“Huh?” Pascual couldn’t believe it. The story sounded so full of paranoia. Drama. So James Bond–like. Why go to such trouble when the state police could have just put a tail on the guy? He wasn’t that important.
“That second time they took the car,” Ned explained, “the police took the GPS off.”
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The man responsible for putting Assistant State’s Attorney David Zagaja’s case against Ned in a neat little package and readying it for trial was Jim Rovella, a former Hartford cop with over twenty-five years of investigative experience. A big, hulking man, with white hair and a comforting smile, Rovella was introduced to the missing persons case of Carmen Rodriguez back in May 2003. Carmen’s case had been packaged inside a file of other “cold” cases that his new boss at the Cold Case Unit (CCU) of the office of the chief state’s attorney wanted him to take a look at.
Rovella’s quarter-century law enforcement career dated back to when he started as a patrol officer in Hartford in 1981, a time when there were about thirty-five murders per year in Hartford. When he was transferred to robbery and homicide in 1987, with the crack explosion and gang violence reaching Hartford’s North End, the murder rate doubled. It was here that Rovella’s people skills were utilized as he seemingly went from one homicide crime scene to the next: an endless disharmony of murder, sexual assaults, rapes, and violent crimes. (“You get a lot of experience in Hartford,” Rovella said later.)
In 2002, Rovella retired from the Hartford PD after spending two decades behind the badge, but found himself unable to stay away from the addictive pull of investigating crimes and solving cases. “So I went to work for the state’s attorney office.”
Part of the work Rovella does for the Cold Case Unit of the state’s attorney revolves around sitting and studying files for months. He has the advantage to take all of the police reports and witness statements, along with the evidence, sit down without the constraints of time, and go through the case, piece by piece. He may spend six months, a year, two years. Whatever it takes. It’s important to Rovella to try to eliminate a suspect. Take him out of the equation—which stood out to him right away as he started to study Ned in the realm of Carmen’s disappearance. “I kept trying to exclude Snelgrove from the case, but he kept popping up back in,” Rovella said. “The fact that he left the bar with Carmen. That he was a regular at the bar and he stopped going once Carmen disappeared, even before HPD started asking questions. These were all important factors to me.”
Then there was the gas receipts and the mileage that Rovella’s former colleague Luisa St. Pierre had brought into the case. To Rovella, it all added up to one answer.
II
Ned’s trial was the most high-profile court case the city of Hartford had seen in years. Not that murder was an uncommon affair in the city. But not for several years had a potential serial killer been brought before a Hartford judge. The Rodriguez family was getting most of the press as they stood vigil outside court every morning before proceedings began. For the most part, it was Luz, Sonia, and Kathy Perez leading the charge, with other family members joining them periodically. This first day of the actual trial, however, brought out nearly twenty members of the family.
All united.
All thumping their feet for justice.
For Carmen.
For Karen.
For Mary Ellen.
III
On January 4, 2005, a mildly cold Tuesday morning, Judge Carmen Espinosa addressed the jury. Ned sat wearing a sweater and slacks. He had decided not to wear his large-rimmed “Buddy Holly” glasses. He smirked ever so slightly, as if to say the entire process had been a witch hunt—which would become Ned’s mantra throughout the trial.
Pinning the murder of Carmen Rodriguez on him, Ned had convinced himself, was a reaction to his prior convictions in New Jersey. It was convenient. Once a con, always a con.
Regarding his glasses, “He didn’t wear them,” one investigator who was in the courtroom every day later told me, “because he believed they made him look like the person he was: a vicious serial killer.”
Ned tried pulling off the classic “guy next door” look: sweater and slacks, short hair, naïve manner, congenial demeanor. But as the trial commenced, Ned couldn’t hide from himself and started right away “stage whispering,” one courtroom observer told me. Ned whispered things to his lawyer loud enough so the jury could hear him. “He thought he was smart,” Jim Rovella added. “But in the end he disappointed me.”
IV
Judge Carmen Espinosa, the first Hispanic sworn in as a superior court judge in the state of Connecticut, a judge many who worked in her courtroom every day later said was as fair as any judge in the state, would end up being the target of Ned’s eventual anger and outbursts. Espinosa was a rather good-looking, middle-aged Hispanic woman. She had thick black hair, which she kept cut just above her neckline. Her dark eyebrows were cast against her slightly olive complexion. Her smile was radiant and contagious. Even comforting, some might say.
Her tenure on the superior court bench started in 1992. According to her bio, Espinosa was born in Puerto Rico and moved with her family to New Britain, a suburb of Hartford, at the age of three. After attending public schools in New Britain, she graduated from Central Connecticut State University in 1971, with majors in Spanish and secondary education. Continuing her studies, Espinosa received a Master of Arts degree in Hispanic Studies from Brown University and her law degree from George Washington University. What most don’t know about the judge is that she was once a special agent for the FBI. She had a brief run as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Office of the United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut, beginning in 1980, and stayed on as a federal prosecutor until she was appointed a superior court judge. If there was one judge in the county who could preside over a trial that was sure to have its share of controversial moments, there was no better than Judge Espinosa.
“She’s almost too fair,” one man who knows her well told me later.
V
For the Rodriguez family, talking about Carmen, even years later, was difficult. Teary-eyed and choked up, many of Carmen’s relatives couldn’t handle sitting and sharing memories. But Luz Rodriguez, who, admittedly, had a difficult time with her sister’s death, took a step forward, along with Sonia, and seemed to be the spokeswoman for the family as Ned’s trial—and the ensuing media circus—got under way. (“It was hard,” Luz recalled, “don’t get me wrong, but we had to do it.”)
Carmen needed a voice. The family knew Ned was going to shoulder the blame on Carmen. Talk as though she didn’t matter. Make all sorts of excuses for her leaving the bar with him. So the family had to stick together in support of protecting her memory.
And, like they had during every hearing over the past few years, members of the Rodriguez family wore T-shirts and badges with Carmen’s photograph and sat together in back of David Zagaja’s table, where Rovella, whose job it was to make sure each witness was ready to testify, also sat.
Ned’s money had run out. Either that, or his mother and father weren’t about to drain what little savings they had left to pay for yet another defense, as they had in New Jersey twenty years prior. Donald O’Brien was a court-appointed special public defender. Ned was lucky to have him. Although Ned would undoubtedly be driving the bus and telling O’Brien what to do, O’Brien—who refused to talk to me—was a competent and well-prepared public defense attorney. He was in the courtroom every week, said one law enforcement official, defending some of the state’s most undesirables. O’Brien knew the ins and outs of murder trials.
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During those first few days of hearings, where both sides argued over which evidence would make it into trial, the talk inside the courtroom wasn’t so easy for Sonia Rodriguez, Carmen’s oldest sister. “I had to go out,” Sonia said. “I had to scream. I had to clench my fists.”
Carmen’s life—and death—had come d
own to this one moment. What if, for some reason, Ned was allowed to walk? The Rodriguez family didn’t need a trial to convince them that Ned was guilty. They knew it in their hearts, Luz told me later. Jackie, Carmen’s daughter, slated to testify (but nowhere to be found), had interrogated Ned with Miguel, Cutie, and Jeffrey Malave at Kenney’s that night shortly after Carmen disappeared: “Oh, that was your mom? I’m sorry,” Ned had asked Jackie. It was a fact of the case the family had a hard time letting go of.
“That was your mom….”
For the Rodriguez family, Ned’s use of the past tense was a confession. Sonia, like Luz and Kathy Perez, however, got over the anger and sorrow and decided to honor Carmen’s life by moving forward and, being the glue, hold the rest of the family—some twenty members at any given time during the trial—together. There had been one tragedy after another for the Rodriguez family. But it didn’t stop them from fighting. Jesus Ramos, the older man from Puerto Rico whom Carmen was married to when she went missing, died two weeks after she disappeared. (“He died of a broken heart,” Luz said. “Thankfully, Jesus never knew that Carmen’s body had been found.”)
With Carmen having been the gypsy she was, it helped her mother cope. Because Carmen moved back and forth between the United States and Puerto Rico throughout her life, always in and out of her mother’s house, Rosa could always look at Carmen’s photo in the house and, knowing she was dead, still be able to tell herself, She’s traveling. She’s in Puerto Rico. She wouldn’t have to deal with the immensity of Carmen being gone forever.
“We have a shirt,” Luz recalled, “that Carmen wore shortly before she disappeared, that we haven’t washed. You can still smell her on it.”
These are the people Carmen left behind.
“He had thought he chose the perfect victim,” Luz said later, “that no one cared about Carmen. That no one would miss her. We were there in solidarity to show him—and everyone else—that Carmen was part of our world and our lives.”
BOOK VI
“PURE EVIL”
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On the morning of January 4, 2005, the State of Connecticut v. Edwin Fales Snelgrove Jr. was officially on record. Ned sat next to O’Brien on one side of the small room, while Rovella sat next to Zagaja on the other, as Judge Espinosa addressed the court with her usual cheery demeanor. “Good morning. All right. Is there anything we need to consider before the jury comes in?”
David Zagaja said, “Thank you, Your Honor. I did…alert the court that the state is putting forward [an] oral motion in limine….”
For the layperson, the term “limine” probably threw a kink in the proceedings immediately. In Ned’s case, it meant that a request had been submitted to the court before trial in an attempt to exclude certain pieces of evidence. In this instance, Zagaja was arguing that a particular witness Ned was going to call, a man who had supposedly taken a deathbed confession of Carmen’s murder, needed to be qualified before he could take the stand. There was some controversy surrounding the witness’s statement, whether he was credible.
The judge said they’d take it up at the appropriate moment; right now, she wanted to get on with the day’s proceedings. The trial had been held up long enough.
For the next hour or more, the judge went through and gave the jury its instructions and the attorneys talked about witnesses and availability and other tedious issues that would bore the average reader. The entire time, Ned sat with guarded composure. He watched every move and listened to every word as if he were sitting in a business meeting and had been warned not to speak.
Zagaja’s first witness, Hartford police officer Jeffrey Rohan, set the stage for Carmen’s disappearance, taking jurors through how he answered the call at Carmen’s apartment from Jackie (who, incidentally, was dodging Zagaja and could not be found).
Ever since Carmen had been pronounced dead, more than three years ago now, Jackie’s life had taken a turn for the worse. “Poor Jackie…she could never face Carmen being murdered like that,” said a family friend.
“We have to find her,” Zagaja had whispered to Rovella more than once as the trial got under way. “We need her.”
Janet Rozman, assistant manager, bartender, and Kenney’s waitress, who had seen Carmen and Ned together on the night she disappeared, testified next. Rozman’s words were powerful and enlightening. It gave the jury an image that they could use for building events around the night in question. It was clear from Rozman that Kenney’s was a special place for Carmen. A place out of her normal routine that her family didn’t know about, where she could let loose. A hideaway. Zagaja wasn’t trying to tell the jury that Carmen was a choir girl; but she was a human being. She liked to party. She liked to drink and dance and meet guys and flirt.
A free spirit.
And yet, what Zagaja proved was that on the night of September 21, 2001, Carmen met the wrong man. The Devil dressed in a businessman’s suit. A killer in disguise. A sexual sadist on the prowl for a victim.
After a few opening questions, Zagaja asked Rozman, “And did you see Carmen do anything when she came in?”
“She walked directly over to Ned.”
“And could you describe what you observed them doing, if anything?”
“Um, they were playing pool and dancing, drinking, kissing.”
“Was this the first time you had seen them interacting that way?”
“Yes.”
“Had you ever seen them together in a situation like this previous?”
“No.”
II
Paula Figueroa was another Kenney’s employee who took the witness stand and established several important factors. For one, Ned was not some sort of customer who showed up once in a while: an interloper who stopped in from time to time. Ned was a regular Kenney’s barfly.
The bar had even ordered a case of Moosehead beer especially for Ned, Figuroa said.
By the end of the morning, Zagaja established that Ned and Carmen knew each other. They had danced and kissed and talked and drank together on the night she disappeared. And there was no way, absolutely no way, that Ned could deny that he and Carmen left Kenney’s together. Too many people had seen them.
III
One of Kenney’s owners, Nick Taddei, raised his right hand, swore to tell the truth, and then told his story of coming in between Ned, Jackie, Miguel, Cutie, and Jeffrey Malave that day when Miguel and Jackie were on the warpath looking to question Ned.
“The problem was that Ned didn’t want to reveal his whereabouts,” Taddei testified, “where he lived, he didn’t want to give them any information. Family members wanted assurance that he was going to contact the officer, wanted to make sure that he was going to go and talk to the police….”
Taddei was just one more piece of the puzzle Zagaja was gluing together with each one of his witnesses—all of whom O’Brien tried to impeach on cross-examination, but failed.
IV
The following day began with Jeffrey Malave, who backed up the testimony of the witnesses Zagaja had already presented. On this day, Ned wore a charcoal gray sweater and black tie. He looked every bit as uptight and on edge as he had the previous day. If he thought he was going to walk in and control the room, he had perhaps watched too many episodes of Law & Order. Judge Espinosa was not about to let anything in her courtroom get out of hand.
What was intriguing to some, while others didn’t even notice, was that Ned was paying a price for not wearing his glasses. Reading documents became a task. He struggled like an old man trying to read the fine print of a contract. Ned would hold a piece of paper up to the edge of his nose and stare at it, unable to read it, but he refused to put on his glasses.
One of the problems Zagaja ran into early on was that many of his witnesses had records of their own to contend with. Felonies from the past or present. Each witness had admitted to his or her crimes. Zagaja was the first to ring that bell. Miguel Fraguada, for example, Zagaja’s next witness, had two prior felony convic
tions. “They were a long time ago,” Fraguada explained through an interpreter.
All Zagaja could do, of course, was have each witnesses point out his or her faults, as well as his or her role in the case. The jury could decide from there who was credible.
Fraguada told the jury exactly what had happened on the night Carmen disappeared and the day he confronted Ned with Jackie, Cutie, and Jeffrey Malave.
Fraguada kept referring to Carmen as his “wife,” but, of course, it was a figure of speech. To him, he loved Carmen—and in his eyes and heart, that made her his wife.
Then Zagaja asked him how upset he was about seeing Ned at the bar. “You said you were going to hit him?” Zagaja said.
“Yeah. He…I was going to hit him because he ran off on me.”
After several more questions, Zagaja handed Fraguada to O’Brien—who went right after him: “Mr. Fraguada, you say that Carmen was your wife?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you get married?”
“She lives with me, but we weren’t married.”
“OK. So she wasn’t your wife, she was…you were living with her, correct?”
“Yes. She lived with me.”
“And how long had you lived with her?”
“From May until she disappeared on September twenty-first.”
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As the clock began to nudge its way toward the noon hour on January 5, in walked a crooked old man, a man of great intelligence and absolute dedication to his son: Edwin Fales Snelgrove Sr. Zagaja called Edwin as a witness to discuss, among other things, the suicide note Ned had written shortly after the Hartford PD and CSP began to investigate Ned—before Carmen’s body had been found. In Zagaja’s view, this was a very important point. It showed a pattern. Ned had fallen right into his old behavior of killing a woman and then, not being able to deal with it, setting it off with a feigned, ill-fated suicide attempt. For a criminal—any criminal—the past is a good indication of the future.
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