I'll Be Watching You (4 page)

I

As he walks toward Capitol Avenue, he can see her out of the corner of his eye. She’s in front of the bar. Talking. Walking sexily along the sidewalk. She’s working it, too: back and forth. Her hair bounces. Heels click against the sidewalk like wooden blocks. Her breasts, the most significant part of all of this, are moving up and down gracefully—he can hardly take it—as she loiters down the runway toward the end of her life.

He needs her to leave. To walk away from them. Her nephew. That security guard. Walk away from the entrance to the bar.

Come on.

Streetlights. Other cars. The stars. The moon.

None of it matters.

His eyes are on the Target.

He needs to get her alone, out into the gloom of the city.

This must be fun for him: the hunt, the stalking part of it. It has to be like buying the dope and preparing it in a spoon. The high before the high. Heating it up. Sucking it in through a piece of cotton with the syringe.

He walks up closer to her, likely picturing the outcome. That scene running through his mind since, in his own words, “the second or third grade”: strangling a woman until life departs from her body (while staring into her eyes, of course).

He starts to sweat. His hands shake. Heart. Racing.

Turn around and walk away.

No. There she is.

Leave.

No.

Take a breath.

II

On this night in early September 2001—days before the terrorist attacks—forty-two-year-old Christina Mallon (pseudonym) stands outside Kenney’s Restaurant on Capitol Avenue while our forty-one-year-old predator acts as if he is heading for his car around the corner. Christina has no idea a killer, right at that moment, is staring at her. Neither does she have any idea that, of course, he has
chosen
her.

In a way, Christina knows better. Capitol Avenue at night is not a place for a woman with Tina Turner legs, and a walk that would make any man shudder, to be hanging around.

Turning, he approaches her. This close to it all, he can’t help himself. Quite casually, as if he is speaking to a child, he says, “Get in the car.” His tan Ford Escort is beside them.

She tells him to take a hike. Not tonight. And then turns.

He grabs her by the arm.

“Damn it, let go of me,” she says. Christina is startled. She recognizes him from the bar. He’s a regular at Kenney’s. Not only that, but she’s helped him get customers for his stupid frozen-food business. She’s sat and talked with him. She knows him.

What are you doing?
Christina thinks.

The security guard and her nephew, now watching from afar, begin to suspect she is in trouble. As he tries to grab her more firmly by the arm and force her into his car, she jerks her shoulder and gives him a solid smack across the face.

He winces.
Ouch!

“We tussled,” Christina later tells the court.

So she gets away and she runs as fast as she can as her nephew walks hurriedly toward her. She’s been through a lot in life, but she’s terrified. It was that look on his face. In his eyes. He seemed “different.”

Scared somebody has seen him, or that the security guard and her nephew will do something, he hops into his vehicle and pulls up, quickly, alongside Christina, as she registers what is going on. “Get in the car, bitch, or I’ll hurt you,” he yells from his window.

By now, she is standing directly in front of Kenney’s, almost near the entrance.

“What’s going on?” asks the nephew.

“You OK?” the security guard wonders.

There is a bottle in the gutter of the street. She picks it up and tosses it at his car, hitting the side of it.

Clank.

“Bitch!” he says before speeding off, looking in his rearview mirror.

I

Four months later, Christina is reading the newspaper one morning. Dead of winter. Frost on the windows. Snow on the ground. Outside, you can see your breath like cigarette smoke.

She had decided not to report the incident. What good would it do? The cops know her. She doesn’t have a good standing with them. Although she’s no hooker, she does have a few pockmarks on her record.

In any event, there’s an article about a woman, a beloved local girl, Carmen Rodriguez, staring back at her. Christina knows Carmen. She has seen her at Kenney’s. Carmen had been reported missing near the same time Christina had that run-in with the man on the street.

What’s his name?

Then it clicks. Christina is horrified. Carmen was last seen leaving Kenney’s with the
same
guy. No one has seen her since.

Christina picks up the telephone and calls the Hartford Police Department (HPD).

I

And so it appears he has made one more mistake—a vital mistake, which, unbeknownst to him at the moment, will open up a Pandora’s box of possibilities for investigators looking into the disappearance of Carmen Rodriguez. All of which will, of course, lead back to him.

II

“This guy, the one you’re writing the book about,” one criminal profiler, who has studied him for the past twenty years, tells me as we are discussing serial killers over the telephone, “could have left bodies all over New England. He is one of the most dangerous people I’ve ever tracked.”

“Everyone says that,” I respond. “I don’t know.”

“Believe them,” he offers.

Indeed, in the days of researching and writing this book, I come to learn that they are all spot on with their judgments of my guy. He is, as David Zagaja has said, the
embodiment
of pure evil.

Satan himself.

To get to the juxtaposition of Carmen and Christina’s stories, however, we need to start at the beginning: in New Jersey, where the end of our serial killer’s path began with the biggest mistake of his murder career, when he met a woman one night at a bar—a woman he underestimated.

I

Mary Ellen Renard made it through what for many might have been the most volatile part of adulthood, and somehow managed to escape with her life. Sure, divorce, physical and emotional abuse, a witness to the sickness of alcoholism and its repercussions, weren’t things to celebrate. There was likely going to be a lifetime of therapy in her future.

Contemplation. Medication. Nightmares.

Yes. Midnight screams. Awake, asleep.

Up and down.

Tossing and turning.

But for the most part, Mary Ellen—along with her two daughters, after seventeen years of living with a man she described as “intermittently violent”—had left him and made it out into the world on her own. That was something to commemorate, indeed. A major accomplishment. She wasn’t running. Or hiding. Mary Ellen was
leaving.

That first apartment, Mary Ellen said, after living in Ringwood, New Jersey, with
him,
had been an old construction office shanty at one time, she found out months after moving in. There had been a drought in New Jersey when she and the kids rented it. When the drought ended and the rains came, so did the water. Leaking directly above her bed.

But looking back, Mary Ellen agreed it was nothing compared to the violence and chaos she and the girls had left behind.

Walking out of that house wasn’t easy. After all, it was two months after she was married, in 1963, that he had started hitting her, and didn’t stop until 1980 when she left. After two kids and more beatings, she believed she could tame him. Love was going to get them through, she convinced herself. “I never considered,” she said, “leaving. It wasn’t something you did then. I truly believed that when you loved someone enough, you could overcome any problem.”

Growing up Catholic didn’t help, Mary Ellen insisted. Having a priest for a brother made divorce sacrilegious. “Yes, we went to church religiously,” she said, laughing at the pun.

In fact, when Mary Ellen went to see her mother one night after her husband hit the kids for the first time, pleading with her, telling her the only option she had was to get rid of the bastard, Mary Ellen’s mother looked at her with conviction and said, “You’re a Catholic. There is no divorce.”

Mary Ellen understood, but it didn’t make it any easier. She thought maybe that if she confided in her mother, the woman might feel differently. But instead, “That is your cross to bear,” her mother said. “And you bear it.”

Mary Ellen accepted her mother’s answer. “Look at my mother’s crosses to bear,” she recalled. “She was like the Rock of Gibraltar. I mean, nothing would stop her.”

II

During the 1950s, north of Newark, west of White Plains, Fair Lawn, New Jersey, enjoyed one of its greatest periods of growth. By the 1960s, Fair Lawn would soar fourfold, from a meager nine thousand residents to almost forty thousand, in twenty years.

Working farms dominated the landscape. “We were like farm kids,” Mary Ellen said. By example, Mary Ellen’s parents taught their four children that living through hard times was never an excuse for a life of poverty. The American dream was theirs, if only they wanted it bad enough. Her dad, who hadn’t made it past the eighth grade, went on to become an industrial engineer.

Mary Ellen was born in 1942. The first house she recalled living in with her three siblings was a modest cape-style ranch. She grew up as a tomboy in one sense, but a girly girl in another. With Mom home all day, she fell into the same reclusive life her mother had known for decades. “My mom was always home. Today it might be called agoraphobia. She never left the house.”

It wasn’t only the confines of being a wife and mother molded from the 1950s social class of stay-at-home moms that kept Mom cooped up. The family had a rare disease, which saddled most of them. Mom was a bleeder, not a hemophiliac, but had a disease of the veins known as hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT), which, according to the University of Michigan, is “a disorder of the small and medium sized arteries of the body.” Primarily affecting four organ systems of the body—lungs, brain, nose, and gastrointestinal (stomach, intestines, or bowel) system—the “affected arteries either have an abnormal structure causing increased thinness or an abnormal direct connection with veins (arteriovenous malformation).” It was not uncommon for Mary Ellen to return from school and find her mother on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood. Her oldest memory of her mother, in fact, contains ghastly images of walking in the door with her book bag in one hand and a smile on her face, only to find her mom struggling to get up off the floor after the veins in her legs had burst open like a dry-rotted garden hose.

“All of my siblings have the symptoms.” Luckily, the gene skipped over Mary Ellen. “No one knew what was wrong with my mother until many years later. Doctors actually took photographs of her for medical books.”

I

As Mary Ellen’s marriage fell into an abyss of alcoholism and violence, she had no one to whom she could turn. She had grown up in a reclusive household, cut off from a social world of any kind. It wasn’t a stressful childhood, she insisted. They lived off the farm and ate, mostly, off the land. Mary Ellen’s mother and father had lived in orphanages throughout their childhood. They met while working at a New Jersey silk mill. They were thirteen. Mary Ellen said the household was loving and caring.

Mary Ellen’s dad was the stereotypical 1950s male provider. All through her years of school, Mary Ellen never had a boyfriend. She was intimidated by boys and had no time for them. Mom had surgery to repair a herniated disc when Mary Ellen was five and the doctors severed a nerve, which paralyzed one of her legs. “She came home in leg braces,” Mary Ellen recalled. The old type: leather and steel, like Forrest Gump’s. She also wore a back brace and had to walk with crutches. It lasted a year. Even though she was young, Mary Ellen helped her mother around the house. “What got my mother through all those tough times,” Mary Ellen added, “was her faith in God. I asked her later, ‘Why did you never get hopelessly depressed?’ She said, ‘I didn’t have time for that. I had four little kids who needed me.’ She was just amazing. Her faith is what got her through.”

II

Mary Ellen described herself as a “painfully shy” high-school student. But it wasn’t necessarily growing up in such an isolated environment at home that turned Mary Ellen into such an introvert. At thirteen, she learned she suffered from a form of scoliosis, which, in high school, began to curve her small vertebrae. Because of it, she started high school in a full-body brace. Luckily, “the brace prevented me from becoming a full hunchback”—yet it also prevented her from being active socially. “It added to my shyness…. If you have a mother who rarely leaves the house, you don’t learn social skills. You don’t know how to behave in the world.”

What made matters worse was that Mary Ellen’s father was on the road, traveling for work. He’d be gone a month and home for a weekend and gone again. Mary Ellen’s high-school English teacher encouraged her to write. Her teacher suggested college, majoring in creative writing. But, Mary Ellen said, it was a time when the men went out into the world, educated themselves, and took care of the family financially, while the women stayed at home with the kids. So she enrolled in Seton Hall University and figured she’d pursue her dream in small doses. Tragedy struck, however, and derailed even that modest ambition. Her father was involved in an auto accident that had almost killed him. Then he had a stroke. He was forty-eight. For two years he was recovering at home, unable to work.

By the time her father got back on his feet, college was no longer an option for Mary Ellen. The money was gone. Plus, she had what was considered then to be a fairly good job for a girl as a service rep for the local telephone company, a job she had taken after high school to help out with the bills around the house.

Still, things were OK. Mary Ellen believed that helping her family was more important. Her Catholic education had taught her that life was worth living
only
when you helped others.

Be a servant of the Lord. It was the only way. The Catholic way.

“Even though I loved to write, I saw myself as a mother and a homemaker, just like
my
mother.”

Be grateful for what you have, not what you don’t. God had chosen Mary Ellen’s path. She was fine with it.

III

Her parents kept a short leash on Mary Ellen when it came to dating. “Wrapped in tissue paper,” she described that time frame, from the first day she left the house for kindergarten until she graduated. Even after high school, she wasn’t one to go out looking for boys to date or even hang around with friends. She lived under a system: work, home.

Home, work. Five days a week. Chores and errands on Saturday. Church Sunday.

It wasn’t that her parents—and Mary Ellen was quick to point this out—were shielding her from a profane life, sheltering her from opportunity or “devils,” demanding she not date anyone. “Both of them had had such hardship in their childhood, they just wanted to protect their children.”