The Blackhawk finally flew in at about four-thirty and touched down a few hundred yards south of the campsite. Raffi Kodikian was airlifted to the Carlsbad Medical Center, thirty miles away, where the questions would only mount. Waiting at the hospital was Gary McCandless, chief of detectives for the Eddy County Sheriff’s Office, along with Roswell FBI agent John Andrews, who was called in because the killing took place on federal land.
“They brought Raffi in,” recounted McCandless, the surprise still in his voice, “and I noticed right away when he came off the aircraft that he was in pretty good condition. Not what I was expecting when they talk about dehydration and stuff like that. He was very sharp, he was coherent. He talked well. He talked a lot about how hungry he was. He talked about how glad he was to be out of that canyon.”
McCandless and Andrews had high hopes that Kodikian would tell them what had happened in Rattlesnake Canyon. How had he and Coughlin become so lost in a landscape where a climb to the highest peak would have revealed signs of civilization in almost every direction? Why hadn’t he shaken his buddy by the shoulders, told him to hang in there and tough it out? And, if they had tried so hard to slash their wrists, how come the cuts were so superficial?
But moments later when the investigators approached him for an interview, Raffi Kodikian would no longer be talking. He invoked his Fifth Amendment rights. It would take him only an hour later to recover and be released from the hospital, and as he walked toward the door to leave, an officer from the Eddy County Sheriff’s Office would arrest him for the murder of David Coughlin. It would turn out that Kodikian was an aspiring writer and journalist. He loved travel and adventure, and hoped to one day pen tales of his own, perhaps in the vagabond vein of his idol, Jack Kerouac. Some would wonder if a story he wrote while lost in the desert was too perfect to be true.
2
Shade comes small in Rattlesnake Canyon. The tallest thing that casts a shadow near the spot where Lance Mattson found Raffi Kodikian is an island of brush that sits in the creek bed about fifteen feet from the campsite. Since the bed is almost always dry, calling the brush stand an island is a stretch, but it’s the only place where you can study Dave and Raffi’s final campsite relatively free from the harassing desert sun.
The day after Kodikian was rescued and arrested, there were nearly a dozen crime scene investigators perched on the edge of the island. Leading the group was Capt. Eddie Carrasco from the Eddy County Sheriff’s Office, and John Andrews from the FBI, who had met Kodikian the day before at the hospital. With them was Jim Ballard, Carrasco’s second in command, two examiners from the state office of the medical investigator, a ranger from the National Park Service, two agents from the U.S. Border Patrol, and two anthropologists from the University of New Mexico, who’d been called in because they were experts at excavating shallow graves.
Spread out in front of the team over a quarter acre were forty-some-odd items, including David Coughlin’s buried body. All of the disarray that Mattson and Maciha had noticed the day before—the food wrappers, the socks, the ripped-up tent—had now become much more than a random scattering of gear cast off in what appeared to have been a struggle for survival. Even the smallest item was potential evidence, its nature and placement a cipher that, when unraveled, could either support or refute Kodikian’s sparsely detailed claim about what had happened.
To preserve the crime scene, the sheriff’s office had closed down the entire canyon the night before. Deputies had been posted at every entrance and exit, guarding them in shifts. Even now, tantalizingly close to the evidence, none of the investigators ventured in too far. They still needed a search warrant, and so the team stood on the island, making a list of everything in view. As the team called off the items, Eddy Carrasco radioed them to a deputy a mile away at the trailhead. The deputy, in turn, radioed everything back to the sheriff’s office in Carlsbad, where Gary McCandless typed them up on the warrant. This is exactly what Carrasco and his men saw:
1 pair of men’s plaid underwear
1 pair white socks 1 black knapsack
1 dark brown T-shirt with white lettering
Black nylon straps of various sizes
2 red multipurpose knives, one with an open blade
Assorted writing pens and color markers
1 black-and-turquoise knapsack
1 red leather camera case
1 black nylon camera case
1 green-and-maroon nylon tent
2 pairs brown hiking boots
1 blue-red-and-white-plaid shirt
1 small green pillow
1 black pocketknife, single blade, with what appears to be blood on it
1 Leatherman-type multipurpose tool/knife
2 black nylon Leatherman tool carriers
1 cassette case with cassette inside
2 boxes of poker cards
Several small boxes of matches
3 stainless steel pans
1 clear Tupperware-type container
2 dark green plastic plates
2 dark green plastic bowls
1 purple vinyl case
1 yellow net
2 plastic water bottles
1 plastic grocery bag with unknown contents
2 hard plastic containers
1 carabiner—rock climbing equipment—rope guide
1 black-and-gray article and 1 black plastic article (appears to be camera attachments)
1 purple-green-and-tan nylon canvas
1 blue sleeping bag
1 gray plastic tarp
2 purple nylon tent cases
1 green sponge
2 blue foam sleeping-bag pads
1 pair sunglasses
1 small butane burner
Logging the items in the heat was tedious work, but the sheer number of objects that could potentially be evidence was promising. This did not include the items—such as the knapsacks—with hidden contents. While they reeled the list off into the radio, Carrasco’s second in command, Jim Ballard, panned a video camera over the site. A standard crime scene procedure; later on they would get an unwanted lesson as to why.
After logging everything, there was nothing for the investigators to do but seek shade in the saltbush and wait for the warrant. Once that arrived, they could study the scene more closely and bag everything. As the team sat quietly in the heat, they couldn’t avoid looking at the cowboy grave. It was right in front of them, the tragic anchor of all that clutter, and a reminder of the worst part of the job still ahead. They knew that later in the afternoon they would lift the stones one by one and see a young man who they suspected had literally been a knife’s edge away from being the kind of person that cops, rescue workers, and rangers like to encounter more than any other: a survivor.
Eddie Carrasco, who’d been a cop for twenty-five years and had come from a family rooted in the region since the Mexican era, wondered just how close to death Coughlin had been before Kodikian expedited his demise. He’d once worked with a thirty-three-year-old woman who’d been kidnapped, raped, then shot five times and left for dead in a riverbed. She’d crawled out of the riverbed, hung on until help arrived, then gone on to recall so many details about her attacker that he was easily identified and put away. Coughlin had been just twenty-six, and his friend had walked out of the hospital in just over an hour.
After exhuming Coughlin’s body, the plan was to airlift it out on a U.S. Customs Service helicopter, which was due to arrive anytime. The one consolation to this grim task, however distasteful the context, was that the chopper would also be bringing lunch, and by now the team was hungry. Whether or not anyone actually said it, the phrase “Where’s that damn chopper?” was not far from their minds.
The customs chopper finally showed up around two P.M. Once again it was a Blackhawk, but this pilot approached much lower than the fellow from Fort Bliss had. By the time Eddie Carrasco saw the danger, it was too late. He and his entire CSI team watched helplessly as the pilot, angling for a landing spot, crui
sed less than fifty feet directly over the campsite.
“They came in there and boy, when they went over that campsite, it just scattered stuff all over the place,” recalled Carrasco. “Some of the stuff remained intact, but we saw shoes, knapsacks—I mean they just took off. As a matter of fact a piece of gray tarp, I believe, just utterly went up in the air and followed the helicopter to where he landed about thirty yards from where the actual campsite was. I mean, the suction from the actual helicopter blade just picked it up.”
It was a detective’s nightmare. To say that the crime scene had been contaminated would be a gross understatement: it had more or less been destroyed. The items, now spread out across twice the area of the original scene, no longer had any relational value. Any suggestive patterns within their overall placement were gone forever. If their disposition had hinted at a struggle, a cover-up, or the truth exactly as Raffi had said it, no one would ever know. And if the case were to go to trial, a defense attorney could use the incident as a powerful tool to cast doubt on how the scene was processed.
Another detective might have gone into a rage, but Carrasco was known for his poise and reserve. Recovering from the shock, he did the best he could to minimize the impact by ordering Jim Ballard to videotape the evidence once again, post-customs helicopter. Since they already had video of the intact scene, they could use the second tape to assess exactly what had been moved and where. The tapes wouldn’t be a substitute for studying an intact scene, but together they’d have a significant degree of preservative value. So Jim Ballard sighed, got back behind the camera’s eyepiece, and the two men started sifting through the new, rotor-washed evidence field.
And that was how they found the journal.
It was lying on the weatherworn rocks of the canyon floor, a few feet from the campsite, its pages blown open by the same metal wind that had lifted it from wherever it had been hiding. It was a student’s notebook, made by Mead, the kind of 8 × 7 spiral pad that millions of American college students carry to class every day. Carrasco knelt over it, his curiosity vanquishing the dejection he had felt moments before.
Twenty-four pages in all had been written on, and at first glance there appeared to be two distinct styles of handwriting. Most of it was written in a masculine chicken scratch; the other style—more rounded, vertical, and feminine—appeared on only two pages, both of which were signed “David Andrew” at the bottom. Many of the entries were dated. It appeared that both boys wrote in it over the course of their road trip and ordeal in Rattlesnake Canyon, right up to the day that Coughlin was killed.
Combined with statements Kodikian would later make in court, it was either the gripping account of a road trip gone horribly wrong or one of the greatest written alibis ever created.
“We made plans to have Dave pick me up @ 3:00 from work. At 2:30 He called to say he’d be late. Dave Dave Dave…” read the first lines. They were dated Friday, July 30, 1999—ten days earlier.
3
Dave Coughlin had a good reason for being late that Friday. For him, the road trip he’d been planning with his buddy Raffi was more than a pleasure ride; he was moving to California to attend graduate school, which had been the whole reason for taking the trip in the first place. While Kodikian waited for him at his office job in downtown Boston, Coughlin was twenty miles away in Norfolk County, taking care of all the final details that come with a cross-country move.
There were more details than he’d imagined; he was well dug in to his community. He’d grown up in the town of Wellesley, home of the famous women’s college, and had stayed in orbit of the town most of his life. The only time he’d ever left for an extended period was to attend a college just a few hours away in Amherst. He was the kind of kid nearby Boston was built on: Irish Catholic, and proudly working class. His father worked for an off-shore clothing manufacturing firm; his mom did bookkeeping work in a local doctor’s office. After graduating college with a degree in environmental science, he had come right back home and taken a job working at the town hall. This is a great place to live, he’d often told people; someday I wouldn’t mind dying here.
But that was a lifetime away, and first he had goals to fulfill, beginning with a higher education. So that morning he stood in a driveway outside an apartment building in the town of Milford, forcing himself to part with the woman whose name was all poetry: Sonnet Frost.
When he’d met her eight months earlier in a local bar, he’d naturally wondered if she was related to the poet; she wasn’t, but she was the daughter of a pair of literature lovers. She had wavy brown hair and green eyes, and didn’t stand much higher than his shoulders. He was a bearish guy, nearly six feet tall, with umber hair and eyes so brilliantly blue that they contrasted with the overall subtlety of his face, which was gently defined, ruddy, and decisively Irish. He was a bit stocky, but beneath the stout was plenty of muscle. He’d been working out for the past six months, and was in the best shape he’d been in since high school.
Standing with them in the driveway was Frost’s five-year-old son, Daniel. As a single mother, Frost had been reluctant to introduce her son to a man whose future in their life was uncertain. Coughlin had begged to meet him every time they spoke, but she’d held off for two months. When she finally introduced them, she immediately regretted waiting so long. Coughlin and Daniel took to each other immediately, and he’d had been coming to the apartment to stay with them ever since. At the end of the street was a New England pond, and over the past few months Dave and Sonnet had taken to sitting on its edge at dusk, talking and watching Daniel throw stones into the darkening waters.
Now, wouldn’t you know it, he was leaving.
She’d felt as if she’d been robbed when he told her he was moving to California, but she understood his reasons. He needed to fulfill his goals professionally. They’d taken a trip up to Maine a few weeks earlier, walked together on the rocky beaches, held hands tight, and tried not to think of his move to California as the end. They had even talked about the possibility of her and Daniel joining him out West, or of his returning to Wellesley after he had his degree. But they were realists and decided to just play things by ear.
Neither one of them wanted the pain of a prolonged good-bye, so they made it fast. She had to get Daniel to school; and before meeting Raffi he had to pick up a few items in his old apartment, drop off the keys to his office at the town hall, and say good-bye to his folks. After embracing, she got into her car, he got into his, and they drove off in separate directions. In her last memory of him, he’s in her rearview mirror, giving her a final wave until his red Mazda turns a corner.
It wasn’t until about four o’clock that Dave finally made it into Boston. In spite of the delay, Raffi had left work early and gone to a nearby video arcade to wait for Dave and play his favorite game, NFL Blitz. When Dave finally showed up, Raffi threw his backpack into the car and jumped into the passenger’s seat, and they pulled out into the downtown traffic. It was a high-five moment, the culmination of weeks of planning and expectation. Raffi summed it up in the margin of the journal with a single phrase: “It was in the bag.” Many of his entries during the road trip would ring with the same brevity. Since it was a travel diary, a text born in the moment, what he didn’t write down, naturally, was the past.
They’d known each other nearly five years. That wouldn’t be much to the park-bench bookends in Simon and Garfunkel’s song, or even to younger buddies who’ve stuck it out since childhood, but they would have bet their bond against any other that summer. During those five years, their friendship had outlasted geographic separation, college graduation, career woes, and the greatest test of male friendship of all—relationships with women—which is precisely how they met in the first place.
Back in 1991, Dave was a freshman at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he lived in a single room at Orchard Hill, a towering brick residence hall on the edge of campus. It had all the architectural charm of a state prison, and it might have felt like
one if it hadn’t been coed. One of the young women who caught his attention lived on the same floor as him, a petite, auburn-haired freshman psychology major from New Jersey named Day Decou.
“Dave hadn’t had much luck with girls in high school,” said Kristen Fischer, a friend of his since childhood. “He had been attracted to several, but had kept his crushes quiet. He was shy. He always ended up being their friends.”
Things began that way with Decou, but the connection quickly deepened into what became a milestone for him—his first serious girlfriend. He’d been dating her for about two years when, in the fall of ’94, she asked him for a favor: a friend of hers from high school was returning from a year abroad to resume her studies at Boston University, and she needed to find an apartment, fast. Since Coughlin knew the Boston area best, Decou enlisted him to help her find one. And so just a few weeks before his junior year, he found himself driving around town with two attractive women, happily playing the boyfriend come to the rescue.
He found Decou’s friend, Kirsten Swan, easy to help. As he sportingly chauffeured her from one apartment to another, he got to know her better and liked what he saw. She was an English major, literate, worldly, and confident after having spent a year abroad. Swan’s looks, slightly reminiscent of her name, didn’t hurt either. She was fair and flaxen-haired, with light-as-air arms and sleepy blue eyes, spaced just far enough apart to whisper of an old film beauty, like Harlow or Dietrich. He even offered up his parents’ house, where the three of them stayed on their excursions into the city. By the end of the weekend, the mission was a success: they found her an apartment on Massachusetts Avenue, about half a mile from BU.
Dave and Day drove back to Amherst, and Kirsten settled into her new digs. A few months later, she called them with a story they could relate to: she was seeing a guy who lived in her building.
Raffi, a sophomore journalism major at Northeastern, had been living on the fourth floor for about a year. Much like it had been with Coughlin and Decou, Kodikian and Swan had run into each other around the building and the neighborhood, and the encounters evolved into a steady romance.
Journal of the Dead Page 2
