He knew. I wasn’t crying. I was stunned, more than anything.
Yet this sixth sense is baffling to me in some respects. I don’t understand it. While, on the other hand, I can somewhat equate it to what twins describe when the other is in distress. It’s real and I believe it. I have heard it over and over and experienced it myself in my brother’s situation. Family members say things like: “I knew something happened to her. I had this feeling she was in trouble and I was never going to see her again.”
In any event, this is the part of Jane’s story where conflicting accounts come into play. Jane’s sister had a key to Jane’s apartment but she didn’t want to use it. She was scared to go in. What’s more, one report claimed, the door into Jane’s apartment had been tampered with, as though someone had broken in.
So Jane’s sisters called police. It was somewhere near eleven p.m.
The cops said they’d only come out if the sisters waited. They worked it out and the police arrived at 12:30 a.m.
Jane’s sister spoke to a newspaper reporter the following day, recalling what happened next, saying, “It was a nightmare.”
Jane was dead, stabbed to death.
A source close to the case tells me that Jane was found with her breasts exposed, stabbed in the chest, and also strangled. She was apparently clothed from the waist down. The door tampering could have been staging by Jane’s killer. What’s more, and this is where it becomes something of a lock for me if the information I obtained during an interview with someone close to Ned is true: I was told a business card belonging to Ned was found around the corner from Jane’s apartment on a nearby lawn not long after Jane’s murder. My source for this is indisputable. This person was certain of this fact.
If that information is true, which I believe it to be, I have to ask myself: What are the chances that Ned Snelgrove did not have something to do with Jane’s murder?
Chapter 5
THE PEN PAL RELATIONSHIP NED AND I shared lasted close to a year. I routinely asked Ned to put me on his visitor’s and/or phone call list so we could discuss his case at length person to person, but he ignored my pleas. Ned is a control-freak type of killer: He won’t face someone who is going to challenge him. He’s afraid that he’ll give himself away with a look, a particular stare, or even a slip of the tongue. Detectives tried to interview Ned on several occasions, but described to me a man that would not engage you in person. Ned learned this from studying his hero and mentor, Ted Bundy (a relationship I will explain in more depth momentarily).
So, for months Ned and I wrote. I played this bizarre game with Ned, not sharing with him (and why should I, really—he’s a scumbag, POS killer and deserves nothing from me or anyone else!) exactly what I was thinking. Ned had developed a theory—or some sort of odd belief—that I had walked into his life to rescue him. That I was going to take his case and prove a miscarriage of justice, same as he had implored journalist to do two years before after his sentencing. (I had never told Ned I was going to do this—I might have hinted, now that I think about it, but at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter.) The problem I ran into was that the more I studied the evidence, the more I believed Ned had not only attacked Mary Ellen, nearly killing her, murdered Carmen Rodriquez and Karen Osman, but in my opinion I believe he murdered Jane Goodwin and several other women. I had a detective tell me that he had been looking at Ned for potentially several other murders with similar patterns all throughout New England, but could not nail anything substantial down. The fact that this detective had spent months looking into this side of Ned’s life told me something. Off the record, this same cop said he believed Ned was responsible for at least two additional murders between the time he got out of prison in 1999 and 2001, when he abducted and murdered Carmen.
During that eleven-year period Ned spent behind bars in New Jersey for Karen’s murder and the attack on Mary Ellen, he wrote pages and pages of letters to an old friend of his. The content of these letters—a lot of which later became part of Ned’s Hartford, Connecticut, court case—was astonishing. Ned’s friend saved the letters because he was going to write a book one day with Ned’s blessing and input. They talked about this in the letters, both agreeing they needed more drama (more murder, in my opinion) in order to up the ante of Ned’s story and make it more salable.
On a whim, the Connecticut State Police, while investigating Ned for Carmen Rodriquez’s murder, took a ride to visit Ned’s so-called friend, simply to find out what he knew. They didn’t have a clue as to the amount of information they were about to unearth after asking him if he still had any of the letters he had Ned had shared over several years.
Ned and his friend had an ongoing chess match throughout many of the letters, but they also discussed Ned’s obsession while in prison with Ted Bundy. The original title of the Ned Snelgrove DARK MINDS episode was “Better Than Bundy.” The reason for that was simple: Ned believed that by studying Bundy’s mistakes, he could, in turn, when he got out of jail, become better than Bundy at stalking, abducting and murdering women. Why this friend never turned the letters over to the police in real time, while Ned was talking about all of this madness, baffles me to this day.
Ned studied every nuance of Bundy’s life. Bundy made errors, Ned was convinced, which sunk him. Ned resigned not to make those same mistakes once he got out to, as Ned wrote, “pick up when I left off.”
In speaking to his friend about Mary Ellen’s attack, Ned explained how meeting Mary Ellen and getting into her apartment (like a Bundy copycat) “was the perfect situation.” The way Ned talked about it, you could almost sense how erotic and gratifying this would have been for Ned if his original plan had fallen into place.
Mary Ellen became a situation in Ned’s way of telling this story. As 13, our serial-killer expert consultant on DARK MINDS, might say, Mary Ellen was nothing more than an object for Ned to gratify his sick needs. She was not a person, but a situation to control, to do as he wished with.
What happened during that “situation,” Ned wrote, was what put him behind bars that first time.
“I botched it all up,” Ned wrote to his friend. “She didn’t die! If she had died, my name wouldn’t have even made the suspect list, because she had just met me that night.”
Ned went on to call Bundy “stupid after the fact. He kept maps, schedules and pamphlets of the hotels, brochures of ski resorts he visited. He even purchased gas with credit cards (stupid!).”
Funny thing is, when Ned got out years later and murdered Carmen Rodriquez, he made these same mistakes.
Chapter 6
I GREW TIRED OF PLAYING GAMES WITH NED SNELGROVE. As I began to wrap up the research portion of my book in 2007, I hit him with one last letter I hoped would twist his arm behind his back and make him reveal some of his innermost thoughts about why he kills. I did it knowing full well it wasn’t going to do much more than rattle his cage.
Still, it had to be done. I’d been playing Kick The Can with the guy. We both sensed there was this 800-pound gorilla between us, but had avoided it for whatever reason. I was getting something out of Ned, and he was getting something out of me. Ned had always explained himself, throughout his run as a killer and afterwards, on his terms. He had never allowed someone to question him specifically or directly. He never wanted to be in a position where he had to answer questions that made him uncomfortable.
This is why I call Ned a coward. I’ve spoken to serial killers that are (dare I say) at least man enough to answer questions. As an example, look at 13 on DARK MINDS. Here’s a guy who tells it like it is, no matter what. Whether 13 or other serial killers lie to us as researchers is not the issue here (that is a separate argument/discussion). Ned always dodged the questions that pried into his personality, especially dealing with the past. He didn’t want anybody to know what he was thinking unless it had to do with the stock market (his cellmates claim he was a master at picking stocks) or the Boston Red Sox (a sports team he was obsessed with).
&nbs
p; During the research and writing process of “I’ll Be Watching You,” I had developed a snitch on the inside, a man who testified against Ned in court during his trial for Carmen’s murder. My snitch claimed on the stand that Ned had given him a blow by blow account one day of killing Carmen Rodriquez. On several occasions, I met with this man inside the prison where he is serving time for murder himself—just recently as a few months before writing this e-book.
I recall the first letter I got from this guy, after writing to him and asking if he’d be willing to tell me what he had told jurors about Ned. I wanted to sit in front of him, stare into his eyes, and decide for myself if what he had to say held the truth that the jury in Ned’s case obviously believed.
In his first letter, my snitch said, “…There is much more [about Ned] that you need to know. There are more murders that he told me about and he gave me detailed information about who and where and how he did them.”
Here is a portion of that same letter:
My snitch told me Ned bragged to him about several murders he had committed in and around the Hartford region. Many of the women he had first stalked and met through a door-to-door meat sales job he had at the time he murdered Carmen. (I should also mention that Ned allegedly tried grabbing a girl off the streets of Hartford before he abducted and murdered Carmen. He was brought up on charges of kidnapping in that case, went to trial, but was acquitted of the charge.) There were several women Ned had called on during his meat-selling days that police later spoke to. They claimed Ned acted strangely while in their house. One even said Ned kept returning to her house without being asked, kept calling and calling her, and only stopped after her husband waited for Ned one day and gave him a warning about coming back.
The idea that Ned had killed many women throughout New England after being released from prison in 1999 played into a letter that Ned wrote to me near the end of our correspondence. In this particular letter, Ned went on and on about how he “did not kill Carmen Rodriquez.” He said my snitch was full of shit and making it all up so he (the snitch) could get a break in his sentence.
That, I must admit, is buyable. The fact that a snitch came forward and bartered with prosecutors over information he had about a so-called serial killer on trial did raise some eyebrows at the time. Prosecutors and police checked out the snitch’s stories, however, and proved that there were details in what he had reported that had never been made public (this is one reason why cops like to keep certain facts of cases close to the vest).
I did the same. I also interviewed him in prison and gave him my carotid artery test to see if he was lying. The carotid artery test, of course, is from “Meet the Fockers.” In the popular series of films, Robert De Niro’s character Jack Byrnes, an old CIA man, could tell if you were lying by watching your carotid artery as you spoke; if it beat rapidly, you were nervous and likely bullshitting. I’m joking, obviously, about using this method on my snitch. But looking into the snitch’s eyes as he spoke, watching his hands, listening to the details, going back and checking those details out one by one, I felt the same as the detectives: he was being honest.
Ned wrote to me in a peculiar way about Carmen’s murder, trying to convince me, I can only assume, that he didn’t do it. And yet he revealed several interesting details about his psyche within this series of letters. He belabored this point of how the medical examiner could never determine an actual cause of death in Carmen’s case (true) because her body was so badly decomposed. He even listed several of the differences between Karen’s and Carmen’s murders, as opposed to Mary Ellen’s attack, and sketched out a quasi-chart listing all of the variations in each case.
You must understand something about Ned’s letters to me. They were banal in every way possible, and proved how structured and obsessive-compulsive this serial killer was during his reign of terror. He’d send me a letter, for example, and then a day later, I’d get another letter asking if I had received the one previous and if the staple in the right-hand corner he had purposely placed there had been disturbed. This would have been a telltale sign, Ned explained, that someone had tampered with the letter. But he didn’t stop there. Each letter always came with a small card with questions he had designed and created himself in pen: Did you receive my last letter? Was the staple disturbed? There’d be actual check boxes made by Ned, with “yes” and “no” above each box. He’d implore me to send the card back ASAP. Strange, indeed. But also quite telling if you’re someone studying these types of sexual sadist killers and their behaviors.
Getting back to what I was explaining about Ned and one of his charts pertaining to the differences between Carmen’s murder and the other girls, here, see for yourself what I mean. Have a look at one of Ned’s bizarre “charts.” He even talks about himself in the third person, which is a tell-tale sign of emotionally distancing himself from these crimes.
He focused on the testimony of a doctor who, according to Ned, got it all wrong. Ned’s entire argument here became: Just because I killed before and promised to kill again when I got out of prison, it doesn’t necessarily mean I did it in Carmen’s case.
“He was upset because we proved Carmen’s case against him,” said one detective. “He thought he’d covered every base with Carmen’s murder, but we got him and he was pissed.”
No professional could determine the cause of Carmen’s death, indeed—which I would argue was Ned’s plan from the moment he convinced Carmen to go with him and then tortured and murdered her somewhere in the darkness of the woods on the grounds of the Berlin Fair in Connecticut, but a few mere miles from where he lived with his parents at the time.
In the second part of that same letter, which was even more bizarre than the chart-like portion, Ned could not let this idea go that cops and the medical examiner could never figure out how Carmen was murdered, thus excluding Ned from the crime. After all, Ned wrote, “… other causes of death [for Carmen] that cannot be ruled out: why weren’t they mentioned in the autopsy?” He listed the ways in which Carmen COULD have been killed. And I wondered, staring at this poorly written document, which had obviously been scribed in a fit of rage over him being figured out (and exposed), what type of sick bastard would think of the following ways to kill another human being?
· Gunshot through soft tissue (no bone damage)
· Electrocution
· Drowning
· Forced starvation as result of being held captive
· Forced dehydration as result of being held captive
· Hard blow to the temple (no skull damage)
· Heart attack brought by external, traumatic event
The only conclusion I could come to was: only a person who has done it!
The thinking process of this man is alarming, yes; but also quite illuminating and obvious. He had gone to great lengths to come up with different ways to kill another human being.
So the question had to be: Had Ned practiced these various ways of murder? Was he sending me a direct message, describing to me some of the additional ways he had killed? Serial killers, at least the ones I’ve interviewed and built professional relationships with, love to send subliminal messages. They get off on speaking between the lines to see if we can figure it out. I mean, “heart attack brought by external, traumatic event”? Who else but a killer (someone who’s done it already) could think of that?
My bet is, despite the narrative my snitch gave cops of Ned stabbing and strangling Carmen to death, that Ned used one of these methods to kill Carmen—and then told the snitch he stabbed and strangled her.
Chapter 7
ACCORDING TO A LAW ENFORCEMENT SOURCE, there was a woman found dead not too far from where Ned had an appointment to sell some meat in Massachusetts, just over the Connecticut border. I was told she had been murdered in her bathtub. The tub had been filled with acid or bleach or a combination of the two. This was an extreme way to kill someone. Cops didn’t really connect Ned to this murder because it didn’t fit his normal MO of breasts exp
osed and stabbing and strangulation.
But given what Ned had written to me, I would suspect that Ned Snelgrove, unlike many serial killers, experimented with several different methods of murder—especially AFTER having that particular M.O. attached to him all those years. And Ned’s right when he says we don’t know, other than what a snitch has told us, how Carmen Rodriquez was murdered.
What we do know, however, is that Ned Snelgrove was responsible for Carmen’s death.
The one rock-solid piece of evidence in all of this, the absolute undeniable fact for me that Ned murdered Carmen Rodriquez, turned out to be a piece of evidence offered at Ned’s Hartford trial that was ultimately prohibited from being entered into the record. The prosecution could not get it in. It was too “controversial” at the time.
A rather high-profile, well-known forensic expert had testified outside the jury about conducting ballistic-like tests on a few staple guns found in Ned’s basement bedroom apartment inside his parents’ house (where he went to live after getting out of prison in 1999). Yes, ballistics can be conducted on staples and staple guns, and, according to this expert, each staple gun fires a different staple, thus leaving behind a fingerprint, if you will, of that staple. It’s much like that unique spiral, candy-cane-shaped pattern on a bullet that matches the inside of only one gun chamber.
MADNESS, SEX, SERIAL KILLER: A Disturbing Collection of True Crime Cases by Two Masters of the Genre Page 4
