Journal of the Dead

by Jason Kersten

  Mitchell and Boyne, in fact, attempted to throw Kodikian’s mental abilities into question even further with their next three witnesses, all mental health experts, who testified that Kodikian was, in fact, all but mentally handicapped when it came to his spatial and visual recognition abilities—and yet somehow, quite miraculously, wasn’t aware of it. Dr. Thomas Thompson, a neuropsychologist, went as far as saying that, based on written tests Kodikian had taken a week earlier, that “a topographical map would have been impossible for him to read,” and that his foray into Rattlesnake Canyon was “a disaster waiting to happen.”

  None of them, however, were able to account for why Coughlin had apparently been just as clueless. The closest they came was a suggestion that, because Kodikian had such strong verbal abilities (Mitchell would even call Raffi a “genius” when it came speaking and writing), he may have influenced Coughlin’s decisions for the worse, overconfidently leading his friend deeper into the demon’s mouth. “It was a bunch of junk,” Les Williams would later say of the psychologist testimony; he had never disputed that Raffi and David had been lost to begin with, and didn’t think Mitchell needed an expert to explain how people stayed lost in a national park wilderness, especially once they were out of water. In fact, Williams thought the expert testimony gave Raffi and Dave far too little credit. “They did a lot of things right,” he pointed out. Following headlights, leaving notes, seeking shade during peak temperatures—all of them were logical moves, they just hadn’t been enough.

  Even Raffi himself was reluctant to believe some of the experts in his own corner, a few of whom he had met only a week earlier and, in their defense, had a very limited basis on which to judge him. Dr. Thompson, for example, testified that people with strong visual and spatial abilities were typically “really good home builders, really good craftsmen who build furniture, people who can take and visualize and conceptualize and move these things around in their head,” his point being that Raffi totally lacked those skills. Clearly Thompson hadn’t seen the cages Raffi’d designed and built for his pet snakes, which incorporated just about every skill he supposedly didn’t possess.

  Whether true or not, the visual-spatial recognition theory was certainly good for a joke. Back at the Stevens Inn later that day, Raffi was hanging out with Jeff Rosen and Kevin Guckaven, who had come out to New Mexico to support their friend and provide character testimony. They were staying four doors down from him, and when Raffi told them he was heading back to his room, Rosen and Guckaven couldn’t resist the open shot.

  “Kev and I said, ‘Raff, don’t get lost. You’re just gonna go down to the left, four doors. We know you have no sense of direction, right?’ Rosen remembered.

  Raffi went back to his room with a smile.

  Kirsten Swan was the first to take the stand when the sentencing hearing moved on to its final phase, character testimony.

  Every eye in the courtroom turned as she rose to take the stand. When Mitchell had pointed her out during Raffi’s testimony, there had been much speculation among the reporters as to whether or not she’d testify, but she had sat so quietly since then that they had more or less forgotten she was there.

  “Do you know Raffi, and did you know David?” Mitchell began.

  “I did, very well, they were two of my closest friends in Boston,” she said.

  “We have a series of photographs today that we looked at during Raffi’s testimony. Are you the woman that’s in the photographs?”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “I hate to be the one to ask you this,” Mitchell said, “but in all these cases there always seems to be some vicious rumor out there about things, because people have a right to be curious and they’re curious about things. But I’d like to know if there were ever any problems between David and Raffi that you were aware of?”

  “Never,” she said forcefully. “Never in my experience, in any of the time that I spent with them together, was there ever any tension. It was always light and fun and just a good time, never.”

  “In particular, was there ever a fight over you?”

  She laughed as if the question were completely absurd.

  “Never. My relationship with Dave was completely platonic. We were the closest of friends; he was my confidant. He and I also went to the movies together. We had gone on a trip to California together, but it never went beyond that. It was a wonderful relationship, but again, strictly platonic.”

  “And was Raffi aware of that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were there ever any problems in that regard?”

  “No, never. If anything, there’s always been an open line of communication on all fronts. Just between Raffi and I, even after we broke up, he still remained one of my closest friends. And we did spend some time apart, so that was never an issue. It was a nonissue. There was no romantic inclination on either of our parts. I mean, Dave was more like a brother to me than a romantic interest, so that was never—that never came into question ever.”

  “So it was never a problem between the three of you, and how the rest of the world thought it was a problem was beyond you?”

  “That’s right,” she said, laughing again.

  Mitchell then asked her to describe Raffi’s personality, both the good and the bad. “He is the best of friends to have,” she said. “He is absolutely committed to his friends and family. Perhaps, in my experience of all the people that I’ve met, among the most committed. I’m lucky that he’s in my life, and I think that there are a lot of other people that feel that way, too.”

  “And the bad qualities?”

  “Well, having been formerly his girlfriend for three and a half years, he’s certainly strong-willed. And we had our tiffs, but always communicated well. Maybe a little stubborn, never put his clothes in the hamper. But never, never violent. Even in all the fights that we had, we kind of came to a meeting of minds over time and I don’t have anything really bad to say about Raffi, I don’t.”

  “And, you know, I’d think it would be good for us all to know something about David. So what can you tell us about David?”

  “Personally to me, he was a very special person in that, because he was one of my closest friends, you know. It always amazed me, the minutiae that Dave remembered about my life when I would sit down and talk to him and kind of work through things that were happening at work or relationship issues. He was absolutely there for me in the way that a friend should be. We just enjoyed one another’s company, had our own private jokes. Again, one of my very close friends in Boston.”

  “Let me ask you this: you’re friends of both, do you know—’cause I’ve asked this of other witnesses—do you know of anything evil between the two of them, anything of a malicious nature between the two of them, David and Raffi?”

  “Absolutely not, never. Never have I seen anything along those lines,” she said, and with that Mitchell let her go.

  “Mr. Williams?” the judge asked.

  Les Williams had seen Terry Cunningham’s police report. “Mr. Connelly informed me that on one occasion that David told him that he had been intimate with Swan,” were the exact words the Wellesley police chief had used. If everything in that report was true, then either Dave had lied to Terry Connelly, or Kirsten Swan had just lied to the court. But Les had already decided not to go down that road, and what would it have proven if he had?

  “I have no questions,” he said.

  The rest of the character testimony moved quickly after that. Jeff Rosen and Kevin Guckaven talked about what a great friend Raffi was. They used words like “integrity” and “loyalty” and “fun-loving,” and no one expected them to say otherwise, but there were some moments when the need to say something honest became as important as the need to say something good. “He might be a bit stubborn sometimes,” Rosen offered when Mitchell asked him if Raffi had any bad qualities. Guckaven was more diplomatic. “He likes to hold his own opinions and carry them out,” he said. “He’s very strong-minded as far as tha
t goes. If he has an opinion about something, he’s willing to discuss it with you and make his point.” The most flattering comments came from Katherine Swan, Kirsten Swan’s mother, who had flown out with her daughter to show her support: “Raffi is the kind of man I would have liked my daughter to marry,” she said. “I hoped he would have been my son-in-law and one point in time, when they broke up, I was sad about it. He was, of all the men she brought home, my favorite.”

  When Hal Kodikian took the stand, he was full of generosity. He thanked “everybody in Carlsbad,” even the sheriff, and especially the Coughlin family. “I hope I could be as gracious if I lost a son,” he said. He looked directly at Raffi when he spoke. “You’re stubborn at times, Raffi, you are,” he told him. “And you don’t listen to your old man quite a bit, I know that.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he said, “It’s been great to have him home.”

  But perhaps the words that gave people the most to think about came from Ara Asadorian, a cousin of Raffi’s who had flown in from New York: “It’s very painful to be here and see such a good man in such a terrible circumstance. I think the lesson and the thing to be understood here is that under the right condition and circumstances, a bad thing can happen to a good man.”

  The last witness to take the stand in the State of New Mexico v. Raffi Kodikian was Peter Bigfoot, a survival expert from Arizona. When reporters first saw his name on a list of defense witnesses a few days earlier, a few of them wondered if Mitchell was planning to be the first lawyer in history ever to call a Sasquatch to the stand.

  “Who is he?” one of them had asked Gary Mitchell.

  “Oh, you’ll see,” he said. “If he comes. I’m actually not sure where Mr. Bigfoot is, but if he does show up you’re gonna love him.”

  On that last day of the hearing, a man who must have been at least six foot two was sitting by himself in the back of the courtroom. He wore tan corduroys and had a shaggy silver beard and a pair of smiling black eyes on a clever, feline face, and his solitary perch in the back smacked of nothing if not an outdoorsman’s shyness among house cats. He had spent much of the last twenty-two years of his life alone in the deserts of the Southwest, he explained when he took the stand, testing his ability to survive, unlocking the curative secrets of its plants and herbs, and assimilating the desert’s scorched lore. He’d written three books on desert herbology, and now ran the Reevis Mountain School of Self-Reliance in Arizona, where Shawn Boyne had tracked him down in the hopes that he could fill in some of the holes in Kodikian’s story.

  “Have you had any personal experience with dehydration?” she asked him.

  “I’ve had a lot of personal experience with dehydration. I think the most noteworthy was back in 1976. I walked eighty-five miles across the Sonoran Desert without any food or water,” he said from the stand later that afternoon, as if he were recalling a typical day at the office. “It was in the summertime and daytime temperatures were up to one hundred thirty degrees in the sun. My first day out I didn’t have anything to drink for the whole day. By about noon, my mouth was so dry that it would be about as dry as my clothes are now. And by the end of the day when I finally got to the water hole that I was looking for (and I was traveling by map and compass at this time), I was in pretty serious condition for water. And the water hole that I was looking for had a decomposing dead cow in it. I drank probably about five gallons of that water. Perhaps to give you an idea how desperate people get for water, to drink next to a decomposing dead cow, but that was the only moisture around.”

  There were groans in the audience, but people were clearly entertained. Even Raffi seemed intrigued as he listened, and for a moment it was possible to forget that all of this was testimony in a court of law. It felt more like a campsite, with Bigfoot, the wizened elder of the range, telling stories next to the fire.

  “As I’m in my normal state of being well fed and with plenty of water, I have an awareness around me—and I think most people do—of maybe a mile or so of view, just clear thought about what’s around us and where we fit in it. And that kept coming in on me to where I got seriously dehydrated I sat down to rest and when I would stand up I’d just fall down and wake up on the ground. At that time dehydration was so bad that my awareness was only right here, in the suffering of my body. I couldn’t think in terms of what’s a mile away or more, or what’s a hundred yards, or even ten feet. All I could think of was what was right here, in the suffering of my body,” he said, holding his hand to his heart.

  “Do you have any experience with the prickly pear cactus?” Boyne asked.

  “Yes. I’ll just expand on that,” he said. “When I first started teaching survival skills I had read, but I didn’t have firsthand experience about it, that the prickly pear cactus were edible, and in the first class that I taught, one of my students decided to eat a prickly pear pad for lunch. And about two hours later—this was a one-day class—he became very ill, and we had to carry him almost a mile back to the vehicles. And I stayed up with this guy all night long trying to keep him alive, and he was just extremely ill, all night long, and that was just from one prickly pear cactus leaf. So that was where I first became aware I needed to study more about this.”

  After experimenting on his own, Bigfoot concluded that the prickly pears were safe to eat only if they were thoroughly ripe, without any tartness, and described yet another occasion when a woman ignored his warnings and insisted on eating tart, unripe prickly pears. “She was convulsing and screaming from pain,” he said. “She had eight quarts of water, and six sleeping bags to keep her warm, and she was still shivering. She was retching.”

  Although Bigfoot’s testimony seemed to come as afterthought, he was the only witness to offer a possible explanation as to why Coughlin had seemingly been so much worse off than Kodikian—a bad reaction to unripe cactus fruit.

  22

  A fter Peter Bigfoot left the stand, Les Williams returned to the podium. His somber, hunched stance seemed loaded with the weight of the closing argument he was about to make.

  “Your Honor, where there is life, there is hope,” he said. “The defendant purposely took David Coughlin’s life. I realize at the time he felt there was no hope, but obviously there was. David Coughlin would be alive today if Raffi Kodikian had not killed him. Thousands of years of experience, wisdom, and thought make up the law. And the law says you may not murder another person just because you think it’s in their best interest. The practical common-sense reason for that is shown by this case. The reason we had our experts come in and compute the amount of dehydration was to show that David still would have survived. By body weight, he was approximately 11 percent to 12 percent dehydrated. He would have survived if he had not been killed. Even if, possibly, he may have died, the law still says you cannot kill him. The defendant thought it was the right thing to do, but it was not….

  “I think it’s clear from his testimony and from other testimony that he was not demented. He knew what he was doing. He knew he was killing his best friend. He did it on purpose to save his friend from pain and agony. This does not discount that this was a dreadful situation. It was awful, both the defendant and David were in great pain, and frankly, when he said he was without hope, based on what had happened so far, that was a reasonable conclusion. Because they had not been found, obviously they were not able to walk out anymore, so it was certainly reasonable for him to think that he was going to die and it was going to be painful. But the law says you do not kill another person. And the people from the park service who had dealt with numerous people who were lost and dying from dehydration say this is the only time that one person has killed another person in these situations.”

  Pausing, Williams walked over to the evidence table and picked up the knife that Kodikian had used to kill Coughlin.

  “As further evidence that he knew what he was doing, he said that they had a suicide pact and the only reason they didn’t complete it was that the knife wasn’t sharp enough. This knife,” he said,
holding it up, “is sharp enough to cut your wrist. This knife is sharp enough to go through your chest. The real reason they didn’t commit suicide was they believe, as I said, where there’s life, there’s hope. And even though they intellectually thought they were going to die, they didn’t really want to kill themselves. When I said there’s life, there’s hope, the defendant thought that, too, because he did not kill himself after he killed his friend.

  “It’s a hard thing that you have to do, because this defendant is not an evil person. He’s not a bad person. But he did do a bad thing, and he did it purposefully and he did it knowingly. Actions speak louder than words. That’s why we can say he didn’t really feel there was no hope because he didn’t kill himself, too. Just as his actions speak louder than words, the court’s actions will also. We have responsibility in the law to look beyond this case to other cases where defendants may be in similar situations and may need to know you will not be forgiven for violating the law. You will not be forgiven for killing your friend. You are not to do it, period. Situational ethics do not apply. You do not get to murder anybody. You do not get to murder your friend. You do not get to mercy kill. That’s the law in the state of New Mexico and in almost every other state. This court must sentence this defendant severely, to teach people they may not place themselves above the law, whether they are a good person, whether they are a caring person, whatever. They must follow the law by not murdering.”