Love You Madly

by Michael Fleeman

  “I’m sorry to hear about your mom turning up missing, baby. I’m sure she’ll turn up all right though it’ll be OK. And if heaven forbid you guys end up forming a search party or something then let me know. I’ll want to help out for you if nothing else.”

  Jason explained to the jury that the letter was “just basic damage control in case anyone read it.” They were in touch the next night over instant messaging, making “mostly small talk,” he testified, before the conversation came around to her mother.

  “She was curious exactly how things had happened,” said Jason. “I told her I didn’t feel all that comfortable discussing it. I would just as soon forget all about it. She said that was fine.”

  The next time they spoke was over the phone when she called him from school like she usually did. They didn’t discuss her mother. But later in the day she called him again. “She was just in tears, asking me to come down,” he said. “I was worried something had gone wrong.”

  This was the afternoon that Jason arrived at the school at the same time as Rachelle’s neighbor Don Pierce.

  “They showed me into the office,” Jason said. “She was with the principal, I think; she was just destroyed, in tears. I was a little curious about what was going on, obviously. We did have a conversation. I kind of played my supportive role for the benefit of the principal that was there. He left and gave us a few minutes alone. The crying switched off like a light. She just wanted to see me. We spoke for a few minutes. I recall her saying, ‘I told you I was a good actress.’”

  After Don Pierce took Rachelle home, Jason headed there, too, with a stop at the police station.

  “I knew something was going on,” he said. “They must have found something. So I went down to the police station where my mother worked to try to find out what I could about what they knew. She told me that they discovered the vehicle and that it was obvious the body was in it, but she hadn’t been identified yet.”

  Over the next few days, as troopers spoke to him, he at first was “still pretending that I had no knowledge of it, trying to salvage what I could.” He said he was “kind of throwing things out on the fly that I hoped would placate them,” giving investigators a half-baked alibi that he was with Brian in Hollis and had gone to Craig to buy munchies.

  By that Wednesday, however, when Jason went to the trooper station to give another statement, he realized he couldn’t keep lying.

  “It’s kind of hard to describe what I was thinking at that point,” he said. “One part of me just wanted to be done with it, and another part of me still wanted to salvage it. I kind of ended up somewhere in the middle.”

  That’s when he got the idea to stage being attacked at the school, nicking himself on the throat with a serrated knife and dropping garbage bags on the side of the building where he would say he was assaulted by the unknown assailant. When Claus and McPherron arrived, he cooked up a description—“big guy, dark clothes, could have been anybody”—and the phony story.

  “The implication was it was somebody involved in the murder,” he said. But by the next day, Thursday, Jason knew that story wasn’t going to hold up, either, so he gave a half-truth of what he knew about the murder.

  “I was still trying to salvage what was rapidly becoming the rest of my life,” he said. “The half-truth was that I had no prior knowledge and that Rachelle had no prior knowledge, but that Brian kind of pulled me into it at the last moment.”

  Jason said he then admitted what the investigators already knew—that he had made up the assault report—and agreed to wear a wire to get Brian to confess. When he met Brian in Hollis, Brian was “jumpy” and told him “he had been seeing cops and that he believed the home was being monitored”—which of course it was, in a way. Sergeant Habib in full tactical gear had encountered Brian with his flashlight just minutes before.

  The next day, after Jason was arrested, he implicated Rachelle during the talk with Habib.

  “Did he plant the idea?” asked West.

  “I already knew she was involved,” said Jason. “I can’t say that he planted it.”

  “What was the reason that you and Mr. Radel killed Lauri Waterman?”

  “It was to protect Rachelle.”

  “From?”

  “From her mother.”

  “From?”

  “From physical and mental abuse.”

  “And this was the abuse that Rachelle described to you?”

  “Yes.”

  As the only witness to point the finger at Rachelle, Jason got the fiercest cross-examination of the trial.

  “Tell me something,” began defense attorney Steven Wells, “when you make up your lies, are they all on the fly or do you think about some of them ahead of time?”

  “Most of them were on the fly.”

  “So you do think about some of them ahead of time?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Do you think about lies you were going to tell when you were going to—how did you put it?—‘salvage what would remain of the rest of my life’?”

  “Some of them, yes.”

  “You thought about lies to tell as you thought about how to salvage your life?”

  “Yes.”

  Wells suggested that the biggest lies came when Jason wanted to get a plea deal, selling out Rachelle and “getting a pretty good deal” that could result in parole when he’s forty-two years old

  “At forty-two you might even still be young enough that you could still pick up teenage girls, couldn’t you?” asked Wells.

  Jason didn’t flinch. But West objected, and the judge sustained it.

  “At forty-two,” Wells asked, “you would be young enough that the difference in age between you and a teenage girl might be overcome by giving them booze and marijuana and cigarettes, right?”

  Again Jason’s face showed no reaction.

  “I don’t think that’s where I want to go with my life,” he said.

  “You were the first to squeal in this case, weren’t you?” asked Wells.

  “Yes.”

  “You just sacrificed her so you could salvage the rest of your life?”

  Again the judge sustained a prosecution objection.

  “Did you not have the guts to go ahead and really dig the blade in to make the story seem real?” asked Wells.

  “No, I guess not,” said Jason.

  “Just like you didn’t have the guts to kill Lauri Waterman yourself? You had to get Brian to do it, right?”

  “I can’t kill anybody, no.”

  Wells brought Jason through several lies he had told police, from his initial concocted alibi to the fake assault at the school. He noted that Jason had even told the investigators during one of his interviews that he knew he had credibility problems because of his previous lies.

  “Are you going to tell this jury: ‘I know that destroys my credibility but I’m not lying now’?”

  “I’m not,” said Jason. “I would like to point out this is the first time I’ve been under oath.”

  “So it makes a difference? You don’t feel the need to tell the truth when you’re not under oath?”

  “I felt the need, but I didn’t. I am now. I don’t know how many more times I can make that clear to you.”

  For two days Wells pounded at Jason. The defense lawyer repeatedly threw Jason’s own words at him about “trying to salvage what was rapidly becoming the rest of my life.”

  Finally, on the second day of cross-examination, Jason snapped at the lawyer.

  “I’m glad you have such a fun phrase to play with,” he said.

  Wells did not let up. He had Jason read his love letters to Rachelle, including one suggesting Jason worried the relationship would end. Each letter had a more desperate, pleading tone, his obsession with Rachelle growing as he was unable to see her. He read the letter about sneaking to her house in the middle of the night and looking in her window. And he read the letter in which he urged her to share her sexual fantasies.

 
When they got to one letter, the lawyer asked, “Could you read it out loud?” but Jason balked.

  “I would prefer not to,” he said. “You’re certainly welcome to read it, but I would prefer not to.”

  The attorney looked to Judge Collins, who nodded to Jason. He had no choice. He was under oath and his deal with the prosecutors hinged on testifying openly about everything. His lawyer, on the phone line, did not raise an objection.

  Jason sighed and read.

  “‘And yet your present sits just a couple of feet from me tucked away and it smells so good, and admittedly tastes incredible. Just that little taste on the tip of my tongue made me shiver like a crackhead, and your pictures are so sexy, I would love to get my tongue in between your thighs right now.’”

  Under questioning from Wells, Jason said that he was writing about a pair of underwear she had sent him.

  On it went. He read more letters; some, he explained, were written while he was stoned on marijuana, including the letter telling Rachelle that he almost starting cutting again.

  He explained in court, “When I was an adolescent I was a cutter.” At the defense attorney’s instruction, Jason showed the jury his arm covered in scars.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Jason Arrant was led back to prison and a parade of law enforcement witnesses took the stand, including two more troopers and trooper computer expert Christopher Thompson, who had found the nude photos of Rachelle. The defense wanted to bar the pictures from evidence, with Wells saying they served only to “titillate” jurors and “embarrass Miss Waterman.” Prosecutor West argued the photos showed the nature of the relationship Rachelle had with Jason. In the end, the judge did not allow the pictures to be shown but did allow witnesses to talk about them, which Thompson did, in somber, dispassionate tones. Judge Patricia Collins instructed the jury to consider the photos only in terms of explaining the nature of the relationship between Rachelle and the two confessed killers, and not to “prove that Ms. Waterman is either a person of bad character or has a tendency to commit bad acts.”

  The final police witness was the lead investigator, Sergeant Randy McPherron, who related some details of the case but was mainly called to introduce the centerpiece of the case: Rachelle’s interrogation. The detective set the scene and the video was played, the black-and-white images of Rachelle tearfully acknowledging she was involved in the murder plot and then lied about it to investigators. Her wails filled the courtroom and when it was over the mood was bleak.

  The video carried an extra punch because it was the last evidence presented to jurors before a long weekend. They would have three days to let it sink in, without any answer from the defense, and the judge delivered a longer and stronger-than-usual warning.

  “During this long break, get lots of rest,” she told them. “Please remember the admonition that you could probably recite in your sleep by now. Of course it’s important over this three-day break that you avoid any contact with reports that might be generated about the case either in the paper or on the radio or television or the Internet, that you not conduct any independent investigation, that if you’re inadvertently exposed in any way, or if someone attempts to influence you or contact you in any way, that you notify me immediately. And of course, sometimes inadvertently, people tend to just want to start a conversation, and you’ll just have to be incredibly careful about that. No experiments outside the courtroom. Remember, you haven’t heard all the evidence, so it’s important to continue to keep an open mind. Have no contact with the parties, the witnesses or others. We will see you Monday morning at 8:30.”

  After the jury left, the judge asked if there was anything else to talk about. West said that the prosecution’s case was nearly over. Wells said that on Monday he planned to call psychologist Marty Beyer and Rachelle’s father, Doc Waterman.

  He added, “I can tell the court that the other witness that we would potentially have would be Ms. Waterman, but the decision about whether she’s going to testify has not been made yet. So obviously we have to deal with that issue separately.”

  The following Monday, it was Sergeant Randy McPherron’s turn in the hot seat. Defense attorney Steven Wells elicited that McPherron’s army experience included battle simulation training in which McPherron played the enemy. As he led McPherron through the last interrogation of Rachelle, the lawyer sought to show that he was still the enemy.

  McPherron acknowledged he employed a number of interrogation techniques, starting with getting Rachelle from her house to the cramped room at the police station to create a “psychological sense of being isolated and alone,” along with getting her to a place where they had a video camera so there would be no issues later on about what they did.

  “You didn’t wait for Doc, did you?” asked Wells.

  “Well, no,” said McPherron.

  “You wanted to get Rachelle alone—I think ‘isolated’ was the word that you used—to talk with her?”

  “Yes, but I don’t need Doc’s permission. I didn’t have to wait for his permission.”

  “She’s sixteen years old, right?”

  “At the time, yes.”

  “She’s sixteen years old,” repeated Wells. “Actually if a doctor is going to operate on her, the doctor needs—”

  West objected, saying it was irrelevant what a doctor does. The judge overruled him.

  “The doctor needs,” Wells continued, “absent an emergency right then and there, the doctor needs her dad’s permission?”

  “I believe so. I’m not absolutely certain on that. But I think so, yes.”

  “And under the law, at being just barely sixteen, she can’t sign a contract, can she?”

  “I don’t know much about contract law.”

  “She can’t buy a car, can she?”

  “I don’t believe so, no.”

  “She can’t buy cigarettes?”

  “No.”

  “She can’t buy a gun?”

  “No.”

  “She can’t get married without her dad’s permission?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “She can’t even sign for a cell phone by herself, can she?”

  “I guess so, yes, I wouldn’t know.”

  “But that’s all right—you just wanted to isolate her?”

  “Legally, I do not have to get her father’s permission to speak to her,” said McPherron. “He wasn’t there. He’d given permission earlier to speak to her. He hadn’t withdrawn it. He hadn’t told me ‘No, don’t ever talk to her again, no, don’t talk to her without me being there.’ I didn’t have to wait, time was of the essence, since both codefendants had been arrested. Things were falling into place quickly. I felt if we waited much longer it could have been detrimental to the case. I asked her. She agreed to come, and we went to the police station.”

  “When you say, ‘If we had waited much longer things could have been detrimental to the case,’ you mean that if Doc had known that you were going to take her down and sweat her, he might have said no, right?”

  “Well, first of all I didn’t sweat her. I don’t even know what that term means. I went down and interrogated her. Doc’s permission or withdrawing his permission wasn’t material to me. Didn’t matter.”

  After Rachelle agreed to speak with them by herself, McPherron and Habib then used another interrogation technique.

  McPherron acknowledged that in their questions to Rachelle they repeatedly overstated the strength of the case and in some instances made up things. McPherron told Rachelle that both Jason and Brian had sold her out, when in fact only Jason implicated her in the murder plot: Brian said he never had direct contact with her and worked only off of what Jason said about her wishes. The detectives told her they had incriminating evidence off the computers of Rachelle, Jason, and Brian when in fact they only had a single e-mail, given to them by Rachelle’s father, in which Jason spoke about the “hunting trip.”

  McPherron even waved an envelope full of papers at Rachelle implyi
ng that was the evidence, but in court he admitted it was just a “prop.”

  McPherron had told her detectives found “evidence at the scene” that pointed toward her, when in fact they never collected physical evidence implicating her in either the plot or the actual murder. McPherron knew she wasn’t in Craig at the time and that her alibi was unshakable. Even telling her that they were her “friends” was a lie: McPherron had considered Rachelle a suspect from early on and was seeking to get her to confess.

  Yet, even as they lied to her, the detectives accused Rachelle of lying to them at least two dozen times.

  “I wanted her to tell me the truth about what happened,” McPherron told the jury. “Obviously when dealing with a juvenile, you have to be extra cautious,” he added, noting that a detective has to take into account the suspect’s age, maturity, and education. He also said there had been debate among researchers about whether such interrogation techniques risk generating a false confession from younger suspects. “There’s a lot of opinion on both sides of issue,” he said.

  Among the techniques he said he doesn’t do—and didn’t do in this case—was promise leniency if she cooperated. Although a staple of cop shows, the tactic of “Work with me and I’ll cut you slack with the DA” is considered both improper and legally risky: it could lead to a court finding the confession coerced. Interrogation subjects are not allowed to be lured into giving up their constitutional rights against self-incrimination with false assurances of leniency. “I don’t make any deals with the people I interview,” McPherron said

  But Wells suggested that both McPherron and Habib attempted to do just that. When Habib was alone with Rachelle after they took a break, lecturing her about telling the truth and showing respect, McPherron was actually secretly watching the exchange over a video monitor. But McPherron denied this was cutting her a deal.

  “I’m trying to appeal to her sense of maturity,” he said. “I’m just basically telling her, ‘Listen, you know, you’re going to be judged, it’s your life, you’re going to have to figure out what you want to do with it.’”