Jury selection lasted two days. Prospects were brought into the judge’s chambers to be questioned by lawyers while Rachelle and her father observed. The questions were designed as much to influence jurors as to ferret out bias. Defense attorney Steven Wells not only asked whether any of the Juneau jurors had ever been to Prince of Wales Island but whether they’d be willing to accept the concept that somebody can implicate themselves in a crime by saying things that later turned out to be untrue. Several jurors said they couldn’t imagine talking themselves into jail but that a teenager could do so under pressure.
By Tuesday afternoon, both sides had settled on a panel of fifteen, a dozen jurors and three alternates, for what looked to be a two-week trial. Judge Collins swore in the panel and scheduled opening statements for the next day, though testimony would be determined by the weather. A winter storm gripped the state of Alaska, and prosecutor West warned that his first witnesses may be delayed by snow. When the day’s session ended, participants exited the courthouse into the early darkness of January in Alaska, where the nights are seventeen hours long even as far south as Juneau.
Indeed, it was still dark on Wednesday, when attorneys, jurors, reporters, and Rachelle Waterman returned to the courthouse the next morning. By law, the prosecution gets the first and last word, and so the case began with Ketchikan DA West standing before the judge and jury to deliver his opening statement on January 25, 2006, just over two years after the murder.
“This case is about Lauri Waterman,” he told the jury, showing the panel a photo of her taken on the night of Saturday, November 13, 2004, at the chamber of commerce dinner in Craig. The snapshot captured Lauri in her element: attending a volunteer function, surrounded by friends and neighbors. It had been a gray, rainy night, but she dressed for spring in her tropical skirt.
“Eighteen hours later,” West said, “this is Lauri Waterman.”
The next photo on the screen showed a blackened skull and charred torso in the backseat of a burned-out minivan.
“She’s dead and found in the burned van,” said West. “This case is about Lauri Waterman and about three people who planned and then murdered her.”
For the next two hours West explained how the relationships between Rachelle, Brian Radel, and Jason Arrant became what the prosecution considered a toxic conspiracy that resulted in the grisly scene before jurors. West played some of Rachelle’s interrogation, read letters between her and Jason, and reviewed the legal language of charges against Rachelle.
By eleven a.m. he told jurors, “After hearing all the evidence, the state will be request you to return verdicts finding Rachelle Waterman guilty.”
When attorney Steven Wells previewed the defense case, it was not Lauri but her daughter, Rachelle Waterman, who was introduced to the jury.
“A teenage girl,” he said. “She grew up in a small town in Alaska, a town of 1,300 or 1,400 people. Essentially, she is just a quintessential small-town teenager.”
The villain in this tragedy, he told jurors, was not Rachelle but the two men who already have admitted to being responsible for Lauri’s death: “Poor, pudgy” Jason and “the hitman,” Brian Radel. These men, he said, can only be believed when admitting to evil, not when blaming a teenage girl for whom they had unhealthy affections.
West concluded his statement by presenting the jury with questions he would answer during the course of the trial: “What did Rachelle intend—not know—but intend? What did she actively want and when did she want it? You’re going to realize [that] for all her griping, she wants what every teenage girl wants. She wants a good relationship with her mother, who is alive and who is well. When you realize that, you’re going to have the courage to come back and say: Rachelle Waterman, you are not guilty.”
Rachelle’s father wept during the opening statements, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. The tears, he later told reporters, were for his daughter. “She may be the greatest living victim of all of us.”
The prosecution called its first witness, chamber of commerce volunteer Janice Bush, who made it to Juneau despite the snowy weather and recounted Lauri’s last night at the awards dinner. She was followed by Scott MacDonald, the young Forestry Service worker who found the burning van, and then Doc Waterman.
Testimony of a relative of a victim or the accused is often a high point in a trial, and the fact that Doc was both the husband of Lauri and father of Rachelle set the stage for an early burst of emotion. But the quiet, low-key Realtor maintained a calm demeanor as he recounted the most horrific week of his life. He also described the tensions between Lauri and Rachelle, and how his daughter’s behavior had become increasingly troublesome in the months before the murder, with mother and daughter arguing over Rachelle’s growing interest in Wicca, which Doc barely understood.
“We never had a very long discussion about that. It’s nature based, uh, not—I’m kind of lost,” he said. “The explanation is a couple of years old.”
“Was there some friction between Rachelle and Lauri about this?”
“I know that Lauri talked to Rachelle about it. I don’t know how much friction. I didn’t have the impression there was a great degree of friction over it. It was more of a counseling.”
But on one point Doc Waterman was certain.
“Did you ever see her physically hit or strike Rachelle?” asked West.
“No,” he said.
“Did Rachelle ever say anything to you?”
“No.”
“Did anybody else tell you?”
“No.”
“Did you see any injuries on Rachelle that might have come from hitting?”
“She was a very active girl, not only in volleyball—and she’d play football with the boys down at the ballpark on the weekends,” he said. “She had bruises nearly constantly.”
“She ever say they had come from Lauri?”
“No,” he said.
After he left the stand, it was up to Rachelle’s neighbor and godmother, Lorrain Pierce, to inject emotion into the trial. Visibly nervous throughout the softball questions from the prosecution, she began to cry during cross-examination.
“Is this hard for you?” asked defense attorney Wells.
“Very.”
“Is it hard for you to see Rachelle sitting there?”
“Yes.”
With Lorraine and other witnesses, Wells sought to show that Rachelle’s behavior was well in line with any teenager flirting with normal rebellion against her parents.
“Was there anything that you ever saw, when you dealt with Rachelle, when you talked with her or anything like that, that made you think she hates her mom?” asked Wells.
“I would not say hates her mom, maybe defy her rules,” said Lorraine.
“Frustrated at what she had to live under?”
“Yes, maybe under the rules that Lauri wanted her to follow.”
“Would you agree that that’s fairly typical for teenagers?”
“Typically,” said Lorraine, “it is.”
The first day of testimony ended, and on Thursday morning Don Pierce followed his wife to the witness stand. During cross-examination he recalled watching Doc Waterman being told by Craig police chief Jim See that his wife’s van had been identified.
Just once that week Don Pierce saw his longtime friend and neighbor break down. It happened after Lauri’s identity had been confirmed and Doc dealt with both his daughter’s arrest and wife’s funeral at the same time.
“He had to put on a strong front for the family from Tacoma that was coming up, he had to play host,” said Don. “We helped him in those roles as much as we could, but it was a very hard experience for him.”
“He bore it well?” asked Wells.
“He bore it the best he could.”
“Kept a stiff upper lip?”
“Yes.”
“Is that sort of how Doc is?”
“Yes.”
As Wells had sought to do with Don’s wife, the attorney tried to
make Don into a defense witness. Don Pierce had been a teacher for years and was in a unique position to interpret Rachelle’s behavior in the summer and fall of 2004.
“Based on your relationship with Rachelle, based on your training with psychology and child development as a teacher, did you see anything in the years 2003 and 2004 before Lauri’s death to suggest that Rachelle was anything other than an ordinary teenager?” asked Wells.
“No,” said Don Pierce, “I didn’t.”
“Did you see anything other than ordinary teenager angst that she displayed?”
“No.”
“Did she seem particularly angry or hostile or hateful?”
“No more than my kids,” he said.
Wells tried the same line of inquiry with the next witness, Trooper Bob Claus, who traced the course of the investigation from the day he first saw the burned van and concluded that the murder had to have involved Rachelle, Jason, and Brian. But he acknowledged under cross-examination the weaknesses in the case.
“You’re not going to have any of Rachelle’s DNA on the flashlight that was used to kill Lauri Waterman, are you?” asked Wells.
“No, sir,” said Claus.
“You’re not going to have anybody that can walk in and say, ‘I saw Rachelle Waterman buy this bottle of wine to force her mom to drink,’ are you?”
“No, sir.”
“You’re not going to have anybody that can say, ‘I saw Rachelle Waterman buy duct tape and towels to bind Lauri Waterman,’ are you?”
“No, sir.”
“All you’re going to have is the word of Jason Arrant saying, ‘Rachelle Waterman told me to do it,’ right?”
Claus refused to concede this point. “No, sir,” he said.
“Aside from Rachelle Waterman’s statements, that’s all you have, right?”
“No,” repeated Claus, “I believe that the totality of the evidence from Mr. Radel, from Mr. Arrant, from all of the physical evidence we collected, from Rachelle’s statements to us, all of those things lead to that conclusion—not just Jason’s statement.”
“So you wound up ultimately taking the word of somebody you don’t really know, who happens to be the son of a dispatcher, over somebody you’ve known for twelve years. Is that a fair statement?”
West objected but was overruled by Judge Collins.
“It wasn’t a matter of taking a word of any individual,” said Claus, exasperation in his voice. “It was the totality of the evidence collected, from the time I went to the van through the last interviews, that led all of us together, with our collective experience to that [conclusion]. No, I didn’t take Jason Arrant’s word for this as the sole basis for anything.”
Claus would be the prickliest of witnesses for the defense. When Wells asked the same question he had earlier posed to the Pierces—“Did you see anything before Lauri Waterman’s death that indicated that Rachelle was anything other than just a regular teenage girl?”—the trooper would not concede.
“I knew that she was, through what my children told me and through what my direct observations, that she was more rebellious than most, and that it caused difficulties in the house,” he said.
“But teenagers can be rebellious?” pressed Wells.
“Yes, sir,” agreed Claus.
“And certainly as trooper you were never called to investigate any crimes that were committed by Rachelle, where you?”
“No, sir.”
The prosecution called more law enforcement witnesses—Craig police chief See; Fire Marshal John Bond; the state’s coroner, medical examiner Frank Fallico; crime scene technician Dale Bivens—to set the scene for the first critical witness of the trial.
Brian Radel, hulking in a jail jumpsuit, rattled up to the witness stand in handcuffs and leg irons on Friday, January 27. His attorney monitored the proceedings over the phone but said nothing during the questioning.
Brian began, for the record, confirming that he was a bulk of a man: six feet five inches, 277 pounds, the same weight this day as he was in 2004.
For the first half of 2004, he considered himself to be in a relationship with Rachelle Waterman; she was fifteen to his twenty-five. They had sex, he said, even though she may have been also dating Ian Lendrum at the time.
“I don’t really know,” Brian said. The relationship ended in June 2004 when he opened the Dark Wolf Computer Design store, the gathering place for his Dungeons & Dragons group until it closed later that summer. As with many of her friends, Rachelle spoke to Brian about her mother abusing her.
“What did she tell you?” asked West.
“Mostly that she was hit, mentioned being hit with a baseball bat,” Brian said.
“She ever mention anything about knife?”
“Not sure.”
“She mention anything about her selling her into prostitution?”
“Yes.”
“How about her mother trying to throw her down [the] stairs?”
“Not sure.”
“Did you do anything to try to get her to report this?”
“No.”
Instead, he said, a plan emerged to kill Lauri Waterman. Prosecutor West fast-forwarded through the months during which various schemes were discussed and abandoned, and brought Brian to the night of the murder, giving the jury—and the public—the first detailed account of how Rachelle’s mother died.
It began with a shopping trip to Craig and Klawock, Brian said.
“What did you buy the rubber gloves for?” asked West.
“So that I wouldn’t leave fingerprints at the scene,” he said.
“What did you buy the duct tape for?”
“To bind Lauri Waterman.”
“And what did you buy the towels for?”
“So that there wouldn’t be any marks left from the duct tape.”
“How were you going to use the towels?”
“I was going to wrap those first and then put the duct tape over them.”
“And why was that?”
“So that there wouldn’t be any marks left by the duct tape.”
“And why were you afraid to leave those marks from the duct tape?”
“Basically because it was supposed to look like a car accident.”
“What was your plan?”
“Find Lauri, tie her up, have her drink the wine, stick her in her van, and drive out to wherever Jason was.”
“And then what were you going to do?”
“Go out to where there was a steep drop-off from the road that we found, and I was going to kill Lauri, break her neck, try to make it look like whiplash, and drive the van, or push the van over the edge.”
In eerie detail, the tension heightened by Brian’s calm, unemotional voice, he retraced his steps after Jason dropped him off near the Waterman house.
Wearing a black polar fleece jacket, black knit hat, black jeans, Xtratuf rubber boots, and two sets of socks, Brian stood next to a power pole at around midnight, casing the neighborhood. It was cold and blustery. He crossed a ditch and through a yard to the side of the Watermans’ house and checked a window to see if it was unlocked.
Looking around for any witnesses, he peered through the window into the garage, realizing he was on the other side of a workbench covered in tools. He jimmied the window open and lugged himself inside onto the workbench, then reached back out for his backpack containing the duct tape, towels, rope, and wine bottle.
In the darkened garage, he looked for keys to the house but didn’t find them. He could make out the two vehicles parked there, a blue truck and a minivan. He checked the door to the house; it was locked. He had no idea where anything was. He had asked Jason for a plan but didn’t get it. “I basically was going in blind,” he said.
With a butter knife, he tried to unlock the dead bolt—TV style—but couldn’t get it to move. That’s when he got the idea to break in through the cat door, removing the flap and reaching his arm through and up to undo the lock. He opened the door and entered the dow
nstairs. Making his way up to the kitchen, he found the wine in the refrigerator and set his own bottle on the counter, then went up the stairs again to what he assumed was Lauri’s room, the door ajar, but when he got near he heard her open it. He ran around the corner to hide.
“I thought she’d seen me,” he said. “I figured she was probably calling the cops.”
Had she dialed 911, the night would have been over and Lauri Waterman would be alive today. Instead, “I didn’t hear any sirens,” he said. “I stood there for an hour debating going into the room … . I finally decided to go in, and so I opened the door and I rushed in. Lauri was laying facedown on the bed.”
He subdued her and she started to cry. The first thing he told her was to stop crying, which she did after a time. He bound her hands behind her back, gagged her with a dishtowel and duct tape, and untied her long enough for her to get dressed in sweat pants, bra, socks, T-shirt, and sweater.
“Originally I got jeans, but apparently they were broken,” he said. “She was gagged. She motioned that the zipper was broken, so I got sweat pants then.”
Also, he said, “for some reason, she wanted a different bra, so I got a different bra.”
“How was she reacting to all this?” asked West.
“I don’t know,” said Brian. “It could have been anything. Terror or whatever. She was doing it.”
She didn’t cry and followed his every direction, said Brian.
“I asked her if the tennis shoes next to door were hers,” said he. “She nodded her head. I gave her the shoes to put on and she put them on.”
He said he got her to the kitchen, where she downed the rest of the wine, then led her into the van. He returned to the house to wipe away any fingerprints, retrieved the wine bottle he had brought with him but didn’t need, wiped down the glass and put in the sink, got her purse, then returned to the car. He removed Lauri’s gag so she could tell him where the garage door opener was, and headed to the rendezvous spot.
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