Lethal Guardian (30 page)

“Mark?”

“The person who was murdered was hurting a child….”

When they arrived at the next location, Clein told Dara it was time to split up. He had to keep on the move. She had to go back to school.

The following Monday, Dara sent a cashier’s check for $5,500 to Bonnie Clein’s brother’s house in Massachusetts with instructions to forward it to Bonnie.

By December 17, 1995, Clein was officially a fugitive from justice, his photograph plastered all over newspapers, television stations, airports and border crossings.

As soon as the news broke, Clein’s friends, family, relatives, coworkers and employees began pleading for him to give himself up. Dara worried that if her father didn’t come forward soon, he would be hurt, maybe even shot. Bob Axelrod, proclaiming Clein’s innocence, said that the “thought” of his client killing a “total stranger” was “ludicrous.” Many were saying Haiman Clein—loving father, respected member of the Jewish community, lawyer, friend, husband, adulterer, cokehead, alcoholic, embezzler, alleged conspirator in a murder for hire—could not have been involved in such a thing.

With her former lover on the run, Beth Ann had no other choice but to wait for him to call her when he reached a certain destination. Almost daily, Clein later said, he phoned Beth Ann in London. But whenever Clein began to talk about the murders, Beth Ann would hang up on him.

Christmas, 1995, was fast approaching. Penniless, Beth Ann went to Ali Bagherzadeh and asked if she could borrow some money. “I want to visit my family,” she proclaimed.

Ali felt bad for her. He was a compassionate man. He had given her a place to stay. Food to eat. A job. This was it. Maybe she was making plans to leave? Thinking about it for a moment, Ali decided to lend her the money.

“I’m flying into Boston,” she added.

Sometime later, Beth Ann left. Ali assumed she had gone back to the States to see her family for the holidays. With Beth Ann gone, Ali took off on a business trip.

“I wasn’t sure she was coming back.”

When Ali returned, he was shocked to see Beth Ann’s things in the back office as though she had just returned. It had only been a few days. She was supposed to be gone for a week or two.

Confused, Ali called British Airways and Virgin Airlines to see if either airline had flights that had come in from Boston within the past two days. Neither did. Right there, he knew she hadn’t gone home.

When Ali confronted Beth Ann with the information, she began crying.

“I went to Spain. I am so stressed out. I went to the Canary Islands.”

“I want my money back because you lied to me.”

John Turner, Marty Graham and Reggie Wardell, three ED-MCS detectives who had formed a coalition to bring down those responsible for Buzz Clinton’s murder, now encountered a major snag in their investigation, which had been building momentum ever since they had obtained statements from Joe Fremut and Mark Despres. Fifty-four-year-old Haiman Clein was gone. Reports were that he had fled to his boyhood home of Florida. But no one knew for sure.

On December 21, 1995, Graham went to Robert Clein, Haiman’s brother, and asked him where he thought Haiman had run to. Robert said he didn’t have the slightest idea.

“Has he tried contacting you?” Graham asked.

“Nope.”

But Graham had information that Robert Clein had just recently returned from Florida himself. He wanted to know why he took the trip.

“I last spoke with Haiman,” he then admitted, “on December twelfth, but it had nothing to do with the case. I didn’t know he had run until I read it in the newspapers. My brother never mentioned anything about the murder to me. Only that his lawyer instructed him not to talk to the police. He did, however, mention that he was a suspect.”

“Do you know Mark Despres?”

“I met him a few times at Haiman’s office. Haiman said he was good at fixing cars.”

“What’s up with Haiman and Beth Ann Carpenter?” Graham asked. “Did you know they were—”

“I will not discuss that,” Robert said. Then, “Am I a suspect in this case?”

“No. We’re looking for your brother.”

It was a short interview. Graham could easily tell from Robert’s mannerisms and careful choice of words that he was hiding something. Graham had been a cop for nearly two decades. He knew when a witness was holding something back. A good sign was when the witness would, like Robert had done, stop talking and start again all in the same breath. It meant he was thinking about what he was saying.

“He did not appear to be fully cooperative and was careful…about what he would discuss with me,” Graham later reported.

Jose Argarim was not yet through with Beth Ann. There was something about her that kept Jose going back even after he knew she would probably let him down. While she was in London, Beth Ann and Jose had talked a few times a month to keep in touch. But that was about the extent of their relationship.

When Jose read about Clein’s flight from justice and the possibility that he was somehow involved in the murder of Beth Ann’s brother-in-law, he began to find out through various sources that there was a bitter family custody battle going on between the Carpenters and Clintons regarding Rebecca. So he asked Beth Ann around Christmastime what she knew about it, knowing she’d had a relationship with Clein for so long.

Beth Ann fell silent.

So Jose asked again.

She then changed the subject and refused to talk about anything having to do with Clein, Rebecca or Buzz’s murder.

When he hung up, Jose had an “uneasy feeling about Beth’s response,” he later said. He knew something was up. “I felt that [she] knew something about Clinton’s death and Haiman’s involvement that she wasn’t telling me.”

Accountant Michael Krissell had been friends with Clein since they were kids in school. Clein had always looked to Krissell as someone to whom he could turn in a time of need. Here it was, the beginning of a new year, 1996, and Clein had been on the run for about two weeks. He had bought a car in Indiana with the money Dara had gotten for him, and after leaving Indiana, he drove directly to Miami to see Michael. Living on the run was not only a difficult, twenty-four-hour-a-day job, but it was expensive. Clein was just about tapped out of the money he’d had, his options running out.

“I’m in Miami,” Clein told Krissell over the phone when he arrived in town. “I need to meet with you.”

They agreed to meet across the street from Krissell’s office in downtown Miami. Within moments of seeing each other, Clein told Michael everything.

“I’m on the run and wanted in Connecticut for the murder of Beth’s brother-in-law….”

“What?”

“Beth fled, too,” Clein added.

“What are you
doing,
Haiman?”

“I have no money or credit cards, Mike. I’m living horribly.”

“How have you survived?”

“Doing odd jobs.”

Clein looked dirty, beaten down. He had not shaved or changed clothes in some time.

Mike Krissell was shell-shocked. He knew Clein and Beth Ann had been having an affair, and he also knew there were problems with her brother-in-law. He never believed, however, that Clein actually was going to do anything about it. The last time Krissell had seen Clein was back in 1994, shortly after the murder. Krissell had come to Connecticut to help Clein with an audit the IRS was conducting. It was then that Clein told Krissell that Beth Ann was calling him eight to ten times per day. Clein said it was “driving him nuts.” Krissell even met Beth Ann several times while he was in town. Clein explained the custody battle and how he had gotten involved in the middle of it all. He told Krissell it was Beth Ann’s idea to have Buzz “roughed up, beat up or taken care of.” Clein said she wanted him to hire someone to do it. He was reluctant at first, he admitted, but as Beth Ann kept insisting on it, he began to think about it more seriously. As they spoke, Clein also admitted that he and Beth Ann had gotten together with the man he’d eventually hired to do it. When Mike Krissell asked what happened next, Clein told him that “the client he hired took it too far and killed [Buzz].”

When Clein met with Krissell for lunch in Miami, he reiterated what he had said almost two years earlier.

“It was Beth’s idea,” Clein said as he and Mike talked. “I only did it because Beth was so insistent….”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I need some money.”

Krissell later said he felt obligated to help Clein. Everything at that time was moving so fast for Krissell that he really didn’t know what to do or say. One minute, he was sitting in his office working; the next moment, Clein was telling him he was on the run from the law along with Beth Ann because he’d hired someone to murder Buzz.

After lunch, Michael Krissell went with Clein to a local bank and withdrew $1,000.

“I’ll pay you back,” Clein promised before leaving.

With money in his pocket, Clein headed west for California. On his way, he was stopped in Arizona by a trooper who had spotted a headlight that was out on the car he was driving. Nervous and twitchy, Clein took a written warning and was on his way only moments after being stopped.

When Reggie Wardell reached the FBI, which had since become involved because Clein had crossed state lines, he was told that Dara Clein had admitted to meeting with her father in Indiana. The last time Dara had spoken to Clein was on December 27, 1995, she said.

With Dara’s information, on January 6, 1996, the FBI tracked one Ron Coleman, from New York, who had registered at a Holiday Inn in Plymouth, Indiana, and South Bend, Indiana.

It was Clein, Detective Wardell knew as soon as he saw the name. Clein had used the same name to register at hotels in Connecticut before he took off.

Scotland Yard, in London, had been notified back in December 1995 that Beth Ann Carpenter was being investigated for the murder of Buzz Clinton. The state’s attorney’s office, however, didn’t have enough evidence just yet to begin thinking about an arrest warrant. But Kevin Kane, Assistant State’s Attorney (ASA) Peter McShane and Paul Murray, the three state prosecutors who had been working on the case with the ED-MCS all along, had an ample amount of evidence that placed Beth Ann under the same light as Clein. Still, they needed Clein to implicate her. Without his statement, they didn’t have much on her at this point.

Interestingly, the state’s attorney’s office needed to get Beth Ann involved in the apprehension of Clein. It was no secret he was probably calling her from wherever he was hiding out. If McShane and Kane could convince her to help out, they could probably find Clein and then nail her later.

After discussing it with Hugh Keefe, Beth Ann’s attorney back home, the next step was to get Scotland Yard to locate Beth Ann and talk to her.

When they found her, she agreed to help, saying Clein had, indeed, been calling her, but he was reluctant lately because he was scared of getting caught. At one time, he’d even convinced her to write down various pay phone numbers in the area where she lived in London so he could call her at different numbers. Eventually, though, Clein ran out of money and gave her phone numbers to reach him, most of which were in California.

When Scotland Yard asked, Beth Ann told them everything.

Officials at Scotland Yard, on Sunday, February 4, 1996, indicated to the FBI that Clein had made plans with Beth Ann to call her the following day. Beth Ann had given them the number Clein was going to be calling from, which was traced back to a pay telephone booth outside a 7-Eleven convenience store in Long Beach, California, just sixty miles south of Los Angeles.

Clein had been in Long Beach for about a week without anybody noticing him. The FBI had set up surveillance early in the morning on February 5 near the 7-Eleven store. They had a make on the car Clein had purchased in Indiana back in December—a blue Oldsmobile Ciera. Like the alias Clein used to check into several different hotels along his path, he used the name Ron Coleman to buy and register the car later.

With FBI agents positioned in a way that allowed them to monitor the situation, all they had to do was wait.

At about five minutes to noon, Clein pulled up in his Ciera, and FBI agents made a positive identification from a photo they obtained from the ED-MCS. A few moments later, Clein got out of his car and walked toward the phone booth. He looked scruffy and unkempt, like a homeless person, his hair matted and longer.

It was obvious, FBI agents later said, he had been living out of his car.

As Clein and Beth Ann spoke, Clein became impatient—his voice hurried and hoarse. For the first few minutes, they talked about menial things: how he was doing, how she was doing. Then, without warning, two FBI agents moved in without a word. Realizing what was going on, Clein said, “You set me up, didn’t you?” to Beth Ann before he was wrestled to the ground, handcuffed and led away.

Detectives Reggie Wardell and James Brady arrived in California to collect fugitive Haiman Clein on February 9. Clein was facing multiple charges—the most severe being capital felony murder, punishable by the death penalty, and conspiracy to commit murder.

Before they took off for the airport to fly back to Connecticut, Bob Axelrod warned Reggie Wardell over the phone not to talk to Clein.

“Idle conversation only,” Axelrod said. “Nothing about the case.”

Clein was handcuffed and his jacket draped over his wrists. When they got up to the airline counter at LAX, Clein asked Wardell where they were going to sit in the plane.

“Prisoners usually sit in the back of the plane. We’ll board first, though,” Wardell said.

“Well, I have frequent-flier miles,” Clein said, hoping maybe he could use them to upgrade the ride back home.

Wardell didn’t say anything at first. He thought it was a joke. Clein, however, gave him the impression he was serious, so Wardell went with it.

The airline knew who they were. Wardell, in a mocking fashion, asked the ticket agent if there was a chance they could get upgraded to first class.

“Our perp has frequent-flier miles!”

“Officer, I’m sorry, but we can’t do that.”

“Oh well,” Wardell said to Clein, shrugging his shoulders.

John Turner was waiting at Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, when Clein, Wardell and Brady arrived. From there, they drove to the Westbrook State Police barracks so Clein could be officially processed.

Brian Carlson,
a wealthy New York businessman with three homes—in Connecticut, North Carolina, New Hampshire—had met Clein back in early 1995. Carlson’s mother needed a notary, and Carlson happened to be driving by Clein’s Old Saybrook office at the time. Months later, when Carlson found himself in a battle with his mortgage company over its changing owners and not notifying him, he turned to the one lawyer he knew in Connecticut as having a stellar reputation for dealing with mortgage companies.

“He was delightful,” Carlson recalled of those first few meetings with Clein. “He was a really nice guy. Farmer Brown type. Flannel shirts and jeans. Laid-back. Easy to talk to and get along with. I liked him.”

When Carlson asked Clein where he stood with his mortgage company, Clein seemed excited. “We got ’em,” he said.

“How much money are we talking about?” Carlson asked. If it were only a few thousand, what was the sense?

“Probably about twenty-five to thirty thousand,” Clein said.

A few weeks went by, then a few months. Carlson grew impatient and called Clein to see what was happening.

“Don’t pay them any money,” Clein advised. Then, “But I need you to give me some money, just in case I have to make a quick deal.”

“How so?”

“Well, if they want to settle right away, you’re going to have to pay back all of those mortgage payments at once. I need to put twenty-five thousand in an escrow account so I can have it on hand if you’re out of town. It’ll just make things easier.”

It made sense.

Summer 1995 turned into fall 1995, and Carlson hadn’t heard a word from Clein. A letter would arrive from time to time indicating that Clein was still working the deal, but other than that, Carlson assumed Clein was making progress.

Then Clein called Carlson one day and invited himself and Bonnie to dinner over at Carlson’s house. It was around Halloween, 1995.

Carlson said sure. It sounded like a good idea. They could catch up on the status of his case.

With Carlson and his wife sitting on one side of the table and Bonnie and Haiman on the other, Carlson watched as Clein’s glass of vodka seemingly never ran empty throughout the night. Clein had brought a bottle of vodka and polished it off himself as the night wore on. Bonnie, rather timid in that she only spoke when she felt she was allowed to by Clein, began talking about her background.

“My father is an Episcopalian. He lives in New Hampshire,” she said. “My parents are heavily involved in the church up there.”

“No kidding,” Carlson noted. “We own a home up near there. How ’bout that?”

“I’ve converted to Judaism, though,” Bonnie made a point of saying. “I’m involved in a synagogue in Waterford now. All of our children are being raised under the Jewish faith.” Gloating, Bonnie put her arm around Haiman, smiled, then said, “And it’s all because of him.”

This was an odd conversation. Only a few months before, Beth Ann and Bonnie were involved in a power struggle to win Clein’s love and affection. They were fighting and yelling and having showdowns at various times and places—Clein’s kids had even gotten involved. Moreover, Bonnie had slept with several of her husband’s friends throughout the years, many times while he watched. Furthermore, Clein had been involved in a murder-for-hire plot. Yet here the two of them were, living it up at Carlson’s house as though it were just another normal day.

In a matter of a few months, however, Brian Carlson would find out why the dinner date was so important. Clein had to keep up the facade; he had to make it appear as if he were still actively involved in his clients’ legal matters, when he was actually robbing Carlson and several others blind.

Carlson had a Christmas party at his Connecticut home in mid-December 1995. Friends, neighbors, family and business associates all came. It was festive and friendly. People were caught up with the holiday spirit. At this time, Carlson had no idea that Clein was robbing him. Because the bank hadn’t called looking for mortgage payments, Carlson trusted that Clein was taking care of everything.

The day before the Christmas party, Marilyn Rubitski called Carlson at his Manhattan office to tell him that Clein couldn’t make it to the party. Something had come up, she said.

The next morning, Carlson snuggled up in his favorite chair by his fireplace and unfolded the morning newspaper, and there it was: HAIMAN CLEIN WANTED FOR MURDER; POLICE SEEK OLD SAYBROOK LAWYER.

“Honey,” Carlson yelled into the next room, “someone finally has a good excuse for missing one of our parties.”

“What?”

“Haiman Clein is wanted for murder!”

After the initial shock set in, Mrs. Carlson asked, “What about our twenty-five thousand, Brian? What do we do now?”

The night of the party, neighbors and friends teased Carlson about his involvement with Clein. He was embarrassed, sure; but in truth, what could he do? Carlson was one more on a growing list of financial casualties Clein had accumulated throughout the years.

“It pisses me off that I gave his kid a five-hundred-dollar savings bond at his bar mitzvah. I trusted this man. He used me.”

In the end, Carlson hired another attorney he had chosen out of the Yellow Pages. By chance, it happened to be Richard Paladino, a former partner of Clein’s. First Paladino fixed the real estate problem Carlson had gone to Clein for in the first place; then he recouped the $25,000 Clein had stolen from his client.

In the forty days Clein had spent on the run, he traveled from Connecticut to Indiana to his boyhood home of Miami to, finally, California, where he was set up by his former lover and arrested. But now he was back in New London, facing a judge as—ironically—a criminal instead of a lawyer.

As Clein was brought into court to be arraigned, Bonnie, his loyal wife of two decades, exposed her unrelenting admiration and codependency as she smiled, waved and even blew him a kiss as he sat down next to his attorney, Bob Axelrod.

By the end of the proceedings, Judge Joseph Purtill set Clein’s bond at $1.5 million. With little or no assets left—Clein had $2.81 on him when the FBI took him into custody back in Long Beach—and the bank close to fore-closure on his Waterford home, Clein certainly wasn’t going to make bail.

At an intimidating six feet three inches, Assistant State’s Attorney Paul Murray, at fifty, had a reputation in Connecticut for being one of the toughest prosecutors the state employed. He was stern in his arguments, forthright in his beliefs and convictions, and determined to win cases other lawyers might otherwise give up on when things didn’t go their way. In his two decades as a prosecutor, Murray tried the worst of the worst: drug abusers, murderers, sexual predators.

Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, Murray went to Sacred Heart High School and the University of Connecticut; and served in the Vietnam War. Some said Murray learned his hard ways as a prosecutor working the ghettos of the state’s capital, Hartford, as a police officer for five years while at the same time earning his law degree.

In the early 1980s, the chief state’s attorney had formed a “five-person government corruption SWAT team” that set its sights on organized crime and corruption in state offices. The head of that committee was none other than Kevin Kane, who was now working with Murray and Peter McShane on the Buzz Clinton murder case.

When Kevin Kane went to work for State’s Attorney Robert Satti, who ran the operation in New London before Kane took over in early 1995, he never thought that Murray would one day end up working side by side with him again. After both graduated from the University of Connecticut Law School in the late 1970s, they started out together in Middletown. Since then, they always seemed to run into each other somewhere along the vocation pathway.

Where Murray wore a hat of contempt for rogue cops, serial killers and child predators, at times speaking openly of his determination to rid the streets of such filth, Kane worked in the background quietly, rarely ever speaking out. When Kane went to work in New London as an assistant state’s attorney in 1986, Murray went to Hartford as a special drug prosecutor. But here they were once again, together, getting ready to prosecute one of their own: Haiman Clein.

Recently Detective John Turner had uncovered a source that would eventually help the ED-MCS bust the case open even further.

On March 21, after carefully piecing together Beth Ann’s role in the murder, contacting old friends and relatives, seeking to develop a motive, Turner got hold of Tricia Gaul and ended up with a four-page statement that moved the case into a completely new realm. Tricia and John Gaul were at the forefront of the custody battle between Kim and Buzz and the Carpenters. Tricia could offer an independent source of information not only to reinforce what Cathy White, Mark Despres and Joe Fremut had already stated, but also shed light on Beth Ann’s role.

Around the same time John Turner took Tricia’s statement, he and Reggie Wardell drove over to Dr. Matthew Elgart’s office in Old Saybrook. They had gotten Elgart’s name from someone close to the case who, by sheer coincidence, knew a patient of Elgart’s. Mark Despres had also told them that Clein was hanging around with a “doctor in town” with whom he had snorted cocaine. Turner and Wardell knew that Elgart probably didn’t know much, but he and Clein had been friends. A few simple questions wouldn’t hurt. Maybe he could offer something.

After Elgart’s receptionist alerted the doctor that Turner and Wardell were waiting in the reception area, Elgart appeared and asked them to walk back into the office area.

“I don’t have long…. I have to pick someone up,” Elgart said as they walked.

After walking down a short hallway, Elgart led them into an examination room that held two patients.

“Can we go somewhere a little more private?” Turner asked.

Loudly, so the entire office could hear, Turner and Wardell remembered later that Elgart then began shouting: “I hate cops! I have a real problem with authority figures because they abuse their authority and they pick on minorities.”

Turner and Wardell were beside themselves. Here was a doctor shouting at the top of his lungs in his office at two detectives. It could mean only one thing: Elgart knew more than they thought; he was hiding something.

“We’re just here,” Turner explained quietly, “to get some background information on Haiman Clein. We’ve conducted interviews with people that led us to you. Relax.”

“Maybe I should call an attorney.”

“Who’s your attorney, sir?”

“What are the questions you want to ask me?” Elgart demanded to know. He was still being loud and obnoxious, roaming now from room to room to make communicating more difficult.

“Just some background on Haiman—”

“
What
specific questions do you
want
to ask me? The police, you know, like to twist things.”

“Well, sir, since you’re so adamant,” Turner said a bit more sternly now, “we want to know about your cocaine use with Haiman Clein. And if you have any info about the murder.”

“I do not know anything about Mr. Clein. Haven’t seen him in a year and a half. He was out of control.”

“We know that,” Turner said.

“How was Mr. Clein out of control?” Wardell asked.

“You see…you see how you
twist
things around,” Elgart shouted. Then he walked into the area where his two patients were sitting, shouting along the way, “I hate cops! I hate cops!” Looking directly at both patients, he added, “See, they’re threatening me!”

One patient laughed.

“I want an attorney present before I answer any questions,” Elgart said more seriously.

“Well, maybe you
should
call one.”

“I will consider this.” Then he added, “I hate guns.”

“I hate murder,” Turner shot back immediately. “We are still going to have to speak to you.” Turner handed Elgart his business card. “Call Paul Murray when you’re ready to talk.”

As Turner and Wardell walked out of the office, Turner stopped, turned and offered one last comment: “You’re going to talk to us, Mr. Elgart. You might as well call your attorney and get it over with.”

A few days after Turner and Wardell first spoke to Elgart, Elgart’s lawyer phoned the state’s attorney’s office and indicated that Elgart was ready to talk.

Elgart’s attorney was a small woman. Petite. Docile. Soft-spoken and frail. When she walked into the state’s attorney’s office, Turner explained what they wanted to talk about with her client. She agreed to let Elgart speak, just as long as she could monitor the interview.