Love You Madly

by Michael Fleeman

  “And that she had given orders that this was the time to do it?” asked McPherron.

  “No, she never actually gave orders that this was time to do it,” said Brian. “At least, I didn’t hear any. Once it got to that stage, the plan of execution was my call.”

  “You were basically given the task of doing the dirty work? You willingly agreed to do this?”

  “I did not want murder on Jason’s conscience.”

  “And then the same thing for Rachelle?”

  “I’d never assumed she would ever be involved.”

  “You understand what a conspiracy is?” asked McPherron.

  “Yes,” said Brian.

  “Everybody has a role in it. Obviously, you’re the guy who did the deed, but these other people assisted you?”

  “No, no,” Brian said.

  “Well, she’s in on it?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “She’s the catalyst. She’s the driving force?”

  “What I’m saying is, when it came to planning, she was definitely not involved in the planning,” said Brian. “I did not want her to know anything. Because just like I knew I was taking a risk simply having Jason involved, every single mouth that knows anything is one more mouth that can talk.”

  “Right, OK. I understand. So you basically kept her out of the loop because you don’t want her to talk?”

  “Yeah. I figured, the more people that knew something, the more likelihood they would respond, for example, if you’re questioning them. If they knew something, their eyes might light up. If a person doesn’t know any specifics about it, they can’t give anything away about it.”

  “But that still makes them a conspirator nonetheless?”

  “Right, I understand.”

  McPherron reminded Brian about a statement he made before they sat for the formal interview: “I keep my promises, no matter how long it takes.”

  The detective asked, “Who did you promise that?”

  “I had given a promise to Jason and previously to Rachelle that if I’d [been] asked to do anything—at that time I hadn’t actually meant murder—I would do it.”

  “You told that to Rachelle?”

  “At one point, I told Rachelle,” said Brian. “Apparently, she spoke to Jason … and Jason came to me and asked me and I said OK.”

  “Because Jason didn’t have the stones to do it?”

  “I can’t say exactly why he came to me, other than the fact that we were very close friends. I was his blood brother and had made promises in the past, that if you ever need something, I would do it.”

  “So she’s for sure, she’s in on the starting phases of this?”

  “From what Jason tells me, yes,” said Brian.

  “Then you get this idea, you run with the ball.”

  “It’s the simple fact that I had studied sort of different military and police enforcement over the years, so I knew more what we might need done,” said Brian. “I actually didn’t like any of the plans, it was just a matter of time and just doing it. Personally, I didn’t think it was well enough funded or anything. I just didn’t think it was going to work.”

  “Funding? What’s that?”

  “It takes money to get items that you want to use to do something like this. I didn’t have lock-picking tools. I didn’t have anything that was professional.”

  “Did Rachelle ever provide any money?”

  “No, she did not,” Brian said. “I provided money. Jason—he got the fuel.”

  “I see. He basically paid for gas. For his truck or the gas for the fire?”

  “He did not pay for the fuel for the fire.”

  “That’s the stuff he borrowed from Lee? Took from Lee?”

  “Yes,” said Brian. The gas came from Lee Edwards’s house, but Jason didn’t know what it was for until he got out to the logging road.

  “After the fact, was Jason in communication with Rachelle?” asked McPherron.

  “I asked him some questions about that,” said Brian, “but I never actually got an answer on it. So I don’t know. From what I could tell, it seemed like he had not … . I have no clue if he did or not. I didn’t have much contact with him other than a couple of phone calls asking how he was doing.”

  No matter what Jason said, Brian wasn’t going to give them up. McPherron looked to Claus and asked, “Have any other questions?”

  “Not right now,” the trooper said.

  They slapped handcuffs on Brian, who grimaced. “I was wondering if you might know,” he asked, “is there a nerve or anything down there that can get pinched by handcuffs.”

  “It’s possible, I suppose, why?” asked McPherron.

  “It’s nothing major,” said Brian. “I’m just like numb on the side. I was wondering if I’d twisted it or something.”

  “Let’s see how it goes in a couple of days,” said McPherron.

  Brian said, “Oh, I’m sure it’s not gonna kill me.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  On Friday evening, five days after Lauri’s burned remains were found, Brian Radel stood before Craig town magistrate Kay Clark for his initial court appearance on murder charges. The courtroom in the red building that also housed Brian’s old computer store was packed. Among those watching were Don Pierce and Doc Waterman. The newly bald Radel was escorted to his seat, where he quietly listened to Clark read the criminal complaint written by Sergeant Randy McPherron accusing Brian of murder in the first degree. The charges were based almost entirely on statements made in the last twelve hours by Brian and Jason.

  Aside from the judge, there were no lawyers physically in the courtroom. Because of the vast distances between cities and villages in most of Alaska, it’s customary for attorneys, and sometimes judges, to make appearances via telephone, even for such serious matters as sentencing. Over the courtroom speakers, Ketchikan district attorney Dan Schally could be heard requesting a cash-only bail of $250,000. It may as well have been $250 million. Brian told the magistrate he was self-employed and made $15,000 in the past year. He listed his assets as fishing gear and an old boat. He had no attorney and hadn’t tried to find one. The magistrate appointed a public defender from Ketchikan to represent him.

  Brian had always valued loyalty, and while the rest of his life would likely be spent in a prison cell, he felt a certain pride. He had promised to Jason, Rachelle, and himself that he would liberate Rachelle from her horrific mother, and he had succeeded. Moreover, he had done everything he could to spare Rachelle and Jason any burden. Brian took the fall, but he could also take the credit.

  It was only much later that he came to realize that Jason, his blood brother, was rapidly abandoning the code of honor that Brian had thought they shared. During the interrogation, the police had told him that Jason sold out Rachelle, but Brian didn’t believe them. He knew Jason was weak—that’s why Brian carried out the kidnapping and murder alone—but he hadn’t appreciated how weak.

  While Brian was standing before the magistrate, Jason was sitting in an Alaska State Troopers patrol car with Bob Claus talking almost nonstop. Jason, too, faced a life sentence, but he never felt more free, unburdening himself not only of the details of the murder but of a lifetime of pain and frustration as a socially awkward fat kid on a remote island.

  After giving yet another statement to investigators at the police station, again without requesting a lawyer, Jason agreed to take a drive to show where everything had gone down that weekend. Claus loaded a video camera and a tape recorder and led Jason to his truck. They pulled out of the police station to a restaurant, where Claus bought Jason a cheeseburger. Jason also was allowed to smoke and stop for bathroom breaks. If Jason got any ideas about escaping, there was an armed trooper in the backseat and a chase car behind them with officers.

  They left Craig and drove to the high school, the ball field on a bluff to their right. Through puffs of cigarettes, Jason shed all pretenses: he and Rachelle were knee-deep in the murder plot from beginning to end. This was not
the first time they had tried to kill Lauri Waterman; just the first time they succeeded. They had talked about putting Lauri’s feet in cement and tossing her off a boat. They had come close to storming her house and shooting her. Each plan was abandoned for one reason or another.

  But one murder attempt nearly came off. As they approached the turnoff to the school, Jason revealed that about four weeks earlier, on an afternoon in late September, Brian was at this location, crouching in a stand of trees with a high-power rifle. The plan had been to gun down Lauri after she dropped off Rachelle for volleyball practice. But Brian had trouble with the gun and the mission was aborted. Jason said he informed Rachelle in an e-mail, using the code phrase “hunting trip,” and promised to try again.

  The sun was now setting as they continued on the road past the sawmill, where mountains of spruce, stripped of their bark and branches, stood near the road; across the street were monitors testing the air for dangerous fumes. Arriving in Klawock, Jason confirmed that he knew exactly what Brian had in mind that previous Saturday as they purchased wine, towels, duct tape, and a pair of small, cheap flashlights.

  After the thwarted assassination attempt, they settled on a plan to stage a drunken-driving accident by kidnapping Lauri and forcing her to drink wine, then driving her off a cliff or a ridge on a remote road. When Rachelle told him that she and her father would be gone over the weekend, they knew they had their window of opportunity and, in Brian, the perfect man for the job.

  As Jason talked about the murder, Claus realized that his prime suspect was a man-child, at twenty-five no more mature than any of the teenagers he hung out with. Jason told Claus about his sad and unsettled childhood. He was ten years old when his family moved from Oregon to Prince of Wales Island, where they lived first in Craig for a year or two before moving to Klawock for another two to three years. The family moved back to Oregon, where Jason finished middle school, then returned to the island for his high school years in Hollis. When he dropped out of basic training in the Marine Corps, he came back to Craig, washing dishes at Ruth Anne’s for about a year before moving to Yakima, Washington, with a couple of friends, where he worked in a plastics plant. That went nowhere, and in a year he was back in Klawock sweeping floors, cleaning toilets, and taking out the trash as a school janitor.

  Claus picked up on what a psychologist would later describe in court: that Jason was a lonely and troubled child who struggled to make friends and establish lasting relationships with peers. Moody, socially isolated, he retreated into comic books, video games, and pornography, battling depression. He felt so numb that as a teenager he would cut himself just so he could feel something. By the time he was an adult, he was consumed with paranoia fueled by pot smoking.

  Jason’s one enduring friendship was with Brian Radel, whom he met when they were both about thirteen or fourteen at the Echo Ranch Bible Camp in Ketchikan. A few years later they reconnected by chance at the meat market in Craig where Brian worked, bonding over computer games and D&D. When Brian opened Dark Wolf Computer Design, Jason helped him on calls to people’s homes to set up their systems.

  When Jason met Rachelle in February of 2004, he was, in all likelihood, a virgin. His father had warned him to stay away from her, telling him, “She’s jailbait.” But Jason fell hard. The first time he saw her, she was with her boyfriend Ian Lendrum. Rachelle told Jason she was in the process of breaking up with Ian. Jason saw his opportunity, and the two began quietly seeing each other over the summer, even as Ian thought he was still with Rachelle.

  Jason had a strong physical attraction to Rachelle, and one day he asked her to send him nude photos of herself. She complied, striking poses suggested by Jason. Soon their relationship, as Rachelle had said, became sexual. It was when he saw bruises on her body that he found out about the abuse Rachelle suffered at home.

  Dating a teenager proved challenging, as Jason opened himself up to a statutory rape charge and Rachelle feared being ostracized by her friends and punished by her family. They met when they could, where they could: in the computer shop, at the T-shirt shop where Rachelle worked, and on Brian’s boat. By August they had their first separation when Rachelle went on vacation to her grandparents’ house in Washington State. It was then that she revealed, while they chatted online, that she also once had a relationship with Brian. Until then Jason thought they had just been friends.

  The beginning of the school year brought more complications. Brian’s store went out of business and it became almost impossible to see Rachelle. They communicated by instant messaging, e-mail, and through letters. One of their Dungeons & Dragons friends, a high school boy named John Wilburn, served as messenger, delivering Jason’s typewritten letters to Rachelle’s locker and bringing Rachelle’s handwritten notes back to Jason. In exchange, Jason got Wilburn pornographic movies. Jason was so desperate to be near Rachelle that he joined the community play, where she was on the lighting crew. The prospect of being on stage terrified him, but at least he could see Rachelle.

  From Klawock, Jason led Claus to the next stop, a gravel pit several miles outside of town. This was to be the rendezvous spot. Jason said he waited there for hours on Saturday night and into Sunday morning, chain-smoking cigarettes while waiting for Brian to kidnap Lauri and drive up with her in the van. In the gravel, Claus collected cigarette butts matching the brand that Jason smoked and photographed the area.

  Jason said that he had finally grown tired of waiting, drove back toward Craig, turned around, and returned to the gravel pit. He repeated this trip several times before seeing oncoming headlights from the van. Jason directed Claus to their next stop, taking them from the paved road onto the winding gravel road that lead to Naukati. Eventually they stopped at a pullout on the left just before Yatuk Creek.

  It was here, Jason said, that Brian killed Lauri. Jason said he had lied earlier when he claimed that he met Brian at the logging road after Lauri was dead. Instead, Rachelle’s mother was still alive, bound in the back of the van. Claus directed Jason through a thirty-five-minute video reenactment of the murder, the production values poor because darkness had set in, but the horror of the attack came through.

  Jason described the tied-up Lauri kneeling on a garbage bag on the gravel: they thought the staged drunken driving would be more convincing if she had no dirt on her. In the illumination of Jason’s truck headlights, Brian first tried to snap Lauri’s neck, then pummeled her with one of the little flashlights, then suffocated her. Jason confirmed everything Brian had said, with the exception that Jason witnessed it. Claus searched the area with a flashlight, but in the days since the murder, the gravel road had been regraded, obliterating any sign of violence.

  The last stop on Jason’s tour was on the other side of the island, a pullout near Thorne Bay where he said they burned some of the gear they had used in the murder. While Jason stayed under guard in the truck with Claus, two troopers found a fire pit about two hundred yards off the road. Amid the ashes and blackened kindling were unburned pieces of pink rope, white cloth, gray duct tape, partially melted, gloves and burnt socks.

  Back at the Craig police station, the investigators, including McPherron and Habib, were discussing how to proceed. DA Schally sent the investigators an e-mail saying he was satisfied with the state of the case.

  “We currently plan on presenting the Radel and Arrant charges to the grand jury on Friday, Nov. 26, 2004, because Thursday, Nov. 25, is Thanksgiving,” the DA wrote in an e-mail at 4:35 p.m. Friday to the investigators. “If we can develop charges against Rachelle Waterman, that case should be presented to the Grand Jury at the same time for multiple reasons.”

  That was a big if. So far, the case against Rachelle was shaky. Even while implicating themselves, Jason and Brian still minimized her role. None of the other people they interviewed, neither her school clique nor her Dungeons & Dragons friends, knew anything about her being involved a murder plot aside from her complaints about her mother and strange behavior after returning from Anchor
age. The closest to an incriminating statement came when Rachelle admitted she lied when she gave Jason an alibi.

  The investigators decided their best course of action was to interview Rachelle again, this time more aggressively. Trooper Bob Claus bowed out. He felt his anger rising during Rachelle’s last interview because he was certain she was lying to his face. He didn’t think he could hold in his emotions in a second round. So Sergeant Mark Habib would play second chair to McPherron if Rachelle agreed to talk to them.

  The pair went looking for her. They stopped into Brian’s arraignment but didn’t see Rachelle. Next they drove to the Pierces’ house, arriving a little before five p.m., and knocked on the door. Lorraine Pierce answered.

  “Is Rachelle here?” asked McPherron.

  “She is,” said Lorraine. “Do you want to come in?”

  As they entered, McPherron saw Rachelle.

  “Hi, Rachelle,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “How you doing?”

  “I’m OK.”

  “Good, well, as you know, Brian got arrested.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And he’s just been arraigned. We talked just a little bit last night and there’s a few things we need to run by you. Would that be OK?”

  Rachelle said, “Yeah.”

  “Would you mind coming down with us to the police station where we talked before?” asked McPherron.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Be a little more private down there.”

  Rachelle said, “Let me get a coat.”

  While Rachelle did this, Habib made small talk with Lorraine Pierce.

  “How you doing?” he asked. “I’ve been meaning to stop by and see how you’re doing.”

  Lorraine said she was glad about the arrests of Jason and Brian.

  “We’re glad too,” he said. “It doesn’t resolve anything, but we’re really glad, too.”

  Rachelle came out. Lorraine asked, “You’re going to go?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m going to go with them.”