II
Standing at the door, jiggling the doorknob, was a strange feeling for Mary Ellen. After getting no response from the landlady, Mary Ellen stepped a few feet back and then threw herself against the door.
But it wouldn’t budge.
After that, she pummeled her shoulder against the door, but her strength was dwindling. At this point, her landlady screamed, “Who is it? What’s going on out there? What’s happening? Who’s there?”
“Please…open the…door,” Mary Ellen said, her words falling short. She was out of breath. Losing blood. Weak. Everything slowing down.
Then she’d get a bit of energy back and become frantic, pleading with her landlady.
During this moment, she had her back turned toward the stairs leading up to her apartment. She had no idea where Ned was or if he was still in the apartment. But as she continued pleading with the landlady, she felt a hand come from around her back and cover her mouth. And then he spoke for what was the first time since the ordeal had begun.
“Be quiet,” Ned whispered in Mary Ellen’s ear. “We have to go back upstairs.”
Mary Ellen’s eyes widened. She couldn’t believe it. Hearing Ned whisper in her ear like that was one of the weirdest feelings Mary Ellen said she’d ever had in her life. Ned had said it in a way that made her think he believed she was a willing participant in it all. She felt as though he was playing a game and he believed that she liked it.
“Let’s go. Don’t say anything,” he said.
III
It wasn’t once or twice that Ned had violent thoughts of rendering females unconscious in order to sexually arouse and stimulate himself. He admitted later that it was “every time I look at or talk to a female.”
Every time.
Living inside his head for thirty years or more, Ned added later, were these images of women disabled by the violence he had perpetrated for the sole purpose of sexual gratification. He wrote how he would mentally rehearse this scenario dozens of times a day. He’d sit and think about how to do it. He’d drive around in his car and go through it, over and over. He’d pull up to a stoplight, see a nice-looking female in a car next to him, and imagine that she was lying naked from the waist up on a bed or couch, unconscious, indisposed, there for his pleasure. It was such an inherent part of his consciousness that, by one point in his teens and college years, he would go out of his way, he wrote, miss a party, stay up until the wee hours of the night, to see a movie like Psycho (the shower scene), Frenzy, No Way to Treat a Lady…The Boston Strangler, or any James Bond film where at least one beautiful spy is killed….
Beauty and death. For Ned, they were like chocolate and peanut butter.
Ned was not an uneducated man. He wasn’t incapable of knowing that these thoughts were abnormal. These fantasies he had, he hadn’t told anyone about them.
Nor had he sought treatment.
In a way, I guess we can say, Ned liked these thoughts.
In one letter to a judge, Ned wondered what it would be like to have an EKG machine monitoring [his] heart rate while he sat and viewed some of the films in which women were killed. Alone with a female, he admitted, these thoughts were all that consumed his mind. Ninety-nine out of a hundred times, he wrote, he could contain himself. But it was that one time, he said, when he couldn’t manage the urge, that usually got him into trouble. Unfortunately for Mary Ellen, tonight she was that 1 percent.
IV
After demanding that she be quiet, Ned tried pulling Mary Ellen up the stairs back toward her apartment. He needed to finish the job. She could identify him. She knew where he worked. His name. What he looked like. If she lived, there was no getting out of this.
Mary Ellen wasn’t about to give up now, not after all she had done to survive. Her landlady wasn’t going to open the door, however. She was possibly too scared or just didn’t want to get involved. The old woman had no idea, of course, that a maniac was on the opposite side of the door trying to kill her tenant.
Or maybe she did.
Either way, as Ned tried forcing Mary Ellen up the stairs, she managed to scratch him in the eyes again.
He winced. Went down. Put his hands over his face.
“Who’s there with you?” the landlady asked.
Mary Ellen yelled, “Help me…open the door!”
“Be quiet,” she heard Ned say again.
“Help me…open the door.”
“Who’s there with you?”
Ned kept grabbing at Mary Ellen, but he kept losing his grip because of all the blood.
When he realized he wasn’t going to be able to pull her up the stairs, Ned ran up the stairs by himself back into the apartment.
A moment later, he was gone.
18
I
Mary Ellen was able to stand and grab the doorknob to her landlady’s apartment and rattle it. Her hand, however, kept slipping off the handle because they were “all wet.”
Full of blood.
I really must have gotten his eyes good, she thought.
Then, standing there, with only a door to safety between her and the landlady, everything went quiet. Mary Ellen didn’t hear the landlady and realized that Ned was gone. An eerie silence. It was just Mary Ellen. Alone. She could feel herself getting weaker and her body drooping. She looked down. Her dress was all “crumpled around her waist and full of blood.” She then saw the holes in her body once again with “blood [still] spurting out of them.” Her legs started to give out. Her knees buckled. She began to slide down against the door.
This is really crazy, she thought. This only happens in movies. I’m inches away from safety and I’m going to die right here.
Her life had come down to a door. A woman scared of letting her in. She was going to die because she couldn’t get through a damn wooden door.
II
The landlady must have seen the cops pull up, because she finally opened the door as two cruisers arrived out front. When she heard the door open, Mary Ellen pushed her way inside and said, “Call the police. Close the door right away. He’s still up there.”
When the landlady didn’t respond, Mary Ellen closed and locked the door.
“The police are coming,” the landlady said as Mary Ellen, bloodied, topless, and hysterical, fell into the landlady’s apartment and started stumbling around from room to room. Dizzy and unsteady. Totally out of it. Fading in and out.
Pulling herself up off the floor, Mary Ellen found her way into her landlady’s kitchen and collapsed on the linoleum floor. What seemed like only moments later, a policeman appeared over Mary Ellen and began asking questions. Seeing a silhouette of the policeman standing over her, Mary Ellen later recalled, was a relief. She had won.
She survived.
III
Just before police arrived, Ned ran back upstairs and grabbed Mary Ellen’s keys—a souvenir, perhaps, which was something he had done in the past—pushed a window open and, swinging from the upper windowsill like a monkey, jumped from the roof, over the asphalt walkway. He landed on his feet, like a cat, on the grass out front—as luck would have it, right near his car. Within a few moments, Ned was on his way out of the neighborhood as more police were arriving from the opposite direction.
IV
Mary Ellen was hurt more severely than she knew. Survival wasn’t a given. When Officer Gary Van Loon approached her as she lay on her landlady’s kitchen floor, he and his partner noticed that her dress, “laying across her genital area,” was covered with blood. The area of the floor around Mary Ellen was one large pool. There was also a great deal of blood on her hands, Van Loon later wrote in his report.
Noticing the two puncture wounds below her breasts, Van Loon immediately applied pressure in order to stop the bleeding.
Van Loon’s partner, Officer Kayne, came into the kitchen with a first-aid kit and wrapped the wounds until an ambulance arrived. Another officer dashed upstairs to see if Mary Ellen’s attacker was still inside the apartment. After a careful
, gun-drawn search, it was clear he had slipped out a window and taken off. The drifting curtain in the open window was the only sign of his departure.
Mary Ellen was transported to Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Saddle Brook. Upstairs, inside her apartment, detectives working the scene noticed several things that caught their attention immediately. Mary Ellen’s black bra was on the floor, but it was unknown, Van Loon wrote, if it was torn off or taken off. The telephone jack in the kitchen was ripped from the wall. Mary Ellen’s bed was “open,” the bedspread on the floor. The nightstand and lamp Mary Ellen had next to her bed had been knocked over, as other pieces of furniture were spewn [sic] around.
And no weapon was located.
19
I
As she struggled to stay conscious in the emergency room, doctors secured Mary Ellen’s wounds and gave her a sedative so she could fall asleep and get some rest. This, while they figured out if they could save her life.
Several moments later, as Mary Ellen started coming to, she saw a man heading into her room. His hair was cut in a fashion similar to Ned’s. Mary Ellen, groggy and drunk from the sedative, believed he was even the same height, that he looked like Ned.
Oh, my God… (“I was terrified it was him.”)
Whenever Mary Ellen became frightened, she held her breath. It was part of being consumed by fear and anxiety that she had lived with most of her adult life.
There was another man behind the man who looked like Ned; they were heading for her. Holding her breath, Mary Ellen realized they were detectives and she started to cry, pleading, “Please find him. He’s going to kill somebody. He tried to kill me.”
Ned was like a snapshot in her mind. Doped up and suffering post-traumatic stress, she rattled off a description: “A blue paisley design on a red tie…white oxford cloth, button-down shirt. A navy blue suit.” He had “California good looks,” she said later. “Blond hair and blue eyes.”
Doctors weren’t going to allow such nonsense: cops questioning Mary Ellen so soon. She was in no condition to talk. “You must leave this room right now,” her doctor said.
II
The way he felt, it was like running up a flight of stairs. Or taking an entire bottle, he explained, of “pep pills.” A combination of “an electric shock and having someone sneak up behind you” and startle “the daylights out of you.” That was how Ned explained it—that sensation when “I felt her throat in my hands.” He wasn’t talking about Mary Ellen. He was speaking of another woman—a woman he had killed four years before he met Mary Ellen. Like a hunter, he claimed it was his first kill. But cops, investigators, and profilers in the years to come would beg to differ.
As he later wrote to a judge and described these feelings, Ned said he could barely contain himself while writing the words. He could feel that adrenaline once again just writing about it, racing through [his] heart, hands and legs.
Words on a page had done it for him. He was picturing it all as he sat in his cell and wrote. Doing the actual deed of murder, Ned explained, was another thing entirely. Actually strangling a woman, he said, was nothing like it was portrayed in films. It was practically impossible to kill someone with your bare hands, he wrote. Sure, he continued, a football player could probably do it because he had “huge hands.” But Ned was certainly no football player.
He had killed a woman and gotten away with it for several years before he met and attacked Mary Ellen. He had floated the notion in his head of getting “professional help,” but it had been, for him, such a “terrible experience,” and he was “so thankful” not to be arrested, that although he still had those crazy, violent, sexual “urges,” he had “convinced” himself that he would “never allow” a situation to develop where the potential was there for him to “lose control ever again.”
That was, of course, until he met Mary Ellen.
III
As he pulled into his driveway after attacking Mary Ellen, Ned had to hope that she would die in the hospital. Because if Mary Ellen Renard lived, Ned Snelgrove was going to jail.
IV
It was four in the morning when Diana Jansen, Mary Ellen’s youngest daughter, heard what had happened to her mother. The hospital called. “Your mom’s been attacked,” a nurse said.
Diana had a nine-month-old child and was pregnant with her second. She didn’t need drama. Not now. Her first child had been born premature—one would have to think it was because of all the stress she had been under her entire life, which had already been, as Dianna described it, “unbelievable.”
So this is how it’s going to end, Diana thought after hanging up the phone.
How scripted. How perfect, really. It was as if their entire lives had led up to this one moment. After everything, here was Mom, killed by an attacker.
V
When the fog left and Diana realized that her mother had been stabbed by a stranger and could die, she frantically began looking for a way to get from her home in Pennsylvania, where she lived with her husband and child, to New Jersey. She needed a babysitter. Oh, my God, she thought, oh, my God. How am I going to get there fast enough?
Then the spasms of guilt washed over Diana. I shouldn’t have left her alone down there…. Why did I not take her up here with me? (“I’ve been guilt-ridden my whole life,” Diana said later. “This just escalated that feeling.”)
Diana called the hospital. She didn’t know what else to do. Her mother needed her. In many ways, Diana felt as if she had taken care of Mary Ellen.
Now her mother was in the hospital after being violently attacked, and no one was with her.
“Mom?” Diana said when she heard a voice on the line. “That you?”
Mary Ellen was crying. She didn’t know what to say. Perhaps she couldn’t speak.
“Mom, I love you. I’m on my way down there. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
20
I
The Elmwood Park Police Department (EPPD) had a potential serial rapist/murderer on their hands, a man who had just attacked a woman in her home and taken off with her keys. It was clear from the way in which Mary Ellen had described the attack that the guy was no novice. He had possibly done it before.
And would probably do it again.
As the investigation got under way back at her apartment, Mary Ellen wasn’t going to be much help. She was in and out of consciousness.
Ned had victimized a woman who was already a victim, which was perhaps his plan from the moment he had met Mary Ellen. He picked up on her vulnerability. Sensed it. Exploited it. For a guy like Ned, who could be smooth and deliberate without ever giving himself away, Mary Ellen was easy prey. He didn’t need to know that she had been mistreated her entire married life. It was written on her face. There in every word she spoke. Every mannerism.
II
When Diana showed up later that morning, she was told her mother was in surgery. There had been a problem. They were trying to save her life. She had been stabbed pretty badly. One of the wounds was deep.
Diana wondered what she could do.
Pray.
While Diana was waiting for her mom to come out of surgery, her uncle, Mary Ellen’s brother, showed up. (“He started right in,” Diana recalled, “with blaming her. ‘Who was she out with? What is she doing now?’”)
Diana couldn’t take it. Here was a man of the cloth talking as if Mary Ellen was the one to blame for being attacked by some animal. It was disrespectful, and Mary Ellen could be dead.
Listening to her uncle, Diana snapped. “Shut the f*** up,” she screamed. “Enough!”
She had heard it all before. Condemnation for the way Mary Ellen dressed or the way she walked or the way she talked. It was sickening for Diana. No matter what, even if her mother had invited the guy into the apartment and presented herself to him for sex, once she said no, once she said stop, that was it.
How in the heck could it be her fault? (“I lost it,” Diana remembered. “I went at him full force.”)
&nb
sp; III
The doctors came out. They explained that Mary Ellen’s heart had stopped once during the operation. But they had stabilized her and she was doing “OK.”
“Will she make it?”
They were sure she would.
IV
Later on that same morning, detectives asked Diana if she would take a ride with them over to the apartment and answer a few questions. “Sure,” she said.
Mary Ellen was recovering from surgery. Diana wasn’t going to get a chance to see her until later on that day.
One of the detectives led Diana into the apartment entrance—and it was there where Diana saw the immensity and violence of the attack. Blood was everywhere. On the walls. The floor. The doorknob. Going up the stairs, leading into Mary Ellen’s apartment. It was a wonder she was still alive.
Diana gasped. “I’m kind of hysterical,” she said later, crying while recalling the memory. “The blood. It was all over the place.”
There was blood on the bed, Diana said. The sheets and blankets and other items in the room were scattered. Cops were walking around. Taking photographs. Searching through drawers. Looking everything over.
“Do you see anything that might be missing?” one of the detectives asked Diana.
“No,” Diana said.
“Nothing?”
“I have no idea.”
“Do you know where your mom was heading out to last night?”
“No.”
“Maybe who she’s been hanging around with?”
“No.”
Diana had a full plate of family life back home. She had been to the hospital during her current pregnancy regarding a few complications she had been experiencing. It was all she could do to keep her own life on track, let alone keep tabs on her mother. She spoke to her mother quite often, but Mary Ellen wasn’t one to give Diana a rundown of what she was doing.
I'll Be Watching You Page 6
