I'll Be Watching You. M. William Phelps
it, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to be seen leaving with this lady…. He would have, he added, also brought a weapon into the bedroom with him.
Likely, as Ned began to masturbate, “the lady,” as he explained it, woke up and began struggling with him. As that happened, he wrote, I ran back into the living room…in a panic, picked up a stupid…knife.
“Stupid” was an interesting adjective; it implied that if he had chosen a better weapon, he could have killed Mary Ellen.
In any event, Ned wrote that he had stabbed her, remembering how that worked to quiet things down years before when he had committed the same crime—but had instead killed the woman. [B]ut this time it did not work, he wrote.
He claimed Mary Ellen then began to scream and the phone started ringing. [I]t was the landlady calling from downstairs, he guessed in his letter.
He tried to leave at that point, but, of course, he was locked in.
So he jumped out the window.
As the letter continued, Ned blamed Mary Ellen over and again, saying that she was “obviously embarrassed” by what had happened and the fact that, according to him, she had invited him back to her apartment for sex. Moreover, he said, he never fixed her car or helped her with it because it had started right up.
Ned agreed that he needed help with his problem—that there was “something inside of” him that he could not “handle by” himself.
III
If there was one thing Ned had not embellished in describing the attack on Mary Ellen, it was that he had no criminal record and had not tried to hide his identity from Mary Ellen.
Then again, Ned admitted that he had never expected Mary Ellen to survive the attack. I botched it…, he wrote to a friend years later, this merely months after claiming he needed help for his condition. She didn’t die!
IV
Elmwood Park police detectives had little trouble locating Ned. Mary Ellen had described his build, recalled his first name—Edwin, which, to begin with, was rare—and remembered that he worked for Hewlett-Packard.
Detectives searched the immediate area around Mary Ellen’s apartment and didn’t find the knife or her keys. They photographed bloodstains running down the stairs by the landlady’s door, up the stairs into Mary Ellen’s bedroom. The sheets on her bed looked like old painting rags smeared with redwood stain. Bloodstains littered the door into her apartment, while spatter was all over the floor and walls.
On the top of the windowsill inside Mary Ellen’s living room, detectives located a few latent fingerprints, all of which were in perfect condition.
V
At around 10:30 P.M. on August 3, 1987, detectives spoke to several employees at Kracker’s, all of whom identified Ned as a “regular customer” who, Jimmy the bartender said, “liked to play golf and was employed by Hewlett-Packard.”
Investigator Textor took a ride over to Hewlett the following morning and spoke to the personnel director. “Ned? Sure,” he said, “I know Ned. His name is Edwin Fales Snelgrove.”
Ned was described as a model employee: a salesman who produced results while out on the road and worked hard when he was transferred to a desk job. The company, in fact, had high hopes for Ned. The white shirts saw Ned as a leader one day, someone who was going to run his own department. In addition, Ned’s fellow employees said he was an all-around “great guy,” captain of the company softball team, a genius when it came to stock market tips, even “charming,” a sort of “ladies’ man, good-looking” and a brilliant intellectual. In fact, there wasn’t an employee Ned knew who didn’t like him or have not good—but great—things to say about him.
He was pleasant. Funny. Calm and delightful. Always fun to be around. A regular jokester. No one could understand how Ned had gotten mixed up in any trouble. He’d worked at Hewlett for four years, lived in the area for eight. There must be some sort of terrible misunderstanding.
VI
Investigator Textor found Ned at the plant doing some paperwork at his desk. After reading him his rights, Textor explained that he would have to take a ride downtown.
As some of his fellow employees looked on with curiosity, Ned said, “No problem. Anything I can do to help.”
Once, Textor had Ned inside the confines of the police department, however, Ned was a different person. All of a sudden, he wasn’t so congenial and willing to talk.
“I want a lawyer.”
The detective explained the details of the case, while Ned sat and listened for what was three hours. Textor later wrote in his report how Ned refused to make any statements.
“Do you know the victim?” the investigator asked.
Ned shook his head.
“You’re going to be charged with attempted murder, aggravated sexual assault, and sexual contact,” Textor explained, looking up at Ned’s blank expression.
VII
Near 3:00 A.M., after being processed, Ned was placed in a cell, his bond set at $100,000, and the case referred to the first assistant prosecutor Dennis Calo. In the due course of New Jersey law, Calo would have to present the charges against Ned to a grand jury.
Textor sped over to the hospital and had Mary Ellen, who had just undergone yet another surgery, take a look at a photo lineup, which included a shot of Ned.
Mary Ellen was groggy and stoned. In and out of it. “That’s him,” she said through tears. Just the sight of his face was enough to bring her back to the moment. “That’s definitely him.” How could she forget that stare? The way he looked into her eyes, waiting, watching her die.
Ned’s car, a 1987 gray Ford sedan, was towed from Hewlett’s parking lot as a throng of Ned’s peers watched through the window blinds. It was brought to the EPPD, where forensics would have a go at it. Two investigators sped over to Ned’s apartment, taped it off, and began a search.
Within a few days, the FBI called Detective Robert Kassai and related some important information. The fingerprints Ned had given to Investigator Textor matched those found on Mary Ellen’s windowsill. It was clear that Ned had been inside her apartment and had jumped from her living-room window.
23
I
The first assistant prosecutor in Passaic County, Dennis Calo, was in charge of indicting Ned Snelgrove. From a prosecutorial standpoint, the case against Ned appeared to be ironclad. Talking to the press after Ned’s arrest, Calo said, “He helped her start her car and then agreed to follow her home to make sure she got home OK. He then asked if he could come in and clean up [and] tried to rape her and she struggled. He stabbed her twice in the chest with a knife.”
The Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office, in which Calo was also the chief of the investigation unit, had photographs, Calo explained to reporters, of Mary Ellen’s—a name they were not releasing at this time—neck and the injuries she had sustained from the knife wounds. Calo had secured Mary Ellen’s medical records. She had identified Ned in a photo lineup. They had a latent fingerprint matching Ned’s. Even if the argument came down to whether Mary Ellen invited Ned in for sex, there was no doubt Ned had stabbed and strangled her.
And then there was Ned’s past. Four years ago. That other case haunting investigators who believed Ned was their guy. Ned had been questioned. Cops had him on radar. They had always believed he had committed the crime, but they didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him. Maybe now they did.
II
EPPD Detective Robert Kassai was a street-smart cop with seventeen years on the job when he met up with Mary Ellen Renard—a job that would span several decades by the time he retired in 2000 to run a successful campaign for town council. He had dealt with guys like Ned throughout his career. For a number of years, Kassai