I'll Be Watching You

by M. William Phelps

  “No.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing further.”

  104

  I

  Inside the waiting area of MacDougall-Walker Correctional, the prison that I interviewed Mark Pascual in, I sat and listened as several women argued over whose man was cleaner—yes, cleaner. “My man takes a shower right before every visit with me,” said one woman, a heavyset Spanish lady, her head bobbing and weaving, forefinger waving like a wiper blade. “He’s been doin’ it for twelve years.”

  Twelve years, I thought. This poor woman, like a half-dozen others there beside her, had been faithfully coming to this godforsaken smelly place to visit “her man.”

  A dozen years. Three presidential terms. A cycle of schooling.

  The visiting room was quite small. Quite vanilla. And rather claustrophobic. Pascual walked in first, a guard said something to him, and then they buzzed me from the waiting area into the visiting area, a large sliding metal door separating the two rooms. This occurred after making me wait, standing by the door, until the obvious personal conversation the two guards were having was over.

  Pascual is a short, stocky man. He has long reddish hair flowing halfway down his back, pulled and tied tightly into what looks like a horse’s tail. As I approached him, he stared at me as if I have some sort of “get out of jail free” card for him, which, being someone who can connect him with the outside world, I guess I do.

  We talked about his case. He expressed his sorrow for the man he had paid two other men to kill. He wished like heck he could do it all over. Take it back. “I’d just walk away from that woman,” he said, shaking his head in disgust at himself.

  Love triangles. They never end in harmony.

  “Tell me about Ned,” I said about twenty minutes into our conversation.

  Pascual told me to keep my voice down. “The guards,” he said, cupping his hands around his mouth, pointing with his thumb, “they hear everything.”

  He told me the story of how he and Ned met. “We got split up,” Pascual noted, “but then after I spoke to the cops, they put us back together again.” And this was when Pascual began to work on getting Ned to confess. They played chess. “Ned was a terrible chess player.” They watched television and hung around together, watching each other’s back. “Ned was scared. He’d gotten pummeled several times by friends and cousins of Carmen’s who had ended up in the same jail. Everyone wanted a piece of Ned once they found out how [sick] he was.” As Pascual talked, I studied his body language and facial expressions. My instinct told me he was speaking the truth as he knew it. He said Ned had told him about two additional homicides, on top of murdering Carmen. One was a prostitute Pascual claimed Ned said he had picked up off the streets of Hartford one month after he was released from prison, in 1999. “He did one right away”—Pascual was certain—“he had to. He told me that he couldn’t help himself. He punched this woman so hard that he thought he broke her jaw. Then he stripped off her top and bra, posed her, and did his thing.”

  “His thing?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Pascual said, motioning a masturbation technique with his hand.

  The next one, Pascual said, wasn’t until a year later. “Ned said he would always wait a year between them. Something about the planning. He wanted to plan the perfect murder, right down to every detail. It was part of what got him off on it all.”

  II

  “I wouldn’t put it past Ned,” one inside source told me, “to plant these homicides in Pascual’s mind to try to set up an alibi for himself later on. Remember, this stuff with Pascual, it all takes place pretrial, so Ned is perhaps working on Pascual to set up his own defense, knowing that Pascual will later testify.” The idea was that Ned planted enough details about several crimes in Pascual’s head, in addition to those details about Carmen’s murder, for the sake of confusing Pascual so Ned could turn around during his trial and prove that Pascual was a liar. “Ned was that smart. And it fits with his wanting to play a game with the law enforcement and the system.”

  I checked into both of the murders Pascual told me about. He gave names. Dates. Locations. Specific details. All of which matched up with these crimes—crimes, I might add, that were not high-profile enough to garner extensive news coverage. The details Pascual gave me, in other words, matched the details of the crimes, but were not reported in the press in a manner that Pascual could have studied, as Ned would argue.

  III

  Pascual has no pedigree of crime or violence. Before he asked two guys to murder a rival, he had never been arrested for anything serious. It’s easy to see how Ned and Pascual formed this friendship, if we can call it such. Pascual has this sort of demeanor that seems honest and forthright. Yet, from Ned’s point of view, it’s also easy to see how he believed he could manipulate Pascual. With me, Pascual was sincere. I believed most of what he had told me. Our conversations continued, as did our letters. Pascual never asked me for anything.

  105

  I

  Over the course of the next week, Zagaja’s case against Ned cruised along on autopilot: witnesses came in, witnesses walked out, each hammering one more nail into Ned’s coffin. The focus of the trial went from Ned’s admission to Mark Pascual to the mileage Ned had logged. Zagaja brought in his experts and explained how Ned had tried to fudge his record keeping to incorporate enough mileage into his accounting in order to make up for those additional miles he had traveled to Rhode Island to dump Carmen’s body. One after the other, the experts explained to the jury in layman’s terms how Ned had cooked his own books to try and hide the fact that he traveled an additional 140 miles. Michael O’Shaughnessy, who worked for NETS, which provided analytical services (primarily on vehicles) to a number of different agencies, including police, was asked if a request was made of his firm “to focus in the area of September 21 through September 25, 2001” and match those dates against the records Ned had kept. “On that particular instance, I took the actual reported fuel (from Ned and his receipts) and reported mileage driven and then calculated out,” he testified, “basically, how much fuel had to be replaced after those miles were driven. In other words, I got the mileage, again, similar to what I had done on this one. I did run into a problem on this, however.”

  O’Shaughnessy hadn’t run into a problem with the other months Ned had kept records for. It was just this one particular period in which Carmen had happened to disappear.

  What a coincidence.

  “There were two instances where there was more fuel purchased than would appear to fit in the tank.” Zagaja encouraged him to explain. “Well, I took the miles driven and then compared the fuel that was put in the tank after those miles were driven and found that the actual fuel that’s gone into the tank was higher than what the mileage would indicate would have been used based on the overall average of this particular vehicle.”

  Ned was caught red-handed—by his own mistake—with information he had volunteered and provided. “And you had two overall averages to use in your calculations?”

  “Both of them were very, very close, one was twenty-nine, and on the last set of calculations we got, it was in the very low thirties.”

  “And, specifically, can you draw our attention to what dates you considered and what calculations you used in coming to those conclusions?”

  “On the paper that we had on September twenty-first there was ten gallons—well, 10.006 gallons purchased. Then, on September twenty-third, there was 9.131 gallons purchased.”

  “In between those two purchases, how much mileage was reported to have been driven?”

  “We received, after adding it up, we got about one hundred and twenty-six miles.”

  “And based on your calculations with the determined average mileage to be somewhere between twenty-nine and the low thirties miles per gallon and the hundred and twenty-six miles driven, how many gallons of gas would be used up in that distance?”

  “I used twenty-nine fl
at. I used a lower number, actually. I used below the lower number we received. And there was approximately four gallons more put into the tank than the actual mileage of this vehicle.”

  “So four gallons—”

  “Excess.”

  “—of gas excess?”

  “More than what the tank would have [been able to hold].” (It all came back to that day in the hospital when Ned—after trying to commit suicide—offered his mileage records to Hartford PD detective Luisa St. Pierre. Ned had rung this mileage bell. Why? St. Pierre had asked herself as she left the hospital. Because Ned thought he had it all covered. And here it was—in black and white—coming back to sink him. He had calculated wrong. He had fudged his mileage well enough, but he had forgotten to adjust the fuel.)

  II

  By January 20, Ned and O’Brien were bringing in their own witnesses. Many were former cell mates of Ned’s there to explain how Ned never said much about his personal life. He was quiet. Reserved. He never talked about his crimes. Ever. No one understood why he had chosen to open up to Mark Pascual. It was so unlike Ned.

  The jury, sitting, listening, had to see that Ned was putting all of his chances for acquittal in Mark Pascual’s hands. If we could just prove Pascual to be a liar…

  Not true. Many of the jurors later said that they had tossed out Pascual’s testimony right away. They didn’t trust him.

  Then again, they didn’t need him.

  O’Brien called a few detectives in to try and prove that they had made things up about Ned in their reports. But it didn’t work.

  Then he called Mark Pascual back to try to prove he was a liar. But again, it didn’t work.

  As the days ticked by, it appeared that Ned had dug himself a hole. He and O’Brien keyed on certain issues that made little sense to anyone sitting in the courtroom, a room that was closing in on everyone as the trial dragged on into its third week.

  But then, when things looked grim for Ned, a surprise—a witness with a confession: he knew who had murdered Carmen.

  And it wasn’t Ned.

  106

  I

  There was an inmate at Connecticut’s maximum-security prison who said he had taken a deathbed confession from a friend of his—that this “friend” had, in fact, killed Carmen Rodriguez. The proposed murderer, a convicted rapist many times over, who, the snitch said, “had never used condoms” during his many rapes, had picked Carmen up in his van on the corner of Broad Street and Franklin Avenue. (He could not recall the exact date, nor was this the corner that Ned said he had supposedly dropped Carmen off at.) He raped and murdered her that night, and had recently committed suicide. Before he died, however, at the very moment he was about to hang himself, the inmate said he had whispered across the hallway to his friend’s cell and admitted killing Carmen.

  He gave no details. He had no particulars of the crime itself. Not even a last name. Only, “I killed her…. I cannot live with myself.” On top of that, the witness was classified as a psychotic who took a pharmacy of meds for delusional thinking, besides routinely seeing and hearing people who just weren’t there.

  The judge decided to hear the witness out without the jury present. It was only three weeks ago that the guy had come forward. It was clear he wanted something out of it all. And the admitted killer—well, he was dead.

  O’Brien got to work right away and asked, “So the same day that he committed suicide, he told you that he—”

  “Yeah.”

  Err… “—killed Carmen—”

  “Yes.”

  “—Rodriguez?” O’Brien finally finished.

  “Exactly.”

  “Do you remember if he said anything else about Carmen Rodriguez?”

  “No.”

  “At any point during the time that you were with him?”

  “No.”

  After a few more questions, O’Brien finished and motioned to Zagaja, who said, “And when the private investigator [the ex-cop that O’Brien had hired to help him with Ned’s defense] spoke with you, did he tell you the last name of—”

  “Yes,” the witness said, not allowing Zagaja to finish.

  “—Carmen?”

  “He told me the last name,” he said, meaning O’Brien’s investigator.

  “Did he tell you when she was killed?” Zagaja asked.

  “Yes.”

  “When did he tell you she was killed?”

  “September.”

  “And did he tell you if her body was found?”

  “Yes.”

  “And where did he tell you her body was found?”

  “In another state.”

  “And you already said that you asked, ‘What can you do for me?’”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he provide you with a response?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “He could try to get me out of jail.”

  In her decision, Judge Espinosa explained what she thought of Ned’s star witness: “A statement from a psychotic inmate, if you will,” she said, “a statement from a guy who has delusions, who hears voices, who takes at least three medications for psychiatric problems, that leads one to believe that this person was not very reliable if you believe [the witness], which, frankly, the court does not. It’s a very self-serving situation on [the witness’s] part.”

  Ned shook his head. His last chance…gone. “How is it self-serving, Your Honor?” O’Brien stood and asked.

  “Well, it’s also interesting that this just came to light a couple of weeks ago. When, in relation to [other] testimony, did this come up? The court’s impression is that inmates are trying to jump on the bandwagon of coming in, and everybody has got something now to say about this case.”

  The jury wasn’t going to hear any of it.

  Gavel.

  Next witness.

  II

  By February 1, the trial was getting old. O’Brien was calling witnesses who were adding nothing to the process. Most of the testimony was weak and repetitious, if not totally unbelievable. Most believed Ned was behind it all. At lunchtime, the judge had finally heard that Ned was not going to testify. He had discussed it with O’Brien and came to the conclusion that it wasn’t in his best interest.

  Smart move. Zagaja would have mopped the floor with him. Still, Espinosa wanted to be 100 percent sure that Ned was making the call, not O’Brien. “Now, let me ask Mr. Snelgrove,” she said, “…your lawyer has told us that you do not want to testify. And I want to ask you some questions about that decision. Have you used any alcohol, drugs, or medicines of any kind today?”

  “No.”

  “Now, have you had enough time to discuss with your lawyer your decision not to testify?”

  “Yes.”

  For the first time during the trial, Ned was terse and respectful. “And I note that during the entire trial you’ve been very active in your defense, assisting Mr. O’Brien, so is it correct to say you’ve discussed with him, fully, the pros and cons of testifying—”

  Ned wouldn’t let her finish: “Yes.”

  “—on your behalf?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you agree with the decision, or, I take it, it is your decision that you do not want to testify? Is that correct?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And you understand that you have a right to testify?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re giving up that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you doing that knowingly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Voluntarily?”

  “Yes.”

  “With understanding of the consequences?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you satisfied with the representation you’ve received from your lawyer?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Very well….”

  Gavel. Time for closing arguments.

  107

  I

  After introducing hims
elf to the jury and thanking them for sticking it out through such a long process, David Zagaja put it as plainly as he could, “What you have here,” he said, “what happened to Carmen Rodriguez on September twenty-first—the evening of September 21, 2001—up to the point where her body was found in Rhode Island on January 6, 2002, is a reflection on the evolution of a killer.

  “What does all of that packaging speak to?” Zagaja asked the jury halfway through his closing. “It speaks to his reflection on Ted Bundy and it speaks to his intent…he planned this. He planned this for the evening of September 21, 2001, he had his goody bag all packed. He had everything that was necessary to kill and dispose of the body ready to go: tape, staplers, one or more rope, two types of bags, a cutting implement to cut the rope. It speaks to the planning, it speaks to a well-laid-out plan to execute a murder. Look at the dumping of the body right over the state line in Rhode Island. What I think was so amazing was the constant questioning about the defendant’s familiarity with Rhode Island. That’s missing the point. What you need is the familiarity with the eastern border of Connecticut. It was the first possible turn you could take off of Route 138, once you hit the state of Rhode Island, the first possible turn. Not the second, not the third, not a well-plotted-out turn, the first possible turn. There is literally no other turn. And you know what’s great about dumping the body in Rhode Island? Connecticut is not going to go help in investigating that matter, Rhode Island is….”

  Zagaja went through the entire crime, moment by moment, while Ned sat. Twisted in his chair. Winced at times, smiled at others, and repeatedly frowned.

  Zagaja spoke of the letters and how significant they were. “You get down to these writings. Are they the same as Ted Bundy or are they different?” Zagaja allowed a moment. Raising his voice, “I would tend to believe that they are actually the same because what Ned Snelgrove became was…Ted Bundy.” Then, concluding, “And although he fails to see how he turned into Bundy—he did. In his mind these are things that will actually shift the police attention from him and not allow them to identify him as the true suspect in the killing of Carmen Rodriguez. But when you look at it and you look at his impression as to what Ted Bundy did and the mistakes he made, so did Ned Snelgrove. He wrote himself right into a guilty verdict, ladies and gentlemen. The evidence so supports.”