“In hindsight, the only explanation I have is that we saw a plane, and we thought it was some kind of a park service truck that was doing a route,” he said of the lights, and described how the next morning they had left their tent and made the arduous hike up the canyon slopes.
“The tent was down on the canyon floor?” Judge Forbes interrupted. He, and everyone else in the courtroom, had been so still and quiet up to this point that it was easy to forget he was there, even though he was sitting right next to Raffi.
“The tent was down in the canyon floor,” Raffi affirmed.
“Could you see it?”
“We could when we were out on the edge of that mountain, at the tip,” Raffi replied, “but as we walked in we lost sight of the tent.”
Those would be the only two questions Judge Forbes would ask Raffi, who went on to describe their decision to remain up the plateau instead of continuing on to the plains below, where Dave thought they might find a road. “There was no way that I was gonna be able to move, so I told him that if he felt he could get to it then he should go and send back help. He didn’t want to leave me behind and he didn’t want to go by himself,” he said, and briskly described their long afternoon in the plateau’s sweltering heat; the lack of shade, the biting ants, the exhaustion. When he spoke again, his voice was slow and heavy.
“Friday was when we first noticed the birds,” he said, as if he could see the buzzards circling in his memory. “They were probably about thirty feet above us. It would start with just one circling and then another one would come and then another one. And they would just stick around and watch us. We would wave our arms to let them know that we were still alive. And they’d disappear, and they would come back about an hour later.
“That was the first time that Dave and I had discussed suicide. My understanding of buzzards at the time was that they start before you’re done. That they’ll start attacking you as soon as you’re too tired to fight them. And the topic of ending it early came up. But that was it. It was just mentioned once and then we forgot about it for the time being.”
Raffi resumed his steady recounting of Friday, August 6; their attempt to drink urine on the way back to their tent; how they’d mistakenly thought the rangers had come and left water on the ranch foundation; and how Dave struggled the last few hundred yards back to the tent. It was then that they had seen what they thought was a new cairn.
“The first thing we both thought was that the rangers had come down and put that cairn up basically to cover their ass,” he told the courtroom, “so that nobody would say later the trail wasn’t marked well enough.” He recounted how they resolved to try to pick up the cairn trail the next morning, then his disturbing vision of people in the canyon building machines to make their escape. “Me and Dave didn’t have what we needed to build the machines,” he said, “so we were gonna be stuck.”
He moved on to the following morning: their last, fruitless attempt to find the trail, the stone “SOS,” and the signal fire. “We started tossing everything we had that could burn into that fire, including my sleeping bag,” he said. “We threw mine as opposed to his because it was older and it was smaller and we just needed one for the night.”
So far, much of Raffi’s testimony about the ordeal in Rattlesnake Canyon had been consistent, in greater detail, with lines either he or Dave had written in the journal: “We will not let the buzzards get us alive…. Yesterday we never found the road but reached what seemed to be the furthest reaches of the park…. Nobody has come … returned to camp and built fire.” But by Saturday, their journal entries had mostly been either recollections of what they had already gone through, or good-bye notes to their family and friends—not what they were going through at the time. Consequently, the whole downward spiral that led up to the killing would be based almost entirely on Kodikian’s next words.
“And Saturday … Saturday was rough,” he said, slowing down again. “Saturday was long and mentally painful. I’ve never been so aware of every second that goes by. You didn’t have the distractions that you normally have in the day that speed things up. We just lied there. I remember several times looking at my watch and thinking that an hour had gone by but it had been five or ten minutes. And mentally that was very taxing. Again, like going up the mountain that the end wasn’t in sight. It was Saturday that we cut the bottom out of the tent. The reason we did that was because the fly was open in front and in back and you could get a better breeze under the tent with just the fly than you could with the tent itself. So we dropped the tent part of it and we cut that out. And then we … A little while later we noticed that the rocks underneath the tent were cooler than the nylon or the plastic that we were lying on, so we cut the bottom of the tent out and just kept the outside of the tent to hold up the fly. And all day Saturday we moved rocks back and forth to get to the cooler rocks underneath. I remember we took small handfuls of pebbles and ran them down our back ’cause it felt like water. And that’s pretty much the way we spent Saturday. We had stopped eating the fruit. We weren’t at all hungry and it was almost like the water we were getting out of it was too thick with sugar, so we just stopped eating it, we had no desire to eat it.
“I remember that there was no cloud cover at all on Saturday. The sun was up the whole time and I remember thinking about the sun as like a guard, and his job was to beat us into submission and we just had to take it. Every once in a while a cloud would come and block the sun, and it was like someone was distracting it and we could breathe for a minute. And then it would disappear and the sun would be back and it would be right back to the whole thing over again.
“The sun went behind a cloud late Saturday afternoon. The birds had been there the whole time. They had been circling around us all day, over us all day. We crawled out from under the tent and the sun stayed behind the cloud until night. And mentally and physically I was destroyed. I didn’t know if I could go through another day like we had just gone through. It was probably about an hour later that Dave started getting sick.
“He started vomiting and nothing was coming up. In the beginning, nothing was coming up—eventually mucus started coming out, bile. But it wouldn’t…. His voice all day Saturday had been getting progressively worse. I suspected … I could hear the mucus in his throat was staying there and his voice was sounding garbled. So it was difficult to understand what he was saying. When he started throwing up I figured that’s what was coming up, but he couldn’t get it out of his throat. He was throwing up and it would hang out of his throat and just stay there. He couldn’t get it to come out all the way. So I had to help him pull it out, pull it out of his throat because it wasn’t going to come out any other way. So I had to give him a hand and then pull it out of his throat for him. He was throwing up for a while, probably an hour. Sometimes it would be constant and then he would get a break and then he would start throwing up again.
“Eventually he started yelling for a doctor and saying he needed to go to a hospital. And I didn’t have the heart to tell him that nobody was listening. So I started yelling with him. And then he stopped yelling and he looked at me and he said, ‘I just realized.’ And I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘This is it.’ And I think I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘They’re not coming.’ And I said, ‘No.’
“After sitting there all day on Saturday and nobody showing up and we were over two days late, we had no hope that they even knew were down there. We had figured that the kid who had taken the permit had put it in the wrong file or it was in the trash or it was gone, that they didn’t even know we were in the canyon. And we had absolutely no hope of getting out of there. We figured that some hiker was gonna find our bodies. And Dave turned to me and he said, ‘Let’s do this.’ And I knew what he was talking about and we talked about how we were gonna end our lives.
“We decided that since I was stronger that he would cut my wrist first and then I would cut his. I don’t think that either one of us really had the strength to do it to ourselves. So
I sat next to him and we got a knife and he tried cutting my left wrist. Either the knife we were using was too dull, or he wasn’t pushing as hard as he should have been. But it wouldn’t break through the skin all the way. We cut across my wrist, went down it. We tried each of the knives we had and none of them worked. I knew if I made any sound it was gonna be that much harder for him so I didn’t make any. But I think he knew that it hurt and I really don’t think he pushed as hard as he could have. We eventually gave up, we stopped, and we were both beside ourselves. We didn’t know what we were gonna do, how we were gonna handle it. I bandaged up my arm. I don’t really think I was worried about it getting infected, I just didn’t want to look at it. And we actually tried it again, but it didn’t work. He put down the knife and we pretty much decided that we were gonna have to go through whatever we were gonna have to go through, that we weren’t gonna end it early. We abandoned the idea of committing suicide. They tell me that Dave had slashes on his wrist. I don’t remember trying to cut his. What I remember was deciding that if it didn’t work on me it wouldn’t work on him so we didn’t bother. There’s a possibility we did but I just don’t recall it.
“Dave started throwing up again. He spent the whole night on his hands and knees, throwing up. I was awake most of the time and I eventually started throwing up too. It wasn’t as bad as Dave, but it happened maybe a half-dozen times for me. I don’t know how many times Dave threw up. He was on his hands and knees the whole night, and when he did stop it wasn’t for long. He couldn’t sit down. He tried to sit down, he tried to straighten his legs out sometime early in the morning and he couldn’t. His body was frozen. We eventually got him to the point where he could sit upright and he was trying to lay down because he was exhausted. And every time he tried to lay down a little bit he started getting sick. We tried it with him sitting in front of me and me sitting behind him and I would take his arms like this and he would lean back and I’d try to ease him down, but every time we’d gotten a couple inches he’d start throwing up again. And then he’d come back and we’d do it again and he’d get a bit further and get sick again. We tried that countless times, I don’t know how many times we tried that.
“Eventually he got down on his back, and as soon as he did he turned to me and said, ‘You’ve got to end this.’ And at first I wasn’t really sure what he meant and he said, ‘Get the knife.’ And I said, ‘No.’ I said I wasn’t gonna do that. And he reached up and he grabbed me right there and he squeezed me hard, real hard, and he said, ‘Stop fuckin’ around.’ He said, ‘You know they’re not coming.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I know they’re not coming.’ And he said, ‘So then get the fucking knife.’ So I did, and he said, ‘Put it through my chest.’ I was bawling. He said, ‘Get next to me and put it through my chest.’ He said, ‘Don’t fuck up.’ I got next to him and I pushed it through his chest. But I fucked up and I hit his lung, because when I pulled the knife out, air came out. I told him I had to do it again. And he said, ‘Okay.’ And this time I thought I hit his heart. Blood came out and he said, ‘Pull it out.’ I did. I asked him if he was still in pain and he said no, that he felt a lot better, and he smiled.
“I held his hand the whole time. He started getting weak and I covered his face with a T-shirt. And then he died.”
21
Les Williams began his cross-examination with a question that, to this day, has no definite answer.
“You think the map that the rangers found is not the one that you had, is that correct?” he asked.
“I don’t think it’s the one we had, no. You’re talking about the topographical map?”
“Right.”
“I don’t think so.”
“And you think that you had that map up until the fires?”
“I believe so. I don’t remember which day we burned it, but I do believe we threw it in the fire.”
“So I take it the map wasn’t a help to you in finding your way out?”
“I had never used a topographical map before. I had seen them. I knew what they were approximately, but I had never actually used one. We tried to make sense of where we were in relation to that map, but we couldn’t. I don’t know how much experience Dave’s had with it. He seemed to know a little bit more about it than I did, but we couldn’t justify the mountains and the hills that were around us with where we thought we were. And then we saw that the foundation wasn’t where the map said it was, that made us question the entire map we had and whether or not it was accurate. We stopped even trying with the map eventually and just threw it in the fire.”
“So the map was… You did have the map when you found the foundation, when you went up on the hill and came back down?”
“I don’t remember. I remember that we had looked at the map and that we had … I think we had walked by the foundation when we had the map. We had walked by the foundation when we were going up the mountain on Friday, so we knew that it was there. So I don’t know if we had the map Friday afternoon or not. We may have already burned it, but we were aware that the map showed a foundation. I think that map did…. We had two of them. One was like a copy that the park hands out with the rules and the other was the topographical map. I believe the topographical mentioned the foundation but I’m not positive.”
“The first camp that you went to … You mentioned that you were in a hurry to get out there and get camped because you got there at about six o’clock in the afternoon?”
“No, we left about six o’clock in the afternoon, left the visitor center. We got into that camp I’d say somewhere around eight or eight-thirty. And at that point the sun had left the canyon floor, and it was starting to get dark.”
“Now that camp was quite a ways from where you enter Rattlesnake Canyon, right?”
“Yes.”
“About two, two and a half miles?”
“Okay.”
“If you were just gonna stay the night, why did you go so far back to find a place to camp?”
“Because we thought that there was actually a camping area. We didn’t realize that you were just supposed to camp along the trail someplace. It said, ‘Don’t camp on the canyon floor.’ So every time we went around a corner or went around a turn—because it runs like that, it’s an ‘S’ through the mountains—we figured that the campsite was just around the corner. We would get around the corner and it wasn’t there so we tried one more. And we did that probably two or three S’s until we just said we gotta camp here. I don’t even know if there is a campsite or an area that’s designated for camping, but at that point we realized that it was just too far away and we were gonna camp where we were.”
“Now you say that when David asked you to kill him, your first answer was no.”
“Yes.”
“So you knew what he was asking you to do at that time, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You knew that he wanted you to kill him and he was going to be dead and he was never going to recover?”
“I was going to be dead,” Kodikian said brusquely.
“He was going to be dead when you killed him?”
“He was going to be dead, and I was going to be dead shortly after, yes.”
“So you knew what you were doing?”
“In the sense that I remember it, and that then I knew what he needed, yeah. I recognized the situation, yeah.”
“So I take it that when you said that you thought you were both going to be dead that you didn’t think it would matter, since both of you were going to be dead?”
“What I thought I was doing was keeping my friend from going through twelve to twenty-four hours of hell before he died,” Kodikian said with an undeniably self-righteous edge. “That’s what I thought I was doing.”
“But I mean, you knew that you were killing him?”
“Yes, yes sir.”
“You didn’t think that you were killing the devil or anything like that?”
“No.”
“And since you said no the first time,
you could have resisted. In other words, you could have decided not to kill him, couldn’t you.”
“I could have made that decision, yes. I could have crawled out from under the tent and gotten away from him and just listened to his pain from a distance, yeah. I could have done that.”
“And it seems that you do suffer from remorse, that you’re sorry you did this, because you realize that if you hadn’t killed him, he’d still be alive, don’t you?”
“For about the last nine months, for about the last eight months, I’ve felt that way, yeah. It has not been until recently that whether or not Dave would have survived has been called into question. I don’t know now that he would have survived that, and to a certain extent if I found out that he wouldn’t have it would make me feel a little better, knowing that he wouldn’t have made it and that I did the right thing, I made the right decision. I don’t know now that he would have walked out of that canyon alive. And if he had there’s a good chance that he wouldn’t have walked out as the Dave that I know.”
“Well, he certainly wouldn’t have walked out.”
“No, he wasn’t gonna walk out of there.”
“He would have flown out with you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So it wasn’t mental illness that made you kill him, it was mercy—is that what we’re saying?”
“That’s the way I see it, yeah.”
Williams, paused, letting the admission sink in.
“I have no further questions,” he said, and left the podium.
His cross-exam couldn’t have lasted more than ten minutes, and many in the audience were surprised that he hadn’t grilled Kodikian further. He certainly could have attempted to corner him about his haziness about the missing map, the burning of the sleeping bag, and why—with not one, but four sharp knives in their possession—their suicide pact had been only skin deep. In Williams’s defense, the bottom line was that he chose to believe Kodikian based on the facts he had in front of him, and having been convinced of his remorse, knew that there was no need to be cruel. He already had a conviction the moment Kodikian agreed to a plea bargain, and from then on there was only one thing he was intent on proving: that Raffi Kodikian knew what he was doing when he killed Coughlin. He had succeeded magnificently when Kodikian admitted precisely that, despite the fact that Raffi’s own lawyers had gone to great lengths to show the contrary.
Journal of the Dead Page 17
