Читать книгу I'll Be Watching You - M. William Phelps - Страница 33

I

The first assistant prosecutor in Passaic County, Dennis Calo, was in charge of indicting Ned Snelgrove. From a prosecutorial standpoint, the case against Ned appeared to be ironclad. Talking to the press after Ned’s arrest, Calo said, “He helped her start her car and then agreed to follow her home to make sure she got home OK. He then asked if he could come in and clean up [and] tried to rape her and she struggled. He stabbed her twice in the chest with a knife.”

The Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office, in which Calo was also the chief of the investigation unit, had photographs, Calo explained to reporters, of Mary Ellen’s—a name they were not releasing at this time—neck and the injuries she had sustained from the knife wounds. Calo had secured Mary Ellen’s medical records. She had identified Ned in a photo lineup. They had a latent fingerprint matching Ned’s. Even if the argument came down to whether Mary Ellen invited Ned in for sex, there was no doubt Ned had stabbed and strangled her.

And then there was Ned’s past. Four years ago. That other case haunting investigators who believed Ned was their guy. Ned had been questioned. Cops had him on radar. They had always believed he had committed the crime, but they didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him. Maybe now they did.

II

EPPD Detective Robert Kassai was a street-smart cop with seventeen years on the job when he met up with Mary Ellen Renard—a job that would span several decades by the time he retired in 2000 to run a successful campaign for town council. He had dealt with guys like Ned throughout his career. For a number of years, Kassai had worked with the Crimes Against Women and Children Unit, where, he said, his passion for law enforcement was deeply rooted. There was something about Ned that struck Kassai right away, he recalled. It was a feeling he had about him that led the veteran cop to believe Ned fit into a certain, rare category of serial sex offenders. Kassai relayed that he had a “sixth sense that we had a predator on our hands. Somebody that’s capable of doing it again and again.”

While going through Ned’s personal possessions shortly after his arrest, Kassai found a business card in Ned’s wallet. It was from a detective in Woodbridge, New Jersey, near Middlesex County, south of Bergen County, where Ned was living at present. Although it wasn’t a far drive for Ned, Detective Kassai wondered why he had the business card to begin with. So he picked up the phone and dialed the detective’s number.

“We’re looking at him for a murder down here,” the detective said.

Kassai sat back in his chair, shook his head. He knew it. Had sensed it. Ned was not some sort of random attacker.

She was a Rutgers student. Ned’s age. She had been strangled. Stabbed. And posed.

This victim in Middlesex County, like Mary Ellen, fit into Ned’s preferred victim pool perfectly. More than that, Kassai was onto something. Getting the investigating officer on the phone shortly after finding the card in Ned’s wallet, Kassai asked him why they never arrested Ned.

“We couldn’t tie him to the murder scene,” the cop said. They had questioned Ned. Followed him. Pestered him. But they couldn’t find any physical evidence to link him to the crime. In 1983, when the woman was killed, and even in 1987, as investigators began digging into the crime scene at Mary Ellen’s, DNA was not a major part of the investigator’s toolbox. “You had to do footwork,” Kassai recalled. “You didn’t have science the way you have science today.” So even if Ned had left a hair, skin tissue, or bodily fluids behind in 1983, there was no way to tie him to the crime scene.

This new information sent Kassai back out to speak with Ned’s coworkers and friends at HP. “All I heard,” Kassai told me years later, “as I began to try to get some background information on the guy was that he was a ‘lovely man,’ ‘nice guy,’ et cetera. His coworkers called him a ‘polite guy,’ ‘a gentle, kind person.’ It was almost as if you were dealing with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

III

Kassai began asking questions back at Kracker’s, where Ned and Mary Ellen had met. He was trying to find out all he could about Ned. He had heard Ned liked to brag about playing golf. That he’d talk to people in the bar about his swing, his handicap, boast to the females about how good an athlete he was. “The thing is,” Kassai said, “he had never golfed a day in his life. Ned was cool. Smooth. But when you started to push Ned’s buttons, boy, did he get annoyed.”

When Kassai and Textor interviewed Ned, he was careful about saying anything that was going to come back to him. But when Kassai made an accusation, Ned became a bit heated, like he wanted to say something, but he thought it better to control his emotions. For Kassai, this meant something. “He struck me as a [chronic BSer], but not in…how can I say this, not in [a] liar’s sense. He was a con artist. Smart. Very intelligent.”

In Ned, he saw a predatory nature. He could tell Ned worked hard at what he did. It wasn’t a random crime or something that happened on the spur of the moment (as Ned himself later said).

Ned was a hunter. He preyed on a certain type of female. He thought things through carefully, deciding on the best way to carry out his plans. “Ned reminded me of a serial sex offender I had just arrested,” Kassai recalled. “Staturewise, anybody pushed to a point can overpower anybody.” Ned was five feet nine inches tall. He weighed in at about 170 pounds, had blond hair then, and kept up an outward appearance of a pretty boy. Ned presented himself to the world as a clean-cut intellectual who cared about his hygiene and appearance. This was clear from his colleagues at Hewlett, who spoke admiringly of him.

“And yet, when we searched his apartment in Passaic,” Kassai remarked, “it was a s***house.” He lived like a slob. Stuff all over the place. A pack rat. “He gave the impression and dressed and maintained an appearance as if he was running a million-dollar operation, like you’d walk into his apartment and see thirty or forty expensive suits.” But Ned had hardly any clothes. His apartment looked as though a burglar had ransacked the joint looking for something specific.

The search of Ned’s apartment told Kassai a lot about who Ned was in his private life. But also, while digging through Ned’s things, Kassai found what was possibly the weapon Ned had used to stab Mary Ellen. It wasn’t a knife. Inside the apartment, they found an “awl,” Kassai said later, “like a seaman’s pocketknife—a knife that sailors carried, with a blade on one side and a pick of some sort on the other.”

IV

When word got back to Ned about the investigation, he went silent. He said he wasn’t going to talk to anyone. He demanded cops speak to him through his new attorney, John Bruno, a man Ned’s parents in Connecticut—including his father, a seafaring man who liked to tie knots and collect sailor’s tools—had recently hired and, according to one source, “had spent a ton of money on.”