I'll Be Watching You. M. William Phelps
the upper part of her chest all the way down to her belly button. Surgeons had conducted exploratory surgery. “This man knew anatomy,” one of the doctors told Mary Ellen. “Your clothes had been ripped down to your waist. These were carefully aimed wounds. Very clean. This person knew what he was aiming for.”
Despite it all, Mary Ellen was alive. And she believed she had learned something from the attack. Until that day, she had always thought of herself as a weak person. “I had this violent husband who had terrorized me for years, and I thought I was weak because of that. But I know I fought Ned Snelgrove on that night—and, at least in part, I know that my actions saved my life.”
25
I
As Ned’s attorney, John Bruno’s job was to present the best defense he could manage, or cut his client a deal the prosecution was willing to offer and Ned was willing to accept. It sounded simple. But for a defense attorney with a conscience, it was harder than most people thought. There were clients and cases that made Bruno ill to think about—every defense attorney has them. In Ned, Bruno saw a well-liked man with a respectable job, whose parents were spending a fortune to prove his innocence, but were willing to do that in order to defend a son they could in no way believe committed the crimes of which he was accused.
Meanwhile, Ned initiated a campaign to push the blame onto Mary Ellen’s shoulders, saying that she had invited him into her apartment for sex. He claimed all he wanted to do was wash his hands and use the restroom, but instead, Mary Ellen came on to him as soon as he walked out of the bathroom. As far as the wounds Mary Ellen sustained, Ned said they occurred only after he “refused” her pushy sexual advances. Being the advocate, the diligent soldier, Bruno spoke for Ned, telling the same story to anyone in the press who would listen. During a superior court hearing in Hackensack, during the first week of August, Bruno stood in the courtroom and said his client “was invited into the woman’s apartment after the two met” at a local bar. When they got inside, Bruno explained, she “locked” Ned in the apartment and “tried to engage him in some rough activity.”
Assistant county prosecutor Fred L. Schwanwede had taken over the case from Dennis Calo. Schwanwede stood in the courtroom listening, dropped his head, disgusted with Bruno’s blame-the-victim mentality.
“The facts are not as they may have first appeared in the prosecutor’s report,” Bruno continued, explaining to Judge Charles R. DiGisi. The hearing was designed to discuss a reduction in Ned’s bail, which had been set at $100,000. Bruno wanted it reduced to $25,000. After hearing arguments on both sides, Judge DiGisi decided on $50,000.
Schwanwede was appalled. Here was a dangerous man, obviously capable of extreme violence. He had almost killed a woman. And now he was being allowed to walk away from the courtroom on $50,000?
Unheard of.
What helped Ned was the fact that he had no criminal record and had, Bruno argued, “close ties in the community.” Moreover, Ned’s fellow coworkers at HP were in total support of him. No one who personally knew Ned believed Mary Ellen. Many of Ned’s coworkers said he couldn’t have attacked her, as she described. He was not that type of person.
Schwanwede stood and faced the judge, saying, “In stabbing this woman twice in the chest, his purpose was clear: he was unable to do what he wanted to do sexually, and there was only one way out.”
In lowering his bail, the judge told Bruno that Ned was to have no contact with Mary Ellen.
Bruno was optimistic. He felt he could present a strong case on Ned’s behalf. In fact, Bruno told reporters outside the courtroom that Ned’s friends and coworkers from HP were in the process of “setting up a fund for his defense…. His friends and family are completely shocked by this accusation. Everybody is just outraged. We have witnesses who know that this would be totally out of character. There has to be more to it than what the state claims,” Bruno said to the throng of people.
One reporter asked about the life-threatening injuries “the victim” had sustained. How was Bruno going to explain those injuries? How was Ned going to defend himself against what he had done? Self-defense? A man versus a woman? It didn’t add up.
Bruno painted a picture of Mary Ellen preparing a cheese plate for her and Ned as he used the bathroom. And when Ned came out and saw Mary Ellen with her top down, being as shy as he was, he immediately told her that he wanted no part of it. That was when, Bruno insisted, she “lunged at [my client] with the cheese knife, when he refused to participate in ‘rough’ sexual activity.”
II
Mary Ellen was terrified to hear that her attacker, whom she now knew to be a twenty-six-year-old Berlin, Connecticut, native named Edwin Snelgrove, was out of jail on a $50,000 bond. When Mary Ellen left the hospital after ten days, Diana insisted her mother stay with her until she could get back on her feet again. Being with her daughter and grandchild in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania would help Mary Ellen cope. What frightened her more than anything was Ned. She had no idea if she’d return home one night, only to find Ned lurking in the bushes, waiting to get rid of, essentially, the only witness against his alleged crimes.
After about five weeks in the Pocono Mountains, Mary Ellen decided she wanted to go back home and return to work. Getting back into the routine of everyday life would help her cope and perhaps act as a precursor for what a normal life could be like down the road. It wasn’t going to be easy, but she would force herself to do it.
“I want to drive you back home, Mom,” Diana said when Mary Ellen told her she was leaving.
“You’re pregnant,” Mary Ellen said. “It’s too long of a ride. I’ll be OK.”
Diana didn’t want to see her leave. She believed her mother was unprepared for life back out on her own. When she spoke to Mary Ellen about her feelings, it was like talking to someone in another language, Diana said later. “She refused to believe the reality of the situation, or see what’s going on.”
“I need to be on my own,” Mary Ellen told Diana.
What else could Diana do?
“In some ways,” Diana later told me, looking back on that time in her life, “I was relieved. I couldn’t handle it any longer myself.”
When Mary Ellen left, Diana said a prayer. What else could she do?
III
Walking through the door that first time after not being inside her apartment since the attack only increased the anxiety Mary Ellen already felt. What she found upon her return was not only shocking, but alarming and quite unexplainable at first. It was the atmosphere. She’d had a dozen or so lively, colorful plants, which she had always taken pride in taking care of, in the large windowsill holder. They were all dried up and dead now.
More victims of the attack.
Beyond that, throughout the apartment, all over the place, as if it had fallen from the ceiling, was a metallic blue powder investigators had used to find fingerprints. Forensic scientists spread the talcumlike substance over an area and brushed away the excess, hoping to come up with a latent print or two. Upon seeing it all, Mary Ellen understood why it was there, but she was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of it. Not to mention the fact that no one had cleaned it up.
“My bedroom was torn apart, too,” Mary Ellen said. “To come home and find this, I mean, it really threw me into a horrible sense of reality.”
An emotional tailspin was more like it. Here she was, trying to recover from the most devastating time of her life, sustaining injuries that almost killed her, and it was back in her face, when all she wanted to do was try her best to carry on with life. She knew a trial was possibly in the future and could deal with testifying, but that was months away. She just wanted to get back into the swing of her life and return to her job.
IV
As she settled back in, within a day or two, Mary Ellen’s landlady knocked on the door with some bad news. “I think it’s best you leave,” the old woman said.
Mary