Love You Madly

by Michael Fleeman

Driving out of Klawock, he saw Jason’s pickup and flashed his headlights, and they pulled alongside each other to discuss their next move. Brian led Jason to the gravel pit, where they stopped again. “He got out, I got out,” said Brian. “He came up, asked me if I had her. I said, ‘Yes.’ We said a few other things and then we both got back in our vehicles and headed out.”

  Brian said that after they arrived at the turnout, he wiped down the van with a paper towel or rag.

  “I was getting pretty nervous by that time,” he told the jury. “I had seen several cars pass us.”

  In the turnout, either Brian or Jason got out a garbage bag from the van—“I don’t know if it was him or me,” he said—to cover the wet and muddied ground, then Brian got the limp Lauri from the back of the van. Her hands and feet were still bound, though she was ungagged. She said nothing. Brian assumed she was still drunk.

  “I had her kneel,” said Brian. “I attempted to break her neck back backwards.”

  “How’d you do that?” the prosecutor asked.

  “By yanking up on the chin, forcing it back.”

  “How far back did you pull her chin up?”

  “A ways, but—”

  Brian’s testimony was interrupted. At the defense table, Rachelle put her hand to her face and broke into tears.

  “Judge, could we take a break please?” Wells said urgently. “I’m sorry, we need to take a break.”

  Judge Collins called for a recess as Rachelle fled the courtroom.

  The trial resumed twenty minutes later, with Rachelle back at the counsel table and Brian back on the witness stand.

  “You testified that she’s on the ground,” said West, picking up Brian’s testimony exactly where he had left off. “How is she on the ground? Is she standing or what?”

  “Kneeling,” said Brian.

  “And are you having to hold her up? Or is she able to kneel by herself?”

  “At that point, before I tried to break her neck, she was kneeling on her own.”

  “Then the first time you tried to break her neck, were you standing behind her or in front of her or on the side?”

  “Behind her.”

  “And where on her head were your hands?”

  “One at the back of her neck, one on her head.”

  “And then when you said you pulled her head back, did you jerk it back or were you pulling it steadily?”

  “I tried to jerk but I don’t think I—Nothing happened.”

  “So what did you do then?”

  “I tried to break her neck sideways.”

  “And what do you mean by ‘sideways’?”

  “Pulling, pushing on the chin. Basically trying to use brute strength.”

  “How far were able to get her head around that way?”

  “Uh,” Brian said, then sighed. It was the first time in his testimony he paused or showed anything other than straightforward narration. “Somewhere in this area,” he said, tilting his own head to demonstrate.

  “At least 90 degrees over?” asked West.

  “I think a little bit over,” said Brian. “She was fighting by that time.”

  “She was still restrained?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many times did you do that?”

  “It was drawn out.”

  “How long of a time?”

  “Couple of minutes.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Laid her down on the ground,” Brian said. “Jason held her down for me, I karate chopped her in the throat.”

  “With what?”

  “The side of my hand.”

  “Which hand?”

  “I think it was my left hand.”

  “How many times did you try to karate chop her?”

  “Couple of times.”

  “What effect did it have?”

  “I couldn’t tell anymore at that point. I wasn’t sure. I mean, I wasn’t really sure how you were supposed to do that if you’re going to kill somebody that way.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Jason had a flashlight. He handed it to me. I think I might have asked for it.”

  “What kind of flashlight was it?”

  “It was one of the cheap ones you buy in the store. I don’t know what the name of it is. It’s a disposable flashlight.”

  “And you got the flashlight—how did you hold it?”

  “I was holding it the way you would normally hold it, and I used the bottom of it, and I struck her repeatedly in the throat.”

  “Where was she at when this was going on?”

  “She was on the ground.”

  “She was on her back or her side?”

  “Back.”

  “And was she struggling or doing anything at this time when you hit her?”

  “I really—”

  “You didn’t look?”

  “I was doing my best not to look.”

  “How many times did you strike her in the throat with the flashlight?”

  “At least a half dozen.”

  “How hard were you hitting her?”

  “As hard as I could.”

  “What happened then?”

  “She didn’t die.”

  Lauri continued to breathe, Brian said. Whether her eyes were still open or closed, he didn’t know. Brian had stopped looking at her. But he could hear her.

  “She did say something,” said Brian.

  “Could you make it out?” asked West.

  “She said, ‘Can I ask a question?’ But I think she was too delirious by that time to realize that I would let her ask the question.”

  “Did you answer?”

  “I said, ‘What is it?’ but she kept repeating, ‘Can I ask a question?’”

  “So you didn’t say anything else?”

  “No, Jason said something, but I didn’t say anything.”

  “Do you remember what he said?”

  “He got down in front of her. By that time she was kind of on her side, and he crouched down in front of her and said something along the lines of ‘You won’t ever effing hurt Rachelle again.’”

  Even in the midst of describing such a horrible act, Brian refused to use the actual profanity.

  “And what did you do then?” asked West.

  “Me and Jason attempted to suffocate her,” said Brian.

  “And how’d you do that?”

  “By placing our hands over her mouth.”

  “Who placed their hands on her?”

  “I did. I think Jason did. I’m not too sure on that. I wasn’t paying attention. I had to let go at one point to check her pulse.”

  “And what part of her face did you cover?”

  “The mouth and nose at one point, both at one point, and just the nose at one point.”

  “And how long did you do that for?”

  “Jason timed it. I think it was four minutes.”

  “After four minutes, what did you do?”

  “It was taking a long time, so we took her—and she was still alive because I could hear her breathing—and stuck her in the van … . She was rasping in the back of the van,” said Brian. “Eventually I heard her stop breathing.”

  After he put her back in the van, he drove toward the logging road, arriving at the turnout about forty-five minutes later. With Jason behind him in his four-wheel-drive truck, Brian labored to get the van as far up the steep and rocky road as he could. It was pitch-black and raining.

  “I put it in park, got around to the other side, opened the door, and checked Lauri’s pulse,” he said. “Jason had mentioned he had some medical training or something, so he checked her pulse too. There wasn’t any pulse that either one of us could notice at that point.”

  Brian doused the van and Lauri’s body with gasoline from Jason’s truck, then set the van on fire with a torch made from a burning roll of paper towels, and they sped away from the scene in Jason’s truck, seeing a “reasonably big” fire in the rearview mirror. By now it was about five
thirty a.m., with dawn approaching. Jason got him to Lee Edwards’s house in Hollis well before eight a.m. with a quick stop along the way to burn cotton rags, garbage bags, ropes, socks, “whatever was left.” Brian lay down and went to sleep.

  Two days later the first troopers interviewed him, and he denied knowing anything about the murder. By the end of the week he had confessed his role in it, but didn’t tell all.

  “When you were talking with the troopers, you described this as a ‘cold-blooded.’ Is that still your view?” asked West.

  “It was murder,” Brian said. “At that time, at the same time, I was trying to take the blame. I was trying to look as bad as possible.”

  “So you don’t think it was cold-blooded now?”

  “It was murder,” he said again. “I mean, I didn’t want to do it, but I don’t know. The perception that I was trying to get across at that point was someone who would be willing to go out and do it on their own without anyone else’s input.”

  “But in your interview, you did talk about how Jason was involved,” said West.

  “I still didn’t tell everything,” said Brian. “I was in between.”

  The only thing he told investigators initially was that Jason had planted the seed for the murder plot in late August of 2004 by relating Rachelle’s tales of abuse. What he left out was how insistent Jason was that it be carried through.

  “He pretty much just kept bringing it up [but] I told him I wouldn’t kill somebody unless somebody’s life was in jeopardy. He just would bring up that he felt that it was better off if Lauri was dead.”

  “What was the reason he gave for asking you to kill her?” asked West.

  “He felt that Lauri was a threat to Rachelle.”

  “Did you agree with him?”

  “At that time I didn’t think she was that much of a threat,” said Brian.

  Finally, Brian reluctantly agreed to commit the murder, and the pair cooked up a number of plans. Jason suggested “injecting Lauri with bleach,” he said. Brian wanted to encase Lauri’s feet in cement and throw her off the boat owned by Jason’s police dispatcher mother and her husband. But Jason nixed that idea.

  “Jason said that he didn’t think that would work because he didn’t normally go fishing, and he didn’t think he could come up with an excuse to borrow his parents’ skiff,” said Brian. “So I said, ‘What about a lake?’ He thought that was a great idea. So it was decided to go with that. And we started trying to find a lake.”

  “Were you able to locate a lake?” asked West.

  “No,” said Brian.

  They talked about using explosives, but that idea was scotched too. “So I listed every possible thing I could think of,” said Brian, “everything I’d see on TV, anything possible. And let him pick one.” At one point they planned to go into the house and kill Lauri.

  “It turned out there were volleyball girls over, and I wasn’t interested in having anybody else hurt,” said Brian. “When I found out the volleyball girls were there, I said no.”

  Another time, Jason wanted to kill Lauri after Rachelle was grounded from using the computer. “Jason was freaking out because he couldn’t get ahold of her,” said Brian. “He was saying, ‘What if Lauri killed Rachelle?’ or ‘What if Rachelle couldn’t take it anymore and killed Lauri and killed herself?’”

  They called the Waterman house from a pay phone at the Black Bear Market in Klawock. When Lauri answered the phone, they hung up and drove to the house.

  “As I was getting out of vehicle he had a large knife,” recalled Brian. “He told me that if I didn’t see anything to go in and kill Lauri. I went down and standing in front of the house, I didn’t see anything, but I just wasn’t ready to kill anybody yet. After a few minutes, I went back up and got back in the vehicle.”

  The murder plan went into higher gear in September when Jason got a phone call from Rachelle at his parents’ house while Brian was there on the computer. Whatever Rachelle told him sent him into a fury.

  “He went back through the hallway to his room, and I heard the sound of a rifle being loaded,” recalled Brian. “I went back and he was in his room loading a rifle, and I was concerned that if I told him that I wasn’t going to let him do it, he’d shoot me.”

  Brian said nothing to him at first. Jason settled down enough to tell him what Rachelle had said.

  “Lauri again threatened Rachelle’s life, that Rachelle was afraid to go home, and that he was going to go up to the Craig school and shoot Lauri Waterman,” said Brian. “And I tried to talk him out of it. I brought up that despite the fact that he had hid the relationship, that I felt a lot of people knew he had being going out with Rachelle. If he shot Lauri, he would be the next person they’d look at. I wasn’t convincing him.”

  Brian finally got Jason to put down the rifle by telling him to wait a week while Brian came up with a new plan—“something that wouldn’t involve going to jail,” he said. “And I couldn’t come up with something. So I finally decided just to go ahead with shooting Lauri.”

  That’s how he decided to hide in the bushes across from the school and gun Lauri down with his 30-30 Model 94 lever-action Winchester after she dropped off Rachelle at volleyball practice. He noted that even as he was debating whether to go through with it, he realized he had left a piece of the gun at home and had to abandon the assassination.

  “When did you come up with the idea for the DWI plan?”

  “Originally what I had come up with was simply a car accident. Jason suggested getting her drunk and decided that he wanted it outside of town, so we end up going out until we found a location that satisfied him.”

  “Why did you pick the weekend of November 13 and 14?”

  “Because Doc Waterman was going to be out of town, and Rachelle Waterman was going to be at a tournament.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Jason told me.”

  “Did he tell you how he found out that information?”

  “He said that Rachelle had told him. He had at one point in the past, probably from the very beginning, he had mentioned that if Rachelle went to the tournament that he thought that would be the best time to kill Lauri.”

  Even after Brian was told that Lauri would be home alone that weekend, he insisted, “I had been rather forceful to see if we could wait until December at least.” Brian expected to be receiving $3,000 to $10,000 from a business venture and thought that could help fund alternative ways to help Rachelle than murder.

  “Why did you go along with it?”

  “I don’t really know,” said Brian. “He pushed real hard. Jason even brought up to me that if I didn’t do something, and something happened to Rachelle, I was responsible for that. If she got hurt, if she got killed that it would be my fault. So I decided to go along with it.”

  Asked by the prosecutor why he went along with plan from the beginning, why he had ever listened to Jason, he said, “I am someone who I count my loyalty very, very important. And as I showed, I ended up doing literally anything for someone. It was the fact that I felt Jason was lying that made it where I was not willing any longer to just say it was me.”

  He protected Jason as much as he could. But after he was arrested, and was shown what Jason had said about him—and about Rachelle—he changed his mind, realizing, as he wrote to his parents, that Jason had the backbone of a jellyfish.

  Prosecutor West asked, “Is that still your view?”

  “I agree with the whole backbone-of-a-jellyfish bit,” said Brian. “He doesn’t want to take responsibility for his part.”

  “But do you still love Rachelle?”

  “I assume so,” he said. “I still care.”

  “Do you still feel that your life is a small price to pay to protect her?”

  Brian sighed. “If it was under different circumstances, yes,” he said. “This was not one of them.”

  West noted that the letter to his parents concluded with this thought: “I’m not saying what I d
id was right or wrong. I haven’t come to a decision on that.”

  West asked, “Have you come to a conclusion yet?”

  “Yes, for me that was more a question of why did I regret being in jail? Did I regret it because I was in jail or did I regret it because I had killed somebody?” he said. “I came to the conclusion—it took me about five or six months—but I came to the conclusion it was because I killed somebody. I can do the jail time. I’ve been in worse places. But killing someone is not something to be taken lightly.”

  After a brief break, defense attorney Steven Wells cross-examined Brian, and immediately established who did the dirty work.

  “Mr. Radel, did Rachelle ever ask you to kill her mother?” asked Wells.

  “No,” said Brian.

  “Did Rachelle Waterman ever tell you: ‘I want my mom dead’?”

  “No.”

  “Did Rachelle Waterman ever come to you and [say] ‘Let’s figure out plans to get rid of my mom’?”

  “No.”

  “You killed Lauri Waterman?”

  “Yes,” said Brian.

  The murder, Brian told the jury, stemmed from his close friendship with Jason. After breaking up with Rachelle, Brian was instrumental in getting Rachelle together with Jason.

  “I basically defended Jason’s honor, that he was good guy, but I wasn’t directly trying to get them together,” he said. “I trusted Jason and felt confident he would treat her right if he got with her.”

  Friends with Jason since they were both sixteen, Brian considered him a “blood brother.”

  “I was raised: an oath is an oath. You keep it,” Brian said. “To me that meant anything that was mine was his. He could ask for the shirt off my back, my money, my boat—and sometimes he did ask for stuff like that. If he asked for something, I would be there for him.”

  That’s why Brian listened to Jason when he insisted that Lauri Waterman must die. The stories of parental abuse of Rachelle resonated with Brian. He grew up in a home that was “very religious” with “lots of discipline” enforced by “switches, berry bushes, cedar branches, thin, whippy pieces of wood, one-by-fours, one-by-twos, broom handles, rubber hoses, hands. Not too many fists, mainly open hand.”

  “Basically, my parents believed in the verses that say ‘Spare the road, spoil the child,’” he said. “You didn’t stick children in corners.”