I'll Be Watching You. M. William Phelps
Mary Ellen was able to stand and grab the doorknob to her landlady’s apartment and rattle it. Her hand, however, kept slipping off the handle because they were “all wet.”
Full of blood.
I really must have gotten his eyes good, she thought.
Then, standing there, with only a door to safety between her and the landlady, everything went quiet. Mary Ellen didn’t hear the landlady and realized that Ned was gone. An eerie silence. It was just Mary Ellen. Alone. She could feel herself getting weaker and her body drooping. She looked down. Her dress was all “crumpled around her waist and full of blood.” She then saw the holes in her body once again with “blood [still] spurting out of them.” Her legs started to give out. Her knees buckled. She began to slide down against the door.
This is really crazy, she thought. This only happens in movies. I’m inches away from safety and I’m going to die right here.
Her life had come down to a door. A woman scared of letting her in. She was going to die because she couldn’t get through a damn wooden door.
II
The landlady must have seen the cops pull up, because she finally opened the door as two cruisers arrived out front. When she heard the door open, Mary Ellen pushed her way inside and said, “Call the police. Close the door right away. He’s still up there.”
When the landlady didn’t respond, Mary Ellen closed and locked the door.
“The police are coming,” the landlady said as Mary Ellen, bloodied, topless, and hysterical, fell into the landlady’s apartment and started stumbling around from room to room. Dizzy and unsteady. Totally out of it. Fading in and out.
Pulling herself up off the floor, Mary Ellen found her way into her landlady’s kitchen and collapsed on the linoleum floor. What seemed like only moments later, a policeman appeared over Mary Ellen and began asking questions. Seeing a silhouette of the policeman standing over her, Mary Ellen later recalled, was a relief. She had won.
She survived.
III
Just before police arrived, Ned ran back upstairs and grabbed Mary Ellen’s keys—a souvenir, perhaps, which was something he had done in the past—pushed a window open and, swinging from the upper windowsill like a monkey, jumped from the roof, over the asphalt walkway. He landed on his feet, like a cat, on the grass out front—as luck would have it, right near his car. Within a few moments, Ned was on his way out of the neighborhood as more police were arriving from the opposite direction.
IV
Mary Ellen was hurt more severely than she knew. Survival wasn’t a given. When Officer Gary Van Loon approached her as she lay on her landlady’s kitchen floor, he and his partner noticed that her dress, “laying across her genital area,” was covered with blood. The area of the floor around Mary Ellen was one large pool. There was also a great deal of blood on her hands, Van Loon later wrote in his report.
Noticing the two puncture wounds below her breasts, Van Loon immediately applied pressure in order to stop the bleeding.
Van Loon’s partner, Officer Kayne, came into the kitchen with a first-aid kit and wrapped the wounds until an ambulance arrived. Another officer dashed upstairs to see if Mary Ellen’s attacker was still inside the apartment. After a careful, gun-drawn search, it was clear he had slipped out a window and taken off. The drifting curtain in the open window was the only sign of his departure.
Mary Ellen was transported to Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Saddle Brook. Upstairs, inside her apartment, detectives working the scene noticed several things that caught their attention immediately. Mary Ellen’s black bra was on the floor, but it was unknown, Van Loon wrote, if it was torn off or taken off. The telephone jack in the kitchen was ripped from the wall. Mary Ellen’s bed was “open,” the bedspread on the floor. The nightstand and lamp Mary Ellen had next to her bed had been knocked over, as other pieces of furniture were spewn [sic] around.
And no weapon was located.
19
I
As she struggled to stay conscious in the emergency room, doctors secured Mary Ellen’s wounds and gave her a sedative so she could fall asleep and get some rest. This, while they figured out if they could save her life.
Several moments later, as Mary Ellen started coming to, she saw a man heading into her room. His hair was cut in a fashion similar to Ned’s. Mary Ellen, groggy and drunk from the sedative, believed he was even the same height, that he looked like Ned.
Oh, my God… (“I was terrified it was him.”)
Whenever Mary Ellen became frightened, she held her breath. It was part of being consumed by fear and anxiety that she had lived with most of her adult life.
There was another man behind the man who looked like Ned; they were heading for her. Holding her breath, Mary Ellen realized they were detectives and she started to cry, pleading, “Please find him. He’s going to kill somebody. He tried to kill me.”
Ned was like a snapshot in her mind. Doped up and suffering post-traumatic stress, she rattled off a description: “A blue paisley design on a red tie…white oxford cloth, button-down shirt. A navy blue suit.” He had “California good looks,” she said later. “Blond hair and blue eyes.”
Doctors weren’t going to allow such nonsense: cops questioning Mary Ellen so soon. She was in no condition to talk. “You must leave this room right now,” her doctor said.
II
The way he felt, it was like running up a flight of stairs. Or taking an entire bottle, he explained, of “pep pills.” A combination of “an electric shock and having someone sneak up behind you” and startle “the daylights out of you.” That was how Ned explained it—that sensation when “I felt her throat in my hands.” He wasn’t talking about Mary Ellen. He was speaking of another woman—a woman he had killed four years before he met Mary Ellen. Like a hunter, he claimed it was his first kill. But cops, investigators, and profilers in the years to come would beg to differ.
As he later wrote to a judge and described these feelings, Ned said he could barely contain himself while writing the words. He could feel that adrenaline once again just writing about it, racing through [his] heart, hands and legs.
Words on a page had done it for him. He was picturing it all as he sat in his cell and wrote. Doing the actual deed of murder, Ned explained, was another thing entirely. Actually strangling a woman, he said, was nothing like it was portrayed in films. It was practically impossible to kill someone with your bare hands, he wrote. Sure, he continued, a football player could probably do it because he had “huge hands.” But Ned was certainly no football player.
He had killed a woman and gotten away with it for several years before he met and attacked Mary Ellen. He had floated the notion in his head of getting “professional help,” but it had been, for him, such a “terrible experience,” and he was “so thankful” not to be arrested, that although he still had those crazy, violent, sexual “urges,” he had “convinced” himself that he would “never allow” a situation to develop where the potential was there for him to “lose control ever again.”
That was, of course, until he met Mary Ellen.
III
As he pulled into his driveway after attacking Mary Ellen, Ned had to hope that she would die in the hospital. Because if Mary Ellen Renard lived, Ned Snelgrove was going to jail.
IV
It was four in the morning when Diana Jansen, Mary Ellen’s youngest daughter, heard what had happened to her mother. The hospital called. “Your mom’s been attacked,” a nurse said.
Diana had a nine-month-old child and was pregnant with her second. She didn’t need drama. Not now. Her first child had been born premature—one would have to think it was because of all the stress