As for the religion in which her mother raised her, Rachelle criticized Catholicism for what she saw as its intolerance of gays and others, though her most serious complaint focused on having to get up early on Sundays to go to church. She needed the rest. By early 2004, Rachelle was tired and stretched thin. She was on the volleyball team, the basketball team, the honor choir, and the Academic Decathlon team. She was trying out for the community play and kept a demanding school schedule. She was so exhausted that one day she fell asleep at school during World Geography and dreamed that she was driving a carload of kids. When her friend smacked the desk to wake her up, in her dream the car crashed.
Final exams and an Academic Decathlon competition amped up the stress level, and she warned her readers not to expect to see too many updates. She was so tired and cranky that a couple of days later at school, after she finished an essay, she went in the hall to take a nap, feeling a cold was coming on. That’s when a boy made an unfortunate decision to ask her if she was Wiccan. When she said yes, he asked if she would then be willing to join him in an orgy ritual. Rachelle chewed him out to the point he cried. Her only regret, she reported to her blog readers, was that she didn’t also kick him in the groin.
As the pressures of her schedule mounted, Rachelle clashed more with her mother. Rachelle described her mother as a perfectionist who had to paint Rachelle’s room a particular shade of robin’s-egg blue in December, paying close attention to the corners. “Whatever,” Rachelle said. By February 2004, it was one battle after another, with Rachelle complaining that her mother was finding new reasons to torment her. When Rachelle got a 92 percent on a Spanish test, which she described as “just fantabulous,” her mother instead took issue with Rachelle’s weight. Rachelle’s slender, athletic mother—Lauri had been good in sports and had a trophy collection that rivaled her daughter’s—wanted Rachelle to go on a diet, according to the blog, which Rachelle felt was unnecessary.
Lauri Waterman also didn’t like Rachelle’s penchant for wearing black clothing and leather collars. When Rachelle decided to take her look one step further by getting a tattoo, she said nothing to her mother. One day in February, Rachelle heated up a paperclip and burned a pentagram into an upper buttock, hidden so her mother wouldn’t find it. She got assistance from a friend she didn’t identify and the pain “sucked massively,” but she was proud of the outcome. She said she showed it to an anonymous someone—as a birthday gift.
By late winter and early spring of 2004, Rachelle had entered her worst emotional stretch. She wrote of “little pieces of shit” piling up to the “breaking point” and making her want to cry. She said she didn’t know whether to curl up under the covers or kill somebody or herself. After one particularly nasty argument with her mother—Rachelle had gotten in trouble over something at school—she locked herself in her room. Her mother tried to make peace by offering her a CD and asking if she was depressed.
“I kinda did say yes,” Rachelle wrote.
After researching depression on the Internet and discussing it further with her “female parental unit,” Rachelle wrote that she was prescribed Prozac. She thought the medication would be “happy pills,” but the effect was the opposite, making her feel “hairy” and “stoned” but also so “horny” she had to masturbate twenty times. This reference was the first of what would become several increasingly profane and sexually explicit posts. She started using the F-word more frequently and told her audience she would soon post naked pictures of herself from her digital camera.
Despite the antidepressants, her fights with her mother intensified. They clashed over grades, her wardrobe and sports. Begging out of playing softball, Rachelle didn’t like the coach—she said he taught the same thing over and over that she already knew from T-ball. Rachelle won that argument and focused on volleyball, only to fight again over what Rachelle would wear to the spring prom. Rachelle wanted to wear an “awesome” black velvet Japanese dress, but her mother told her she was too ugly and fat to pull off the dress, she wrote. She said her mother could “bite me.” Her mother pestered her to go fat camp over the summer. She told her “silly mother” she would be the skinniest one there and get hurt when somebody sat on her.
But as it had in the past, the emotional pendulum swung back. In the spring of 2004 she got a job at a T-shirt shop in Craig called Q-Tees. Hard work agreed with her, and she relished creating a new filing system, coming up with shirt designs for her friends, being trusted enough to open and close the store, and getting her twenty percent manager’s cut of the profits. Then her “brother bear” returned home from college for the summer. “Goodness in a can,” she said, using another favorite phrase.
As the weather warmed, so too did relations with her mother. Lauri didn’t even get angry when Rachelle received a C in math. Her mother made her pancakes—though Rachelle couldn’t help noting it was from batter left over from pancakes made for her father and brother. She wondered whether “pod people” had taken over her mother.
It wouldn’t last. Just days after that post, on June 15, Rachelle got in trouble over something not specified. Her mother went “psycho bitch” and Rachelle fled to a friend’s house to spend the night. But then her mom “freaked out” and wanted her home, in case the neighbors found out her mother had banished her. Rachelle was grounded for three days. When she was allowed out of her room, she hated her mother more than ever. She mocked her mother by taking a huge bite out of her toast at breakfast and telling her how good it was. She vowed to herself—and her blog readers—to get out of the house.
When school was out, Rachelle got a second job, this one at the computer store. She wrote she was hoping to learn computer graphics for ten dollars an hour—“WOO it should be fun,” she wrote. She described her mood as content and cryptically referred to an anonymous kind person in her life who did “something so small” that made her feel “all better.” Rachelle made it through the summer without getting grounded again. She kept busy at the T-shirt shop and computer store and had a Fourth of July celebration at the beach with family and friends. Rachelle’s blog went quiet for weeks on end; July had no entries at all.
As the weather cooled and the new school term approached, Rachelle’s mood soured again. By late August, she resumed her blog to announce that she was depressed again and wrote a dark poem that spoke of “contemplating death” and wondering if she would “live to see the stars.” She tried out for one of two female leads in the community play, which was being produced in the high school auditorium, but didn’t get either. Rachelle complained the roles were written for eighteen-year-olds but went to older women. She called the director “retarded” and settled for working on the sound crew.
Her junior year brought another demanding class schedule: Academic Decathlon, advanced literature, US history, advanced calculus, chemistry and band. The varsity volleyball team met each day for practices and frequent travel to other towns and islands. Her sports itinerary included trips to Juneau, Metlakatla, Petersburg, and Anchorage. She was selected to be in the school’s honor choir, which Rachelle announced with an enthusiastic “YEYNESS” on her blog, but singing in the choir also required more practice and travel, with an upcoming trip to Haines, a small town more than 200 miles to the north.
A few days into the new school year, Rachelle had the flu and complained again about feeling alone. She asked her blog audience if anybody else felt like there was nobody to “connect with” or to “comfort you when you find out you might die.” She posted a depressing poem called “Ode to Suicide,” about pain that ate away at her body like lye and left her yearning for relief. Even her depressing poem depressed her. “Wow I suck amazingly at poetry,” she wrote.
In October, she was grounded again, this time for two weeks with more restrictions on her computer, because, she said, she got an 89 percent on a math test and her parents found her Wicca books. When she finally got back limited computer privileges, she announced her liberation as if she were a freed prisoner. She i
nvited friends to the regional high school volleyball tournament being hosted in Craig. She repeated that she was lonely and that the world hated her. But when her volleyball team placed second at the Region 5 regional tournament, earning the players a trip to the state tournament the following weekend in Anchorage, a celebration broke out in the gravel streets of Craig. The team rode around town on a fire truck with ten cars behind them honking. The girls sucked in helium from the balloons decorating the fire truck and yelled in funny voices. A dance followed the regional tournament where not even “kinda sucky” music could keep Rachelle down. An ex-boyfriend tried to put the moves on her, but that didn’t bother her either.
Three days later she and the team were off to Anchorage. A sprained ankle in practice put her in a brace and did not bode well for her performance in the state finals. She had piles of calculus homework that nobody could help her with because it was too advanced. She also felt another cold coming on, and packed up on flu medication. But no matter: her sights were set on a visit to the Hot Topic store.
On Sunday, November 14, Rachelle wrote in her blog at 6:10 p.m. that she had returned from the road trip. She said she was still feeling sick, that the team finished in fifth place, and that she had bought some “incredibly awesome boots” that went to her knees.
She wrote nothing of coming home to find her mother missing. Her blog didn’t mention her first half-hour talk with Sergeant Randy McPherron or her longer, intense interview that left her in tears. It was only the next morning, on Wednesday, November 18, that Rachelle found a computer and posted her one and only message about the event that would rock the island and turn her life upside down:
“Just to let everyone know, my mother was murdered. I won’t have computer acess [sic] until the weekend or so because the police took my computer to go through the hard drive. I thank everyone for their thoughts and e-mails, I hope to talk to you when I get my computer back.”
It was the last blog post she’d make.
About five thousand people would comment on the entry. It would make Rachelle a celebrity in cyberspace and leave the town leaders stunned. That Doc and Lauri Waterman’s overachieving daughter could write so candidly, so crassly, of such private matters—and so unflatteringly of Craig—defied explanation. That she’d dash off a note about her mother’s murder as an explanation for the loss of her computer and hard drive struck many as just plain cruel. Most people had never even heard of a blog. Gossip flourished but rarely left the island’s shores. Soon, parents in Craig, like elsewhere in America, would be keeping a closer eye on what their sons and daughters were putting out on their computers.
Examined in a vacuum, Rachelle’s My Crappy Life blog was neither incriminating nor exonerating. Never in all of her complaints about her mother did Rachelle say she wanted to kill her or wanted anybody else to do it. The names Jason Arrant and Brian Radel never appear. But if Rachelle was the catalyst, as detectives McPherron and Claus repeatedly suggested to her, then the blog offered insights as to why. Police interviews with her friends and family would fill in the rest of the picture.
From what she told police, the two prime suspects in her mother’s murder entered her life in the spring or summer, at the very time that her depression worsened and her fights with her mother were becoming more frequent. If these two men who loved fantasy games wanted a real-life damsel in distress, Rachelle made for an attractive candidate.
The Watermans’ neighbor Lorraine Pierce told investigators that in the winter of 2003 Lauri was “very concerned” about her fifteen-year-old daughter.
“She felt that she was depressed,” Lorraine recalled. “We had discussed what the signs were. We had discussed even the possibility of the type of help she would need. We discussed what the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist was. We discussed what the availability was in Ketchikan for her, whether the doctor would be a female or a male.”
As with many other services, psychological help was a three-hour ferry ride away, since there were no mental health professionals on Prince of Wales Island. At the very least, Lauri and Lorraine considered, Rachelle might need a break from the relentless cold and rain.
“It was very dark here,” Lorraine recalled. “We had discussed maybe extending her trip to see her grandparents in the summer to get her out of Craig a little bit more, maybe attend another volleyball camp or something like that to help pick up her spirits and be in some sunshine.”
Rachelle’s father also noticed a change in his daughter. “She painted her nails black, she had a preference for black clothes, she wore a collar sometimes with studs on it,” her father later said. He knew that her new look corresponded with a growing interest in Wicca, but “we never had a very long discussion about that.” All he knew was that Wicca was “nature-based,” that Rachelle burned incense and candles, and that his wife didn’t like it.
“In matters of religion, Lauri was a little more conservative than I am,” said Doc later. “She was raised [with] a strict Catholic upbringing and she pretty much believed everything that she had been taught growing up.”
For all his volunteer work with the school and Girl Scouts, Doc had only a vague idea of what was going on with his daughter. Lauri handled the day-to-day child rearing and what he called the “minor discipline.” For “major discipline, she would come to me and ask me to be the enforcer,” Doc would recall.
Rachelle was grounded twice, as she had reported in the blog, though Doc gave different accounts. The first time came over the summer when around midnight Lauri woke up to let the cat out and noticed that Rachelle wasn’t in her room. Lauri awakened Doc to investigate. It appeared Rachelle had slipped out through a window in the lower-level family room.
“Lauri had noticed some leaves and grass on the window sill. That was her first suspicion,” Doc Waterman later said.
They waited up until Rachelle came back around two thirty a.m. or three a.m. “I believe she confessed,” Doc Waterman said. “She was confronted with hard evidence.” Rachelle claimed she had been at the ballpark, which made no sense to her parents. “There’s nobody at the ballpark at two o’clock in the morning,” her father said.
Rachelle was restricted to school and her bedroom for several days. She couldn’t leave the house but could stay on her computer, her parents still oblivious to her blogging.
She was punished more severely the second time she was grounded, the incident Rachelle wrote about in October, though again Doc related a different version of events. He told police that Rachelle had snuck out for a second time, returning with a story that she had gone to a friend’s house.
“She was—and I don’t know if I have it all exactly straight—she was trying to put a good spell on the house because her friend was having some kind of problems,” her father said. “This was related to her Wiccan.”
Her parents didn’t believe her and took away her computer privileges in addition to banishing her to her room.
Rachelle’s ex-boyfriend Kelly Carlson got the Rachelle side of things. He told detectives that Rachelle complained her mother—it was always her mother—would ground her for getting bad grades, would be condescending toward her, would put her on a diet limiting her to three meals a day and no snacks.
For all her ranting about her mother in the blog, Rachelle never explicitly accused her of physical abuse, though one entry may have hinted at it. On June 14, when Rachelle wrote her mother “went psycho bitch on me” and grounded her, the post ended with this line: “I even got to fly … down the stairs.” Rachelle listed her current mood as “sore.”
She was more open about it in conversations with her friends.
“I do remember at one point, I don’t remember exactly what was said, but Rachelle had said to me her mother had pushed her,” Kelly recalled later. “I can’t remember if she tried to push her down the stairs. I believe she did.”
Rachelle never asked for help and Kelly didn’t do anything about it.
“I know they had prob
lems,” her friend Amanda Vosloh recalled. “It was more like a mother/daughter arguing a little bit. I never saw Lauri arguing with her daughter. Lauri wanted to protect her, and Rachelle wanted something else … . She would talk about how her mom thought she was fat and would not feed her sometimes because she thought she was overweight. I never really believed that.”
Rachelle also confided to Amanda that her mother had hit her, but she “never emphasized that.” It would be said in passing. “She said that her mom had tried to knock her down the stairs,” said Amanda.
Like Kelly Carlson, Rachelle’s girlfriends did nothing because they didn’t believe her. “She said some things to me about her mom that didn’t seem like they were always true,” recalled Stephanie Claus. “She told me that she would be grounded and her mom wouldn’t feed her, and that to me seemed entirely inaccurate. She got grounded because she got a B-plus on a math test because a B-plus wasn’t good enough for her mom, and that didn’t seem right to me.”
As fond as he was of Rachelle, her former boyfriend Ian Lendrum shared the skepticism. He knew that Rachelle and her mother fought and yelled at each other, and that Rachelle was grounded a couple of times. Then she told him “that her mother hit her and stuff like that,” he recalled. “She said her mother pushed her down the stairs or shoved her or something.” Rachelle showed him bruises and what she said were marks from her mother grabbing her, but he didn’t think much of it: she also had bruises from volleyball.
John Wilburn, a boy who played Dungeons & Dragons with Rachelle over the summer, recalled that Rachelle said her mother beat her and called her fat. Rachelle even said something to the effect of “I wish my mother would die,” but Wilburn thought it was just “normal teenage angst.”
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