Love You Madly

by Michael Fleeman

This nocturnal visit to her house was as close as he’d get to her. The next day, he wrote that he was “pleasantly surprised” to see Rachelle on Instant Message, so he dropped her a message. But she didn’t answer. By the end of October, he couldn’t stand the separation. In a note he later said he composed at 10:30 p.m. while stoned on marijuana, he told her he was “baked like lasagna” with only one thought: “Missing you, baby.” Filled with self-pity, he fantasized about a nighttime rendezvous or confronting her parents with a speech in which he announced his love for her. But in reality, he admitted he’d probably just end up “like a dumbass” without her. “Reality,” he wrote, “you mock me with your cruel destruction of my fantasies.”

  From his letters, it was clear to investigators: Jason couldn’t get over his summer fling with Rachelle—the sex, the naughty pictures, his first real taste of passion. He felt free to write her things like: “I’m practically quaking with excess sexual energy, more of a shudder I guess.” He reminded her that she still owed him her “groovy or erotic fiction or fantasy.” It would never arrive. No stranger to depression throughout his life, Jason told Rachelle that he almost started cutting himself again, just like he did when he was younger when he needed to feel something besides the hurt. The only reason he stopped from cutting himself was because of a “promise I made to you,” a promise, investigators believed, he delivered by killing Rachelle’s mother.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The weeks after the arrests of Rachelle, Jason, and Brian brought a whirlwind of activity. The trial was set to begin in February 2005. While investigators scrambled to complete the last of the searches and interview and reinterview more witnesses, lawyers toiled to prepare for the trial scheduled less than three months after the murder. After Rachelle, Jason, and Brian appeared at their arraignments in November, all pleading innocent, a trial judge was appointed.

  Patricia Collins had been a superior court judge in Alaska for seven years and possessed a background that would be unusual in any other state. An avid sailor, Collins also had worked as a commercial fisherwoman in southeast Alaska. She attended college in the East and received a law degree from Gonzaga University. Most judges come from the ranks of prosecutors, but Collins was unique in coming not only from private practice and academia but by having a background in criminal defense as well as labor law. She worked in private practice in Alaska, running her own law firm in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, and taught law at the University of Alaska. She also served as assistant public defender for Alaska from 1984 to 1985.

  Her court was located in Juneau, but like all Alaskan judges, she was always ready to travel and could also preside over the telephone. The case spilled over multiple jurisdictions. Jason and Brian appeared in court in Ketchikan because that’s where they were incarcerated; Rachelle appeared in Juneau because that was the location of the women’s prison. The DA’s office that handled crimes on Prince of Wales Island was based in Ketchikan, and the court-appointed defense lawyers were located all over Alaska.

  The vast distances meant that many hearings were conducted by telephone, and it made for an unusual sight to the uninitiated. If Doc Waterman couldn’t attend a proceeding in Juneau, a long and expensive journey from Craig by ferry and plane, Rachelle might be the only party to the case physically in the courtroom. Such was the scene on Tuesday, December 21, when bailiffs escorted Rachelle to the defense table. She was handcuffed and wearing a jail uniform for a morning hearing. The judge’s bench was empty—Judge Collins had to be out of town on another case—and Rachelle sat alone listening to lawyers argue over loudspeakers, with the DA in Ketchikan and her own lawyer in Anchorage. The attorneys hashed out pretrial matters, including the question of whether to delay the February 3 trial date.

  The hearing covered routine matters and was significant for the fact that it marked the debut of Rachelle’s court-appointed lawyer, Steven M. Wells. Burly and bearded, Wells had a passion for fishing and hunting. He looked like he was born and raised in the Alaskan woods, but in fact was a product of California. He got his degree at California Western School of Law and practiced in the state for several years before moving to Nashville, where he shared office space with noted criminal defense attorney Lionel Barrett.

  Wells’s biography on his Web site tells the rest of the story. “After a while, though, the call of the wild places became too strong to ignore and he moved to Dillingham, Alaska, to be the public defender,” it says. “The sole public defender for an area roughly the size of Ohio, he handled every type of case from commercial fishing cases to first-degree murder.”

  A fishing village of 2,400 on an inlet of Bristol Bay southwest of Anchorage, Dillingham is as far from Southern California as possible, and it served as the stepping-stone to his next position with the Office of Public Advocacy, a state agency providing legal representation for children, the elderly, and adults in custody cases. It also handles criminal cases that the public defender can’t take because of a conflict of interest or other reason.

  He was a traveling lawyer, representing clients accused of serious felonies, including sexual assault, kidnapping, and murder. The job brought a grueling schedule, bumpy flights on small planes in bad weather, overnights in little inns and bed-and-breakfasts. Like Rachelle, Wells kept an online journal—he called it Alaska Blawg—in which he described the plight of an itinerant defense lawyer for Alaska’s indigent.

  “On Monday, I might have a sentencing hearing in Bethel and then on Thursday I would have to fly to Sitka to see a client,” he wrote. “So while I do not have a great deal of cases, the ones I have require a great deal of work. The work on each case, the distance between cases, and pressure to get them to trial is extremely wearying (is that even a word? I don’t know, but it works).”

  His tales of travel and work weariness echoed those of Rachelle in her My Crappy Life blog, and from early on Wells showed a strong connection to his young client. Loud and brash in court, Wells immediately went on the offensive, fighting for a new trial date that would give him time to wade through thousands of pages of interview transcripts and hundreds of hours of tape recordings. He complained that there was still much the prosecution had not yet turned over, including materials found on the computers, and that what little evidence he had seen so far amounted to nothing.

  “The state of Alaska,” he wrote in one motion, “is seeking to convict Ms. Waterman on the theory that she conspired to have her mother killed in a particularly brutal way because she and her mother did not get along.”

  Wells enjoyed a rare luxury for a defense attorney: a prosecution case with virtually no physical evidence and a client who was hundreds of miles away at the time of the crime. The prosecution was building a circumstantial case based on a conspiracy theory and the credibility of two Alaskan miscreants—a defense attorney’s dream. Of all the written material in the prosecution’s hands, there was not a single e-mail or handwritten letter from Rachelle, Jason, or Brian, and not one entry in thousands of pages of Rachelle’s blog entries that directly referenced the murder plot or the actual killing. The closest the state had was an ambiguous reference to the “hunting trip.” The prosecution was still hoping to bolster the case by winning the cooperation of Jason or Brian or both. Private negotiations had begun to strike plea deals that would bring them into a courtroom and provide testimony against each other and against Rachelle.

  But those were issues for another day. Right now, Wells simply wanted Rachelle out of jail. By a hearing on December 28 in Juneau, she had been locked up for more than a month because her father couldn’t afford her $150,000 bail, half of which was required to be paid in the cash, the rest in stocks or bonds. Judge Collins, presiding in person this time, listened as Wells, speaking by phone from Anchorage, requested that bail be reduced to $50,000, with $10,000 posted in cash. Doc Waterman’s voice next was heard over the courtroom speaker, calling from Craig, to say that he could scrape up that much cash from savings and borrow the rest. He added that he and two fam
ily friends would supervise Rachelle if she were released. As for whether she was a risk to flee, Wells noted that Rachelle would still be a prisoner of sorts, released to an isolated Alaskan island accessible only by ferry and floatplanes, where everybody knew her. She further posed no threat to the people of Prince of Wales Island, Wells argued. Even the prosecution was conceding she didn’t actually commit the murder.

  The assistant DA, Dan Schally, calling from Ketchikan, opposed a bail reduction. He said that while Rachelle didn’t physically kill her mother, the teenager was the “lead domino” in the murder, planning it for months with Jason and Brian, both of whom she was involved with sexually and who fell prey to her manipulations.

  Judge Collins ruled that she wouldn’t put Rachelle’s father or family friends in the difficult position of monitoring Rachelle, who, if she returned to Craig, could get hurt or even harm herself. “I have to be conscious of the danger to the community,” the judge said, and kept bail at $150,000. Rachelle was in tears as she was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs and transported back to her cell.

  As the year 2005 began, the pace of litigation slowed. Lawyers next sparred over evidence sharing, and the February trial date came and went. One of the biggest early legal hurdles concerned the nude photos of Rachelle found on Jason’s computer. The DA refused to provide hard drives containing the pictures to the defense because the images could be construed as child pornography and the transfer of them could be interpreted as a crime. To protect himself, the DA wanted a court order first. The judge issued one, but the defense complained the prosecution continued to drag its feet in providing the evidence. More legal issues arose, more motions were filed, and a new trial date was set for August 2005.

  While the lawyers argued, the three people at the center of the case remained locked in jail. Rachelle’s father would never come up with the $75,000 in cash required to get her out, and Rachelle would have to come to terms with remaining incarcerated until the trial—longer if things went badly in court. Jason and Brian never had any hope of making their $250,000 bail and both early on resigned themselves to never seeing freedom.

  For Brian, the early weeks behind bars gave him time to pause and reflect. For the first time in years he had been separated from Jason, and as Brian sat in his Ketchikan cell day after day he began to see his old friend in a new light. He explained his thoughts in a letter written to his parents about a month after his arrest.

  “I loved and still love Rachelle,” Brian wrote. “I’ve always figured my life would be a small price to pay to protect the ones I love. Unfortunately, I had Jason involved, and he had about as much backbone as a jellyfish.”

  Investigators and the prosecution fueled Brian’s emerging doubts by telling him that Jason had sold out both him and Rachelle. This violated Brian’s sense of loyalty and honor. From the very beginning he portrayed himself as a reluctant but willing participant in the plot to kill Lauri Waterman. The only reason he choked her to death was at the insistence of Jason and to protect a girl he thought both of them loved enough to die for.

  After months of off-and-on plea negotiations, Brian made a decision. On Wednesday, June 8, 2005, he appeared in a Ketchikan courtroom to affirm that he had reached an agreement with prosecutors. He would plead guilty to first-degree murder. The conviction carried a maximum penalty of ninety-nine years in prison, but with time off for good behavior he could be out in thirty-three years—when he would be fifty-eight years old and still had some life left. In exchange, he would testify in court.

  While Brian wrestled with his conscience, Jason also took stock of his plight. His statements to police had been the primary reason he, Brian, and Rachelle were arrested. As liberating as it was to open up to old acquaintances like Trooper Bob Claus and Sergeant Mark Habib, it brought the very real prospect that he would never leave his jail cell. While Jason was instrumental in the murder scheme, it didn’t escape notice that he was not the one who actually killed her. And when investigators got a bead on the three of them and everything was falling apart, it was Jason who was the most cooperative. He even wore a wire and showed Bob Claus where the crime took place.

  As with Brian, prosecutors played into Jason’s concerns and second-guessing, and about two weeks after Brian’s hearing, Jason, too, was in court to announce that he had also reached a deal. Like Brian, Jason would plead guilty to first-degree murder, but the penalty would be less severe, reflecting his cooperation and reduced role in the crime. Prosecutors would dismiss all the other counts against him and he’d face a prison term capped at fifty years. If he behaved himself, he could make parole in sixteen years, when he would be forty-two years old. In exchange, he also would testify.

  With the two men reaching plea agreements that left Rachelle. There would be no deal. She conceded nothing and was prepared to gamble that a jury would find that she was guilty of nothing more than bad taste in friends. The strategy relied on the defense being able to find an unbiased jury. Rachelle would soon discover how difficult that would be.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In the spring of 2005, the people of Prince of Wales Island were starting to get phone calls from strangers asking personal questions.

  “Hello, I am from Hellenthal and Associates,” the caller said. “We are conducting a Southeast Alaska public opinion research survey. Your telephone number was randomly selected. The questions I need to ask will take three to five minutes. All of your responses will be completely confidential.”

  The callers, reading from a script, were instructed to “pause and proceed” with asking if they had the correct telephone number. If not, they were told to end the call by saying, “I’m sorry, I dialed the wrong number.”

  If they had the right number, they said, “Am I talking to you at a place where you live?” A no answer would be met with the scripted remark, “I’m sorry, I need to talk to someone at a residence,” and the call ended.

  If they said yes, the caller would lead them through a series of questions: Are you eighteen years or older?

  If no, then: Is there anyone home who is eighteen years old or older? If yes, then: May I speak with them? If no, then: When would be a good time to call back and find someone who is eighteen or older?

  Finally, the caller got to the point.

  “Now, I am going to read to you a list of names of various people. Please tell me whether your feelings toward each of them is very positive, somewhat positive, somewhat negative, or very negative. Or if you don’t know who they are.

  The list included the names Carl “Doc” Waterman, Rachelle Waterman, Brian James Radel, and James Arrant.

  If people hadn’t figured it out by now, they would know later: the research firm was polling residents on behalf of Rachelle in preparation for her trial. By law, she was supposed to be tried in the jurisdiction where the murder occurred—in this case Craig, Alaska.

  The telephone survey of 377 people found that publicity about the case had saturated southeast Alaska, with 79 percent of the respondents having heard about or learned of what the callers called “a recent case regarding the daughter of a mother in Craig.” Of those, nearly 90 percent got their information from the newspapers—the Ketchikan Daily News had covered it extensively from the week of the murder—while another 55 percent said they also heard about it through word of mouth. Only a fraction heard about it on television or in a People magazine story in early February under the headline “Did This Teen Have Her Mother Murdered?”

  No matter how they got their information, it was the talk of the region. More than 80 percent of those who found out about the case had discussed it with family, friends, or coworkers. About 7 percent, or twenty-six of the respondents, knew Rachelle and her father personally, while another nine people knew Jason, Brian or both.

  Still, many people didn’t know the most explosive aspects of the case. Only 15 percent were aware that Rachelle had “made a statement about the case.” Those who did know about it overwhelmingly thought she was guilty. Mor
e people—nearly 80 percent of those surveyed—knew that Rachelle kept a blog, but their knowledge of it proved to be sketchy. More than 40 percent believed Rachelle had admitted in her blog to having participated in her mother’s death, even though she had not.

  The findings with the most impact for Rachelle concerned the conclusion that people had come to. Of those who had heard about the murder of Lauri Waterman, two-thirds said they believed Rachelle was guilty.

  Just under 7 percent thought she was innocent, and 27 percent were undecided. The same number of people who thought Rachelle was guilty also thought Jason and Brian—the two men who had already reached deals and wouldn’t be going to trial—were guilty.

  Rachelle’s attorney, Steven Wells, wanted the trial moved. Even the prosecution conceded it would be impossible to justify trying Rachelle in the tiny village where everybody had an opinion and everybody knew everybody else. The next logical venue would be across the water in Ketchikan, but Wells objected to that location too. With the same local paper and many friends and relatives in common, the attitudes of the people of Ketchikan likely differed little from those displayed in the survey of Prince of Wales Island residents, Wells argued. The prosecution asked for Ketchikan, noting in addition to it being the next-closest venue, this site would be more convenient. The DA’s office was based there, and both Jason and Brian were incarcerated there, making it easier to get them to court for their testimony.

  At a hearing in July in Juneau, Judge Collins said she didn’t like the idea of moving the case even to Ketchikan, saying she wanted to litigate a crime in the community where it happened “if at all possible,” but she didn’t make a final decision. This legal challenge, along with the defense’s continued hunt for access to the computer hard drives, delayed the trial date, and now Judge Collins reluctantly reset it for January 2006.

  “I don’t like continuing the trial,” she said at a hearing, complaining that people’s memories fade and evidence “tends to become stale.” But she saw no choice. The lawyers needed time to prepare. Rachelle was brought into the courtroom in chains and asked if she waived her right to a speedy trial.