I'll Be Watching You (15 page)

I

Karen’s apartment was soon overcome with detectives and EMTs and cops asking questions of neighbors and flashing lights of blue and red—all that comes with the discovery of a bloodied body, a murder victim.

What was evident from the moment detectives started to study the crime scene was that Ned had posed Karen’s body. The way Ned described the murder years later didn’t necessarily gel with the scene that cops came upon. Maybe it was selective memory on Ned’s part. Or perhaps he saw it in his mind another way altogether. But Karen had been propped up with her back against the bed, stabbed upward of about fifteen times in the chest and abdomen (someone even later reported the stab wounds having a distinctive circular pattern to them), and that green sleeping bag had been placed over her corpse, not haphazardly, in haste, but as if it were a shroud.

“Even when murderers confess,” an investigator working Ned’s case later told me, “they pick and choose what they want to remember to downplay their role, their evil.”

II

Detective Dennis Watson, from second assistant prosecutor Thomas Kapsak’s Middlesex County Detective Bureau (MCDB), had arrived at Karen’s near sunup. Watson was in charge of the investigation. His notes and reports were clear and concise. Direct and very detailed.

It was extremely cold outside (“single digits”) when Watson arrived and met with Detective Joe Smith in the parking lot of Karen’s building. There were several other detectives from different bureaus on hand and Watson nodded to each that indelible “hello” cops give one another without having to say anything.

When they got inside, Watson noted that Karen was wearing blue jeans “which were zipped up and snapped” with a “belt tied.” She had blue socks on. Her panties had not been removed. Karen’s attacker was obviously only interested in her upper torso.

From the waist up, Karen was totally naked.

Watson knelt down and took a closer look at the injuries. There were six stab wounds, he counted, in the center of her chest area alone; several more—“puncture-type wounds”—near her lower front neck region. There were bruises on Karen’s neck, consistent with strangulation.

After the medical examiner cleared the scene, Watson and his colleagues headed back to the NBPD, where the arduous task of interviewing everyone Karen had come in contact with throughout the past few days, maybe even weeks, began.

This, no less, during the Christmas holiday season.

III

Barbara had called the house that morning. “We’ll be there this afternoon, Mom,” she said.

Elizabeth Anne was solemn.

“Mom?”

“OK, Barbara.”

Nothing more was said. How does a mother tell a daughter that her only sister is dead?

When Barbara and her husband left, Arthur Bilger called back and told Barbara’s in-laws what had happened. They didn’t want to worry Barbara now. Not with the baby and all. They would tell her in person when she arrived.

IV

A guy named Frank, along with his three roommates, hosted the party Karen and Ned had attended. Beyond describing how packed the house was, Frank offered investigators very little information regarding whom Karen spoke to or with whom she left. After that, detectives spoke with Elizabeth Anne, who was obviously broken up and totally overwhelmed by the loss. Karen was dead. One minute, her daughter was talking about the baby her sister was going to have, and the next moment, she was lying in the morgue.

It wasn’t fair.

Cops weren’t going to get much out of Elizabeth Anne—but they were extremely interested in speaking with Philip Costanzo. Philip was about to celebrate his twenty-fourth birthday. He had been going to Livingston College in Piscataway and worked part-time at a retail store, Shoppers World, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He and Karen had been dating for about three months, he explained. “I last saw Karen, let me see, Friday, December twenty-third,” Philip said. “It was approximately one-fifteen
A.M
.” Karen had just returned home, he said, from a night out with friends. Karen was tired and wanted to go to sleep. She came in for a while and then went across the hall to hit the sack.

Detectives asked Philip what he did the previous day. If he had seen Karen? Spent any time with her? Philip said he spent December 22 with Karen in her apartment drinking champagne and celebrating the end of the college semester. She was happy. Ready to face the holidays and have fun with her family. She said something about going to a party on campus that night, and Philip said he couldn’t go because of work and possibly traveling to his parents’ house after work.

Philip was visibly distraught. Poor Karen. Did he have to see her like that? There was an image now in his mind, etched like a nightmare, that would be there forever. A lasting memory of his girlfriend.

The sleeping bag.

The blood.

Her tiny feet.

Her face.

Those soulless, foggy eyes.

The stab wounds.

Philip had an ironclad alibi: he was working. There was no way he’d had anything to do with Karen’s death. After a thorough check, Detective Watson and his colleagues were sure of it. In truth, as they started talking to people, dragging friends of Karen’s into the station house and shining a light in their face, they quickly began to feel that Karen’s killer had attended the house party. Someone had perhaps met Karen and followed her home.

Stalked her.

But who? And how were they going to narrow it down from sixty party guests to one person?

V

Within a day, the MCDB had a list of house party guests. One after the other was brought in for questioning. The most plausible suspect was a guy who lived above Karen. He had gone to Cook College and knew Karen from class. He had last seen her on Friday morning, December 23, as he was leaving for work at People’s Express Airlines in Newark. He worked all day, he said, and then went shopping. When he returned home at about eleven that night, he knocked on Karen’s door before retiring upstairs.

“Why?” asked one of the detectives.

“Well,” he said, “I must have seen her car”—it was there in the parking lot outside—“because I wouldn’t have knocked if I knew she wasn’t home. But I got no answer.”

“You know Philip?”

“Yeah, we all hang out together.”

The guy explained that Philip was supposed to go down to his parents’ home that night, but he called and said he wasn’t going.

It sounded strange.

“It was snowing,” he added. “Phil didn’t want to drive in the snow.”

He then explained that he and his roommate had watched a television movie,
Cotton Candy,
but his roommate left halfway into it. After the movie, he played his guitar, recorded some music until about 3:30
A.M
., and went to bed.

The detectives asked him for permission to search his apartment.

“Sure.”

After a “brief search,” Watson noted, nothing was found.

Detectives going through Karen’s apartment found several names and numbers of what they presumed to be friends, but were now, of course, suspects.

All checked out.

And then, after speaking to nearly everyone at the party, detectives came to Ned Snelgrove. His name was in Karen’s address book.

“Yeah,” someone at the party said, “Ned was here. I saw him talking to Karen.”

I

That afternoon, Barbara made it to the shore house with her husband. Walking in, she took one look at everyone and knew, she recalled later, that
something
had happened. “It’s one of those moments in your life you never, ever forget,” Barbara told me. “I get chest pains just thinking about it now. I can feel the pain welling up when I think about it.”

II

There was no answer at Ned’s apartment when detectives, after finding his name and number in Karen’s address book, first called on him. One of his roommates—he lived with two friends from college—said that Ned had left for Connecticut to go spend the holidays with his parents.

After some checking around, they came up with Ned’s parents’ number. Detective Watson spoke to Ned. He sounded somewhat unfazed, but also jumpy, twitchy. Watson mentioned that the MCDB had heard Ned had been at the same party. “I went to the party alone,” Ned said. “It was approximately nine
P.M
. I saw Karen a couple of hours later and spoke to her briefly about what we were both doing with our lives.”

It sounded as though Ned had rehearsed the conversation in his head.

“Were you dating her?” Watson wanted to know.

“In college, I did. But we broke up in August 1982.”

“What time did you leave the party?”

“About two
A.M
.—with Karen.”

“You left with her?”

“Not
with
her. I walked her out to her car, a little economy car. It was parked up the street from the party.”

“What next?”

“She went her way and I drove directly to my apartment alone.”

As they talked, Ned sounded more scripted than ever. Each little detail perfectly fit into the scheme of things. It was the way Ned added words—“alone,” “with Karen,” “August 1982”—as if he had gone over the conversation in his head all the way to Connecticut.

“When will you be back in town?” Watson asked.

“The day after Christmas.”

III

During the afternoon hours of December 26, detectives tracked down ten more potential suspects and questioned each regarding his whereabouts that night. All were men. All had known Karen in some capacity.

None, however, were taken seriously as suspects.

Whenever a suspect seemed promising, his alibi checked out. That was the thing about investigating a murder during the Christmas holiday: nearly everyone had someone who could vouch for them.

Everyone, that is, except Ned Snelgrove.

I

Whenever Ned found himself in a jam, he reacted. On his way back from Connecticut to New Jersey, after spending the holidays with his parents, Ned must have—I say “must have” because even though Ned would admit to a lot of things in the coming years, this is something he routinely denies—believed that by taking his own life he could escape the embarrassment of showing his true self to those who would now see that he was a failure and murderer. He later wrote that he was
always the prime suspect
in Karen’s homicide. The police, however, didn’t have one piece of substantial evidence to tie Ned to Karen’s murder.

As he made his way back to New Jersey, Ned began to “feel terrible from then on.” Killing Karen like that, he insisted, was not part of his plan. As evil or bizarre as it sounded, strangling Karen was part of the fantasy, but knifing her—at least according to Ned—wasn’t. Stabbing Karen and making a mess of things was never supposed to happen.

Murder as a contingency. How charming.

Back at his apartment, Ned was stewing, trying to figure out how in the heck he was going to get out of this one. How should he act? Should he call Karen’s family? Show up at her funeral? Run into the police station and throw himself on their mercy? Which was appropriate?

Tears, Ned believed. Tears were the answer. Yes, lots of crocodile tears.

Instead of facing it all, however, Ned decided to take the coward’s way out: disappear. So he swallowed
a whole package of sixteen sleeping pills,
he later wrote, a
nd a bottle of iodine,
believe it or not.

It didn’t work, though.

I didn’t die,
he penned.

II

At 7:20
P.M
., on December 26, 1983, twenty-three-year-old Ned Snelgrove—looking so much his age and, strikingly, bearing an uncanny resemblance to his later mentor, Ted Bundy—was sitting at the MCDB going over things with Detective Watson and several of his colleagues, all of whom by now had a gut “feeling,” an instinct, about Ned.

Ned had swallowed the pills and taken the iodine and was treated and released from the hospital. He was alive. He said he would “get help.”

Ned seemed calm and cool for a guy who had just tried to take his own life. He explained where he worked and where he lived, how he knew Karen, when they dated and when they broke up, how he helped her move into her apartment, and that he had just received a Christmas card from her three weeks before her death.

“I bumped into her a couple times since the breakup,” Ned explained.

It was important for Ned to place himself inside Karen’s apartment, which would account for his fingerprints and any possible hair or clothing fibers they might come up with.

After Ned went through and answered some of the same questions he had over the telephone the week before, he gave detectives consent—after they asked—to search his apartment. Ned had said he left for Connecticut on December 24, at about 1:30 or 2:00
P.M
.

Watson’s report read: [Snelgrove]
was advised of his Constitutional rights and he signed and dated a rights card—a search was conducted [of his apartment] with negative results.

III

Karen’s mother, Elizabeth Anne, her sister, Barbara, and stepfather, Arthur, of course, were dreading the process of burying Karen. What family wanted to bury their twenty-three-year-old child, a woman with so much promise and virtue and love to shower on the world? It was almost as if there were no words to describe how they felt. For Elizabeth Anne, her heart ached, literally. She was having trouble breathing. Talking. Sleeping. Eating.

Karen was special. She had played the flute, the guitar, the piano. She enjoyed photography and magic, which she learned from “the Great Oz,” her father, whom she was now standing with at the gates of heaven, Elizabeth Anne believed.

And yet, during a day that couldn’t seemingly get any worse, here came Ned Snelgrove, a man the family firmly believed had had something to do with their daughter’s death, sauntering into the funeral home to pay his respects to the woman he had killed.

No one truly knew, but what gall the guy had!

There were hundreds of family members and Karen’s friends on hand at the wake to say good-bye. The news media had called “relentlessly,” looking to interview anyone, Barbara later said, as the story of Karen’s murder was headline news and on the front page of the
New York Times,
but the family shooed them all away.

A college girl—no, a
Rutgers
girl—had been murdered in her apartment.

Big news story.

As the wake proceeded, Ned made his way up to Karen’s casket as all those around sobbed and shook their heads.

“What’s he doing here?” someone whispered.

“Can you believe this guy?”

Ned, Barbara later said, was “the person crying the loudest.”

Ned walked up. Knelt in front of the coffin of the woman he had murdered.

Bowed his head.

Cried.

And then stepped up, leaned inside the coffin, and kissed Karen good-bye.

Kissed her.

A peck.

“He made a spectacle of it all and made sure everyone knew he was grieving,” Barbara said. Detectives were there watching Ned. “But they could not do anything.”

IV

Detectives had several mitigating factors to look at, or, rather, as they like to say, “go on.” For one, Karen lived in a three-story tenement in a section of town that was not at all known for a history of high crime. The house she lived in was four blocks from the downtown district. To get into the building, you needed a key. There were no signs of forced entry into Karen’s building or her apartment.

Ned.

Detectives were confident that Karen knew her murderer.

Ned.

They were confident her murderer had been in her apartment before the murder.

Ned.

And had anger issues with Karen.

Ned. Ned. Ned.

No matter how they looked at it.

V

Detective Watson telephoned Ned on December 31. “We need you to come in,” Watson explained.

“For what?” Ned asked.

“Answer some questions, you know, and discuss maybe taking a polygraph.”

Ned’s stomach turned. “When?”

“How ’bout January third, say, um, nine
A.M
.?”

“That’ll work.”

Over the course of the next three days, the MCDB brought in several of Karen’s college friends—all males—who were at the house party. All agreed to take a polygraph.

None failed.

When Ned hung up with Detective Watson, he immediately phoned his parents and, together, hired a lawyer. On January 3, 1984, Ned and his attorney, Clifford Kuhn, showed up on schedule to speak with detectives investigating Karen’s murder. Kuhn said he wanted to read his client’s previous statements to the police before allowing him to take a polygraph.

They didn’t stick around. Kuhn said he’d call after having a look at the statements.

Six days later, Kuhn called Watson. “I advised my client not to take a polygraph.”

“OK,” Watson said.