Lethal Guardian (9 page)

Answers would come, but not until the ED-MCS began unraveling Buzz’s brief marriage to Kim Carpenter Clinton. There had to be a connection with Despres, Fremut or both. The task now was to find out what it was. In addition, who was the
real
Buzz Clinton? Cops had put together a file as thick as an encyclopedia on him with allegations of everything from rape to theft to drug abuse. But that was it: they were “allegations.” Former friends, girlfriends and an ex-wife, who had all been scorned by Buzz at some point, had made claims against him, but were they true?

The time had come to find out exactly what had been going on in Buzz’s life around the time of his murder, where detectives assumed they’d find a connection to Despres and Fremut. And as a portrait of Buzz’s life the past few years emerged, a disturbing and sinister murder-for-hire plot rose to the surface—one that detectives themselves could never have imagined.

For anyone who had known Anson Clinton Jr., or crossed his path throughout his twenty-eight years, he was called Buzz. Many assumed the name was given to him because of a hearty appetite for booze and drugs. “He
was
always buzzed,” Shawn Butterfield later recalled. “That’s how he got the name.”

Actually, the nickname Buzz wasn’t given during some keg party in the woods one night by a bunch of hoodlums sitting around a campfire funneling beers. Nor did a drinking buddy lean over one night at a bar and say, “You’re buzzed all the time. We’ll call you Buzz!”

No. The truth of the matter was much more innocent.

Buck Clinton was in Arizona on a wrestling scholarship when his blue-eyed, blond-haired son Anson was born on January 7, 1966. Buck and Dee had been married a year. Dee, at twenty, couldn’t afford to make the trip after she’d given birth, so she stayed in Connecticut, where she lived with Buck’s parents. A few days after the birth, Dee sent Buck some photographs of little Anson, along with a note: “I’ll call you in a few days.”

“Think of a nickname,” Dee told Buck a few days later. He was sitting around with three of his buddies envying the photographs Dee had sent. “We need a nickname,” Dee urged, “because I am
not
calling him
Anson
.”

It was her husband’s name. His father’s name. A Clinton family name that had been passed down. And Dee hated it.

“We’ll come up with something,” Buck promised.

A few more days passed, and Buck sent Dee three names.

“The other two names I cannot even remember to this day,” Dee said later. “I picked Buzz because it was one of the names on the list.”

The Clintons moved to Old Lyme when Buzz was in the fourth grade. He was diagnosed with dyslexia shortly thereafter and participated in a Connecticut learning-disabled program for six years, where he overcame his disability. In 1985, six weeks before graduation, Buzz dropped out of East Lyme High School, but he took his GED and passed the test sometime later. Despite having a promising future ahead of him in wrestling, he followed in his father’s footsteps and became an ironworker.

During his high-school years, Buzz was scrawny. Very petite. And generally stayed to himself. “He was a loner,” a friend recalled. Because of his size and build, Buzz was pushed into joining the gymnastics team, where he excelled. But it was wrestling he loved most. Buck was a well-respected wrestling coach of Wethersfield High School at the time Buzz had dropped out of school, and he had been an all-American himself.

After the realization that he couldn’t make a career out of wrestling, Buzz began taking seriously his passion for spinning records. Soon he was getting jobs around town under the name Rent-A-Buzz-Entertainment. While doing that, he worked hard on getting his ironworker’s union book. By the time he was twenty, in 1986, Buzz was working with his father, who had been an ironworker since 1967.

He worked in Waterbury, Hartford, Bridgeport, Connecticut, and even in Iowa. Wherever there was work, Buzz went. But when the bottom fell out of the steel industry, Buzz always returned to the Old Stagecoach Road home of his mom and dad.

Some friends recalled that Buzz didn’t seem to have a problem with alcohol or drugs at this time. He more or less had a few drinks and took a hit of a joint at a party once in a while. He wasn’t bouncing off the walls or crashing cars. He was just Buzz: seemingly happy all the time and always working on some sort of “deal” that would better his life.

“He had no big reputation for being a tough guy,” one friend remembered. “He thought he was tough, but he never really gave anyone any trouble. More talk than anything else.”

To others, Buzz was someone who liked to exaggerate the truth. “A bullshitter,” Shawn Butterfield later said, “to be exact.”

One day, however, Buzz proved that his tall tales held some truth.

While Buzz and Shawn were installing pools one afternoon, Buzz took Shawn aside; knowing that Shawn was an avid music lover and guitar player, Buzz said, “Would you like to meet Ritchie Blackmore?”

Ritchie Blackmore was the lead guitar player and one of the founders of Deep Purple, one of the largest-selling rock acts in the world. There wasn’t a budding guitar player alive who hadn’t asked his guitar teacher to show him “Smoke on the Water,” Deep Purple’s first big international hit.

Shawn looked at Buzz and thought,
You’re so full of shit.
Then, figuring he’d call Buzz on his lie, he said, “Sure. Just tell me when and where.”

“Great!” Buzz said. “Meet me in Redding tomorrow at the soccer field.”

That Friday, Shawn showed up at a Redding soccer field and was amazed to see Buzz running around the field playing soccer with several men Shawn couldn’t recognize from a distance—but all of whom had waist-long hair.

“I told you, you son of a bitch,” Buzz said when he greeted Shawn.

Butterfield was speechless. Here was Buzz playing soccer with Ritchie Blackmore and several of Blackmore’s friends and roadies. It was remarkable. Not only because Shawn was meeting Ritchie Blackmore, one of his idols, but that Buzz had been telling the truth all along.

Buzz became involved heavily with alcohol and drugs in the early 1990s. His mother and father knew it. His friends knew it. And most around him knew it. Alcohol became a friend to Buzz. He had been hanging around area bars and nightclubs and, perhaps like a lot of people, got caught up in the moment. The late ’80s were a maze of clubhopping, dance music and booze. Cocaine flowed like talcum powder. The drug made it out into the suburbs and became somewhat of a social statement for the middle class. Everybody, it seemed, was doing it.

Now in his early twenties, Buzz would live out on his own for a while, then go crawling back to his mother and father when the money ran out. Even though the Clintons now had two young children in the house—Suzanne, who was seventeen years younger than Buzz, and Billy, nineteen years younger—they always found room for Buzz.

But Dee wasn’t naive or easily fooled. The deal had always been: As long as Buzz stayed in the house, he would live under her rules. If he couldn’t, Dee would throw him out.

One night, Buzz had come home complaining of severe abdominal pain. “I’m sick, Ma,” he said, holding his stomach as if he’d been punched.

Dee had had it by this point. Buzz hadn’t paid his rent for some time. But as Dee carried on about how irresponsible Buzz was, he fell to the floor, still holding his stomach. Then he began vomiting.

“See!” Dee fumed. “That’s what you get for drinking all night long.”

“Ma, you have to believe me. I haven’t been drinking.”

“Yeah, Buzz. Right. That’s what all the drunks say,” Dee said as she made her way to her bedroom, closed the door and went to bed.

Around 2:00
A.M
., Buck woke Dee out of a dead sleep and said, “Buzz is still up. He needs you,” adding, “He’s calling out your name. Something’s wrong.”

When Dee entered Buzz’s room, she saw him stretched out on the floor in a fetal position. “He was crying,” she recalled. “Not loud, but softly, as if he was in too much pain to cry any louder.”

Dee then walked over and put her hand on his head.

“I’m dying,” Buzz whispered.

Something is dreadfully wrong,
Dee thought—and it had nothing to do with alcohol.

“I’ll take you to the hospital, Buzz,” Dee said, caressing his forehead and tearstained face. “It’s going to be okay, honey.”

“I can’t move, Ma.”

Dee tried dressing him. Then,
Forget this shit,
she thought after several failed attempts to get his pants on,
I’m calling an ambulance.

Sometime later, doctors diagnosed Buzz with peritonitis, which meant “an inflammation of the membrane lining the cavity of the abdomen.” There was a good chance, doctors added, that his appendix was swollen and, possibly, had ruptured.

If that was the case, Buzz was in big trouble.

When Dee showed up at the hospital, doctors informed her that if he hadn’t gotten help when he did, he would have been dead within a few hours. His appendix, they said, would have exploded inside his body.

The morning after emergency surgery, Buzz called home.

“Ma, bring my cigarettes, lighter and my special blanket when you come in today.”

“Sure,” Dee said. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay. Sore, but okay.”

When Dee spoke to Buzz’s doctors later that day, one of them blasted her. “Do you realize, Mrs. Clinton, that you should have had this young man in here two days ago?”

“Young man? He’s twenty-three years old! He can take care of himself.”

“Do you understand that he’s really not out of the woods yet?”

Dee was surprised. She had assumed everything was okay. The operation went well. Buzz was recuperating just fine.

“What do you mean?”

“If he makes it through the next forty-eight hours, he’ll live. But he’s not anywhere near ‘okay’ just yet.”

Dee had beaten herself up enough already for not believing Buzz when he came home and said he was sick. She didn’t need some doctor who looked young enough to be her son making her feel even worse.

When she entered Buzz’s room, he was, she said later, “pretty doped up on morphine.”

“Mom,” Buzz said softly, “I can’t even die of natural causes.”

Buzz had been at a low point in his life. He was unemployed and had no future. He wasn’t really sure of what he wanted to do with his life. With everything that had happened the past few days, Buzz had had some time to reflect. The morphine—a narcotic named after the Greek god Morpheus, “the god of dreams”—surely didn’t help. A pain reliever and sleep inducer, the drug, sometimes compared to heroin, caused depression and anxiety. It was obvious to Dee that Buzz was disappointed that he’d let her down. He should’ve been somebody by now. He should have made Dee and Buck proud of him.

Dee began gently pushing Buzz’s sweaty hair away from his eyes. It was quiet in the room. Peaceful.

“Listen to me, Buzz Clinton,” Dee said, “you were sent here to so something special. You can’t get out of this world until you get it done. Just remember that God has a plan for you.”

It was a moment between mother and son that would stay with Dee forever. She said later that Buzz just looked up at her and nodded when she said it.

“He understood what I meant.”

Even with rising unemployment rates and downturns in business, there are three types of parking lots jammed with cars: casinos, bars and strip clubs. People always seem to find extra money when it comes to gambling, drinking and sex.

Male exotic-revue dance nights became the craze during the latter part of the 1980s and beginning of the ’90s. Bars and nightclubs, on certain nights during the week, were inundated with magazine-ad-looking males with chiseled arms, legs and six-pack abs, wearing as little clothing as possible. Women went wild. What had been a “men’s only” type of extracurricular activity became watercooler conversations of soccer moms and females everywhere.

By the time Buzz entered his early twenties, he’d grown into an attractive man. He wasn’t the scrawny DJ from Old Lyme anymore; he was the handsome, gruff guy with just the right amount of stubble on his face who drove around town in his tow truck. “He reminded me of Charles Bronson,” Dee later said.

When the opportunity to dance came along, Buzz saw it as merely one more way to make a buck. He was an ironworker and a pool man. He sold firewood, did bodywork and mechanic work on cars. He towed cars. Why not try dancing?

It wasn’t as though he’d had a dream of becoming a Chippendale, touring up and down the East Coast. It was that the opportunity presented itself one day, and Buzz went for it. He saw dollar signs, plain and simple. An old friend was running a service for male dancers and asked Buzz one night if he wanted to dance. Buzz took him up on the offer. It was a few times a month at the local watering hole. Shake your ass. Take some clothes off. And let the ladies slip cash into your G-string. Most men who had the looks and body that Buzz had would have jumped at the chance.

Almost everyone in Old Lyme and East Lyme knew Buzz, for good or bad. He was that kind of memorable person. Still, with all that was being learned about Buzz by the ED-MCS during the weeks and months following his murder, there was a part of him that didn’t quite fit into the portrait detectives had developed. To those who had been scorned or ripped off by Buzz, he was a selfish liar who cared only about himself.

Nonetheless, there were times when Buzz’s unselfish acts of pure love revealed a totally different person.

One night, Dee got a phone call in the wee hours of the morning. It had woken everyone in the house up—including Buzz. A friend of the family had gotten into a fight with her boyfriend and was calling for a ride. Apparently, the young girl had been at home with her live-in boyfriend. While they were drinking, they had gotten into a fight that was teetering on becoming violent.

The woman told Dee she’d taken off from the house and just started walking. Hours later, she was far away from home, lost and scared.

Buzz stood up as Dee talked to the woman. “I’m going to get her,” he said, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“Sit down,” Dee said. “You just relax.”

Dee had little tolerance for the drunk and disorderly. Her disgust of her own son’s behavior at times was a testament to that fact. And after considering the woman’s predicament, Dee surmised she was in no real immediate danger. Her problem, Dee thought, was that she was intoxicated and had likely overreacted to the situation she was in. To Dee, it was the same old story with people who drank.

“I’m going to get her,” Buzz repeated while slipping on his shoes.

“Are you crazy? It’s two in the morning. She’ll be fine. Let her walk home. It’ll do her some good.”

“I don’t care, Ma,” Buzz snapped. “I don’t leave ladies out in the cold in the middle of the night.”

“Well, she’s not a lady,” Dee said. “She’s a
drunk
!”

“So what? She had too much to drink. I’m going….”

Years later, recalling this episode, Dee said, “Buzz could never say a bad word about anybody. It wasn’t in him. He knew this girl needed help. That’s all he cared about. It didn’t matter to him—as it had to me—what she had done or how much she’d had to drink. What mattered was getting her home safely.”