Jamie Severino was charged with being a principal to robbery with a deadly weapon, robbery with a firearm, and armed burglary, dealing in stolen property, and driving with a license suspended or revoked. Her bail was set at $320,250.
“I was at the wrong place, at the wrong time,” she recalled. “They blew it out of proportion. My boyfriend at the time was selling drugs, and these junkies came, two dudes. One of them had been calling and calling my phone, harassing me. My boyfriend didn’t like anybody calling my phone—and when they came, I didn’t think anything of it. They started arguing and got into a fight. We didn’t think the cops were going to be called. Junkies don’t call the cops. They came to buy drugs, got into an argument, a fight, and that was it. Nothing really bad happened. When the cops got there, the junkies started lying, saying my ex-boyfriend had a gun, hit him with a gun. I don’t like guns, and my ex-boyfriend never had a gun around me at all. There was no gun.”
The charges might have been based on fabrication, but the effect on Jamie’s life was real enough. “It really messed up a lot of things for me.”
After her arrest, Jamie took up residence in the Pinellas County Jail. One day, when entering the visitation room, Jamie was horrified to see someone she knew—Rachel Wade—also receiving visitors.
“It was really, really awkward, because she used to harass me when I went to Applebee’s, and stuff like that,” Jamie said. “And it was just me and her in the room. So there I am in the room and I’m talking to my daughter on the visitation screen, and I could see that Rachel kept looking over and being really nosy. I don’t know who she was seeing, but I could hear her saying things like, ‘It’s really funny who’s sitting next to me right now.’”
After Jamie finished speaking to her daughter, she turned to Rachel and said, “Do you have a problem?”
“No,” Rachel said.
“Why were you saying those things you were saying? What’s funny about sitting next to me?”
“I don’t need your shit.”
“I’m not starting any shit with you.”
That established, Rachel talked about her future. The way she saw it, she had one. Money talks, she said, and her family had shelled out fifty grand for a really good attorney. She was going to walk.
“I’m going home,” she said.
“Why did you even do that?” Jamie asked. “Why did you stab her? Sarah wasn’t that tough.”
Rachel replied, “I tried to tell her about Joshua, but she wouldn’t fuckin’ listen.”
According to Jamie, who was not Rachel’s friend, Rachel exhibited no sadness, no regret—just the firm belief that she was going to get away with it.
Girls would come to Jamie and ask about Rachel. They knew there was a connection. After all, Jamie had a tattoo of CAMACHO. So, during her stay in jail, Jamie learned some things about Rachel through the grapevine.
Rachel had been telling bizarre lies. She claimed, for example, to be the mother of Javier Laboy’s child.
“One girl said to me, ‘That’s so sad. Rachel is going away for murder, and she has a baby at home.’ I was like, ‘What?’”
Jamie set the record straight. Rachel was not a mommy.
When Jamie and Rachel ran into one another the next time, also in the visitation room, this became a topic of discussion.
“She got really mad that I’d told everyone the truth. As we were being led back to our pod, she started screaming, ‘I swear to God, if I could get away right now, I’d strangle you!’”
Same old Rachel, hurling threats. Threatening violence. Threatening to kill.
But at the same time, it wasn’t the same old Rachel at all. Her words used to roll off her enemies’ backs. Those days were through. Rachel’s threats bore more weight now.
She had proven that she could, and would, back them up with action.
Jamie didn’t have much nice to say about Rachel, but she did not think that the death of Sarah Ludemann was premeditated murder.
“Rachel lacked impulse control at the key moment,” Jamie said, “but she hadn’t thought it through beforehand.”
The idea exploded into action before the thinking part of her brain could catch up.
“I think she brought the knife just to let everyone know ‘Don’t fuck with me,’” Jamie said.
Why Rachel did it wasn’t the only mystery surrounding the death of Sarah Ludemann, according to Jamie Severino. There was also the question of how.
One thing was for sure—whether it was fear or anger or something else—Rachel was physically charged at the time. She was jacked when she killed Sarah.
It required some arm strength to stick a knife into somebody that far and, look at her, Jamie Severino said, “Rachel was not that strong of a person.”
That same spring of 2010, more than a year after their daughter’s arrest, Barry and Janet Wade finally agreed to talk to reporter Lane DeGregory, who went to the Wade home. During the quiet interview, Janet clutched Rachel’s small dog to her bosom as if it were a security blanket.
Janet Wade said that she had been filled with such optimism, right up until the night of the incident. Rachel had been giving them problems for years, rebellious to the nth degree; but by 2009, they thought she had started to calm down.
After years of not-so-much socializing, Rachel was visiting regularly with them, stopping by periodically for dinner. The Wades had reason to believe their chilly relationship with their daughter was starting to warm up a little bit. They didn’t worry about her being in her own place. Rachel had a nice apartment and a good job. Janet Wade felt like she could finally breathe a sigh of relief. And then this …
The problem with Rachel all along was boys. She was boy crazy, and then some. She couldn’t live at home anymore because it was cutting into boyfriend time. Janet condensed her daughter’s bitter biography, from innocence to experience: “When Rachel was little, all of the girls wanted to be like her. From middle school on, all of the boys wanted to be with her.”
With a nose for news, DeGregory looked around the house, scrutinized the demeanor of the parents, sought anything that might give her a clue as to why Rachel Wade was the way she was. But there was nothing. The ambience was a completely suburban, middle-class lifestyle—normal.
The only missing piece to the puzzle was Rachel’s older brother. DeGregory never saw him, never spoke to him. She called him, left voice messages for him, but she received no response.
DeGregory asked Rachel’s parents about their son, and they replied that they were not close.
“They said they were estranged from their son, that he was quiet, and that he didn’t want to have anything to do with this,” DeGregory recalled.
PART THREE
THE TRIAL
Chapter 10
DAY ONE
The Pinellas County Criminal Justice Center was an impressive four-pillar courthouse in Clearwater, Florida. On July 20, 2010, in that building, voir dire began. That was the process by which a panel of Rachel Wade’s “peers” would be chosen from a large jury pool.
The jail was just south of the courthouse, on County Road 611. The sheriff’s office was just south of that, so proximity led to convenience. Transporting Rachel Wade to and from the courtroom would not be difficult.
Judge Bulone’s courtroom was large with seven rows of seats for spectators. Capacity was more than one hundred people, and it would be full throughout the trial.
Groups of young men and women, friends of the victim and the defendant, sat on opposite sides of the aisle. Rachel’s friends included Courtney Richards, Lindsey Atticks, and Lisa Lafrance.
The first elimination came after potential jurors filled out a written questionnaire. Those that passed the first test were brought into the courtroom in small groups.
If the court took a break during questioning, Judge Bulone would ask, “Did anyone see anything about this case during the break in the hallway? No one heard anything. No hands. Did anyone see anything about the media coverage?
No hands.”
Every once in a while, a hand would raise and the judge would ask that juror to approach his bench. If he felt what the potential juror had experienced or overheard would prejudice that person, the potential juror was dismissed.
Each person was questioned by both the state and the defense. The defense asked questions such as, “Do you have any family members in law enforcement?” And “Do you have a set idea of what happened in this case, how it came down?”
One exchange went like this:
“Juror twenty-three, do you have anyone in your family in law enforcement?”
“Yes, I do, but he’s retired now.”
“Is there anything in your past that would interfere with you being a fair and impartial juror?”
“No.”
Defense attorney Jay Hebert asked each potential juror the same question: “Have you ever been in a fight?”
If they had not been, he didn’t want them on his jury. He needed jurors with empathy, who understood the intensity of the emotions here.
By the early morning of the following day, July 21, the six-person jury—five men, one woman—plus two alternates, were seated. Seven of them sat in the front row of the jury box, one behind. They would take turns as to who sat behind the others.
It was almost half past ten in the morning when Judge Joseph Bulone took the bench. He looked out over the full courtroom, noted the crowd of family members and young people, and warned that he didn’t want to hear any emotional outbursts.
He warned, “If anyone can’t control themselves, they will forfeit their right to be in this courtroom. Does everyone understand?”
Silence.
The jury was brought in.
First order of business was a stipulation. Both sides had agreed that the victim in this case was indeed Sarah Ludemann.
The judge called for opening statements: “Ms. Hanewicz?”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Assistant State Attorney (ASA) Lisset Hanewicz said.
ASA Hanewicz was a slightly stocky woman with an aggressive, almost pugilistic, stance. She wore a white suit. Her dark brown and frosted hair was cut in three lengths: into bangs in the front, shoulder length at the sides, and midback in the rear.
She turned to the jury and shouted, “‘I am going to fucking murder you!’”
Several jurors physically recoiled.
Hanewicz explained that was what Rachel Wade had said to Sarah Ludemann seven and a half months before she took a knife and stabbed her through the heart.
She had another quote. On the night of the murder, the prosecutor said, “Rachel Wade was telling her friend, ‘I’m going to fucking kill that bitch.’”
That same night, Rachel Wade had a verbal argument on the phone with the victim, Sarah Ludemann, and said, “I’m going to stab you and your Mexican boyfriend.”
The point was that the defendant promised to do it, and she did it. That was the reason they were all gathered together in that courtroom.
“Because Sarah Ludemann is dead.”
Hanewicz gave the jury the background: On April 14, 2009, Sarah was with Joshua Camacho, her boyfriend, and they were at his sister Janet’s house. Also there was a young woman named Jilica Smith, who knew Janet because she was related to the father of Janet’s children.
There would come a time during that evening when Joshua and Sarah were in the house, while Jilica was outside in a car with a gentleman, and Janet was also outside.
Just then, Jilica noticed a red car “zip by.” She noticed that the driver was a woman with blond hair. Janet also saw the car, which pulled over and parked at the side of the street at the end of the block.
“Janet thought that was strange and wondered why that car was there,” Hanewicz said.
The jury would learn that at some point during that evening, the girls got into Sarah’s vehicle, her mom’s minivan. Sarah was driving, Janet Camacho was in the front passenger seat, and Jilica Smith was in the back.
They were going to McDonald’s. At least, that was the plan. However, they received a phone call during the ride—a phone call that changed everything. The phone call was to Sarah Ludemann from the defendant, Rachel Wade.
The passengers in Sarah’s vehicle heard that phone call. They heard the arguing back and forth. They heard the voice on the other end of that call making threats. They heard that voice make the “Mexican boyfriend” threat.
That phone call came only short minutes before the physical confrontation between Sarah and Rachel. The jury would learn through eyewitness testimony that Sarah was visibly upset by that call.
“Perfectly understandable,” Hanewicz said.
After all, Sarah had just received a death threat. The jury would learn that this threat was just the most recent in a feud between Sarah and Rachel, which had been going on for months. It was a feud over Joshua Camacho, a young man whom Rachel used to date.
Not long after the phone call, Sarah and her friends would encounter the vehicle of another friend, a girl named Ashley Lovelady. Both vehicles stopped; Sarah and Ashley had a conversation.
Ashley told Sarah that she had just seen Rachel Wade at Javier Laboy’s house; Javier was another neighborhood boy whom Rachel used to date. At that point, Sarah drove directly to Javier’s house to confront Rachel. (For the first several times that Hanewicz mentioned him, she mispronounced Javier’s name as Ha-VEER. As she went along though, a third syllable developed and her pronunciation came closer to Ha-vee-air.)
The jury would hear the testimony of Javier’s friend Dustin, who was also there. Hanewicz explained that Dustin could not be in court in person because he was serving in the military and was in Korea. His testimony had been prerecorded and they’d be seeing it on a TV set.
Dustin would testify that he was with Javier when Rachel showed up, that she was extremely emotional, extremely angry. The word he used was “enraged.” Rachel spent a lot of time on the phone, and after she got directions from Javier, she left.
The directions were either to Sarah’s house or Joshua’s house. Dustin didn’t remember. For a while, Rachel was gone, and then she came back. Dustin also saw a vehicle go by Javier’s house, which turned out to be driven by Ashley Lovelady. That was how Sarah found out where Rachel was.
Hanewicz didn’t want the jury to think that all of this accidentally running into one another was a series of unlikely coincidences. All of these people lived in close proximity in the same neighborhood.
“Ashley swerved her car toward Rachel a little as she passed,” Hanewicz explained. “And soon thereafter told Sarah that she’d seen Rachel at Javier’s house.”
The jury would hear that when Javier and Dustin realized that Rachel had a knife, they said, “You don’t need a knife.” Hanewicz held her arms out at her sides as she said this, a gesture meaning that what the boys were saying could not have been more obvious: You do not bring a knife to a fight. Only bad things could happen when you brought a knife to a fight. Everyone knows that.
The boys told Rachel to put the knife away, and they thought she had. When trouble started, Dustin and Javier didn’t know that Rachel still had the knife on her.
As soon as Sarah found out that Rachel was at Javier’s house, she forgot all about going to McDonald’s. She headed directly to Javier’s, pedal to the metal.
The jury would learn that Jilica Smith, who was sitting in the back of the minivan as it zoomed through the streets of Pinellas Park, had no idea what was going on.
Jilica didn’t even know Sarah very well, having only met her once or twice at Janet’s house. Jilica had just happened to be at Janet’s house at the same time as Sarah, and just happened to come along when Sarah volunteered to make a McDonald’s run.
Hanewicz explained that Sarah’s minivan, moving as fast as it was, arrived at Javier’s house very quickly. As Sarah drove down the street, her headlights were in Rachel’s eyes. Sarah stopped her car right in the middle of the street.
Rachel’s car was facing in t
he opposite direction; it was parked at the side of the street. Rachel was standing near the hood of her vehicle, on the driver’s side, right in front of the left headlight.
According to the prosecutor’s scenario, the defendant grabbed the knife the instant the minivan screeched to a halt. With the knife in her hand, she walked across the front of her car and then across the front of the minivan.
She was heading straight for Sarah.
“Everyone agrees that it all happened in less than five seconds,” Hanewicz said.
As Rachel was walking between the vehicles, Sarah got out of the minivan. She left the driver’s door open, and took no more than a couple of steps toward the front of the minivan, when the confrontation occurred.
“It happened right there. Right there on the driver’s side of Sarah’s vehicle!” Hanewicz exclaimed. “Near the front of the minivan.”
Hanewicz’s scenario had Rachel moving fifteen feet in the time it took Sarah to open the car door and take a couple of steps. Who was the aggressor? There could be no doubt.
Rachel wanted to get to Sarah as fast as she could, and she didn’t just have a fistfight in mind—evident, to the prosecutor, from that kitchen knife Rachel held tightly in her right hand.
“And it is immediate,” Hanewicz said, switching to the present tense and crisply clapping her arched palms together. “It is not as if words are exchanged. It is boomboomboom, just like that.”
It happened so quickly that all of the eyewitnesses, some of whom were only a few feet away, did not know immediately that Sarah had been stabbed.
There had been a blur of action in the street. Hair was flying, arms were flailing. Then it was over. It just stopped, and Rachel turned around and she just walked away.
But Sarah had been stabbed in the heart. Gravely injured, she managed to call out, “We got to go.”
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