I'll Be Watching You. M. William Phelps

cannot move right now,” Mary Ellen said. “Where would I go? I’m not even physically recovered.”

      “Nope. I think it’s best. I think it’s best that you move from here.”

      And then the notes started again. Mary Ellen would find them on her door, on the windshield of her car, in the hallway: I think it’s best you leave.

      Caving to the pressure, Mary Ellen started looking for a new apartment, but couldn’t find anything right away. “The way I like to describe this period of my life,” Mary Ellen said, looking back, trying to make sense of how she made it, “it’s like when an animal is wounded, it likes to crawl into its hole to recover. You’re wounded. You want to be in your home and what’s familiar to you in order to recover.”

      Her landlady was denying her that one comfort: recovery.

      A friend ultimately stored Mary Ellen’s belongings for her while she moved back in with her parents, which became a situation that only added to a growing list of problems. Her father wouldn’t even look at her or speak to her. She’d walk into a room and “start shaking from head to foot. I didn’t know how to deal with it.”

      Or Dad.

      As stories about her attack started circulating in the newspapers, Mary Ellen’s parents began hiding the papers from her so she couldn’t see what was being written and what Ned and his supporters were saying.

      V

      Getting back to work provided a bit of social comfort from the toil of being home with Mom and Dad, but as time went on, Mary Ellen began to suffer from post-traumatic stress. It started when she’d answer the telephone and speak to a client. As soon as she hung up, she’d forget who called and what he or she wanted. She couldn’t understand what was going on. She’d be at her desk, doing paperwork, or just sitting, and suddenly burst into tears. She’d drive down what was once a familiar road and not know where she was. (“I just cried and cried and cried. I could not stop crying.”)

      Then the flashbacks started. There was Ned in her face, staring into her eyes again, his hands around her throat, watching the life drain from her. It got to a point where after moving into her own place she’d have friends bring her home and they’d walk into the new apartment before her, checking underneath the bed, in the closets, and in back of the curtains to make sure the coast was clear. All at once, it was eerie and surreal: she could see the events take place step-by-step in her head, and it seemed like it was happening all over again. On some nights, she’d lie in bed wide awake, lights out, and hear Ned breathing in her ear. “I mean, it was, I swear, it felt as if he was right there…. I would freeze. I could feel him get on the bed behind me (just as he had). I could hear him, breathing and breathing.”

      And she would turn around and there he was: watching her.

      26

      I

      Ned had always challenged himself to be the best at whatever he did. Sales. Studying stocks and bonds. Tracking the statistics of the Boston Red Sox. Or, of course, studying killers. Whatever Ned did, he prided himself that he was the absolute best. Writing to a friend years after attacking Mary Ellen, Ned could talk about himself—his letters were always about Ned—and encourage his friend not to buy a certain stock in one breath and, in another, describe killing as if it were like clipping hedges or washing his car. In one letter, after warning his friend that GM wasn’t a good buy that month, Ned explained how he had umpired Little League games for six or seven years. He enjoyed being around baseball, he wrote, even on such a young level of play. The money wasn’t all that good ($30 per month), but if he couldn’t play the game himself (he had a bum ankle), being around it satisfied the need to be involved. And yet, after talking about Little League baseball and helping kids, in the next sentence, he mentioned reading all of the books about Bundy he could get his hands on and watching (studying) the movie about Bundy starring Mark Harmon. Ned didn’t see the resemblance between Harmon and Bundy. He said Harmon looked like Lee Harvey Oswald—that is, before launching a detailed description of killing and how to avoid being caught.

      Ned wrote that he was always thinking about it.

      “It” being killing a woman.

      His point was that although it was always on his mind, he didn’t necessarily drive around town like Bundy and prowl for victims or, as he put it, “find a situation.”

      What was clear from the letters was that Ned enjoyed the art involved in getting away with a crime as evil as murder. It was something he aspired to. Not a goal, per se, but more than a game. He liked playing. With his victims first. Cops second. Meeting Mary Ellen that night, he wrote, fooling her into inviting him upstairs into her apartment, was a perfect situation. When it was over, however, and he realized Mary Ellen had survived, Ned said he knew he was going to get caught. But even when the cops came and he was arrested—he beamed later when remembering the time period in his letter—he was thrilled how everyone the cops spoke to about him couldn’t say anything bad. No one really knew him. They talked of the man they thought they knew. But Ned had fooled them. And there they were, like fools, supporting him, when he knew damn well that his goal that night, the game he had played with Mary Ellen Renard, involved murder.

      Ned loved it: the thrill of fooling all of them. It was part of crime itself.

      27

      I

      By April 1988, Ned’s attorney, John Bruno, knew more about his client than he had perhaps wanted to know. An attorney from Middlesex County had visited Bruno’s office one afternoon, bringing with him information that didn’t bode all too well for his client. “The method of attack,” the prosecutor explained to Bruno, talking about Mary Ellen’s case, “is strikingly similar to an unsolved murder at Rutgers.”

      There was that case again, hovering in Ned’s past. Even if he hadn’t committed the crime, the way in which the murder had been carried out, was almost identical to that of the attack on Mary Ellen. With that, Bruno wondered how he was going to get around explaining the case away. Ned was in trouble down the road when his case went to court. And yet, Bruno realized, Ned’s network of supporters seemed to grow with each passing week. People were coming forward to support him. Promising to walk into court and explain that he wasn’t some psychopath who could kill people and attack them with knives. It just wasn’t in his character.

      II

      What was it about that Rutgers murder that made investigators certain Ned had been involved? “He could be a likeable guy—piano player, salesman, captain of the softball team, a guy’s guy,” Bruno explained to me years later. “He was always organizing the parties, the softball games. He seemed like somebody who always wanted to have a company picnic. Not some quiet little nerd who sits in the corner and is afraid to face people socially.”

      According to the women Bruno spoke to, Ned was “charming” and always “polite.” Bruno had to go to Ned with the allegations from Middlesex, explaining to him that the Middlesex murder had the parallels of a repeat offender, and was intrinsically similar in signature to the attack on Mary Ellen. Bruno explained that Ned had been on Middlesex’s radar for some time, but they had no evidence to arrest him. They had even questioned Ned a few times, but they had to release him due to the fact that they had nothing with which to charge him.

      After Bruno went to Ned and explained the situation, Ned thought about it. The bottom line was this: What if, while he was in jail awaiting trial on the Mary Ellen Renard charge, Middlesex came up with some sort of new evidence? Ned knew he had killed the woman in Middlesex. He thought he had gotten away with it. He believed he left no evidence. But what if something surfaced?

      Murder one. The death penalty. Add the Mary Ellen Renard attack to the Middlesex case and he would face death if a jury found him guilty.

      “It’s something to think about,” Bruno told Ned.

      On the other hand, with the right plea bargain, Ned realized, he could avoid a murder charge in Middlesex and walk out of prison one day—if only he admitted to it and