Lethal Guardian (26 page)

John Turner and Marty Graham had a feeling that Catherine White knew much more than she was admitting to. However, they also knew the rules where sources were concerned: don’t intimidate or push; instead, let them give information at their own pace. Catherine White would open up. It was only a matter of when.

On August 26, Turner received a call from Reggie Wardell that he had been hoping to receive ever since first talking to White back in May.

“Listen, John, Cathy White was arrested by the Madison Police Department on a failure-to-appear DWI warrant. They have her in custody.”

“I’ll be right there,” Turner said.

White had been moving around so much after she made that initial call to police that Turner and his crew had a hard time keeping track of her. She was never in one place more than a day, but now they had her locked up.

“Everyone found out about what I did,” White said when Turner and Wardell walked in. “Thanks a lot! I’m scared as hell now.”

“Relax, Cathy. We’ll take care of it.”

“I’ll give you more info, but I am
not
putting it in writing.”

“Talk to us, Cathy.”

Over the next hour, White began to open up a bit more. She said “the whole thing” was “set up” by an “attorney” for “the father-in-law.” This attorney, White insisted, had “hired Mark Despres.”

“Okay…”

“Mark received a phone call one day when we were all driving to New York to buy drugs for this same attorney.”

“Wait a minute. So, Mark is selling ‘this attorney’ drugs, too?”

“Yeah. That’s why the attorney felt comfortable hiring Mark; he knew him.”

“Is there anyone else who can back this up?”

“Mark’s fifteen-year-old girlfriend and Mark’s brother.”

White then gave Turner and Wardell their names. Then she said that Joe Fremut knew about the murder, but he was not “directly involved.”

“What else?”

“Well, I know you’ve been speaking to John Filippi and his girlfriend, Liz Stranland.”

“We do what we have to do, Cathy.”

“You’re wasting your time. They don’t know anything. All they know they got from me.”

By the end of the conversation, White said she didn’t know where she’d be in the coming months. If they wanted to get hold of her, they would have to contact her friend in California, and she would get her the message.

As Turner, Wardell and Graham began checking White’s latest information, it turned out to be so accurate they ended up using it as a litmus test to find out if some of their other sources were telling the truth.

“Call Cathy White what you want,” Marty Graham said later, “but she was very much a hero in this thing. We didn’t know who these people were before she came forward. So, it really didn’t matter what kind of background she had. She brought new names into this thing every time we spoke to her.”

With the insurance money from Buzz’s death, Dee and Buck Clinton began building Kim and the kids a rather spacious house with a three-car garage underneath it on their property shortly after Buzz was buried; in fact, the house was a lot nicer than the one Dee and Buck lived in themselves. But Dee didn’t mind. She wanted to take care of her daughter-in-law and grandchildren the same way Buzz would have.

Around the middle of summer, with the house still under construction and Kim and the kids sleeping on the floor in Dee’s living room, Kim moved out.

Where did she go? To one of Buzz’s old friends, the ED-MCS’s first suspect, Rob Ferguson.

“Kim had undergone a complete change in character,” Buck Clinton told detectives around this same time. “[She] had moved into Rob’s house…much to the chagrin of Rob’s girlfriend.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’ve been keeping in touch with Rob. He was a business partner of my son. Through Rob, I can learn more about Buzz’s friends and associates.”

Like his wife, Buck was a bull. He couldn’t just sit around and wait for the cops to figure out who killed his son. He had to get out there and do what he could.

“What makes you say that Kim has changed?”

“Well,” Buck said, “the children seem to be less cared for by her.”

“In what ways?”

“They are being bathed infrequently. She’s only returned once in nearly the past two weeks to drop off dirty clothes and pick up new clothing.”

The previous day, Buck had seen Kim at the end of the driveway, he said, talking to Kevin Myers, another one of Buzz’s old friends. Buck said he knew Myers to be a drug user and wondered what Kim would want with him. Weeks before that, Buck said Suzanne had gone with Kim over to Rob’s one day and came back talking about seeing another friend of Rob and Buzz’s whom Buck knew to be involved heavily with drugs. That man, Suzanne reported, was also living with Rob.

“More important,” Buck insisted, “this guy is an employee of Fremut Texaco. He must know Joey Fremut.”

Then there was a phone call Buck received from Rob Ferguson one day. Ferguson sounded drunk. It was 12:30
A.M
. He began by telling Buck about a conversation he’d had with Kevin Myers, who said he was “afraid of a man from New London…” who sells him drugs. When Ferguson asked why, Myers said, “Because I thought they were going to break his (meaning Buzz) fucking legs, not
kill
him!” When Ferguson pressed for more, Myers admitted that the “cops were on the right track.”

Buck then said that Buzz had told him a day or so before his death that he had his wrecker sold to a “friend of Kevin’s.” In Buck’s eyes, it was all beginning to add up.

Turner, Wardell and Graham, of course, knew differently—Kevin Myers, this “drug dealer,” or Rob Ferguson had little, if anything, to do with Buzz’s murder. But there was still an outside shot that Ferguson knew more than he was saying, though. And with this new information regarding Myers knowing Joe Fremut, there was also a chance Myers knew who was involved in the murder, too, which was what Turner, Wardell and Graham were after.

On August 16, Turner took one more stab at Ferguson to see if he had come up with anything else. On top of that, Turner wanted to make sure Ferguson was being straight with him. Turner had information in the bank now. He could play him a little bit to see if he was being truthful.

Turner first mentioned the name Kevin Myers.

“Kevin Myers,” Ferguson immediately said, “came over here last week and told me how Buzz used to steal cars. We thought this is why he was maybe killed.”

Myers was also involved with the same crowd who hung around Blonders Used Auto Parts. Was Buzz a car thief? Was he lifting cars for Snyder? Who knew? It seemed that anyone who ever had a beef with Buzz was now accusing him of committing all sorts of crimes. Turner knew Buzz hadn’t been killed because he was stealing cars. It was an absurd theory.

“Tell me some more about Kevin Myers, Rob.”

“Kevin also thinks that maybe a drug dealer friend of Buzz’s from New London might have killed him.”

Turner wrote down the dealer’s name. “We’ll check it out.”

“You should,” Rob said.

Before Turner left, he had one more question.

“Is Kim living here now?”

“She’s been staying here on and off since June.”

When John Turner heard from Catherine White that Liz Stranland only knew what she had told her, he wondered if he could extract more of what White knew by simply talking to Stranland again.

Liz Stranland herself was no Mary Poppins. She was being held at Niantic Correctional Center for Women after being arrested, like White, for several failure-to-appear warrants. So Turner and Graham drove to Niantic, picked Stranland up, and brought her to Troop F. It was a more comfortable place to talk. Sources in prison sometimes get angry and resentful because of being locked up. Troop F wasn’t the Hyatt Regency, but it wasn’t prison, either.

Stranland said right away that she knew only what White had told her. No more.

“She told me that it was…what’s his name…the victim—”

“Buzz Clinton,” Turner interrupted.

“Right. Buzz. He was killed by someone hired by his wife.”

This got a rise out of Turner and Graham.
Kim?
It was like looking for the source of a crack in the ice: every time they thought they were close to finding the mastermind behind Buzz’s death, a new name came up and their investigation branched out farther.

As Stranland spoke, it was obvious she was confused. Yet, at the same time, she knew more than she thought. For example, she said it was Fremut who called Buzz under the ruse of buying his tow truck, and it was Despres who had been paid and ultimately pulled the trigger.

“Explain this a bit more, Liz, would you?” Graham suggested.

“Well, Mark Despres brought along his fifteen-year-old son and shot…Buzz six times,” she said, adding, “Joey’s aware of everyone who is helping, but he is also confident that he wouldn’t be arrested because—and these are his words—he is ‘too smart’ for you guys.”

Turner and Graham had to smile. They knew Fremut was nothing more than a wanna-be gangster who didn’t have the guts to do half of what he told people he did.

“To me,” Reggie Wardell later said, “Fremut was a weasel of a guy. A coward. But we also knew he was more dangerous than Mark Despres. We couldn’t forget that.”

It was clear to Turner and Graham that, like Cathy White, Liz Stranland was petrified of Fremut. Whether he carried out his threats or not, Fremut was an intimidator. He knew how to manhandle women and scare them with words.

“He talked a big game,” Graham said. “He made himself out to be some gangster, but he wasn’t even close.”

When they asked Stranland where Fremut was, she said he was roaming around the country, hiding out.

Later, after Turner and Graham dropped Stranland back off at prison, they began to talk about their next move.

“Cathy White,” Graham said.

“We have to get her to write out a statement,” Turner suggested.

“Let’s do it.”

On September 12, Turner and Graham got a call from the Atlantic County Jail in Mays Landing, New Jersey. White was now being held there on several charges. She was ready to talk.

White was a drug addict, exotic dancer and prostitute. One day she could be in California, the next in Florida. By a stroke of luck, she was only four hours away in New Jersey.

“Cathy would go up and down,” Graham recalled. “When she was using, she wasn’t much of a witness, informant. But when she wasn’t, her conscience would begin eating at her. The nicest person in the world when she was straight. Truly a great person.”

Her character or history never mattered much to investigators; it was the information she was providing. Time and again, it added up.

When Turner first arrived in New Jersey and laid eyes on White, he could see that she wasn’t just scared anymore—she had been running for her life.

“Mark and Joey,” White said first, “consider me a loose end. They know I’ve told you everything.” She was certain she was going to be killed next.

“Do you have anything else you want to add, Cathy?” Turner asked.

“Although everything I said earlier was true, it wasn’t complete.”

“We kind of figured that out.”

After Turner advised White of her rights, for two hours she sat and wrote out a rather telling statement: the conversations she’d heard between Despres and Fremut, those she’d had with Fremut alone and dates, times, places. It had been two weeks since White had done a bag of dope. With a clear head, she recalled every detail she could remember.

The first time White said she heard anything about Buzz’s murder was back in January while she, Fremut and Despres were driving to New York. They were going into the city, she said, to “rob a pimp and throw him off a bridge.”

After giving up the notion once they got there, during the ride home, White said she heard Despres brag to Fremut that he’d had several “contracts” in the past to kill people.

“Who gave you those contracts?” White said Fremut asked Despres.

“A Devil worship group I belong to in town,” Despres said. White added that both Despres and his son, Chris, belonged to this same Devil worship group, “where they would go out in back of Mark’s house in the woods with young girls and have orgies.”

It was a few weeks later that White said she first heard Despres specifically targeting Buzz. After that, she heard Fremut and Despres routinely discussing how they were going to carry out the murder.

By the time White was finished, the ED-MCS had enough information to begin drafting arrest warrants for Fremut and Despres. But they still needed to know who the “lawyer” was who had come up in many of their conversations with sources lately. Fremut and Despres hadn’t acted alone—not that they weren’t smart enough, but they had no reason to kill Buzz. There was no connection. Besides that, there was this continuing notion that perhaps Dick Carpenter had hired Fremut and Despres. It seemed every time Turner and Graham turned around, someone else was fingering Dick.

In a majority of murder cases, incriminating information comes in at such a rapid pace that it’s sometimes hard for detectives to keep up with it. Most cases are broken in the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Investigators then scramble around to put information together to serve arrest warrants. Arrest warrants have to be detailed and faultless; otherwise the information misrepresented—either mistakenly or deliberately—will come back to taint the case when it goes to court. Defense lawyers scour warrants and police reports for mistakes and inaccuracies. Good investigators are thorough, tenacious. They don’t present an arrest warrant to a judge or a prosecutor until they know the charges they’re bringing forth will stick. Mix murder for hire—one of the toughest crimes for prosecutors to prove—into the equation, and things get even more complicated.

Even though Turner and his colleagues had some solid anecdotal evidence that put Despres and Fremut under a guilty light, they still had to think about how tangible the evidence was. Turner had been writing up the arrest warrants almost daily since Fremut and Despres had been on their radar. He would add information whenever it came in. During the latter part of 1994, about nine months into the investigation, Turner still felt he didn’t have enough yet to seek a judge’s signature on the warrants. They needed more. Who was this mysterious attorney? Was it actually Haiman Clein? If so, why had he hired Despres? At this time, of course, Beth Ann’s name played no part in the investigation. To the ED-MCS, she was just another grieving family member.

Jose Argarim, a thirty-three-year-old native of the Philippines who had been living in New London for the past twenty years, met Beth Ann in early October at the local Gold’s Gym. Argarim, who worked for Electric Boat in Groton, liked what he saw when he first spied Beth Ann. A short time after seeing her talking to a mutual friend, Argarim asked his friend if he could introduce them. A few days later, Jose got Beth Ann’s phone number and called her.

“The relationship took what I would say a normal course, and as time went on, we became very close,” Jose later said. “After the first couple of months…she told me that she was having an affair and was involved sexually with her boss, Haiman Clein.”

Clein and Beth Ann’s intimate relationship, Jose suggested, continued for a time while he was also seeing her. In January 1995, Beth Ann ended up leaving Clein’s law firm under the agreement that Clein would continue paying her, and Jose helped her move out. After that, Jose Argarim began being intimate with her and began spending time at her condo. Because she was always on the phone with Clein, from time to time, Argarim would ask her if she was still seeing him.

“Only professionally,” she’d say. “It’s all work-related.”

In March 1995, Beth Ann and Jose took a trip to Key West. As soon as they arrived, Beth Ann began acting edgy and nervous, as if she were looking over her shoulder waiting for something to happen. Two days later, to Joses’s surprise, Clein showed up at the hotel where she and Argarim were staying. After Clein left, Jose went crazy, demanding to know what the hell Clein was doing in Florida at the same time they were.

“Haiman has a house in Key West,” Beth Ann explained. “I didn’t know he would be here.”

Jose, of course, was livid. He didn’t believe her. Beth Ann, however, brushed off Argarim’s contempt and continued to say she had no idea Clein was going to be there. Later that night, they began fighting more loudly and aggressively. Argarim wanted to know straight up:
“Did you or did you not invite him down here?”

“I didn’t know he was going to be here, Jose. You have to believe me.”

As the night progressed, Argarim became more angered by the “coincidence.” She had dissed him, made a fool out of him. So the next day, he drove back to Connecticut while she stayed in Key West.

According to Jose, a month went by before he heard anything from Beth Ann. Then, unexpectedly, she called.

“Upset and crying,” Argarim recalled later, “she [said] she’d had a fight with Haiman.” Argarim said he acted as if he didn’t care. He had been duped once—why chance it again?

“But he pulled my hair,” Beth Ann said through tears. “He kicked me around and punched me.”

“I’ll be right over,” Jose Argarim said.

When he arrived at her condo, he said he saw bruises on her arms and legs. When he asked her why Clein had hit her, she only said, “I’m never seeing him again.”

One of the people who had, as far as Turner and his colleagues could see, a close connection to Despres and Fremut was John Filippi, Fremut’s old friend who had been commissioned once by Fremut to find him a silencer. Turner and Graham knew if they continued working on Filippi, they could possibly find out either where Fremut was or what he knew.

Filippi, on the other hand, just couldn’t keep himself out of trouble. In February, he’d burglarized a home in Norwich and confessed to it a short time later. Then in March, he broke into an office building in Essex, and cops found his basement full of the stolen merchandise. When detectives interviewed him about the burglaries, Filippi mentioned that he might have more information regarding Buzz’s murder.

Back on March 12, a former girlfriend of Filippi’s phoned the state police with some rather shocking news. She said Filippi had just called her and said he was on his way to her house to “take care of her, her two kids and then himself.” He said he didn’t care anymore about anything.

When the woman pleaded with him to remain calm, Filippi said, “Anson Clinton got exactly what he deserved. I gave him what he had coming. He deserved to die! You’re a whore, a pig, a loser. You’ve ruined my life.”