Journal of the Dead

by Jason Kersten

  “I do not know what to do right now,” Ballard slowly dictated from the journal, “but I am in utter agony and I know you would understand.”

  Kodikian began to write, then stopped. He asked his father to leave the room, sobbed quietly for a few moments, then continued. It was the first time Kodikian showed remorse in front of the investigators. After he was finished, Ballard put the test in an envelope and mailed it to the U.S. Secret Service office in Albuquerque for handwriting analysis.

  13

  David Coughlin’s memorial service was held on a rainy Saturday afternoon a week after the killing. It was the kind of warm, airy drizzle that comes to eastern Massachusetts during the late summer, barely a tenth of an inch, but enough to make a few of the mourners wonder.

  “Dave definitely would have considered that funny,” one of them later said. “I could almost hear him laughing at it, saying, ‘It just figures the damn water would come now.’”

  Only hours before the ceremony began, Judge Lyons had given Kodikian permission to return home—an unusual privilege for a man charged with murder. Most of the guests at Coughlin’s funeral had not yet heard the news that his killer had been set free. Quite a few of them, in fact, had never even heard of Kodikian before the killing, and were surprised that the newspaper and television reports were referring to him as David’s “best friend.” It was plain enough from the turnout that Coughlin had a lot friends. More than three hundred mourners filled the pews at Saint James the Great Catholic Church, a grand and elegant brick house of worship next to Route 9 in Wellesley.

  The list of speakers was long. There were people from college, people from the town hall, people from high school whom he hadn’t spoken to in years. Over the past week, Kodikian’s bizarre story of what happened had made Coughlin’s death larger than his life; many of his friends had been unable to begin processing the pain because they didn’t have a clear picture of what had happened. Many never would. But on that day, at least, they tried to put aside their astonishment and speculation and remember their friend.

  Coughlin’s family sat in the front pews, the eyes of the entire congregation upon them. They had come to say good-bye to their son and brother, but people were also looking to them in order to know how to be. So far, they had remained silent about their position on Kodikian’s story, avoiding a merciless media assault. Outside the church, camera crews from the Boston TV stations were setting up, their lenses trained on the doors in order to make brutally public that awful, personal loss on the family’s faces. Even now, reporters who had snuck in were sitting in the pews behind them, quietly taking notes, fishing for anything that would move the story forward. They would not be disappointed.

  Toward the end of the ceremony, David’s brother, Michael, ascended the pulpit and began an emotional remembrance of his little brother. After telling an amusing story from their childhood in which David had once refused to eat his dinner beets, he drew some merciful laughter from the crowd, then at last made the family’s first public statement about the killing.

  “This is very, very important to me,” he said, his eyes fixed on the nave. “Everyone here, please say a prayer for Raffi, because I know how much he loved David and I know how much my brother loved him.”

  A heavy hush followed. How much of it was prayer, and how much of it was disbelief that Michael had expressed support for his brother’s killer so soon after his death, only the mourners know, but from that moment on, it was clear where the Coughlins stood: they believed Raffi. It came down to incredible heart and faith in their son’s choices, and a conscious decision not to embrace rage as a fulcrum to ease their loss. They had chosen the hardest road of all, and one that very few people at the funeral were prepared to go down at that point.

  “Jaws dropped,” recalled Kristen Fischer, a childhood friend who was at the ceremony and is still mystified by Michael Coughlin’s words. “I mean, ‘Pray for Raffi?’ What about pray for David?” Fischer had grown up right up the street from Coughlin and had actually been his first crush, one of those girls he liked but had been too shy to approach. In their junior year, however, Coughlin confessed his feelings for her in a letter. She never saw it. Perhaps sensing that his affections wouldn’t be returned, he crumpled it up and threw it away, but it came back to haunt him. Fischer’s brother, who was friends with David’s sister, Kathy, was over visiting the Coughlins and spied the discarded letter in a garbage can. Seeing his sister’s name at the top, he couldn’t resist fishing it out and reading it.

  “It was a crush letter. It said things like, ‘I really like you, I haven’t been able to tell you’—the whole thing. And my brother just opened it up and pulled it out and read the whole thing in front of all his high-school friends. And they’re laughing away, putting their feet up and joking, and David came in. My brother told me that his face just got bright red, then he grabbed the letter and left. He didn’t say a word.”

  Coughlin’s contained reaction to what must have been one of his life’s most embarrassing moments, Fischer said, was indicative of his personality as a whole. She believes he would have faced his ordeal in the canyon with calmness and determination, and, more important, wouldn’t have placed his friend in the position of being the vehicle of his death.

  “I could see him jumping off a cliff before he asked his best friend to put a knife in his heart,” she said. “Even if Raffi had it in him to kill him, I could see David not wanting to bother somebody else or hurt somebody else, or bring somebody else into his pain and his world of trauma and trial and tribulation. I could not see him dragging somebody else into his problems.”

  David Coughlin had always admired the local police officers. As a kid, his favorite game was cops and robbers, and his two best friends were both sons of Wellesley cops; as a man, he had several friends who were cops themselves. Like him, most of them were local boys of Irish descent who went to the same bars he did after a day of working for the town. He’d joke with them about being the desk jockey stuck with fielding the complaints about the same parking laws they were enforcing, and they considered him one of their own. When word of his strange death went through Wellesley PD, they were not about to sit around and wait for the feds to figure out if there was another reason Raffi might have wanted to kill Dave. They were going to look into it themselves.

  Terrence Cunningham, the deputy chief of police, immediately started his own investigation. Cunningham had known Coughlin most of the time he had worked for the town, and had always liked his attitude. The defeatist vision of Coughlin giving up and begging to be killed was unacceptable to the deputy chief. From Cunningham’s experience, Dave Coughlin was anything but a quitter. He was animated and full of life, and he accomplished his goals. He ran in the local charity races the department threw, and in the months before he left, Coughlin had been attending the gym religiously, building up his muscle mass. The idea that he had physically caved while Kodikian had hung on seemed far-fetched.

  Cunningham set up a meeting with two younger men who he knew were close to Dave: Chris Clark, a coworker at the town hall, and one of his own police officers, Terrance Connelly. Connelly, he knew, was fired up about the killing, eager to help. He was one of Coughlin’s best friends, and whenever Dave had dropped by the station on a social visit, it was usually to meet up with him. Also present was Dave’s boss, Arnold Wakelin, and Ernest Gagnon, Wellesley’s chief of police.

  You guys know any another reason why this guy might have wanted to kill Dave? he asked the two men.

  Clark couldn’t think of anything, but Connelly immediately thought of Kirsten Swan. He knew that she was Raffi’s ex-girlfriend, and that Dave had known her first and had always been close to her. He also knew that she had gone with him to California back in May. Perhaps they had been closer than Kodikian liked.

  What exactly are we talking about? How close? Cunningham asked.

  Connelly’s next words would be recorded in the deputy chief’s police report, which he later submitted to both
the FBI and the Eddy County Sheriff’s Office: “Mr. Connelly informed me that on one occasion that David told him that he had been intimate with Swan,” read the report.

  For an investigator looking for a motive other than mercy, Connelly’s statement was a good place to start.

  Finding out if there was any truth to the doubts people had about Raffi’s story fell on Larry Travaglia, a thirty-six-year-old special agent with the FBI. A native of Huntington, Long Island, he seemed as East as Chunky Click was West. He looked like Robert De Niro, spoke with an East Coast assonance, and had five cousins and an uncle in the NYPD. He would have gone to work for the NYPD, too, but at the time he decided to go into law enforcement they weren’t offering the test. He had gone into the FBI instead, and had been with the bureau’s Violent Crimes Task Force in Boston since 1990. He’d worked on several high-profile investigations, including the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh cases, but nothing in his experience prepared him for his first visit to the Coughlin house, two days after the memorial service.

  “It was looking into David’s father’s eyes and his mother’s eyes and having them, you know, hysterically crying and talking about their love for their child and now their child is gone,” he remembered. “It’s something that’s gonna stick with you for a while.”

  What also stuck with him was their readiness to believe and forgive Kodikian.

  “Mr. Coughlin said to the effect, ‘If Raffi killed my son, there had to be a good reason for it, and I hold no malice toward him,’” Travaglia recalled. He was stunned. “I just don’t know how they could make that determination without really knowing all of the facts. I mean, this was relatively soon after the incident that they were basically proclaiming Raffi’s innocence. It’s a testament to what type of people they are, though, that they would be willing to forgive somebody for what he had done to their son.”

  Not everyone was so trusting, or forgiving, of Kodikian. Wellesley deputy chief Cunningham set up an interview between Special Agent Travaglia and Terry Connelly, the local police officer who Cunningham had written up in his report as having said that Coughlin had once “been intimate” with Kirsten Swan. According to Travaglia, during the interview, Connelly again “alluded to the fact that he felt something was going on” between Coughlin and Swan, but this time he wouldn’t go into specifics. Travaglia left the interview disappointed, but still hopeful. With the Coughlin family more or less supporting Kodikian’s story, it was understandable if Connelly had second thoughts about introducing an alternate theory that might not be corroborated.

  Deputy Chief Cunningham was less understanding.

  “After the interview, I spoke with Connelly and asked him why he did not tell SA Travaglia what he had previously stated to me regarding the fact that Swan and Coughlin had at some point been intimate,” Cunningham wrote in his own report. “Connelly then told me that I must have misunderstood what he said to me and he stated that he did not know anything about an intimate relationship between Swan and Coughlin. I reminded him that Mr. Wakelin, Mr. Clark, and Chief Gagnon were all present when he made those remarks. He again stated that either he misunderstood the question or I misunderstood his response.”

  Travaglia was hopeful that, if Connelly’s August 9 statement was true, other friends of Coughlin would know about it. On August 17, he interviewed Keith Goddard, Coughlin’s former roommate, who lived in the apartment he and Coughlin had shared in Millis. He told Travaglia that he, too, suspected something had been going on between Coughlin and Swan, but had no definite knowledge of a tryst. If Coughlin had been secretly attracted to her, he kept it to himself. Despite Coughlin’s closeness to her, Goddard never met her until Coughlin’s funeral.

  Like everyone else who knew Coughlin, Goddard was devastated, and having trouble picturing Coughlin begging to be killed. As roommates and friends, he and Coughlin had occasionally stayed up late chatting, sharing their ideas about life. Since Coughlin’s death, one of those conversations had kept haunting him. They had been discussing death itself, and at one point Goddard had said that he would rather die before any of his family members. Coughlin had adamantly taken the opposite view, and couldn’t understand how Goddard could want such a thing. “Think about your mother,” he had said. Over the years Goddard had known him, Dave had never once mentioned feeling suicidal. “I never saw an individual as happy as Coughlin,” he told Travaglia, “which is one of the reasons why I liked associating with him.”

  The only thing that did jibe with Goddard was the image of Coughlin having a hard time in the wilderness. He and Coughlin had once gone on a river-rafting trip, and he remembered Coughlin struggling and, at one point, losing patience with the rigors of the outdoors. Even so, he told Travaglia that “Coughlin was an optimist who would have toughed it out until the rangers arrived.”

  Sonnet Frost, Coughlin’s girlfriend, used the exact same words, describing David as “a guy who would tough it out.” Frost had a hard time believing Kodikian’s story about a mercy killing, and when Travaglia showed her a copy of the journal she found Coughlin’s entries curious. They appeared to be in his handwriting, but some of the things he said didn’t fit with the man she knew. “We had forever but now all we have is eternity,” he wrote to her at one point. “You will always be in my heart and you will always have an angel standing by.”

  “David was not religious,” she told Travaglia. “He didn’t believe in angels, and he didn’t believe in an afterlife.”

  Goddard had also said the same thing. Although Coughlin dutifully went to church and Sunday school throughout his childhood, after he left home for college he began to develop his own views about religion. Whether it was the sort of classic and temporary rebellion from the religion forced on him since childhood, or a permanent shift in his spirituality, his closest friends knew him not only as nonreligious, but as an atheist. The only explanations for the religious references Frost could think of were that the entries were simply false, or written with the idea of soothing his parents, who would have wanted him to find God. Faced with an agonizing plight in Rattlesnake Canyon, he may have done just that.

  Like Goddard, Frost didn’t know about any affair between her boyfriend and Swan. If she had her suspicions, she kept them to herself and wasn’t able to offer Travaglia any other reason why Kodikian might want to kill Coughlin. Travaglia decided it was time to question Swan herself.

  Kirsten Swan hadn’t known the full details of David’s death. All she knew was that Dave was dead, Raffi had been arrested, and there was nebulous talk about mercy killing and suicide. She did not believe that Raffi had actually killed Dave. When Travaglia went over to her apartment in Boston to interview her, he found himself in the added position as the bearer of bad news.

  “I unfortunately had to tell her that it looked like a murder,” Travaglia said. “Because she didn’t know. She just simply knew that David had been killed, and wasn’t really sure of the circumstances, and I had to inform her that her boyfriend killed her friend.”

  Swan was understandably shocked, and Travaglia avoided pressing further on the nature of her relationship with Coughlin. She told him that David was a friend, and that she knew of no animosity between him and Raffi. But by the time he had his second interview with her, he had a police report from Terry Cunningham detailing Connelly’s statement about David “having been intimate with her on occasion” and this time he confronted her directly, asking her about the trip to California and if she and David had been more than friends. Her demeanor, said the investigator, changed immediately.

  “When I started to propose some speculative theories as to a possible murder motive as to why this thing transpired, the interview went right away from being cooperative to somewhat defensive,” Travaglia said. Before answering any more questions, Swan said she wanted to speak to her lawyer.

  Travaglia was once again disappointed, but he understood Swan’s reaction as a natural one. She was as surprised as anyone else at the killing, and had no way of knowing whe
ther her relationship with Coughlin—especially if it had been more than a friendship—was the actual motive. To admit to having had a sexual encounter with Coughlin would have put her in a position even more conflicted than Connelly’s. She could be called as a witness for the prosecution, quite probably a hostile one, and end up admitting to a tryst that could very well provide a skeptical jury with exactly what it needed to fill in the blanks and put Kodikian away for good. Before crossing that Rubicon, she had to be sure exactly which side of it she stood on.

  Travaglia also interviewed Kodikian’s coworkers at Massachusetts Financial Services, and found that none of them had any reason to believe Kodikian might have been lying about the mercy killing.

  “There was really nothing to indicate that there was an issue with temper or anything like that,” said the agent. “Nothing in the personality makeup whatsoever to indicate that he would be capable of such an act. There might have been a slight reference that one individual saw him blow up one time, but it was like a one-time quick shot with really nothing to it. And his girlfriend never alluded to the fact that he had any type of mean streak or temper. The Coughlin family spoke very highly of him. We didn’t come across one person that said, ‘Whoa. That guy had a temper that you really gotta watch out for.’”

  14

  Once a month, a program on a computer at the Eddy County Courthouse randomly decides which of the county’s seven prosecutors will be on call each weekend. The process—like so many rituals of the justice system—is meant to ensure fairness and impartiality. So it was that a mathematical algorithm brought Lesley Williams the strangest case of his career.