Lethal Guardian (29 page)

“Have you ever made a remark,” Szamocki then asked, “about contracting the murder of Buzz?”

“I jokingly may have said that.”

“When did you say it? Where were you?”

“I don’t know…maybe around Christmastime, 1993, maybe January 1994. It was right here. I said it to some of my buddies at the coffee shop. I told Cynthia I’d like to ‘do away’ with Buzz. But no one ever took it literally. I didn’t have a thing to do with this, and I know that Dee Clinton has been telling people I have.”

“What do you think happened?”

“Drugs. Drug deal. Buzz used to take money from a gas station where he worked.”

Szamocki got Dick to give him bank account numbers for all of their finances and signed a disclosure so they could later check to see if a large withdrawal had been made near the time of Buzz’s murder.

“Tell us, Dick,” Szamocki asked next, “who is it that you think most likely wanted your son-in-law dead?”

“Well, me or Cynthia would be highly probable. But it wasn’t us.”

“Who else, then?”

“Buck Clinton. He had an insurance policy on Buzz.”

“Why did you refuse a polygraph test…around the time of the murder?”

“I talked it over with Beth. She told me you guys could make the outcome anything you wanted.”

“That’s not true, Dick.”

“If you don’t have anything else to go on, then I guess I’ll take a polygraph.”

“We’ll be in touch,” Szamocki said as Dick got out of the car and went back into the coffee shop.

When Reggie Wardell and Paul Killoran showed up at Haiman Clein’s Pond Edge Drive home in Waterford to talk to Bonnie, she wouldn’t let them in.

Wardell identified who they were and showed Bonnie his ID. “You get one shot at a witness like Bonnie,” Wardell later said. “You have to be ready to ask one or two key questions. You may not get another shot after that. The witness might throw you out.”

“What do you want?” Bonnie said after opening the door.

“Can we talk to you, Mrs. Clein?”

“What about?”

“It’s personal—”

“What is it about?”

Wardell pulled two Polaroid photographs—Despres and Fremut—out of his pocket and showed them to Bonnie, without mentioning their names.

“Do you know these people?”

Bonnie pointed to Despres. “I know
him.
” Then at Fremut. “I saw his picture in the newspaper.”

Wardell asked her how she knew Despres, and Bonnie said he’d been a client of Haiman’s for many, many years.

“Listen,” Bonnie then said, “I shouldn’t be answering any more questions. My husband’s an attorney, and I’d like him present during any more questioning.”

Wardell handed Bonnie his business card.

“Call us if any questions arise that you might want answers to.”

Within the few first weeks of being in London, working for Ali Bagherzadeh, Beth Ann began complaining about how financially strapped she was. Ali was paying her in U.S. currency and not withholding taxes, but she continued to complain about not having enough money to rent her own apartment.

Feeling a bit sorry for her, Ali allowed Beth Ann to live in the back of his office in what amounted to nothing more than a bed in an old, musty room. It was an abrupt change for someone who had come from living in luxury for so long now.

As Beth Ann began her new life, Ali immediately became impatient with her. Later, he said their relationship was “strictly platonic.” Furthermore, he didn’t involve himself too much in—“or care about”—her personal problems, which seemed to dominate everything she did.

But as the days passed, Beth Ann’s problems became almost impossible to ignore. She ran up enormous phone bills, which she never paid, talking to Clein, and continually complained about how her life had turned out. Whenever Ali, a self-proclaimed “sap,” told Beth Ann that she had to carry her weight in the office or leave, she would begin “crying and carrying on about how she had no place to live and that she had no money.”

When Mark Despres found himself confined to jail for his role in Buzz’s murder, having worked for Detective Chet Harris in the past as a paid informant, he decided to begin using Harris as his “go-to” person in law enforcement whenever he wanted to talk. On November 4, Despres reached out to Harris and got word to him that he wanted to open up about everything.

Harris contacted John Turner, who, along with Marty Graham, visited Despres at his new home: Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield, Connecticut.

Without any hesitation, Despres waived his rights.

The first thing Turner wanted to know was why Despres had changed his mind so suddenly.

“I’ve heard that Joey is talking shit, spreading rumors about me,” Despres said.

“Well, let’s hear what you have to say, then?”

Despres, masking his actual role, pointed the finger at Fremut and four other people, whom he refused to name. “Me and Joey killed Buzz,” Despres admitted, “but Joey did the shooting.”

A few days after Turner and Graham spoke to Despres, they convinced Fremut to open up even more. Whether he was going to be truthful, well, that was still to be proven. F. Mac Buckley, Fremut’s attorney, had worked diligently to post bond for Fremut within the past few weeks. At $500,000, Fremut’s parents had put Fremut Texaco, their house and the land they owned up as collateral, eventually getting Fremut out of jail.

At about 9:30
A.M
., on November 10, Fremut and F. Mac Buckley showed up at the ED-MCS office in Norwich. Fremut agreed to waive his rights.

For four hours, Fremut talked about Despres and how they had planned to kill Buzz months before the actual murder took place. Yet as Turner listened, he knew Fremut was trying to misrepresent certain facts. When Turner pointed it out, Fremut changed his story to fit whatever scenario Turner put in front of him. At one point, Buckley warned Fremut about telling any more lies. When it came down to it, Buckley was there to cut a deal, get a reduced sentence. He told Fremut he couldn’t do that if he continued to lie.

Finally, after Turner caught Fremut in a few more lies, Fremut ended up providing a detailed nine-page statement that provided Turner and Graham with a little more information. Fremut ended up implicating Despres even further, painting a more sinister, evil portrait of him.

“Mark told me he joined a Devil worship cult in Meriden,” Fremut said. “As long as I have known Mark, he has always been a Christian. [But]…he [later] denounced God and worshiped Satan. Mark told me that these people in the cult had connections to do hits (kill people). I told my girlfriend, Cathy White, about Mark and his Devil worship.”

Then he talked about how Despres planned the murder and how Dick Carpenter was responsible for setting it up through Haiman Clein.

By the time Fremut finished, and Turner and Graham had a chance to sit down and weigh his information against Cathy White’s, they realized that as much as Joe Fremut wanted to downplay his role, the truth was all there: times, dates, details about guns, stalking Buzz, on and on. Joe Fremut knew things that Cathy White knew that Mark Despres knew. There was no way the three of them could have all gotten together and made their stories dovetail so perfectly.

Armed with Fremut’s statement, Turner and Graham went back to Despres and told him they weren’t going to tolerate his lies any longer. But if he wanted to work with them, they just might be able to do something for him down the road.

Between December 8 and December 11, Despres finally rolled over. He told them everything he could remember about the entire murder plan. Despres had even told Reggie Wardell, who had taken his statement, he was sorry for killing Buzz.

“I didn’t even know Anson Clinton. I never met Anson Clinton before the night I shot him…. I [thought] I was getting rid of a child molester. I believed Haiman Clein when he told me that Anson Clinton was a bad guy and a child molester.”

He was like a scorned child at that point, Wardell later remembered. “I wasn’t so sure, though, that he was actually sorry about what he had done. But it did tell that he did it. Saying sorry was the same as a confession.”

Indeed, why would someone say they were sorry for something they hadn’t done?

Over a two-day period, Despres wrote a twenty-nine-page statement of fact that included just about every detail he could recall—most important, the meetings he’d had with Clein and Beth Ann. Whereas for the past few weeks Mark Despres had been protecting his son, he now admitted that Chris was there, too. To bolster his truth telling even further, Despres insisted on drawing a map of the murder scene, which matched up perfectly with the facts and photographs the ED-MCS already had.

When Wardell looked at the map Despres drew of the murder scene and put it up against all the known facts, he was overwhelmed at Despres’s attention to detail.

“When I saw that,” Wardell later said, “it was clear to me that Mark Despres was at that murder scene on the night Buzz Clinton was murdered.”

But there was more. Besides the wealth of information they now had, the ED-MCS also had statements implicating both Beth Ann Carpenter and Haiman Clein, and it was now clear that Clein and Beth Ann had been the brains behind the entire operation from the get-go.

Once John Turner got Mark Despres to admit that his son had been present on the night of the murder, he and John Szamocki hauled Chris into the state’s attorney’s office for questioning.

“I’m not speaking or signing anything unless I can call my mother so she can contact my attorney,” Chris said right away.

Then he demanded they order him a pizza.

“He played hardball better than the rest of them,” Turner later said. “He absolutely shut up.”

At some point while Chris was at the state’s attorney’s office, he demanded to see his father.

“He felt horrible about what he was about to do,” Margaret Long later remembered. “He wanted to hear from his father that it was okay to talk.”

So detectives allowed Chris to talk to Mark—but only through the doorway.

“What should I do, Dad?” Chris asked.

“Tell them the whole story…. Tell them the truth.”

Margaret recalled later that Diana Trevethan, Chris’s mother, told him not to talk unless the state was prepared to grant Chris immunity.

Within a few hours of being at the state’s attorney’s office, Chris had his lawyer on a speaker phone monitoring the interview. By then, Chris’s attorney had already secured a deal for immunity; he was free to talk about anything without worrying about being prosecuted for his role later on.

A few days after the ED-MCS obtained signed statements from Joe Fremut and Mark and Chris Despres, a cellmate of Mark’s came forward with a note he claimed Mark had written to Clein. Mark, in a last act of desperation, was trying to smuggle the letter out of prison through his cellmate, who had just been released.

“Now I don’t care what it takes,” Despres opened the brief letter to Clein, “you have to get me out of here, or you will be here with me.”

Then he demanded that Clein “get the money together” for his bail. If not, “my friends will do anything I say…your family, your girlfriend, and her brother.” Despres said he was “
not
fucking around.” He threatened that if Clein didn’t bail him out, he would begin talking. As a postscript, Mark added: “They (his friends) will keep an eye on you till you pay—one week!”

Threatening letter or not, for Clein, the entire infrastructure of a murder-for-hire plot he had constructed from the start with Beth Ann was collapsing. Thus, there was only one thing left for Clein to do.

On December 13, John Turner finished writing Clein’s ten-page arrest warrant, along with a search warrant for Clein’s Old Saybrook law office. That night, Connecticut State’s attorney Kevin Kane signed off on both. The arrest warrant was as detailed and meticulous as an instruction manual for an Apache helicopter. Turner left nothing out. The evidence he and his colleagues had amassed was remarkable. They had bank records, statements and a ton of circumstantial evidence that placed Clein at the forefront of what was looking like one of the most sensational murder-for-hire cases they had ever seen.

Thirty-four-year-old Sharon Brockaway was, she later admitted, Clein’s “girl Friday.” She was listed as a real estate assistant at Clein’s law firm, but her job consisted of much more.

Brockaway looked up to Clein as a father figure. She had been a battered wife. Once, when her husband beat her, it was Clein who called the police and later “encouraged” her to have her husband arrested. Like many of her colleagues in the office, she liked Clein.

At about 11:30
A.M
., on December 15, members of the state police and ED-MCS showed up at Clein’s Old Saybrook office and were given permission to make entry. Clein hadn’t been seen for a day or so and had been keeping a low profile since Fremut and Despres had been caught. He had been holing up in motel rooms throughout the area, hopping from one to the next to avoid contact with anyone. Brockaway, when state police asked her, said she hadn’t seen him since December 14.

As the state police, detectives from the ED-MCS, and members of the Old Saybrook Police Department began rummaging through Clein’s office—taking photographs, bagging items, looking through files—the phone rang. Laura Rowland, the bookkeeper, picked it up and, after speaking briefly to the caller, tracked down Sharon Brockaway.

“It’s Haiman,” she said, handing her the phone.

“Hello?” Brockaway said.

“Hi,” Clein said.

“Hi.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Not exactly.”

“Are you having problems with your husband?”

“No.”

“Let me speak to Marilyn.”

Marilyn Rubitski had been Clein’s most trusted confidante in the office. She had worked for Clein as his personal secretary for the past fifteen years. Despite her contempt for Beth Ann and the affair between her and Clein, Rubitski believed wholeheartedly in Clein. Some later said she protected him any way she could. As for Clein, he knew Rubitski would be straight with him, no matter what was going on.

“She’s not available,” Brockaway said of Rubitski.

“Is the office closed?”

“No.”

“Is it because of snow?” Clein said, undoubtedly referring to cocaine.

“No.”

“Call Axelrod.”

By noon, Bob Axelrod had received a page. So he called Clein’s office and spoke briefly to Brockaway.

Halfway through the phone call, a detective got on the phone and told Axelrod what was going on, adding, “We have an arrest warrant for Mr. Clein. He can surrender if he wants to.”

“I’ll let him know.”

Dara Clein, Haiman Clein’s daughter from his first marriage, had been in Chicago attending Illinois College of Optometry since 1992. Clein was proud of his daughter. She was smart beyond her years and not afraid of hard work.

The day before Clein’s Old Saybrook office had been searched, Clein called Dara with what, at first, seemed like some good news.

“I’m coming to Chicago.”

This wasn’t necessarily an odd thing for Clein to do. In the four years Dara had been away at school, Clein had visited her on numerous occasions. The only difference this time was that it was on short notice. Whenever Clein had visited in the past, he’d always planned the trip, giving her plenty of notice about when he was coming.

On December 15, hours after the search had been concluded, Clein phoned Dara again. She wasn’t home, so he left a message.

“I put some money in your bank account. Ten thousand dollars. I want you to take out ninety-five hundred. I’ll be there tomorrow. I want you to give it to me then.”

On Saturday morning, December 16, Clein called again. This time, he told Dara to put the $9,500 back into her account and then take out $3,000 in cash—which she later did. During the same phone call, Clein also explained that he wouldn’t be coming to Chicago after all—he now wanted her to meet him at a hotel in South Bend, Indiana, which was about ninety minutes away.

When Dara arrived and gave Clein the $3,000, she noticed right away how “upset” he looked.

“What about the rest of the money?” Dara asked. “What am I supposed to do with the seven thousand?”

“Keep a little bit for yourself, but send your stepmother fifty-five hundred.”

“How?”

“Call and set it up with her. She’ll give you instructions.”

The next morning, they took off to another hotel in a different Indiana town about forty-five minutes away from South Bend. As they drove, Dara couldn’t keep to herself what had been bothering her ever since she arrived the previous night and saw how distressed Clein had appeared.

“What’s going on, Daddy?”

“I am going to be charged with murder for hire,” Clein admitted.

“How…What happened? Tell me what’s going on?”

“Someone is pointing the finger at me. His name is Mark.”