But Rachelle said nothing. She waited patiently for the detectives to return after several minutes. After conferring in the hall, they decided to play tough.
Rachelle had earlier provided an alibi for Jason, saying she spoke to him from Anchorage on Saturday night for more than an hour and that he was at home. That wasn’t what Jason and Brian had said, McPherron told Rachelle.
“Their story,” he told her, “is that they were together Saturday night, Sunday morning, and that Jason drove out to Brian’s house some time between two and four p.m. Saturday and spent the remainder of Saturday at Brian’s house. They came back into town and do a little shopping, but they did not go back to Jason’s house: they went to Brian’s place in Hollis and stayed there the rest of Saturday night watching TV. They crashed there. And then Jason gets up in the morning and comes home, ten-ish. Now, that doesn’t seem to match what you were telling us about the phone call, does it?”
Rachelle said, “Nope.”
“What’s the discrepancy here?” asked McPherron. “Who’s being honest with us? Did you call him?”
“No,” Rachelle admitted.
“Why did you tell us that before?”
“I was scared,” she said.
In fact, she said, she had not spoken to Jason on Saturday night. She had talked to him Tuesday before the trip. They didn’t get in touch with each other until the day she returned, Sunday, when they chatted online. By then her mother was dead.
“Why did he show up at your house?” asked McPherron.
“Because I called him from the school because I was upset and wanted to talk to somebody.”
“Why did you choose to speak to him?”
“Because I didn’t think he was doing anything. I really didn’t want to pull my friends out of class.”
Rachelle was caught in a major lie. McPherron wanted to leverage that.
“I appreciate you being honest with me,” he said. “I need you to be absolutely honest with me with everything. Your credibility is on the line here.”
“Yes, I know.”
“You need to tell us everything,” said McPherron. “We do not believe you are responsible for your mother’s death but somehow you are the catalyst for the events and we need to find out what that is. And I think you may know.”
“I don’t know,” she insisted.
“We’re not blaming you for anything, and it’s not your fault what happened.”
“You have a funny way of saying one thing and saying the other.”
“No, I’m not trying to confuse you or trick you,” McPherron said. He explained that the law has “a lot of degrees” of responsibility, and that while somebody could be the cause of a person’s death, it could still be inadvertent or unintentional rather than killing somebody “deliberately with malice and planning and forethought.” He didn’t tell her, but that’s the legal definition of “murder.”
The more he lectured Rachelle, the more irritable she became. She repeatedly told him she had no idea why Jason and Brian would want to kill her mother. When McPherron asked, “What is making these guys tick?” she shot back, “I don’t know. I’m not telepathic.”
All Rachelle knew was that the men were “not typical sex-driven people,” that they were only occasional drinkers, that they never dabbled in cocaine or LSD, that they played Dungeons & Dragons and other fantasy games but nothing overly violent.
“Are they into pornography?” asked McPherron.
“I don’t know. They’re guys. Probably.”
McPherron said, “We’ve been talking quite a while. I’m sure you’re getting tired. Your dad’s probably worried about you. There’s one more thing we do need to talk about.”
He asked one more time for Rachelle to secretly record a conversation with Brian and Jason. All she would have to do is call Jason, tell him it’s very important, then follow a script of questions.
“Time is of the essence,” said McPherron. “The longer we wait, the more hysteria builds, the more of a chance that they will get spooked and won’t want to talk to anybody.”
“And frankly,” added Claus, “I’m worried about Jason. Jason is acting really strange lately. Jason [did] an attack on himself, cut his throat with his keys or his own fingernails to make it look like he was attacked, told us a story, which all by itself is a crime.”
“Yeah,” said McPherron, “he’s committed a crime already.”
“If he’s willing to hurt himself,” said Claus, “implicate himself or commit a crime just to do this, with the amount of pressure that’s on him now, I’m afraid he’s gonna hurt himself, do something so reckless that other people will hurt him.”
“All we’re after is the truth,” said McPherron. “Like Bob’s saying, I’m just as compassionate as he is.”
Rachelle made a face.
“Oh, don’t roll your eyes at me!” chided McPherron. “Are you willing to help us?”
“I still want to think about it.”
“Well, how long?”
“Can I give you my answer tomorrow afternoon?”
“That’s a long time. How about tomorrow morning?” pressed McPherron.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll think about it. You kind of pissed me off, making me feel really bad.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that, but unfortunately that’s my job.”
“I know, but I don’t like being told—”
“The truth?” Claus offered.
“No,” she shot back. “You’re telling me I killed my mother.”
“We’re not saying you did it,” said McPherron. “These two people that we know killed your mother and for some reason something is motivating them to do that.”
Claus said, “The only nexus, the only connection, is you. And the only way to smoke them out quickly is you.”
“The ball’s in your court, kiddo,” said McPherron. “You can do something rather than sit on the sidelines now. You can get involved. We need your help … . The rumors are running. The last thing we need is an ugly mob pointing the finger, blaming Jason, and deciding to do a little vigilante justice on this guy.”
“You’ve heard the rumors as well as we have. Jason can’t even go to work,” said Claus. “Middle school kids are calling him a murderer in the school.”
“I would like until tomorrow lunchtime,” Rachelle said. “That gives me tonight, tomorrow. I’ll still be tired, so I won’t be able to give rational thoughts. I know I’m gonna go home and cry and go to bed. I might be able to think rationally after sleep.”
“Your father wants to know,” McPherron said. “Your mother’s family is desperate to know. You brother wants to know. This community wants to know. Life is tough sometimes. You get in dilemmas. How we deal with our dilemmas is what makes us human beings or scumbags. And I think you’re a human being.”
Rachelle held firm. She wanted to sleep on it and go to school as usual. McPherron tried to talk her out of that.
“You’re either gonna focus on school or be distracted by your friends.”
“I highly doubt that I’ll be distracted … . I don’t like missing class.” She said she also had a math test the next day.
“We can fix it for ya,” said McPherron. “We can get it so you can take the test again.”
“No,” said Rachelle. “I mean I like to go, just go there and get my work.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” said McPherron. “Why?”
“Get my work so I can have it done for the next day of class. All I wanna do is get my homework.”
“OK.”
“I’m sorry, I’m a student.”
“I understand that, but—”
“I don’t like falling behind.”
They left it that the police would talk to her at noon the next day—Wednesday—and get her decision. Then they would tell her father what they’re doing.
“Do we got a deal?” asked McPherron.
“Yeah,” said Rachelle.
“Shake on it?
” asked the detective.
“OK.”
At 9:52 p.m., McPherron drove Rachelle home, nearly two hours after picking her up. He walked her up to her front door, where they met her father.
“She looks a little agitated,” said Doc Waterman.
“Long talk” was all McPherron said.
The detective left Rachelle at home without telling her father anything more.
CHAPTER SIX
Craig, Alaska, is a very old town. The native Tlingits arrived around the time the ice age glaciers were still receding. One Indian artifact was dated 10,300 years old. They were later joined by the Haida Indians, who in the early twentieth century worked in the fish saltery owned by a white man. The saltery prospered and by 1907 lost its original name, Fish Egg, and adopted that of the business owner, Craig Miller. When a salmon cannery and a cold storage plant were built, workers arrived, and with them came houses, a post office, and a school, all erected on the steep hills of town. Timber joined fishing as the island’s prominent businesses and, by the late twentieth century, so did tourism, sports fishing, and hunting.
Today, Craig retains what Fodor’s travel guide calls a “hard-edged aura fast disappearing in Inside Passage towns,” still retaining the feel of the little village where herring eggs were collected. No cruise ships come here, sparing Craig the cheesy jewelry and souvenir shops that line Ketchikan’s waterfront. The totem poles in Klawock, Hydaberg, and Kasaan villages recall their ancient Indian history. They face the sea and tell in carved cedar creation myths and historical events. This is the real Alaska. A person could find his peace here amid the salt air and spruce, the cold, quiet nights where the lapping waters on the rocky shores and the purr of an outboard are the only sounds. The sunsets over Bucareli Bay are the stuff of poetry.
But to some, Craig might as well still be called Fish Egg, a stinky nothing town with 1,200 gossips and no movie theater or McDonald’s. Its most famous former resident is the Playboy reality star Holly Madison, and she has long since left town and doesn’t advertise her Prince of Wales Island roots.
Among those who professed to fall into the category of Craig haters was Rachelle Waterman. She hinted as much during her police interview when she revealed her computer password was “Craigsucks.” But that was just the beginning. Rachelle regularly expressed her burning displeasure with all things Craig in an Internet blog. She had referred to it briefly during her police interview, telling the cops she had a LiveJournal account that is “like an online journal type of thing.” It was called smchyrocky, she said, a “combination of weird nicknames I got.”
What she didn’t tell them was the other title—My Crappy Life—and that she referred to her hometown as “Hell, Alaska.”
Sergeant Randy McPherron and Trooper Bob Claus could be excused for not following up on what she wrote; they were more interested in her e-mails and instant messages, things they knew about and understood. Late 2004 was the Bronze Age of social networking. Blogging could still be done in the privacy of a teen’s bedroom for a select audience of peer-group friends and fellow travelers, far away from the prying eyes of teachers, parents, and the police. There was no evidence that Rachelle’s parents—or any other adult on the island—knew about her blog.
But thousands of others did see a note posted at 10:56 p.m. on Wednesday, November 18, 2004, and the impact was dramatic. A bizarrely offhand revelation sent shock waves through the Internet and focused a harsh and often unflattering light on Craig, Alaska. It would also provide a context—and potential clues—to Rachelle’s mother’s murder.
Before there was MySpace and Facebook, before Twitter, FourSquare, and iPhones and iPad apps, there was LiveJournal. Launched in 1999, LiveJournal was an outgrowth of online dating and social networking services such as Friendster and school alumni search sites like Classmates. com. It offered the best of social networking: users could create a profile of personal information, make lists of new friends, and reach out to old ones. But LiveJournal had a revolutionary feature: the ability to keep an online diary that people could read and comment on.
At 7:50 p.m. on Monday, September 15, 2003, Rachelle typed her first words on her LiveJournal blog: “I’m a newbie.”
“This is my first journal entry,” she wrote. “What can I say, I’m a virgin (or am I?;).”
From the start, her blog would have all the hallmarks of a teen online journal, from the winking sarcasm to the slapdash punctuation, misspellings, and mild expletives. She was a rebel without a dictionary, and her frank entries would have shocked her parents’ friends and neighbors while also providing an intimate and poignant view of island life. One of the first people on her friends list was her boyfriend Kelly Carlson, who also kept a blog and who saw nothing unusual in Rachelle likening Craig to hell. He would later say, “Anyone who lives in a lot of these towns in southeast Alaska doesn’t think very highly of them.”
From the very beginning, Rachelle struck a melancholy tone. One of her first posts dealt with losing a close friend who was about to leave Prince of Wales Island for college in Washington State. Rachelle wrote that she snuck out of the house from 2 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. to spend a final day with her friend, driving around the island to let her say goodbye. They ate and tried to find a cat at the beach to feed but it wasn’t there. Then her brother Geoffrey also was in Washington for college. She felt alone and sad. “Sniff sniff,” she wrote. She tried to distract herself with homework and choir practice, but it was no use. She likened her mood to “PMSing without the bleeding.”
But as would be typical throughout her blog, her teenage emotions rebounded. “Woohoo!” she wrote after an illness to return to sports training, running ten minutes nonstop. In another post, she looked forward to a weekend without homework, a lunch of pizza and a night with her favorite junk food, Cheetos. She signed off with a pet phrase: “Yeyness in a box.”
This was followed by another emotional dip. In October she felt somebody wrongly accused her of something—she didn’t give her readers the details—and Rachelle said wanted to curl up in a corner and die. Just as quickly, there was another rebound. A week that had left her feeling depressed and “bitchy” brightened when her teacher brought chinchillas to class. With a smiley-face emoticon, Rachelle wrote of how she loved petting the critters and watching them take a dust bath. The week ended with a Sunday night dance where Rachelle had to laugh at one “pathetic guy” who wanted to slow dance with every girl, including her. A suggestion by somebody that she try out for cheerleading also had her in stitches. She got her braces off and was so happy licking her teeth all day. Halloween night was a blast—she and some others egged a house—and her volleyball team earned a trip to the state championships the next month. “WEEEE!!!!” she wrote.
The only thing bringing her down in the late fall of 2003 was that her commitments to the school volleyball team kept her too busy to perform in the school production of Winnie the Pooh. Volleyball meant road trips, which were grueling in Alaska: early morning wake-up calls, harsh weather, stomach-churning flights in small planes. But for Rachelle it was worth it: she could get out of Hell. The best trip was to Anchorage, which she described with wide-eyed wonder, telling her blog readers that the state’s largest city had everything tiny Craig lacked, including a movie theater, where the team saw School of Rock and a shopping mall, where the team hit the Hot Topic store and Rachelle bought a “‘Johnny the Homicidal Maniac’ shirt.”
The long downtime in airports and ferry terminals also allowed her catch up on homework, listen to music, and mingle with the state’s more colorful characters from remote villages. She wrote of a “moron” from Whale Pass and a guy from Nakauti who was “kinda hot” but had a bad habit of talking to her chest instead of her face. She fantasized at how she could get back at him. She would wear tight jeans and a low-cut fishnet tank top, and lean over the counter and tell him she was a lesbian. She suggested she could wear a T-shirt announcing she was only fifteen years old and if anybody tried anything they’
d go “straight to jail.”
Looking back, her references to being wrongly accused and the object of sexual fascination by older men seemed ominous. But none of what she wrote about in late 2003 would foretell the crisis in which she was immersed a year later. As the winter of 2003–2004 gripped Alaska, the blog took on a darker tone. She wrote of a rare dusting of snow in Craig that washed away with an “evil rain.” She tried to keep her spirits up by staying busy. She sold Christmas trees, worked at a local bazaar and watched DVDs of Jim Carrey movies, X-Men II, Great Expectations. She traveled to Juneau for an Academic Decathlon competition, finishing in fourteenth place, lamenting that she could have done better. She performed in both the choir and the orchestra in the high school holiday concert.
As it always did, the pendulum swung back. Her brother’s return home for the holidays lifted her spirits. They went to the pizza restaurant and watched Bruce Almighty again. For Christmas, she wrote, she got “some really cool shit” that spoke to her personality: CDs, two books by Edgar Allan Poe, a copy of Macbeth, candy, a new coat, pajama pants, a camera case, lotion, candles, drawing supplies and her best gift, a desktop computer with a color printer. “HOLY CHRIST ON A CRAPPER,” she wrote, using another pet phrase. The computer came with preinstalled software for her digital camera.
Two presents, however, spoke to simmering troubles at home. She received a new leather collar and a book of Wiccan charms. Her newfound interest in Wicca concerned her mother and father, whom she called “parental units,” taken apparently from the Coneheads sketch on Saturday Night Live. Her friends didn’t get Wicca, either, which she found “irritating,” especially those who called it a fad. She took to lecturing her blog readers on what it really meant to be Wiccan, saying she was not motivated by becoming “popular” or “cool,” but had a serious interest in it. She explained that she wasn’t worshipping Satan or evil, but quite the opposite.
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