Love You Madly

by Michael Fleeman

  “Yes, Your Honor,” she answered, and she was sent back to the women’s prison.

  On August 22, four days before Rachelle’s seventeenth birthday, she was back in court in the usual orange jail jumpsuit, her wrists again shackled in front with a chain around her waist, for the most important hearing of the case. Family members had traveled to Juneau to support her. Despite the high stakes, Rachelle appeared relaxed, laughing with her attorney Steven Wells and making faces at her brother and father, according to an account by the Associated Press. When Rachelle complained during the hearing that the chain hurt her back, Judge Collins allowed the restraint to be removed.

  At issue was whether Rachelle’s police interviews to police would be admissible at her trial. Until now, authorities had said nothing about what Rachelle had revealed in her three sessions with investigators—the short conversation with Sergeant Randy McPherron at her house and the two longer interviews at the police station. The supposition in Craig was that she had confessed to being a part of the murder plot; she had, after all, been arrested. But her exact role—and the reason she gave police—remained unknown.

  The prosecution intended to play all three of Rachelle’s interviews in court, each one more incriminating than the one before it. The first short interview had Rachelle acknowledging her mother’s objections to her friendship with Jason. In the second, longer interview, Rachelle revealed she had sexual relationships with both Jason and Brian, claimed that her mother had physically abused her, and ultimately admitted that she had lied about calling Jason at home the night of the murder. That session ended with Claus and McPherron telling Rachelle she was the catalyst that set the plot in motion, perhaps unwittingly.

  It was the third interview that the prosecution considered the most valuable—and the defense most wanted to suppress. This is the one that had McPherron confronting Rachelle with the “hunting trip” e-mail and ended with her in tears, under arrest, and saying that her father would never like her again. While people in Craig already knew most of what she had said in the first two interviews—most assumed she’d had sexual relations with Jason and Brian, and her friends had long heard her tales of motherly abuse—the revelations in the third interview were new. A transcript of the interview, attached to court papers as part of the defense challenge, drew the attention of the local newspapers and the Associated Press. Many in Craig saw her actions—and inactions—as a betrayal that could not be forgiven. No matter how the criminal case turned out, Rachelle could never come home again.

  From a legal perspective, her statements formed the heart of the prosecution’s case, and Rachelle’s attorney mounted an aggressive campaign to have them suppressed. In court papers, Wells argued that Rachelle fell victim to a level of police coercion that fell far outside legal bounds during an interrogation. He also claimed that while the investigators had properly read Rachelle her Miranda rights and gave her the opportunity to have her father present, the teenager was too young, immature, and psychologically fragile to make an informed decision when she waived those rights.

  To bolster the defense case, Wells arranged for Rachelle to meet with a child psychologist for eleven hours over two days. Dr. Marty Beyer was a Yale-educated clinician with vast experience with young people in the criminal justice system: her résumé listed work in Alabama, Oregon, New York, Virginia, California, Florida, New Mexico, and now Alaska. Her psychological evaluation explored Rachelle’s childhood through her final moments with investigators.

  “Rachelle,” according to Beyer’s report, “is a bright, depressed 16-year-old who shows a complicated combination of independence and immaturity.”

  Beyer concluded that traumatic events throughout Rachelle’s life left her not only scarred but easy prey to an aggressive interrogation. These factors dated back to when Rachelle was in grade school. She developed physically at an early age—menstruation at age ten, acne at eleven, conspicuously large breasts in junior high school—leaving Rachelle plagued with low self-esteem. All this was exacerbated by frequent criticism about her weight from her mother, whom the psychologist noted “was slim.”

  Her mother also criticized her for getting any grade below an A, favored her brother, pushed her into sports and disapproved of Rachelle’s interest in Wicca. Eventually, Lauri Waterman lashed out with more than words, according to the report, hitting Rachelle “with increasing frequency over the summer before 11th grade.”

  That was the summer that Rachelle met Jason Arrant and Brian Radel.

  Rachelle told her therapist, “I was her anger outlet,” a victim of her mother’s menopausal outbursts. As Rachelle had told police, she never reported the alleged abuse. “No one would have believed me,” she told the therapist, and Rachelle was correct. Her friends didn’t believe her and, when she finally told police, neither did they.

  Rachelle told the therapist she thought of talking to her father about the abuse but didn’t think he would understand. The two had a “buddy-buddy” relationship that prevented them from deep conversations, and, besides, “I knew he wouldn’t believe me,” she told the therapist. When Rachelle complained about her mother, her father “made light of her mother’s bad moods,” the report says, “so she decided not to complain about her mother’s abuse.”

  But low self-esteem and alleged parental abuse weren’t the only traumas haunting Rachelle. Dr. Beyer’s report included a shocking claim that placed Rachelle’s behavior in a new light, but was one that Craig residents weren’t sure they believed.

  According to the report, Rachelle says that when she was in eighth grade, while walking home from school one night, she was pulled into the backseat of a car and raped at knifepoint by “someone who did not live in their community.”

  “The rape was traumatic not just because of the violence, the pain of first time intercourse, and the terror encountering the perpetrator again,” the report says, “but also because her mother did not believe her.”

  Rachelle claims her mother refused to take her to a doctor and wouldn’t tell her father. Her mother felt Rachelle had invented the story to avoid punishment for coming home late. After this, according to Rachelle, she didn’t trust her mother and worried about acting or dressing in a way that would draw attention to herself.

  “I quieted down. I was not as happy. I read a lot. I was a little weird,” she told the therapist. “My worst fear was being raped again. I worried about seeing him. I didn’t want it to control my life or make me afraid of men. I didn’t want it to change who I am.”

  The rape account could not be confirmed and became one more reason to question Rachelle’s credibility. Many in Craig refused to believe that a mother as devoted as Lauri Waterman would have reacted the way Rachelle said she had. The defense psychologist took it at face value as something that Rachelle believed and, therefore, contributed to problems in her emotional development and her depression. Rachelle, Beyer concluded, appeared independent for her age but was in fact as needy as a young teenager, reaching out to boyfriends and friends for the nurturing she didn’t get at home.

  These psychological forces came into play with tragic consequences in the summer of 2004, the report says. Rachelle showed an immature thinking process in which she “did not imagine negative consequences of friendships with Jason and Brian,” the report says. When Jason asked her if she wanted him and Brain to “get rid of” her mother, Rachelle claims, “I played along. I didn’t think it was serious.”

  When they told her they had plotted to shoot her mother, Rachelle dismissed it as their “weird sense of humor. I thought they were joking.” When Jason suggested that the weekend she and her father were out of town would be a good time to kill her mother, “I did not think he was serious. I thought it was talk, not a real plan.” Rachelle, according to the therapist, merely saw the men as “different” and, despite their fixation on D&D and Jason’s drug use, “it had not occurred to her that they would act on these fantasies.”

  By the fall of 2004, when Rachelle’s moth
er was killed and detectives were asking her questions, Rachelle didn’t grasp the Miranda warning read to her, thinking that “right to an attorney” meant she could only have a lawyer if she already knew one. When Rachelle asked in the second interview why the detectives were reading her rights, McPherron brushed it off as “standard” and “just for this interview.” Rachelle claimed to have been intimidated by the detectives, that Sergeant McPherron was big like a football player, and that she would have wanted to have her father there but didn’t know how to deal in an adversarial situation with authority figures.

  Rachelle told Beyer that “I was so confused. I told them the truth but they wouldn’t listen. They kept telling me it was my fault.”

  In the end, the psychologist concluded, Rachelle fell victim to classic “coercive interrogation techniques,” leaving this confused girl in shock over her mother’s death with no choice but to tell the detectives what she thought they wanted to hear—not necessarily the truth. In her court testimony, Beyer said, “She parroted back the words she had heard.”

  The prosecution countered that the interrogations of Rachelle were done by the book. The state’s argument was presented by a new face in court, Stephen West, who became Ketchikan district attorney when the governor appointed Dan Schally as a judge in Valdez, Alaska. West had taken over the plea negotiations from Schally and now was trying to keep the state’s case from being gutted.

  Like so many in Alaska, West came from somewhere else, in his case Texas, and the prosecutor still spoke slowly with a tinge of a drawl peppered with “y’all’s.” Although he lived most of his life in Houston, West had spent three years in Alaska as a child from ages nine to thirteen when his family temporarily relocated, and after he returned to Texas he always wanted to go back north. After getting a law degree from the University of Houston, he took a job with the Alaska Legal Services Corp., which provides free and low-cost legal representation. West worked in civil litigation there, then switched to criminal law, working in the district attorney’s offices in Juneau and then Ketchikan. He, too, traveled extensively throughout southeast Alaska and appeared at least once a month in Craig, staying in a bed-and-breakfast near the water. The work exposed him to every aspect of criminal law, from screening incoming cases and drafting appeals to participating in full-fledged murder trials.

  At the admissibility hearing he elicited testimony from the three investigators involved in Rachelle’s interviews—Sergeants McPherron and Habib and Trooper Claus. They said they went so hard on her because she lied at the beginning, and only reluctantly told the truth over time under repeated questioning. Their techniques, including exaggerating the strength of the evidence, all fell well within the legal and ethical parameters of police interrogations.

  In his argument before the judge, Prosecutor West responded to the psychological issue raised by the defense. He said the investigators faced a much different Rachelle Waterman from the naïve, immature, vulnerable girl described by the psychologist. The Rachelle going toe to toe with the detectives was smart—and smart-mouthed—and seemed to fully grasp her decisions. He said the detectives, in refusing to accept Rachelle’s lies, were doing their jobs.

  “A defendant has a Fifth Amendment right to be silent,” West argued, “but doesn’t have a right to lie.”

  Judge Collins took two weeks to make her decision. In early September, she released a thirty-page decision that showed she carefully considered the psychologist’s report—and rejected most of it. The judge took issue with Dr. Beyer’s methodology, noting she didn’t conduct standardized tests on Rachelle that could provide a more objective opinion. Instead, the judge found, the therapist’s conclusions came from Rachelle’s own statements, many of which had proven to be false. Rachelle, for instance, had denied to the therapist that she had sex with Jason or Brian but acknowledged it, in detail, to detectives. Rachelle also didn’t tell the psychologist about the nude photos sent to Jason, which Beyer—in formulating her opinion that Rachelle had body image problems—conceded would have been an area to explore.

  “The audio- and videotaped interview process clearly reflects that Rachelle Waterman is intelligent and articulate,” the judge said, adding that the detectives followed the proper legal steps, reading Rachelle her rights, making sure that she wasn’t harmed or subjected to physical deprivation. Rachelle was free to leave during her second interview, but never did so—in fact, never even asked to go.

  The judge raised one concern about how children could be influenced by adults generally, but “it does not, however, render all juvenile confessions involuntary.”

  In the end, “given the totality of circumstances in [this] case,” Collins concluded, “the statements made by Ms. Waterman to Investigator McPherron and Sgt. Habib were knowingly and voluntarily made and she was sufficient of age, maturity and intelligence to make reasoned decisions to provide information to police. No obviously deceptive tactics were used and there was no physical threat or deprivation of any kind.”

  The murder case against Rachelle was now on the fast track for trial, with her defense having to recover from a major blow.

  While public opinion in Craig was squarely against Rachelle, residents cut slack for her father. When Matt Volz of the Associated Press caught up with Doc Waterman in the summer of 2005, the Realtor was trying to live life as close to normally as he could. He was still working with the school board and the Girl Scout council, still busy in his real estate business, spending his free time fishing or sitting alone with his thoughts. He still smoked in the garage instead of the house, still living by Lauri’s rules.

  Interviewed in his office, Doc told the AP reporter he was trying to “dwell on and focus on the good parts” of his life. He said he had “lost something,” but “I had 25 or 30 years that were fantastic.” Stoic as always, “I tell myself I’m doing well and sometimes I’m just, you know … ,” his voice trailing off.

  Although the DA was building a case against his daughter, Doc steadfastly supported Rachelle. He would travel to Juneau for her pretrial hearings, sometimes with her brother, Geoffrey, making eye contact from the audience section while she sat shackled in her orange jail jumpsuit. It was Brian Radel who put her up to it, he said, describing the man as “the poster child for reinstating capital punishment.” In Doc’s eyes, Rachelle was merely a “16-year-old kid [who] doesn’t really recognize the impact of everything that is happening” and whose statements to police were bullied out of her.

  Rachelle, too, was trying to have some semblance of a life. While in jail, she passed her high school equivalency exam and was applying for colleges. But Doc acknowledged his daughter could never return to Craig. And despite his best efforts to remain positive, his friends conceded that life would never be the same in Craig.

  “They aren’t going to bounce back,” Lorraine Pierce told the AP. “I don’t think anybody’s going to bounce back. They’re going to cope.”

  In Juneau, Judge Collins considered whether these wounds suffered by Craig, Alaska, from the case were felt too deeply to hold a trial there. She agreed with Rachelle’s defense, ruling on January 17, 2006, that the case wouldn’t be held in Craig or in Ketchikan. Jury selection would begin in one week in Courtroom D on the second floor of the Dimond Courthouse in Juneau.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  More than one hundred potential jurors squeezed into Judge Collins’s courtroom—another fifty had to stay outside—on Monday, January 23, 2006, to begin the process of finding a panel to consider Rachelle’s fate. They were a cross-section of the thirty thousand people in the state’s capital: homemakers, teachers, miners, fishermen, and workers in the tourism business.

  Government employees made up the largest proportion of the jury pool, since state offices and the legislature are based in Juneau. The governor at the time was Frank Murkowski, but by summer he’d be trounced in the GOP primary by an up-and-comer named Sarah Palin, who would win the general election. The pool was overwhelmingly white, with Native Ame
ricans making up the biggest minority group at about 10 percent of the population.

  They skewed younger and male: Alaska is the only state where men outnumber women, though the discrepancy is smaller in Juneau. It’s a city accustomed to safety and friendly relations with the police. At the time of jury selection, there hadn’t been a murder in Juneau in years. Taken together, they came from the same demographic as Craig.

  As jurors filed in, Rachelle sat at the defense table with Wells and her father. Gone were the orange jail jumpsuit and handcuffs she had on for pretrial hearings. She now wore a gray blazer with a white turtleneck. At the prosecution table sat Ketchikan DA Stephen West. Throughout the trial, Sergeant Randy McPherron and Trooper Bob Claus would be on hand to assist.

  Judge Collins had agreed to allow a television pool camera in her courtroom. This, plus the national attention from the case, brought Court TV, which would stream the trial on its Internet site for $5.95 a month. NBC’s Dateline had sent producers and a crew for a big prime-time story. CBS, ABC, CNN, and Extra also planned to cover portions of the trial. Television stations from Juneau and Anchorage also were on hand, as were reporters from the Juneau bureau of the Associated Press and the city’s paper, the Juneau Enterprise, which described the courthouse scene as a “spectacle.” So many reporters wanted to cover the trial that the court set up an overflow press viewing room with a closed-circuit television monitor.

  The media presence raised the question of whether the jury should be sequestered in a hotel during the trial. When Judge Collins asked the crowd of jury prospects to raise their hands if they had heard about the case, most did. Prosecutor West argued against it. He said juror media bias could be weeded out by questioning prospects and dismissing tainted prospects for legal cause. The judge agreed and said she would allow jurors to go home at night with a stern admonition to avoid news reports.