Love You Madly Page 6

  “So, how did that make you feel?”

  “I totally understood her position,” said Rachelle. “I mean, I would be the exact same way if I had a daughter. But, I mean, I agreed with her.”

  “How do you feel about your mom’s role in your life?” asked McPherron, adopting Rachelle’s present tense about her dead mother. “I mean, we were teens once. I have teenagers. I know there’s sometimes resentment.”

  “Well, I mean, sometimes I don’t agree with why I can’t go out with my friends,” she said. “But, I don’t know, she’s pretty fair and she’s open-minded.”

  “Any other relationships you had that she’s disapproved of?”

  “Well, with every boyfriend she probably disapproved in the very first, but, you know, she got to know ’em.”

  Rachelle said her mother didn’t like Kelly Carlson “’cause he had an eyebrow ring and a tattoo,” but she came around. Her mother had never been unreasonable and, even when Rachelle did something wrong, her mother “could only really ground me, like, a few times.”

  Even with Jason, Rachelle said, “She actually agreed with [us] being friends. She said: Yeah, you know what, we’ll have a talk and maybe he can come over and watch a movie.”

  As Claus listened, he felt that Rachelle was again downplaying the level of animosity toward her mother and misrepresenting her relationship with Jason. Rachelle said nothing of Jason meeting her at school the day before or of Rachelle stopping by the Klawock school to see him. McPherron would return to the subject later, but backed off and moved instead to the days surrounding the murder.

  Rachelle said that she called her mom from the volleyball tournament in Anchorage when she arrived on Wednesday.

  “She was really excited to hear from me,” she said. Her mother was going to the chamber of commerce dinner and Rachelle was surprised she’d be attending alone. Rachelle repeated her account of returning on the Saturday flight from Anchorage to Juneau, coincidentally getting on the same connecting flight to Ketchikan with her father, then taking separate floatplane flights to Hollis and driving home together. The airlines confirmed her account and McPherron ratcheted up the pressure by moving to a more delicate subject.

  “We need to ask,” McPherron said. “Now, I’ll throw this out first, OK, just so you understand where we’re coming from.” The detective stopped himself. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I should have gone over this again. You know we had talked before and you understand you have a right to have a parent here if you so desire?”

  “OK,” said Rachelle.

  “You understand you don’t have to talk to us if you don’t want to? You can leave at any time you want—or here in this room just for privacy’s sake. And if you wanna go, we’ll gladly give you a ride home?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Or you can leave on foot, whatever you’d like to do,” he said, “but there’s some hard questions we need to ask. And I think you’re mature enough to take ’em.”

  “All right.”

  “And so you understand: your mother is dead,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Rachelle.

  “And, based on what we’ve found, that this is not an accident. Your mother did not die in a car crash.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your mother was killed.”

  “Yeah.”

  “By somebody. And that’s what we’re here to find out.”

  “Yep,” said Rachelle.

  He told her that the next few questions would pry into her personal life and deal with issues like sex and drugs.

  “You’re not going to get in any trouble for anything like that,” assured McPherron. “OK, we’re not here to judge your lifestyle or anything like that.”

  “And it’s confidential?” asked Rachelle.

  “We’re just here to find out what happened to your mother,” he said, dodging her question. “So I wanna make sure you understand that you don’t need to be afraid to talk to us about certain issues. I mean we’re all essentially adults. You’re this close to being one.”

  “A couple of years,” said Rachelle.

  He told her the investigation had now provided a “clearer picture as to what happened and who might be responsible for this”—and that one of those people was Jason.

  He asked her again about their relationship.

  “Just friends,” Rachelle repeated. “We’re, I mean, like I said before, we had an interest in each other, but it was brief and we decided, you know [with the] age difference, maybe when we’re older and are not, you know, this young—”

  McPherron interrupted her. He told her that while he understood some young people may feel uncomfortable talking about sensitive issues, “This is very, very severe. This is the biggest thing there is. And we need to find out what happened. And we need everybody to tell us the absolute truth.”

  He said that he and Claus had been cops a long time and they by now “get a pretty good idea of when somebody’s being straight with us and when somebody’s trying to be deceptive with us.”

  He then asked her about her relationship with Brian Radel.

  “We became friends but, I don’t really—I mean, I talk to him,” Rachelle said.

  “You ever party with either Brian or Jason?” asked McPherron.

  “I have shared an alcoholic beverage once,” said Rachelle.

  “Smoke any dope, anything like that?”

  “Hmm, with Jason, once.”

  “Has there been any sexual contact between you and Jason and/or Brian?”

  “Nope,” said Rachelle.

  “None at all?” pressed McPherron.

  “Nope,” she repeated.

  “So, why,” he asked, “would Jason and Brian tell us that they’re having sex with you?”

  Rachelle suggested, “Trying to make their egos inflate?” She said the most she ever gave Jason was a “kiss on the cheek.”

  McPherron didn’t drop the issue. He asked her again why Brian would claim to have had sex with her.

  “That’s really gross, because I’ve never had any interest in him whatsoever,” she said. She acknowledged Brian had a “crush” on her, but “I don’t think he’d ever pursue it. I mean, probably the age thing and just ’cause when I met him I was dating his friend”—Ian Lendrum.

  Neither Jason nor Brian had acknowledged dating Rachelle, much less having sex with her. It was an interview technique—legal and widely considered appropriate and ethical among police detectives—that McPherron would use repeatedly in the case: lying to get the truth. The tactic drew on his military experience. As a training officer in the army during the waning years of the Cold War, McPherron was an expert on the enemy, teaching a class about the then Soviet military. During battle simulations, he played on the enemy side.

  Trooper Bob Claus took over the questioning and picked up on the deception. He told her that police had scoured her house for fourteen hours and looked at “everything that’s on the computer,” which also wasn’t true.

  “I’m not a gossip,” he told her, a statement that would resonate with a fellow island resident. “You’ve never heard a word of gossip out of my mouth.”

  “No, I have not,” Rachelle said.

  “I don’t tell things to my family,” he said, a reference to Rachelle’s friend, Stephanie. “This is between you and me and Randy.”

  McPherron asked, “So, how many times have you had relations, sexual relations, with Jason? Has it been less than five?”

  Relenting, Rachelle admitted, “Yes.”

  “When did these incidents occur?”

  “Like, do you want specific place and time?”

  “If you recall those, yes, because it could be of importance.”

  “Once in his truck—I don’t remember what time, it was probably evening. Once in the bathroom of the building where I used to work. And once at his house.”

  “Did you have genital intercourse?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have ana
l intercourse?”

  “No.”

  “Did you have oral sex?”

  “Yes.”

  “You gave him oral sex. Did he give you oral sex?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it’s less than five times?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when did these incidents occur?”

  “This summer.”

  She said she also was intimate with Brian. She said she didn’t have intercourse because his penis was too big—“Girth,” she explained—but they had oral sex at his house the previous spring.

  “We fooled around, I guess you’d say, and that’s it.”

  “In any of your conversations with Jason,” the detective asked, “did you ever say anything about, you know, you’re mad at your mother, that she’s running your life, you wished she was out of the picture?”

  “I said that I was mad at her, but I’ve never said I wanted her gone,” said Rachelle.

  “I’m not accusing you of anything,” said McPherron, “and I’m convinced that you are not a willing participant in what’s happened. But it’s very clear to us that Jason and Brian are responsible for your mother’s death, and we’re trying to figure out why it keeps coming back to you as an unwitting catalyst.”

  “I highly doubt Jason would do anything like that,” Rachelle said. “He’s offered to talk to her because she used to hit me occasionally.”

  “Would Brian wanna get that involved in your life?”

  “He’s one of those people where he would do a lot for somebody he really doesn’t know.”

  “How far would he go?”

  “To the end,” said Rachelle. “He is a very dedicated, loyal person.”

  “We’re talking murder,” said McPherron. “He would kill somebody?”

  “Probably,” said Rachelle.

  “If somebody asked him to help him do it?”

  “Or even on his own.”

  But Rachelle insisted that Jason couldn’t have been involved because she called him at his house from the pay phone in the lobby of the downtown Marriott in Anchorage “very late,” perhaps two a.m. on Sunday, when the murder likely happened.

  “I was really bored. I couldn’t sleep. I knew he’d be up,” she said. They spoke for about forty-five minutes to an hour.

  “What was the gist of the conversation?” asked McPherron.

  “How’s volleyball going? How’s Craig? New Halo 2 game?” she said. “That kind of stuff. Just BS-ing.”

  The detective continued to push the view that Jason was involved, telling Rachelle about the assault Jason had staged earlier in the day. He pressed Rachelle on why, if Jason were innocent, he would make a “100 percent crapola” story.

  But Rachelle pushed back. “I don’t know,” she snapped. “I’m not that smart, I guess.”

  “Just speculate,” said McPherron. “Why do you think somebody would do that?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?” she shot back, her tone now more confrontational. “I’ve never known him to get, you know, angry. Never. He gets irritated when he doesn’t get a cigarette, but that’s about it.”

  McPherron offered a way to determine once and for all if Jason was involved in the murder: have Rachelle talk to Jason and Brian while secretly wearing a wire.

  Aghast, Rachelle asked, “You’d have me ask them?”

  “Yes,” said McPherron.

  “That seems kind of dodgy.”

  “‘Dodgy’?”

  “Dishonest,” she said.

  “I know on the surface it appears—”

  “Dishonest,” she answered.

  “Well, I don’t know if that word would be right,” said McPherron. “It’s sneaky.”

  “Yeah,” said Rachelle.

  “The law allows us to sometimes lie to people,” he told her, “just in order to get to the truth.”

  “It seems wrong to me,” she said.

  With Rachelle resisting, Claus appealed to her sense of community pride. He told her that the case had to get resolved because “people are scared to death” that a killer was still on the loose.

  “People are sleeping with guns. People are paranoid. People are chasing people out of bars ’cause they’re the wrong color, ’cause they think this is some kind of stranger thing,” he said. “So if we can go quickly, we can put a stop to this.”

  And nobody was more at risk than Jason and Brian. “I would be afraid for these guys,” he said.

  Claus was vastly overstating the reaction. One man had raced to the Klawock school with a shotgun when he heard about Jason’s assault report, but otherwise life proceeded as quietly as usual on the island, not counting the hum of the rumor mill. But the approach worked. Rachelle was in tears, the magnitude of what the detectives were suggesting sinking in.

  “It’s not your fault,” McPherron told her. “It’s, like, is it the water’s fault that it flows into the rocks and freezes in the winter and breaks the rocks? It’s the water that’s doing its thing, right? Your mom’s death is not your fault.”

  “But if I told them—”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” McPherron said.

  “No offense,” she said, “you did a really good job of making me feel like it was my fault.”

  “So, why did these guys want to get rid of your mother?” asked McPherron.

  “I don’t know,” Rachelle sobbed.

  “Your mom’s never done anything to them other than disapprove of you being around them, right?”

  “Right,” she said.

  “Do you know if she’s ever confronted either of ’em and told ’em to ‘stay the hell away from my daughter’?”

  “No.”

  “Now, obviously both of them knew you and your dad are out of town, right?”

  “I don’t know if they knew my dad was out of town. They knew I was,” she said. “I might have mentioned it.”

  McPherron asked her to try to remember what she said to them. The last time she spoke to Jason, she believed, was that previous Tuesday—the day before she went to Anchorage—when she saw him at the rehearsal for the community play, The Importance of Being Earnest, in which Jason played Dr. Frederick Chasuble. They spoke about her trip to Anchorage the next day.

  “Do you think you told him Dad was going to be gone too?” asked McPherron.

  “I might have mentioned it,” she said, “like, a while ago, but I really don’t recall. But it might have come up.”

  That’s not all she told Jason and Brian. Under relentless questioning, Rachelle acknowledged what Claus had suspected—that she and her mother clashed more frequently and intensely than she had previously said, with their differences over more than clothes and dating. In recent months Rachelle had developed an interest in Wicca, she told the detectives.

  “What’s that?” asked McPherron.

  “Just a religion that we believe,” she said. “It’s kind of like hippie mixed with what you call magic. We believe the earth has spirits, and perform spells.”

  “So, how did she deal with that?” asked the detective.

  “She’d get angry and fight—well, not really fight, but, you know, she’d say you shouldn’t do that. A lecture,” said Rachelle. “And she’d hit me.”

  “Explain,” said McPherron. “I mean, slap you across the face, kick you in the shin? What do you mean?”

  According to Rachelle, the abuse took various forms: her mother hit her legs with a baseball bat and tried to push her down the stairs—“but I caught myself.” Her mother also “came to me with a knife once” while in the kitchen cutting up meat for dinner. She ran and hid in her room.

  “Did you ever push her back or slap her back?” asked McPherron.

  “No,” said Rachelle. “I’m too much of a coward.” She never told her father and for all she knew he never found out about it.

  “You ever tell Jason and Brian about these incidents?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I just told ’em that she was abusive.”

  “Did
you give ’em any details about that?”

  “Not really, just, you know, that she pushed me occasionally. I didn’t really say exactly what happened.”

  “Did you ever say anything like ‘I wish someone would straighten her out, get her out of my life’?”

  “No, because I didn’t want other people interfering ’cause I was embarrassed.”

  She also told Jason that she had been “depressed lately” about “things with my ex”—Ian Lendrum—as well as troubles at school and nagging health problems, including a sore back.

  “You were in a very bad place?” asked McPherron.

  “Like, a bad place in my life,” she said.

  Rachelle told Jason and he in turn “probably told Brian, ’cause that’s who he confides in.” With each statement Rachelle implicated Jason and Brian, creating a scenario in which the two older men tried to protect the depressed girl from an abusive mother by resorting to murder. The more the investigators listened, the more they came to believe that Rachelle held the men in her thrall, the ties both emotional and sexual.

  “Sex is a big motivator,” Claus told Rachelle.

  “Particularly for young men,” added McPherron.

  Rachelle downplayed that aspect of her relationship with them. “Yeah, but there’s enough people on this island,” she said. “That’s really not a hard thing to find.”

  “Hard to find a nice-looking sixteen-year-old girl to have sex with, you know? I’m not saying this is true—”

  “Yeah, right,” she said.

  “I’m just trying to understand what’s the driving force behind this,” said McPherron. “What is making this happen?”

  “I think they’re also worried about me because I had contemplated suicide,” she said. She confided this to Jason about two months earlier. “It was: My life was crappy, everything’s going wrong, that kind of teenage melodrama bullshit,” she said.

  Brian could have misinterpreted that if he heard about it from Jason. Rachelle said, “I don’t know how far he’d take it.”

  The detectives thought they already had the answer. They had been talking to Rachelle for nearly an hour. It was time for a break, they told her. Claus and McPherron walked out of the interview room, leaving Rachelle alone. It was another interrogation technique: let the subjects stew in their private thoughts, talk to themselves, make admissions thinking nobody is there to hear—even though all the time the video camera was trained on Rachelle.