughter asked the nurse.

“Absolutely not,” the nurse said.

Any more sedation and Mary Ellen’s slow heart rate might stop, the nurse explained. Yet, moments later, when the nurse left, all the alarms suddenly went off. Mary Ellen stopped breathing. The code blue team pushed their way into the room with the crash cart and, after a few tries, brought her back to life.

II

Mary Ellen later explained those first hours at the hospital when she didn’t know if she was going to survive. Arriving at the hospital after the attack, on her way into surgery, she believed it was over. “Black and white,” she called that period. “Some of this is as clear as a photograph and some is as dark as night. That was me going in and out.”

“Am I going to die?” Mary Ellen asked the doctor as they prepped her for surgery.

“Can I get anyone for you?” the doctor asked. “Can we call anyone?”

Mary Ellen thought of calling her brother. Maybe he could perform last rites over the phone, just in case she didn’t make it.

Making matters worse, Mary Ellen’s family blamed her. She began to sense their reproach as the days passed. She shouldn’t have been at a singles dance. It was ungodly. A good Catholic wouldn’t be out and about, trolling the town for men. Family members routinely asked:
What were you doing there? How could you be so stupid?
“My father especially,” Mary Ellen said. “This is a family who thought that I should have spent time with the church, doing service, after my first divorce, which was actually an annulment. They were very angry with me for dating at all. My father would call me a couple times a week. If I wasn’t home, he wanted to know where I was.”

From the family’s pious point of view, a divorced man was not an eligible candidate for Mary Ellen. The men she dated were supposed to be widowed or bachelors. When it came to divorce, “they insisted on an annulment.”

It was three days before her parents even showed up at the hospital for a visit. Apparently, they just couldn’t deal with what had happened, or disagreed with her social behavior.

III

Mary Ellen’s liver had been lacerated. She had an incision running the entire length of her abdomen, from the upper part of her chest all the way down to her belly button. Surgeons had conducted exploratory surgery. “This man knew anatomy,” one of the doctors told Mary Ellen. “Your clothes had been ripped down to your waist. These were carefully aimed wounds. Very clean. This person knew what he was aiming for.”

Despite it all, Mary Ellen was alive. And she believed she had learned something from the attack. Until that day, she had always thought of herself as a weak person. “I had this violent husband who had terrorized me for years, and I thought I was weak because of that. But I know I fought Ned Snelgrove on that night—and, at least in part, I know that my actions saved my life.”

I

As Ned’s attorney, John Bruno’s job was to present the best defense he could manage, or cut his client a deal the prosecution was willing to offer and Ned was willing to accept. It sounded simple. But for a defense attorney with a conscience, it was harder than most people thought. There were clients and cases that made Bruno ill to think about—every defense attorney has them. In Ned, Bruno saw a well-liked man with a respectable job, whose parents were spending a fortune to prove his innocence, but were willing to do that in order to defend a son they could in no way believe committed the crimes of which he was accused.

Meanwhile, Ned initiated a campaign to push the blame onto Mary Ellen’s shoulders, saying that she had invited him into her apartment for sex. He claimed all he wanted to do was wash his hands and use the restroom, but instead, Mary Ellen came on to him as soon as he walked out of the bathroom. As far as the wounds Mary Ellen sustained, Ned said they occurred only after he “refused” her pushy sexual advances. Being the advocate, the diligent soldier, Bruno spoke for Ned, telling the same story to anyone in the press who would listen. During a superior court hearing in Hackensack, during the first week of August, Bruno stood in the courtroom and said his client “was invited into the woman’s apartment after the two met” at a local bar. When they got inside, Bruno explained, she “locked” Ned in the apartment and “tried to engage him in some rough activity.”

Assistant county prosecutor Fred L. Schwanwede had taken over the case from Dennis Calo. Schwanwede stood in the courtroom listening, dropped his head, disgusted with Bruno’s blame-the-victim mentality.

“The facts are not as they may have first appeared in the prosecutor’s report,” Bruno continued, explaining to Judge Charles R. DiGisi. The hearing was designed to discuss a reduction in Ned’s bail, which had been set at $100,000. Bruno wanted it reduced to $25,000. After hearing arguments on both sides, Judge DiGisi decided on $50,000.

Schwanwede was appalled. Here was a dangerous man, obviously capable of extreme violence. He had almost killed a woman. And now he was being allowed to walk away from the courtroom on $50,000?

Unheard of.

What helped Ned was the fact that he had no criminal record and had, Bruno argued, “close ties in the community.” Moreover, Ned’s fellow coworkers at HP were in total support of him. No one who personally knew Ned believed Mary Ellen. Many of Ned’s coworkers said he couldn’t have attacked her, as she described. He was
not
that type of person.

Schwanwede stood and faced the judge, saying, “In stabbing this woman twice in the chest, his purpose was clear: he was unable to do what he wanted to do sexually, and there was only one way out.”

In lowering his bail, the judge told Bruno that Ned was to have no contact with Mary Ellen.

Bruno was optimistic. He felt he could present a strong case on Ned’s behalf. In fact, Bruno told reporters outside the courtroom that Ned’s friends and coworkers from HP were in the process of “setting up a fund for his defense…. His friends and family are completely shocked by this accusation. Everybody is just outraged. We have witnesses who know that this would be totally out of character. There has to be more to it than what the state claims,” Bruno said to the throng of people.

One reporter asked about the life-threatening injuries “the victim” had sustained. How was Bruno going to explain those injuries? How was Ned going to defend himself against what he had done? Self-defense? A man versus a woman? It didn’t add up.

Bruno painted a picture of Mary Ellen preparing a cheese plate for her and Ned as he used the bathroom. And when Ned came out and saw Mary Ellen with her top down, being as shy as he was, he immediately told her that he wanted no part of it. That was when, Bruno insisted, she “lunged at [my client] with the cheese knife, when he refused to participate in ‘rough’ sexual activity.”

II

Mary Ellen was terrified to hear that her attacker, whom she now knew to be a twenty-six-year-old Berlin, Connecticut, native named Edwin Snelgrove, was out of jail on a $50,000 bond. When Mary Ellen left the hospital after ten days, Diana insisted her mother stay with her until she could get back on her feet again. Being with her daughter and grandchild in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania would help Mary Ellen cope. What frightened her more than anything was Ned. She had no idea if she’d return home one night, only to find Ned lurking in the bushes, waiting to get rid of, essentially, the only witness against his alleged crimes.

After about five weeks in the Pocono Mountains, Mary Ellen decided she wanted to go back home and return to work. Getting back into the routine of everyday life would help her cope and perhaps act as a precursor for what a normal life could be like down the road. It wasn’t going to be easy, but she would force herself to do it.

“I want to drive you back home, Mom,” Diana said when Mary Ellen told her she was leaving.

“You’re pregnant,” Mary Ellen said. “It’s too long of a ride. I’ll be OK.”

Diana didn’t want to see her leave. She believed her mother was unprepared for life back out on her own. When she spoke to Mary Ellen about her feelings, it was like talking to someone in another language, Diana said later. “She refused to believe the reality of the situation, or see what’s going on.”

“I need to be on my own,” Mary Ellen told Diana.

What else could Diana do?

“In some ways,” Diana later told me, looking back on that time in her life, “I was relieved. I couldn’t handle it any longer myself.”

When Mary Ellen left, Diana said a prayer. What else could she do?

III

Walking through the door that first time after not being inside her apartment since the attack only increased the anxiety Mary Ellen already felt. What she found upon her return was not only shocking, but alarming and quite unexplainable at first. It was the atmosphere. She’d had a dozen or so lively, colorful plants, which she had always taken pride in taking care of, in the large windowsill holder. They were all dried up and dead now.

More victims of the attack.

Beyond that, throughout the apartment, all over the place, as if it had fallen from the ceiling, was a metallic blue powder investigators had used to find fingerprints. Forensic scientists spread the talcumlike substance over an area and brushed away the excess, hoping to come up with a latent print or two. Upon seeing it all, Mary Ellen understood why it was there, but she was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of it. Not to mention the fact that no one had cleaned it up.

“My bedroom was torn apart, too,” Mary Ellen said. “To come home and find this, I mean, it really threw me into a horrible sense of reality.”

An emotional tailspin was more like it. Here she was, trying to recover from the most devastating time of her life, sustaining injuries that almost killed her, and it was back in her face, when all she wanted to do was try her best to carry on with life. She knew a trial was possibly in the future and could deal with testifying, but that was months away. She just wanted to get back into the swing of her life and return to her job.

IV

As she settled back in, within a day or two, Mary Ellen’s landlady knocked on the door with some bad news. “I think it’s best you leave,” the old woman said.

Mary Ellen was shocked. How heartless. Thoughtless. Did the woman have an ounce of compassion?

“I cannot move right now,” Mary Ellen said. “Where would I go? I’m not even physically recovered.”

“Nope. I think it’s best. I think it’s best that you move from here.”

And then the notes started again. Mary Ellen would find them on her door, on the windshield of her car, in the hallway:
I think it’s best you leave.

Caving to the pressure, Mary Ellen started looking for a new apartment, but couldn’t find anything right away. “The way I like to describe this period of my life,” Mary Ellen said, looking back, trying to make sense of how she made it, “it’s like when an animal is wounded, it likes to crawl into its hole to recover. You’re wounded. You want to be in your home and what’s familiar to you in order to recover.”

Her landlady was denying her that one comfort: recovery.

A friend ultimately stored Mary Ellen’s belongings for her while she moved back in with her parents, which became a situation that only added to a growing list of problems. Her father wouldn’t even look at her or speak to her. She’d walk into a room and “start shaking from head to foot. I didn’t know how to deal with it.”

Or Dad.

As stories about her attack started circulating in the newspapers, Mary Ellen’s parents began hiding the papers from her so she couldn’t see what was being written and what Ned and his supporters were saying.

V

Getting back to work provided a bit of social comfort from the toil of being home with Mom and Dad, but as time went on, Mary Ellen began to suffer from post-traumatic stress. It started when she’d answer the telephone and speak to a client. As soon as she hung up, she’d forget who called and what he or she wanted. She couldn’t understand what was going on. She’d be at her desk, doing paperwork, or just sitting, and suddenly burst into tears. She’d drive down what was once a familiar road and not know where she was. (“I just cried and cried and cried. I could not stop crying.”)

Then the flashbacks started. There was Ned in her face, staring into her eyes again, his hands around her throat, watching the life drain from her. It got to a point where after moving into her own place she’d have friends bring her home and they’d walk into the new apartment before her, checking underneath the bed, in the closets, and in back of the curtains to make sure the coast was clear. All at once, it was eerie and surreal: she could see the events take place step-by-step in her head, and it seemed like it was happening all over again. On some nights, she’d lie in bed wide awake, lights out, and hear Ned breathing in her ear. “I mean, it was, I swear, it felt as if he was right there…. I would freeze. I could feel him get on the bed behind me (just as he had). I could hear him, breathing and breathing.”

And she would turn around and there he was: watching her.