Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  Then Hebert sounded defensive. If he was being blamed for allowing a jury that was thinking “guilty from the get-go,” the public needed to know how difficult the process could be. During the brief time lawyers got to spend with prospective jurors, they had to learn and gauge their priorities, their life experiences, and their predilections.

  Hebert’s critics were unmoved. A jury of “peers” need not be comprised of citizens demographically similar to the defendant. It need be comprised only of people who are eligible to serve on a jury. There was no guarantee, despite Hebert’s frustration, that a jury solely comprised of nineteen-year-old females would have delivered a different verdict.

  Also on Monday, Rachel’s father, Barry Wade, spoke out. He said that his daughter was holding up as well as could be expected, and that she had been “very, very surprised” by the verdict. The family had tried to prepare themselves for the worst and hope for the best. He himself had been surprised. He knew some of the evidence (the voice mails, for instance) would be difficult to overcome. He thought the jury would choose manslaughter. His daughter was a “very good person,” a fact obvious to anyone who knew her. Everybody had “nothing but great things” to say about Rachel. No one thought she could intentionally hurt someone. Unfortunately, she was part of today’s generation with the way they communicated and talked back and forth, the e-mailing and the texting and so forth. That was what had caused the situation to escalate—but Rachel was basically a very good person. High-tech communication wasn’t the only catalyst, however. A lot of the tragic situation was the creation of Joshua Camacho and the way Rachel felt about him, although Barry was at a loss as to what his daughter saw in Joshua.

  Camacho, he noticed, had a certain amount of control over the girls and had them following him and doing what he said. He was like a Svengali, using hypnotism and mind control, or something. Barry believed that Joshua could have easily stopped all of the drama between his “friends with benefits,” but that wasn’t going to happen. Camacho fed off the drama. He told them to fight for him. That was just his mentality. He was never going to tell them to back off because instigating was too much fun. He was right in the middle of it, stirring things up.

  “He played the girls,” Barry said, starting to show emotion. “And they were both wonderful girls.”

  Barry said that the morning after the incident, Rachel told him the same story she’d told in court: she had brought the knife in hopes it would scare the other girls away.

  Unfortunately, the dad added, with today’s kids, “nothing scares ’em.” There was a time when you would have stayed away from a person with a knife, but it wasn’t the case anymore.

  He’d spoken with a neighbor who confirmed Rachel’s story that Sarah had been harassing his daughter during the hours before the incident.

  Also, he wanted it noted that Sarah was not the only one Rachel was afraid of. There really was an issue with Janet Camacho, and Janet had threatened his daughter “many a time.” Rachel was very afraid of Janet, and she knew Janet would have Sarah’s back.

  “Our lives are upside down,” Barry Wade said.

  Realizing the pain he and his wife were experiencing, he could only imagine how much suffering the Ludemanns had endured.

  If he could talk to the Ludemanns—and, of course, he could not—he would ask them to look deep in their hearts and look at Rachel and realize that she was a good person, and that there was the possibility that Rachel had no intention of using the knife that night. The incident exploded in seconds, and the biggest mistake Rachel made was bringing the knife in the first place. That was what he would say; although, obviously, none of that was going to bring their daughter back.

  In most cases, a guilty verdict brought great joy to the police and prosecutors who’d worked it, but lead investigator Michael Lynch didn’t enjoy this one.

  “There were no winners on either side of the aisle,” Detective Lynch said.

  One side lost a daughter to violence, and the other side lost a daughter to prison, maybe for life. He said he was pleased at the outcome, but he found no joy in the circumstances.

  The detective had been aware of problems between Rachel Wade and Sarah Ludemann long before that violent night. Charlie Ludemann had contacted the detective regarding the threats that Rachel Wade had made toward Charlie’s daughter.

  Lynch was a father himself, and cases like this made him worry about his own children. High-tech communications made it harder to be a young person. Teenagers were an impulsive and emotional lot. In the old days, putting distance between them cooled off youthful combatants. Today, with a variety of instant forms of communication, what might formerly have been a cooling-off period might be used to enflame a situation and send it spiraling out of control. Thank goodness, in Pinellas Park, there had not been an increase in murders because of instant communications between young people.

  This case was still the exception rather than the rule. But the number of harassment and stalking cases in this age group was on the rise in Florida. Hostilities were not only growing because of text messages but also because of photographs that could be easily taken and instantaneously disseminated.

  Sure, Sarah had done a better job of preserving Rachel’s messages than vice versa, but Lynch was still satisfied that the battle of words, verbal and written, between the two was not a one-way street. Both girls made inflammatory statements. There were Sarah’s words of antagonism on Myspace, although he felt the point was moot. Everyone was responsible for her own actions. Rachel was responsible for what she did, no matter what Sarah Ludemann might have done or said to anger her.

  “Rachel needed to step back and act as an adult,” Lynch said. “We forget that she is an adult, and should have had the self-control to take herself out of the picture.”

  Lynch added that during his investigation, he never found any evidence that Joshua Camacho wanted the girls to fight over him, either in messages from him to the girls or in girl-to-girl communications. The detective did, however, believe—based on the personalities involved—that Joshua enjoyed the fact that there were girls fighting over him. If the detective had found evidence that one or both of the girls were fighting under Joshua Camacho’s instructions, Joshua might have been arrested.

  “We certainly would have talked to the state attorney’s office about that,” Lynch concluded.

  Detective Lynch never turned down a teaching moment, and he reminded anyone who might be receiving threats through their cell phone or computer to save those messages, and to bring them promptly to the attention of local law enforcement.

  “The idea,” he said, “was to nip the situation in the bud so that it didn’t escalate and spiral out of control, as it did in this case.”

  Why, in his opinion, were young women of low self-esteem so common? A kind of “pimp and ho” subculture permeated America’s youth. It was certainly evident in this case, with a flock of women fighting over one scrawny male, who seemed like a creep to outsiders.

  Lynch didn’t have a good answer. He could only guess. The social/sexual rules were being determined by young men. That was for certain. It was either give in to the demands or risk being kicked to the curb.

  “That was Joshua Camacho in a nutshell,” Lynch said. “He would use bits and pieces of those he met, and then he would trash them just as quickly as he found them.”

  Maybe these girls just wanted to fit in, to feel like they belonged, and perhaps they wanted to have an interesting story to tell when they got back to their friends.

  “It’s hard for me to believe that there are that many people out there who would allow their daughters to have such low self-esteem,” Lynch admitted. He had two young daughters, who were still small, but he was very conscious of keeping their egos inflated. He and his wife tried to build their self-esteem. They hoped that when the girls were older, they would feel that no one was good enough for them. They should demand the best in how they were treated, no matter what.

  Plus they wer
e being trained to be polite and respectful of their elders, qualities that seemed lost much of the time today. His intuition told him that most parents wanted their children to be the best, strive for the best, and to insist that others treat them the best.

  Taking this case specifically, Sarah’s behavior was somewhat understandable. She’d been a big girl, with a weight problem. She had been teased in school; and all of a sudden, she had status because she had a boyfriend. It made a certain sense that she was willing to fight for him.

  But where was Rachel coming from? Here was a girl who seemed to have everything going for her. She came from a middle-class home; both parents were still living at home; she was good-looking and popular. She could have had anything she wanted, another boyfriend, any boyfriend she wanted. In many ways, Rachel was not a typical teenager. She had lived on her own for years at that point. Very unusual.

  “Heck, we’ve got officers here at the PPPD that still live with their parents,” Lynch said. “Rachel was one of those kids who said, ‘I want to be on my own. I can make it on my own.’ And she did it. Until that bad night, she had been somewhat successful. She’d earned her GED. She had an apartment. She had a job.” Most cases like this involved kids who were products of broken homes. Not this one.

  How low was the self-esteem of this crowd’s teenaged girls? There was even status in becoming pregnant. Being a baby mama allowed a young girl to lay some claim forever to the father. It was as if the young woman were saying, “Not only have I been there and done that, but the baby is proof!”

  “Pinellas Park is not by any stretch of the imagination a community with an epidemic unwed pregnancy problem, but it was common in this group,” Detective Lynch said.

  That night Jay Hebert went on CNN’s Issues program and pleaded his case. That brought the ire of criminal profiler Pat Brown, who said Rachel Wade should consider herself lucky that she was not charged with first-degree murder because, based on the facts as Brown understood them, this was a premeditated killing. Wade was a “jealous stalker,” in Brown’s opinion, as well as a psychopath.

  Chapter 15

  SENTENCING

  Rachel’s sentencing hearing was held in the same Largo, Florida, courtroom as her trial, on Friday, September 3, 2010. She wore her dark blue prison uniform. There had been a startling change in her appearance. Her youthful appearance was fading fast. Her makeup-free face had grown puffy since her conviction. She’d developed jowls. Her hair wasn’t dyed blond during the year and a half she’d been in jail, and there was just as much dark as light in her hair, which now hung limp to the middle of her back.

  The Ludemanns and the Wades were present. All four parents wore black. Both sets of parents gave statements at the hearing; both expressed sympathy for the other. At no time did the Ludemanns and the Wades make eye contact.

  Letters written on both sides were read into the record. One of Rachel’s teachers, now retired, wrote: Concerning the Rachel Wade case, I am asking that you consider reducing her sentence. I’m sure Rachel was on the brink of cracking.

  Jo Anne Reuter, Sarah’s aunt, wrote: To say I cannot comprehend teenagers today is an understatement. How sad that the interaction between Rachel and Sarah had escalated with no one intervening to stop it.

  Barry Wade said, “Two beautiful young girls both made the same decision to get involved with someone who not only didn’t love them, but used and demeaned them. These girls were so much alike. Now they have both lost their dreams and their futures.”

  Charlie Ludemann said, “I’ll never get to hold my daughter again, never get to see her get married, never hear her laugh at my dumb jokes. The only way I can hear her voice is when I call her cell and she says, ‘Hey, this is Sarah. Leave me a message and I’ll call you back.’”

  When it was Gay Ludemann’s turn to speak, she placed two large photos of Sarah on an easel and turned them to face the judge. “Remember, Judge Bulone, this is my daughter. She lives in a cemetery. I go visit her.”

  Rachel herself took the witness stand and gave a statement, which she read from a piece of paper without looking up. To the Ludemanns, she said: “‘I never wanted our worlds to collide like this, especially over a boy, and a worthless boy at that. I am so sorry to be the one that caused you this pain. I need you to know that I, too, was just a teenaged girl, not a monster or the murderer, as it may seem. Some days I feel like it should have been me.’”

  At that moment, Gay Ludemann did feel sorry for Rachel. She thought of how hard it must have been for Rachel to say she was sorry for killing their daughter. “And she wanted us to believe, she truly wanted us to believe that she was sorry,” Gay later said.

  Gay might have been feeling sympathetic, but Judge Bulone was not.

  “The murder was no accident,” Bulone said. “It took a lot of force to plunge that knife through skin, through fat and bone, through someone’s heart.”

  He said he had been tempted to give Rachel Wade a life sentence. He didn’t believe she was sorry for what had happened that night. He felt that when she put that knife in her purse, she was “almost hoping” she would have an opportunity to use it on Sarah.

  “The issue is the defendant tried to conceal the evidence in the case, and actually did a good job of concealing it when she threw the knife onto the roof of a neighbor’s house. This court will sentence her to twenty-seven years in the Department of Corrections. The actions of Rachel Wade have caused a lot of pain,” Bulone said. “I hope now healing can occur.”

  Rachel Wade, sobbing, was led from the courtroom. Even with best behavior, she was spending the next twenty years behind bars. By the time she was once again a free woman, more than half of her life would have been spent incarcerated.

  Gay Ludemann’s moment of sympathy was over. She had hoped that Rachel’s sentence would be twice as long. She’d been hoping that she’d be long dead by the time Rachel was released, so she would not be around to see her.

  Barry Wade did the math—and was overwhelmed by the cruel chunk of Rachel’s life that would be past before she could again be free.

  Sitting in the spectator section during the two-hour hearing was St. Petersburg Times reporter Lane De-Gregory, who spent much of her time during the sentencing hearing looking for something that was not there. She kept looking for some sort of connection among Rachel Wade, her parents, and her grandparents, who were all in court. With the exception of Rachel’s older brother, who never came to the courthouse for his sister’s trial, Rachel’s whole family was there.

  DeGregory kept thinking Rachel was going to turn around and make eye contact with them, or see them and have some sort of emotional reaction. But there was nothing. It didn’t seem so much like she was going out of her way to ignore them. It was more like she didn’t care enough to make a connection with them.

  The journalist didn’t know if it was self-preservation or if Rachel was just trying to get through the moment. However, she had just learned that she was going to be put away for all these years, and Rachel still didn’t want to turn around and look at them.

  “You figure at a time like that she would want to look at her mother, blow her a kiss or something,” DeGregory said.

  Jay Hebert wasn’t sure if there would be an appeal. Such a move was expensive and labor-intensive. The Wades couldn’t afford it, although there was a possibility that the court might appoint a public defender to handle the appeal, as they clearly qualified for it. If there was going to be an appeal, the grounds would be that the judge’s instructions to the jury were too complicated. The jury did not understand the difference between second-degree murder and manslaughter. The maximum sentence for manslaughter would have been eleven years. Asking for a second trial was risky, however, as there was always the chance that state attorneys would decide to up the ante and charge Rachel with first-degree murder, in which case a conviction might mean life behind bars without the hope of parole.

  The Wades left the courthouse without comment.

  When
only a few stragglers remained in the courtroom, Charlie Ludemann was overheard saying, “I’m not happy, but what can you do?”

  “Where from here?” the Ludemanns were asked.

  “To the cemetery,” Gay said. “To tell Sarah the news.”

  On November 19, 2010, the case was featured on the 20/20 TV program, with Ashleigh Banfield reporting. Lisset Hanewicz told Banfield why the voice mails were the key to getting a conviction. People often said, “I’m gonna kill you,” when they were upset. But Rachel had said, “I’m gonna murder you,” and then she went out and did it. It was as if Sarah had kept those voice mails so that the world would know what had happened.

  Banfield also interviewed Rachel, whose take on the events that ruined her life remained unchanged. It was Sarah’s fault. Everything was Sarah’s fault. She didn’t hate Sarah. She hated the situation. She didn’t understand what made Sarah so mad, why she came at her like that. Sarah was with Joshua. Sarah had everything she wanted.

  Banfield asked what Joshua had? He seemed like such a loser. What gave him such control over his harem?

  Rachel said it was the way Joshua made her feel when they were alone. “Like he really cared about me,” Rachel said. Joshua told her he didn’t care about the other girls, and she believed him. “I believe everything that he said to me,” Rachel said.

  Had he visited her in prison? No.

  Written? No.

  Did she still love him? No.

  Any feelings at all for him? No.

  Rachel said she “talked to Sarah” all the time, telling her that she was sorry, how much she hoped they could have been more mature, that they could have sat down and had a civilized conversation, that they could have just walked away. They both deserved so much better.