Love You Madly

by Michael Fleeman

  “Big difference between a wooden spoon and a rubber hose?” said Wells.

  “I thought that,” said Brian, “but at the same time I grew up in that. I thought it was wrong, and I tried to express it, but I usually just—there had been wooden spoons at one point. I graduated to a metal spoon eventually, after the wooden one broke.”

  So when Rachelle told him she had been hurt by her mother—and later Jason said that abuse was continuing—Brian knew he had to take action.

  “I have a major problem with people who abuse their children,” he said. “It’s just something that I don’t like, and I was [remembering] what it was like for me. I thought about what it would be like in her situation … . I felt it was that bad for me, how much worse could it be for her.”

  Still, Brian reiterated he didn’t think murder was the answer—that there were other alternatives—and, looking back, Brian now knew he should have been skeptical. Jason’s behavior in the summer of 2004 showed signs of paranoia. In addition to asking Brian to kill Lauri, he also asked him to kill Rachelle’s former boyfriend Ian Lendrum.

  “He said he’d had a dream where Ian forced Rachelle to commit ritual suicide,” recalled Brian, “and he knew that I believed in psychics, and I believed in prophesy and things like that, and he brought it up to me. And I told him that I didn’t care how much I believed in that stuff, I wasn’t going to kill somebody over a dream.”

  Instead, Brian stormed into the pizza shop where Ian worked and told him to leave Rachelle alone.

  As summer ended and Jason saw less of Rachelle, Jason’s pressure on Brian to murder Lauri grew stronger. The idea seemed “harebrained” to Brian, who thought that Jason was being “overly protective” of Rachelle. By September and October he was bringing up the murder plot constantly. He insisted that Rachelle approved of it, but from what Brian knew of her, it didn’t sound like her.

  “She didn’t like war, she didn’t like killing,” he said. “When he told me she said yes, it flabbergasted me. She just had always seemed to dislike violence.” Brian recalled a day at the T-shirt shop where she worked when he and another man “basically got into a macho contest talking about how tough we were,” and Rachelle got “very upset with me afterwards.”

  “I happen to be someone who’s conservative, and I may be a little more warlike than some, and we had a difference of opinion on those issues,” he said. “So I just didn’t think she was someone who would be that way.”

  It had crossed his mind that Rachelle might have been exaggerating her troubles. But she had complained about things an old boyfriend had done—Brian didn’t specify what to the jury—and those claims turned out to be true.

  “I felt, if she hadn’t lied to me about that, I didn’t feel that she had lied to me about the other,” he said. “I still was a little uncomfortable about it, but Jason ended up informing me at one point that Rachelle had had her Web cam on—because he and her had chatted—and he had seen Lauri hitting Rachelle with a baseball bat. That was kind of the final confirmation for me. To me it was independent confirmation that it was happening.”

  It never occurred to Brian that this time Jason was lying. A week or so later, when Jason asked Brian to kill Lauri, “I said, ‘I guess so,’ which basically counted as saying yes.”

  He now wished he hadn’t said that, he told jurors.

  “I regret most of it,” Brian said. “I regret helping Jason get with her in the first place. There’s a lot of things I wish I had done and hadn’t done. Even at the end, I could have gone down there and talked to [Rachelle] and asked her, ‘What’s up? Is this really true?’ But I just didn’t think Jason would lie.”

  By October, Jason openly worried about losing Rachelle. She was apparently telling Jason she wanted to wait until she was eighteen before having a relationship with him so that her parents wouldn’t be so upset. Jason said that if he waited that long, Rachelle might no longer love him. He wanted Lauri taken care of—now. They kicked around some ideas, none of which seemed good enough.

  “I told him that if I couldn’t come up with anything else, I’d do it myself,” he said. “I thought I was expendable. I’d been having suicidal thoughts at that point. I was looking to get sued. I still owe $60,000 or so [on the failed store]. Contracts came due and I couldn’t pay them, couldn’t pay for my shop, getting sued for not paying rent. Basically I was living on a boat with no money. My power bill was already late. I didn’t have food. I felt my life wasn’t worth very much, and if he was going to go ahead and do it, I’d rather I did it. I wasn’t going to report him to the cops. I’d rather I went down for it than he would go down for it.”

  Wells asked, “If you had listened to your instincts, would we be here today?” asked Wells.

  Brian laughed. “No,” he said. “Bottom line is: What we did, shouldn’t have happened. I look at it: We killed a forty-eight-year-old woman. She could have had twenty, thirty years of life left. That’s just—on top of it, it’s a woman. I guess a guy isn’t better. But for me, that makes the crime worse. The only thing worse would be killing a kid.”

  “Did Lauri’s death accomplish what you had been told it would accomplish?” asked Wells.

  “No. It’s very obvious that it hasn’t,” he said. “It didn’t help Rachelle. It didn’t help anybody else for that matter. It hurt a lot of people.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The trial was drawing a crowd. One TV camera in the courtroom fed several news organizations, and seats were at a premium. Government employees walked across the street from the State Office Building to catch the action. Locals welcomed a hometown hero, NBC’s John Larson, originally of Anchorage, whom Dateline sent to the trial. Larson’s career took him through Juneau, and he told the Juneau Enterprise he was happy to be back. “I think I had my first beer when I was right out of college in Alaska at the Baranof Hotel.”

  Harriet Ryan traveled from Los Angeles to cover the case for Court TV, and her Alaskan hosts were eager to know what she thought of Craig. “Our experience in Prince of Wales was just great,” Ryan told the Juneau Enterprise. “Those people are so nice and so welcoming, and it seemed like a wonderful place to live. I want to go back fishing in the summer.” A few days in Alaska and she had already gone native, buying a pair of Xtratuf neoprene boots.

  The activity caused only a few hiccups. The state’s coroner and two investigators got into trouble when they wandered into the overflow room. As witnesses, they were barred from being in the trial at any time other than during their testimony. When it was discovered, Rachelle’s attorney, steven Wells, called for a mistrial. The judge considered the potential damage and found none. “Essentially, there’s no testimony to change or shave, given these witnesses,” Collins said.

  The mood in the courtroom also had been largely low-key, despite the horrific nature of the crime. Defense attorney Wells played Brian Radel mostly as his own witness, since he readily admitted committing the murder and had no idea what role, if any, Rachelle played in her conversations with Jason. For the first week of the trial, few facts were in dispute, save for the level of animosity between Rachelle and her mother. Prosecutor West called Rachelle’s friends Stephanie Claus, Amanda Vosloh, and Katrina Nelson to show that Rachelle had complained about her mother’s physical abuse, but none of the girls believed Rachelle and saw the arguments as normal mother-daughter conflict.

  The tone changed, however, on Monday, January 30, when Rachelle’s former boyfriend, Ian Lendrum, strode to the witness stand exuding hostility. Still protective of Rachelle sitting just a few feet away, Ian bristled at being put in the position of providing evidence against her.

  When West asked if he ever saw bruises on Rachelle, Ian reluctantly confirmed it, but snapped, “There’s no sign on any of the bruises that said ‘Made by Lauri Waterman’ or ‘Made in China,’” he said.

  Asked if he witnessed problems between Lauri and Rachelle, he acknowledged, “I remember there was tension. They fought. Yelled at each other. Som
etimes she’d be grounded. I never found out why exactly.”

  “Did you ever tell [anybody] that she had told you that she hated her mother?”

  Lendrum sneered, “I don’t recall.”

  The tension heightened the next day, Tuesday, when guards led another big man into the courtroom. A figure who loomed large throughout the case, it was the first time the jury saw Jason. He screamed prisoner: handcuffs, leg irons and yellow jail jumpsuit. He, too, had a lawyer on the phone—bad weather had stranded his attorney in Sitka—but his lawyer also would say nothing.

  After taking the oath to tell the truth, Jason gave an outline of his life story: raised on Prince of Wales Island, his failed stint in the Marines, his acquaintance with Sergeant Mark Habib through his police dispatcher mother, the day he ran into Brian Radel at a Bible camp in Ketchikan, and, in February 2004, how he met the then fifteen-year-old Rachelle Waterman.

  Like Brian, Jason was a big man with a small voice who spoke calmly and quietly. He told the jury that he and Rachelle began dating in the summer of 2004 and that the relationship soon became sexual, with Rachelle sending him nude photos of herself.

  “I actually requested them,” he said. “I filled out text documents just kind of detailing some poses I’d like to see. She obliged.”

  Asked by prosecutor West when their relationship ended, Jason said, “It was going on pretty much up to the point of the arrest. I’d say that’s what stopped it.”

  Early in their relationship, Rachelle confided in him how her mother had hurt her, trying to throw her down the stairs, hitting her with a baseball bat, Jason said. The bruises he saw on Rachelle when they had sex confirmed her stories. He wanted to help her, and they discussed emancipation and running away, but she dismissed those ideas.

  Finally, she told him, “It would be better if my mother weren’t around.”

  “Did you ask her what she meant by that?” asked West.

  “Well, yes,” said Jason.

  “And what was her response?”

  “That she thought it would be better if her mother was dead.”

  “And what was your response?”

  “I was obviously trepidatious about it, but I loved her and I already told her I would do anything for her. So at that point, I decided that I needed to enlist some help.”

  “Did she offer you anything to help her in doing this?”

  “No.”

  “Did she offer you any money?”

  “No.”

  “Drugs?”

  “No.”

  “Sex?”

  “No.”

  It was love, he said, nothing more, that drove him to recruit Brian Radel to concoct murder plans that ranged from the cement shoes to a rigged car accident. Rachelle knew about some of the plans, including the one to gun down her mother outside the school.

  “Had you talked to Rachelle Waterman about this?” West asked.

  “Yes, she called me on the phone,” said Jason. “And I relayed to her that that’s what the plan was going to be.”

  “What was her response?”

  “She wasn’t too into that plan,” he said. “She wanted something a little more concrete. She asked us to abort. But by then it was already too late to contact Radel.”

  “What was the reason she gave you for calling it off?”

  “She didn’t like the plan because it was—there was too many ifs. If Radel had stood up and shot her there, there was too much chance of being caught. She was too close to the situation.”

  He said he sent Rachelle an e-mail later in the evening—the “hunting trip” message—and conversed by instant messaging in an effort to come up with another plan of which she’d approve.

  “How often would the conversation talk about the plans to kill her mother?” asked West.

  “That only came up probably one in every five phone calls. We tried to keep that sort of thing to a minimum.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Just because we were both getting a little paranoid about things by then.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Well, myself, and I know Miss Waterman was probably getting a little antsy about it.”

  In November, Rachelle provided the details that would set the final murder plan in motion.

  “How did it come up?” asked West.

  “We were always sort of planning or plotting if you will, different scenarios. I don’t even remember if it was on the phone or online or what. She mentioned that a good window of opportunity would be coming up when she would be going up north for volleyball and when her dad would also be gone from home.”

  Jason said Rachelle told him how to get into her house through the garage window, telling him it was how she had snuck out at night in the incidents that led to her groundings. He didn’t ask for a detailed map of the house but “basic layout,” and she “kind of described what she could” but didn’t put anything to paper.

  From the very beginning Jason was nervous about the murder plan, and when it came to fruition, he reacted much differently than Brian.

  The actual perpetration of the murder began when Jason dropped off Brian near the house on the wet and windy night, then drove to their rendezvous spot at the gravel pit. He described his anxious hours chain-smoking and waiting, until he finally began driving back and forth looking for Brian. When the minivan headlights came into view, they drove back to the gravel pit, where he saw Lauri tied up in the backseat.

  “What happened then?” asked West.

  “We both climbed back into our respective vehicles and drove out the point where we were going to kill her,” said Jason.

  They pulled into a wide spot in the road—Jason wasn’t sure exactly where they were—and Brian opened up the side door of the van. Jason stood ten feet behind the van watching the scene in the light of his truck headlights. A garbage bag got placed on the wet ground; Jason couldn’t remember if he did it or Brian. Limp and apparently dazed, Lauri was placed on the plastic.

  “She was so inebriated at that time that she wasn’t really capable of moving on her own,” said Jason. “She just was very loose. She couldn’t even hold her own head up.”

  “What did he do next?” asked West.

  “[Brian] held her up on her knees, stood behind her, and then made the first attempts to break her neck.”

  “What did he do then?”

  “He put his hands on her shoulders and tried to whip her head back and forth to break her neck.”

  “How many times did he do that?”

  “Half a dozen.”

  “Did that work?”

  “No.”

  “So, what did he do then?”

  “Then he went for the movie approach, which was just to grab the back of her head and chin and twist.”

  “How far back did he get her head?”

  “Easily 180 degrees.”

  “That break her neck or not?”

  “I can’t speculate whether the bones broke. I know she was still alive at that point.”

  “Then what did he do?”

  “Then he laid her out on the ground, because she was already so muddy at this point that it didn’t really matter anymore if she got any more [dirty]. And he took one of the flashlights and started to strike her in the throat to collapse the windpipe.”

  “How many times did he hit her with that?”

  “Easily a dozen.”

  “And where did he hit her?”

  “Right in the throat.”

  “And she was lying on the ground at this point?”

  “Yes, on her side.”

  “On her side? And where was he at?”

  “He was standing behind her.”

  “Was she doing anything when he was hitting her?”

  “Aside from some various noises I would care to forget, not really, no. I think she was beyond struggle at that point.”

  “What were you doing during this time?”

  “At first I was watching, but after about t
he third blow I couldn’t. I turned around.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “I threw up.”

  The surreal and violent scene had become “kind of a blur at this point,” with Jason reeling against the sickening sound of Brian pummeling Lauri with the little flashlight they had purchased hours earlier at the Black Bear Market.

  “Then what happened?” asked West.

  “Well, she was still alive at that point,” said Jason. “She was still breathing. And so then he just put his hands over mouth and nose to cut off her air and waited.”

  “Waited for what?”

  “Waited for her to die.”

  “And she did?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long did he have her hands over her mouth and nose?”

  “Easily four or five minutes.”

  “Did she struggle or was she just lying there?”

  “I couldn’t tell if it was struggles or just nerve response. She did move.”

  “After he removed his hands from her nose and mouth, what happened then?”

  “He checked for a pulse. I did as well.”

  “Were you able to detect one?”

  “No.”

  They then drove to the logging road and set fire to the van—and Lauri’s body. Jason dropped Brian off at home and returned to his own bed early Sunday morning. Jason got a call at his house in the afternoon. It was Rachelle, back from the volleyball tournament in Anchorage.

  “She said she noticed her mother was gone and the minivan as well. And I said, ‘Well, yeah, we did it. It’s done,’” recalled Jason. “And she asked what happened to the minivan. I said that it had been burned; it was completely destroyed. She expressed disappointment that she wouldn’t be inheriting it.”

  “And what else do you remember about the conversation?” asked West.

  “I asked her to do a last minute wipe-down, go over the railing on the stairs, doorknobs, anything that might have been missed.”

  “Did she say that she would do it?”

  “Yeah.”

  They talked maybe ten minutes. He didn’t describe in detail what happened to her mother and she didn’t ask. But he sent her a letter, which he read to the jury: