Lethal Guardian Read online

  “You have to be kidding me?” Wardell balked.

  “You’re foolin’ with us, Donny, right?” Foley said.

  No sooner had Richardson spoken, when all of their pagers went off.

  Mike Foley then made the call into dispatch. “Get to that scene,” the dispatcher ordered.

  “The crime scene van is in Colchester, though,” Foley said. Colchester was about an hour away. They were only minutes away from the connector.

  “Get to that scene! We’ll have someone pick up the van and bring it over.”

  The first thing Officer Joe Dunn did when he got to the scene was check for “responsiveness by attempting to establish an airway.” But the man’s mouth, Dunn noticed, was full of blood. Getting air into his lungs would be impossible.

  Dunn then realized that the man’s shirt was also covered with blood, so he ripped it open to see if he could find out what had happened.

  Just then, Dunn realized that it had not been a hit and run—at least not in a conventional sense—as so many combing the scene had been suggesting. There were two small holes, clearly visible to Dunn, in the man’s chest: one above his left nipple, the other near his armpit on the same side. There was no blood in or around the holes; they looked like tiny moon craters, as if someone had poked the man with an ice pick or something sharp and round.

  Dunn knew from experience that they weren’t stab wounds. By the looks of it, someone had shot the man. And they weren’t close-range wounds, either; he had apparently been hit from afar. Close-range wounds leave starlike marks—like a balloon knot—on the skin around the wound. Gases from the weapon char and tear the skin apart.

  Looking more closely at the man’s face, Dunn noticed something else—he recognized the man. It was Anson “Buzz” Clinton, a local “hustler” in town Dunn had had some contact with on several occasions.

  “I had dealt with him…in the past regarding domestic disturbances. And had also seen him several times in local drinking establishments,” Dunn later said.

  On January 7, 1994, only two months before Buzz Clinton was found dead, he and his family celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday. They were all looking forward to where Buzz’s life was heading. A rather popular guy in the Old Lyme–East Lyme area, Buzz had the build of a featherweight boxer: lean, cut, muscular. Whether from genetics or the hours of hard manual labor he had done throughout his short life, Buzz could eat all day long and retain his bodybuilder shape without worry. One of the stars of his high-school wrestling and gymnastics teams, quite striking in his pretty-boy manner, Buzz had an uncanny likeness to pop sensation Ricky Martin, back when Martin was fronting the boy band Menudo as a teenager.

  With his feathered-back dark brown hair and blue eyes, Buzz had no trouble getting the ladies. But he also had a reputation in some crowds for being a troublemaker. Buzz was always looking to cut a deal to make some money on the side, former friends recalled. Married for a second time when he was murdered, his first marriage lasted only about a month, and, some claimed, was rife with dysfunction, drug and alcohol abuse and violence.

  Chapter 2

  Officer Joe Dunn, now standing over Buzz’s body staring at his blood-drenched face, had spoken with Buzz back in January, only weeks ago. Buzz had been drinking. He’d been fighting with his wife, the former Kim Carpenter, and her family over custody of Rebecca, Kim’s daughter from a previous relationship. Kim’s sister, Beth Ann Carpenter, was an elegant and beautiful lawyer. In her own right, she seemed to be a beacon of sanity during a situation that had gotten completely out of hand. Beth Ann had helped her mother, Cynthia, wage a savage battle for custody of Rebecca back in 1991. When Buzz met Kim in 1992, he had become entangled in the custody fight. There had been countless court battles. Custody had been granted to the elder Carpenters and then returned back to Kim Clinton. By the beginning of 1994, with Buzz threatening to take Rebecca and Kim and move cross-country, Rebecca’s grandfather Richard “Dick” Carpenter and Buzz had been arguing and fighting fiercely just about every time they ran into each other.

  One night, Buzz called the East Lyme Police Department in a fury. Joe Dunn had taken the call.

  “I’m living in town in an apartment…,” Buzz said, his voice wrought with rage and alcohol. “I haven’t gotten along well with my father-in-law.”

  “Go on. What’s the problem?”

  “My father-in-law, Dick Carpenter, and I have cross complaints against each other filed at the Old Lyme Police Department. He came over here tonight. I told him to leave.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes, but…I want him arrested and a restraining order placed against him.”

  Dunn then explained to Buzz that no crime had been committed.

  “He hasn’t trespassed—”

  But Buzz interrupted and became angrier, Dunn recalled later. Then Buzz began to shout.

  “If the feud continues,” he said clearly, “one of us will end up dead. And if I end up dead, you’ll know who did it!”

  “You should file a restraining order against him, Mr. Clinton. But you have to do that through the courts, not us.”

  “Maybe I’ll kill him first and end the problem,” Buzz said before hanging up.

  On two separate occasions, Joe Dunn had either arrested Buzz or participated in the arrest. Both instances involved domestic disputes, either between Buzz and his wife, Kim, or Buzz and his in-laws.

  The day after Buzz had made that rather threatening phone call to Joe Dunn, he called back. Sober now, he wanted to explain himself, saying how he felt bad about the previous night’s call. He had been drinking, he explained. He was fed up. Things were getting out of hand with his in-laws.

  “It’s because of my wife,” Buzz said, “that [the Carpenters and I] don’t get along.”

  “If the problem continues,” Dunn advised, “I suggest you get that restraining order.”

  Officer Joe Dunn was standing on the Rocky Neck connector now, shaking his head, staring down at Buzz Clinton’s lifeless body as it lay in a pool of blood. Buzz’s skin was turning yellow. It had warmed up a few degrees as a slight drizzle began to fall again, and rigor mortis was beginning to set in.

  Dunn radioed for backup. He needed to get the Connecticut State Police homicide division out there as soon as possible. Any rookie cop—which Dunn wasn’t, by any means—knew the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours after a murder were crucial. The more time the killer had immediately following his crime, the less the chances were he’d ever be caught.

  As Steven and Christine Roy wandered around the scene, which was overflowing with onlookers and rubberneckers, they were finally informed that the man they had found lying on the road, most likely, had been shot. It wasn’t an aneurysm or a hit and run.

  It was murder.

  After learning this, Christine concluded that the man in the car she had seen speed off was probably the murderer.

  Oh, my goodness, she told herself, holding her child tighter.

  About fifteen minutes later, when the state police showed up and began questioning Steven about what had happened and what he had seen, one of the detectives, Steven recalled later, indicated to him that they already had a suspect—and it wasn’t the guy in the car who had sped off.

  With about 3.5 million residents, 90 percent of which are white, Connecticut is a tad over five thousand square miles. Bridgeport, about twenty-five miles from the New York border, is Connecticut’s largest city with about 140,000 people. The entire southern portion of the state—among the towns are Greenwich, Stamford, Old Lyme, East Lyme, New London, Waterford, Old Saybrook, New Haven—borders the Atlantic Ocean and contains some of the most sought-after real estate in New England.

  The Constitution State, as it was dubbed in 1959, holds bragging rights to being the first among America’s fifty states to develop the typewriter, newspaper, nuclear submarine, artificial heart, color television, hamburger, vacuum cleaner, pay telephone, dictionary and revolver.

  With Hartford, the s
tate capital, situated in the middle of the state, many outsiders view the financially suffering city as nothing more than a pit stop between New York City and Boston.

  Connecticut has twelve state police barracks spread throughout the state’s eight counties, 169 towns. Meriden (Central), Litchfield (Western) and Norwich (Eastern) house the Connecticut State Police’s Major Crime Squad District Headquarters.

  The ED-MCS, in Norwich, is about an hour from the East Lyme ramp where Buzz Clinton had been found dead. The crime squads take their work seriously. Territory is everything. If Buzz had been shot just fifteen feet south of where he was found, it would have been Central District’s case.

  The Major Crime Squads are responsible “for all major case investigations—homicides, sexual assaults, armed robberies, arsons—for the forty-two towns situated in the eastern portion of the state.” In addition to its primary responsibilities of investigating violent crime, the ED-MCS serves the offices of the state’s attorneys in Tolland, Windham, Middlesex and New London Counties, and also “assists and supports” twelve police departments within the Eastern District, helping out with “crime processing and major crime investigations.”

  At about 8:30 P.M., Joe Dunn turned the crime scene over to several state troopers and the ED-MCS. Yellow crime-scene tape was unspooled, and an area about the size of a football field, with Buzz’s body in the middle, was cordoned off.

  It was time for the big boys with the gold badges to step in and begin reconstructing exactly what had happened. Containing the crime scene and getting a handle on it were critical. One mistake, and the integrity of an entire investigation could be compromised.

  As plainclothes detectives began to scour the area, looking for any possible pieces of trace evidence—a single strand of hair, a cigarette butt, shell casings, tire tracks, linen, gum, anything—troopers began gathering witnesses who had been hanging around, waiting, wondering. It was getting colder. With drizzle falling, the road had developed a slight glaze that sparkled like diamond dust. Locating evidence—if, in fact, the killer or killers had left any—was getting tougher by the minute.

  By 8:40 P.M., local emergency personnel had tried reviving Buzz, but their efforts were fruitless. He had been dead at least an hour already, maybe longer.

  Murders may take years to solve, but it’s those clues picked up in the first two days that always become the key pieces of evidence. The East Lyme crime scene, however, as it appeared to ED-MCS detectives from a first look, offered little, if any, evidence. Buzz’s Firebird would be towed away, taken to the lab and scoured for clues. But that would take days.

  Temperatures plummeted as the drizzle finally subsided. Within minutes, detectives began gathering any information they could from several of the witnesses who had arrived on the scene after Christine and Steven Roy, who were still standing over by their car, talking to troopers. Buzz’s body, now spread out on the pavement in somewhat of a Christ-on-the-cross fashion, was still out in the open and uncovered. In all the chaos, no one had thought to place a sheet over him.

  Dressed in a cherry red, button-up shirt (which had been opened from top to bottom by Joe Dunn), Buzz lay in a pool of his own blood, urine and feces. The large pool of blood around his head had seeped into the ground and mixed with whatever rainwater had accumulated around him. It was easy to tell that he had been moved at some point after his death. There was a large blood spot to his left that appeared smudged—like pencil markings on paper—as if he’d been dragged. There were also blotches of blood toward his feet—more smudges, detectives guessed, from when one of the witnesses or Joe Dunn had rolled him over.

  Detectives Reggie Wardell and Mike Foley, of the ED-MCS, after viewing the body and discussing how they were going to go about processing the scene, walked over to where Christine and Steven Roy had been waiting. It had been a long night for the couple. What started out as a simple trip to the Bridal Mall ended as a scene out of a TV movie of the week. Steven was tired, Christine shaken. Brendan, who had held up fairly well throughout the night, was beginning to whine now.

  “We’re going to have to separate the two of you and ask you guys some questions,” one of the detectives said.

  “Fine,” Steven answered. “Let’s just get this over with so we can go home.” If only we had left our house five minutes sooner or later…

  Christine had been appalled that one of the first things Joe Dunn had done when he’d arrived on the scene earlier, after looking at Buzz lying on the ground near their car, was to walk over to the Roys’ Pontiac Grand Am and begin circling it with his flashlight out, checking to see if maybe the Roys has struck and killed him. She was wondering now if the detectives were going to be hostile and accusatory, pressing questions on them for which they didn’t have any answers.

  As one of the detectives and Christine walked past Buzz’s body en route to a police cruiser, Christine could see that Buzz’s body was beginning to show signs of death. She put her hands over her mouth. “I had never really seen something so graphic before,” she recalled. While everything had been going on, she never had time to stop and think about what had actually happened. But now the anxiety of the entire night settled on her: She and Steven had come upon the scene of a murder as it was just winding down, and they had possibly even seen the murderer drive away.

  “At that point,” she later said, “I was beginning to comprehend what had happened. I was really, really scared. I didn’t even want to look at [Buzz]. Everything was becoming so real.”

  “Can’t anyone cover that body?” Christine asked as she and one of the detectives proceeded by Buzz’s body.

  “Sure, ma’am.”

  It was pitch black out now. The only hint of light was coming from the blue and red flashes protruding off the tops of the many police cruisers surrounding the scene. Out on Interstate 95, traffic was backed up for miles. Drivers were being stopped by state troopers and asked questions.

  Buzz Clinton had not always gotten along well with his parents, DaLoyd “Dee” and Anson “Buck” Clinton. But the Clintons, of course, loved Buzz, along with their other children, Suzanne and Billy. Shortly before Buzz was killed, he and his new wife, Kim, had lived out in the back of the Clintons’ ranch-style home, situated on the top of a hill off Old Stagecoach Road, in Old Lyme, on about fifty acres. It was a little apartment Buzz had converted from an old toolshed. Just four months ago, though, Buzz and Kim had moved out of “the shed” and into their own apartment in East Lyme, just down the road from where Buzz now lay dead in the road.

  When he was single and living at home, Buzz was always getting kicked out of the house. Dee had a typical motherson relationship with him, and she always bent over backward to help out and give him whatever she could. But when he failed to live by her rules, they butted heads like rams, and Dee would have no other choice but to ask him to leave. Months later, Buzz would promise to be a good little boy and Dee would allow him back.

  “Buzz was a complex person and, at the same time, very simple,” Dee said later. “[He was] not perfect, and most of my gray hair I got from him. He always tried to do at least two things at the same time. He could make me smile and make me want to wring his neck…often at the same time…I used to tell Buzz, ‘There is no expiration date on your birth certificate, so make every day count.’ Buzz packed a lot of living in such a short time.”

  Dee had left her Old Lyme home for a shopping trip at about 7:10 P.M. on the night of Buzz’s murder. Here she was now, however, at about 8:30 P.M., still sitting in a traffic jam—and she had no idea it had been created by the death of her son. From where she was on Exit 72, about one hundred yards from the crime scene, Dee could even see the police’s yellow tape and the sheet troopers had, only recently, placed over Buzz’s body.

  “I hear somebody got hit by a car,” a passerby said to Dee as she sat and worked on a crossword puzzle, waiting for traffic to move again.

  “No kidding,” Dee responded.

  The connector was a parking
lot by this point. Cops were still roaming around, asking questions, not letting motorists pass.

  In no hurry, Dee was content in waiting for whatever the holdup was. Traffic would move soon enough, and she would be on her way. Kim, her daughter-in-law, who was at home waiting on Dee to pick her and Buzz’s kids up to go shopping, would have to understand.

  Detectives soon realized that finding actual forensic evidence on the road or in the field that ran parallel to the crime scene was probably going to be like finding a pine needle in a pile of grass. It was wet, dark, cold. And there really wasn’t much of anything around besides two spent shell casings on the road near Buzz’s body, which detectives guessed had come from the murder weapon. Beyond that, there really wasn’t much more the scene offered other than speculation and theory.

  As Christine Roy made her way through the small crowd of state troopers, witnesses and onlookers, toward the detective’s vehicle where she was going to be interviewed, Steven Roy was being grilled by another detective about one hundred yards away.

  “Why were you on the road tonight?”

  “We were going to buy a gift for my…”

  “Where?”

  “Just up the road at the Bridal Shop—”

  “What time did you come upon the body?”

  “I don’t know exactly…maybe seven-thirty….”

  “Did you touch the body?”

  “Yes, but I—”

  “Where?”

  “I rolled him over with the other guy, the EMT. I think that officer was there, too.”

  “Right to left, or left to right?”

  Specifics: What? Where? When? Why? Any cop would have asked the same repetitive questions. Details were still fresh in Steven’s mind, even if he didn’t realize it himself. He and his wife were the first people on the crime scene. Moving the body was a mistake. But Steven wasn’t an investigator. He was looking to save Buzz’s life, as most people would have done.