Teach Me to Kill

  “Billy is gonna be pissed!” he heard one hushed voice say.

  “Yeah, you know who’s gonna be next.”

  With that, Ralph burst into the room and jumped on top of Pete, mock-wrestling and tickling his friend.

  “I heard you!” Welch said. “I heard you! I can’t believe you lied to me about this. Tell me now.”

  Welch climbed off Pete, who went over and shut the door. The three sat on beds facing each other and Randall quietly recounted the night of the murder. JR chimed in periodically, to provide a detail or two, but mostly he remained silent.

  Pete spoke of ransacking the condo to make it appear burglarized, putting the dog in the cellar, and Greg’s futile attempt to escape and his pleas for mercy.

  Then Randall described how Billy shot Smart. “Greg didn’t even see it coming,” he said.

  Welch could not believe his ears. Why? What made them go so far?

  Greg Smart was an asshole toward Pam, Randall replied. “Greg was worth more dead than alive,” he said. Pam was paying them five hundred dollars each, out of her insurance payoff, for killing him.

  “How do you think I got these?” said JR, holding up his hands to point out Greg Smart’s Kenwood truck speakers between his windows.

  The conversation soon moved outside to the driveway. Ralph needed air, and Pete thought it best to be away from anyone who might overhear.

  That night Ralph learned that Randall had planned to slit Smart’s throat with a knife from the guy’s own kitchen, that one of JR’s father’s .38-caliber guns and a hollow-tip bullet did the job, and that on the ride home JR and Ramey had belted out “Shoofly Pie.” They told him that Sal Parks knew everything as well.

  “How could you do something like this?” Ralph said, growing more angry.

  “That’s what they do in the Army,” Pete replied. “People do it every day.”

  “That’s not what they do in the Army!” Welch fired back.

  Ralph was bewildered that they had done it at all, but what struck him as even stranger was that they could discuss it in such normal, even tones, almost as if it was just another scam. At one point Pete said, “Me and Bill said our Hail Marys before we did it,” as if killing someone was one big joke.

  “Did it make you feel good to watch this guy’s head come apart?” Ralph asked sarcastically.

  “It didn’t come apart,” said Randall. “There was just lots of blood.”

  Ralph was responding worse than Pete and JR had expected. They’d thought he would protect them if he knew the full story. But now quite the opposite seemed likely.

  “So, what are you gonna do?” asked JR.

  “I don’t know,” said Ralph. “I gotta do something.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” said JR. “Just forget you ever heard about it.”

  “I can’t,” said Ralph. “I can’t keep something like this inside. What are you gonna do if I tell?”

  “We’ll be out of here like that,” said JR.

  They stood at the top of the driveway for nearly half an hour, talking back and forth, before Ralph Welch got in his car and left.

  Ralph needed time to clear his head and, more important, to find Raymond Fowler and warn him that his life might be in danger. When he had heard one of the boys say, “You know who’s gonna be next,” he was certain that they were talking about killing Ramey.

  Welch drove for a quarter mile, just down the road, and parked near Seabrook’s former fire station. Then, trying to be inconspicuous, he walked back to his father’s house. Ralph bummed five dollars from his dad and when he stepped out, Pete and JR were on a motorcycle, slowly cruising back and forth, almost as if they were sizing up what Welch was going to do.

  Ralph went back to his car and set out to find Fowler. But first he stopped on South Main Street at a local hangout, to find Danny Blake and get directions to where Fowler was staying in Maine. Then Blake climbed in the car and said he would come along for the ride.

  It was close to three in the morning when they got to Maine. Fowler’s relatives woke him up and Welch spoke to Ramey. “Ralph went in and told Raymond that they were looking for him,” recalled Blake “Raymond said he didn’t care.”

  Pete and JR, in the meantime, had driven the motorcycle to Pam’s complex in Hampton. In the early hours of the morning, they knocked on her condo door, but no one answered. The boys wanted to warn Pam and Billy that the dam was about to burst. But all they could do was go home to bed and see what the morning brought.

  As dawn approached, Ralph dropped off Blake and returned to the Lattimes’ house, where he lay down for a bit and fell asleep, only to be awakened Sunday morning by JR. Welch’s father was outside and wanted him for something.

  When Ralph returned, he went into where Pete Randall was sleeping over and sat beside him.

  “I don’t want you or Bill around here anymore,” said Welch. “I don’t want you anywhere near Ryan.”

  “I’ll come around here whenever I feel like it,” Pete replied.

  “Well, if you don’t stay away, I’ll make you stay away.”

  “I’ll come around when I feel like it.”

  “Well, then we’re gonna fight. Maybe we should go outside right now.”

  “I’ll step outside with you,” said Pete.

  So they did. Randall and Welch started up the Lattimes’ driveway, with JR trailing along, when all of a sudden, Ralph grabbed Randall’s shirt and shoved him, as if he was pushing him off the Lattimes’ property.

  “You’re not gonna come around here anymore!” said Ralph.

  Randall snapped. When they were little, Ralph pushed Pete around and Randall used to run home crying. But now Pete was flailing away, driving his fists into Ralph’s face. Then, grabbing Ralph from behind, Pete took to strangling him. In seconds, they both thunked to the ground, with Welch’s skull smashing against a rock.

  Ralph blacked out for a moment. When he opened his eyes, Pete was still choking him, but then let up and got off him.

  Gazing up, Ralph saw JR standing nearby crying.

  Battered, with a gash over his left eye and his clothes now filthy, Welch raised himself to his feet and staggered down the driveway toward the house. Pete and JR headed in the direction of Randall’s place.

  “I don’t want either one of you coming back here!” Welch shouted, seeming to forget that it was JR’s family’s house.

  Crying, Ralph stumbled inside. When Diane Lattime saw him, her first thought was that the boy had been working on his car and that it fell off the jack onto him.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “They used Vance’s gun to kill someone!” said Ralph, sobbing.

  Diane, a slight, thoughtful woman of thirty-six, could make no sense of what Welch was saying. She called for her husband, who had been sitting in the living room with a friend.

  In another setting, Vance, thirty-nine, would easily pass for a lumberjack. He was tall and husky, with a full head of beginning-to-gray hair, a moustache, and a slow baritone voice.

  “What’s wrong?” he said, stepping into the kitchen.

  “They used your gun to kill someone!” blurted Ralph. Now he was nearly hysterical, blubbering and running on and on. Bill and Pete were robbing this guy, Ralph sobbed. JR wasn’t there but he drove. Then the guy came in and they used Lattime’s gun. It must be true because he himself had gone to Maine to check it out. But they said it was a joke.

  All Vance understood was that the boys seemed to have shot someone with one of his weapons.

  “Which gun did they use?” said Vance.

  “I don’t know,” said Ralph. “A thirty-eight maybe. I’m not sure.”

  Lattime entered his bedroom to see if his .38 caliber rifle and pistol were still there. Ralph, who had been leaning against the kitchen wall, slid down to the floor in tears.

  Vance did not know what to think. Ralph was talking crazy, but it sounded like the guy who was shot, if there was someone shot, might still b
e alive. He guessed that it was a gas station holdup, maybe in Maine.

  All Lattime knew for certain was that the kids never fought each other. If they had come to blows there had to be something to Ralph’s story.

  The guns were there. When Vance checked the .38 pistol, though, one thing struck him as odd. Lattime did not remember cleaning the weapon after JR had fired it that day up in northern New Hampshire. Now, not a trace of gunpowder was on it.

  Vance called to his friend Dave in the living room. He needed help moving Ralph to the couch.

  “What happened?” said his friend.

  “You wouldn’t want to know,” replied Lattime.

  When Vance finally got Ralph settled down, he turned around and Dave was gone. “If I don’t wanna know, then I’m outta here,” Dave told Diane before he hustled out the door.

  After talking to Ralph further, Lattime grabbed the rifle and the handgun. Something had happened involving the boys. He did not want to believe that his son was tied up in a murder, but he did want to know the truth—good, bad, anything.

  Lattime decided that there was only one way to unravel the matter: He was going to the police.

  Ralph, in the meantime, said he was going to his girlfriend’s house. The Lattimes said they would call him when it was time to go down himself.

  It was around noon, a relatively sleepy Sunday for the Seabrook police, when Vance and Diane Lattime walked through the door, the husband clutching the handgun. He had left the rifle in his car.

  Sergeant Carlene Thompson, who ran the department’s detective bureau, had come in to put in three hours on paperwork. She was in her office when a dispatcher called on the intercom to say that Thompson should probably talk to the couple who had just come in. They had what they thought might be a murder weapon, she said.

  Thompson came out and talked to the Lattimes. “A lot of things started falling together when she started talking,” said Vance. “She said the Derry police thought there might be a Seabrook connection to a certain teacher they were looking into. And then she asked, “Have you ever heard the name Smart?”

  “That’s when my wife said that she was the one who came with the boys a couple weeks back to look at a new car. Then that started the whole thing off.”

  To say the least.

  What had happened was that Thompson remembered that Jackson’s men had been in Seabrook following up on the tip from Louise Coleman. Thompson secured the gun and made a call to the Derry police.

  Thompson’s three hours of paperwork on a Sunday afternoon was about to become several sleepless days.

  ◆◆◆

  Pete and JR knew that everything was spinning out of control. After they left Ralph, the boys got back on the motorcycle, which they had stolen in the first place, and roared off again for Pam’s condo.

  Pam and Billy were awake, lounging in bed, when they heard the motorcycle outside and then the knocking. It was obviously Billy’s friends.

  At first he thought to ignore them and maybe they would disappear, but they persisted. Finally, Billy angrily pulled on his sweatpants and went downstairs to see what they wanted. By their faces alone he could tell disaster had struck.

  Their words affirmed it: Pete had told Ralph everything. Ralph had flipped out. He’s probably going to go to the police.

  Flynn stood frightened and angry and disbelieving. How could they be so stupid as to tell Ralph?

  The boys were in the living room, trying to figure out what to do next, when Pam padded downstairs to the shocking news. While she had been spending the night with her teenage lover, hell had ripped loose on Upper Collins Street.

  Panicked, they decided to take a stab at damage control, which by now was like applying the brakes as your truck careens off a bridge.

  Billy managed to track down Welch by telephone at his girlfriend’s house. “Ralph, what’s going on?” he asked as Pam, who was beside him, and everyone else in the room sat nervous and quiet.

  “I know what you guys did,” Welch said. “Pete told me everything.”

  “Who did you tell?” asked Billy. “What did you say?”

  “The truth,” said Ralph.

  Billy Flynn, not the most practiced of liars, then began to unfurl a convoluted explanation.

  A vicious rumor was going around that Billy and Pam were involved in Greg’s death. Pete and JR—whom Billy said had dropped by but were now gone—only affirmed the rumor because they thought Ralph would want to protect Billy and therefore not repeat it. But it was just a rumor.

  Pam—whom Billy said was with him but in the other room, out of hearing distance—meant everything to him. If she learned about the rumor, she would leave him. And if Pam dumped him, Billy said, he would kill himself.

  “Ralph, you know I didn’t do it,” he said. “You know I wouldn’t do anything like that.”

  “I know you did do it,” said Ralph.

  Welch might not have been class valedictorian, but he recognized a line of garbage when he heard it. Why would Pete and JR say they’d done something so awful unless they’d truly done it? What’s more, he could hear whispering voices on Billy’s end of the line. Ralph knew Flynn was not alone.

  So when Billy, sounding scared and desperate, repeatedly insisted on meeting him somewhere, Welch refused. Finally, he hung up. He did not want to be the next corpse.

  Figuring that Ralph was a lost cause, Pam and the boys decided they had to find Raymond Fowler, to fill him in on the turn of events and to come up with a mutually acceptable story for the police.

  The plan was for Ramey to meet JR at Tuck’s Field, not far from Winnacunnet High School, where graduation ceremonies were underway, and JR would bring him to Pam’s condo. They called Maine several times and Fowler repeatedly said he was on his way. Forewarned of imminent danger by Welch, though, he never showed up.

  At mid-afternoon, JR called his parents to get a feel for the size of the avalanche that Ralph had begun. Diane Lattime told him to come home immediately. There was a family emergency, she said. JR said he was at Pam Smart’s condo, but that he could not come home right now.

  That afternoon, Pam drove the boys back to Seabrook. She dropped off JR at his house and drove over to a convenience store on nearby Route 286.

  Lattime walked down his driveway and saw his uncle, whose house was in front of the Lattimes’ place. When JR asked if his parents were around, his uncle said no. They had gone back to the police station.

  JR hurried to the convenience store and found Billy and Pete playing video games in an arcade next door. Pam, they told him, said she saw Cecelia’s parents at the laundry adjacent to the store and took off in her CRX. She would be back, she said, in a few minutes.

  Pete Randall, in the meantime, called his mother, who was at work in another Seabrook convenience store. He and his friends were in a lot of trouble, he said, and he needed her to come right now. He would be watching for her on Route 286.

  The boys walked to the road and hid in the bushes alongside a small bridge to wait.

  Suddenly, Randall spotted his mother and waved her down. Pete had always been fiercely close to Patricia Randall. When she stopped, Patricia recalled, he told her of the murder and that he and his friends were planning to flee.

  Mrs. Randall, a small, reserved woman, said she was nearly in shock. She didn’t know what to think. But this was her only son. She gave him all the cash she had—one hundred dollars.

  Pete then went back and waited with his friends until Pam returned. When she did, the foursome headed back toward her condo in Hampton, all of them nervous and trying to decide what to do.

  Suddenly, at a traffic light near the condo complex, Pam ordered them all out of her car. With the police hot on their trail, she said, she wanted nothing to do with them. They should just stay away.

  Pete and JR got the motorcycle out of Pam’s garage. Billy, whose heart had dropped when Pam seemed to have abandoned them, went to say good-bye to her.

  Billy told her that if he wa
s arrested he would never tell on her. She, in turn, told him not to worry. The boys were juveniles, she said. Even if they were found to be involved in the murder, they could only be held until they were eighteen.

  Randall and JR took off toward Seabrook to get Patricia Randall’s car. Their plan was to take the car, meet Billy, and leave the state.

  When they got into town, they spotted Mr. Randall’s 1983 Sunbird on South Main Street. Both the boys and Pete’s mother headed for Randall’s house. In the meantime, though, a Seabrook cop driving in the other direction inexplicably turned around. He may have altered his course for any reason, but that didn’t matter to them.

  The boys panicked.

  Adrenaline running amok, JR dropped off Pete at his house and told him to meet him on a dirt side street that they both knew. Then he roared away, with the cruiser zooming behind.

  Randall went inside with his mother. She gave him the keys to the Sunbird, and Pete took off to find his friends. “He’s my kid,” said Mrs. Randall. “I would do anything that I could to help him.”

  Originally, the boys had planned to take both the motorcycle and the car, but by the time Pete hooked up with JR, who had lost the cop, they decided to abandon the bike. The police had already seen it.

  Next, they headed to Winnacunnet High School, where they met Billy Flynn. Then they filled up the Sunbird with gas and headed south—not to South America, as one might guess, but to Connecticut.

  ◆◆◆

  Detective Barry Charewicz was considered by Captain Jackson to be the “last of the pure-hearts.” At thirty years old, Charewicz was the kind of cop who did everything by the letter. Even if his supervisor was not around, Charewicz refused to relax. Instead, he would diligently complete the tedious paperwork that most people would leave for tomorrow, working to the very end of his shift. And when he said he was going to be somewhere, invariably he would be there.

  Growing up in Andover, Massachusetts, Charewicz had hoped to be a veterinarian, but because of the cost of vet school, he drifted toward criminal justice, which he found interesting as well. He had started as a patrolman in Derry eight years earlier and had been a detective since the end of 1987.