Town note
The village of Niantic is technically inside the town of East Lyme.
about 0:03:28The story
His first marriage, made in Chicago when he was about seventeen or eighteen, was annulled within a month after he assaulted his bride. In late 1968 he married Ellen, three years his junior, and in 1973 they had a daughter, Jessica. By the early 1980s the couple were living near the entrance to the Black Point Beach Club, a quiet, exclusive stretch of shoreline in Niantic, Connecticut. Ellen owned Ad Graphics, an advertising and design studio in East Lyme, and both of them earned well. Their marriage was openly promiscuous: they swapped partners, went to sex clubs and took other lovers. Ellen had affairs with at least three men, one of them Len Frederickson, Ed's fishing friend.
Ed's main mistress was Nancy Prescott. Around 1984 she became pregnant and gave birth to his daughter Rachel, and she wanted him to leave Ellen. Ellen, pregnant herself by 1985, wanted the affair finished. In June 1985 she found Ed in bed with Nancy, packed his things and told him to get out, and spoke to Len about a divorce that would give her the house, the child and support. Ed moved back in July, promising to give up Nancy, though he slept with her again on 31 July.
On 5 August 1985, Ed's forty-second birthday, he spent the afternoon at home and then set off on a four-day fishing trip to Maine with friends. Roger Peterson picked him up at about seven that evening and they drove through the night, reaching the dock in Maine around two in the morning and waiting six hours in a car park for the boat.
Barbara found the door locked, the lights on and the air conditioner running, and called Len Frederickson. Len broke into the house and found Ellen naked and dead in the bedroom, strangled by hand and then with a ligature. She was thirty-nine and five months pregnant with a boy. The room was cold and the air conditioner was turned up high, with its door closed. The medical examiner did not arrive until 6.57 the next morning, ten hours after the police were called at 8.40 p.m., and the scene was not preserved.
There were no defensive wounds. Fingerprints all belonged to the household or to Len. Semen on the bedsheet was consistent with Ed. Dr Henry Lee concluded the ligature was a torn pair of Ellen's blue underwear, and tested the theory by having identical panties laundered repeatedly and torn from a volunteer in a laboratory. Ed, flown back from Cape Cod, gave an inconclusive polygraph, admitted the affair and denied the murder; his lawyer refused a second test. He attended the funeral on Long Island, where he told Ellen's mother he had not done it, and then rang Barbara Lavalli to ask what the police had said and whether they had found fingerprints.
Ed and Nancy bought a house together within the year and raised Rachel, Nancy's son and Jessica. In 1990 the New London County State Attorney's Office asked Henry Lee to look at the case again. Stomach contents showed Ellen had eaten linguini with clam and tomato sauce for lunch on the Friday with three co-workers, and experiments on volunteers suggested a digestion time that fitted a killing before Ed left. In June 1990 Christin McDuff, the McDuffs' daughter, then thirteen, recalled that as an eight-year-old she had listened on an extension while Ed spoke on the telephone and heard him talking to a ringing line, saying goodbye and that he loved the person.
The defence called an air-conditioning engineer who said a unit like theirs could not cool a room below about 70 degrees in 80-degree weather, and a forensic witness who was not allowed to testify that the fetus would have been more macerated had death occurred on the Friday. Ed testified and was cross-examined for eight or nine days.