“What?”
“I just saw her a few days ago.”
“Huh?”
“I know a Carmen Rodriguez who is missing,” Carrel explained.
Upon further talking to Carrel, the CSP learned that she had seen Carmen with Ned at Kenney’s on the night she went missing. If there was any reluctance on the CSP’s part regarding Carrel’s story, she gave spot-on descriptions of both Ned and Carmen, down to the growth on the side of Ned’s neck and the long, black “Nancy Sinatra” boots Carmen wore. Like many of the girls from Kenney’s, Carrel’s name popped up on that receipt of Ned’s because she filled out an application for Ned and was paid $25.
The bank, however, refused to cash the check.
“I still have it,” Carrel said.
“Great,” the detective answered. “I’ll need that.”
“Ned gave me a ride home one night,” Carrel said.
“Anything happen?”
“He tried raping me.”
III
On January 23, 2002, Patrick Gaffney was with some of his coworkers discussing Ned’s case when he realized that during the search the CSP had ended up with documents of Ned’s that had not been part of the warrant. So he phoned Ned.
“Hey, listen. I was just reviewing what was taken at your house during the search and seizure and I realized there was an item here that should not have been taken. I was hoping I could meet you at, maybe, the Olympia Diner and give you back some items we didn’t mean to take.”
The idea was to get Ned out of the house. Break that bond of him being in his comfort zone. Maybe pull him out of his element and get him on neutral ground. Gaffney figured if he could get Ned alone, he could work on him and possibly get him to open up.
But Ned was “suspicious” of Gaffney’s suggestion right away. “I don’t know,” Ned said. “Sounds…why don’t you meet me here. I’ll make us some coffee.”
“OK.”
As Gaffney drove to Ned’s, he contemplated whether to accept Ned’s gesture of coffee. Everybody knows where I am, he thought. It’s not like they don’t know where I’m going. Ned’s offer seemed subtle and neighborly, but Gaffney knew that for Ned it was a test—an experiment in trust. Gaffney had taken quite a ribbing from his colleagues before leaving the office. “Don’t drink that coffee. He’s probably gonna spike it.” And yet, as funny as it sounded, the situation was more serious. Gaffney knew he had to accept Ned’s coffee. (“Ned’s actions were one of a person who was guilty,” Gaffney explained to me later. “He’s exhibiting guilty expressions and mannerisms. By this time, we were like, ‘OK, how do we enforce what we believe—that Ned murdered Carmen?’”)
As Gaffney pulled into Ned’s driveway, Ned came out of the house and hurriedly walked down the few stairs from the porch onto the driveway. He had two mugs of coffee in his hands.
Gaffney laughed to himself. He’s waiting for me?
“Sergeant,” Ned said, handing Gaffney the mug, “here.” There was a car in the driveway. Ned pointed to where the cream and sugar were sitting on the hood.
“Thanks,” Gaffney said.
After some small talk, Gaffney handed Ned the documents, asking, “How are you doin’? How are your parents?”
“Good, considering.”
“Coffee’s not bad, Ned,” Gaffney said after taking a sip.
“Hey, you got those maps of Rhode Island—can I get those back?” Ned pressed.
“They’re part of the evidence, Ned. I can’t give them back. You’ll have to make a request by court order.”
Ned shook his head. “The Hartford PD never gave me a receipt for the car search.”
“You’ll have to take that up with them,” Gaffney suggested.
Gaffney and Ned stood in the driveway exchanging small talk for a few more moments. The Red Sox (of course). Weather. Family. But Ned kept dragging the conversation back to the HPD and how irritated he was at them for not giving him a receipt. For Ned, he was all about following rules, providing they worked to his advantage. He kept an itemized inventory in his head—checks and balances—of the investigation, ready to pounce on the system the moment he saw a violation of his rights.
“Those Rhode Island cops,” Ned said next, “they have a lack of credibility with me. They don’t know how to deal with people.”
Gaffney shrugged. The comment opened up an opportunity. “Why do you feel that way, Ned?”
“Well, when you guys came here for the search warrant on the fifteenth, they were rough. I thought I was being arrested. As soon as I realized I wasn’t being arrested, they told me they were going to bring in cadaver dogs and bulldoze my parents’ yard.”
“It’s all part of this,” Gaffney said.
“Yeah, but if they had something on me, they would have arrested me that day, instead of just threatening to dig up my lawn.”
“What would they have on you?” Gaffney wondered out loud.
Ned changed the subject. “That Stratford case!” he raged. “My palm prints are being compared.”
Since Ned had been under investigation for Carmen’s murder and his prior convictions from New Jersey had become part of the case, the Stratford Police Department (SPD) had inquired about Ned’s possible role in several missing persons cases and murders it had open. Ned’s former employer, American Frozen Foods, had an office in Stratford. It was practical to at least look into the prospect.
This, however, infuriated Ned. There was one particular case the SPD had matched up to Ned’s MO and requested a set of his palm prints from the CSP. He was worried about how those comparisons were coming along. “Look,” Ned said to Gaffney as they continued talking, “if Stratford had anything, if Rhode Island had anything, they would have arrested me.”
“I can’t speak for them, Ned. But they must have good reason for doing what they’re doing.”
“Do you know anything about those Stratford comparisons?” Ned asked.
For once, Gaffney had an answer. “They came back negative.”
Ned looked relieved. Gaffney wanted to maneuver the conversation back into the yard and the idea the CSP had that Ned could have buried evidence or more victims. As they spoke, Gaffney looked toward the backyard. There was a section of the landscape that looked disturbed, which investigators had noticed during the original search. As they talked, Gaffney could see that Ned was stewing over the thought that he could be arrested at any moment. Of course, Ned had no idea an arrest warrant was being prepared for him at that moment, not for Carmen’s murder, but for the attempted kidnapping and assault of Christina Mallon.
“Why are you so preoccupied with being arrested, Ned?” Gaffney asked. “Why you so worried about it?”
Ned wouldn’t answer. (“He’s asking these questions,” Gaffney told me later, “because he realizes that once he’s arrested, he’ll never see the light of day. He’s probing. Being evasive. Answering the questions he wants to. This tells me that he’s hiding something.”)
At one point, Gaffney started staring into the neighbor’s yard. Ned noticed his interest and became nervous, according to Gaffney.
“How long that house been empty?” Gaffney wondered.
Ned was looking off in the opposite direction when Gaffney posed the question. It was a subject that rattled Ned. He “suddenly turned,” Gaffney said. The mention of the neighbor’s house put him in a defensive mode.
Pale as paper, Ned asked, “How do you know that?”
“The physical appearance of the home,” Gaffney said. “It’s obvious it’s been neglected.”
“That woman died some time ago. The family is making arrangements, I guess.”
Gaffney immediately began contemplating the notion that Ned had possibly buried a few bodies next door, or hid evidence in the home or yard. Ned was entirely uncomfortable talking about the house. He wanted to change the subject.
Gaffney had struck a nerve.
“Ah, um, I…were you present when they searched my parents’ house?” Ned asked.
Gaffney looked at his watch. “It’s two-thirty, Ned. I need to get going.”
“Oh, OK.”
“Thanks for the coffee. I appreciate it.”
Ned stood by his door as Gaffney drove away.
Gaffney later said Ned was the type of suspect who always thought “two moves down the road.” He was “squirrelly, introverted. I understood this. I wanted to put myself in a position where, if he decided, ‘OK, if there comes a time when I have to tell somebody something, I want to be comfortable telling this guy.’”
75
I
Ned’s phone was ringing. Reporters were knocking on his door. But Ned didn’t want anything to do with publicizing what was going on in his life. If not because of the embarrassment, for the sake of his parents. They were old and ailing. And now with Ned’s life becoming a major news story, the added weight of constantly being under a microscope was overwhelming. In addition, Ned believed the New Jersey newspapers had made him out to be a monster years ago, up there with the likes of his so-called mentor, Bundy, and although he secretly devoured the attention, he made it clear that he felt betrayed and was being set up by a group of cops out to get him.
In light of it all, however, Ned used the new opportunity to plead his case. As the Stratford story surfaced and a victim’s name made it into the newspapers—Shani Baldwin, a twenty-one-year-old woman who had been found stabbed to death in her home in 2001—Ned gave a brief interview to the Associated Press, saying, “I gave them fingerprints…but it’s important that both sides of the story be printed.” Yet, that other “side” Ned referred to never materialized as Ned refused to elaborate or discuss the matter further.
Ned had an eerie sense about him. His enunciation, especially to those who did not know him, might have come across as overconfident and even patronizing. But he couldn’t help himself. He drew attention to himself by the things he did—attention, maybe, he enjoyed—albeit good, bad, or indifferent. In every news story published about the search and Carmen’s body being found in Rhode Island, those two cases from New Jersey tagged along with Ned’s name in the lead paragraph as if they were part of a life’s résumé, which, in a certain sense, they were. This made Ned feel as if he were being judged by his prior conduct—crimes for which, he said over and over, he had paid his debt to society. When reporters asked Ned if he knew Carmen, he said he wasn’t going to comment on the case. Yet when Hartford Courant reporter Ken Byron caught up to Ned one day and asked him if he killed Carmen, Ned replied, “I did not kill her.”
There may have been some truth to Ned’s statement—because, inside the next few years, one of the many bizarre twists in the murder of Carmen Rodriguez would be that a man—that same man who had been obsessed with Carmen and raped her—would make a deathbed confession that he had killed her.
BOOK V
ELEMENTS OF MURDER
76
I
On the morning of January 24, 2002, Ned was arrested and formally charged with attempted kidnapping and third-degree assault. The arrest stemmed from that night shortly before Carmen went missing when Ned allegedly grabbed Christina Mallon outside Kenney’s. When they showed up at his house, detectives didn’t tell Ned why they were arresting him. But he assumed it was for Carmen’s murder.
Ned didn’t put up any resistance, but instead acted as if the CSP—who had taken over control of the investigation by this point—had nothing on him. He laughed and joked with the officers placing him into a squad car.
Back at Troop H in Hartford, Ned sat quietly as detectives entered the room, one of whom said, “You think this is for the murder of Carmen Rodriguez?”
Ned looked at each officer. “Huh?” He was shocked. “What do you mean?”
“You’re under arrest for the attempted kidnapping and assault of [Christina Mallon].”
“I’m surprised by that,” Ned said, shaking his head. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
II
Ned was arraigned the following morning, his bond set at $500,000. And his next court date scheduled for February 5. Later that night, someone from the HPD called Luz Rodriguez. “We brought him in.”
Luz sighed. “Thanks for calling.”
“You should know, though, that we haven’t arrested him for Carmen’s murder. We brought him in on another charge.”
“I’m confused.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the detective said.
Luz hung up the phone, feeling ambivalent. The end result was that Ned had been arrested. But why wasn’t he being charged with Carmen’s murder? (“We were told,” Luz explained to me later, “that this first arrest was the beginning of the end. We had no idea it would turn out the way it did.”)
III
On the day the CSP searched the Snelgrove residence, crime scene investigators submitted several items to the Department of Public Safety, Forensic Science Laboratory, in Meriden, Connecticut, for DNA and forensic analysis. Criminalist Maria Warner was assigned the contents of a trash barrel found in Ned’s room. A substance located inside the barrel was suspected to be blood. Warner quickly tested it and determined it to be human blood.
Had Ned made a mistake? None of the other pieces of trash turned up anything useful for David Zagaja. But what about this blood? Whose was it?
IV
There was a sinkhole—a large scallop—in the backyard of the Snelgrove neighbor’s house. It appeared to be consistent with being recently created, an affidavit accompanying Ned’s arrest explained. There was no grass over the divot, which led detectives to believe that someone had (just recently) dug a hole and covered it up.
Detectives got hold of the owner of the house on Tuesday, January 29, 2002, and explained that they needed to get into the yard to conduct a search and, like archaeologists, sift through some of the dirt with screens. Ned was in jail, exactly where they wanted him. The kidnapping and assault charges were going to trial. Ned was not going to plead his case.
“No problem,” the owner of the house said. “My mother died years ago. The place has been vacant since 1999.”
As crime scene investigators approached the sinkhole, someone noticed a black plastic bag protruding from the ground. “You see that,” the investigator said, pointing.
They dug the bag up.
It was empty.
After spending the day searching the yard, nothing else was uncovered. But the bag—that bag had to be significant. What did it explain?
A theory soon developed. Based on the discovery in the neighbor’s yard, some detectives began to look at how Carmen’s body had been found in Rhode Island. The Hopkinton crime scene showed no signs of being disturbed by animals. If the body had sat in those woods in garbage bags from September 22, 2001, the day Carmen was reported missing, to January 6, 2002, when Peter Mareck found it, many believed wildlife in the area would have at least ripped the bag open or tried getting at it. Furthermore, renowned forensic scientist Dr. Henry Lee made what, at first, appeared to be an important discovery while studying the “secondary” crime scene photographs. (Secondary because investigators believed Ned had killed Carmen in Connecticut and transported her body to Rhode Island.) Analyzing the photographs microscopically, Lee noticed that the leaves around the area where the garbage bag was found were “dry, so it has to be around fall.” Moreover, there was no “dated material growth through the bags…. If, say, longer than a year [had expired],” Lee said, “…usually something can grow through the bags, through the hole, because that area [is] going to be very fertile and you see a lot of new shoots coming out. So that tells me [it] has to be relative, you know, under six months, cannot be over, over a year.”
Some believed that as soon as the Hartford PD started sniffing around, asking questions, Ned moved Carmen’s body from the neighbor’s yard (or another location) to Rhode Island, sensing that a search of his home was imminent.
“You can see little branches around the body,” Lee explained. “But no branches sticking through the bod
y area. If this body [had] been there…usually we see something grow through the body.”
For detectives, based on their training and experience, knowing that Ned had spent years in prison studying Bundy’s manner of drawing unsuspecting women into his web, realizing he had, upon his release, improved on his MO by meticulously wrapping women in various articles of linen and transporting their bodies to various locations, like Bundy, it was their interpretation that animals will disturb a body left out in the open for an extended period of time, said the affidavit for Ned’s arrest. Based on this, it is reasonable to assume that Carmen Rodriguez’s body may have been moved to the place it was found from another location after police contacted Edwin Snelgrove and conducted the first search warrant on his automobile.
“We did some testing and analysis on the bag found in the neighbor’s yard and found nothing,” David Zagaja told me. “There was some speculation that maybe he moved her body at a later time. But I don’t think he did. I think he placed Carmen’s body in Rhode Island on that weekend of September 22 to 23, 2001.”
It was easy to figure out that between the end of September and beginning of January, at least in the Northeast, nothing generally grew wild in the forests. That would explain the bag not being covered with fresh undergrowth. There were dry leaves scattered around the bag and on top of it, which meant that the body had been placed in the Rhode Island woods before the month of October when leaves started falling.
Still, how to attest to no animals getting into the bag?
Carmen’s killer used nearly one dozen garbage bags to wrap up her body. Stapled and taped them all together so it couldn’t—or wouldn’t—leak fluids or emit smells. To this, David Zagaja added, “We played around with the possibility that he moved her—put it this way, we’re not sure. I think Ned made that trip on that weekend. And remember, the trip being made on that weekend matches with the mileage evidence we uncovered.”
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