Journal of the Dead

by Jason Kersten

  After Klein carefully removed Coughlin’s clothes, Estrada went through the pockets of his shorts and found a wallet, four keys, some gas station receipts, and $48 in cash—nothing unexpected. He also noticed that inside his briefs was a collection of small pebbles, which he presumed had fallen in when the body was removed from the shallow grave.

  Now that Dave’s body was fully exposed, they began to study it closely, searching the marbled terrain of his skin for any markings—in addition to the stab wounds—that would tell a story. There were many.

  Almost every surface of his skin showed some rumor of an abrasive encounter. Just above his right eyebrow was a red scrape, about half an inch square, while the back of his head bore a 2 × 2-inch bruise. His arms and legs were similarly covered with small cuts and bruises. The detective observed as Klein dictated the injuries into a mini-cassette recorder.

  “What do you think of these scratches?” Estrada asked, pointing to Coughlin’s shins. Both bore numerous vertical cuts that were about seven inches long. Some appeared to be scabbed over; others were fresh.

  “Could be a result of vegetation,” Klein said. For a second opinion, he called over Dr. Jerri McLemore, the senior medical investigator on duty, who concurred.

  “Is it possible that they came from running through the vegetation, or stepping down on it?” Estrada asked. McLemore knew what he was getting at. Could the scratches indicate that Coughlin had possibly been fleeing from an attacker?

  “It’s possible,” McLemore said, “but without any more information to go on it’s just a theory.”

  When they turned up Coughlin’s right wrist, they saw three parallel cuts, neatly horizontal, typical of a suicide attempt. But if David Coughlin had tried to kill himself, it appeared he had not tried very hard. They did not even penetrate the skin.

  In all, they counted a total of nineteen blunt force injuries, but except for the cuts on Coughlin’s wrists neither Klein nor McLemore could say whether they had been inflicted by a person, or the rugged canyon terrain.

  Estrada photographed the body, then Klein used a large scalpel to make the classic Y-shaped incision from Coughlin’s shoulders to his pelvis, careful to avoid disturbing the stab wounds. As the internal examination got under way, they saw that both wounds had completely penetrated Coughlin’s chest, and that one of them had grazed a rib on the way in. Just how deep the wound tracks had gone was evident moments later after Klein removed the breast plate: Coughlin’s pericardium, a thin, normally pink-colored membrane that surrounds the heart, was dark and inflamed with blood. David Coughlin, it appeared, had died from two stab wounds to the heart.

  Although the stab wounds were the obvious players in Coughlin’s death, there were other, more molecular tales locked inside his body. Klein removed Coughlin’s heart and his other major organs, all of which he weighed, measured, and, in some cases, drained of their fluids so that their chemical contents could be analyzed later. When Klein removed Coughlin’s spleen, he found that it contained 105 milliliters of urine—an indication that his kidneys, often the first organ to fail in a dehydration victim, were still functioning when he was killed. There was also a small, bright green mass of fecal matter in his bowel that appeared vegetable in origin.

  Klein submitted his final report two days later, listing “stab wounds to the chest” as the cause of the death. Based on the chemical work, which showed that Coughlin had heightened levels of sodium, potassium, nitrogen, glucose, and creatinine in his blood, Klein’s official assessment was that Coughlin was “moderately to severely” dehydrated at the time of his death, but “very much alive.”

  It was his opinion that if Raffi Kodikian hadn’t stabbed him, David Coughlin almost certainly would have lived.

  Raffi’s father, Hal Kodikian, had thought his son was joking on Sunday night when he’d called from the medical center and told him the tragic news. Like the Coughlins, he and his wife, Doris, hadn’t heard from Raffi since New Orleans, and had simply assumed that he and Dave were too busy having fun to bother calling home. When the gravity in his son’s voice convinced him that it was true—David was dead and Raffi was about to be arrested for murder—he and Doris found themselves in a nightmare of grief, fear, and incomprehension second only that of Bob and Joyce Coughlin.

  Hal immediately booked a flight for New Mexico and arrived in Carlsbad Monday evening after a sleepless night and an anxious, lonely plane flight across the country. He was nearly heartbroken when he arrived in Carlsbad and was told that visiting hours at the jail weren’t until Friday, and infinitely grateful when he was given special permission to see Raffi that night. As he waited in the visiting room behind a Plexiglas window, the anticipation of finally seeing his son was crushing. When a guard brought Raffi in, tears of happiness pooled in his eyes despite the horrible circumstances.

  “When [you see your son in jail] the first thing you look at is what he looks like,” he later said, “and he looked fine. He looked all right, and that made me feel a lot better.”

  Hal had a thousand questions for his son. He and his wife were as confounded by Raffi’s story as anyone else. Later he would acknowledge that his son’s story was “bizarre,” but when he picked up the phone and spoke, he didn’t press Raffi for hard details. He and Doris were convinced from the beginning that their boy had done exactly what they had raised him to do: he had told the truth.

  I’m trying to find you a lawyer, he told Raffi. I’m going to do everything I can to get you out of jail.

  The next morning, he did just that. He had $50,000 wired to a bank in Carlsbad, converted it into a cashier’s check, and immediately posted bail at the courthouse. Judge Lyons, who was accustomed to setting bail for people who had far more difficulty coming up with much less money, was stunned. Most of the time, the only way a defendant could pay a $50,000 cash bond was to enlist the services of bondsman, who might charge ten times that if a client skipped bail. Technically, it had been one of the highest bails he had ever set, but by Tuesday afternoon, Raffi was free to go.

  The task of bailing out his son had distracted Hal from his grief, but when there was nothing left to do but wait while the jail processed Raffi for release, he fell apart.

  “He was sitting in a chair outside my office, and he just looked like he was about to die,” Gary McCandless remembered of Hal. “He couldn’t understand what had happened to his son, and he felt horrible for the Coughlins. I’ve met a lot of people in my business, and if there’s one thing I learned about Hal Kodikian it was that he is a good man. A good man.”

  McCandless, a father himself, felt awful for Hal. He knew it was going to be a long week ahead for the father; according to Raffi’s bail limitations, he couldn’t leave the county, and the Kodikians knew no one in Carlsbad and nothing about the town. As Hal wiped away his tears and prepared to leave with his son, the detective offered to give them a tour, and Hal took him up on it.

  “I showed them where the best restaurants were, the movie theater, and the banks,” McCandless said. “Raffi didn’t say much. He was pretty quiet. He sat in the backseat.”

  That was no surprise, given that his dad was riding shotgun with the man investigating him for murder. For much of the next week, Raffi would remain quiet, avoiding the reporters in town by laying low at the Quality Inn, where he and his father took a room under an assumed name. It was a lonesome hideaway, clinging to the edge of town out on Highway 62/180, the nothingness of the desert just beyond its marquee. Even in an air-conditioned room, he could feel the desert’s presence right outside, hear its vacuity in the long howls of semis as they passed down the same road that he and Dave had taken only a week earlier.

  He didn’t blame himself for Dave’s death—in his mind he had had no other choice—but if statements he would later make were true, he did feel as if his own survival was a crime. All he could think about was Dave’s family, two thousand miles away, on their knees in the basement of sorrow. More than anything, he wanted to talk to the Coughlins, to
tell them in his own words what had happened.

  Hal did his best to comfort his son, but he was hurting himself. He dropped by the sheriff’s office almost every day just to check in with Gary McCandless. It was a gesture a lawman in a county less than a hundred miles from the sanctuary of the Mexican border could appreciate, but there was more to it than that. In what would be one of the oddest relationships born from the case, Hal Kodikian and Gary McCandless became friends.

  “We talked about family, about raising children, about life,” McCandless recalled. “We didn’t talk much about the case. I told him up front that it was my job to make sure every question about the killing was answered, and he respected that.”

  Despite the detective’s genuine sympathy and affection for Hal, he had serious questions about Raffi’s story. Even while Hal sat in his office, drinking coffee and rubbing the tears out of his eyes, McCandless had to explain—as gingerly as he could—that he was going to need blood, saliva, and handwriting samples from his son. Every cold, clinical detail—no matter how gingerly the detective put it—just drove home the awful reality for Hal. McCandless tried to comfort him by explaining that the evidence could indeed support his son’s story, but also warned him that—even if it did—his son would still need a strong attorney in his corner.

  McCandless, in fact, had an attorney in mind, but he didn’t think it was his place to recommend him. He was relieved on Wednesday when Hal dropped by to tell him he had found one. Three different lawyers back East had all given him the same name: Gary Mitchell, from Ruidoso, the very lawyer McCandless would have suggested.

  “Well, you’re in good hands,” the detective told Hal. He couldn’t help being tickled by the irony: Mitchell was not only the same attorney who had defended Sheriff Click during the evidence-tampering debacle, but his own lawyer as well.

  12

  There’s a small statuette that can be found in almost every tourist shop in New Mexico. It’s an image of a cowboy—a broncobuster—riding wildly on the back of a bucking horse. Whether it’s done in pewter, bronze, or carved out of imported mahogany, the cowboy is especially long and wiry, a creature of motion and hunger who bends his back in impossible arches and is somehow both rugged and wispily adaptable at the same time. He is the gaunt trickster of the plains, undefeatable, forever on the verge of a fall that never comes.

  At a lanky six feet three and a half inches, Gary Mitchell could have served as a model for those statues. It was much easier to picture him on the back of a bronco than it was to envision him in front of the state supreme court, his steel blue eyes softened by a sincerity in his voice as he pleaded to keep the most cold-blooded criminals in the state off death row. Child murderers, cop killers, and Ricky Abeyta, the state’s biggest mass murderer in modern history, were among the nearly one hundred men he had represented since New Mexico reinstated the death penalty in 1978. Some got life in prison, some were acquitted, but not one of his clients had ever felt the needle of lethal injection. And if there were indeed analogies between breaking wild horses and coaxing New Mexico juries to show mercy toward men who possessed none themselves, Mitchell was the man to make them. When he wasn’t in court, he could usually be found working at some corner of his father-in-law’s ten-section cattle ranch in a pair of Wranglers and boots, which was also what he wore to the office.

  “I’d be perfectly happy as a rancher,” he was fond of telling the reporters who followed his cases, “but there’s God’s work to be done, and I was raised to believe that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

  That Mitchell actually was a cowboy had a great deal to do with his success. In the early days, district attorneys had snickered when he drove to trials in a king cab pickup and walked in wearing a western-cut suit, but they soon learned to respect him. In New Mexico cowboying is still the most honest work a man can do, and jurors could spy the cowboy in Gary Mitchell a mile away. They listened raptly to his arguments for that very reason: he wasn’t a liberal city slicker educated at an East Coast college; he was their own Atticus Finch, raised on a farm outside of Santa Fe, and he knew what it was to make a living with his hands. His own father had been killed in a tractor accident when he was nineteen, and whether his clients were accused of murder, petty theft, or traffic violations, he had always tried to portray the side of them that was pure working man.

  Judge Lyons gave Raffi permission to leave Eddy County to visit Mitchell, and he and his father made the three-hour drive up to Ruidoso. As they drove north to Roswell, then east, the sun-bitten land gave way to cultivated fields, which in turn gave way to the dark and crowded pine forests of the Sacramento Mountains and New Mexico high country. It was a different world, Ruidoso, a mountain playground with casinos, a horse track, and a ski resort.

  Mitchell’s office was a church of oak. Bookcases, paneling—all of it was natural and unfinished except for his desk, a huge and beautifully gnarled laminated crescent. On the wall behind it a large oil canvas depicted life on the range. Hal Kodikian left his son alone with the tall lawyer, and it was there, in that venerable den of rawhide and wood, that Gary Mitchell became the first person to hear Kodikian’s full version of what had transpired in Rattlesnake Canyon.

  “He hadn’t told his father, or his mother, what had happened,” Mitchell said in a light New Mexico drawl. “That just wasn’t his way. He wanted to spare them the pain. You know, I’ve represented some evil men, but Raffi Kodikian isn’t one of them. His was a case of bad luck.”

  As Mitchell listened to Raffi’s account of his and Dave’s ordeal in the canyon and the mercy killing, an old story his father once told him surfaced in memory: A man was driving down one of New Mexico’s empty highways when he suddenly came upon the burning wreck of a truck. The passerby pulled over to investigate and heard screams coming from the flame-engulfed cab. There was no way the passerby could reach the trucker, and when both men realized there was no hope, the trucker yelled for the passerby to kill him before he suffered the horrible death of being cooked alive. Since New Mexico is the kind of state where it’s typical for people to carry guns in their cars, the passerby ran back to his car, grabbed his rifle, and shot the trucker dead. Other cars had stopped by then, too, but when the highway patrol finally arrived, none of the onlookers said anything about the shooting.

  Mitchell couldn’t remember where or when the trucker incident had taken place. Maybe it never had; such legends came with the landscape. Whether it was real or not was less important to the lawyer than the idea that it could have been, and Raffi’s story was a living cousin. David Coughlin had been the trucker, Kodikian the passerby, and if the case went to trial, he would have to turn the jury into the approbative onlookers.

  Another story Mitchell quickly latched on to was one of oldest in the West: the tenderfoot. Mitchell was a connoisseur of western lore; he had a degree in American history and kept in his truck a well-worn copy of Paul Horgan’s masterpiece Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History, which he dipped into between court sessions. But it didn’t take an expert to see that Kodikian fit the tenderfoot profile perfectly. He had come from the East, ignorant and overconfident when it came to the power of the desert. He had neglected to bring enough water with him, failed to mark his surroundings; and sure enough, tragedy had ensued. “These boys just didn’t know what they were getting into,” he would later say. “Raffi wants to live and write in a Hemingway style, but he doesn’t have the Hemingway ability to survive.”

  But cases weren’t won on stories alone. They were won on the law, and in this department Mitchell knew that Raffi had a problem.

  He told Raffi up front that his defense might have to somehow revolve around the idea that he wasn’t in his right mind when he killed Coughlin. In other words, insanity, but as far he knew insanity had never been used in a case like his, simply because there had never been a case like his. Precedents were thin, which meant that defenses would be, too. In a worst-case scenario—a conviction—they could ask for
a pardon, which he thought Raffi had a good chance of obtaining, thanks to the mitigating circumstances of their desert ordeal.

  Insanity. Pardons. To Raffi, none of it sounded good.

  Mitchell’s first job was to get Kodikian permission to return home to Pennsylvania. To get the process moving, all he had to do was pick up the phone and call his good friend and former client, Chunky Click. The two men had seen each other often since Click’s own trial. They lunched together whenever Mitchell breezed into Carlsbad for a court hearing, and if there was a trial, they might even end up drinking a few beers together at Click’s house. Mitchell knew Click well enough to know he’d want something before he’d support allowing Kodikian to leave the county. They jawed for a few minutes, inquiring about each other’s family, then he agreed to let the sheriff’s investigators interview Kodikian, provided they didn’t ask him any questions about what happened after the friends had arrived in the park.

  The interview took place in the sheriff’s office, on Friday, August 13. Kodikian, Mitchell, Eddie Carrasco, and John Andrews sat down in the conference room, and Raffi told the investigators about the road trip, naming the cities and places they’d visited, and any addresses he could remember. Carrasco then left the conference room, then Jim Ballard came in with a search warrant for an example of Kodikian’s handwriting. Also present was Hal Kodikian, who watched quietly as his son filled in the standard forms with letters of the alphabet, days of the week, names, and occupations. Afterward Ballard read from a copy of the journal and asked Raffi to transcribe. This was particularly important, because the investigators had noticed earlier that two of the journal entries were signed “David” and appeared to be in a different handwriting than the rest of the content. One was from Friday, August 4; the other from the Saturday, August 5, David Coughlin’s last day of life.