I'll Be Watching You (20 page)

As fall came, being in the apartment day after day, night after night, began to wear on Carmen. She wanted to go out dancing, maybe have a few drinks. She wasn’t going to disrupt what she had with Miguel, she promised. The only way she’d go out was with his absolute blessing. She had stopped at Kenney’s, a local restaurant/bar around the corner from the apartment, once in a while to have a drink and play pool. But she hadn’t made going out or Kenney’s a habit. Luz knew she had stopped at Kenney’s, because Carmen had gone to her one day with a check from a Kenney’s patron, “Ned something,” Carmen called him. The check was for $25. Carmen said she had taken a survey for the guy and he paid her by check. She wanted Luz to cash it—which she did.

VII

On the evening of September 21, 2001, Carmen was at home with Miguel. Things had been going “great” between them, family members said. Because Carmen had been doing so well with her drinking, she had spoken to Miguel about maybe going out that night. Her aunt and uncle were heading to a club to go dancing. Carmen wanted in.

“Can I go with them?” she asked Miguel.

Her uncle and aunt were in the apartment, standing there.

“I’ll watch her,” said Carmen’s uncle. “I bring her home early.”

Miguel thought about it. Carmen was standing in front of him. It was almost as if she were saying,
Please, please, please say yes.

“OK,” Miguel said.

Carmen’s daughter Jacqueline called her into the other room and helped her put on her makeup and get dressed. Putting on some flashy clothes and sexy makeup was all part of the atmosphere of going out.

Afterward, they piled into Carmen’s uncle’s car and headed into the north end of Hartford, to the Goravena, a popular nightclub, where Carmen danced, drank, and had fun.

It was around 9:00
P.M
. when Carmen’s uncle said, “It’s time to go. I promised Miguel I’d get you back early.”

To his surprise, Carmen didn’t bark. “OK,” she said.

In the car on the way back, however, Carmen became a little impatient and wanted another drink. They were somewhere near Capitol Avenue, just a few blocks from Carmen’s apartment on Grand, when Carmen started arguing with them, saying she said she wanted to stop for “one more.” Just one.

“No,” her uncle said. “You need to go home.”

“I don’t want to go home.” Carmen kept repeating herself. She was in the backseat. She sounded a bit tipsy.

“Come on, Titi. I gotta take you home.”

Carmen opened the door when they pulled up to a stoplight and got out of the car. “No,” she said, “I’m not going home.”

There was a cop sitting on the corner watching them. Carmen’s uncle, family members later said, didn’t want to get out of the car and cause a big commotion. The cop would get involved. It would turn ugly.

So her uncle let Carmen go. He figured she’d walk home. She was maybe two blocks from her apartment.

Instead, though, Carmen walked straight down Capitol Avenue and went into Kenney’s Restaurant and Bar, which was right around the corner from her apartment, while her uncle drove to her apartment and roused Miguel.

“She took off on me,” he said, “when I stopped at a light.”

“Let’s go looking for her.”

By now, it was close to 10:00
P.M
. Carmen was sitting inside Kenney’s having a drink, talking to Ned, whom she had met once or twice over the past few weeks. To her, Ned was a harmless white nerd who liked to hang around the bar after work and play pool. She could finagle a few drinks out of him, call it a night, and walk home.

Miguel, Jacqueline, Carmen’s uncle, and her aunt drove around the Capitol Avenue area looking for Carmen, never thinking to stop at Kenney’s, simply because Kenney’s wasn’t one of Carmen’s preferred hang-outs. They spent hours driving around the city stopping at the bars she liked to dance at. The thing was, no matter where Carmen went, how drunk she got or how late it was, she picked up the phone and called home. “‘Mother,’” said Kathy Perez, mimicking what Carmen might call and say when she was out, “‘I’m staying at a friend’s.’”

After returning home, early the next morning, Miguel and Jacqueline waited, but the call never came. No one could find Carmen.

I

After Ned was released from prison, he traveled straight back to Connecticut, settled into a seedy motel on the Berlin Turnpike in Newington (not far from his parents’ house) for a few months, and then moved back home. Several things were significant to Ned as he integrated back into society for the first time in over ten years. For one, getting the hell out of New Jersey as fast he could before the Department of Corrections decided to find a reason to keep him behind bars; two, starting over without being pressured from people (the dirty looks, the whispers behind his back); and three, if what Ned had been writing from prison to his former high-school friend George Recck was any indication as to what he had planned postrelease, planting his feet firmly in Connecticut, a fresh location, would provide new faces, new people, and, per Ned’s own words, new victims.

Ted Bundy had driven into faraway counties and states to hang out at bars and choose the perfect victims. Ned had even mentioned Bundy’s MO in one of the letters he’d written from prison to his old high-school friend George Recck. There’s no way to tell for sure—Ned wouldn’t admit to it—if he had chosen Hartford in response to what he learned from studying Bundy, but Ned started hanging out at Kenney’s Restaurant and Bar, downtown, after he got settled into his parents’ house and found a salesman’s job at American Frozen Foods. Ned was an expert at what he did; he could sell milk to a cow. As a “food counselor” for American, he excelled. His job was to go into customers’ homes and pitch frozen foods his company would later deliver.

Kenney’s was a popular local restaurant and lounge mostly populated by blue-collar workers, a few stray Hartford businessmen and locals, and several hookers working the area. As Ned’s job performance took off, he began showing up at Kenney’s every other day. Not to get drunk, mind you, but more or less to meet new people, scope out the scene, enjoy a few beers during happy hour, and maybe catch a Red Sox game. During the summer of 2001, Ned began asking his new friends at Kenney’s to fill out credit applications for American Frozen Foods. “Ned asked…this whole neighborhood to fill out a credit application or contract,” a former Kenney’s regular who knew Ned later said. “He wanted people with bad credit to fill out a contract to agree to buy frozen foods based on a credit check. Ned explained that he would put up a twenty-five-dollar fee (out of his own pocket) for any applicant, who would get a check in the mail.”

Carmen had filled one out herself that summer after stopping in Kenney’s one night. Luz had cashed the check for her.

For the neighborhood barflies who frequented Kenney’s, Ned’s offer was a free night out. For Ned, he would get a bonus for every contract he signed, whether the credit check went through successfully or not. Primarily, Ned had asked only the females. Alice Nevins (pseudonym) had hung around Kenney’s for many years and knew Ned as a traveling salesman, the somewhat taciturn, clean-cut geek with the enormous growth on the side of his neck—a benign tumor Ned had picked up with age—who liked to sit on the same stool and make the same stupid sexist jokes. Ned wasn’t feeling too good about himself these days. That tumor the size of a grapefruit protruding out of the side of his neck was benign, yet it caused him a great amount of discomfort and, of course, shot down his self-esteem even lower than it was.

II

Alice and her friend Tina were approached by Ned that August. Tina had introduced Ned to Alice. Ned knew all the neighborhood girls. He was even friends with several of the hookers. Tina was quite eccentric. She was thin, had short-cropped hair, with reddish brown highlights, and “very distinct” eyes, Alice later told police, which “seemed sunken in and very dark.” She was a chronic drug user, Alice claimed, like many of the prostitutes Ned knew.

On the day Tina introduced Alice to Ned, he asked her if she wanted to help him out with the scam he was running. “I’m paying girls,” Ned told her, “to fill out an application. You’ll get a twenty-five-dollar check in the mail.” So Alice filled out the short application, but failed to put down an address.

“What’s your address?” Ned asked, staring at it. “I
need
an address.”

“I live at the YMCA, right up the street.”

Alice liked to stop in Kenney’s every day. As the summer of 2001 wound down, she began to see a lot of Ned. He was always with one of the “girls” hanging out in the bar. Prostitutes were safe companions for Ned. Talking to them made Ned feel superior. Perhaps he could snatch one off the street and no one would notice. No one would care.

Alice’s friend Kendra (pseudonym) lived above Kenney’s in a small apartment. Kendra and Alice would see Ned several times during the week, sitting at the bar, nursing a beer, trying to charm the girls. There were “several times,” Alice later said, when Ned asked her to dress more sexily.

More provocatively.

“Wear a low-cut skirt and boots,” Ned would demand.

“Huh?”

“Dress like Carmen,” Ned suggested one night, smiling, giving her the “Groucho Marx eyebrow” raise. It was obvious Ned liked Carmen. He hadn’t seen her much. But during those few times, according to sources, she had stopped in Kenney’s since moving to Grand Street with Miguel, she had run into Ned. At thirty-two (preparing to celebrate her thirty-third birthday that October), Carmen was an attractive woman, with long, flowing, curly brown hair, a shapely, girlish figure, and that Dentyne smile her sisters later spoke of so lovingly. She was five feet three inches tall. Although Latin by heritage, Carmen had a paler complexion—she looked Caucasian.

Beautiful skin. Velvety. Plush. Soft.

She hadn’t been partying too much the last few months, ever since getting out of jail. She looked good. Even felt good.

For Ned, it had to be Carmen’s voluptuous chest that first drew him to her—Carmen was huge.

With her sixteen-year-old daughter, Carmen and Miguel were happily situated and comfortable two blocks south of Kenney’s, one block east, on Grand Street, in that new apartment they had spent weeks cleaning and painting. Carmen talked to everyone. Ned didn’t have any other friends to speak of that he hung around or did things with. Ned had settled into his new life after prison as a loner—a man who lived in the basement of his parents’ suburban home, worked a professional job all day, and hung out at a city bar talking to prostitutes and locals at night.

Carmen was different from the other women Ned had met. She had a way about her that Ned obviously found attractive. On some nights, Carmen wore her long hair up in a ponytail, like an Egyptian goddess. She strutted into the bar, wearing high-cut black leather boots, sporting bling around her neck, wrists, and ankles, a flashy skirt, and sexy, low-cut, tight blouse. She had likely come from one of the dance clubs in town, and as she had on the night of September 21, 2001, a Friday, when she had stopped at Kenney’s for a nightcap.

Ned loved the way she dressed and the simple fact that she paid the slightest amount of attention to him. He never realized for one minute that she was probably just talking to him so she could get a free drink.

When Alice showed up at the bar that night not dressed like Carmen, Ned got mad, Alice said later. (“He would be upset with me when I didn’t dress like her.”)

Alice had no trouble shunning Ned. And she certainly wasn’t going to dress in the manner that a man told her. But the conversations she’d had with Ned made his relationship with Carmen—if it could be called such—stand out. Alice was the first to notice when Carmen and Ned were talking or hanging around together. And also the first to notice when they left together.

I

They could always tell when she was in the bar. Her favorite song was “Suavemente,” a romantic Latin ballad by Elvis Crespo that took Carmen back to her roots in Puerto Rico. (“That’s how we knew she was there,” a woman who worked at Kenney’s said.) Like a starlet from an old 1950s musical, Carmen would walk into the bar, plunk a quarter into the jukebox, and…hit C-4…. That’s it…
click.

“Suavemente.”

Ah, yes.

She would sit at the bar, sipping her drink, whispering the lyrics to herself.

II

The night of September 21 was cool in Hartford. The leaves on the trees in Bushnell Park were still dark green, ready to change any day now. Hartford is a two-and-a-half-hour ride on a bad traffic day from New York City. Only ten days after the worst terrorist attack in American history, the people of Hartford shuffled about the city with a certain amount of fear, uncertainty, and trepidation.

Inside Kenney’s on that night, the talk wasn’t centered on the recent deaths of over three thousand people in Manhattan and the fact that two national landmarks had crumbled to the ground. Instead, the talk at the bar in Kenney’s, at least between Kendra and Alice, was how Ned was schmoozing with Carmen all night long after she had strolled into the bar somewhere around 10:00
P.M
. after jumping out of her uncle’s car a few blocks away.

As soon as Carmen walked in, she saw Ned sitting in a booth. Unlike a normal night where he’d sit bellied up to the bar, he seemed to be waiting for someone. And according to witnesses, Ned and Carmen hugged when she arrived at his table.

After a while—and a few drinks—they danced.

Played pool.

Janet Rozman, the bartender, even saw them kiss a few times.

Carmen was really tipsy. Well, maybe even drunk.

She and Ned kind of hung around together most of the night. It was loud in Kenney’s. Lobsterfest night. More people than usual. Carmen was dressed in those black leather boots, short skirt, and flamboyant blouse that Ned had begged the other girls to wear. Ned had on his typical business attire, but he had loosened his necktie, a red-white-and-blue cheesy sort of homage to the events in New York. At some point during the night, he took his tie off and gave it to Rozman, who put it around her neck, saying, “Check me out….”

Kendra and Alice walked around the bar several times and spotted Ned and Carmen laughing, talking, dancing, both the girls later reported to police. But after going out into the back of the bar late into the night, they lost sight of them. And when the girls returned to the bar area a short time later, Carmen and Ned were gone.

Alice was curious. She knew Ned was weird and could be a bit overwhelming and even violent, but at the same time, she understood why Carmen was hanging out with him: free drinks.

“Anyone seen Carmen?” she asked around the bar.

Several people said the same thing: “Carmen and Ned left together.”

III

Carmen’s daughter Jackie was pregnant. On the morning of September 22, after a night of looking around the city for her mother with Miguel, Jackie awoke to find that Carmen hadn’t returned home—or called. Jackie hadn’t gotten much sleep after spending half the night searching for her mother.

It was odd she hadn’t called,
Jackie thought. Jackie’s baby shower was slated for Sunday, September 23. “Carmen had put the shower together,” Carmen’s niece Kathy Perez later said. “Every month,” Luz added, “she used to give me money to hold for the shower. It was at my house. She was so excited about the baby and the shower.”

The baby shower had to go on. With Carmen being gone now for nearly a full day, with no word, there wasn’t much to celebrate. However, life had to continue as if she was coming home.
Think positive. She’ll be home anytime now.

After the quick shower on Sunday morning, Jackie and the others went back to handing out flyers around the city and calling people. The family got hold of the local newspaper, which happened to be directly across the street from Kenney’s, and asked if it would publish a photograph of Carmen with a note. But, like the local television station, editors declined, saying they needed a police report or some sort of acknowledgment from law enforcement that there was an actual problem. After all, Carmen was an adult. She could have taken off.

With no help from the local “English-speaking” media, family members claimed, Sonia, Carmen’s oldest sister, went to Telemundo, the local Spanish TV network, which agreed to immediately air something about Carmen’s disappearance.

Kenney’s was a quick stop off Interstate 84, a major Connecticut highway cutting a path directly through downtown Hartford. Above all, locals filled Kenney’s bar stools. Men and women who called one another by their first names and sat in front of bartenders who knew more about their lives than their own family members did. That afternoon, the family called the HPD. When an officer showed up, Jackie explained that Carmen was happy the previous night. She had gone out with family members and then took off on her own. She drank, sure. She probably hung out at the local bars more than she should have, but Carmen
always
came home at night. Or, Jackie explained, she
always
called. “She’d never miss my baby shower. Never.”

Besides a rather artful tattoo on her right leg, Carmen had an
I Love You
tattoo on her left leg, Jackie told the police officer, before describing her features: height, weight, hair, eyes.

“What was she wearing, do you recall?” the officer asked.

“A burgundy blouse,” Jackie said. She was sure of it. She’d watched her mother get dressed. Even suggested what to wear and helped her pick it out. “Two gold wrist bracelets, a gold-and-silver necklace, and double gold earrings.” Jackie also explained that Carmen had a tattoo on her ankle that said “Tarzan.”

On top of that, Carmen also wore those black knee-high “Nancy Sinatra” boots—the ones Ned had been so fond of and demanded the other girls at Kenney’s wear.

“Where’d she go last night?” HPD officer Jeffrey Rohan asked next.

Jackie was visibly upset. Something was wrong. She could feel it. “At about nine o’clock,” she said, “my mom’s uncle dropped her off on Capitol Ave, I think she was going to the El Camerio Bar on Walnut Street.” The El Camerio was a bit farther east, on the opposite side of Interstate 84, and Carmen had sometimes stopped in to see friends and have a drink. She never thought about why she had said “dropped her off” when she knew her mother had run from the car when her uncle stopped at a light.

In truth, Carmen could be anywhere. She was a grown woman. She had been known to stay out all night in the past and show up the next afternoon. What made today any different?

Jackie realized something was amiss. She knew her mother was in trouble. She couldn’t explain how. She just
knew.
“She always calls home if she stays out all night,” Jackie told Officer Rohan.

Rohan asked Jackie for a current photograph, adding, “It’ll be filed as a missing persons case today.” He didn’t want Jackie to worry. Someone would be on it. If Carmen didn’t return home by the end of the day, an investigator would be back. (“The Hartford police,” family members later said, “were very helpful. They did all they could for us.”)

Later that day, Carmen’s family posted more missing persons flyers around the Capitol Avenue region near Kenney’s and downtown. The Hartford PD had generated the eight-by-ten posters. Carmen’s radiant smile and expressive brown eyes—so guarded and yet calm and charming—shined on thousands of Hartford residents as they went about their lives unshaken by this beautiful woman in the poster staring at them. Her image was wrapped around telephone poles, hung up on the bulletin boards of Laundromats, convenience and liquor stores, gas stations and local businesses. Indeed, there was Carmen’s beautiful face: now a part of the “Milk Carton Class of 2001.”