The Ketchikan Public Defenders Office was appointed to represent her. Bail was set at $150,000—$100,000 less than that of Brian and Jason because she was a minor, didn’t participate in the actual murder, and was not considered by the DA’s office to pose the same threat to the community as the nearly decade older Jason and Brian. Otherwise, her age gave her no advantages. Alaska’s tough murder laws call for anyone as young as sixteen to be tried as an adult. At the time of the murder, Rachelle had been sixteen for about two and a half months. If convicted, she stood to spend ninety-nine years in an adult women’s prison.
Sitting in the audience section at the court appearance was Ketchikan Daily News reporter Tom Miller, who in his article would describe the sixty-year-old Doc Waterman as “shaken throughout his daughter’s arraignment hearing.” Miller noticed that when it was over, Doc stood in the aisle, reached out, and touched Rachelle’s elbow as troopers ushered her out on her way to the women’s prison in Juneau. It was a bittersweet detail picked up by the Associated Press and repeated in stories that would soon sweep the nation.
At 1:30 in the afternoon, the Alaska State Troopers released a statement on their Web site providing the most detailed account of the events leading up to the arrests of Jason Arrant, Brian Radel, and Rachelle Waterman.
“Rachelle Waterman approached Arrant and solicited him to kill her mother, Lauri Waterman,” the statement said. “Arrant agreed to kill Lauri Waterman and enlisted the aid of Brian Radel, age 24, of Thorne Bay. Between the solicitation and the actual murder, Arrant, Radel and Waterman plotted several murder scenarios and aborted one attempt to carry out a plan in September 2004.”
The statement said that on November 10, 2004, Rachelle told Jason that both she and her father would be out of town for the upcoming weekend and “agreed that it would be a good time to attempt to carry out their plan because Lauri Waterman would be home alone.” After Jason and Brian “made preparations” for their plot, Jason dropped off Brian near the Watermans’ house, where Brian “abducted Lauri Waterman out of her bed and forced her into her minivan that was parked in the garage.”
Brian drove her to central Prince of Wales Island and met Arrant with a plan “to murder Waterman and to stage what appeared to be a fatal drunk driving motor vehicle accident,” the statement said, “but after Radel had murdered Waterman they changed their plan.” Lauri’s body was loaded into the van, driven to the end of Forest Service Road 3012, soaked in gasoline, and set on fire to destroy the evidence. When Rachelle got home Sunday, she was briefed by Jason.
“This account,” the statement said, “was developed during interviews with the three defendants over the past four days. During the interviews all three made admissions as to their involvement in the murder. Physical evidence recovered at the various crime scenes corroborated many of the defendants’ statements.”
The statement was signed by Trooper—and longtime Craig resident—Robert Claus.
He left out some details: that Lauri was forced to drink wine, then was bludgeoned with a flashlight. Claus’s statement said “blunt object.” And there was no mention of the apparent actual cause of death, Brian choking Lauri with his bare hands. Also missing was any mention that the murder was spurred by Rachelle’s claims her mother physically abused her. When the Anchorage Daily News ran a lengthy story a couple of days later, it said, “Troopers said they are trying to uncover a motive.”
The people of Craig were stunned, the no-nonsense, cop-report prose laying bare these horrific acts. “Everybody is pretty much in disbelief,” Trooper Captain Kurt Ludwig—Claus’s boss in Ketchikan—told the Anchorage Daily News. “The family is pretty prominent.” Craig School District superintendent Ronald Erickson added, “This is a big surprise to everybody. We all need to hold judgment until we know why it happened.”
It didn’t take long before the social networking community linked the arrest of Rachelle Waterman with smchyrocky’s My Crappy Life blog. Rachelle’s final post saying, “Just so you know” her mother was murdered attracted thousands of comments, some pained. The DrudgeReport picked up the story, as did Web sites with names like Surf Wax, Daily Rotten, and Crime 2000. LiveJournal would take down Rachelle’s blog, but not before thousands had read it and cached it, leaving it on sites for all to download. Here was a landmark: the first blogger accused of murder. “This isn’t a legend, it’s a sad tragedy, because this is a no win situation for all involved,” wrote a Craig resident using the name usa-nightmare. But many more were of a less thoughtful vein. “An LJ [LiveJournal] killer! Cool as fuck,” wrote a mr. twisty. Rachelle also was memorialized in a song “Van on Fire” by the Washington State rap group Futuristic Sex Robotz.
Rachelle’s candid and often unflattering posts on the limited opportunities in “Hell, Alaska” shined a light the locals of this tourist-reliant island—including the chamber of commerce that Lauri Waterman helped the night of her death—would rather not see. This young girl was openly writing of Wicca, masturbation, the creepy guy on the ferry, the cruel treatment of classmates, the snide remarks about friends, and troubles with a “female parental unit” who found her daughter too fat.
As the era of social networking was dawning, this would become the voice of the online generation: sarcastic, dark, angst-driven, complaining, snide, dismissive, ironic, unable and unwilling to bother to spell correctly or use proper grammar. This was the generation for which privacy meant something else, that life could be played out—and commented upon—on the computer stage, the virtual public. This was the generation that didn’t just love the emerging waves of reality stars—the bachelors and bachelorettes and Hills girls—but identified with their life-lived-in-public more than their more discreet, off-line parents.
In reporting that people were now “flocking” to My Crappy Life, the Anchorage Daily News marveled at how her blog, without filters or editors, was a “fascinating peephole into a world where lock-and-key diaries have been replaced by journals written for the whole planet to read and respond to, a world where voyeurism has been compounded by participation.” The story spread around the world, with the London Sunday Telegraph commenting on the “pale and pretty” Rachelle, “clever at school and a keen singer,” who seemed on the surface to be a “normal, angst-ridden teenager” who, if convicted, would become “the blogging world’s first killer.”
Police pored over the blog and read thousands of comments from the public. Comparing blog entries with evidence from the investigation, including the statements to police by Rachelle, Jason, and Brian, placed Rachelle’s teenage tribulations in a more serious light, but Sergeant Randy McPherron found nothing of evidentiary value in them.
“I don’t know if it’s just me being a cynical old cop or what, but come on, it’s a sixteen-year-old girl doing a journal,” McPherron told the Anchorage Press, a weekly newspaper that printed many of her blog entries. “You might want to take with a grain of salt what’s being said there.”
In an interview with the Anchorage Daily News, he said that he still didn’t have a clear idea why Rachelle wanted to kill her mother. “We couldn’t cross that bridge of motive with her,” he told the newspaper. “Obviously there was some discord in the family, some problems between mother and daughter,” he added. “But there’s no evidence that Lauri Waterman was behaving in any way but as a normal parent. She was trying to keep her [daughter] out of trouble. Obviously, Rachelle chafed at that.”
By Monday, November 22, the teenager at the center of all this was in Juneau, behind the walls of the Lemon Creek Correctional Center, Alaska’s only prison for women, housing both those convicted of crimes and those awaiting court dates. Rachelle was housed with seven women serving sentences and thirteen others awaiting their fate at trial—all adults. She was the only minor in the facility. The grand jury delivered exactly what the prosecution wanted, a smorgasbord of charges, including conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, second-degree murder, kidnapping, first-degree burglary, and first-degree vehicle the
ft. The only difference between the charges Rachelle faced and those of Jason and Brian, who were incarcerated to the south in Ketchikan, was that the men also had evidence-tampering counts.
Her father remained in Craig, reeling under the weight of a painful paradox. Don Pierce, who was with his old friend Doc Waterman when they got the news of Rachelle’s arrest, said Doc’s emotions swirled. “As painful as the loss of Lauri was,” Don later told Dateline. “I think that the arrest of his daughter was even harder.”
Police were not done yet—there were more search warrants to be served and more evidence would come to light—leaving Doc in a bind. He wanted to help solve his wife’s murder but he also wanted to protect his daughter. In the weeks and months after Lauri’s murder, he coped as only Doc knew how, exhibiting a calm, detached demeanor that perplexed all but his closest friends. Tears came only once in the days after the murder; otherwise, he kept strong and busy for the sake of Lauri’s family, who had arrived in Craig for her funeral.
“Doc’s a very brave man,” Don Pierce said later. “He has faced many things in life that I wouldn’t want to face, the Vietnam War being one of them. And in our travels over the island that next week we had talked about it, and [he] told me that it wasn’t that he was going to be cold, it wasn’t that he didn’t want to care, but the only way that he could see getting past this was if he put it in survival mode like he had in the Vietnam experience.”
Doc didn’t talk about the war, but those who knew him well knew it had been traumatic. “That part of that experience he still had not dealt with and it was going to take a long time for him to get to the point where he would be able to deal with Lauri’s death,” added Don. “We helped him in those roles as much as we could, but it was a very hard experience for him.”
Even as islanders openly expressed anger over Rachelle, Doc did not hide. He went to his real estate office every day, conducting business as usual. Rachelle’s brother, Geoffrey, returned from college, faced with the same predicament as his father. Both decided they would stand by Rachelle while also cooperating with police on building a case against her.
In the days after Rachelle’s arrest, officers returned to the Waterman house to search for more evidence of how Lauri Waterman was kidnapped. Sergeant Mark Habib checked the garage windows, finding cobwebs pushed up against the glass. This was an indication the window had recently been opened. On the sill he saw what appeared to be a boot print and, outside under the window, a yellow box of spark plugs that had apparently toppled from the workbench when Brian went through the window.
More evidence came from the computers used by Rachelle, Jason, and Brian. Although Sergeant Randy McPherron and Trooper Bob Claus told the three during the interviews that police had a wealth of computer evidence, in fact the analysis was only just beginning weeks after the arrests at the crime lab in Anchorage. Trooper Christopher Thompson, who worked in the computer and financial crimes unit, used forensic software designed for law enforcement that is able to recover documents and photos, even if the files have been deleted. Exploring the dark recesses of the hard drive, Thompson typed in search terms such as “parental unit,” “Lauri,” “Rachelle,” and Rachelle’s various nicknames.
The software failed to turn up any of the many instant message notes sent between Rachelle and Jason, and only a few e-mails relevant to the case. But Jason’s computer contained something detectives found helpful: a file with Rachelle’s name containing nine photographs and four video clips, time-stamped July 12, 2004—shortly before Rachelle left for a summer vacation to her grandparents’ house. The photos appeared to have been taken with a digital camera, probably the one Rachelle reported on her blog that she had received the previous Christmas.
They showed Rachelle on her bed taking off her clothes and posing provocatively for the camera with explicit closeups. The videos featured similar poses, the last one showing a naked Rachelle tapping at the keyboard. A text file contained Jason’s instructions for the poses he wanted.
Taken together, the evidence from the garage and the photos and videos corroborated the statements by Jason and Brian. The photos and videos in particular, investigators believed, helped explain why Jason was so driven to help Rachelle by murdering her mother, supporting the theory by Sergeant Randy McPherron and Trooper Bob Claus that this lonely island misfit was motivated at least in part by sex.
The psychological forces at work became more apparent when Rachelle’s school principal turned over a stack of letters from her locker. These were the notes shuttled between Rachelle and Jason by their friend John Wilburn in exchange for Jason securing porn (itself a crime because John was a minor). Intimate and sad, the letters lay bare a grown man’s obsession for a teenage love he grew to sense he’d never fully and openly possess.
“If you’re reading this around anybody, stop,” wrote Jason, adding a winking emoticon. He apologized for an earlier email that may have seemed “a little impersonal” but said he worried that somebody might have access to her messages. He also explained the strange words at the end—he wrote “I love you” in Russian because he didn’t think her mom would know what it said.
This letter was undated, but appeared to have been written early in the summer, before Jason and Brian considered violence and were instead cooking up other ways to deal with Rachelle’s complaints about her mother. Jason wrote that Brian considered Rachelle’s mother “rather materialistic” and referenced something that Rachelle apparently told them—that her mother threatened to sell her into slavery. Jason told her he fantasized about driving up to Rachelle’s house in a $100,000 Ferrari so that her mother would “be wanting us together so she might get something out of the deal.” He also told her that he and Brian came up with ideas “to nab some large cash,” a reference, he later said, to Brian’s plans to make $100,000 by growing a rare strain of marijuana. The plan fizzled.
In this letter Jason was growing obsessed with having Rachelle for himself. He fantasized about Rachelle telling him on Instant Message one night to “come and get me.” But it wasn’t until another letter, also undated, that he specifically spoke of the murder plot. The letter was probably written in the fall as Jason and Brian considered either shooting Lauri or killing her in a staged drunk driving accident. He told her he’d be “so glad” when the “whole thing with your mother” was over. He said he realized he wouldn’t be able to see her immediately, but would take comfort in knowing she’d finally be “safe.”
The plot, however, was “stressing the hell out of me,” he said, and added he needed somebody to lean on. Jason’s longing for Rachelle grew more acute as they spent increasingly less time together because school was back in session and their computer store hangout closed. By late September, he wrote in another letter, he worried that he would lose her. He wrote that he feared she’d “take matters into your own hand” and “just get tired and move on to someone else.” He didn’t think she’d do it, but reminded her that he’d be lost without her.
This letter is dated September 29—the day of the failed attempt to assassinate Lauri in front of the school.
Although Rachelle’s letters to Jason were not as long, she filled hers with the same aching emotions. “I wish I could live with you. It consumes most of my thoughts,” she wrote in one undated letter. She said she dreamt of the day her father “goes off his rocker” and that she could be emancipated. It was a dream, she wrote, that “helps me get through the day.”
Of most interest to investigators were lines they believed could be referring to the murder plot. Rachelle wrote as volleyball season was winding down, “It”—living with Jason—“will happen one day, hopefully not long after V-Ball.” Later in the letter, she was more specific. “I’m tempted to take a hunting trip myself,” she wrote, then complained that her mother was pressuring her to go out with Ian again because he was a good influence on her by not allowing her to drink or smoke and would tell her mother where Rachelle was at all times.
Jason replied wit
h gushing letters that went on for pages. Rachelle’s notes began to change in tone and length. “It’s not fair,” she wrote. “You send me this huge romantic letter and all you get is a crappy one. I’m sorry. Lol.” Another letter was similarly short: “Not a lot going on. It took me until lunch to finish your letter.”
If Rachelle was sending signs she wanted to distance herself from Jason, he didn’t pick up on them. “You pretty much consume my every thought, babe,” he wrote on October 6, a week after the failed assassination of Lauri Waterman. Even while playing video games, he was wondering what she was doing, how she was feeling and whether she was also thinking of him. “I’m not sure if that’s entirely healthy,” he acknowledged, “but I just don’t care.” He reminded her that the only reason he had joined the play was in order to be near her.
Five days later, he wrote that he finally got to talk to her for an extended time. “I wish it never had to end,” he wrote. The letter was dated October 11, during the time Rachelle said on her blog she was grounded with “computer restrictions.” How they were able to speak isn’t explained, but their conversation left Jason yearning for more—and drove him to do “crazy stupid things.”
Jason revealed to Rachelle that later that night he parked his truck behind the mall, walked down a trail to her house and found her bedroom window. He described looking through the glass at the blinking lights that he thought came from her computer. His hand was two inches from the window when he stopped himself. He says it would have been “pretty selfish of me” to wake her up at 2:30 a.m. on a school night “just so I can say hi.”
He left her house, feeling disgusted with himself, even though all he wanted were a few precious seconds together. “It’s not like I was trying to sneak a peek at you,” he notes, “since I know you sleep not wearing much.”
Love You Madly Page 16