“Serial killers,” John Kelly likes to remind me, “are addicted to murder—they cannot stop killing in the same way that a drug addict cannot stop shooting dope.”
Coming out of the loo, staring down at the carpet first, then up at Mary Ellen with a transfixed look of abnormality, Ned Snelgrove attacked her without speaking a word, making a move as though he wanted to kiss her, but then strangling Mary Ellen unconscious while they struggled on the couch.
The details of the next thirty minutes or more are chilling and replete with the textbook behavior of a serial killer fitting Ned’s psychological wiring. My book, “I’ll Be Watching You,” details every beat of this scene and I don’t want to simplify that evil moment in Mary Ellen’s apartment by summarizing it here. It’s a complex series of events that speak volumes about who Ned is as a serial murderer and psychopath. I’ll just end here by saying that Ned wound up straddling Mary Ellen on her bed, her blouse and bra open (her pants left on, of course), as he touched himself and stabbed Mary Ellen repeatedly in her chest.
Remarkably, Mary Ellen Renard survived—and the story of how is utterly incredible. In short, she woke up while Ned, after ripping open her blouse and tearing off her bra, was straddling and stabbing her in the chest repeatedly. As she came to, Mary Ellen recalled a self-defense technique she had read about in a magazine and instinctively gouged Ned in the eyes with her fingernails. He screamed like the coward he is and jumped off. This was enough for Mary Ellen to run for help.
Mary Ellen Renard is an extraordinary woman—a survivor.
Chapter 3
NED WAS EVENTUALLY ARRESTED FOR MARY ELLEN’S attempted murder and sexual assault, mainly because Mary Ellen knew his name, where he worked, and her ability to identify him. Out of the blue—and this is where part of Ned’s so-called intelligence plays into his career as a serial killer—Ned told his lawyer that he wanted to, on top of copping a plea in Mary Ellen’s case, admit to the murder of Karen Osman.
What? Admit to the murder of a woman the cops are not even asking about any longer? It seemed preposterous. Had Ned lost his mind? Had he wanted to come clean and show some remorse for his crimes?
“I could not believe this,” someone close to Ned later told me. “But then, as we discussed it, I understood.”
Ned Snelgrove, Mr. I-Didn’t-Do-It, wanted to admit he had murdered his former girlfriend, Karen Osman, when he was not even being questioned about the murder any longer, and there was no evidence linking him to that case. It made little sense to those involved on the legal side.
“For a defendant to come forward and admit to a homicide that had been open for many years with no prospect of being solved,” the prosecutor in charge of Mary Ellen Renard’s case told me, “that’s extraordinary.”
Or was it?
Ned had thought this through. I was told by someone close to him that Ned decided to the plea because he didn’t want to face the iron crunch of Lady Justice if (and possibly when) she caught up to him while he was behind bars serving time for the crimes against Mary Ellen. Ned knew he was not getting out of the case against Mary Ellen. He was going to serve time for stabbing and sexually assaulting her. The way Ned began to think was: What if forensics tie me to Karen’s murder somewhere down the road (while I am in prison serving time for Mary Ellen’s case) and there is no escaping a guilty verdict?
Undeniably, if that was the case, Ned would be tried and charged separately for Karen’s murder. Ned figured, what the hell, I’ll roll the dice and plead it out, forcing the prosecution to put both cases together, and take a sentence for both cases.
Faced with the fact that they had no evidence against him in Karen’s case, the prosecutor decided to make a deal with the devil. After reportedly talking it over with Karen’s family, Ned was allowed to plead out both cases at the same time.
Ned was ultimately sentenced to twenty years. He knew, however, that in the state of New Jersey, you walked into prison with “good time served”—meaning, a twenty-year sentence was actually eleven (you got your nine years good time served the day you started serving your time). Based on your behavior behind bars, days were added to your sentence, not taken away. Therefore, although Ned had received twenty years, he was walking into prison with eleven years to serve on that twenty-year sentence. (Sounds confusing, I know.) Every time he misbehaved, a day or more would be tacked on to his eleven years, pushing him closer to that original twenty year sentence.
The system seemed to work backwards, yes. But Ned knew that system and worked it to his advantage.
“I’ve never met a more model prisoner,” a professional at the prison where Ned did his time told me as we filmed episode eight of DARK MINDS, “Dance with the Devil.”
“No kidding,” I said.
“Yeah. Ned was a great guy. Really nice prisoner. Great with numbers.”
Lest we forget: we’re talking about a ruthless killer of women, I thought. What nerve. To say that Ned was a nice guy. It was akin to, as I saw it, spitting on the graves of his victims. And by a prison employee, no less.
I was at that jail, East New Jersey State Prison, formerly known as the infamous Rahway, to conduct an interview with Fred Schwanwede. He prosecuted Ned for Mary Ellen’s attack and also took Ned’s confession of Karen Osman’s murder after making that plea deal with Ned’s attorneys.
“Ned is dangerous precisely because he didn’t look like a bad guy,” Fred told me as we stood in front of the prison on a day so hot and humid that it was hard to breathe. “We all go to the movies... we watch TV shows, and you always see the same actors playing the bad guy because they look like bad guys. They have that kind of face. Ned was just the opposite. Ned had the kind of face that you say to yourself, Eagle Scout. He was a handsome guy. He was a personable guy, very bright. None of the alarms would go off. He didn’t have any characteristics that would raise a woman’s awareness to a level that she would defend herself against him.”
What struck me about Fred and his passion for prosecuting Ned back in 1987-88, was how deeply engrained Ned Snelgrove had become inside the psyche of this retired prosecutor. Here we stood, what, almost thirty years later, in front of a prison, talking about Snelgrove, and Fred was spouting this stuff off as if he had prosecuted Ned the day before. It was incredible to hear how Ned had influenced this prosecutor’s life over the years.
Staring at Fred, listening to him, I thought about my own experience with Ned and other serial killers like him, and considered how you can never forget evil. It has a way of becoming part of you. It’s something that gets under your skin and you either cave into it, or learn to fight it anyway you can.
Eleven years after Fred Schwanwede was able to secure a confession from Ned Snelgrove in Mary Ellen’s case (Ned, of course, blamed Mary Ellen for bringing on her attack and told a fairytale about Mary Ellen coming onto him and... seriously, it’s not even worth repeating) and get him to admit to Karen Osman’s murder, Ned Snelgrove collected his things from prison. He combed his hair—now gray—one last time in the mirror inside his cell, said goodbye to his mates, and walked out of prison a free man.
“He ran back up to Connecticut,” one prosecutor in Hartford told me. “He was afraid New Jersey might figure out a way to put him back behind bars.”
Indeed, after a short time staying at a scuzzy motel, Ned moved in with his parents. He set up a bedroom in the basement of their Berlin, Connecticut, home, just a skip off the Berlin Turnpike, where he was living in that sleazy motel.
Schwanwede was mortified, as were Ned’s victims. After all, this monster had admitted to having a significant problem with women and once wrote that as long as he wasn’t around women he would be okay. In a letter Ned had written to the judge before his sentencing in 1988, Ned did something unprecedented. He talked about what goes on inside the mind of a monster. For some reason nobody can explain to this day, Ned Snelgrove wrote to the judge who was going to be sentencing him, describing the fantasies he’d had since he was a boy. Portions
of this remarkable twelve-page document are worth publishing here (forgive me if the reproduction quality on your e-reader is not what it should be—but if you can read these excerpts, you won’t believe what this man wrote to a judge preparing to sentence him):
“I told the parole board Ned Snelgrove was the most dangerous defendant that I have ever dealt with in the criminal justice system,” Fred Schwanwede told me. “I believed he might do something like this again whenever he was released. Even if he was released after twenty years there was a real danger that he was going to do something like this again.”
Fred was not some sort of prophet, or able to see into the future. He just knew this killer, same as just about every other law enforcement person that had ever had any contact with Ned.
Not two years after Ned was released, while living with his parents in Connecticut, he found himself back in prison facing murder charges. This time for the murder of the large-breasted woman—Carmen Rodriquez—Ned had met at a bar he hung out at in Hartford.
In the “Dance with the Devil” episode of DARK MINDS, I explained what happened to Carmen as I stood in the spot where we believe Ned drove to kill her: “So this is the Berlin fairgrounds [just a skip from where Ned lived with his parents]. This is where families come, have fun, eat cotton candy. And this is also where Ned Snelgrove brought Carmen Rodriguez for her last ride. They come down this street right here and Carmen thinks she’s just going to party a little bit with Ned. And they pull in here and Ned drives back to those woods over there and he starts in with Carmen and he grabs her around the throat and she gets away and she runs into the woods. [While] running for her life... Ned tackles her. He drags her back to the car... where he puts her on the back seat, on a tarp and he starts stabbing her. And when he’s done, he hogties Carmen, puts her in garbage bags, puts her in the trunk of his car, and then he takes back off and he heads out to Rhode Island.”
Ned is an animal. He kills women. He will never stop. Carmen had to pay the price for all those women Ned would have murdered had he not been caught for her murder six months after she disappeared.
This thread of the story leads us back to the beginning.
Re-enter Jane Goodwin and my literary dance with Ned.
I kept hearing Jane’s name pop up in conversation as I interviewed cops and attorneys and prosecutors and people who knew Ned in New Jersey as I wrote “I’ll Be Watching You.”
“You have to look into Jane’s murder,” sources said again and again.
What I didn’t know was that Jane’s mother, Aletta Goodwin, was also in search of someone to look into her daughter’s murder—and Aletta, even before reading my book (in which I never named Jane), had Ned Snelgrove on radar for Jane’s brutal slaying. And had ever since she, not long after Karen was murdered, contacted Karen Osman’s mother and learned something remarkable about Ned.
Chapter 4
ALETTA IS ONE OF THOSE WOMEN YOU FEEL, after sitting and speaking to for a time, that you want to help anyway you can. She’s gentle and outspoken, opinionated and educated. She’s getting older, Aletta explained to me. And so she needs to know, before the white light appears, who murdered her daughter. I didn’t make any promises, but I told her that I would do my best to find answers.
As Aletta read my book, she took notes. Lots of them. She wrote in the margins. She sketched things out on a piece of paper. She believed that I knew what several others had thought: that Ned Snelgrove killed her daughter.
I told her it was only my opinion; I had no distinguishable, tangible proof. I also said that a cold case detective from Essex County had contacted me and I helped him try and prove Ned killed Jane, but the case is still open.
“I know,” she said. “He contacted me, too.”
I then asked her about that conversation she’d had with Karen Osman’s mother not long after Karen’s murder. Why? What connection was there between Ned, Karen, and Jane?
Turns out Aletta had reached out to Karen’s mother after reading about Karen’s murder finally being solved.
“I wrote to her and said I really know how you feel because this just happened to me a year ago,” Aletta told me, “and if I can help you in any way, please contact me. So she did immediately.”
Karen’s mother told Aletta that she had always suspected that Ned had killed Karen. One of the reasons why Karen had broken it off with Ned was because her family had not trusted Ned and thought he was strange.
“There was something about him,” Karen’s sister told me. “You could sense it when you were around him. Karen even picked up on it at the end and let Ned go.”
The Osman family had noticed what they later came to know as Ned’s demonic nature while he was dating Karen. They had watched Ned closely whenever he was with Karen and knew something was terribly off.
As Aletta and Karen’s mother chitchatted, Karen’s mother dropped a bombshell.
“Well, the thing that sticks in my mind the most,” Aletta explained to me, “is, she said that she saw Ned Snelgrove on August 20-something, late August and that he looked like he had been through something very bad, he looked terrible. He was pale and looked sick and, ah, and that would be around the time that Jane was killed.”
I had looked into this while writing my book. Karen’s family had told me the same thing—that there was a time right around the week that Jane Goodwin was murdered when Ned seemed spooked, like he had done something, and was looking over his shoulder, in fear of being caught. The behavior was enough to rouse suspicion in them and they remembered it all those years later.
This seems to fit with Ned’s evolution as a serial killer. When he murdered Karen (which he always claimed was his first kill), Ned seemed to be very structured and certain about what he was doing. He didn’t, in other words, come across as a man killing a woman for the first time. The crime scene told that story. It wasn’t—as he claimed—as if he’d killed Karen in a fit of rage he couldn’t control, or went into some black out, murdered her, and then hurriedly taken off from the scene. The crime scene was almost staged to some extent; and was certainly not the work of a killer experimenting or unsure of himself. In my opinion, Ned had a plan going into that murder—and he carried it out. Killing Jane some time before Karen would explain the comfort level obvious at Karen’s murder scene.
Jane lived on the bottom floor of a three-story, small (for Newark), red-brick apartment complex close to the corner of North 12th Street and Davenport Avenue in downtown Newark. Her apartment, as the crow flies, was a 2.8-mile hike from the Rutgers campus where Ned hung around. Newark today is not the Newark of Jane’s day. When we were there filming the episode, the streets were coated with a layer (or glaze) of filth, garbage literally lined the sidewalks, and traffic on Davenport seemed to never let up. Cops were everywhere. People were everywhere. And yet they kept to themselves, many of whom were locked into the technology in their hands, talking on a cellphone, or conversing with friends on the corner. I didn’t get a “community watch” feel while in Newark. I’m sure there are sections of this city where residents bond together and keep an eye on one another. Just not where we were.
In Jane’s day, this particular section of Newark was more secluded and laid back. There were half as many people. And at night the streets were dark, especially where Jane’s apartment was located. Although, that said, crime rates back then were higher per capita than they are today—Newark being one of the highest rated crime cities in New Jersey year after year. Anyone could have followed Jane into her apartment, attacked and murdered her. It could have been a random act of violence. But looking at the remnants of the crime scene—at least the way in which it was explained to me during my investigation (I have not seen reports because it is an open case, but have spoken to law enforcement)—and the particular signature attached to this murder, including evidence that Jane and Ned could have crossed paths several times throughout their days, I am led to the conclusion that I cannot exclude Ned from Jane’s murder.
In fact
, if I look at everything I have, it points to someone who had at least known Jane enough for her to invite him into her apartment. The fact that two wine glasses were on her kitchen table and a bottle of wine was nearby suggests that Jane was not murdered by a random act of violence, or this was a crime of opportunity. It suggests that Jane invited her attacker inside and they were close enough for Jane to feel comfortable enough to make an offer of wine.
On that Friday morning, August 20, 1982, Aletta called Jane, as she normally did (along with her other three grown children) every other day. Repeated calls brought no answer. Over the course of the day, Jane’s mother grew greatly concerned. So she called her two other daughters and explained the situation. It was so unlike Jane. She was on her own, sure. But Jane always answered her phone and always told the family if she was running off somewhere.
Jane’s sisters called and got no answer.
After not being able to reach Jane, the sisters took a ride over to the apartment and knocked on Jane’s door.
Jane was a “meticulous” person. She liked to keep things clean and tidy. When one of her sisters, after not getting an answer at the door, peered in through an open window, she saw that Jane’s living room was in disarray, and knew immediately that something was wrong—that is, something terrible had taken place inside that apartment.
Some family members of murder victims have expressed to me during interviews a certain feeling, or “sixth sense,” they’ve had at times. It’s a strange, but strong, sensation of something being terribly wrong. It happens with some siblings and family members of murder victims before they even know a tragedy has occurred. I recall the day I was told that my brother’s wife had been found murdered. I took the call. Moments later, my brother, who was out shopping for food, walked through the door. He and my sister-in-law were estranged at the time. They had not been together for a few weeks. He was living with me. He took one look at my face and, literally dropping the groceries on the floor, said, “She’s dead, huh?”
MADNESS, SEX, SERIAL KILLER: A Disturbing Collection of True Crime Cases by Two Masters of the Genre Page 3
