Chapter 1
AFTER NED WAS SENTENCED IN HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT, for murdering a young woman, Carmen Rodriquez, in April 2005, he stood up in court and implored any “reporter” in the gallery to give him two years to study his trial and corresponding documents. After that, he said, he would be willing to provide anyone interested proof of his innocence in the murder of Miss Rodriquez. He said he had been convicted of a crime—Carmen’s murder—he had not committed and DNA and a shoddy prosecution would exonerate him one day. He was certain of this.
Ned could not claim innocence in the murder of Karen Osman, or the vicious attack on Mary Ellen Renard, because he had admitted committing those crimes. He was sentenced to sixty years (life for a man in his forties) for Carmen’s murder—she was found stuffed inside several layers of plastic garbage bags, which had been stapled meticulously and obsessively, on the side of the road in Rhode Island, just over the Connecticut border. It was a spot sixty miles from where she was last seen (in a bar that Ned Snelgrove frequented every night—that is, up until the day Carmen disappeared). Inside that bag, Carmen’s bones told the story of her being hog-tied and thrust into the bag like a rag doll. She was identified by only a small section of skin that had not decomposed on her shin and, remarkably, a tattoo that cops sketched out and sent to police departments across New England. Otherwise, there was nothing left to Carmen but a bag of bones attached to her skull and long mane of brunette hair, all held together by the ropes binding her.
At the 2005 sentencing hearing in which forty-four-year-old Ned Snelgrove ranted and raged about his wrongful conviction, filling the role of the narcissistic serial killer needing to take the opportunity to speak his proverbial peace, the judge blasted Snelgrove. Judge Carmen Espinosa said: “I have been doing this for many years, talking to psychiatrists and psychologists who try to explain why people do what they do. But sometimes people are just bad, beyond redemption, and you are one of them. All we can do is warehouse people like Mr. Snelgrove to make sure they don’t hurt anyone again.”
Powerful words from a powerful and respected woman of the bench. Ned was pissed. The judge had rattled his cage pretty well. The contempt he had for this judge was obvious on his face. If this had been a cartoon, cue steam protruding from Ned’s ears now.
Judge Espinosa, who had sparred with Ned throughout his trial at various intervals, concluded by stating what every law enforcement officer and prosecutor that knew Ned or crossed paths with him at some point had told me as I wrote my book: “The court is convinced that if he ever gets out on the street... he will kill again.”
I have said this before. I am not the first person to utter it. But some people are just plain evil and there is no rehabilitation that can turn them back into human beings. They walk the earth simply to hurt people.
Ned Snelgrove is one of these inhumane people.
After being convicted for Carmen’s murder, Ned flaunted his arrogance and contempt for the court during his sentencing. When Judge Espinosa finished, Snelgrove stood and addressed her. Picture a professor type (his nickname in prison) with large tortoise-shell glasses, a chip on his shoulder the size of Gibraltar, reading from a piece of paper in his hand, his voice crisp and sharp: “You used my past convictions as a substitute for evidence,” Ned began as the gallery gasped at Ned’s utter display of hubris and flagrant self-absorption. “Things that happened seventeen years ago,” he continued, meaning Karen Osman’s murder and a subsequent twelve-page letter he wrote to the judge back in that case (which I’ll get to later on in the piece), “are totally unrelated to Carmen Rodriguez. This conviction will never stand [on appeal.] So go ahead and sentence me to life.”
He took a deep breath. Looked up at the judge, squarely, sporting a smirk. “And I’ll see you again in a couple years when my conviction is overturned.”
After a bit more back and forth, Ned made his declaration to the journalists in the gallery.
I wasn’t in the courtroom that day. But I did write to Ned. And the basis of that first letter and my subsequent investigation into Jane Goodwin’s murder was the impetus for the “Dance With the Devil” episode of DARK MINDS.
Here is how it started:
February 3, 2007
Dear Mr. Snelgrove:
Forgive this brief intrusion. Allow me to introduce myself. I’m a nonfiction book author. I’ve penned seven books, several of which were best-sellers. (I’ve enclosed a brief bio for your convenience; you can also visit my author Website at www.mwilliamphelps.com)
The purpose of my letter is rather simple. I followed your case. I’ve done some preliminary interviews. I’ve read some of the documents. I’m interested in your case, particularly your story.
I’m just digging in here and wanted your input and maybe some direction regarding where to go with my investigation. I like to look into every aspect of a case and quarry beyond what was presented in court—I’ve found there are always two sides to a story. I was wondering if I chose (I haven’t really decided yet) to write a book about your case, would you be willing to be interviewed….
Let’s be honest: I had ulterior motives when I wrote it. I knew Ned’s type. I had written several books about serial killers by then (“Every Move You Make,” “Sleep in Heavenly Peace,” “Perfect Poison”). I understood how the mind of the monster works. One detective I interviewed before writing to Ned, a cop instrumental in solving Carmen’s murder, explained, “My gut feeling was that Ned... he was basically telling us that, You don’t know how I did it... and you know that I did it... and he was happy with that. It was almost like a cat and mouse game. He knew we knew he did it.”
Ned wasted little time contacting me. Several days after sending my letter, I received five pages of what was the beginning of a relationship—if it can be called such—between a writer and a serial killer.
It was one that would not end amiably.
Here, then, in its entirety, in his own handwriting, is Ned’s response to my first letter. One incidental note I’d add is that the highlighted portions of Ned’s letter are not mine; they’re his. This would become a common theme of Ned’s: pointing out certain words in his letters and the documents he sent; writing cryptic notes in the margins; and sending along strange pieces of cardboard (like bookmarks), inserted into certain sections of a stack of papers to point me in a certain direction and point out various “wrong-doings” by cops and the prosecutor. Please note how Ned personalizes the letter at the end, letting me know (subtly) that he (thinks) he knows where I live. Ned was obsessed with a few key phrases (of which he would continually remind of), and he opens his first letter to me with one of his favorites:
Chapter 2
THE BOOK I ENDED UP WRITING ABOUT NED’S crimes and my relationship with him was published in 2009. Titled “I’ll Be Watching You,” the book has been re-issued by my publisher to coincide with the March 2012 debut of the DARK MINDS episode about Ned. For that side of the story, the book is a good resource. This e-book is more of a continuation of what has happened since the book came out, along with a few details about what went on behind the scenes as we filmed the episode and I began to chip away at a theory that Ned Snelgrove murdered a Newark, New Jersey woman, Jane Goodwin.
As I was researching and writing my book, I became close to several sources. One of which is irrefutable as a New Snelgrove source, and I wish I could reveal the name of this person, but for the record, I understand why he or she has asked for anonymity in the book and beyond, and I respect that.
As my research began, a name kept popping up: Jane Goodwin. I had heard this name several times while talking to several different sources in New Jersey. At one point, as I turned to John Kelly, my profiling partner on DARK MINDS, and asked if he had ever heard of Ned Snelgrove, John even said he knew of the name Jane Goodwin being connected to Ned.
Small world, I thought.
Jane was beautiful. She embodied the spirit of the tough and strong-willed single woman of the seventies and early eight
ies, fending for herself in what was a male-dominated and male chauvinist world. Jane lived alone in Newark, New Jersey, downtown. It was 1982. She had started a new job just about two weeks before her murder in late August, training on Hewlett Packard computers. Ned worked for Hewlett in New Jersey at the time and was involved with training people on the complex mystery machines. There is no doubt in my mind that Jane and Ned crossed paths. Rutgers, where Ned went to school, was a five-minute drive from Jane’s apartment. Jane was several years older than Ned and had large breasts (two distinguishing characteristics, at the top of a short list, that all of Ned’s victims had in common).
“[Ned] could be placed at a training seminar that Jane attended,” one law enforcement source told me, with two others backing it up.
That was all I needed to hear. The thing about Ned is, if he knew you and you later became a murder victim, there can be no doubt that he did it. The fact that a woman with large breasts was stabbed to death in the manner that she had been AND she crossed paths with Ned Snelgrove is not a coincidence.
The summer of 2012 will mark the 30-year anniversary of Jane Goodwin’s murder.
“I was told first that she was stabbed,” Jane’s mother, Aletta, told me. “And I thought, OK, she walked in the door and somebody stabbed her, you know. I wanted her to have suffered the least pain and I thought if that’s what happened, I thought, Thank god, she didn’t know what happened. But then I found out she was also strangled and then I thought... she suffered.”
I’d like to give a bit more background on Ned before I get into the schematics of Jane’s murder and how Ned’s handprint and signature are plastered all over the matrix of this brutal crime. All of Ned’s victims had large breasts. Ned was known as a “breast man,” but not in terms of him having a particular liking or fascination with women with large breasts (which he certainly did, but not in that way). Ned was fixated and obsessed with large-breasted women and also seeing those women, he once admitted in a letter, immobilized and unconscious. This was Ned’s MO: to render a good-looking, large-breasted female (usually older than him by many years) comatose (through strangulation), so he could then place her limp body on a bed or any place that was to his liking, and then strip her naked (very important) from the waist up, exposing her large breasts so he could, I began to find out, pleasure himself while stabbing the woman in the chest.
This fantasy of seeing women like this has been inside Ned’s head, he once admitted, since the third grade. He recalled having these fantasies, can you imagine, while learning to read and write. Other kids in his class were dreaming of Matchbox cars and playing in the mud, and little Neddy Boy was picturing his teachers—providing they had large breasts—unconscious and propped up on a bed, ready for him to do what he wished. This seems remarkably profound. If it had not come from Ned’s mind onto a piece of paper in a letter he wrote, I would have had trouble believing it myself.
So we have a very distinctive signature by a serial killer admitting to it. What’s important is that this is behavior no other killer would (or, before Ned was caught and admitted to it, could) mimic with any exactness. I am convinced of that. This sort of crime scene signature is Ned’s all the way (unless, that is, we’re talking copycat killer).
In Karen Osman’s murder (to which Ned admitted to and gave a fairly detailed, if not bizarre, account of, backed up by the evidence left behind at the murder scene), Ned had strangled the young, beautiful and very large-breasted woman, torn open her blouse and bra, exposed her breasts, and then proceeded to stab Karen around her breasts in what is believed to be a (semi) star-shaped pattern. The quote that stands out to me from Ned about this crime is as follows: “I felt her throat in my hands.” He said they had been horsing around on Karen’s bed and the next thing he knew, he was strangling her and had no idea why or how it came about. “I could not stop my hands from squeezing as hard as I could,” he said.
Ned did not touch the bottom half of Karen’s body—she was found (by family members, no less) with her pants on, posed with her arms out to her sides (Christ-like), her back up against the side of her bed, her chest a mess of blood and stab wounds. The crime went unsolved for several years. The police had Ned on radar, of course, and had questioned him. But it was in an era before the DNA/forensic technology we have today, and Ned had every reason to leave DNA all over Karen’s apartment—they had dated shortly before her murder but had been estranged at the time. Also, Ned—because he is a bit more intelligent than your average serial killer—was able to play cat and mouse with the cops, outsmart them and dodge any heat that was first on him for the murder.
But then, nearly four years after Karen’s murder, unable to control himself, Ned struck again. (I would argue here that Ned—same as any serial killer within his same structure patterns and fantasy-driven thought process—did not stop attacking women during this time, but simply made several mistakes with his next victim and was caught.)
Ned’s next victim, Mary Ellen Renard, forty-four years old, a newly divorced New Jersey mother, happened to go to the wrong singles dance on August 1, 1987. She walked directly into the clutches of a monster. Ned spied Mary Ellen alone at the bar and approached her. In a performance straight out Ted Bundy’s playbook, after Mary Ellen left the bar alone and realized her car wouldn’t start, she turned around—and guess who was standing there, waiting with open arms to help her out?
Ned got Mary Ellen’s car started. I could never nail it down, but I am certain that Ned somehow managed to find out where Mary Ellen’s car was parked (they had spent over an hour in the bar talking and hanging out). And, slipping out into the parking lot after telling her he had to use the restroom perhaps, he fixed her car so it wouldn’t start. Ned had planned to kill Mary Ellen from the moment he met her. I know this because Ned was honest with Mary Ellen about where he worked, where he went to school, and his real name. Later, Ned would talk about how he had botched this murder and that alone tells me that he was there, at that singles dance, looking for a victim.
In any event, Ned got Mary Ellen’s car started and then suggested that he should follow her home just in case something went wrong with her vehicle along the way.
Mary Ellen thought about this. Her instincts were speaking to her as she hesitated. But, “OK,” she said.
When they got to Mary Ellen’s apartment, Ned walked up to the window of her car before she even got out and, showing Mary Ellen his dirty hands, asked if he could use her restroom to wash up before driving home.
Mary Ellen lived on the second story of a double-decker house converted in two apartments. Her landlady lived downstairs. A set of stairs and a door separated the two apartments.
“I don’t know,” Mary Ellen said. Again, her instincts were telling her to question this man and turn him away. But she said OK and let him in.
The devil had talked his way into his next victim’s lair. Ned was alone with a woman (older than him) with very large breasts, no one else around. Moreover, no one even knew they were together. There was no connection, as Ned himself would later explain, between him and Mary Ellen. He had her exactly where he wanted.
Mary Ellen told me she felt bad for the guy. And Ned did not come across as some sort of one-eyed green monster resembling a Charles Manson or John Wayne Gacy, or even Gary Ridgway. He didn’t have that filthy, skanky serial killer look to him. He came across as a charmer. He knew how to speak to his victims and knew the right victims to choose. He was good-looking then and slightly resembled a man who would become one of his heroes, Ted Bundy. He had a boyish appeal about him. Ned was book-smart; he had graduated from Rutgers University with honors. Fellow students spoke highly of him. He was a model employee at Hewlett Packard. Anybody (besides Karen Osman’s family) who knew Ned said he was a model citizen and nice guy. Ned had that geekish frame of Ted Bundy, not so much weak but almost childlike. He didn’t come across heavy-handed or overbearing. He didn’t speak much. Many women I interviewed said Ned appeared to come across as shy and in
troverted.
“Non-threatening,” was a quote I heard again and again.
Mary Ellen and Ned walked up the stairs and into her apartment.
After some time, Ned said he had to use the bathroom. Mary Ellen had to get some cheese in her belly; she had a condition where she needed to eat every few hours in order to keep her blood sugar up.
Ned went to use the restroom; Mary Ellen sat on her couch with a can of soda pop, eating some cheese.
When Ned came out after an oddly extended period of time in the loo, Mary Ellen immediately saw a different person. Ned had this awful stone-faced look about him, as if he was a different man altogether. He was quiet and had withdrawn deeply into himself. It was as though Dr. Jekyll had gone into the loo to transform himself into Mr. Hyde.
Ned had essentially walked into the bathroom and turned himself into that psychopathic killer he would soon write about. Ned needed those moments alone in order to change into this “other person”—that meandering menace to society that liked to see big-breasted females unconscious and unable to move, spread out for him so he could do as he wished. This was the fantasy Ned had obsessed over since grade school. He crossed over inside that bathroom, preparing himself for the reality of bringing that fantasy to life. Serial killers live inside their fantasies day and night. When one can manifest that fantasy into reality, it becomes overpowering in a way they have a hard time not only controlling, but later explaining. If he was a drug addict, you could say that Ned walked into the bathroom, took out a bag of dope, prepared the spoon, heated it up, and placed the solution inside the syringe. And, walking out and facing Mary Ellen, he steadied himself enough to inject the poison into his veins.
MADNESS, SEX, SERIAL KILLER: A Disturbing Collection of True Crime Cases by Two Masters of the Genre Page 2
