Sarah had not stopped at her house. No one got out of the van until they pulled up behind the red car. They got there quickly. No one had a chance to think things through. No one in the van had a weapon of any kind. As they pulled up, Jilica saw Rachel crossing the lawn, heading toward the street, toward them. Lynch showed her a diagram that had been made from Janet’s version of the facts. Jilica said that Janet had the position of the cars correct, and the spot where Javier and his friend were standing, but the diagram was wrong when it came to Rachel. Janet said Rachel was leaning on the front of her car when the van pulled up. Jilica disagreed. She clearly remembered Rachel crossing the lawn. Janet and Jilica agreed that when Sarah first got out of the van, when her feet first touched the ground, Rachel was already between the vehicles and approaching fast. It was when she crossed in front of the van that Jilica got her first look at Rachel’s face.
“I saw the knife,” Jilica said.
It was in Rachel’s left hand and held in a threatening manner. She didn’t see the stabbing; and the next thing she remembered, she was holding Janet around the waist, holding Janet back, protecting her because that girl still had the knife in her hand.
The confrontation between Sarah and Rachel was quick—two or three seconds, no more than that. As soon as she saw Janet coming, Rachel backed off. During the ruckus, Jilica dropped her phone and somehow it managed to end up underneath Rachel’s car. She had her shoes off and she went under Rachel’s car, trying to get her phone. It was too much at one time to process properly. She retrieved her phone. When she got back up, she saw Sarah standing there, just inside the van’s open driver’s door, holding her chest.
Janet and Rachel were fighting on the lawn. Janet had a shoe in her hand and was trying to knock the knife out of Rachel’s hand with it. Jilica managed to get her own sandals back on. Janet had the same pair, but she lost her shoes that night. Two pairs of sandals were recovered at the scene: one black, Janet’s; one white, Sarah’s. It seemed crazy now, but at the time Jilica thought Sarah was okay, and that her real worry was Janet’s safety.
Rachel was still waving her arms wildly, still had the knife, and Jilica remembered saying, “Janet, no,” and pulling her friend away from Rachel, toward the van. She glanced back at the van and didn’t see Sarah anymore. Janet went around to the other side of the van and screamed that she saw blood. Jilica got down on the ground with Sarah.
Janet headed back for Rachel, who had run up between houses. After that, Rachel didn’t have the knife anymore. Sarah’s phone was ringing. It was Joshua. Jilica told him Sarah was down and bleeding. Then she called 911.
As she gave the lady the info, she noticed that Javier was on the phone; she realized they had called 911 simultaneously. The operator gave Jilica instructions for first aid. She needed something to apply pressure with; Javier gave her his orange shirt. Other people were showing up. At some point, a man showed up and took over tending to Sarah.
Jilica stood up and began screaming at Rachel, “You just stabbed someone! You are going to jail!”
Jilica again tried to pull Janet away from Rachel, now fearful that the cops were going to arrive any second and might not be quick to figure out the good guys from the bad guys.
“It’s not about us now,” Jilica recalled saying, thinking the focus should really be on safety. “Think of your kids,” Jilica said to Janet.
Rachel kept saying, “I’m done, I’m done!” She didn’t want to fight anymore. Rachel tried to go in the house; but for some reason, she didn’t. Instead, she took a seat on a lawn chair. She was smiling. No remorse!
Lynch asked, “At any time, did you ever hear Joshua encourage Sarah to go fight Rachel?”
“No,” Jilica replied.
Had she ever heard Joshua encourage Rachel to fight Sarah? Jilica silently shook her head.
Jilica again apologized. Everything caught her by surprise that night. Back at Janet’s house when Joshua showed her the texts from Rachel, she wasn’t impressed because—as it had been explained to her—Rachel was crazy and she did this sort of crap all of the time. Rachel and Sarah were perpetually threatening to kick each other’s asses, but they never did. Jilica had no idea why this night was different.
Lynch tried to probe Jilica’s theories as to why this all happened and found Jilica unwilling to speculate.
“It was just a bunch of high-school foolishness taken to the street,” she said.
Jilica left, and Janet Camacho came in and sat down in Jilica’s seat.
Lynch continued his follow-up questioning.
Janet said she was aware that Joshua had once dated Rachel, but it wasn’t for long. “A few weeks, I’m not sure,” she said.
When was that?
“Maybe last year,” she said.
Janet never met Rachel, just saw her from afar a few times, but she just heard a lot about her. Everything she knew was based on stuff Joshua had told her. She’d heard rumors about Rachel, heard she did it with her brother Jay Camacho, too—but that was not verified information. Jay denied it, but who knows?
When did Joshua start dating Sarah? Janet didn’t know. She just knew that they were always together, every day. According to Joshua, he and Sarah dated for a year and then broke up, but Janet couldn’t verify that. In the chronology of Joshua’s love life, Janet said, Erin Slothower came first, but she and Joshua had broken up already by the time she learned she was pregnant. Joshua had been there for her because of the baby, but they were never a couple after that. Janet admitted that there had been friction between Erin and Sarah, mostly jealousy over Joshua. Janet knew of no fights between Erin and Sarah. Other than Erin, Sarah, and Rachel, Janet didn’t know of any other women in Joshua’s world.
Janet had no use for Rachel. She was a bad influence, introducing Joshua to a destructive lifestyle, which included alcohol and pills. This was not recent.
Once, while on the phone as she was going to the store, Janet told Rachel about her feelings.
“How did she react?” Detective Lynch asked.
“She had a mouth on her!” Janet replied. “She was disrespecting me, and after that, I didn’t have nothing else to say to her.”
The only other contact Janet had with Rachel came during autumn 2008, after Joshua moved out of Rachel’s apartment. All Joshua wanted to do was return the house key to Rachel. Seemed like simple enough, right? Rachel was such a loose cannon that Janet went along with Joshua to have his back. Janet and Rachel had another sharp verbal exchange on that occasion.
During the days leading up to the stabbing, had Joshua ever talked to his sister about new problems with Rachel? Janet said no. How about Sarah? Did she mention new problems with Rachel?
Janet shook her head. Sarah liked to come over to Janet’s house and play with her kids or whatever, but they didn’t have a relationship where Sarah would confide in Janet.
Janet described the scene in which Rachel drove past the house a few times and then parked at the end of the block. Janet was in a car with a friend, and didn’t know at first that Rachel was in the car parked at the stop sign. It was too dark to tell the color or make of the car. Joshua came out of the house and told Janet that Rachel was waiting for Sarah to go home because she wanted to fight her—and that was when Janet put two and two together and realized Rachel must be in the car at the end of the block. Janet flashed the lights on her friend’s car, and Rachel flashed right back. Rachel was watching. Sometime after eleven at night, Rachel left.
Janet and Jilica’s company left. Janet said she felt hungry and went in the house to recruit Sarah to take her to McDonald’s. Jilica agreed to go along for the ride. The closest McDonald’s was closed down for the night, so they planned to go to the twenty-four-hour franchise, which was farther away. Janet said she thought it might be on Park Boulevard, but she wasn’t sure because she’d never been to that one before.
Sarah wasn’t angry, but she was concerned because she knew Rachel was out there looking for trouble. Janet explained
that she and Sarah and Javier all lived very close to one another, but Rachel’s place was relatively far away. It was therefore slightly unnerving for Rachel to be cruising around their neighborhood.
So it was wrong to think that Sarah was out looking for Rachel. Sarah and Janet were home; Rachel had come to their neighborhood and was looking for trouble.
Sarah might not have been angry when she first got into the car, but her anger quickly grew. Instead of heading straight for McDonald’s, Sarah went to her own home, first—a minor detour—but Rachel was nowhere to be seen.
Janet told Detective Lynch about the “stab Sarah and her Mexican boyfriend” comment. She didn’t remember if she was on speakerphone. It was possible Rachel’s unbelievable mouth could be heard throughout the minivan without amplification.
Sarah replied, “Where you at? You say you’re at my house and want to fight me. I’m at my house. Where you at?”
During the phone call, Janet said she and Jilica kept their mouths shut because they didn’t want Rachel to know they were in the car.
The mood in the van relaxed a little. The little bitch was all bark. That was when they encountered Sarah’s best friend, Ashley—Janet didn’t know her last name, someone Sarah went to school with at Pinellas Park High—who said Rachel was right down the block. Janet wasn’t sure what kind of car Ashley was driving. After that, Sarah went directly to Javier’s house.
Michael Lynch gave Janet a piece of paper and asked her to draw a diagram, a map of what the scene outside Javier’s looked like. Where were the cars? Where were the people? Where did the fight take place?
The cars ended up almost “face-to-face,” Janet said, but there was room enough between their snouts for people to walk back and forth. Illustration was not Janet’s forte, but she tried.
Janet said that Rachel was leaning on the hood of her car when Sarah pulled up. This disagreed with Jilica, who recalled Rachel crossing the lawn as Sarah approached. Janet remembered that Javier and his friend were standing in the driveway. Once the van stopped, Rachel came quick. Sarah didn’t even have a chance to close her car door when Rachel was on her, attacking her with a knife, which Janet thought was in Rachel’s right hand.
Sarah said, “What you going to do with that knife?”
At first, Jilica and Janet stayed in the car, but Janet got one glimpse of the knife and got out to assist Sarah, who had no weapons. Sarah was trying to defend herself and hit Rachel also. The fight was so fast—two, three seconds.
By the time Janet got to Rachel, she’d already turned around and was heading back toward Javier’s house. Janet removed one of her slippers and used it to try and knock the knife out of Rachel’s hand. But she couldn’t do it. There were a few seconds there when Janet thought Sarah was okay. Janet decided they should get out of there. She looked in the minivan’s passenger-side front window and saw blood on the front seat. She heard Jilica scream that Sarah was “on the floor, bleeding.”
Janet ran around the front of the van, saw Sarah was down, and attacked Rachel a second time.
Janet remembered screaming, “You stabbed her!”
Rachel said, “I’m done,” and acted like she didn’t care.
After the second fight, Rachel kept walking back toward the houses. Janet told her she was watching her; she knew she was trying to get rid of the knife.
“You stabbed my friend. You’re not getting away with it,” Janet remembered screaming.
Lynch asked if Janet knew if Joshua was seeing Rachel behind Sarah’s back.
“I don’t have no clue,” Janet said.
Joshua knew that Janet disapproved of Rachel, so he probably would not have shared that kind of info with her.
“Was Joshua encouraging Sarah to fight Rachel, or vice versa?”
“No. Joshua always tried to keep Sarah from fighting anybody. He wanted Sarah to go home because it was past time for her to go home.”
At no time did Janet have phone contact with Rachel. Lynch warned her that he would be subpoenaing her phone records. Janet repeated that she didn’t even know Rachel’s number.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Did it ever occur to you as you headed over to Javier’s that this was a bad idea?”
“I had talked to her plenty of times about all this drama.”
“Were you in the van saying, ‘Come on, let’s go over there and kick her ass’?”
“No! Even if I told her to stop, she wouldn’t have listened.”
Janet then bragged that Rachel didn’t come around her house. “She didn’t want to deal with me,” she said. “Rachel was waiting for Sarah to go to her house, because she knew she would be alone—and I wasn’t going to let that happen.”
Janet felt that just the fact that she was in the minivan in front of Javier’s house would have been enough to make Rachel back off. But it didn’t work.
Detective Lynch also conducted a follow-up interview with Dustin Grimes, but his recording mechanism malfunctioned so he later had to summarize the interview from memory.
According to Lynch, Grimes verified the swerving-car incident, saying it was definitely a smaller car and light in color. He said that Rachel walked out into the street when the van arrived and met Sarah “just to the driver’s side of the minivan.”
He didn’t know who “Ashley” was.
It didn’t take Lynch long to figure out that Ashley was Ashley Lovelady, the victim’s best friend. Ashley Lovelady became the last of the witnesses to be interviewed by police. It was an occurrence further delayed when Ashley was hesitant to speak of that night, unsure of how much trouble she might be in.
When Ashley did arrive at the police station, she was with her dad, who explained to Detective Lynch that because Ashley was underage, he wanted to sit in. The father was also worried that his daughter might be in legal trouble. Even though Lynch explained that Ashley was not in any trouble, she was very closed-lipped during that initial interview.
Ashley told Lynch that she was Sarah’s best friend since forever—from preschool! Next to Sarah herself, she probably knew the most about the problems Sarah was having with Joshua. He had at least two other girlfriends, one of them being Rachel Wade.
Rachel left threatening voice mails, horrible stuff. Ashley had tried to talk Sarah out of Joshua, but no way. She loved him. Ashley last spoke to Sarah about a half hour before her death. She admitted to driving her car in the vicinity of Janet Camacho’s house that night, but she claimed that this was the extent of her involvement.
Ashley got the impression that Detective Lynch knew the truth about her role that night. She could tell by the way he pressed the point. She said she was out driving in a gold-colored Camry, which belonged to her boy friend’s mother. Yes, she did run into Sarah and Janet on the road. Sarah was mad.
“Did Sarah mention anything about Rachel?” Lynch asked.
“Yes. She said, ‘I can’t take it anymore, I’m going to find her.’”
“Did you see Rachel Wade at any time that night?”
“No,” Ashley said.
Lynch ended the interview by telling Ashley that she could call him at any time and that his door was always open to her because—and he told her point-blank—her story was not consistent with what he had heard from Janet Camacho and Jilica Smith.
The very next day, Ashley did call Michael Lynch back. She admitted that it was she who had spotted Rachel Wade outside Javier Laboy’s house, and subsequently had told Sarah Ludemann where her archenemy was located. She denied being the driver of the swerving car. She apologized for not being completely truthful the day before. When she was talking to Sarah for the final time that night, she gave her the old mantra: “He wasn’t worth it. He wasn’t worth fighting about.” Sarah Ludemann was “obsessed” with Joshua. He was her master, and she always obeyed.
There had been one telling moment during the summer when it was hot. Joshua told Sarah that he didn’t like her wearing shorts. He didn’
t like the idea of other boys being able to see her legs. From then on, despite the heat, Sarah wore long pants.
Detective Lynch remembered that, according to Janet Wade, Rachel’s mother, Joshua pulled this manipulative stunt on Rachel as well. If she really loved him, if she loved him enough, she’d wear long pants so he’d be the only one to see her legs.
Joshua told Sarah he didn’t want her to go out at night unless she was with him. So from then on, when her girlfriends asked her to come out, she always said no. She stayed home even on nights when Camacho was out with another girl!
Joshua’s Svengali-like influence was disturbing on another level: It had caused a dramatic change in not just Sarah’s appearance, but in her aura. It was like Sarah’s very spirit was altered. She dressed differently, acted differently. Her voice was different.
“Her old friends were weirded out,” Ashley said.
Sarah’s parents were weirded out, too. Sarah’s dad found his daughter’s new attitude tragic. What was it? Gangsta and slave? Great! Joshua gave the orders and Sarah obeyed. Sarah’s mom remembered how Sarah was developing into a strong-willed woman, but now that was gone. In its place was a tiny person, a puppet, allowing a boy to pull her strings. Sarah’s mom and dad saw the bruises on her arms. Sarah said they came from Joshua while “play-fighting on the couch.”
During the first two weeks of Rachel’s lengthy stint in the Pinellas County Jail, her telephone calls were recorded, just in case she said something to incriminate herself. It was not a secret recording. An automated voice informed the parties on the line every few minutes that every phone call might be monitored or recorded.
In order to talk to Rachel, a prepaid account had to be established, two dollars from which was subtracted with each call, which could be up to twenty minutes long. Only two phones signed up to be on Rachel’s call list: her parents, and her muscular boyfriend, Jeremy Sanders. She talked to others when one of those two phones was set for a three-way conversation.
When Rachel’s dad tried to set up the account, which was done right on the phone, punching information into an automated system, he became frustrated when he entered his credit card number incorrectly on the first try. When Rachel came on the line, she was scared, sick, and crying that she didn’t want to be in jail, only hours after her arrest, and the first thing her dad did was complain to her about what he “had to go through” to call her.
Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle Page 75
