I'll Be Watching You (18 page)

I

Carmen loved to pile her nieces and nephews in her sister Sonia’s car and head out to Ron-A-Roll in Vernon, Connecticut, an indoor roller-skating rink about a half hour from Hartford. Skating around, laughing and joking, falling down and scraping her knees, screaming until the blisters on her feet throbbed, Carmen took it all in as if she were a kid herself. There was something about the wind in her hair and the hum of those wheels gliding along the wooden floor—it was freeing and cathartic.

She was born Carmen Rodriguez, the fourth child of ten brothers and sisters. From the oldest down, there was Carlos, Sonia, Petra, Maria, Carmen, Ruben, Rafael, Luis, Luz (pronounced “lose”), and Glendaliz (pronounced “Glenda Leez”). Luz, who was quite lively, spunky, and garrulous herself, later recalled Carmen as the beacon in their rather large family, the one sibling all the others were drawn to, for good or bad.

With her boisterous spirit, Carmen could walk into a room of strangers and walk out of the same room with a posse of friends.

It was her smile.

Her magnetic charm.

Her charisma.

She was, said family and friends, the “life of any party.”

There was a bond between Carmen and her mother, Rosa, that went far beyond that of the other siblings, Luz said. Carmen looked to her mother as a source of comfort and dependency. She had gone through the local Hartford public-school system, including Hartford Public High School during the late 1980s, went out on her own, and yet always found herself drifting back to her mom, while the others detached and went about their own lives, some moving to Puerto Rico for good, others sticking around Hartford.

It was that strong-willed attitude Carmen exuded that her siblings—especially Luz and Glendaliz—recalled most vividly. “We were little,” said Luz, “Carmen was older. She used to like to take us to Pope Park swimming and roller-skating. She loved Pope Park.” Back then, Pope Park was a popular Hartford neighborhood hangout for families in and around the south end. Throughout the decades, however, as Hartford itself showed a “gradual decline” in housing development and crime, drugs and gang violence began to dominate, the park lost part of its beauty and safety. Still, on any given day, one or more of the Rodriguez kids was at the park doing something. Carmen couldn’t wait until autumn every year, especially as she grew into her teens. When the apples and pears of Pope Park were ready to be picked, she’d gather her younger siblings and march them all down to the park for a day of fruit picking. “She just loved to do that,” Luz remembered. “I don’t know what it was.”

II

There was one thing about Carmen that all of her siblings later agreed upon: She loved older men. For Carmen, it was, several suggested, an inherent need—and they had no idea where it came from—she absorbed as she grew older to be taken care of by these men. “She didn’t want to work,” Sonia, Carmen’s oldest sister, recalled. “She wanted a man to provide for her.”

It started early.
Very
early.

To the family’s surprise, Carmen ran off when she was fifteen, in 1983, with a man twenty-five years her senior, and got married. She didn’t see a problem with it. She was young. In love. And she wanted to spend her life with the guy. “But she didn’t know what she was doing,” Luz said. “She was
so
young. How could she?”

Within a few months, Carmen was pregnant and eventually gave birth to her first child—Jacqueline “Jackie” Garcia—when she was only sixteen. The relationship lasted a year. When it was over and Carmen realized that being married and a mother at sixteen was not all that she had expected, she ran back to her own mother, who was living on Benton Street, in Hartford.

Mom was that safety net. Always there to catch Carmen’s fall.

I

Barbara Delaney had made it her business to write to the parole board anytime she felt compelled to remind them what Ned had done to her sister. Ever since Christmas 1983, Barbara had not spent a holiday season without reliving the nightmare all over again. Karen had been butchered. Ned had admittedly killed her. Her mom was dead. If Barbara and her family had to live with those losses the rest of their lives, how could the parole board even
consider
letting Ned out before he served his sentence?

Not knowing that the letter wasn’t going to do any good whatsoever, in September 1998, Barbara sat down at her computer and stared at a blank screen. It would be hard to write out memories. Karen was a bright star, with so much life and energy. She had inspired Barbara, taught her things about herself no one else had. It had been nearly fifteen years, but it seemed like only yesterday.

Edwin Snelgrove will come before you,
Barbara tapped out,
to ask for parole.
She paused. It was still hard to write his name. Think about him. Imagine him in her parents’ cottage. At the funeral. Kissing the woman he had murdered.

While he pleads to go free,
she found the strength to continue,
his victims will never get a second chance to live out their lives….

She was speaking for Mary Ellen Renard, too.

All
victims,
perhaps.

How could those words—“attempted murder” and “aggravated manslaughter” and “parole”—be considered in the same breath? Here the guy was, not yet eleven years into a twenty-year sentence, preparing to be released from prison. Was there any justice in sentencing laws?

As Barbara wrote, those deep-seated feelings of loss and anger came back. She spoke of Ned’s third victim, her mother, relating to the board that Elizabeth Anne, two years after Karen’s death, suffered her first heart attack. Then, after a long battle with heart problems, “directly related to my sister’s death,” died prematurely at the age of sixty-seven.

Barbara took a break. Writing it all out—verbalizing it all over again—was emotionally exhausting. Recalling the horror. The trips to court. Seeing Ned’s photograph in the newspapers. Hearing him make excuses.

Tears.

Karen was Barbara’s only sister. She couldn’t even begin to explain how she’d gotten by. Pacing in her living room, Barbara wondered if the letter would fall on deaf ears. After all, how many of these letters have board members read? How many murderers have they considered for parole? Ned was likely another in a long list of murderers who would serve his time, do the right thing, and see the light of day. They’d pull out that word: “overcrowding.”

Barbara had to let them know how she felt—if not for the sake of keeping Ned locked up, then for her own self-assurance. Her own sanity. And so she reminded the board that Ned had attacked again, in 1987, after getting away with killing Karen. She told Mary Ellen’s story after detailing how she and her family suffered through the Christmas of 1983. Five pages of a family’s agony. Then another page of Mary Ellen’s. That eleven-page letter Ned had written to the judge detailing how “sick” he was and how he could not control those strange, evil, violent thoughts about women. He
needed
to kill, Barbara pointed out. He
needed
to assuage those feelings of sexual violence. It was there in black and white—from his own pen. Had he gotten help for
that?
Could anyone, she wondered, cure such a sickness? Barbara wrote that there was a
substantial likelihood that he will commit another crime if he is released.
She asked the board if a
relatively short sentence [would] deter him from future violence
? If Ned was cut loose now, there was no doubt in her mind that he would hurt other women. That’s right:
women.
Plural.

Barbara believed that God would ultimately punish Ned, she wrote. But we, as a society, needed to confine him so he couldn’t harm anyone else.
Without repentance…he will have to face God’s consequence, the wages of sin is death,
she wrote.
I am satisfied with this.

She asked if they had considered the idea that he would kill again if released. She said he had a reputation for lying and deception. He was smart in those ways. A con man. She said Ned himself had said he was a danger to society. He had even asked for and admitted he needed psychiatric help.
Please heed to his call for help,
she wrote.
I plead with you to scrutinize this case. Examine the
facts
of the past…. It is your responsibility to protect us…. Deny his parole so we can rest, knowing that someone else will not become another victim…. May God help you in your decision.

She sealed the letter, put a stamp on it, and sent it, not knowing that it wasn’t going to do any good whatsoever, because Ned wasn’t up for parole—he was due to be released on good behavior. He had served his sentence.

I

After splitting up with her first husband, sixteen-year-old Carmen Rodriguez began living with her mom again—but she hadn’t learned a lesson, because she couldn’t stay away from older men. It was that wandering spirit, always out there looking for a man to carry her off into the sunset. “At that time,” Luz recalled, “she really didn’t want to do much.” Going back to school didn’t seem at all interesting to Carmen, neither did working or even joining many of her brothers and sisters in Puerto Rico. She enjoyed motherhood and being a homemaker.

Inside the next few years, Carmen dated another older man and had two more children, Tanaris and Roberto, while Jacqueline, from her failed marriage, grew into a lively toddler. “He treated her very well,” said Carmen’s niece Kathy Perez, speaking of the new man in her life, “he was a
good
man. She loved him.”

Her new man, Roberto, got a job in Springfield, Massachusetts, about a twenty-five minute drive north of Hartford, and Carmen and the kids followed him. Soon they were all living in a small, cozy apartment in downtown Springfield, but Carmen hated it. Almost every day, Luz said, chuckling at the memory, “she was back in Hartford at my mom’s house.” It was that maternal pull tugging at Carmen, as she lived twenty-five miles away from Mom, that made her drive back to Hartford “almost every day” to be with her mother and sisters. “She’d wake up Roberto,” pushing on him first thing in the morning. “‘Let’s go to Hartford. Take me home.’”

Leaving the unity of the family gave Carmen a sense of disconnect; if she couldn’t make it to Hartford for some reason, she was calling to ask what was going on.

The bond between mother and daughter was so strong that Luz and Sonia, after watching Carmen commute back and forth from Springfield to Hartford, found her an apartment next door—connected—to her mother’s apartment. But with three kids at home and a man who worked in Springfield, things became difficult for Carmen and Roberto. “They started to have problems,” Luz recalled.

Those problems, though, began to affect Carmen’s mother, simply because she was living next door. “She (my mother) had to leave. My mother,” Luz added, “went to Puerto Rico and left Carmen behind.”

It was 1988. Carmen was twenty years old. Now, without warning, her lifeline was gone. Not just a walk across the hallway, but her mom was in another country. Although she had her sisters close by, Carmen still felt alone.

“She was devastated,” Luz remembered.

At the time her mother took off, Carmen had been trying to work things out with Roberto. No sooner had her mother left did Carmen drop those reconciliation talks with Roberto and fly to Puerto Rico, too. “Momma is not next to me now,” Luz said, speaking for Carmen, “so she’s like, ‘bye’ to Roberto.”

It was an easy decision. One of which had little to do with Roberto and more to do with the fact that Carmen didn’t feel safe unless she was next to her mother. Still, living in Puerto Rico was not what Carmen had expected. Within three months, she found herself back in Hartford, trying to work things out with Roberto.

A few weeks after she returned to Hartford, Carmen realized she was pregnant again. “The baby wasn’t his,” one of her sisters later said, speaking of Roberto. Six months after returning from Puerto Rico, Carmen gave birth to Rueben Negron.

Back home now, without her mom to fall back on, Carmen relied on her oldest sister, Sonia, who lived on Capitol Avenue at the time, with her four children and husband. “She came to me,” Sonia recalled, “after she tried to make things work with Roberto.” Moving in with Sonia, Carmen had Rueben. Her three other kids were still in Puerto Rico with her mother. They were being well taken care of. Carmen didn’t have to worry. She knew enough to leave them there until she could get herself situated back in Hartford; then she would send for them.

Sonia was an old-school homemaker. She believed in taking care of her family—to a certain extent. Her own children and husband
had
to come first. Carmen was living in Sonia’s apartment with a small child, but now she started to drink heavily. No one knew why. She liked to party, they all said, and it somehow got out of hand for her. “She liked to have a good time,” Luz remembered, “and got caught up in it.”

II

One day in 1990, Sonia, stressed with taking care of four kids of her own and putting up with Carmen’s drinking, called her mother in Puerto Rico. Carmen wasn’t drinking every day, she never did. But a few beers on Thursday night, Luz said, turned into a party for her until Sunday or Monday. “And then she’d go two weeks without a drop. But when she partied, she
partied
.”

“She got to go,” Sonia told her mother over the phone.

Rosa understood. She knew Carmen better than any of them.

Before hanging up, they made a decision. Sonia went out later that day and, unbeknownst to Carmen, bought her a plane ticket and shipped her back to Puerto Rico with Rueben.

Carmen continued to drink while in Puerto Rico, so the family stepped in and took responsibility for the children. For the first time in what seemed to be her entire life, Carmen was childless. She had no one to take care of, but herself. “She was alone, she didn’t have kids, no husband,” Luz said, “and she was like, ‘why not enjoy life, take advantage of the situation.’” Not in a bad way, Luz pointed out. But in a way that allowed Carmen to find herself and deal with the issues she was facing.

While in Puerto Rico, Carmen met that man she had been waiting for. His name was Jesus Ramos, a native Puerto Rican. “A good,
good
man,” Sonia and Luz said.

As with all of the men Carmen dated, Jesus was older—yet no one expected how much older. “Sixty-five,” Sonia said, wincing. Carmen was twenty-three then. The guy was forty-two years her senior. He could have been her grandfather. “But he was great, a wonderful guy,” added Luz and Kathy Perez, Sonia’s daughter. “He loved her,” Kathy said. “She adored him. What did age matter?”

Carmen needed someone like Jesus, who wanted nothing more than to take care of her. Sensing she had found true love—that unconditional love she had been chasing—Carmen married Jesus, and wound up spending the next six years in Puerto Rico by his side. It wasn’t until 1998, when Carmen’s mother moved back to Hartford from Puerto Rico, that things changed. She found a cozy apartment on Putnam Street, a block away from Pope Park, inside the Capitol Avenue, Park and Broad Street square the family had lived in and around all their lives. “It was like a rope,” Luz lamented. “Where Mommy went, Carmen went with her.”

And so, not long after Rosa migrated back to Hartford from Puerto Rico, Carmen followed.

Jesus stayed in Puerto Rico. They were still married, but Carmen was getting bored with the marriage. The change back to the States, she believed, would do her some good. Maybe the time away would reignite that spark of love she had once felt for Jesus.

Carmen was still caught in that spiral of drinking, however; she couldn’t seem to get out of it. Sonia once brought her to a local psychiatric hospital, but she left after only two hours. Then she tried working. Luz was involved with a temp service. One day, the service called and needed two workers. Luz called Carmen.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m no good at working.”

“Come on,” Luz said. “Give it a try.”

So she went.

It was a factory job. Luz and Carmen worked on a production line, piecework. The parts on the machine came by, Luz remembered, at lightning speed. “You had to keep up.” Once you fell behind, the pieces piled up. Luz had no trouble keeping up with production. “The parts were hot to the touch, but I did my best. Carmen would take one part, and five would go by. She couldn’t keep up. She kept leaving the line to go outside and smoke.”

By eleven that morning, Carmen said to Luz, “I’m leaving. This working stuff isn’t for me.”

“Come on, just stay for the day. You’ll get paid for a whole day. You need a ride anyway.” Luz had driven Carmen to the plant.

Carmen left after suffering through the day. No matter, the foreman had gotten all the girls together after the day ended and announced who was going to be invited back the following day. “You, you, and you,” he said, pointing to Luz and a few of the other girls, “come back tomorrow. You,” he added, pointing to Carmen, “you don’t have a job anymore.”

“I didn’t [go] back,” Luz recalled, laughing at the memory of Carmen’s one day of work. “My hands were burned from the parts, it was hot in there. I didn’t like. But they had offered me the job and Carmen knew that. It was so funny to see her try to work.”

Money wasn’t an issue for Carmen. Whenever she needed cash, she’d call her husband, Jesus, back in Puerto Rico, and he’d send her $400, $500, whatever she needed to get by. “This is why she didn’t want to work,” said Luz. “The men would give her money. She didn’t
need
to work.”