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  “Have you seen my mother?” she casually asked her friend Amanda Vosloh, who was part of her music clique, during class. Amanda told police that Rachelle was strangely matter-of-fact, saying after class, “My mom is missing. We don’t know where she is.”

  John Wilburn, a fourteen-year-old member of her D&D circle, heard Rachelle say she feared her mother had died in a drunk-driving accident. Rachelle told him she had returned from Anchorage to find a wine bottle in the trash and the van missing. It was the same thing she related to school counselor Sheila Beardsley.

  Rachelle kept it together until the afternoon, when she broke down in tears. Amanda surmised that Rachelle had been jolted back to reality when her friends gave her a sympathy card for the loss of her mother, for by then everybody had assumed that Lauri Waterman was dead.

  At two p.m. the Watermans’ neighbor Don Pierce received a call from the secretary at Craig High School. “Rachelle was losing it,” Pierce recalled. Don made the short drive to the high school and knocked on the door to the principal’s office.

  Inside, he found Rachelle crying. They hugged each other.

  “We need to go home,” he told her.

  But Rachelle said, “I can’t. I’ve called Jason.”

  Don was taken aback. Jason Arrant was one of Rachelle’s new friends, a man in his midtwenties who worked as a janitor at the school in Klawock. Don knew little about Jason except that the man hung around the computer store where Rachelle worked—and that Lauri Waterman didn’t like the attention he was paying her daughter.

  There was a knock. Don opened the door and in walked a heavyset man with red hair who “blew right by me and went right to Rachelle.” This was Jason Arrant—well over two hundred pounds. Rumor had it that he was an island washout, no college education, still living with his parents in Klawock, spending his time playing video games and hanging around a teenage girl.

  Jason closed the door behind him and dominated the cramped principal’s office with his bulk. He rounded the desk and embraced Rachelle. They shared quiet words, with Jason telling her that everything was going to be all right. They sat in the chairs—Jason taking the one that Don had been sitting in—and held hands with Rachelle while she continued to cry.

  Another knock, and this time the principal’s secretary was at the door. Don went out of the room, leaving Jason with Rachelle, and spoke to the secretary. She said that police chief Jim See had called to say that Rachelle needed to go home. The chief had to meet with her and her father.

  Don went back into the principal’s office and told Rachelle to gather up her things, he was driving her home. Jason objected, saying that he—Jason—would be the one to comfort and console Rachelle. The men had words. Rachelle was Don Pierce’s unofficial goddaughter (the Pierces weren’t Catholic) and he was taking her home so that she would be with her dad at the time that they were going to hear the news from Officer See.

  As Don led Rachelle down the hall to get her coat and books from her locker, the big man followed, angrily telling him to leave Rachelle with him. Don ignored him. As a special ed teacher, Don could tune out what he called Jason’s “white noise.”

  Don brought Rachelle to the teachers’ parking lot, where they got in his truck and headed home. Along the way she rocked in her seat and said Hail Marys.

  Within minutes they got to her house. Don walked her to the front door and into the living room, not wanting her to be alone while she waited for her father to emerge. When he showed up, Don realized he had parked in Lauri’s space in the driveway.

  “We had assumed the worst, but there was a chance that he was bringing good news, and I didn’t want to have the wrath of the wooden spoon,” he later said. “So I went and moved my truck to my house, which was next door.”

  Outside, he saw a truck pull into the spot that Don had just vacated, and in stepped Jason, who had obviously followed them. Don braced for another argument with the big man when Chief See arrived in a police truck. See told Jason to leave, but he refused, insisting that he be with Rachelle while the chief delivered whatever news he had for her.

  See arched his eyebrow—like the wrestler The Rock, Don thought—and said, “And you are?”

  Jason gave him his name.

  “I don’t have time for this now,” See said. “Get in your truck.”

  Jason backed down and drove away while See went into the house with Don. It was a grim scene. Doc Waterman and his daughter appeared tense and agitated, bracing for the worst.

  Chief See didn’t mince words. He confirmed that the rumors were true: a burned-out van with a body inside had been found on a logging trail, and state troopers had confirmed the van belonged to Lauri.

  Rachelle burst into tears. Doc reacted with a calm that often perplexed all but his closest friends.

  “He took it like a person that had been waiting for the other foot to fall all day,” recalled Don. “He was stoic about it, his shoulders slumped.”

  The chief of police cautioned that the body had not yet been positively identified, but he stressed that it didn’t look good. Nobody else on the island had been reported missing and all signs pointed to the victim being Lauri.

  After hearing the news, Doc now told See he wanted to show him something upstairs. Doc led the chief up to the bedroom. The day before he found blood on the sheets. He first thought it was menstrual blood, but he had his doubts when he saw that it was on both sides of the bed.

  “I need to show you something else I found in the sheets and blankets,” Doc said, taking the chief to the bathroom. On a portable mirror lay what See thought was the tip of a rubber glove and a fiber, about five inches long, that seemed to have come from a rope. Doc was about to hand the items to the chief when See warned him not to touch them.

  “They’ve already been contaminated,” said Doc, explaining that he had moved them from the bed to the bathroom.

  Chief See now realized that the house was a crime scene. He told Doc to pack a change of clothes for himself and Rachelle and find a place to spend the night. Investigators would have to comb the home for evidence.

  Doc looked at the chief. “Do we have a wacko here?” he asked.

  Jim See had no answer for his old friend.

  As Doc and Rachelle gathered their belongings, downstairs the chief quietly asked Don Pierce where Lauri Waterman went to the dentist, if it was in Craig or in Ketchikan. Pierce said she had a dentist on the island. See sent an officer to the office to pick up Lauri’s X-rays to help make positive ID on the remains.

  See went outside to find Jason and his truck gone. Jason’s appearance at the Waterman house meant serious complications.

  At 6:15 p.m., Sergeant Randy McPherron and Trooper Bob Claus arrived at the home of Don and Lorraine Pierce. The van had been hauled to a garage for further inspection, the body was being shipped to the coroner’s office in Anchorage, and a search warrant had been secured for the Waterman house next door.

  McPherron spoke to Doc Waterman for the first time. The Realtor repeated what he had told See previously. He told the detective of returning home from Juneau on Sunday afternoon after a weekend trip to find his wife and her van missing, followed by the discovery of the fiber, piece of rubber, and blood on the unmade bed, the wedding ring set in the bathroom, and the wine bottle in the kitchen.

  Between Doc’s account and that of Lauri’s friend Janice Bush, investigators put the time of the murder between ten p.m. Saturday night, when Lauri left the chamber of commerce event in Craig, and nine a.m. Sunday morning, when the hunter found her body in the smoldering wreckage of her van about fifty miles away.

  The rings in the bathroom and the unmade bed suggested Lauri had made it home and gone to bed. The fiber, which may have come from a rope, and the piece of rubber, likely from gloves, suggested an intruder. She may have been killed at home or she was driven off alive and murdered somewhere else and burned along with the van or, more chillingly, burned alive. McPherron was counting on the search of the house and the a
utopsy to fill in the gaps.

  After McPherron interviewed Doc Waterman, he and Claus went into another room to speak with Rachelle. The detective introduced himself and Claus said hello.

  “Before I go any further,” McPherron told her, making clear this wasn’t a social visit, “you understand we are police officers, right?”

  “I understand that you’re police officers,” said Rachelle.

  “And you don’t have to answer anything you don’t want. You can end this conversation at any time. You also have a right to have a parent present if you so desire.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I understand you want to talk to us alone.”

  “Yeah,” said Rachelle.

  McPherron then got down to business.

  “We’re trying to build a timeline and figure out when you last saw your mom, what was going on with you guys,” he said. “I understand you left town on the Wednesday to go to the volleyball tournament, right?”

  Rachelle explained that she had been in Anchorage, returning with her father about three thirty or four p.m. on Sunday. She said she had spoken with her mother while she was away, the last time about five thirty p.m. on Saturday.

  “She was fine, she was happy,” said Rachelle. “She was about to go the chamber of commerce dinner and I had just got done shopping.”

  Rachelle gave a little laugh with the word shopping.

  “And I told her what we were doing,” she continued, “and I told her how we’ve been doing, [what] our plans were for the night.”

  “She give you any idea of what’s going on with her, other than going to the chamber of commerce dinner?” asked McPherron.

  “Not really.”

  “Did she have any plans for Sunday?”

  “No.”

  “Did she normally go to church?”

  “Sometimes; not all the time. Usually she would go with me. She would go every once in a while by herself.”

  “Was she planning on meeting you guys at the house or at Hollis?”

  “At the house,” she said, explaining that her father had picked up a friend’s car in Hollis and drove that back to Craig.

  “When you left Wednesday, how were things going?” asked the detective.

  “Fine,” said Rachelle.

  “Any problems between her and your dad?”

  “Not that I know of. I mean, I heard a while ago … I heard rumors about my father having an affair.”

  Claus had heard the same rumors and passed them on to McPherron before the interview with Rachelle. The Waterman marriage had been whispered about for years on the island. They seemed a mismatched pair—the vivacious Lauri and her older, stoic husband.

  “Over this summer?” asked McPherron.

  “Yes,” said Rachelle.

  “Do you know who it was?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “What was the gist of it?”

  “I heard it from somebody,” said Rachelle. “And the things that were interesting, that kind of made me go, ‘Hmm,’ like he’d say, ‘Oh, I’ve got a meeting. I’ll be late,’ and she [Lauri] would drive by and the car wasn’t there. And he’d go on long drives to watch the ocean. Just things like that. I’m not saying anything.”

  McPherron left the subject for now. He asked her if there was any reason for her mother to be in Thorne Bay.

  “Not that I know of,” said Rachelle. “I have an ex-boyfriend there, but that’s about it.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Kelly Carlson.”

  “Any problems at home?” the detective asked.

  “I like got in trouble, like, a month ago, but other than that, fine.”

  “Any problems with any of your friends, any of your boyfriends?”

  “I don’t have any boyfriends,” said Rachelle. “She doesn’t like that I hang out with a couple of people.”

  “Who is that?”

  “Jason Arrant,” said Rachelle. “I worked with him over the summer. And he’s older. My mom doesn’t like that I talk to him sometimes.”

  “You go out with him?”

  “We’re just friends.”

  “Your mom doesn’t like him?”

  “No, she just doesn’t like the fact that I’m talking to an older man … . We were not, like, really close, it was just, you know, casual.”

  “Anything else she had a problem with?”

  “No.”

  “When you got home on Sunday, did you notice anything out of the ordinary at the house? Anything missing?”

  “Nothing missing, but there was a wineglass in the sink and an empty bottle of wine in the garbage.”

  “Your mom drink?”

  “Sometimes … . Every once in a while,” said Rachelle. “I’ve never really known her to just sit around, watch a movie, and have some wine.”

  “Aside from the car being gone, was anything else missing.”

  “No, not that I know of.”

  “Any sign of a struggle?”

  “I looked upstairs and the bedroom’s fine.”

  “Is your mom the type of person if someone comes over that she knows, even casually, she’ll still invite them in?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, but Rachelle didn’t think her mother would do it late at night.

  McPherron brought Rachelle up to speed with what police had determined from the short investigation, telling her, “As best we can piece together, she did go to this chamber of commerce dinner, people saw her there, she helped clean up, and that appears to be the last sighting we have of her. Who are her friends?”

  Rachelle gave some names, and McPherron said, “OK, I have no more questions. I may have more later on.” He told her police were getting a search warrant to go through the house. “Something may have happened in the house and that’s what we’ll look for.”

  Then McPherron asked Rachelle, “Do you have any questions for me?”

  She did. “Do you think that somebody has done something to her?”

  “We don’t know,” he said. “We found the van, we found the body in the van. The vehicle was burned. We don’t know who this person is or anything yet. So that’s going to take a while.”

  Her comments gave investigators plenty with which to work. But he didn’t want to press too hard at this stage. McPherron saw this as a preliminary interview and hoped to have another chance to talk to her alone.

  Listening to Rachelle, Bob Claus was certain she wasn’t telling the entire truth.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Investigators searched the Waterman house until late Monday night and again for much of Tuesday. Crime scene tech Dale Bivens led the search with help from Trooper Claus and the local cops. “For us, lots of times, it’s a learning experience to see a professional do his work,” Chief See said later in court. “I actually held the end of the tape measure. I may be the chief, but I’m always wanting to learn stuff.”

  Looking through the garage, it appeared that somebody had attempted to break into the house through a door that led from the garage to the downstairs family room. The striker plate for the doorknob had fresh scratches from a screwdriver or another tool. Doc Waterman said this couldn’t have been the work of anyone who knew him well: he always kept a key to that door hanging nearby. For a brief moment the investigators thought they also had found evidence of a horrifying murder scene in the garage. There was dried blood on the floor beneath metal hooks on the rafters. But Doc Waterman explained he had used the hooks during hunting season to dress a deer. Later lab tests confirmed the blood wasn’t human.

  Upstairs, Chief See crouched on hands and knees with a flashlight, looking for more of the fibers of the type Doc had found on the bed. He found several more on the carpet, nylon strands that appeared to have come from the yellow and red ropes commonly used on boats on the island. The chief marked their locations. “We don’t have those fancy crime scene things with the numbers,” he recalled, “so I started ripping paper so the tech would know where.”

  In the closet
were the clothes Lauri wore to the chamber dinner. The tropical-patterned skirt was on a hanger. The black sweater lay on the floor next to the black shoes beneath a white flannel nightgown with pink designs. A pair of black nylon hose were in the left top drawer of the dresser, lying on top of other clothing.

  Doc would say it was unusual for his fastidious wife to have left the clothes so haphazardly: she never would have thrown the nightgown on the floor, for instance. Taken together, it looked like Lauri Waterman had returned home from the dinner, changed into her nightgown, and gone to bed, leaving her wedding rings in the bathroom. She was snatched from her bedroom late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, perhaps awakened by an intruder who had entered through the garage, forced her to change out of her nightgown, tied her up, and taken her down the stairs and away from the house in her own minivan. Only a tiny amount of blood had been found on the sheets, suggesting she was killed somewhere else. The kidnapper may have worn latex gloves, leaving behind that piece of rubber that Doc had found.

  The one piece of evidence that didn’t fit was the wine bottle in the kitchen. While Lauri may have had a drink before going to bed, Doc doubted it. “I haven’t seen her have a glass of wine for probably ten years,” he would say. “Her average alcohol consumption is maybe two wine coolers a year.”

  The wine bottle mystery only deepened when Deputy Fire Marshal John Bond inspected the van wreckage at the Department of Transportation garage in Klawock. The backseat area had a stain of melted nylon, either from pantyhose or rope, located in the same place as the body; a pair of glasses that would be connected to Lauri; and, interestingly, a piece of melted brown-green glass that appeared to have once been a wine bottle.