Journal of the Dead

by Jason Kersten

  The courtroom had two columns of wooden church-style benches for the public that ran about ten rows deep. Hanging from thick crossbeams were six antique wrought-iron and stained-glass chandeliers, touches of the Old West that kept the audience in relative dimness compared to the courtroom’s well, which was awash in modern fluorescent lighting.

  Since Kodikian had accepted the plea bargain, the jury box sat empty, but the audience was full of journalists. Reporters from the Denver Post, the AP, the Albuquerque Journal, and the Boston papers—the Globe and the Herald—were all there, along with Kyle Marksteiner, the reporter who had been covering the story for the Carlsbad Current-Argus since the day after Kodikian was arrested. It was the biggest herd of newspeople the town had ever seen. Judge Forbes had allowed a pool video camera to be present in the courtroom, and outside two white satellite trucks gleamed on the edge of the courthouse lawn, announcing the hoopla to the cars passing by on Canal Street. Dateline, 20/20, and Inside Edition were all on hand—each planned to air features on the case, and unbeknownst to any of the other reporters, one of them already had a scoop.

  A week earlier, Raffi had given the only interview he’d give about the case to 20/20’s Connie Chung, who flew out to New Mexico and met with Kodikian and his family in Mitchell’s office.

  “It was his idea, he wanted to do it,” Mitchell said of Raffi’s decision to talk. In what would be one of the most intense interviews Chung ever conducted, Raffi brought a cameraman, and two of Mitchell’s secretaries, to tears. Chung herself was also deeply moved but reserved judgment.

  “There were people who came to conclusions,” Chung said, “but I couldn’t. For thirty years I’ve trained myself to try and be objective. If I do have a bias, I bend over backwards the other way. If I have a thought or opinion, I bend the other way. I believed the sheriff when I heard his argument, then I believed Raffi when I heard him…. But I’m awful,” she said with an apologetic laugh. “I always believe the last person I talked to.”

  Chung was off on another story by the time the hearing started, but the rest of the reporters filled the front rows on the right side of the gallery, clutching their notepads and speculating as to the identities of the people across the aisle, behind Kodikian. A dozen friends and family members had come to support him, and there was a general understanding that no one else was welcome over there. Over time, their collective vow not to speak to the media had hardened into something close to disdain, despite—or perhaps because of—the obvious irony of Kodikian himself being a journalist. Judge Forbes called the court to order, and asked Kodikian to approach the podium.

  The judge was a methodical and careful man who fully believed that there was no better alternative to justice than a rigorous trial by jury. He knew that Kodikian’s punishment was one of the most difficult legal decisions in the history of the state and had no desire to make it on his own. As he explained the rights Kodikian was surrendering by pleading no contest to second-degree murder, he emphasized the gravity of leaving his fate up to a single judge. When he was finished, he looked long and hard at Kodikian, almost as if expecting him to change his mind.

  “Now that I have gone through those constitutional rights that you’re waiving … do you still want to continue in this no-contest plea?” he asked.

  “My lawyer, Mr. Mitchell, has advised me that this would be the best path to take,” Kodikian said, hesitating to acknowledge his own complicity in the plea. Then, after the slightest pause, he quickly blurted out, “Yes, sir.”

  Lance Mattson, the ranger who had found Kodikian on the afternoon of August 8, was the prosecution’s first witness. He took the stand in his ranger’s uniform and described how he had learned of the missing hikers, gone down into the canyon, and encountered Kodikian lying alone in the tent. He recalled Kodikian asking him for water and pointing to the pile of rocks where Coughlin’s body was buried, then described turning up the stone that revealed Coughlin’s shirt-covered face. As he told of treating Kodikian, and the conversation they had while in the canyon, Deputy District Attorney Les Williams narrowed in on what would be his main contention throughout the hearing—that Kodikian had been fully aware of his own actions.

  “So what would you say his mental state was from the time that you found him to the point that we’re talking about right now?” Williams asked.

  “Through my examinations and with my level of training I did feel he was dehydrated,” Mattson replied. “The only evidence to give me any idea of mental state was whenever I asked a question Mr. Kodikian was slow in responding, like he was thinking about it. But every question I asked he produced an answer. ‘Where is your identification?’ He thought about it and produced it. He knew what I was saying and I knew exactly what he was saying.”

  Williams finished with him a few minutes later, ending his examination by having Mattson recall Kodikian’s statements about how he and Coughlin had attempted to kill themselves, failing because their “knives were too dull.” After the prosecutor relinquished the podium, there was a sense among the reporters that the ranger’s testimony—filled with qualifiers and far more guarded than anyone had expected—had done more for the defense than for the prosecution.

  Gary Mitchell took his time cross-examining the ranger. Addressing him by his first name, he used Mattson as an expert on the general features of the park, deferring to his backcountry knowledge. His informal, supportive tone seemed to bring the ranger into a more conversational mode, and soon Mitchell was homing in on the park’s policies.

  “Now, as part of the preparation, or the availability of water at the National Park Service at Carlsbad, do they sell water there?” he asked the ranger.

  “The concession there, the restaurant there, does sell water in small containers.”

  “A dollar thirty-eight for a pint of water?”

  “I believe so. I’m not sure of the price.”

  “So if I’m going overnight, my buddy and I are going overnight, that’s about twenty-seven dollars worth of water we’ve got to buy at [the visitor center]?”

  “If that’s what the numbers add up to … I’m not sure,” said Mattson.

  “I think that’s about what they add up to. That’s a pretty good concession!” Mitchell said wryly.

  Mitchell next focused on the fifteen-inch-high rock cairns that mark Rattlesnake Canyon’s trails. He carefully led Mattson into reluctantly admitting that, “to some people,” the cairns can be difficult to spot, especially the ones marking the exit trail, because they meet the canyon floor in a place that is already covered by thousands of identical stones. Once Mitchell had established the conceivability of the friends getting lost, he then brought Mattson to the question of dehydration. The ranger admitted that when he found Kodikian, he concluded that he had “the classic signs of dehydration.” His skin had tented, his pulse was elevated, and he had vomited three times while the ranger attempted to give him water.

  Mitchell’s final line of questioning was perhaps the most damaging. It centered on the camping permit the friends had filled out.

  “Was there some method in which you checked up on these permits to see if people had returned?” he asked.

  “No. It’s just the observations of the rangers working at the park.”

  “I see. So if I fill out a permit there and hand it in, the rangers don’t observe that I’ve returned. There’s not some system by which that permit is turned in, saying, ‘Listen, we’ve got campers there a day overdue’ or ‘They’re two days overdue.’ There’s not some system at Carlsbad for that?”

  “At that time, no sir, there isn’t.”

  “Okay. So if you’re camping out there and you’re wondering if somebody’s coming, the fact of the matter is that, unless some of the rangers spot it, they may not be coming.”

  “That is possible, yes sir.”

  Mitchell walked back to the defense table with a loose stride. Williams now needed to fight hard to get his witness back. He began his redirect by picking up whe
re he had left off, asking the ranger to describe the cuts he had seen on Kodikian’s wrists.

  “It looked to me about an eighth of an inch,” Mattson said. “It was … it looked like it had penetrated the skin, but it was not bleeding. It was just kind of at that boundary between that point.”

  “So no blood? You didn’t see any blood on his wrists?”

  “No, not that I remember.”

  It wasn’t until after he got Mattson to restate that he thought Kodikian was “alert” that he finally brought his witness back to the cairns.

  “And these markers on the trail, the cairns, the little rock piles… The way the defense talked … I mean, can you tell that they’re artificial piles of rock?”

  “To me, sir, yes. I can tell. They’re piled up.”

  “Now the defense talked about buying the water bottles. Is there water available to visitors to the park that they don’t have to purchase? Water fountains, water faucets, things of that kind?”

  “There are water faucets and fountains in the bathroom, yes sir.”

  “So you don’t have to buy water?”

  “No.”

  “I have no further questions.”

  Second on the stand was John Keebler, the sixty-nine-year-old park volunteer who had spotted Coughlin’s car at the trailhead on August 8. He’d never been interviewed by the media, and hadn’t even been mentioned by name in any of the news stories about the case. The general feeling among the reporters was that he’d been a small-time player, a mild-mannered man who loved the park, happened to notice a car, and unwittingly stumbled into a scene that nobody—not to mention a volunteer in his golden years—should have had to witness.

  “So what did you do after you saw the car there?” Williams asked.

  “Well, I’d heard over the park radio Wednesday that the permit had been issued,” he said in a slow and graveled voice, “and with that I knew that they were still out there. So I went over to the visitor center and had lunch, then I went and found Lance Mattson and told him about it, that I thought they were well overdue.”

  Keebler described the ensuing trek down into the canyon and the discovery of Kodikian, whom he referred to as “Raffi.” At one point, Mattson had left him alone with Raffi while he climbed a nearby slope to get better radio reception.

  “When you were with him, did you talk to him?” Williams asked.

  “Yes, some. He was talkative. That’s when he was drinking his water and he said, ‘How much should I drink?’ And I said, ‘Well, take it easy.’ At that time he’d already drunk about a quarter of a canteen and then again vomited. And that’s when, after Lance had already found the gravesite, that he told me he killed his best friend this morning.”

  “Did you ask him about that, or did he just volunteer it?”

  “He volunteered it. He just told me.”

  “Did he tell you how he did that?”

  “No. I’d overheard him before tell Lance, ‘That knife over there,’ the one that was by the side of the tent.”

  Williams walked over to the evidence table and picked something up.

  “You said, ‘that knife.’ Were you referring to this knife, marked state’s exhibit one?”

  “That looks like it, yes.”

  “Did he tell you anything else?”

  “Well, there in the conversation he told me that he had tried to take his own life, and he showed me his wrist, where he had some marks on his wrist. And he said, ‘My knife was too dull; I couldn’t take my life.’”

  “And when you were speaking with him, did he seem like he knew what you were saying?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “And did you understand him?”

  “Very clearly.”

  “I have no further questions.”

  Shawn Boyne, who had been quietly taking notes by Mitchell’s side, now rose and quickly took the podium, arching her shoulders toward the stand. She had the lip-licking interest of a cheetah who had just spotted a wildebeest staggering behind the pack.

  “Sir, I am understanding your testimony correctly that on August fourth, that very evening, that you had heard on the radio that these young men had gotten a permit to go camping?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “So on the very first night, you were aware that they were out there camping?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you saw their car on the eighth?”

  “Yes.”

  “So when you saw them on the eighth, right away you knew that they had probably been out there for four days?”

  “Right.”

  “And at that point, the first thing that you did was go back to the visitor center and have lunch?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you didn’t sense any urgency in trying to go find them?”

  “Well, they were over…,” Keebler began to stammer. He seemed surprised suddenly to find himself on the defensive, and crossed his arms in front of his chest. “I thought to myself that they were overdue and that’s the reason I looked up Lance after I finished lunch….”

  “Okay. But you waited until after lunch to find Lance?”

  “Yes.”

  Boyne owned him after that. She led him into admitting that he had no training in rescue work, that the spot where they found Kodikian—exposed on the rocks of the canyon floor—suggested he wasn’t in his right mind, and that he had no knowledge whatsoever about dehydration. When Boyne was finished, Williams didn’t bother to redirect.

  Near midmorning, a compressor in the building’s air conditioner blew out, allowing condensation to collect steadily in the courthouse. It was almost imperceptible at first, a milkiness in the fluorescent courtroom light so faint that no one remarked. People thought it was their own fatigue, or dry contact lenses, until the bailiff whispered in Judge Forbes’s ear and he apologetically explained the situation. Everyone laughed nervously, grateful that the fog hadn’t come from their own failing senses.

  Mark Maciha took the stand next. As the park service’s most vocal critic of Kodikian’s story, everyone expected his testimony to be forceful and direct. He briskly described getting called into the canyon, arriving on the scene, and treating Kodikian. When Williams quizzed him about the cairns along the trail, he talked about their placement and visibility in no uncertain terms. To him, they were facts on the ground, there for all to see, and his characterization of the conversation he had had with Kodikian was equally solid.

  “Everything that I talked to him about he responded appropriately. There was no perceptible delay in responses,” he said.

  Mitchell began his cross-examination of the ranger in the same, casual tone he had used with Mattson.

  “Now, you’ve been doing this for a lot of years,” he said, referring to Maciha’s experience as a ranger.

  “Yes.”

  “And I suspect before you ever worked for the park service that you were an outdoorsman.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the truth of the matter is that on more than one occasion, when you were in Rattlesnake Canyon trying to find that exit, or the trail up and out of there, that you’ve missed that particular entrance.”

  “No.”

  Mitchell was referring to the Philadelphia Magazine story by Bill Gifford, who had written that Maciha himself at first hadn’t been able to find the cairn marking the trail out, and quoted the ranger as saying, “I always miss that.” But Maciha said he had no recollection of making the comment. “That doesn’t sound like me,” he said.

  They went back and forth like that for twenty minutes. The ranger “couldn’t say” whether or not Kodikian had made an effort to get out of the sun, and had “no idea” what the temperature inside the tent was. He disagreed with the lawyer’s assessment that it was difficult to climb out of the canyon. “You just need to watch your footing,” he said. It was during his cross-examination of Maciha that Mitchell first mentioned the two fire pits.

  “Assuming that the boys were complying with the rules
of the park, the one assumption that could be made from the lighting of the two fires was that they were trying to attract somebody’s attention,” Mitchell said.

  “I can’t make that assumption,” Maciha replied.

  “Well, that’s one way you can attract attention in a national park, is with a fire.”

  “That’s true,” the ranger said. He sounded bored.

  “I mean, we know that well today in New Mexico just because we have two raging forest fires out of control,” he said, referring to the Cerro Grande blaze, and a smaller one that had flared up near Ruidoso.

  Judge Forbes called a recess after Mitchell was through with Maciha, and Mitchell strolled out into the hall and sat down on a bench along the wall. Not long afterward, Maciha left the courtroom to head back to the park. After the ranger passed, Mitchell’s eyes followed him all the way down the hall, almost wistfully, as if he were watching a coyote escape across the prairie with one of his chickens.

  “There goes a hard man,” he sighed.

  After lunch, Les Williams played the hour-long videotape of the crime scene that Jim Ballard had taken on Monday, August 9. It was evidence logging, not prime time, but it held all the interest of a bad home video. Ballard identified the various items from the stand—the tent, the knife, the water bottles, the backpacks … it went on and on, and because of the debacle with the U.S. Customs helicopter, many of the same items appeared twice. Just when it seemed as if snores would spread throughout the courtroom, people suddenly realized that the scene had changed. They were watching the exhumation of David Coughlin’s body.

  There on the monitor was the cowboy grave, surrounded by the investigators, whose arms began moving in and out of the frame in an eerie ballet as they reached to remove the stones, one by one. First a pallid patch of skin appeared, then a leg, then his whole body was there, ringed almost regally by the remaining stones. Thankfully, his face remained covered by the blue plaid shirt, but anyone who had known David Coughlin in real life, or had even seen a photograph of him, could see that they were looking at a different man. His legs, once nearly worthy of a linebacker, now seemed inordinately long and sadly feminine. His torso was woefully flat. Not a trace of his stockiness remained. He was an empty husk.