“I don’t know about anybody else but right now you can smell that brimstone from the depths of hell because the state made a deal with the devil,” said Wells. “That devil is Jason Arrant. They bought his testimony to implicate a sixteen-year-old girl … . I know that you will find that Rachelle, like teenagers, just made stupid mistakes, that she didn’t want her mom dead.”
Drawing his two-hour summation to a close, Wells read a letter that Doc Waterman found on Rachelle’s nightstand in November 2004 after her arrest.
“My dearest daughter, I’m sorry that things between us are tense right now. Please don’t feel like I think you’re a bad person because you’re not. I know I worry way too much about you, but that’s what moms do when they love their daughters as much as I love you.”
Speaking so softly only the jury could hear him, Wells asked, “Why would she keep this. Why would this be on her nightstand? Why? It’s because she loved her mom. It’s because she did not want her mom to die.
“This has gone on long enough,” the lawyer said. “It’s time to put this to rest. We can’t bring back Lauri Waterman. But you can reunite Rachelle with her dad. I ask you to do that.”
The quiet of the courtroom was broken only by the sounds of crying. Doc Waterman shed his first public tears since the days after his wife’s death. Sniffles came from the audience section. Three women jurors wept.
It was a different scene at the prosecution table. Throughout the summation, West had been scribbling in his notepad and whispering so loudly to Trooper Bob Claus that the jury sent a note to the judge asking her to tell them to be quiet. At 12:42 p.m., when West gave his final remarks, he shed the business-as-usual tone.
Anger crept into his voice.
“Mr. Wells gave a very dramatic closing,” the prosecutor acknowledged—and he told the jury why: the defense was trying to blind the jury with emotion.
“Quite a bit of [time] was spent on Mr. Arrant, calling him a child molester, stalker. Why is he using these phrases?” asked West. “To build up an emotion in you about it. Now, why does he want to do it? Because he wants you to have a lower opinion of Mr. Arrant so you won’t believe what he has to say.”
He noted that Wells didn’t use the same terms for Brian Radel, who also admitted to a sexual relationship with Rachelle, “because when Mr. Radel testified, he gave testimony favorable to the defendant.”
Jason was no stalker, West insisted, and as a criminal defense attorney Wells knew it. All the e-mails, letters, and testimony showed that the contact between Jason and Rachelle was consensual. “His argument is based on emotion, being dramatic is what he’s trying to do,” West said.
On one point West said he agreed with the defense.
“I don’t doubt for a second that Miss Waterman would not be able to kill somebody,” he said. “That’s why she contacted Mr. Arrant. Mr. Arrant couldn’t kill anyone, that’s why he contacted Mr. Radel. Unfortunately for all of us, Mr. Radel could kill people. He had it in him to kill somebody. The other two, they could get involved in it but couldn’t actually do the actual killing with their own hands.”
Which brought West back to the concept of a conspiracy. He told the jury again that the law didn’t require that Rachelle kill her mother with her own hands, that it was enough that she was a participant in the plot.
“Look at all the evidence,” West said. “All of this shows that Miss Waterman was involved in the conspiracy to kill her mother, and that conspiracy went to its finale with her death and her being murdered. And that makes Miss Waterman as much responsible as Mr. Arrant and Mr. Radel.”
West went back to his seat, having expressed as much prosecutorial indignation as this amiable Texan could muster. But would it be enough?
CHAPTER TWENTY
Bob Claus saw the jurors crying but remained confident of what he saw as the strength of the prosecution case and of the evidence he and the other investigators had collected. Before trial, the state’s team had decided to proceed with a straightforward, no-nonsense presentation of evidence, what he later called a “logical, piece by piece building of the case.” As Steve Wells gave his stirring summation, Claus and prosecutor West conferred by whisper and felt they could counter his key points with facts and logic and, most of all, the law, as read to the jurors by the judge. Rachelle’s age didn’t matter; the law said so in black and white.
But the jury had deliberated for six hours on Wednesday, February 8, when it became clear that Wells had struck a nerve. The judge got a note from the jury asking for the legal definition of the word “intended.” She instructed them that the word meant the panel had to find a “conscious objective” that led to the result, in this case murder. The jury next wanted to know if it had to find every legal element of each offense to reach a verdict; the judge said they did. Then the panel wanted to hear the recordings of the actual police interviews with Jason and Brian, which—except for Jason’s jailhouse interview discussion with Sergeant Habib—were referenced in court but not played for the jury. The judge said no, but invited the jury to rehear any testimony from the trial. The judge also turned down the jury’s request to see an exhibit put together by Rachelle’s attorney, a timeline of key events in the case. The judge said that was Wells’s interpretation and not evidence.
The panel retired for the night, returned the next morning, and deliberated all day Thursday and all day Friday without reaching a verdict, apparently hung up on the very question that Wells had asked them: Did Rachelle want her mother dead? This was a good sign for the defense and cause for worry for the prosecution team.
After a weekend break, the jury returned Monday for another day of deliberations, and still no decision. On Tuesday morning, ninety minutes into the fifth day of deliberations, the jury finally sent the judge a note: they could not reach a unanimous verdict. Attorneys assembled for a hearing and Judge Collins declared a mistrial.
It was a momentarily confusing scene. After more than two years of investigation, litigation, and incarceration, Rachelle was neither guilty nor innocent. Wells announced there was a “good chance” the state would try her again, and the judge set a later court date to reconsider bail. Rachelle was still as much a prisoner today as she was the night she was arrested. She burst into tears as she was led back to the women’s jail. Her father, overcome with emotion, was comforted by Wells. “You know she’s not guilty,” the attorney said.
When they later spoke to reporters, the jurors said that early on they came to an important agreement: that Jason was most responsible for the murder of Lauri Waterman. They agreed that he wanted Lauri out of the way so that he could be with Rachelle. They also agreed that Rachelle had invented her stories of abuse by her mother. They didn’t doubt that Rachelle had wanted her mother gone, but the panelists agreed that it was likely the exaggerated complaints of a teenage girl. One juror said her own sister had expressed similar sentiments about their mother. Where they hung was on the question of Rachelle’s involvement in the murder plot. The two voting for conviction were swayed by her statements during the interrogation. “Clinched it,” juror Curtis Blackwell later told NBC’s Dateline. “What can I say? She admitted it.” But the ten other jurors found cause for reasonable doubt. Although many were not comfortable with letting Rachelle get off scot-free, they decided that the investigators coerced the confession.
“For a fifteen-year-old who’s scared out of her mind, they’re professionals,” juror Andrea Jones told Dateline. “They know how to get people to talk. And I mean if she said, ‘Yes, I did it,’ I don’t even know if I would put a lot of weight on it just because through the whole thing she stuck with ‘no.’”
It was just as Bob Claus had feared.
“All of us failed to realize the power of what we saw as irrational arguments,” Claus said later. “Wells was either emphasizing things that hadn’t been emphasized in testimony or talking about things as fact that weren’t proved.”
The defense had branded Jason as a lying, stalking pervert and portray
ed Rachelle as a naïve girl who got in over her head. Claus saw both much differently, particularly Rachelle, whom he believed had played investigators just as effectively as she had Jason and Brian. The trooper had wondered if the prosecution shouldn’t have tried to introduce more evidence of Rachelle’s mind games with Jason and Brian. “The sexual material pretty graphically showed this isn’t Miss Sweet Sixteen,” Claus said. “The jury never got to see that.”
Three weeks later Rachelle returned to court, seeking to have her bail reduced so she could be free while awaiting word on whether she would face another trial. Judge Collins took the bench and the two lawyers—prosecutor Stephen West and defense attorney Steven Wells—announced their presence over the courtroom speakers. West remained in Ketchikan and Wells was in Anchorage for what they thought would be a standard bail hearing. When the prosecution wrapped up its case, Wells made the defense’s usual request for a directed verdict of acquittal on the grounds the state didn’t meet its burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. As usual, the judge denied the request.
But what the lawyers didn’t know at the time was that as Judge Collins watched Rachelle’s interrogation video again and heard the testimony of investigators, particularly Sergeant Randy McPherron, something stirred. This former criminal defense lawyer started having second thoughts about the prosecution’s case, and at the hearing on Tuesday, March 7, she aired them for the first time.
Several aspects of the interrogation bothered the judge. She didn’t think the investigators were being straight with the jury about their efforts to contact Rachelle’s father before taking Rachelle to the police station. She didn’t think that Rachelle fully understood her right to have her father present during questioning. She didn’t like that the investigators lied to Rachelle when they told her that what she said would be confidential when they knew they were going to use it against her. In all, Judge Collins said, the prosecution had a heavy legal burden to prove that a juvenile’s statements to police were not coerced, and in her mind, having now considered the “totality of the circumstances,” she now, upon reflection, didn’t think the prosecution had met that burden.
Judge Collins dismissed the indictment against Rachelle.
In the courtroom, Doc Waterman gasped. Tears came to Rachelle’s eyes. Both lawyers were momentarily stunned—Wells at his good fortune, West at what he saw as a blindsiding by the court. “You’ve really caught the state by surprise, Your Honor,” said West. Pressed for an explanation, the judge said, “I have reconsidered. That was the order I entered today.”
The prosecution was given two weeks to decide whether to file new charges, and since there was still a good chance the state would do so, Judge Collins ordered bail for Rachelle. But instead of $150,000, it would be only $50,000, payable by a bond that would cost $5,000 in cash.
Doc Waterman said he could raise the money the next day—the banks by now had already closed—and so Rachelle was led crying out of the courtroom for what would be her last night in jail. When Doc left the courthouse, he was hugged by several jurors.
“This is a good thing,” he told reporters. “At least I get my daughter back.”
The next day Rachelle walked out of the Lemon Creek Correctional Facility after spending a year and two months in a cell. A small group of reporters gathered outside the jail, but neither Doc nor Rachelle had anything to say to them. The last image of Rachelle was a glimpse of her in the backseat of a car, reading the newspaper as her father drove off.
Where they went from there, nobody really knew. She didn’t go back to Craig, which was to be expected. The judge herself had suggested Rachelle stay away from her hometown, where nerves were still raw and the chatter in the coffee shops and bookstore, on the docks and in the schools, still ran strongly against Rachelle. Craig had lost more than Lauri Waterman. People locked their doors at night for the first time, eyed outsiders with more suspicion, and wondered whom or what to blame. Jason and Brian? Rachelle? Her parents? Life on an isolated island? Or even the Internet?
As months and then years passed, Rachelle never returned to the place she once branded as “Hell, Alaska,” this tiny community that served as the setting for her crappy life. But this spruce-scented strip of land in the sea left her with her happiest memories, from her best Christmas ever to a T-shirt store job that gave her the first taste of adult responsibility and rewards, to a sports triumph that had the citizens parading in the streets.
Doc came back, still sold real estate, still advertised in the local paper. Many still didn’t know what to make of this man oddly calm in the face of crisis, whether to hate him for raising a demon child or sympathize with a man who had done the best he could with one tough teenager, only to suffer an unimaginable loss. Doc was still spotted around town every day. He’d wave to people at the bank, even people like Bob Claus and Mark Habib, who all thought—and still think—his daughter got away with murder.
Rachelle had disappeared. The Internet’s most infamous blogger never blogged again, at least not under her own name, and her whereabouts became a favorite game of speculation. Doc would be asked many times, and usually he refused to say. Once he said she was in Florida getting a college degree. Her lawyer, Steven Wells, also refused to say where she was—for her own safety, he said. It seemed that Rachelle Waterman, even as she entered her twenties, was still a girl who was being protected.
In time, as life returned to normal on Prince of Wales Island, those same people who cheered at Rachelle’s volleyball games remained divided on whether she was a tragically misguided teen or, as Sergeant Habib had called her, an up-and-coming black widow. Even after so much had happened and so many secrets were revealed, many still asked who Rachelle really was. It was a question she often explored herself as she tapped away on her brand-new computer in her warm bedroom on cold and rainy nights. “I live in Alaska,” she once wrote, “a very small town which I’m sure most of you have never heard of. And no, I don’t live in an igloo. I’m involved in a little bit of everything and am usually kept pretty busy.”
AFTERWORD
The day after Rachelle left jail, Brian Radel and Jason Arrant were formally sentenced in a Ketchikan court. The prison terms had long since been negotiated, and both men made good on their deals by testifying. But the hearing on Thursday, March 9, offered both men a chance to explain themselves, to try to come to terms, and to seek, if not forgiveness, then some semblance of understanding.
Anchorage psychologist Susan LaGrande, who spent a day conducting tests on Jason, came away with the same impression that the investigators had: Jason was a moody, socially isolated man-child whose “paranoia scale was off the charts” and who had retreated into a world of video games and fantasy. His parents testified that Jason was a sad and lonely child.
Jason spoke for himself, telling Judge Collins, “I can never say how sorry I am. What I did was a horrible thing. I won’t dispute that by pretending to be innocent.” His was a crime born out of trusting too much in a girl. Rachelle told him stories of mental and physical abuse by her mother, told him she was in danger, “and I bought it hook, line, and sinker,” Jason said, “because I loved her with all my heart.”
Jason turned to Doc Waterman, who sat in the audience section, and said, “You have every right to hate me. Instead, I can only offer my deepest apologies and regrets, for whatever that may be worth.” He also offered a message to the woman he watched die on a rainy Alaskan night: “To Lauri Waterman, if you’re listening, I can never tell you enough how sorry I am, no matter how many prayers I offer up. Rest in paradise.”
Judge Collins sentenced Jason to the agreed-upon fifty years in prison, with the possibility of parole in thirty, and suggested he serve his time in a facility with mental health treatment available.
As for Brian, his public defender, Marvin Hamilton, portrayed his client as a man who committed a bad act “for a noble reason,” a product of parental abuse who empathized with Rachelle and “wanted to prove he could act sel
flessly.” The attorney bolstered his argument by reading from Clarence Darrow’s Attorney for the Damned and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
After hearing from Brian, who said, “I wish Lauri were alive today,” the judge saw not a Mark Twain character but a “cold-blooded killer,” and sentenced him to the already negotiated ninety-nine years in prison, with the possibility of release in forty-six years.
In an interview later with NBC’s Dateline, Brian said he thought about Lauri’s murder every night and had come to believe that Rachelle never faced any real danger from her mom. Asked if, despite his change of heart, he still loved Rachelle, Brian said, “I still do,” and said she was not to be blamed for everybody’s pain. “I personally think she’s a good person,” he said. “I don’t think she wanted her mom killed.”
In the same program, Lauri’s brother Don Martelli Jr. had a different view: “I’m pretty bitter about it and I don’t know if I can forgive her.”
Two days after the sentencing of Jason and Brian, Rachelle’s attorney Steven Wells made a career change. He announced it on his Alaska Blawg, in what he called “one of the saddest and yet most exciting posts I have written.” After months of soul-searching about his future, he decided to leave the Office of the Public Advocate and hang his shingle in private practice. He was burned out by the travel and the workload. He would continue to represent Rachelle while exploring new areas of criminal defense. “The Waterman case has provided me unprecedented publicity,” he wrote, “which means that this is a good time to make this move.”
He wasn’t the only one to feel this way. Disillusioned by law enforcement because of the Waterman case, Bob Claus retired from the state troopers and took a job with the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, an environmental group to protect the forests. Those years of lamenting the damage to his beloved island by clear-cutting prompted him to finally do something about it. When he’s not traveling to Washington to lobby lawmakers, he works out of a little office in Klawock not far from the trooper post. He enjoys the new work but remains bitter about how his last big investigation ended.
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