Journal of the Dead

by Jason Kersten

  Special Agent Travaglia was waiting for Carrasco, and the two men went right to work. Carrasco had only three days, so Travaglia had set up as many interviews as possible beforehand. Minutes after Carrasco arrived, Sonnet Frost walked into the office. She was friendly and open, and wanted to help, Carrasco could tell, but she had no more info than she had already told Travaglia. She found the “homosexual tension” theory totally improbable, a sentiment that would later be echoed by everyone who knew both men well. But she still had her doubts about Raffi’s story. “As a result of the interview, Frost did express her skepticism to the defendant’s account and suspected malicious intent or ulterior motives,” he later wrote in his report. “However, Frost had no information or inferences by anyone to believe that was the case.”

  That afternoon, the two men drove out to Wellesley to interview the only man who had allegedly claimed to know of a possible ulterior motive: Terrance Connelly. The investigators had high hopes that together they could get the younger cop to affirm the statement he had supposedly made to Cunningham on August 9, about Coughlin and Swan “having been intimate on one occasion.” If he was willing to swear to it and it was true, they might be able to confront Swan with his statement and see if she would admit to an affair.

  Connelly has never consented to an interview, so accounts of the meetings come exclusively from Carrasco and Travaglia. According to them, as soon as the three of them sat down in the interview room at the Wellesley Police Department, the investigators’ hopes began to vanish.

  “During the interview, it became obvious Connolly’s behavioral reactions were consistent as not being completely truthful,” Carrasco stated in his report. “He [said he] never had any problem with the victim or the defendant or negative thoughts towards either. He heard only good about the defendant. No one ever told him or made an inference about the victim and Swan having a sexual relationship.”

  According to Carrasco, Travaglia became openly frustrated at Connelly. “He yelled at him,” Carrasco recalled. “He said something to the effect of ‘Hey, buster, that’s not what you said when I talked to you before. This is serious business; a man is dead. You better start cooperating.’”

  Carrasco asked him if he’d be willing to take a polygraph test. Connelly said he’d do it, but he wanted to talk to Chief Cunningham first. The interview fell apart, and the two investigators told him they’d come back the next morning.

  After meeting with Connelly, Carrasco and Travaglia dropped by the Coughlin house on Pilgrim Road. The detective gave the Coughlins a large envelope containing Dave’s clothes and personal items, and Bob Coughlin reiterated his belief in Kodikian’s story, and told Carrasco that he thought the case might result in plea bargain.

  “What are your feelings about that?” the detective asked.

  “Well, before anything’s done, I want to make sure that there’s nothing else,” Carrasco remembered Bob Coughlin saying.

  When they returned to Wellesley the following day, Chief Cunningham joined the investigators and reminded Connelly, once again, about what he had said the day after the killing. And once again Connelly insisted that the chief had “misunderstood” him.

  Eddie Carrasco asked Connelly again if he’d take a lie detector test; this time the young deputy hesitated. “He said something about wanting to talk to a lawyer first for advice,” Carrasco recalled. The detective kept the heat on, asking him if he’d at least make a taped statement that could later be run through a computer voice stress analyzer. Terry Connelly demurred.

  “I believe what happened was that Terry thought long and hard about the ramifications of his statement,” Travaglia later said. “[He thought], ‘Hey, I may be called as a witness in trial. I better really rethink my position.’”

  Travaglia and Carrasco still had a thin hope that some of the people who had witnessed Connelly’s earlier statement would confirm it and close a circle around him, but it soon became clear that the investigators were fighting a losing battle. Arnold Wakelin, the executive director for the town of Wellesley, “had no recollection” of Connelly even meeting with Cunningham. Chris Clark, the assistant director, did remember the meeting, but said that Connelly’s answer to Cunningham’s question about Coughlin and Swan having had a sexual relationship was more of an “impressionable shrug.” Whether the Coughlins had been in contact with Connelly, or with David’s coworkers at the town hall, is unknown, but it was clear that by November no one in Wellesley was vocalizing any doubt about Kodikian’s story. A few months later, Connelly left his job at the Wellesley Police Department.

  Both of the investigators were frustrated. “We were pretty well convinced that we did have a possible motive,” said Travaglia. They had a practically unheard of reason for murder and, right beneath it, an alternative picture with dots that seemed just on the verge of connecting. They knew for certain that Dave Coughlin had spent a week in California with Raffi’s ex-girlfriend. Maybe Raffi might have told Coughlin he didn’t mind, but what guy, deep in his heart, wouldn’t be just a bit bothered if his best friend took off with his ex for a week? And if Dave Coughlin had indeed told Terry Connelly that he’d actually slept with Swan, then maybe, facing death in Rattlesnake Canyon, he had told Raffi, too. It was just the kind of thing a man who thinks he’s going to die might confess to a friend, and it wasn’t hard to imagine all the heat, betrayal, and frustration Raffi was feeling exploding. Maybe Raffi had stabbed Dave in the heart because that was precisely where Coughlin had wounded him.

  Carrasco’s last hope was Swan herself. He had told her before leaving Carlsbad that he was coming to Boston and wanted to meet with her, and she had agreed, but after he arrived she left a message on Travaglia’s answering machine saying that she had to leave town on a business trip. She left no forwarding number. On his last day in Boston, she called him at his hotel and said she couldn’t meet with him until that evening. His plane was leaving in the afternoon. When he got back to Carlsbad, he tried to set up an interview with Swan over the phone, but there were more complications.

  “I was never able to get her to commit to a time,” he said.

  The murder investigation was over.

  17

  It is said that Edward Marshall, a founding father of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, once walked sixty miles in a day and a half. He set out with two other men at sunrise on September 19, 1737, from the village of Wrightstown and headed northwest, up the Delaware Valley, at a relentless pace. By an agreement with the local Lanape Indians, the colonists were allowed to purchase as much land as a man could walk in thirty-six hours, and Marshall was one of three men who had been hand-picked to stake the claim. Five hundred acres of land was promised to the man who walked the farthest, but by noon the next day Marshall was the only one left. The two other walkers had fallen from exhaustion—one mortally. Marshall himself marched as promised till twelve P.M. and then collapsed; surveyors marked the spot and drew lines at right angles leading back to the Delaware River. The area the claim encompassed became known as the Walking Purchase, and it was bigger than the state of Rhode Island. The walk made Edward Marshall, at twenty-seven years old, a hero.

  At twenty-five, Raffi Kodikian returned home to Bucks County more or less a villain. At worst, he was considered a cold-blooded murderer who had concocted an outlandish tale to hide his guilt; at best, he’d done something that to most people was just as unthinkable—ended his friend’s life. The specifics of his ordeal, the unbearable loss of his friend and his own suffering in the canyon, mattered little to most people. He’d taken the Fifth, so few people knew his side of the story, and even if they had, it was questionable how much compassion he’d get from his community.

  “I don’t know all of the circumstances but if he were charged with murder, that is at least a malicious act and at worst it is an intentional, deliberate and premeditated act,” Terry Houch, a Bucks County assistant district attorney, told the Boston Herald shortly after hearing that Kodikian was now at large in his district.
Houch had followed the case in the local papers, and was stunned to learn that Judge Lyons had released Raffi on only $50,000 bail. “We have shaken-baby cases where the defense said it was an accident and we get at least six figures easily on bail,” he went on to say. “Here, if he were charged with murder, he wouldn’t get bail.”

  In Boston—Raffi’s second home—headlines about the killing sparked rumors of a dark, violent past that led back to his college days. The most titillating of all conveniently connected him to one of the city’s most famous unsolved and grisly crimes: the 1996 murder of Karina Holmer, a nineteen-year-old Swedish au pair whose severed torso was found in a Dumpster behind 1091 Boyleston Street, where Raffi was living at the time with Kirsten Swan. Raffi was never a suspect, and everyone in the building had been questioned at the time; but the Boston Globe now ran a story quoting local police as saying they were “taking another look” at Kodikian. The police later denied making the statement. The demonization of Kodikian appeared complete when the student newspaper he’d once written for, the Northeastern News, ran a story about the killing, along with an on-line poll: “If Raffi Kodikian is found guilty, should he get the death penalty?” it asked. Thirty-two percent of his responding alma mater answered yes.

  Those who knew Raffi couldn’t have been more opposed to the alternate theories, or surprised by news of the killing.

  “I was in total shock,” Craig Lewis remembered. “I found out about it the day before he was supposed to come back. I actually found out from some girls that are friends of mine that we had played pool with two weekends before. I thought they were pulling my leg, and that he was back at their apartment and they were like, ‘Come on over, Craig, we gotta talk to you.’ I just didn’t believe them. And I was going over there, and I thought, ‘You know, let me just go over to the supermarket and look at a newspaper.’ It was right on the front page, I couldn’t believe it. My buddy there in orange overalls with handcuffs.”

  “Bucks Man Charged in Slaying,” “Slay Suspect Arrival Shocks Pennsylvania Officials,” “Murder or Mercy?” were some of the headlines in the Philadelphia and Boston papers greeting him upon his return. Raffi had expected to write the news—not make it—and now, on top of his grief, he found himself having to avoid the very group of people he once considered colleagues. Hardly a day went by when a reporter or a television crew didn’t come knocking. He kept well out of sight while his mother, sister, or father answered the door and politely refused to comment. Once, on a sweltering Indian summer day when a local TV crew, along with some newspaper reporters, were camped out in front of the house, his mom even brought them lemonade, but declined to answer their questions.

  The media seemed to be everywhere. A few weeks after he got back, Raffi drove up to Boston to collect some of his belongings. When he and Craig Lewis drove by his apartment in West Roxbury, they saw reporters camped out in front, and ended up having to sneak around through the back. Raffi had shrugged it off as a joke, but Lewis knew the pressure was taking its toll.

  “When stuff’s eating him up inside, he keeps it to himself,” Lewis said; he remembered a day a year earlier when he and Raffi had been working out in the gym, and his friend had been unusually silent and remote. It was only when he pressed him about it that Raffi told him his uncle had died. Lewis said that a similar silence overtook Raffi later that day, after they had picked up his things and were driving around town. Lewis knew what the problem was this time.

  “I miss Dave,” Raffi finally said.

  Raffi tried to stay busy while he waited for the trial. There was only one place he could work: Rental World. He’d worked at his father’s business before, during high school; it had been just a temporary job then, but now he was looking at the prospect of working in the family business for the rest of his life. Hal thought it would be a good idea to get him out in the world again, so in February, three months before his trial was scheduled to begin, he sent his son to the annual American Rental Association convention in Anaheim, California.

  Raffi went with two other employees, including Sharon Osinski, a woman who had worked for Hal for eleven years and had known Raffi since he was a kid. They stayed in a hotel across the street from the convention center, a massive glass hall next to Disneyland. Every morning they would cross the street to the center, and one morning as they crossed they heard a tremendous noise.

  “We all turned around and this car had flipped over on its hood,” Osinski remembered. “The first thing Raffi did was just throw his stuff down and run toward the car.”

  Raffi was the first one to reach the vehicle. Inside he found its driver, a woman, pinned upside down and bleeding.

  “It took twenty minutes for the ambulance to come,” Osinski said. “He held her hand and comforted her the whole time. She was crying the whole time and Raffi was saying, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, there’s just a little blood.’ I was really taken by the whole thing. And I’m looking at him knowing what he just went through and I’m like, ‘There’s not a mean bone in this man’s body.’”

  Sharon Osinski thought to herself that if she were in trouble someplace, she’d want Raffi with her. She would trust him.

  18

  The sputtering, inconclusive end of the murder investigation supported Raffi’s claim that Coughlin’s death was indeed a mercy killing, but Gary Mitchell knew all too well that, under the law, his client was still far from finding mercy himself. Les Williams had said it: “You do not get to kill someone in New Mexico just because they ask you to.” It was ironic, because every other headline about the killing read “Murder or Mercy?,” but as far as state and federal law was concerned, there wasn’t a difference.

  The closest any state came to allowing mercy killing was Oregon, which had passed a referendum a year earlier legalizing physician-assisted suicide. But a licensed doctor administering lethal drugs to a terminally ill patient was quite different from a would-be travel writer winging it in the desert with a buck knife. Raffi would have been charged with murder even in Oregon, and he could have been charged with murder in other states even if he’d been a physician and David was terminally ill. Less than two weeks after Raffi killed David, in fact, a New Mexico grand jury did just that when it charged Georges Reding, a doctor and good friend of Jack Kevorkian, with the 1998 death of Donna Brennan, a multiple sclerosis sufferer from Rio Rancho.

  Mitchell had followed the Rio Rancho case, and the Kevorkian cases before that, with great interest. Even while he saved the men on death row from lethal injection, he staunchly believed that the rest of us, if suffering and terminally ill, had a right to ask for the same thing. He sat on the board of directors at his local hospital, and was part of a group of lawyers actively lobbying legislators in Albuquerque to get physician-assisted suicide legalized in the state. Kevorkian had finally been convicted of murder in Michigan only that March, but Mitchell was more interested in the fact that three other juries had refused to convict him of assisted suicide, despite overwhelming evidence. Mercy killing may be murder according to the law, but in people’s minds—and juries were made of people—there were more than two thousand years of philosophical, ethical, and legal arguments suggesting the two acts were perceived quite differently.

  “Mercy killing” is roughly defined as “the compassionate taking of another life in order to end its suffering.” It’s the broadest term of a moral construct that includes all acts of “euthanasia,” an ancient Greek word meaning “good death.” We now mainly associate euthanasia with the bringing about of a gentle and easy death in the case of an incurable and painful disease, and modern ethics holds that in order for euthanasia to be morally defensible, it must first meet some basic requirements. The request for death has to come from a person who is in full possession of his faculties, and death otherwise must be slow, painful, and inevitable. There can be no question of surviving.

  Under those conditions, Raffi’s case fit the ethical requirements marginally at best: Dave didn’t have a disease, it was unknown
how lucid he actually was at the time he begged for death, and in hindsight his death was far from inevitable. But Raffi and David didn’t have the luxury of hindsight in Rattlesnake Canyon, and therein was the argument Mitchell could make: in a way, David’s severe dehydration was like a disease; he was suffering, and after three lost days it was reasonable for the friends to believe that death was indeed inevitable. David L. Perry, director of ethics programs at Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, explained: “If David Coughlin reasonably believed that he was going to die in the desert, and saw his remaining hours as containing nothing but increasing misery and degradation, then shortening his life would not necessarily deprive him of anything he valued or could value. And if he were too weak to take his own life, he could waive his right not to be killed and ask his friend to do it, without thereby placing an intolerable ethical burden on his friend. In that case, we might still technically label Raffi’s action as a homicide (the intentional killing of a human being), but morally we should not consider it murder or an unjust killing.”

  From the beginning, Mitchell saw Raffi’s as a euthanasia case. “I don’t view this case as a criminal matter,” he said in October. “I view this case as one of those where people have had a loved one who was dying. We had two or three cases where we got a court order to remove life support. I view this case very similar.”

  Mitchell’s impassioned interviews sat well with the media; there was no doubt about the sincerity and compassion he had for his client. In the court of public opinion, at least, he was able to get a few people to think differently about Raffi, to force them to imagine themselves in his shoes. But there was only one problem.