Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  Rachel Wade was sitting on a bench near the front of the Laboy house. Sarah Ludemann had already been transported to the hospital. The witnesses to the stabbing—Camacho, Smith, Laboy, and Grimes—were still there. As Simpkins briefed him, Detective Lynch was toward the north end of the crime scene; Javier and Dustin were up near the residence; Janet and Jilica were at the opposite end of the crime scene, the south end. Witnesses were primarily separated to get independent statements as much as possible. The secondary reason was the potential adversarial nature of the eyewitnesses: two with the victim, two with the suspect. The knife had still not been located. A canine unit was called in to perform an article search, which was un successful.

  Lynch stepped down from the witness stand to testify regarding crime scene photos in a manner that the jury could see. He testified regarding the location of the vehicles in the street.

  Yes, he observed blood at the scene, both on the van’s driver’s-side interior and also a small amount on items of clothing that were on the outside of the van, also on the driver’s side. There was neither blood in front of the vehicle, nor on the ground outside the van’s passenger-side door. Lynch returned to the witness stand.

  Lynch was still at the scene when he learned the investigation had become a homicide investigation. When finished at the crime scene, Lynch went to the hospital, spoke with Sarah’s family, advised them that he was working on the case, and observed the victim’s remains. (He described the wounds.)

  He subsequently conducted an interview with Rachel Wade at the police station and, at that time, observed the injuries she had sustained during the incident. The inside of her lower lip was cut, and there were scratches and scrapes along her back. During that first twenty-four hours, Lynch interviewed all four witnesses to the incident, as well as Joshua Camacho.

  He did not interview Ashley Lovelady that night because at that time her name was not known to him. When he did learn who she was, he didn’t consider her a key witness as to what had caused Sarah Ludemann’s death. In fact, he didn’t get around to interviewing Ashley until months after the incident. He could not recall the exact date. Ashley was not completely honest when she was first interviewed. Lynch had expressed his concern that she was not being forthcoming with him, and he urged her to get back in touch with him if she decided to tell the whole truth. It didn’t take long for Ashley’s conscience to be her guide. She called him back the very next day and expressed her desire to set the record straight.

  Among the items discovered at the scene of the incident that night was Sarah Ludemann’s cell phone. Rachel Wade’s cell phone was “collected that night” as well. The history of each phone was checked, and it was discovered that Sarah had placed a call to Rachel at twelve thirty-three that same night/early morning. Lynch later learned about the voice mails left in Sarah’s phone by Rachel. The state then played the recordings.

  The first message that the jury heard was the “Why don’t you act your age, Sarah?” voice mail, recorded on July 29, 2008. Sitting at the defense table, Rachel seemed more disturbed at hearing her own manic and profane tirade than she had been by anything else she’d heard during her trial. She dabbed at tears as an automated voice noted that the recording had been made at 3:36 A.M. on July 29, 2008, and had lasted for twenty-two seconds.

  The August 29, 2008, message was played—the one in which Rachel complained about Sarah putting a new picture of herself and Joshua on her Myspace account. Two moments in the recording seemed to pluck an emotional chord in the defendant: first when she heard herself say “I am going to fucking murder you,” and again when she called the victim “fat.” The automated voice came on and said this message, thirty-four seconds long, had been recorded on a Friday at 4:33 P.M. By the end of the recording, Rachel was sobbing, perhaps with self-pity as she must have realized how the recordings sounded to the jurors. Her own words—her own stupid words—made her seem so guilty.

  At one minute and fourteen seconds, the third voice mail played for the jury was the longest of the three—the one Rachel made during the evening of August 31, 2008, the one that started, “It’s so funny that you want to talk shit….”

  By the time it was finished, Rachel was threatening to be Sarah’s “teacher,” who was going to “teach her to grow up … quick.” Both Rachel and her mother were sobbing. Rachel’s father, holding and comforting his wife, had a vacant look of despair in his eyes.

  “I am going to show you psycho!” the jury heard Rachel say.

  The jury then heard the fourth message, the shortest of the group at ten seconds. It was sent less than an hour after the previous one. It began by taunting, “Why don’t you come outside now, Sarah?” The defendant could not have sounded more guilty of harassment, and, now, of stalking.

  The fifth message played—thirty-four seconds long—was the one recorded during the early evening of November 12, 2008, the one in which Rachel compared Sarah’s eating habits to those of her dog. During that call, Rachel bragged about having her own car, while Sarah had to walk places. Rachel said the exercise might do Sarah good. “Maybe it’ll thin you out a little bit,” she said.

  That concluded the CD, and Hanewicz resumed her questioning.

  “Detective, that night, was the knife eventually located?”

  Lynch said it was. It was found on the roof of the house next to, just north of, the Laboy house.

  “Who arrested the defendant?”

  “I did—and I charged her with second-degree murder.”

  “No further questions,” Hanewicz said.

  Jay Hebert began his cross-examination slowly. He had Lynch reiterate that he was the case’s lead investigator, and that it was a tragic situation. During his investigation, he became familiar with the youthful “drama” with which the tragedy unfolded.

  Hebert said they had heard tapes of the defendant threatening the victim, but wasn’t it also true that there had been threats from Sarah toward Rachel as well?

  Lynch said that the interviews he’d conducted during the course of his investigation would lead him to agree with that, yes.

  Hebert said, “In fact, you interviewed Rachel Wade. You went through a detailed, intensive videotaped interview with Rachel Wade, more than an hour in duration?”

  Lynch said it was true. He had interviewed Rachel at PPPD headquarters. The interview was videotaped.

  Hebert wondered if during that interview, Rachel discussed the catalytic drama of the buildup. Lynch agreed that there was “some discussion” regarding “what may have led to” the incident.

  Hebert inquired if Lynch had been the officer who picked up Janet Camacho and Jilica Smith as they began to walk home. Lynch said he wasn’t, but he was aware that the pair had been picked up. Lynch said he would not characterize their actions as “walking home,” but they were on the extreme south end of the area and were picked up.

  Hebert now held the board with the photos from the scene of the incident mounted on it, the same board Lynch had testified about during the prosecution’s direct examination.

  Wasn’t it true that Rachel’s car, the red Saturn, was more or less legally parked at the side of the road? Lynch said that he would have preferred seeing the vehicle pointing north, but agreed that it was closer to being parked legally than the van was. Lynch agreed with Hebert that the van, as it was parked, represented a traffic hazard.

  Some spectators felt this line of questioning smacked of desperation. It had long been established that the van was in the middle of the street.

  Lynch agreed that since the incident and initial investigation took place during the hours after midnight, it was “very dark.” Hebert showed Lynch two photos of the street outside Javier’s house, both taken during the hours after the incident, one with the flash, one without. The darker photo showed a scene illuminated only by a streetlight near the end of the block. The detail visible in the flash photo was far greater than in the other, and Lynch agreed that the photo without the flash was a better representation
of what the scene actually looked like that night.

  Hebert had Lynch agree that because of the location of the blood, Sarah had most likely climbed back into the van after she was stabbed.

  “Based on your investigation, did you ever receive any information that Sarah was stabbed inside the van?”

  “No, I never received any information like that.”

  When did Lynch first hear the name Ashley Lovelady? The name “Ashley” had been mentioned that night, no last name, and only as a person who had been seen or observed earlier that night.

  Who gave the detective the information regarding Ashley? Lynch thought it was Janet Camacho. Lynch did, at a later date, interview Ashley. She lied at first about her essential role in the tragedy, but she came clean the next day.

  One of Hebert’s most important tasks, he understood, was chipping away at the strong connection the jury felt between the voice message threats and the stabbing. Yes, it was true that the first voice mail they had listened to was recorded nine months before “anything happened.” Hebert noted the date of each phone call and the vast span of time between that call and the night of the stabbing. The most recent of the phone messages, the one recorded in November, not only demonstrated a different demeanor, but that was still five to six months before the incident. Were there any recorded phone calls that Lynch knew of inside of five months from the date of the incident? There were not.

  Then, out of the blue: “And the person who told you where the knife was, was Rachel Wade?”

  “Objection, Your Honor!” Hanewicz said angrily.

  “Sustained,” Judge Bulone quickly ruled.

  The subject of who had informed police of the knife’s location had not been broached during direct examination and therefore was off-limits for cross. Besides, the truth was that Rachel had merely said the knife was “next door” and hadn’t mentioned that it was on the roof.

  “You found the knife, right?” Hebert asked the witness.

  The detective understood the “you” to be collective and said they had. They found the knife because someone told them where it was. The jury, for certain, now knew who had told police where the knife was. Hane wicz was irritated by Hebert’s courtroom trickery. Sometimes the jury didn’t need to hear an answer. Sometimes, Hebert knew, hearing the question was enough.

  Hebert was through; Hanewicz had no questions on redirect; Lynch was allowed to step down.

  “Has the state located Detective Blessing?” Judge Bulone asked.

  “Yes, Judge. He’s outside,” Dicus said. “The state calls Detective Kenneth Blessing.”

  Blessing, who had been named the PPPD Officer of the Year in 1992, was a slender blond-haired man with a mustache. He wore a black suit with a black-and-gray-striped tie that dangled down past his belt. Blessing told the jury that he had been a PPPD employee for twenty-two years. Before being promoted to detective fourteen or fifteen years before, he was a patrol officer.

  Wesley Dicus asked Blessing to run down the police training he’d received over the years. The witness replied that he’d attended the police academy, and subsequently took a forty-hour course at “detective school” before his promotion. Before investigating this incident, he’d been involved in “five or six” homicides. At the time of this incident, he was not on duty. He was home sleeping when he received the call. It was common practice for off-duty detectives to be called at home when there was a murder or a stabbing for the simple reason that PPPD detectives only worked during the daytime. Dicus asked at what time Blessing received the call for this case. Blessing referred to his written report and then responded that it had been about one-thirty in the morning. He arrived at the scene fifteen minutes later, so he was on the scene within a “half hour, forty-five minutes” after the stabbing. The first thing he did upon arriving was seek out the lieutenant-on-site for a briefing as to what had occurred. Blessing then waited until Detective Lynch arrived on the scene, as well as Mark R. Berger, who was the criminal investigation sergeant. When everyone was there, they decided who would do what.

  “What were your responsibilities going to be?” Dicus inquired.

  “I ended up interviewing one of the witnesses, and I stood by at the scene for anything else they wanted me to do.”

  “Which witness did you interview?”

  “Janet Camacho.”

  He originally had been assigned to interview both Janet and Jilica, but Jilica Smith, as it turned out, was interviewed by another officer. The interview with Janet took place in Blessing’s car. Jilica was interviewed by the other detective in his vehicle.

  Dicus asked where Janet and Jilica were when he contacted them for an interview. Blessing replied that the pair was standing in the vicinity of Fifty-second Street and Park Lake Drive. Police had closed off the street on either side of the incident with police tape. Dicus asked if Janet and Jilica were inside or outside the crime scene. He replied that they were slightly outside the crime scene, just on the other side of the tape. Dicus asked if Janet had already been interviewed by one of the first responders by the time she got into his patrol car. Blessing didn’t know, although he allowed that she “may have.”

  “During your interview with Janet Camacho, did she make reference to a phone call to Sarah Ludemann from Rachel Wade in which Rachel Wade threatened to stab Sarah and her Mexican boyfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  Dicus asked what time the interview with Janet took place and Blessing read from his report that it began at 2:10 A.M. It was soon after the incident, Dicus noted, at a time when the details of events should have been fresh in the minds of the witnesses.

  “After your interview with Ms. Camacho, what did you do?”

  “I stayed at the scene. I worked with Detective Lynch for a while. I also took the two witnesses [Janet and Jilica] home to their residence. That was at two-forty.”

  “Did you perform a show-up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you tell the jury what a show-up is.”

  “A show-up is when we have a crime and we have a witness to it. We take the witness to the person they say did it, and we ask if this person was indeed the one they’d seen commit the crime.”

  Dicus asked with which witnesses did he do a show-up. Blessing, who apparently had no independent recollection of the night’s activities, again referred to his written report, and took a long time before he answered that he’d performed a show-up with both Janet Camacho and Jilica Smith. Those took place at 2:30 A.M.

  “Who did you take them to see?” Dicus asked.

  Blessing again ran a finger down his written report searching for the answer, a process that had Dicus growing antsy.

  “Was it Rachel Wade?” the prosecutor asked impatiently.

  “Yes,” Blessing replied, although he was still reading. And yes, both witnesses positively identified Rachel Wade as the person they saw commit the stabbing. A sergeant informed Blessing that the knife was on the roof of the house next door, the house to the left of Javier’s house. It became Blessing’s job to find a ladder—he borrowed one from the sheriff’s forensic unit on the scene—and climbed up on the neighbor’s roof. With flashlight in hand, he searched—but he did not see the knife at first. He eventually found the weapon on the side of the roof farthest from Javier’s house. The blade was bent and bloody.

  Dicus showed the witness and the jury a crime scene photo taken of the knife on the roof. Blessing agreed that the photo accurately depicted the location and condition of the knife as it was found. The prosecutor then produced the actual knife, inside a cardboard box. The witness identified it as the one he’d found, and noted that its condition, bent and bloody, was unchanged.

  Blessing was allowed to step down from the witness stand so he could personally show the knife, still in its box, to the jurors. The knife was tied to the base of the box and the lid lifted up. The knife had been mounted so that the bent blade pointed upward.

  Rachel Wade, emotionless only moments before, now d
emonstrated signs of distress. Her brow furrowed and her mouth hung open. She gulped and blinked hard, twice, before shutting her eyes completely.

  Jay Hebert said his cross-examination would be brief. Kenneth Blessing admitted that compared to other witnesses in this case, he’d been a late arrival at the scene. He had no firsthand knowledge of anything that had occurred before he showed up at 1:45 A.M.

  Hebert asked if it was true that when Blessing interviewed Janet Camacho, she claimed that the “Mexican boyfriend” threat came not via Sarah’s phone but Joshua Camacho’s phone. Blessing admitted that this was true. She said it was on speakerphone, but that it was on Joshua’s phone.

  “Ms. Camacho and Ms. Smith were interviewed in squad cars?”

  “No, I have a Ford Escape, so I interviewed [Camacho] in that. And the other detective (Lynch) interviewed the other girl (Smith) in his detective car.”

  The defense attorney asked where the two male witnesses, Javier Laboy and Dustin Grimes, were when he arrived. Blessing said all of the witnesses were more or less in the same area toward the south end of the crime scene, not far from the corner of Fifty-second Street and Park Lake Drive.

  “When you interviewed Janet, did she tell you that she’d seen Rachel Wade throw something?”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t it true that Janet thought that Javier or Dustin had taken the knife away from Rachel? Isn’t that what she told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t it true that the information you received that enabled you to find the knife was provided by Rachel Wade?”

  “Objection, Your Honor,” Dicus said.

  “Sustained,” Judge Bulone replied.

  “Your Honor, the state calls Dr. Jon Russell Thogmartin.”

  The District 6 medical examiner, who wore a green suit, took the stand. Wesley Dicus asked him to explain for the jury what a forensic pathologist did. He said that he dealt with medical examiner/coroner/jurisdictional–type issues. Using anatomic and clinical pathology, he diagnosed “what killed people” in certain types of deaths.