I'll Be Watching You (11 page)

I

Most defendants who plead out their cases sign on the dotted line, face a judge for sentencing, keep their mouths shut, and fall into prison life best they can, hoping to one day sit in front of the parole board and argue for early release. Ned Snelgrove, the Bergen County court was about to learn, was quite a bit different than most defendants it had seen pass through its walnut-and-maple doors.

Ned had been told that it was a good idea for him to write to the judge before his sentencing and, in perhaps a compassionate way, apologize for his actions. He should relay a feeling that he was willing to accept punishment, whatever that may be, move on, and get some help while incarcerated. The thought was that Ned could begin his sentence on a powerful, positive note. Although the judge was unlikely to lower Ned’s sentence, the letter might prove that Ned knew what he did was wrong and understood that he had hurt many people.

As everyone was about to learn, however, Ned Snelgrove was not your average criminal.

II

On Thursday, April 14, 1988, Ned sat down in his cell and began drafting a letter to the judge. He opened by saying he was writing to “describe what happened” in both his crimes. Ned claimed both “incidents” were generated by chronic sexual urges he had developed in grade school for “unknown reasons,” which later grew into an uncontrollable penchant he had for perpetrating violence against women.

The letter, all at once, was shocking, disturbing, and chilling. Some later said, it was perhaps a plea on Ned’s part for help. He described his life leading up to both crimes as being tormented by these unmanageable feelings of attacking women and putting them into a state of not being able to defend themselves. He got off on it, he said in not so many words. He agonized over what was an “enormous”—he underlined the word—“sexual arousement” he would get when seeing women, the good-looking ones with large breasts, rendered unconscious and incapable of defense.

He wrote about being able to restrain himself, most of the time,
although there have been a few very close calls
.

He said he knew it was all wrong, but he couldn’t do anything to about it. He tried. He really did. But it was “difficult,” he added, just to “control” his own “hands,” as if they had a life of their own.

He expected that this sickness—which he hadn’t told anyone about—was one of the reasons why his friends and coworkers had such a tough time believing that he had committed these crimes. He had easily fooled them all. Same as Mary Ellen and his first victim.

Over the next several pages—in powerful, frightening detail—Ned described how he had killed the woman in Middlesex and attacked Mary Ellen years later. It was almost as if in writing it out, Ned got the same cathartic sense of fulfillment all over again that he had gotten while committing the actual crimes.
I held [her] throat,
he wrote of the woman in Middlesex,
pressing down with my thumbs, for as long as I could….

When they had a chance to read the letter, the judge, along with Fred Schwanwede and even Ned’s attorney, John Bruno, couldn’t believe Ned had put such incredibly vile words on a page.

The passion.

The gall.

The elements of murder.

A confession?

Why? For what purpose?

Ned wanted everyone to believe that the letter was a new beginning for him: a point at which he could start to heal his perverse mind. The violent feelings he had, Ned explained, defied “logic.” He knew they did. He wasn’t naïve. He understood that not everyone thought this way. Still, he wrote,
Fred Schwanwede
was likely going to argue that he was a
cold-blooded, heartless killer,
but he wanted the court to know that he wasn’t. If he had been that type of murderer, Ned justified in the letter, why, then, would he have chosen the victims he had? He wasn’t some sort of “Green River Killer.” Some lunatic who prowled the streets for victims. His victims, Ned argued, were “unlucky.”

Wrong place, wrong time.

That’s all. If they hadn’t been near him, he insisted, they wouldn’t have been attacked.

III

Ned’s letter was nothing more than a narcissistic rant, unlike anything the court had ever seen. It was all about Ned and why he had acted on his violent thoughts. There was little remorse. No apology. But he did “hate” himself, and he was upset that he “had it made” at the time of his arrest.

Great job.

Great friends.

Good family.

He couldn’t understand why he had chosen this specific time to act out. It made no sense to him. He had let everyone down:
I cry every time I think of my parents…,
he wrote.

In all that he had said, Ned encouraged the court not to worry about him in the future. Why, as long as he wasn’t allowed, he wrote,
to be alone with a female,
well—lo and behold—he was
not a threat to society.

Imagine that.

His friends, he ended the letter, would
back [him] up on this point.

The words of an admitted killer. A man whom society didn’t have to worry about for at least a decade or more. In fact, the only way Ned would see freedom again inside a decade was if he complied with
every
single standard that the system had set in place for rehabilitation. If Ned met
every
single recommendation, he could be a free man by the year 1999—and not a day before.

IV

What about that woman Ned had murdered in Middlesex County—the one he had squeezed the life from, then stabbed repeatedly in the chest and face as she, he explained in his letter to the court, “sputtered” back to life after his efforts to choke her to death failed? After she expired, he had posed her so he could sexually gratify himself. That beautiful woman, whom he had met and dated at Rutgers, had a family and friends. There were people who loved her and adored the way she had dedicated her short life in many respects to the welfare of animals. Anyone who knew her could never forget her smile, or the way she had of making everyone around her feel comfortable and cared for.

Indeed, that
woman
Ned had killed, well, she had a name.

I

Looking at photos of Karen Osmun from high school and college, with her light skin, curly blond hair, thin smile, large, all-encompassing eyes, and checkmark eyebrows, one could easily tell she embodied the image—no, the
spirit
—of a young woman from Nordic descent. Karen’s mother, Elizabeth Anne Asmund—yes, Asmund—married Ralph Osmun in 1954. Elizabeth went to Clifford J. Scott High School in East Orange, New Jersey, with Ralph, and they graduated together in 1945. In high school, though, Ralph and Elizabeth Anne never hooked up. Some years later, when both were in their twenties, Ralph got a job delivering flowers. Elizabeth Anne, the one with the Icelandic roots and an immediate family the size of a symphony, had spent the morning one day many years after high school at the funeral of an uncle. Later on, back at the house, Ralph showed up to deliver a bouquet of flowers and they locked eyes.

I remember you from high school….

Yes, and I remember you.

Destiny?

Perhaps.

Either way, they made a date and…after a small but lovely wedding, Ralph and Elizabeth Anne set up a home in Cedar Grove, New Jersey. It was “a cute little town,” Barbara Delaney, Karen Osmun’s sister, Ralph and Elizabeth’s first child, later said. Cedar Grove wasn’t quite Reykjavik, but it fit the needs of the Osmun family when they all lived together in one house during what were the happy days of the 1960s and 1970s.

II

The opposite side of that marital bliss the Osmuns so much enjoyed early in their lives was that Ralph had had polio since he was three years old, an incapacitating disease of the spine that started, for Mr. Osmun, when he ended up with meningitis as a small child. For the most part, polio has been wiped out in the United States. But during the mid-twentieth century, the disease had set its hooks firmly in place, affecting a wide variety of people from all social classes. And yet Ralph was such an optimistic person, such a grateful human being and marvelous father and husband, he didn’t allow the disease to disturb his daily life, or those precious lives he loved so much that were around him now. “A polio victim,” Barbara told me later, “[the disease] made him a tremendous person. Some people can have those diseases and it makes them, I don’t know,
bitter.
But Dad was the kind of person who
embraced
life.”

The kids, Karen and Barbara, never thought of their dad as having limitations: To them, he was as normal as any other dad. “It wasn’t until people pointed them—his limitations—out to us, that we really noticed,” Barbara said. “He was definitely instrumental in my life and our core religious values.”

III

North of Verona, west of Clifton, Cedar Grove, New Jersey, of the 1970s, was a working-class town, like many of New Jersey’s northern boroughs were back then. For some, it was a place where men went to work in the morning with black lunch boxes in hand, hard hats, and robotic smiles.

Blue-collar.

No doubt about it.

For others, like Ralph, who picked up the bus down the block and commuted into Manhattan, Cedar Grove was an eclectic mix of white-collar, second-generation immigrants who had taken their parents’ dreams and, slowly, turned them into their own reality. Barbara and Karen were the Osmuns’ only children. Barbara was born in 1957, Karen a few years later, in 1960. From the earliest years of their lives together, Karen and Barbara might have seemed different, but they were as close as sisters could be, building a venerable bond throughout their adolescent years. They might not have agreed on everything, and viewed life in vastly different ways, but they got along and loved each other.

Elizabeth Anne was the one to crack the whip in the house. Always the demanding wife and mother, she had that hard-nosed Icelandic toughness about her that only foreigners, generally Europeans, can lay claim to. And she wasn’t, Barbara said, afraid to show it around the house. “She had a really domineering personality and he—my dad—could kind of blow her off. She’d be ranting and yelling….” Sometimes stomping through the house. Complaining about something. Something minuscule. Something unimportant. Something that didn’t seem to be
that
big of a deal.

Spilled milk.

When she did, Ralph—not one to be negative at all, a rather patient man by all accounts—would shake his head and jokingly utter, “Nag. Nag. Nag.” (Barbara laughed when she later told me this story: the memory giving her a moment of pleasant recall.)

This would always seem to calm Elizabeth down.

In many ways, when the kids were young, Barbara and Karen and Ralph were, Barbara said, “the Three Musketeers.” They spent time together. Every night, Mr. Osmun would come into the children’s bedroom before bedtime and sit and tell stories of his past, or read books, or recite Bible passages. “They were all fascinating,” Barbara recalled. “Very fond memories of the three of us kind of laying in bed with the lights out, telling stories…talking.”

Innocent times, when the world spun on an axis of purity and hope and wholesomeness.

IV

There came a time when Karen decided that she loved animals. All sorts of animals.

Didn’t matter: cats, pigs, goats, dogs, squirrels.

Later, during her college years, Karen would aspire to be a veterinarian, but it was Barbara, really, who had the passion for animals when they were kids. Barbara kept snakes in the family pool. Lizards in her bedroom.

Fish. Turtles. Ducks. Gerbils.

A regular old animal farm.

Karen, though, had what a relative later called was a “sensitive and gentle” way with animals. It was Karen’s “touch,” which, this same relative shared, brought “healing and caring to animals…especially [Karen’s] pet poodle, Charlie.”

It seemed that beyond an innate love for animals, Karen enjoyed everything life in the outdoors had to offer: swimming, sailing, camping, skiing. “She smelled the aromas of living,” said a friend, “the fragrance of flowers, and [she] frequently brought her mother a rose to express her love and share feelings of closeness.”

Taking after Ralph, who was a magician during his younger years, Karen liked to perform magic tricks for the family. “She delighted in the fun,” the friend added, “…as her hand moved faster than our eyes, bringing laughter and joy to those who watched her perform.”

I

Ralph Osmun worked for the insurance industry in New York City. It was hard work, especially for a guy with polio. Ralph had never gone to college. But he hit the industry at a time when all you needed was a high-school diploma, a strong work ethic, and an appreciation for just having a job to begin with. When the girls, growing up, ever mentioned going to college after high school, Ralph was adamant. Like so many men from his generation, Ralph had never gotten the chance to do it himself. So, in some respects, living through his children, he would not only encourage them to place college on the top of their list of future goals, but insist on it: “You are
both
going to college.”

End of discussion.

It didn’t matter what they had to do, he said. Or how they were going to get in. But Karen and Barbara both, regardless of what they wanted or even thought, were going to get a college diploma.

It would be a Monday—the only night the bank in town was open—and any money the kids had been given for birthdays, or just for being good girls, would be on its way into a college fund they had set up. “This is for your school,” Ralph would tell the kids as they trotted down to the bank to make their Monday-night deposits.

II

As the kids grew, church became a way of life.

Sunday school.

Bible study.

Mass.

They enjoyed the sanctity of the wholeness the church embraced and loved the communal aspect of it all. Ruth Smith, who ran the Sunday school, later talked about Karen’s open display of loving life: “She had a winning smile and sparkling eyes, and whenever I think of Karen, I’ll think of that beautiful face.”

Karen was one of those kids, Ruth explained, that neighborhood parents always welcomed into their homes with open arms. She was quiet among the adults, generally, but when left with a group of kids her own age, she would “bubble over….”

One thing that every one of Karen’s relatives and friends later beamed about was her Christian values. “She was not judgmental,” Ruth insisted. “What a quality—that is Christlike. I never heard Karen say anything against anyone.”

III

Ralph Osmun had done such a good job with investing the family’s savings that, by the time the girls were eight and eleven, in 1968, he had enough money saved to treat everyone to a trip to Iceland.

Elizabeth Anne was thrilled:
Home. I’m going to see my family.

What a wonderful surprise.

The kids, too, would get a chance to see where their grandmother grew up, where a majority of their ancestors were from and many family members still lived.

And so it was off to Newark, New Jersey.

The airport.

Then a short plane ride.

Touchdown.

Then cold.

And wet.

“Welcome to the middle of nowhere.”

The kids were in awe. Everything around them was new. Iceland was a place categorically different from the smokestacks and oil barges and honking horns and tall buildings and smell left behind in certain parts of New Jersey. They were too young to realize it, but Iceland was a culture shock. Everything was so fresh and, well, interesting. At the time, Karen and Barbara’s grandmother had seventy-two living first cousins on the island. Karen and Barbara loved the country. They ate fresh bread with bananas and sugar. They swam in the public pools—all fed naturally by hot springs. They took long rides into the countryside in a relative’s Volkswagen. They were introduced to the metric system.

They danced.

Sang.

Took it all in.

And loved every minute of it.

IV

In seventh grade, Karen took an interest in—of all things—carpentry. In her day, said Barbara, the girls cooked and cleaned and did all those things little girls are supposed to do. This, of course, while the boys built things and played in the mud.

But not Karen. Like a little boy who strapped on his tool belt and felt the heaviness of that steel hammer in his hand, pencil in his small ear, Karen would hit the shop to create something from a few planks of wood.

In high school, Karen seemed to run with the conservative crowd. “We were definitely not the cheerleader type,” said Barbara. “We were more…well, joiners. We did a lot of activities. The drama club. Newspaper.”

Brownies.

And Girl Scouts.

Church youth groups.

Barbara and Karen even had a few boyfriends in high school. The two sisters were “average,” Barbara recalled. “Just your average kids. We did a lot of things with the other kids. Very social.”

V

When Barbara was a senior, Karen a sophomore, tragedy struck. There it was—that ringing phone in the early-morning hours no one wants to hear. The bells of death. That solemn rush of life that sneaks up on everybody when things seem to be running on autopilot.

When life seems perfect.

For Karen and Barbara, it was something neither one of them had ever expected, nor could have prepared for, in all their years.