Love You Madly

by Michael Fleeman

  “So you knew it was going to happen this weekend?”

  “I had an idea,” Rachelle admitted, “but I wasn’t sure.”

  When she got home, she called Jason to make sure he followed her instructions not to go ahead with the murder. “So we’re OK?” she asked him. He replied, “Yeah, we’re fine.”

  She took that to mean that her mother was safe and she sighed with relief, thinking her mother was gone because she had an unexpected errand. But then Jason told her, “It happened.”

  “What?” she asked Jason in a panic. “What are you talking about?”

  Jason said, “We did it.”

  Rachelle told the investigators, “Do you know how horrified I was?”

  Habib said, “We can understand that.”

  “I told them not to,” said Rachelle. “I told them beforehand that I didn’t want them to do it. They didn’t listen to me.”

  McPherron was less understanding. “You sat there and lied to me, didn’t you?”

  Rachelle started crying again. “I was scared.”

  “You knew who killed your mother, didn’t you?” said McPherron.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “On Sunday,” McPherron said. “You knew it had been done and you knew they did it.”

  “Why have you got to rub it in my face?”

  McPherron told her that she was still withholding information.

  “We’re about 98 percent there,” he said. “But that other 2 percent belongs to you. And I want to know what that other 2 percent is. If you truly do love your mother, you owe it to her to tell us that. You owe it to her to let the world know what really happened.”

  “I just told you what happened.”

  “If you have any concern, care for her, you’re going to tell us.”

  “I just told you what happened.”

  “Rachelle,” he said, “do you know what Brian did?”

  McPherron was merciless, painting a vivid picture for Rachelle. He told her that Brian abducted her mother from bed, forced her to drink a bottle of wine, tied her up, and drove her out to the middle of nowhere on a wet, rainy night. There, on the gravel, he made her get down on her knees in the gravel and tried to break her neck “because,” the detective said, “it looks good on TV.

  “But you know what,” McPherron said calmly, “it doesn’t really work. So he laid her down on the ground and he took a flashlight and he slammed it against her throat about ten times.”

  Rachelle burst into tears. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I want you to understand what happened here,” said McPherron. He told her that Brian then got on top of her mother and pinched her nose and put his hand over her mouth until she died. Jason and Brian took her mother to the end of the logging road, poured five gallons of gasoline on her, and set her on fire.

  “Now, that’s what happened,” said McPherron. “And you knew it was going to happen, and you didn’t do anything to stop it.”

  “I told them not to do it!” Rachelle said.

  “And after you knew what had happened, you didn’t do anything.”

  “I was scared!”

  “You could have brought your mother’s killers to justice. You could have handed them to us on a silver platter.”

  “I was scared.”

  “And instead you sat there and lied to us about it. And now you expect us to believe you?”

  “Why are you asking me questions if you don’t even believe me?”

  “Because I want you to come to understand what’s going on, and I want you to tell me the truth about your involvement in all this. When did you first tell Jason, ‘I want you to get rid of my mother’?”

  She sniffled and breathed in deeply. “I don’t know,” she said. “August sometime.”

  “Were you still dating him? Were you still having sex with him? What was going on?”

  In a small voice she said, “We were kind of, I don’t know what you call it, coming to the end of the relationship. We were just thinking: You know what, this isn’t going to work.”

  “So even though your relationship’s on the skids, you still ask this guy to kill your mom for you? Is that how it worked?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  The plot came up when she called to ask him a question about the community play. He told her he was planning to kill her mother in the house, and Rachelle told him, “I don’t know, you guys. I told you not to kill her before.”

  The plan resurfaced a few weeks later when Rachelle told Jason that her mother had tried to push her down the stairs. McPherron asked her about Jason’s statement that Rachelle’s parents wanted to sell her into slavery.

  “No, it was a long time ago,” Rachelle corrected. “My mom was really mad at me, and they were low on money, and she was talking about selling me for prostitution as punishment.”

  “You told him this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you got to understand, these guys accepted this as gospel. They accepted this as ‘She’s not joking around. This is for real.’”

  “I wasn’t joking around.”

  “They believed that you were truly in jeopardy, and that the only way to save you from your mother was to kill her,” said McPherron. “I mean, these guys were true believers. You had them so wrapped around your finger, they were so in love with you, that they would do anything for you. And he did do anything for you.”

  “I didn’t know that Brian was in love with me.”

  “Well, you’d had sex with him.”

  “A while ago. I cared for him. And then we ended it. I didn’t know he still loved me. I thought we ended that.”

  “Well, some people react differently, you know.”

  “That’s true.”

  “When you have sex with somebody, it’s quite an experience for some, and not for others. Obviously, both of these guys are real connected to you. They really care about you,” said McPherron. “They don’t care much now, but they did then. They feel kind of used now, and they feel manipulated, and they feel stupid that a sixteen-year-old girl talked them into killing her mother for her.”

  “I didn’t use them,” she said. “I didn’t have them wrapped around my finger.”

  “Now, this has been going on for months, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve at times heard their plans and you knew what was going to happen, knew what was going on.”

  “And I told them no.”

  “And you didn’t do anything about it, like warn your mother?”

  “I didn’t think it was necessary because I thought they would listen to me. As you said before, they listened to me.”

  “They listened to you so good that they were ignoring all other instructions,” said McPherron, “which I’m a little skeptical about. If these guys are your servants—”

  “They’re not my servants.”

  “Just listen to me,” said McPherron. “They’ll live and die by what you tell them. If you would have told them no, they wouldn’t have done it.”

  She acknowledged she “had a hunch” they were planning to kill her mother the weekend of the volleyball tournament: that’s why she called Jason from Anchorage. But she kept insisting, “I didn’t know for sure.” But the investigators shot back that they didn’t believe her, that she was downplaying her role—and that they had evidence to prove it.

  “You can start being honest with us,” said Habib. “If you want to make us use all this evidence against you, that’s fine,” he said. “We’ll let a jury see that, and that you weren’t cooperative, you show no remorse in this whole thing.”

  “No,” said Rachelle.

  “Up to the end, you’re going to hold your own,” Habib continued. “You’re not going to budge. You want to go that route, that’s fine. The DA will hear it, the judge will hear it, everybody can hear that.”

  McPherron added, “You’re sixteen, but this is a serious offense, and you will automatically be waived into adult c
ourt. Juvenile bets are off now. You’re in the big leagues now. This is the real McCoy, no do-over, no restarts.”

  McPherron urged her to think ahead. “A bunch of strangers are going to look at you and judge you based upon your behavior, based on how you deal with this and how you answer the following questions. What face are you going to show them? The grown-up woman who is looking out for herself and realizes that the jig is up and it’s time to come clean? Or Rachelle, who wants to play the little girl that thinks she can lie her way out of anything? … We’re giving you an opportunity to tell your side of the story, but we need it lie-free, embellishment-free, omission-free. We don’t need part of the story. We don’t need the part you think we want to hear. We need the whole shebang, starting from day one, when you told Jason that you wanted him to get rid of your mother for you.”

  “I think it was August,” she said.

  “It was before school started?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He said he might use Brian. I wasn’t sure for sure.”

  “But you did approach him and say, ‘I want you to kill my mother’?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “I just said, ‘Sometimes I just wish my mother wasn’t here. She causes me so much pain.’”

  “But the gist of it was, yes, you did want her dead, and you wanted him to take care of it for you.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Rachelle said she didn’t discuss murder plans with Jason, but didn’t object as “different ideas were discussed,” some of which she knew about, some she didn’t. She never specifically ordered them to kill her mother: Jason instead heard her complaints about her mother, then acted on his own. The plan to shoot her mother outside the school, for instance, probably grew out of a conversation she had with Jason.

  “The day before, my mom had gotten angry at me and beaten me, and I told him about it,” she said. “And I guess that’s when they threw [the plan] together, because they were afraid she was going to do something. And I was honest: I was worried for myself, and I told him then. I said, ‘I’m worried. I don’t know what my mom’s going to do. I’m scared to go home.’ And they, I guess, threw it into gear.”

  She called Jason about three p.m. and was told that her mother would be shot around five p.m. She implored them to call off the plan, but Jason wasn’t sure if he could reach Brian. “I said, ‘Please try. Please, please, please try.’”

  Similarly, Jason decided to go after her mother in October after she related more accounts of abuse. “She was beating me, and I told them,” said Rachelle. “And they said, ‘Well, what do you want us to do?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I just really wish she wouldn’t hit me, and I wish I could make her happy.’ And they said, ‘What about the plan?’ and I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ I was kind of on the fence about it. And then they kind of started plotting it.”

  She then happened to mention to Jason that her dad was going to be out of town the same weekend she was. That’s when she began to worry that the plan was in effect. She called Jason from Anchorage that Friday to call it off, but he said she was being emotional and she’d thank him later. Rachelle responded with “some not very nice things that probably pissed him off,” she said. Her harsh words “might’ve encouraged him not to listen.”

  She tried to reach him again but couldn’t, which she took as a good sign. She assumed he was at a friend’s house comforting the friend after an uncle’s suicide.

  “So I almost felt relieved, you know?” said Rachelle. “I was thinking: You know what, I think it’s OK. So I breathed a bit easier. And I got home and she wasn’t there.”

  McPherron asked, “I still don’t understand why you weren’t raising the alarm flags. I mean, did you tell anybody else about this?”

  “No,” said Rachelle.

  “I mean, weren’t you the least bit concerned about it?” he asked.

  “I thought it was going to be OK,” said Rachelle. That’s why she didn’t warn her mother when they spoke on Saturday about the chamber of commerce meeting.

  “You didn’t tell your mom nothing?” asked McPherron.

  “I thought it was over,” Rachelle said.

  “I mean, heaven forbid we interfere with the volleyball tournament, right?”

  Rachelle snapped back, “I was done playing by that time, thank you very much.”

  It was only when she got home and called Jason that she found out what happened. He told her, “Yeah, it’s done. We did it. She’s gone.”

  “And I freaked out,” she said. She didn’t tell police the truth initially because she was scared. “It was wrong and I didn’t want it.”

  When she was told she had seemed to be joking at school after her mother’s murder, she snapped, “Forgive me for trying to have a smile in the time of gloom.”

  The investigators continued to push her for more information, telling her repeatedly that she played a more active role in the plot.

  “You’re still downplaying. You’re still diminishing. You’re still trying to squirm out of this.”

  “I’m telling you what happened.”

  “Not everything. You’re holding back.”

  “Please, please tell me, then: What am I holding back?”

  “I don’t need to tell you nothing. You need to tell me.”

  “Well, apparently you know more than I do, because apparently I’m holding back.”

  “I do,” said McPherron, “because I’ve talked to your two partners and they’ve told me everything. I found all kinds of things out at the crime scene.”

  She said Jason and Brian were trying to “drag my butt in with them” because “they’re angry.”

  “Oh, they’re definitely angry,” said McPherron.

  “I’m sure Brian’s mad because I didn’t know he loved me, and I didn’t love him back,” said Rachelle.

  “Jason’s the one that’s angry,” said McPherron. “It’s Brian who still loves you. He’s throwing himself on a sword for you, you know.”

  Habib said, “Brian makes no sense to me.”

  “Brian’s a psycho,” said McPherron.

  “I agree,” said Rachelle. “Why do think I broke up with him?”

  “Brian is a crazy guy,” McPherron agreed.

  “You know,” said Rachelle, “I broke up with him because he was freaking me out about marriage and stuff.”

  “Well, he’s a man of commitment,” said McPherron.

  “Yes,” Rachelle said. “I realized.”

  “He promised you he was going to take care of your mom and he did it,” said McPherron.

  “He didn’t listen,” said Rachelle. “Jason didn’t listen.”

  “You didn’t do a very good job of stopping them, did you?” said McPheron.

  Rachelle answered with more sarcasm: “Well, maybe I should not ever be on a debate team.”

  “You don’t need to be a smart aleck with me,” said McPherron.

  “You don’t need to question everything I say, then,” said Rachelle.

  They bickered some more before Rachelle asked, “So, can I just know: Am I going to go to jail?”

  “Eventually,” said McPherron. “But I need to understand just exactly what your role in this all is. You are going down with Jason. It just depends on how hard you go down with him. Quit telling me what you think I need to hear. Tell me what happened.”

  “If I was going to tell you what I think you need to hear,” said Rachelle, “I’d be saying everything a whole lot different.”

  “How would you be saying it?”

  “Probably what you want to hear is that I did it myself,” she said. “Because right now I’m thinking all you want to hear is I had the most involvement.”

  Finally, McPherron said, “We can go around and around about this, and we’ve been talking about it for a quite a while. How about this: How about we take a wee break.” He said he’d come back in ten minutes and urged Rachelle to “think about a few things.”

  “Have you told my dad yet?” aske
d Rachelle.

  “No,” said McPherron. “We’re going to have to.”

  “I know,” she said. “How long am I going to go to jail? How long?”

  “I don’t know those things. All I’m after is the truth. That’s my job. The diviner of the truth.”

  After McPherron and Habib walked out, Rachelle sat in the little interview room alone, crying, breathing heavily, blowing her nose.

  Eight minutes later Sergeant Habib returned. Habib closed the door, took a seat, and said, “Rachelle, why don’t you sit up for me for a second. I want you to wipe your eyes for me. Compose yourself. You’re sixteen years old. You’re almost an adult. You need to start thinking like an adult, so I’m going to talk to you like one, all right?”

  “OK,” said Rachelle.

  Habib began using the same approach as he had with Jason: talking to Rachelle islander to islander.

  “I want you to be very, very clear on this. Very clear,” he said. “And I want you to listen to me. We have been working on this for five days now, twelve-hour days. We have crime lab technicians down here, just like you see on TV. It’s CSI. We have homicide investigators down here, three of them. This department, the troopers here, everybody has been working on this. We have done numerous interviews. We have interviewed your friends. The things your friends have told us is amazing.”

  “These two [Jason and Brian] have basically ’fessed,” he said, and on this score he was truthful. Habib implored Rachelle to come clean with McPherron.

  “That man is one of the top homicide investigators and top interviewers in the state of Alaska,” Habib told Rachelle as she sniffled. “That’s why he flies all over the state from Anchorage to do these cases. He is a pro. He’s got the patience of Job. He’ll stay on this case ’til hell freezes over. He’s not done ’til he says he’s done. He’s got ya. He’s got you. He’s got your involvement in the case.

  “You have a choice. And this is the only choice you have,” Habib said. “This is the only decision you have to make right now. This is not a game. This is not high school: Do you want us to stand up with the district attorney and tell them that you cooperated, you screwed up, you weren’t thinking? Or do you want us to stand up and say for five days you’ve lied to us? Down to the end, when we present all this evidence in front of a jury, you continued to lie to us and bullshit us? Trying to show us you’re smarter?”