The Peugeot broke down. The Belgians rationed their water and lay in the shade of a tarpaulin. The rationing did not extend their lives; they might as well have drunk their fill, since the human body loses water at a constant rate, even when dehydrated. The only way to stretch your life in the hot desert is to reduce your sweating: stay put, stay shaded, and keep your clothes on.
The Belgians hoped a truck would come along. For a week they waited, scanning the horizon for a dust-tail or the glint of a windshield. This was a place, more or less, where the maps still insist on showing a road. The woman felt the upwellings of panic. She began to write more frantically, filling pages in single sessions. The water ran low, then dry, and the family grew horribly thirsty. After filtering it through a cloth, they drank the car’s radiator fluid. They arrived at the danger stage.…
After the radiator fluid was gone, the Belgians started sipping gasoline. You would too. Call it petroposia. Saharans have recommended it to me as a way to stay off battery acid. The woman wrote that it seemed to help. They also drank their urine. She reported that it was difficult at first, but that afterward it wasn’t so bad.
The boy was the weakest, and was suffering terribly. In desperation, they burned their car, hoping someone would see the smoke. No one did. The boy could no longer swallow. His name was Maurice. His parents killed him to stop his pain. Later, the husband cut himself open and allowed his wife to drink his blood. At his request, she broke his neck with a rock. Alone now, she no longer wanted to live. Still, the Sahara was fabulous, she wrote, and she was glad to have come. She would do it again. She regretted only one thing—that she had not seen Sylvester Stallone in Rombo III. Those were her last lines. She had lost her mind, but through her confusion must have remembered the ease of death in movies.
Movies, in fact, are the only places were mercy killing in survival situations seems common, specifically war movies. The scene in which a terminally wounded soldier begs a comrade in arms for a “mercy bullet” is frequent enough that we don’t think twice when we see it, and Raffi would later say that his ordeal in Rattlesnake Canyon “was the closest thing to what I’d imagine combat is like.” He probably got the analogy straight from Hollywood, because in real combat mercy killings are either not talked about or are extremely rare. Informal inquires on three different Vietnam veterans newsgroups visited by thousands produced not a single vet who had ever even heard of a mercy killing in combat, much less committed one. “That’s Hollywood shit,” one vet wrote about the mercy bullet scenario. “You keep on going till you can’t go no more.”
It would turn out that the closest thing to a legal precedent for Raffi’s case came from maritime law. The sea, like the desert, can drive one to desperate acts, and over the centuries a few men have been prosecuted for committing homicides that, under the conditions, were morally defensible. One of the most infamous cases comes from Britain.
In 1884, a racing yacht named the Mignonette set sail from England, bound for Australia. The owner of the yacht had hired Captain Thomas Dudley and a crew of three other men to transport the ship all the way to Sydney, but they never made it. Far off the coast of West Africa, the Mignonette foundered in a storm and went to the bottom.
Dudley and his crew managed to escape in a dinghy, but their troubles were just beginning. They had almost no food and water, and, adrift hundreds of miles from the nearest shipping lane, their chances of survival were small. After nineteen days of seeing neither land nor sail, they were beyond desperate. They were starving and desiccated, their tongues black and swollen. The youngest member of the crew, a fourteen-year-old boy named Richard Parker, was particularly bad off, having drunk sea water despite the warnings of Dudley and the other men. As Parker lay semiconscious in the bow of the dinghy, Dudley made a decision that would go down in the history of criminal law.
Normally, castaways faced with death by starvation drew lots. The loser sacrificed his life for the others, who resorted to the taboo of cannibalism. The practice was common enough to have a term, “the custom of the sea,” but Dudley and his crewmates forwent the formality of chance. Knowing that Parker was likely to die soon anyway, they cut his throat, drank his blood, and survived another eight days—long enough to be spotted and rescued by a German vessel, The Horatio.
Upon being rescued, Dudley told the Horatio’s captain—and later the British authorities—the truth. He could have hidden the killing easily, or even simply said that lots had been drawn, but he was a rigidly honest man. The British courts, which had long been searching for a case that would allow them to establish a harsh precedent against such practices, aggressively prosecuted Dudley and his first mate, Edwin Stephens, for murder. At their trial, Regina v. Dudley and Stephens, the crown rewarded Dudley’s forthrightness by sentencing him and his first mate to death by hanging.
Luckily for the sailors, the public outcry against the sentence was so great that Queen Victoria immediately commuted the sentence to six months’ hard labor. The men served their time, then lived out the rest of their lives haunted by the ghost of a fourteen-year-old boy.
16
I the weeks after the killing in Rattlesnake Canyon, Mark Maciha watched the incident evolve from a small newswire story out of Albuquerque into an international one. He now spent most of his time leading reporters and camera crews from as far as London down to the spot where Mattson had found Kodikian. Baby-sitting journalists, who often forgot to bring enough water themselves and had a way of turning the desert into an unnaturally noisy place, was not why he became a ranger. He preferred to be alone in the wilderness and cultivate its solitude. He put up with the reporters stoically, though, answering all their questions directly, with enough words to convey that he did not believe Raffi Kodikian’s story.
“It just doesn’t add up,” was the quote he most often gave them. When they asked why, he let the landscape do his talking for him. He took them to the overlook where Mattson had first spotted the campsite, then pointed out that it had taken only ten minutes to walk to a point where the campsite could be seen. On the trail down, he stood them next to rock cairns and asked them to spot the next marker, which they always did. Once they reached the campsite, the reporters were confronted by a three-foot-high pile of stones, the same ones that had covered David Coughlin’s body, and Maciha encouraged them to try lifting some of the bigger ones. After they hefted a few, groaning beneath their weight, he asked them whether they could imagine lifting all of those stones, then carrying them thirty feet if they’d had virtually no food or water for three days as Raffi had claimed. He would gesture to a six-hundred-foot peak behind him, and explain that if the friends had climbed it, they would have seen the road they came in on.
But he saved his best argument for last. He asked the reporters to lead the way out, and they usually managed to sniff out the trail while he followed behind. There was only one reporter, Bill Gifford from Philadelphia Magazine, whose tour resulted in an unfavorable impression of Maciha’s theory. Gifford would later write that, during his visit, Maciha himself had led the way back, and walked right past the cairn marking the exit trail. “I always miss that,” Gifford had quoted Maciha as saying.
A month after the killing, Maciha made his way down into the canyon again for the umpteenth time, this time carrying with him photographs that had been developed from David Coughlin’s camera. In and of themselves they were unremarkable—shots of the canyon from various perspectives near the bottom. Two of them, however, showed the friends’ tent, pitched and ready to be slept in, sitting in a completely different location than where the rangers had found them. Perhaps, Maciha wondered, if he could find the spot where the photographs were taken, he might find some remnant of their night there that would add another piece to the puzzle.
Once the ranger reached the canyon floor, he studied the photographs for points of reference—a familiar ridge line, promontory, or bend in the dry riverbed. Most of them seemed to be from a northern perspective, looking south, so he hiked n
orth along the canyon floor, stopping every few minutes to line up another photograph. About a mile north of the access trail, he turned west up a side canyon, off the trail entirely. In the photos with the tent, there was a natural stone bench jutting out from a rock face, and after hiking another ten minutes he stopped dead in his tracks when he realized he was staring at exactly that.
There was no doubt about it: the friends had spent at least a night there. Maciha could even see a patch of cleared ground that still bore a slight impression from the tent. The ranger began searching the immediate vicinity, looking for anything they may have left behind. After about fifteen minutes of nosing around, he’d found a few boot prints, but other than the tent impression there was absolutely nothing. “Leave no trace …” the park’s backcountry camping guidelines read. Except for the tent imprint, it appeared the friends had done exactly that.
Why had they come all the way up here? the ranger wondered as he prepared to head back. The spot was completely off the trail, isolated, a long way to go for a couple of guys who were supposedly planning on staying only one night. It would be another one of those prickly pear questions, the answer known only to Kodikian himself. By now Maciha was getting used to them.
As he turned to go, something on the ground caught the ranger’s eye. It was about twenty yards away, a paper of some kind, rammed into the spiny base of a sotol plant. He must have missed it on the way in as he was attempting to line up the rock formation with the photographs. When he got within a few feet of it, he knew what it was immediately. He had seen it a thousand times before. It was a Trails Illustrated topographical map of Carlsbad Caverns National Park, identical to the ones they sold back at the visitor center. The $7.95 price tag on the front of this one indicated that that was exactly where it had come from.
Maciha reached for it, careful to avoid the sotol spines protecting it as effectively as punji stakes. How it had gotten there was anybody’s guess. Whether it was another work of the wind, or someone had intentionally hidden it, was impossible to tell. He placed it in a plastic bag.
After the reporters hiked down into Rattlesnake Canyon with Mark Maciha and fought to see the world through Kodikian’s eyes, they usually swung back to Carlsbad and interviewed a man who never would, Chunky Click. He’d welcome them into his office, where they would immediately be confronted, everywhere they looked, by the face of John Wayne.
Click had been collecting Duke memorabilia since he was a kid, and when he became sheriff, he transferred as much of the collection as he could to his office. There were movie posters, autographed black-and-white still photos, line drawings, all of them framed. None of these, however, compared to the centerpiece that sat immediately behind his desk: a bookshelf with seventeen china plates from the Franklin Mint, each with a different rendering of Wayne from one of his movies. There was Wayne bulldogging up the beach in The Sands of Iwo Jima, Wayne wielding one eye and a pistol in True Grit, Wayne the Searcher, Wayne the Flying Tiger. They gleamed like altarpieces. Click would talk Wayne as long as you liked.
Another thing that caught the eye were his pistols and gun belt. When he wasn’t wearing them, they were usually hanging from the coat rack, two steely Colt .45s with butterscotch grips inlaid with Masonic emblems of silver, turquoise, and coral. His tooled leather gun belt, equally elaborate with his initials in silver and gold, had holsters specially crafted by inmates at the Terrell Unit, the prison in east Texas that hosts the state’s death row. Click was friends with the warden. Getting the holsters properly sized had been tricky since Click couldn’t just give the prisoners one of his guns. The sheriff solved the problem by laying a revolver on the Xerox machine and faxing a copy over to the prison. It was a no-nonsense solution, similar to the way he would come to view the Kodikian case.
“I don’t care what anyone says,” he professed, “people just don’t do that to their friends. I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy. I believe he had every intention of killing him.”
In the months immediately following the killing, the visceral disbelief Click had first felt upon reading the journal gradually became refined into a targeted argument as to why Kodikian’s story, as he joked, “didn’t hold water.” Along with the arguments Mark Maciha was making about how Kodikian and Coughlin should have been able to find their way out of Rattlesnake Canyon, Click added crime scene evidence and what little he had learned about Kodikian’s character. He had read Kodikian’s ’97 travel piece, and latched on to the episode where he nearly got lost in White Sands during the sandstorm.
“I think that’s where he got the idea that he could have some kind of adventure in the desert, back in ninety-seven” the sheriff said. “He went to the desert on that trip, camped out in it. He knew what he was doing. He says so himself in that article that he spent only fourteen nights with a roof over his head. That means he camped out over fifty times. I don’t care what anyone says, this guy was comfortable roughing it.” (Conveniently enough, he left out the part where Kodikian returns to his car to find he’d locked his keys inside.)
One of the things that bothered Click most was the unopened can of beans the investigators had found. If the friends had been so desperate, Click said, then why hadn’t they at least attempted to drink the syrupy water and sodium solution the beans were packed in? Severely dehydrated people had been known to drink a lot worse (the radiator coolant from Langewiesche’s story comes to mind). “It would seem to me like the most basic thing,” said the sheriff. “If you have water, or any kind of liquid, you’d try to drink it.”
The sheriff was also quick to grab on to Maciha’s discovery of what appeared to be their first night’s campsite, a mile and half up the canyon. “That’s an awful long way to go if you’re just looking for a place to pitch a tent for the night,” he said. “It’s just one more thing.” Could Kodikian have lured his friend off the trail, then intentionally hidden the map? Could they have been closet homosexuals in a lover’s quarrel? The sheriff seemed certain the answer was anything but the one Raffi had already given.
Most troubling of all was the torched sleeping bag. Rattlesnake Canyon brimmed with brush fields and dry wood, including a dead walnut tree immediately behind the campsite where Mattson had found Kodikian. Why, Click wondered, had they bothered to burn something as tentatively flammable as a sleeping bag for a signal fire? Had they wanted to, they could have run around the canyon floor with a burning stick and started a wildfire so large that it would have been impossible not to notice. Faced with death, what man would hesitate at committing arson in the middle of nowhere?
Click saw only one explanation: “He killed him in his sleep, then burned the sleeping bag to hide the evidence.”
Trace evidence from the crime lab in Albuquerque added weight to this argument; they had found sleeping bag fibers on the hilt of the folding knife Kodikian had used to kill Coughlin. Kodikian could have wiped the blade clean on the sleeping bag after he had used it for cutting cactus fruit, or their supposed suicide attempt, of course, but Gary McCandless—another Kodikian skeptic—doubted it. “The fact that the fibers were found on the hilt, and not in the stab wound or on the blade itself, makes sense,” he said. “The fibers would have been pushed up into the hilt as the knife penetrated the bag, then Coughlin’s chest.”
Not even the journal, the strongest piece of evidence supporting Kodikian’s story, made Click second-guess himself. He still pointed to what David Coughlin hadn’t written in it as the most important insight it offered: “Never, not once, does Coughlin write in that notebook that he wanted to die, or that he wanted Raffi to kill him,” he said.
“But what do I know?” he’d ask reporters after offering his speculations; “I’m just a redneck.” The obvious analogy was that he had cast himself as the moral enforcer in an old western. There he was, sitting in his office surrounded by his Wayne posters, wearing his pistols and his star, playing the part everyone expected him to play: the straight-shootin’ sheriff for whom everything was as black and whi
te as a John Ford movie. Sometimes, when the answers eluded him, it seemed as if he would break character and admit that Kodikian could be telling the truth, but he’d remember himself. Somebody had to point out that, if Kodikian’s story seemed unbelievable, the reason was probably because it just wasn’t true.
All of these arguments sounded good—a crafty, cold-blooded murder was infinitely more accessible than the story Kodikian had told—but Gary Mitchell could atomize these theories unless the state provided the all-important motive. “There is a motive; we just haven’t found it yet,” Click was saying with a wink at the beginning of October, knowing full well that there was a police report citing Terry Connelly’s statement about Coughlin and Swan having “been intimate.” But by early November, neither Connelly nor Swan herself had come forward to confirm it, and with the trial less than two months away, Click was growing desperate.
As a last-ditch effort, he and McCandless decided to send Eddie Carrasco to Boston to team up with Travaglia for another round of questioning. It was a long shot, but maybe it was just what they needed to flush out the motive: a meeting between the city cop and the country cop.
Eddie Carrasco caught a flight east from El Paso on November 14. To save the county’s money, he flew into Providence, Rhode Island, then rented a car and drove into Boston. It was the second time in his life he’d ever been to the East Coast. He got stuck in traffic for two hours on the way in, then lost in downtown Boston. In the end, he had to go to three different buildings, and ask directions from two different cops, before he found the FBI field office. Of course, some would say that happens to almost everybody who visits Boston.
Journal of the Dead Page 12
