Lethal Guardian (8 page)

And going nowhere.

With all police work, however, came luck—and Lady Luck was about to shine her bright light on the investigation, and in the process, she would bust the case wide open.

Spring couldn’t have come any sooner for Connecticut residents in 1994. The past winter had produced so much snow that by the time April had come and gone, many wondered if the snow would ever melt.

Nothing could stop the inevitable, however: warm air, shorts, tank tops, the schools of bluefish and flounder that would eventually draw thousands of fishermen to the Long Island Sound, golf courses overflowing with loudly dressed weekend hackers, beaches packed with tourists and townies, barbecues, weddings, graduations.

For the ED-MCS, the changing seasons were abstract parts of the year. Their job was crime. It didn’t matter what time of the year it was. The more time that went by, the more frustrating and confusing things became. Here it was the first week of May, and any new leads in Buzz’s murder appeared to be at a standstill. There were countless people saying that Buzz wasn’t the most well-liked person in the world and others who claimed he was the salt of the earth. There were scores of interviews that still hadn’t produced a single tangible suspect—someone whom investigators could focus on exclusively. Rob Ferguson and Charlie Snyder had long been scratched off the list and were cleared of any wrongdoing. Detectives now thought that Buzz might have been killed by a jealous husband or boyfriend, but they were no closer to finding out exactly who that person was.

On May 5, 1994, Shawn Butterfield, a twenty-seven-year-old hotel manager and former friend of Buzz’s, was driving to his parents’ house in East Lyme for a dinner party. Shawn lived only about two miles away, on the other end of town.

As he crawled up to a stop sign right down the street from his parents’ house, easing his way through, he noticed a cop car on the other side of the street.

At first, Shawn thought nothing of it, but then the cop began tailing him.

When Shawn pulled into his parents’ driveway, the cop pulled up right behind him, blocking his car.

What the hell?

“Sir,” the unassuming cop said, “you didn’t come to a complete stop back at that stop sign….”

“What…are you kidding me? You followed me for
that
?”

“Listen,” the cop said, taking a step closer, “what can you tell me about Buzz Clinton?” He sounded overly intimidating, as if he were trying to be tough. Shawn, a big guy himself at about five feet nine inches, a solid 180 pounds, wasn’t falling for it, however.

“Look,” Shawn said, “I’m not going to murder anyone over a hundred dollars, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

After taking Shawn’s name and address, the cop took off.

A week later, on May 12, ED-MCS detective Diane Morianos showed up unexpectedly at Shawn’s work, the Days Inn, in Mystic, Connecticut.

“We need to talk somewhere alone,” Morianos explained.

“Over here,” Shawn said, pointing to an empty room.

Morianos said her visit was routine. There was no reason to be alarmed. They were just connecting the dots. Since Shawn and Buzz had known each other at one point, Morianos explained, Shawn might know something without realizing it. Yet the first thing Morianos wanted to know was what Shawn had meant the previous week when he told the cop he wasn’t going to murder someone over $100.

Butterfield explained that he and Buzz were former high-school classmates and had worked together for about a year, in 1990 through 1991, but he hadn’t seen him since.

After Morianos asked a few more questions, Butterfield said there was an incident that had taken place sometime ago with Officer Joe Dunn, the Old Lyme police officer who had made an identification of Buzz’s body.

Buzz and Shawn had hooked up together shortly after Buzz and Lisa got divorced. Back in high school, they’d been on the gymnastics team together, but that was the extent of their relationship. After Buzz split with Lisa, he ran into Shawn at a local bar, and the two began talking about old times. Before the night was over, Buzz said he was working for a guy in Newington, Connecticut, installing pools, and he asked Shawn if he wanted a job.

The next day, they were working together.

Shawn saw Buzz as someone who never followed through with anything in his life. He viewed Buzz as a “bullshitter,” someone who was always playing himself up as someone he wasn’t. “He talked a lot about doing this and doing that,” Butterfield recalled, “but he never did
anything.
”

One night, after drinking for most of the evening at a local bar, Shawn drove Buzz back to Buzz’s apartment in East Lyme. Shawn had lived nearby with his parents. So dropping Buzz off had become a routine after-work chore.

On that particular night, though, they’d both gotten pretty drunk, and Shawn later admitted that he probably shouldn’t have been driving a car, but he was young and naive.

When they approached Buzz’s apartment, Shawn got pulled over by a cop who had been following them for a while. He didn’t know it, but he had a taillight out.

When the cop came to the window, Shawn recognized him as Joe Dunn. Shawn pulled out his wallet, took out his license and handed it to Dunn, then placed the wallet on the console between him and Buzz and refocused his attention back on Dunn.

Dunn, who had known Shawn from around town and had watched him grow up, leaned into the car after a moment and said, “Pull over to the side of the road.”

Shawn then looked over at Buzz and thought,
Oh, shit! We’re fucked now.

After getting out of the car and talking to Dunn for a few minutes while Buzz waited in the car, Shawn came back and told Buzz that Dunn was going to let them walk to Buzz’s apartment and come back in the morning to get the car. It was an odd thing for Dunn to do, Butterfield later said, because Dunn had always been a “ball buster of a cop.”

When they got back to Buzz’s place, Shawn realized that he’d left his wallet back in the car.

“Thank God [that] Joe Dunn made me lock the car up, huh, Buzz?”

“Yeah,” Buzz said. “It’ll be all right for the night.”

“I’m going back to get it now. Come with me.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Buzz said. “Get it tomorrow. Don’t even worry about it right now.” Buzz seemed inflexible for some reason, Shawn later remembered, and made it clear that he didn’t want Shawn to go back to the car until morning.

After they argued a bit, they ended up walking back to the car. But after scouring the car for about fifteen minutes, Shawn couldn’t find his wallet.

“It’s gone. I don’t believe it. It’s fucking gone. It was right here on the console.”

The car had been locked, yet there was no sign of the wallet. Shawn looked at Buzz, who was hanging around outside the car.
I know you took it, you son of a bitch. You were the only one who could have.
There was about $100 in the wallet.

“But it wasn’t about the money,” Shawn later said. “It was about friendship and trust.”

The following day, Shawn called the Old Lyme Police Department. “Where’s my wallet?” he asked Joe Dunn.

“I watched you place it on the console,” Dunn confirmed. “The car was locked.”

Later that night, Shawn drove over to Buzz’s. “I want my wallet,” he said when Buzz answered the door.

“What?”

“Come on, man. Where else could it be? You were the last one near it!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Shawn.”

Buzz never admitted taking the wallet, and there was no way to prove it. But Shawn, even years later, never doubted Buzz was the thief.

“Buzz only cared about himself,” Butterfield later said, shaking his head in disbelief about what he was saying. “That’s the way he was. That’s the way I remember him. He ruined a friendship—a
good
friendship—over a lousy one hundred dollars. He used to get kicked out of his house all the time. My parents even let him sleep over whenever he was homeless. I don’t understand how he could have done that to me.

“When I first heard that he had been murdered, the first thing that I thought was ‘He must have ripped somebody off.’”

Butterfield considered Dee Clinton a “sweetheart,” he added. She’d always been hospitable and extremely friendly to him.

“There was something strange there, though, at the Clinton home. Buzz was always a mama’s boy around Dee. He was her baby, for sure. But when Buzz was away from her, he was a totally different person.
Completely.
He was a little angel at home…but when we went out, he was wild. His entire character changed.”

The interview Morianos conducted with Shawn at the Days Inn offered nothing in the form of a lead. If anything, it was just more anecdotal evidence that lent itself to the fact that there were people in Buzz’s life who had motive to kill him. As far as finding the person responsible for his murder, it was still a situation that needed some sort of intervention from the public—someone who had seen something or heard something, but had been afraid to come forward for some reason.

The ED-MCS building is at the top of a long stretch of road off West Thames Street, near downtown Norwich. It is an archaic-looking structure, about the size of a century-old schoolhouse. Its outside finish is made up of cement-colored brick and mortar, faded and coarse. With its stone steps leading up to the main entrance and its large, life-size windowpanes off to the right and left, it looks more like a historical library than a meetinghouse for cops who track down eastern Connecticut’s “most wanted.”

Detective John Turner was assigned to the ED-MCS as a member of the Major Crime Squad back in 1987; he joined the force in 1982. Since becoming a detective, Turner had investigated murders, rapes, child abuse cases and violent crimes of all kinds.

The Buzz Clinton murder investigation, however, had Turner baffled. He knew the answer—or at least some of the answers—was right in front of his face, if only he could put his arms around the motive. Every murder has a cause: jealousy, revenge, robbery, money, drugs, hate. The reasons are endless.

In Buzz’s case, though, something seemed to be missing.

Then it happened—that “break” they’d been waiting on all along came in the form of a phone call that would change everything eventually.

Turner received a message on May 25, 1994, that a woman had called the state police barracks in Montville and stated that she knew who “killed the man on the Rocky Neck connector in East Lyme.”

It was heaven-sent. The detectives had exhausted just about every single lead, and now a potential killer was going to be delivered on a silver platter?

It seemed too good to be true.

While waiting on the line to be transferred to where Turner and the rest of the ED-MCS were attending a meeting, dispatch lost the caller. For the next ten minutes, Turner and the ED-MCS waited nervously for their new witness to call back. Finally the phone rang. After trying to be cryptic, hiding who she was, the woman identified herself as Catherine White.

Thus far, this was a name unconnected to Buzz’s murder in any way.

White told Turner she was scared that her boyfriend, who was involved in the murder, would find out about the call. She had called Troop F because it was the closest station to her apartment. No long-distance charges would show up on her phone bill.

After running a background check on White, Turner’s initial jubilation was short-lived. Catherine White was a convicted prostitute. A rather well-known “lady of the evening” around town, she was also a heavy drug user.

Nevertheless, she might know something.

After sending a few troopers to fetch her, John Turner and Marty Graham sat down with White and began to hear a story that made little sense at first blush.

“It was my boyfriend, Joe Fremut,” White explained, “and his friend Mark Despres who planned and committed the murder.”

Turner was curious about why White had waited so long to come forward.

“I can deal with a lot of things in my life,” she said, tears falling, “and I have done a lot of things I’m not proud of—but I can’t be part of a murder. Just knowing about it, well, I can’t sleep at night.”

At thirty-three, Joe Fremut had followed in the footsteps of his father, James, who had owned and operated Fremut Texaco Service Station on South Main Street in Deep River for most of his life. Fremut, at five feet eight inches, 160 pounds, had worked at the Texaco station, it seemed, since he was a child. In recent years, Fremut Texaco had also gotten into the used-car market and had a parking lot full of used cars. Former customers viewed Fremut as nothing more than “the guy you went to in town to buy a used car.”

Others, however, remembered him differently.

One former acquaintance said he was the kind of guy you left alone. In pretty good physical shape, slim, but built solid, Fremut had a look about him that spoke of a hard life. With his short-cropped black hair and cocky grin, he resembled actor Robert Blake during his
Baretta
days. He always seemed intense, as if on edge.

“No one went out of their way to mess with Joey Fremut,” a former friend said. “That’s for damn sure.”

Some said he was a quiet guy who liked to shoot darts at the local pub. He fixed cars, kept to himself and never really bothered anyone. In fact, if someone brought trouble to him, he usually walked away without incident, or insisted the guy drop it.

“There was respect there for Joe. Joe never went out and looked for trouble. But let me tell you something: if you shit on Joey Fremut’s front lawn, you’d end up eating your own shit. He didn’t run from trouble. And if you brought it to him, well, you had better be ready.”

The ED-MCS now had a key suspect. Still, what was Fremut’s connection to Buzz? Deep River, although it wasn’t too far from Old Lyme, wasn’t exactly part of Buzz’s stomping grounds. Besides working in town at Pettipaug Manor for a few months, Buzz had rarely gone into Deep River.

Could Buzz have screwed over Fremut on some unpaid vehicle repair bills, or maybe a bad drug deal? Fremut, it was soon learned, had been dealing cocaine; plus, the drug-deal-gone-bad theory was on the ED-MCS’s shortlist of possible motives. Furthermore, how did Mark Despres, a second name White had given the ED-MCS, fit into things? Despres, a local man, had known Joe Fremut for about twenty-five years and had worked for him at Fremut Texaco. Catherine White said Despres worked as a used-car salesman—at least that was his job title. But Turner and Graham soon learned that Depres also had a few side businesses. Not only was Despres a paid confidential informant for the state police, but he, too, sold cocaine.

Despres usually dealt drugs, many claimed, out of a local bar in Ivoryton and hung around with Fremut at the Texaco station. In a sense, selling used cars was a front.

So how did Catherine White find out that her boyfriend, Joe Fremut, with whom she said she’d been living for some time now, and his best friend, Mark Despres, killed Buzz? Where was White getting her information? And why would two tough guys who had no connection to Buzz want him dead, anyway?

Detective Pete Cleary drove over to Fremut Texaco with another detective on May 26. He hoped Fremut could give him a few answers.

Fremut immediately turned over on Despres.

At a car auction in January, Fremut explained, he saw Despres wearing an “odd-looking ring and pendant necklace,” so he asked him about it.

“It has something to do with Satan,” Despres said. “Anything can be done for a price. I know people that would beat up, break legs or kill someone.”

A few weeks later, Fremut said, Despres told him he had been offered between $5,000 and $10,000 to “take care of someone.”

Then Fremut explained the mechanics of the contract and how Despres had shown him several guns—including a .38. He said after he’d heard that someone had been killed on the connector in East Lyme, he remembered that Despres had told him the contract was for a guy from East Lyme.

One and one made two.

“It was back in February,” Catherine White explained to John Turner. “While I was at Fremut Texaco, on or about the last week of February, I overheard Joe and Mark talking about how Mark was following a guy around but never had the opportune moment to ‘do him’ because someone was always around.”

Turner was astonished, but at the same time elated. From a source, cops listen for details of a particular crime that haven’t been reported in the newspapers—details that only someone who had inside information about the crime could know.

White, it was easy to tell right away, appeared to have known more than the local reporters covering the case.

“I heard Joe tell Mark that he should continue following the guy around, and the moment will present itself.”

Joe Fremut, Turner learned next, had even sold Despres out to White at one point.

“Later that evening,” White continued, “Joe told me that Mark had picked up a contract for eight thousand dollars to ‘do this guy.’”

It was obvious that Fremut and Despres hadn’t read any how-to books on murder, and they probably had never killed anyone before. Any armchair criminalist knows the first rule of getting away with murder: never tell anybody what you’re about to do. From what White was saying, it appeared as though Despres and Fremut had been discussing the murder at length within earshot of anybody who happened to be around.

White’s statement, however, added another facet to the investigation, an element that ED-MCS had speculated on earlier: there was obviously some sort of mastermind behind the crime—someone else, who was involved at a higher level, had paid Despres and Fremut to commit the murder. In other words, they were nothing more than hired hands.

As White continued, a pretty good portrait of Buzz’s final hours—hours detectives had been looking to make sense of for about the past ten weeks—began to emerge with lucid accuracy. There were things White knew that only a person involved in the murder could have known. She was stating particulars: times, dates, names.

Answers.

According to White, on the day after Buzz’s murder, she heard Fremut and Despres discussing a trip to Florida. At one point, White said, Despres backed out of the trip.

“I can’t go,” Despres told Fremut, “because I have not received my money yet.”

Apparently, whoever had hired Despres to kill Buzz hadn’t finished paying him.

Later that same night, March 11, White went to Fremut and asked him about the conversation she’d overheard earlier that day.

“Mark went through with it!” Fremut roared. He seemed happy about it.

“With what?”

“Mark called the man he was going to hit and expressed an interest in a tow truck he was selling in order to lure him away,” Fremut explained.

“What?”

“Mark made arrangements to meet the guy, then followed him up onto the connector in Niantic. Once they got on the connector, the guy stopped his car and approached Mark, who had stopped behind him.”

“Yeah…”

“When the guy got out of his car, Mark shot him six times with a thirty-eight!”

White then stated that when Despres saw a set of headlights coming over the crest of the connector, he got back into his car and “drove over the body and fled the scene.”

White insisted Fremut had even encouraged Despres to commit the murder, and helped plan it. And when Despres came back the following day, explaining how he’d gone through with it, Fremut “praised” his efforts.

After taking a break and getting a glass of water, White sat back down and continued.

“There’s more?” Turner asked.

“Plenty.”

Days after the murder, Despres went to Fremut and told him he was having trouble sleeping.

Fremut, perhaps more heartless than Despres, couldn’t understand why—especially since Despres, White said, had cut up the gun he used in the murder, buried it and sold the car he’d driven that night.

Then came perhaps one of the most unbelievable aspects of the murder thus far. According to White, Despres had brought along his fifteen-year-old son, Chris, when he killed Buzz.

In January 1994, about ten weeks before Buzz’s murder, Chris Despres moved in with his dad. Chris was a scrawny kid, with long, hippie-style hair. Living with his mother, Diana Trevethan, in Newington, Connecticut, just south of Hartford, Chris had been having the same problems at home every teenager faced at some point in his or her life. Trevethan was working for the phone company at the time and had remarried. Ever since her split from Despres, life seemed to be going well for Trevethan.

Chris, however, didn’t quite see it that way.

“Mark Despres, when he and Diana were married, wasn’t very settled,” a former family friend later recalled. “There was infidelity on Mark’s part. Diana is a great person…the sweetest person in the world. She would do anything for anyone. She got married to Mark and became pregnant when she was young. She knew she needed to provide for Chris. She managed to scrape up enough money to buy a house, worked full-time, and raised Chris while Mark was out and about, not working, racing cars and hustling. As much as she loved Mark, she did the best thing for Chris and let go.”

When the divorce was finalized, Chris was about three years old. Ever since the divorce, Mark had not really paid much attention to his son. As he grew older, Chris developed an urge to hang around with his dad and had always wanted to be part of his life. But Mark wanted little to do with being a father and always let Chris down.

“Mark paid no attention to Chris throughout the years. He was gone all the time. He would say he was coming for a visit, or a birthday, and he wouldn’t.”

Two months prior to the murder, Catherine White, who, Turner noticed, was obviously getting tired and worn out from talking about such horrible memories that had overrun her recently, said she was with Fremut and Despres at Fremut Texaco when she saw something disturbing.

It was a Sunday. Business was slow. Fremut and Despres were just hanging around the station, passing time.

At one point during the day, Fremut and Despres went out to the back of the garage and began test-firing different weapons, as if they were pumping themselves up for the murder. From afar, White said, she watched as Fremut slipped inside a beige-colored station wagon, and Despres fired a gun just outside the window of the car.

After a few rounds, Fremut would get out of the car and the two men would discuss how loud the shot sounded from inside the car. Then they would get a different gun and, with the radio in the car turned up loud and then turned down soft, test-fire the new gun. It went on for some time, White explained.

Obvious to John Turner at this point was that Buzz’s murder was, most likely, a partially thought-out crime, a merciless killing, committed by a couple of misfit criminals, who really didn’t know what the hell they were doing. Others were definitely involved, Turner knew. Despres and Fremut both spoke of a third party who was responsible for paying them. Two guys like Fremut and Despres wouldn’t just kill some guy from Old Lyme for sport—especially someone they had no connection to.

So the detectives from the ED-MCS had some information as to what had happened to Buzz on the night of March 10, 1994, and, perhaps, who had pulled the trigger on the gun that had killed him. They knew Charlie Snyder and Rob Ferguson didn’t have anything to do with Buzz’s murder, and they officially dropped both men as suspects. Still, it wasn’t enough. What they needed to know next was who had hired Despres—or, better yet, why?