Love You Madly

by Michael Fleeman

  Jason said, “Yeah.”

  “Did Brian agree to do the hands-on, the killing part?” asked McPherron.

  “Yes,” said Jason. “He didn’t want me to have any part in that.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because he didn’t want me to see it,” said Jason. “I guess he was trying to protect me from that. I couldn’t even hardly put my own dog down when I had to.”

  According to Jason, the plan called for Brian to break Lauri’s neck, but “I don’t know if that’s actually how it ended up happening.” Brian told Jason the killing would occur close to the Forest Service 3012 road, but didn’t say exactly where. They would dispose of the body by torching the van with Lauri inside it.

  “I was afraid that Rachelle wasn’t safe with her mother,” he said. “And that one day things were gonna go too far. She was gonna get hurled down the stairs and not get back up.”

  “So you planted the seed in Brian’s head?” asked McPherron.

  “Yeah,” said Jason. “And then he’s the one that ended up working out the details. We’d actually tried to think up different things.”

  Of the murder plans they had first discussed “nothing really seemed feasible” for a couple of months. And when Rachelle told him she had stopped having problems at home, their plotting “seemed to boil down a little bit.”

  Then Rachelle told him recently about getting “hurled down the stairs again” and “threatened with a knife” by her mother.

  “Brian and I decided that she needed to be safe,” said Jason. “And he worked out a plan and relayed it to me … . And then we carried it out.”

  “OK,” said McPherron.

  Jason said, “I’m gonna be in jail for the rest of my life, aren’t I?”

  “Well,” said McPherron, “I don’t know that. But I appreciate you being honest with us finally.”

  Jason said, “I just wish I had done it that night.”

  “Done what?”

  “Just dropped him off and come down, told you guys what had really happened,” he said. “I can’t take that back now, but it’s been eatin’ at me. And now I’m just in worse trouble.”

  “Well,” said McPherron, “the truth is—what the truth is.”

  For all Jason’s newfound candor, questions nagged at McPherron and Claus, all of them relating to Rachelle. For two men to be willing to kill for her, she had to have offered something special.

  “Was there ever a threesome?” suggested McPherron.

  Jason appeared genuinely taken aback. “No, absolutely not,” he said.

  “So you loved her that much?” the detective asked.

  “I still do,” Jason said.

  It was over for Jason Arrant. He put on his shoes and coat and reached for a cigarette.

  “Is there any possibility that I could have just one of those before we leave?” he askd.

  “Yeah, sure,” said Claus.

  “Just take one butt,” added McPherron.

  As Jason lit up, McPherron asked one more time, “Just to be sure now, did you ever tell Rachelle what was gonna happen?”

  “No,” said Jason through cigarette smoke.

  “And she was never privy to any of these discussions about how we’re gonna do that?”

  “Not with me,” he said. “She might have been with Brian.”

  “‘Might have been’? Did he ever say she was?”

  “No, but I can’t say whether he did or not.”

  Claus clamped the cuffs. “You can continue to smoke while I get this done,” the trooper said.

  “One more drag and let’s go,” said McPherron.

  Jason’s mother, the police dispatcher, watched in horror. “I didn’t know you guys were taking him,” she said.

  Claus gave her a copy of the arrest warrant and led Jason to the patrol car for the twenty-minute ride to the police station in Craig. Shortly after one a.m., Jason was placed in a cell.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Lauri Waterman case was slow to attract media attention. Prince of Wales Island has one newspaper, the weekly Island News. Supported by ads for concrete contractors, a septic tank maintenance company, beauty salons, the floatplane charters and Doc Waterman’s business, Island Reality, the paper keeps locals up on changes in fishing regulations, the tide tables, and events at the library and senior center, but didn’t have anything on the murder.

  There are no television or radio news stations in Craig. People with cable get their TV news from Anchorage stations, which wouldn’t carry the story for days. Those with satellite dishes pick up the news from Seattle or Denver.

  The first paper with the story was the Ketchikan Daily News, which arrives on the island each morning in bundles carried in the small cargo sections of floatplanes. Under the headline “Body Inside Burning Van Is Identified,” the article said that troopers were investigating Lauri’s death as a “possible homicide.” Doc told the paper of returning home from Juneau to find his wife missing. The story made no mention of troopers’ suspicions about Rachelle, nor was it able to include by deadline the overnight developments, including the arrest of Jason Arrant after he admitted to helping dispose of Lauri’s body.

  Another major development in the case also didn’t make the morning papers. Jason’s undercover operation provided enough evidence to get an arrest warrant for Brian Radel. Trooper Bob Claus tracked down Brian at his mother’s house and, after a brief discussion, handcuffed him and drove him to the Craig jail, where he spent the night in a cell near that of his longtime friend.

  Brian had told Jason he was willing to take the fall, and by Friday afternoon troopers had collected circumstantial evidence against both men. Irving Langmaid, a clerk at the Black Bear Market, a convenience store in Klawock that sells everything from fishing tackle to frozen dinners, told investigators that both men—whom he knew—came into the store on Saturday and bought two rolls of duct tape. Security video at the nearby Klawock Liquor Store showed Jason and Brian buying a bottle of wine at 4:52 p.m. that same day. A search of Brian’s mother’s house turned up a black hat, and a search of Lee Edwards’s house turned up electric hair clippers, a clump of reddish hair, and ashes in a five-gallon bucket near the woodstove.

  At two p.m. on Friday, Brian was let out of the cell and escorted into the same interview room where Rachelle had been two days before. As he sat down with Sergeant Randy McPherron and Trooper Bob Claus, Brian said he was willing to make a full voluntary statement on video explaining in detail how he kidnapped and killed Lauri Waterman.

  He spoke in calm, matter-of-fact tones. When McPherron read him his rights and reminded him he had the right to remain silent and to have an attorney, Brian waived them both. “I can understand. I figure it’s not a problem because I’m planning to plead guilty when this gets to court anyway,” he said. “I have no problem talking to you guys.”

  McPherron got out a pad of paper and asked Brian to help him diagram exactly how he got into the Watermans’ house.

  “I realize I’m not the world’s greatest drawer here,” he said, scratching out a diagram. “Here’s the street, here’s the garage doors, here’s Lauri’s minivan parked in the—was it nosed in?”

  “Nosed in,” said Brian.

  “Here’s the access door with the cat door. Could you show me—I’ll use a different color marker—exactly where you got in the house?”

  “Absolutely,” said Brian.

  Brian said he broke into the two-car garage around twelve thirty a.m. or one a.m. “through the first window I came to,” which he struggled to open. He fumbled in the dark garage, afraid of turning on the light and being exposed to neighbors, before he found a door to the house. He tried to jimmy the lock with a butter knife, two of which he’d brought for that purpose, but “I could see that wasn’t gonna work.”

  Crouching on the floor, he reached his arm through the cat door and tried to get to the doorknob on the other side, but came up short. “So I took the cat door out,” he said. With the ex
tra room, he could reach the knob with his fingertips and “pulled the door slowly open.”

  He found himself in the Watermans’ lower-level family room with a TV, a sofa, beanbag chairs, and a card table, though at the time he wasn’t sure where he was. He had no map, even though he wanted one, and he “didn’t have any idea of the layout of the house,” having been there only once, briefly.

  In the darkened house, he found the stairs to the second floor—the main level with the living room, dining room, kitchen, laundry room, and bedrooms for Rachelle and her brother, Geoffrey.

  “I looked around that floor, checked different rooms there, and I could see that there wasn’t anyone in that area,” Brian said.

  Going to the top level, Brian quietly cracked open a door and saw Lauri in the master bedroom.

  “She was asleep at the time,” he said. “Then she got up and closed the door.”

  Brian feared she had heard him. He hid around the corner just in time not to be seen, and stayed there, motionless as best he could in the dark, for the next ninety minutes.

  “I really psyched myself up considering what I was going to do,” he said. “Was I going to go through with it?”

  At about three a.m., he decided to act.

  “I came up. I had the flashlight shining at her just in case she turned around, so that you know, blinded, because I didn’t have any idea of hideaway guns or whatever,” he said. “So I came up. I had a cloth in my hand, put it over her head, pulled it sideways, and just held it around her mouth.”

  “So that action woke her?” asked McPherron.

  “That action woke her.”

  With his huge body, he pinned her down to the bed. He didn’t say anything to her and she didn’t say anything to him. She didn’t resist.

  “Then what happens?” asked the detective.

  “I had duct tape in my pocket,” he said. He put the tape over the cloth gag, then bound her wrists behind her back the same way.

  “When did the rope come into play?” said McPherron, remembering the fibers found on and around the bed.

  “The rope didn’t come in play until I had her tied up completely,” Brian said. “It was during the process of moving her around. Anytime I was away from the bed, she had two hands tied behind her back so that I could look around the room so I still had some sort of control.”

  “So she’s lying there. You’ve now gagged her, tied her wrists behind her back. Did you tie her feet up then?”

  “Yes.”

  “The cloth first, then the duct tape?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why that particular way?”

  “So that I wasn’t going to leave bruising or abrasion,” Brain said. “Not to leave any residue of the tape.”

  He then bound her wrists and legs with rope, which he described as old, bristly, greenish, muddy rope that had been lying on the side of the road. She was wearing green panties and a flannel nightdress. He held the other end of the rope like a leash while he went through the dresser drawers to find something for her to change into.

  “So you wanted to get her dressed? Why is that?”

  “Because, if things had gone the way I would have wanted ’em, I would have made this look like an accident.”

  “Like a driving accident you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “OK, makes sense,” said McPherron.

  Holding her with the leash, Brian found an item in the drawer and asked Lauri, “Is this your clothes?” She nodded yes. He untied her enough to change into a “shirt or whatever.”

  McPherron asked, “Did you have sex with her?”

  “No, I did not,” said Brian.

  “Did you touch her?”

  “Other than to simply grab her on the shoulder, no,” he said.

  Wearing rubber gloves, Brian helped Lauri get dressed, taking off her gag so she could answer questions: at one point he wanted to know where her purse was.

  With Lauri Waterman now dressed, he tied her hands again behind her back, had her put on shoes, tightened the rope around her wrists, and told her they were going downstairs to show him where her purse was. They went into the kitchen for the next part of his plan.

  “I went and searched the refrigerator,” he said, “found a thing of wine, got a glass and simply filled it up, told her to drink it until the bottle was empty.”

  “What’d you do with the glass?” asked McPherron.

  “The glass went in the sink.”

  “What’d you do with the bottle?”

  “The bottle went in the car. Should be in the front of the car,” he said. In fact, it was a melted blob. “It was in the front seat.” He had no use for the bottle of wine he purchased earlier in the day; it was disposed of later.

  Around this time Brian looked at his gloves and realized he had made the first of several blunders that night.

  “The left hand one got ripped,” he said; that accounted for the tip of rubber police found.

  “And when did that happen?” asked McPherron.

  “That’s when I was putting the duct tape on.”

  “You just left it there?”

  “It wasn’t until I got downstairs that I saw that it had been ripped,” he said, “so pretty much figured at that point I was probably screwed.”

  Carrying the wine bottle, Brian led the bound and gagged Lauri into the garage, where he told her to get into the minivan. He ordered her to lie sideways across the back passenger seat. Now, apparently drunk from the wine, she lay on her right side, her gagged face pressed against the seat back. Brian tied her bound hands to an armrest.

  He ran back upstairs for a once-over, still remembering that missing glove tip, but he couldn’t find it.

  “I was in a hurry to try to get out of town before it got too light,” he said. He packed his gear into a trash bag he had brought and tossed it on the seat behind the one where Lauri was tied. The last thing he did at the house was to reattach the cat door, then got into the van.

  He removed Lauri’s gag to ask her where the electric garage door opener was. She told him it was on the sun visor. He drove out of the garage, closed the door behind him, and headed out of town, past Klawock, until he go to the T in the road, turned left, and drove about a half hour until the pavement turned to gravel. He went another twenty minutes on gravel toward Naukati. Much of the road was winding and unpaved. Lauri, her stomach full of wine she was forced to drink, bounced around in the backseat but never said anything.

  Brian pulled over into a turnout on the left side of the road, unsure exactly where he was.

  “There’s a creek or a river or something,” he said. “There was trees all around.” He recalled a small bridge just beyond where he pulled over.

  It was occurring now to Bob Claus that although Brian had grown up on Prince of Wales Island, he had never been to this area before. Less than an hour’s drive from his home, Naukati is one of only a handful of communities on the entire island, but for Brian, the trooper said later, “this was the end of his known universe.”

  Brian said it was now about four or four thirty a.m. He opened the sliding side door of the minivan, pulled Lauri out, and set her down on the gravel on her knees.

  The plan was to fill her with wine and make it look like she died in a drunk-driving crash.

  It didn’t go as Brian had hoped.

  He tried to break her neck with his bare hands, but although he heard a crack, she was still moving and breathing.

  He then pummeled her neck with a red flashlight, and still she didn’t die.

  Finally, he covered her mouth with a cloth and pinched her nose and held on to her.

  Through it all, Lauri never resisted, never screamed. But at one point she said to Brian, “Can I ask you a question?” She seemed dazed or drunk or both.

  Brian recalled, “She just kept repeating that. She didn’t say anything else.”

  “And did you reply?” asked McPherron.

  “I stopped and said, ‘What?’ And she
just kept repeating that: ‘Can I ask you a question? Can I ask you a question?’”

  “OK,” said the detective, “she’s on the ground, you’re pinching her nose and covering her mouth: Did she finally stop moving then?”

  “She stopped to a certain point, but she wasn’t dead yet,” said Brian. “But I figured I was running out of time. I figured if I had to, I’d take her to another location and finish her off. I figured likely she was dying. Because of the throat, she was going to die anyway. So I put her back in the vehicle.”

  “Did you see any blood? Did you see any swelling?”

  “There was blood. I saw some marks on her throat. There was some marks on the cloth.”

  Her feet and hands were still bound when he loaded her back into the van’s backseat. She was in the fetal position. He got into the van and drove to the 3012 turnoff, where he had told Jason to wait for him. By now it was about five a.m. and just starting to turn light. It was raining softly but there was no wind or fog.

  He saw Jason’s truck. From the intersection, Jason followed Brian up the logging road. Brian pulled over and cut the bonds from Lauri.

  “Did you ever check to see if she was dead yet?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Because I wasn’t exactly interested in burning someone alive. I decided I was gonna kill her, but I figured I’d finish her then.” He said he would have suffocated her again. He checked for a pulse and didn’t feel one.

  “And just to confirm,” asked McPherron, “did Jason ever lay hands on her?”

  “No, he did not,” said Brian.

  “So then you soaked the body pretty thoroughly in gas?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then put some in the car?”

  “I soaked the front seat, all the seats, anywhere I’d been sitting, where my feet might have been.”

  He left the wine bottle and her purse in the car, but took out his break-in gear—the butter knife, duct tape, etc.—which was in a trash bag. Just then the car rolled down the side of the hill a few feet. He went down the bank, poured more gas in the van, ran a trail of gas up the hill, and went to get a lighter from Jason’s truck, about fifty yards away.