Читать книгу I'll Be Watching You - M. William Phelps - Страница 37

I

By April 1988, Ned’s attorney, John Bruno, knew more about his client than he had perhaps wanted to know. An attorney from Middlesex County had visited Bruno’s office one afternoon, bringing with him information that didn’t bode all too well for his client. “The method of attack,” the prosecutor explained to Bruno, talking about Mary Ellen’s case, “is strikingly similar to an unsolved murder at Rutgers.”

There was that case again, hovering in Ned’s past. Even if he hadn’t committed the crime, the way in which the murder had been carried out, was almost identical to that of the attack on Mary Ellen. With that, Bruno wondered how he was going to get around explaining the case away. Ned was in trouble down the road when his case went to court. And yet, Bruno realized, Ned’s network of supporters seemed to grow with each passing week. People were coming forward to support him. Promising to walk into court and explain that he wasn’t some psychopath who could kill people and attack them with knives. It just wasn’t in his character.

II

What was it about that Rutgers murder that made investigators certain Ned had been involved? “He could be a likeable guy—piano player, salesman, captain of the softball team, a guy’s guy,” Bruno explained to me years later. “He was always organizing the parties, the softball games. He seemed like somebody who always wanted to have a company picnic. Not some quiet little nerd who sits in the corner and is afraid to face people socially.”

According to the women Bruno spoke to, Ned was “charming” and always “polite.” Bruno had to go to Ned with the allegations from Middlesex, explaining to him that the Middlesex murder had the parallels of a repeat offender, and was intrinsically similar in signature to the attack on Mary Ellen. Bruno explained that Ned had been on Middlesex’s radar for some time, but they had no evidence to arrest him. They had even questioned Ned a few times, but they had to release him due to the fact that they had nothing with which to charge him.

After Bruno went to Ned and explained the situation, Ned thought about it. The bottom line was this: What if, while he was in jail awaiting trial on the Mary Ellen Renard charge, Middlesex came up with some sort of new evidence? Ned knew he had killed the woman in Middlesex. He thought he had gotten away with it. He believed he left no evidence. But what if something surfaced?

Murder one. The death penalty. Add the Mary Ellen Renard attack to the Middlesex case and he would face death if a jury found him guilty.

“It’s something to think about,” Bruno told Ned.

On the other hand, with the right plea bargain, Ned realized, he could avoid a murder charge in Middlesex and walk out of prison one day—if only he admitted to it and accepted a lesser charge.

And so Ned came clean. He admitted to Bruno that he committed the murder, but, of course, it was the same old story: self-defense. The Rutgers woman had come on to him, and when he refused her advances, he had no other choice but to strangle and stab her to death.

But she had forced him to do it, of course. What was he supposed to do?

The murder had occurred in 1983. Same set of circumstances.

“He looks like a Boy Scout,” Fred Schwanwede told the court during one of Ned’s plea hearings. “He doesn’t look at all dangerous. He looks like he could be the boy next door.”

Wasn’t that what made Ned even more dangerous—that he looked like and could portray the friendly neighbor?

The Good Samaritan.

The salesman.

Softball player.

Life of the party.

Ned didn’t have that evil look of a serial killer, or the rough look of a multiple murderer. In public, he was warm and funny and forthcoming. Just a pleasure to be around.

Ted Bundy redux, in other words. Bundy, who chose mostly college girls and worked his way into their good graces with his all-American pretty-boy looks and charming demeanor, liked to sexually mutilate his victims. In one case, he broke into the dorm room of Lynda Ann Healy, a university student, knocked her unconscious, dressed her in jeans and a T-shirt, wrapped her in a sheet, and tossed her into his car without anyone seeing. Healy’s body was found about a year later—she had been decapitated and dismembered.