Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  “That’s impossible,” Joshua said.

  Lynch wanted to make sure he had the order of events right: Sarah called Joshua and said, “It hurts.” Joshua called his sister, Janet, Jilica, and then Rachel. Was that correct?

  Joshua said it was.

  “What did you say to Rachel?”

  “I asked where she was at. She said she was at Javier’s house. And I told her I was going to kill her. She said, ‘Okay, Josh.’”

  Lynch verified that Joshua himself had not heard the “Mexican boyfriend” comment, but had been told about it an instant after it occurred, as it occurred before the minivan left Janet’s house.

  “You went to the scene. You didn’t ask Janet or Jilica what happened. You didn’t yell at Rachel?”

  “I didn’t see Rachel. I was screaming—”

  “I understand that you were being ridiculous. I’m not going to get on you about that. Obviously, you lost someone you cared about.”

  “The only thing Janet said to me was ‘I didn’t know she stabbed her.’”

  “And you didn’t ask her what they were doing there, what happened?”

  “No, I just started crying when I saw Sarah was on the floor.”

  “Your sister took off her flip-flops and beat Rachel up in Javier’s front yard. She didn’t tell you any of that?”

  “No.”

  “Why was your sister the one who was punishing Rachel for what she’d done?”

  “My sister had hatred for Rachel because after we broke up, Rachel was talking about my sister.”

  “So she’s saying things about her. They’re words. Who cares? Now somebody is dead. And when I was out there at one o’clock in the morning, in charge of cleaning up this mess, I keep hearing that your sister and you and your family were going to get even for what happened. Is that what we really need here? Do we need someone else to die? Did you know that Javier tried to save Sarah’s life? Took his own T-shirt off and was down there on the ground putting pressure on Sarah’s wounds. Did you know that Javier ripped his own shirt off his own back and was trying to save her?”

  Joshua couldn’t answer. He could only cry.

  “If I hear one word about retaliation, we’re all going to have problems,” Lynch said. “Those three women made a huge error in judgment when they went over to that house that night. My question is, how did they know Rachel was there? Do you know how they knew? Did Rachel tell them?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

  “Are you mad at Sarah for going over there? That would be natural.”

  “I told her not to go!”

  “I also have a report that a little white car drove by Javier’s only a couple of minutes before Sarah showed up there. I believe that was someone you know, someone they know, who told them where Rachel was. Do you know who that was?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I promise.”

  “You’re aware that they went to where Rachel was, right? Rachel didn’t find them.”

  “You’ll have to check the phone records, see if she said where she was.”

  “You know that I am the one in charge of building a case against Rachel. I was the one who arrested her. I interviewed her. I charged her with murder in the second degree. You understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I’m not happy with what your sister told me about how they found Rachel that night.”

  “I need to use the bathroom.”

  “Okay, we’re almost done. Janet said Sarah had your phone that night.”

  “I had my phone. Sarah had her own phone.”

  “Any idea why your sister said that?”

  “No.”

  “What does your dad know about all of this?”

  “After I left the hospital, I went to my dad’s house, talked to my mom and dad.”

  “Did they know anything about this before that?”

  “No, just when they saw it on the television.”

  “They didn’t know anything about the problems beforehand?”

  “No.”

  “I need to know what brought Sarah to that house,” Detective Lynch said, and concluded the interview.

  Charlie and Gay Ludemann had kept Sarah’s room just the way it was, as a sort of shrine to her memory. Just the same, but with one exception. All photos of Joshua Camacho were destroyed.

  Gay ran events through her head, again and again, but the outcome never wavered. Normal night, Sarah out with friends. Said she’d be home soon. Gay was waiting up. Phone rang. Joshua calling with the bad news. Arriving at the scene while the paramedics were still working on Sarah, getting there too late. Sarah never got to hear her mother say, “I love you, Sarah.” Gay said it over and over, but Sarah couldn’t hear. Sarah was a good, loving girl. Gay’s heart was broken. Gay felt her heart breaking. Just a teenager. Simple pleasures. Movies, bowling, the beach. She was making straight A’s, going to college next year….

  And Joshua? Gay’s heart went out to him. But here was another thing: she knew he was a big part of the reason Sarah was killed.

  A few days after the stabbing, Lisa Lafrance went to the county jail to visit Rachel. They had stopped speaking because of Lisa’s drug habit—but this was a crisis. Lisa still considered Rachel her best friend.

  “I don’t know if it’s true, but she told me she blacked out and she didn’t remember anything about the stabbing. The last thing she remembered, Sarah and Janet and their friend jumped her. She said she didn’t know what she was doing,” Lisa recalled.

  To a certain extent, Lisa believed her. She knew Rachel really well, maybe better than anyone, and Rachel would not just run up to Sarah and stab her. Rachel was afraid of being beaten up. That would have been the reason why she brought the knife in the first place. She had been afraid of getting jumped by Sarah and her friends for a long time. Months.

  She wasn’t very big, but she had a big mouth. In Lisa’s experience, when crunch time came, Rachel lacked the courage to back up her words.

  Sarah obviously wasn’t in a position to defend herself, but Lisa would always believe that Sarah was the one who went to that location looking for a fight that night.

  Rachel said that she brought the knife because she thought it would scare them off, and that made sense to Lisa. Imagine how the situation must have looked to Rachel, Lisa said. Rachel was already scared of Janet. The third girl was big. This was the nightmare scenario, the very thing that Rachel had been dreading for months, the reason that she used to call Lisa when she was on her way home from work and kept her talking until she was safely inside her apartment. Arming herself when she knew the attack was coming was exactly the sort of thing Rachel would do. It wasn’t the smart thing to do, of course, but it was in keeping with the way Rachel’s mind worked. She was attacked. Three on one. The stabbing was reflex.

  At five o’clock in the evening, on April 15, nearly seventeen hours after the stabbing, Sarah’s minivan was towed from in front of Javier’s house to a PCSO garage for automotive evidence.

  With PPPD detective Kenneth Blessing observing, a crime scene technician processed the van for latent prints, took samples from the various blood drops, and thoroughly photographed the vehicle.

  When processing was complete, the vehicle—blood drops and all—was returned to Charlie Ludemann. Blessing glanced at his watch: 6:30 P.M.

  Rachel Wade’s parents did not skimp when it came to their daughter’s legal representation. They hired forty-five-year-old award-winning defense attorney Jay Hebert, who had his own law firm, the Hebert Law Group, in Clearwater, Florida. Hebert was a Floridian born and raised, having grown up in Winter Park, just outside of Orlando. He earned his law degree at Stetson University and had been practicing law since 1991. In addition to being a top local trial attorney, Hebert was also a board member of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Police Athletic League (PAL) and Tampa Bay Junior Lightning Ice Hockey.

  During one of Hebert’s first inter
views of Rachel Wade, Hebert tried to get to the crux of the matter. Why had this situation been allowed to stew for month after month until it finally exploded into violence, bloodshed, and death?

  Well, Rachel told him, if you looked at it in one way it was Joshua’s fault. He’d encouraged her.

  Pinellas County judge Paul R. Levine was not the sort of man who would send people to prison, or keep them in jail, for emotional reasons. In fact, he was a reasonable man, who believed that different crimes should be handled differently. He was, for example, a proponent of keeping serious alcohol offenders (domestic abusers and drunk drivers) sober rather than incarcerated, and he supported the use of alcohol bracelets, which enabled authorities to check the defender’s alcohol level continuously. One drop, and off to jail they went. Most stayed sober, thus saving that jail space for those who needed to be removed from society.

  At the bond hearing for Rachel Wade, on April 16, 2009, Judge Levine found himself face-to-face with a woman who’d had her heart ripped out by violence. Again he would need to forget emotions and let the letter of the law inform his decision.

  Standing before the bench, Gay Ludemann said, “Rachel Wade murdered my daughter Sarah in cold blood. And for what? A boy. A boy. How sad is that? … We miss and love our daughter. She is never out of our thoughts. Rachel Wade should not be allowed out of jail.”

  Judge Levine explained that he had to give Rachel Wade bail because this was not a capital case. If the police had charged her with first-degree murder, he would have been able to order her held without bail. However, since it was a charge of second-degree murder, bail was mandatory.

  He ordered that Rachel be returned to Pinellas County Jail on $500,000 bail.

  This angered Sarah’s mom. “Rachel Wade knew where my daughter lived. She was coming after her.” Her whole family would feel unsafe if Wade was allowed to walk the streets again. “Are you going to let her back on the street so she can murder someone else?”

  “No, ma’am,” Judge Levine replied patiently. “She has to post five-hundred-thousand-dollar bond in order to get out. That’s quite a heavy burden, I would think. The other thing, and I don’t mean to argue with you right now, I know—”

  “And I’m not arguing with you, either,” Gay said. “I’m letting you know how my heart feels, the pain. My daughter is on a cold slab in a funeral home because of this girl! She took my daughter’s life. She knew if she stabbed Sarah in the heart, she would die.”

  The question that the grieving mother was trying to ask was: Why wasn’t Rachel Wade charged with first-degree murder? Why wasn’t it a capital case, which would have meant no mandatory bail? Rachel brought the knife with her. How was that not premeditated?

  Gay Ludemann would not get an answer to her question at the bond hearing. Afterward, the case’s lead investigator took a crack at it.

  According to Detective Lynch: “One of the things we looked at before presenting the case to the state, and one of the things we looked at very hard, was whether or not there was some form of self-defense here.”

  If Rachel brought the knife with her in order to protect herself, then the fact that she had the knife at the scene of the fight was not, in itself, evidence of premeditation.

  “We knew, for example, that Sarah had driven to where Rachel was, that there were three girls in the van,” Lynch said. “Rachel, on the other hand, although she had two male friends on the scene, was the only female there on her side.”

  Lynch felt it would have been difficult to prove to a jury’s satisfaction that Rachel had premeditation using the knife to kill Sarah.

  Arguing in the other direction, if this was merely a street fight that had gotten out of hand, why wasn’t Rachel Wade charged with manslaughter? Would Rachel have been charged with manslaughter without the voice mails’ inflammatory verbiage?

  Lynch said no. He didn’t believe that the voice mails were that dynamic. If they had been recorded minutes before the stabbing, maybe. As they were, recorded months before Sarah died, he didn’t believe they would be a deciding factor one way or the other.

  Funeral services were held for Sarah Ludemann at Memorial Park Funeral Home and Cemetery in St. Petersburg. Her family received friends on Saturday, April 18, from noon to three, and then from five to seven-thirty, at which time funeral services were held. Her family requested that, in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to the Tarpon Springs Veterinary Academy.

  For Sarah’s friend Amber Malinchock, it was at the funeral parlor that Sarah’s death became real for her. She still couldn’t get the image out of her head: Sarah lying there in her coffin, wearing her prom dress.

  All of Sarah’s friends attended the funeral, of course—all except one: Joshua Camacho. Charlie Ludemann had forbidden him from attending.

  On April 21, in the middle of the afternoon, Jilica Smith came to Sarasota police headquarters for a follow-up interview. Jilica gave her birth date and explained that she was at the stabbing scene because she was friends with Janet and Joshua Camacho. They were like family, and she had been to their house “plenty of times.” She knew Sarah because she was Joshua’s friend, “because she is always there.” Sarah was Joshua’s girlfriend. Jilica hadn’t known Sarah long—not to have conversations and chill with—not really until Janet moved to Pinellas Park, whenever that was. Sarah was always good for a ride, if they needed to get to a store or something.

  She didn’t know Rachel. She’d heard Sarah arguing with Rachel on the phone, and Rachel’s name was repeatedly mentioned during conversations. “I only know what she looks like because of that night,” Jilica said. She had heard that there were previous confrontations between Sarah and Rachel, but she had not been around for any of those.

  On the night it happened, she’d been hanging out at Janet’s house with Joshua, Sarah, Janet, and maybe the other brother Jay, who was in and out. They were hanging out, sitting on the couch and playing video games. Joshua was getting text messages from Rachel that said that she wanted to fight Sarah. Rachel wasn’t mad at Joshua, just Sarah. Joshua showed the texts to Jilica, but at first didn’t tell Sarah about them.

  Sarah’s dad called a couple of times and reminded her that it was a school night and she needed to get home. Sarah said she’d be home soon.

  “Joshua didn’t want to get drama started because he knew if he told Sarah about it, Sarah was going to get mad,” Jilica explained. Rachel had been seen outside, repeatedly “riding up and down the block.”

  Eventually Sarah did find out what was going on, although Jilica didn’t remember a specific moment when that had occurred. Sarah was calm one second, mad the next, when she somehow discovered what was going on. She was being taunted, and she could not let that stand.

  After that, Jilica went outside and sat in a car with her boyfriend. Janet was also outside in a car. Jilica wasn’t sure who she was with, but she thought it might be a family friend.

  The red car went by again after they were outside. Jilica was impressed with the driver’s staying power. It felt like she’d been cruising the block for a long time.

  At one point, the red car parked at the end of the block at the stop sign and blinked its lights. Jilica thought it odd, but she made no comment as she was otherwise occupied. The red car left, but she wasn’t aware of when.

  After about fifteen minutes, Janet announced that they were getting rid of the boys, and just the girls were going to go to McDonald’s. Sarah was driving. Jilica said that sounded good. They got into Sarah’s van.

  Jilica didn’t remember which McDonald’s they planned to visit. She said that she didn’t want to eat, anyway, so she was in her own little world, sitting in the back, behind the front passenger seat where Janet was. Sarah and Rachel were on the phone with one another, and Sarah had the phone on speaker. Jilica had her own phone out and was texting someone. Jilica had not picked up on the level of hostility—it was just talking smack—until she heard Rachel say, “I’m going to stab you and your Mexican boyfriend.” That
caught Jilica’s attention.

  “I was like, ‘Hold on, what’s going on?’” Jilica said.

  She admitted to Detective Lynch that she had no way of recognizing Rachel’s voice and had to rely on the word of Janet and Sarah that it was Rachel who made the threat. Lynch wanted to know what the anger between Rachel and Sarah was about. Jilica said Sarah was just trying to figure out Rachel’s problem.

  Sarah was asking, “Why you talking crap? Why are you saying these things about me?” Sarah said, “Where you at? Where you at?” And that was when Jilica knew they weren’t going to McDonald’s anymore.

  Jilica began to fret aloud from the backseat: She didn’t know this girl. She didn’t know who she might be with. This just didn’t feel right. Word on the street was that Rachel was crazy. She wouldn’t want anything to do with Rachel, and she hoped Janet and Sarah didn’t want to have anything to do with her, either.

  At some point during the ride, maybe before the phone call, they ran into a girl named Ashley at a stop sign. Jilica didn’t know whose friend Ashley was, but Sarah and Janet knew her.

  Ashley said, “Hey, Rachel is at Javier’s house.”

  That got Detective Lynch’s attention. Here was the missing piece of the story!

  Jilica didn’t know Ashley’s last name. And she was not sure what color Ashley’s car was. Maybe white. She didn’t know the make. Ashley was by herself, though. She was a white girl, a teenager, looked like she might be Italian, a little bit on the darker side, but not Spanish. Jilica remembered that.

  She was pretty sure that at some point during the ride, they’d cruised by Sarah’s house because she remembered seeing Sarah’s dad’s car, which was easy to notice because it was a taxicab. Jilica wasn’t sure why Sarah drove past her own house, unless it was to see if Rachel was there. That was the reason that made the most sense.

  Jilica apologized to the investigator. She realized that she was there, and all, but she still felt like she didn’t know anything. “I’m still pretty confused about what happened myself,” she said.