Lethal Guardian (3 page)

“Why were you on the road tonight?”

“We were going to buy a gift for my…”

“Where?”

“Just up the road at the Bridal Shop—”

“What time did you come upon the body?”

“I don’t know exactly…maybe seven-thirty….”

“Did you touch the body?”

“Yes, but I—”

“Where?”

“I rolled him over with the other guy, the EMT. I think that officer was there, too.”

“Right to left, or left to right?”

Specifics:
What? Where? When? Why?
Any cop would have asked the same repetitive questions. Details were still fresh in Steven’s mind, even if he didn’t realize it himself. He and his wife were the first people on the crime scene. Moving the body was a mistake. But Steven wasn’t an investigator. He was looking to save Buzz’s life, as most people would have done.

Still, the fact of the matter remained—the first person at a crime scene can change the entire scope of the investigation.

Meanwhile, the detective interviewing Christine was a bit more relaxed. Christine did most of the talking, explaining exactly what she saw, along with when and where she saw it. At first, the detective had very few questions, letting Christine rattle on about nothing. He could tell she was nervous, scared. There was no sense in putting pressure on her. It would only confuse her more.

But then she mentioned the car she had seen driving away from the scene as they pulled up—and the detective’s eyeballs nearly popped out of his skull.

“What did the guy driving the car look like?”

“Tall. Very, very tall. Lanky. He was thin.”

“That’s good. What make, model and year of car are we talking about?”

“I have no idea…. Blue, maybe? I don’t know.”

Dickey Morris, the East Lyme fire marshal on the scene, had dated Christine Roy’s neighbor some years ago. When Christine saw Dickey out of the corner of her eye, she felt a little bit more comfortable. However, she couldn’t remember what appeared to be the most significant piece of information available to detectives at this point: the make, model and license plate number of, possibly, the murderer’s vehicle.

By 10:00
P.M
., Detective John Turner, ED-MCS’s case manager, arrived. Turner was an eleven-year veteran of the Connecticut State Police, spending the past several with the ED-MCS. He was just under six feet tall and completely bald, save for a ring of gray hair just above his ears and around his head

Quiet, rarely showing emotion, Turner liked to listen and think about things, then maybe come up with an angle and ask specific questions geared toward that theory. When he felt he could get the information he was looking for out of someone, he went for it. Growing up in Everett, Massachusetts, Turner had an unmistakable Boston inflection to his voice. Cops on the force liked Turner. They respected him.

“John was the best processor of evidence and organizer we ever had,” colleague Reggie Wardell later said. “No one did more for [Buzz’s murder] case than John. You can’t do anything perfectly, but John did, as humanly possible, the perfect job.”

Turner knew exactly where to look for what he wanted when he approached a crime scene. The first thing he noticed was the positioning of Buzz’s car. He had been told by other detectives that the headlights were still on when the first troopers arrived. The car had even been running, they said.

Turner approached the car.

There was a car battery sitting on the floorboard behind the driver’s seat, and a baby’s seat in the back.

He made a note.

Then he took out a camera and began snapping photographs of the car, inside and out.

When he walked over to the body, he first noticed how Buzz’s shirt had been pulled open. To the right of Buzz’s chest, Turner saw gunshot wounds. He could tell by looking at the body that it had been rolled over, but the area surrounding it, he noted, was clean. Just beyond the body, about twenty feet, he located a spent projectile.

Detective Mike Foley was roaming around the scene making sketches of things. There wasn’t much: a body, a bullet, a car and a long stretch of road that on any other night would have been as dark and desolate as a cemetery. But Foley needed to note where everything had been found. The distances: yards, inches and feet. It all might seem like a waste of time to a layperson, but when Turner, Foley and the rest of the ED-MCS had a chance to calculate everything, the distance between Buzz’s body and his car just might be the turning point in the entire case. Who could know at this point?

Meanwhile, Steven Roy was still being questioned.

“Did you, Mr. Roy, drive down to the Lyme Tavern and make your 911 call?” one of the detectives asked.

“No. I called from my car,” Steven said. “We have a cell phone.”

“Well, someone made a 911 call from the Lyme Tavern—you’re saying that
wasn’t
you?”

“No! That was definitely not me.”

Then, after asking several specific questions, one of the cops, Steven later recalled, made an odd statement.

“The cop that was questioning me…started going through how many murders had taken place in East Lyme over the past ten years—and he started naming them. And then he started saying that whoever did this…they were going to get them because they had a one hundred percent track record.”

“We’ve gotten every single person!” the cop said.

Steven was overwhelmed.
Why are you telling me this? Why are you gloating? What kind of cop brags about this stuff?

“Is that right?” Steven replied when the detective took a minute to catch his breath. He had no idea what else to say.

“Then,” Steven remembered later, “they said there was bad blood between Dick Carpenter and Buzz Clinton. I didn’t even know who these people were. The names meant nothing to me. But the cop said, ‘We’ve had numerous calls about the two of them. Buzz has a restraining order against Mr. Carpenter. That’s the first person we’re going to talk to about this.’ It was almost as if he was telling me, ‘We’re so good, we already have a suspect.’”

Under the most perfect conditions, it takes between eight and twelve hours for a body to begin show signs of death. In the cold weather, it can take even longer. Here it was, not yet three hours after the murder of twenty-eight-year-old Buzz Clinton, his body still warm to the touch, and the Connecticut State Police had a suspect?

The last thing in the world any good investigator wanted to do was jump to erroneous conclusions and begin pointing his finger at someone with whom he had no evidence to target. At best, it was shoddy police work and unprofessional; at worst, it would lead to sure legal trouble down the road—and a guilty man might end up free on a technicality.

Former Willimantic, Connecticut, police officer Marty Graham joined the Connecticut State Police in 1982. By 1987, he was working as a plainclothes detective for Troop C, in Stafford, Connecticut, and joined the ED-MCS a few years later. At six-feet four inches, Graham skyed over most of his colleagues and was considered the jokester of the bunch. With his military-cropped hair and seemingly continuous smile, Graham brought to the job a much-needed reprise from the day-in and day-out business of death, violence and abuse of all kinds.

Detective Foley, who had been at the East Lyme crime scene for most of the night, received orders for him and Graham to take a ride over to Buzz and Kim’s apartment just a few minutes away. The two veteran detectives would have the grave job of notifying Kim Clinton that her husband had been murdered.

It was 12:40
A.M
., Friday morning, March 11, 1994, when they arrived.

A small, one-bedroom apartment, with a breathtaking view of the Atlantic Ocean out back that might make Robin Leach quiver with envy, the apartment was freedom for Buzz and Kim. Finally out on their own, starting a life together with their two kids, they no longer had to depend on Buzz’s parents for shelter.

Buzz was studying to become a nurse. He had just recently gotten his nurse’s aid certificate—a CNA, a certified nurse’s aide degree. Things were getting better by the moment. In fact, he had been mentioning lately that he and Kim were maybe going to move out to Arizona with the kids and begin anew, meet different people. A change of pace.

Most important, though, was to get away from Kim’s family. Arizona would be a way for Buzz and Kim to rid themselves of the dysfunction the Carpenters—sister Beth Ann, younger brother Richard, father Dick and mother Cynthia—had brought into their lives.

Kim was blond, slightly overweight and, without airs, a plain Jane. Soft-spoken and somewhat introverted, she had been at war with her family for the past two years, fighting with them in and out of court for custody of her daughter Rebecca.

It had turned into an all-out battle, often pitting Buzz against Dick and Cynthia. They couldn’t see eye to eye on anything. The Carpenters felt Kim and Buzz were incompetent parents. They wanted full custody of Rebecca.

Buzz complemented Kim’s passiveness. Whereas Kim couldn’t speak up for herself during intimidating situations with her family, Buzz, never one to be afraid to speak his mind, would step in and take control.

As Graham and Foley made their way around Kim’s apartment, allowing the weight of what they had told her to sink in, Graham later said Kim never shed a tear, as if she had been expecting a visit like this since the day she met Buzz.

“He’s not coming home, ma’am,” Marty said. “Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” Kim said.

It was one of the toughest parts of the job, notifying someone that a loved one was dead. Cops dreaded having to make the midnight phone calls and surprising knocks on the door—especially when the victim had kids. Nevertheless, it was the only way for a cop to get to the truth. The clock on that twenty-four-hour to forty-eight-hour time period was ticking. Foley and Graham were looking to learn who Buzz was and, possibly, who might have wanted him dead.

Kim showed them photos of Buzz for identification.

“That’s him,” both detectives confirmed.

Graham took out his notepad and began asking questions. Initially, all interviews with immediate family members begin with a sketch of the family.

“Buzz and I,” Kim said, still not showing any sign of emotion, “have one daughter, Briana. I’m…I’m pregnant with our second child.”

The detectives looked at each other. They had noticed when they walked in that Kim had looked a little big around the midsection.

Jesus Christ.

There was a photo of another child on the table next to where they were sitting. Graham picked it up.

“Who’s this?”

“Rebecca. She’ll be four in August.”

A cute little towhead with penetrating blue eyes, Rebecca had her hands in her mouth when the photograph had been taken. Mother and daughter, the cops easily calculated, could have been twins.

“So, that’s not Buzz’s daughter, then?”

“No. John Gaul is Rebecca’s dad. He lives in Groton. He pays me ten dollars a week in child support.”

Kim then began describing her Ledyard, Connecticut, roots. “My father and brother do landscaping,” she said. “It’s my father’s business. My sister, Beth Ann, is an attorney.”

“What about Buzz’s family?”

“He has an ex-wife, Lisa. She lives in Meriden and recently got married. He has a four-year-old son with Lisa, Michael.”

“Child support?”

“He was behind on his payments—about three hundred. He’s supposed to pay twenty, twenty-five dollars a week, but we don’t have much money, and…well…he has…he
had
a court date scheduled for March twenty-third.”

She continued, telling them about Buzz’s eleven-year-old sister, Suzanne, and his little brother, Billy, who was nine.

“Where was Buzz working, Mrs. Clinton?” Graham asked.

With that, Kim got up and walked toward the kitchen.

“What is it?” Foley asked.

“He was working at Pettipaug Manor, a convalescent home in Essex, as a nursing assistant for the past year,” Kim said softly.

There was something wrong. Seemingly, just the mention of Pettipaug had dredged up a sour feeling.

“He hadn’t been working for the past two weeks, though,” Kim continued. “He was going to be working at the Groton Regency Nursing Home. A girl,
Natalie Farmer,
used to give him rides to work at Pettipaug. Paula Hunt, who also worked with Natalie and Buzz at Pettipaug, had called Natalie’s husband one day and told him that Buzz and Nat were fooling around. There’s another girl, Tammy. She may have also worked at Pettipaug…I don’t know. Buzz might have been fooling around with her, too.”

If what Kim was saying were true, Buzz’s social life, Graham and Foley figured, was a tangled web of adultery and extramarital affairs. Whenever that was the case, experience told them, the motive for murder existed.

A jealous husband? A jilted lover?

At this point, it was important to get Kim to describe, as best she could remember, Buzz’s final hours. Where was he going when he was murdered? To meet someone? Out for a drink? Rendezvousing with a lover?

Kim explained that Buzz had gotten up at 8:00
A.M
. and had stayed home while she went to the bank and then shopping. By 11:00
A.M
., Kim said, she returned home with groceries and she and Buzz talked a bit and then just hung around the apartment. Around 1:00
P.M
., Cynthia Carpenter came by and picked up Rebecca for a scheduled, court-ordered visit with the child. Buzz and Cynthia, as they often did, exchanged a few hostile remarks, Kim said, but nothing out of the ordinary.

With Rebecca gone, Buzz phoned Stop & Shop in Groton and asked about Kim’s paycheck. She had been working at Stop & Shop for several years. Buzz liked to go pick up her paycheck, cash it and pay what bills he could. It wasn’t much money, but it helped. They had been late on their rent, and Buzz wanted it paid.

A Stop & Shop manager had told Buzz the check was ready. “But make sure you have a note from Kim allowing you to pick it up!”

Kim said she wrote Buzz a note right after he got off the phone. He then left in his Pontiac Firebird.

As promised, Buzz drove to Undersea Warfare Center in New London and signed over Kim’s check for the rent. Before leaving, Buzz had his landlord sign an application he had with him so they could apply for rent subsidy. If approved, Catholic Charities would pay any excess rent he and Kim couldn’t afford each month.

By 4:10
P.M
., as it started to rain a bit harder than it had throughout the day, Buzz was at home telling Kim what he’d been doing all day.

That’s when things got a little sketchy. Buzz, Kim said, received a phone call at about 6:15
P.M
. From what she could tell by hearing only Buzz’s end of the call, someone was interested in buying his tow truck, which he’d had for sale for about a month. Buzz had placed an ad in the local
Bargain News
just two weeks ago. The truck had been good to Buzz. He had made money with it, but he just couldn’t keep up with the maintenance: transmission, brakes, oil changes. Something was always wrong with the thing. Buzz had just recently repainted it and wanted to sell it to use the money to move to Arizona.

“Who was that?” Kim asked Buzz when he hung up the phone.

“I think I have the truck sold,” Buzz said. “I’m meeting this guy at seven. But I have to go to my mother’s first to pick up a battery.”

Within minutes, Buzz left. It was about 6:30
P.M
., Kim told Graham and Foley.

It was the last time she had ever seen or heard from her husband again.

During the course of the interview, Foley and Graham learned several things that could take them in any number of directions. But the most vital piece of information thus far was something Kim had said about a guy named Charlie Snyder. She said that Charlie, the owner and operator of Blonders Used Auto Parts, in nearby Waterford, and Buzz had not been getting along well lately. Buzz had owed Charlie about $1,500 for some auto parts Charlie had fronted him for his tow truck. Charlie would give Buzz auto parts under the agreement that Buzz would either pay him off when he got the money, or work it off, towing junk cars into Blonders. They had a love-hate relationship. As long as Buzz lived up to his responsibilities, Charlie later said, “I would give him the shirt off my back.”

For the past few weeks, however, Buzz had been ducking Charlie’s phone calls and avoiding Blonders. Charlie had even called the apartment a few days before and left Buzz a threatening message on his answering machine: “If you don’t pay me my money, I’m going to break your fucking legs.”

Charlie Snyder grew up in Bloomfield, Connecticut, near the north end of Hartford. It was considered one of the toughest sections of the city, often leading in rape, murder and drug trade statistics. Red-haired, freckle-faced and scrawny, Charlie didn’t fit into the black neighborhoods he frequented, and he learned quickly that survival on the street meant he had to be rough, regardless how big or strong he was.

After graduating from Bloomfield High School in 1972, Charlie bounced around for a while and spent some time in Europe. In 1982, not really sure of what he wanted to do, he saw an ad for a computer technician job at a local junkyard. He didn’t know the first thing about computers or how to fix them. But he walked into the job as if he were the only one who could do it.

“It was one of those things,” Snyder, who had turned forty a few days before Buzz was murdered, said, “where you look in the paper for a job and decide you can do it. I had no idea what I was doing.”

Once he began working at it, Charlie figured the job out easily, then put his name into a pool of employment agencies. Gary Blonders, a local bigwig in the used-auto junk business, soon hired Charlie to put a computer system in Blonders Used Auto. When they sat and talked one day, Gary realized he could use Charlie in other areas and hired him as a salesman. By 1983, Charlie owned the Waterford Blonders.

As time passed, Charlie built a reputation in the Waterford area, a town sandwiched between New London and Old Lyme, for being the go-to guy if one needed cash. His name was known well on the streets.

“How come my shit never got ripped off?” Charlie recalled later. “Because people knew there’d be a price. There was one time when one of my places got broken into. The cops caught the guys in the act. One of the guys went to jail, got out on bail and now walks with a limp. The message is out there.
I
didn’t spread it. Buzz knew that if he didn’t pay me what he owed me, he’d have to pay a price.”

As Graham and Foley worked up a list of people to interview, at about midnight on March 11, John Turner and Pete Cleary went to interview someone whose name they’d gotten from Buzz’s address book: a local kid named Rob Ferguson, who, they were told, might either know who would want Buzz dead, or commit the murder himself.

Ferguson and Buzz had run into each other on occasion throughout the past nine years, but they had recently met at a local bar. Buzz mentioned something about having a tow truck business and needing a space to rent, and Ferguson explained how he’d just opened a car-detailing place in town, Finishing Touch, and could rent out part of his garage.

“I saw him nearly every day,” Ferguson told Turner and Cleary. “I began to learn about his personal life.”

As Ferguson told it, Buzz had been having problems with drugs. Ferguson had never seen Buzz take drugs, he said, but being an ex-addict himself, he knew when someone was on drugs. He also mentioned that Buzz continually talked about the child custody case going on between Kim, Buzz and Kim’s parents.

“Buzz told me that Kim’s father had even grabbed him around the neck one time. But instead of fighting, Buzz just left to avoid being arrested.”

Then the name Natalie Farmer came up again. Ferguson confirmed that Buzz had been having an affair with her for the past few weeks.

Turner asked Ferguson about Charlie Snyder.

“Yeah,” Ferguson said, “Buzz had just mentioned yesterday that Blonders was going down…because some agency was going to begin checking the cars on the lot to make sure they had the proper titles. Charlie, before I kicked Buzz out of the garage on February twenty-third for not paying
me
rent, was calling here every day looking for him.”

Turner and Cleary ended up with a five-page statement from Ferguson, which detailed his whereabouts for the night. Ferguson said the last time he saw Buzz was on March 9, at about 11:00
A.M
. Buzz had cashed a check at the Lyme Tavern. Interesting to Turner and Cleary was the fact that Ferguson placed himself (at the time of the murder) at the Lyme Tavern. He even said a friend of his had come into the bar and mentioned something about an “incident” on the Rocky Neck connector that involved a “dead man” who was driving a Firebird with Maine plates. When Ferguson heard that, he said, he rushed over to Buzz and Kim’s apartment to find out if she knew anything.