I'll Be Watching You. M. William Phelps

in detail. The episode was fresh in her mind.

      “Describe Ned to me,” said one of the detectives.

      “Um…,” Mary Ellen started to say before breaking down in tears.

      “Take it easy…his approximate height, weight, and age?” Detective Kassai asked, trying to ease her into it.

      “He’s five-nine…um”—she started crying again—“um…he weighs…I’m sorry, I would say, maybe one hundred and eighty pounds.”

      “How old?”

      “I’d say thirty,” Mary Ellen said. They had talked about her age, she recalled, but not his. She felt a bit more comfortable. Ned would do it again, she was convinced. And how would she ever be able to sit at home alone again with him on the street? He had her keys.

      “How did you find out—I mean, how did you know his name was Ned?”

      “Through conversation.” Ned had asked her what her name was and said he had an “unusual name.” Then he told her his name and she asked what Ned was short for, perhaps Edward?

      “No, he told me,” Mary Ellen explained. “He said Ned was short for Edwin.”

      “Did it appear to you that he knew anybody else at that club, whether it was employees or customers? Was he friendly with anybody?”

      Mary Ellen thought about it. “A bartender,” she said a moment later, “who he called ‘Jimmy.’ He had dark hair.”

      As the interview progressed, Mary Ellen explained how she and Ned ended up in the parking lot together. It was unclear whether Ned could have fixed Mary Ellen’s car so it wouldn’t start when she left the bar. She had used the restroom before she left. She couldn’t recall if she had told Ned what kind of car she drove before leaving him.

      The investigators were in an odd position. There were questions they had to ask. If Mary Ellen had made a move on Ned and casual sex had turned violent, it was still a crime, but the attack would have to be investigated—and later prosecuted—differently.

      “When you came into your apartment,” Kassai asked, “did you take any clothes off?”

      Mary Ellen didn’t hesitate. “I took my shoes off. I always take my shoes off when I get home, so I won’t disturb my landlady.”

      After they went through the next five minutes inside Mary Ellen’s apartment, one of the detectives asked her when the situation turned uncomfortable.

      Mary Ellen pulled back a bit and tears welled up. “He grabbed my throat with both hands and both his thumbs on my Adam’s apple and his fingers [wrapped] around the back of my neck and he was staring into my eyes.”

      It was obvious to Mary Ellen—as it would be to investigators in the coming years—that this procedure Ned had used, if it could be called such, had been something he had practiced. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was prepared. He hadn’t randomly grabbed her throat, she believed. He strategically grabbed it in a specific area.

      Ned never expected Mary Ellen to survive. He had chosen a victim and what was obvious in the way he acted, and the information he shared with her, was that he never thought she would be sitting, talking to the police about the attack. Either that, or he never intended Mary Ellen as a victim in the first place, but he was overcome by those feelings of not being able to control himself around females and acted out.

      Near the conclusion of the interview, Detective Kassai asked, “During the night, did Ned tell you anything about himself, where he lived or where he worked?”

      “A few blocks from Kracker’s,” she said. “He stopped there after attending a friend’s wedding. I mentioned to him that I had just started a new job in Paramus, and he said that he worked in Paramus, on Century Road, for Hewlett-Packard.”

      “Prior to meeting Ned, have you ever seen him before?”

      “I never saw him in my life before that.”

      Investigator Textor spoke up as the interview wound down. “Did he say anything that he wanted to go to bed with you or have any type of sex with you?”

      “No!” Mary Ellen said, lashing out. She was offended by the question, but understood its validity. “When I mentioned that I was going to have cheese, because I am hypoglycemic and I have a high protein diet and I have to eat frequently…he said, ‘I don’t want you to have cheese….’” It was the last thing Ned had ever said to Mary Ellen—save for “be quiet,” as he put his hand over her mouth at the bottom of the stairs.

      After thanking Mary Ellen for her time and cooperation, they asked her if there was anything else she wanted to add.

      Mary Ellen thought about it. “Yes,” she said, “just that I believed that I was dead, except for the fact that I fought as hard…as hard”—she stumbled, obviously reliving that moment—“as hard as I possibly could.”

      Finding a guy named Edwin who worked at Hewlett-Packard, one of the biggest employers in the immediate area, was not going to be too difficult.

      22

      I

      According to Ned years later, the attack on Mary Ellen was never supposed to happen. It was something inside him, he wrote, he couldn’t control, which proved to him that it was not a premeditated event. As he explained it (or, rather, justified it), Mary Ellen invited him back to her apartment. He mentioned nothing of her car ever breaking down and his Good Samaritan work. Ned wrote that Mary Ellen had undone the top half of her dress and taken her bra off after they entered her apartment, which, he claimed, was too much for his sexually tangled mind to wrap itself around. Once he saw her breasts being offered up, he couldn’t help himself. It was something inside him that took over.

      A demon. Devil. Different personality.

      At some point, Ned explained, he and Mary Ellen were on the couch. He was on top of her. She was enjoying herself. But then, out of nowhere, he wrote, I could not stop my hands from squeezing her throat as hard as I could.

      An uncontrollable impulse.

      An involuntary act.

      Ned’s mind equated sex with violence. There could be many causes for this. The vectors stirring inside the mind of a violent sexual offender are seated deeply in the brain’s behavioral wiring. In this instance, the offender, for some reason, enters into a state of blackout—much like an alcoholic—as he becomes aroused in the presence, or even photographs, of a female. When Ned saw Mary Ellen’s breasts, he was out of his mind. He wasn’t thinking with the same set of morals and values as he might have been moments before. This sexual arousal then becomes intertwined with a sense of pleasure that only violence mixed with some sort of sexual act can satisfy.

      Stabbing Mary Ellen.

      The blood, though, Ned explained later, was not part of the fantasy. The blood was a deal breaker.

      A turnoff.

      Saltpeter.

      Still, to Ned, seeing Mary Ellen unclothed and in a vulnerable position was an invitation to fulfill his sexual fantasies. He blames Mary Ellen because, in his mind, it is her fault for being, essentially, in the wrong place at the wrong time and making herself available to him. This enables Ned to rationalize the crime in his warped sense of reality. Whether she invited him into her apartment and—for the sake of argument—took off her clothes voluntarily, or Ned ripped them off, is irrelevant to the end result. But in mitigating his behavior, Ned obviously felt the need to place the blame on Mary Ellen for putting herself in this position and offering her body to him.

      A sacrificial lamb.

      II

      Talking about the crime itself, Ned later stated that Mary Ellen passed out “a few seconds” after he started strangling her. When that happened, he wrote, he dragged her into her bedroom, half-naked. It was at this moment, these feelings completely took over