“You had drama, not just from Sarah, but from Erin as well?”
“Yes.”
“But you stayed with Joshua?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Are you familiar with the term ‘friends with benefits’?”
“Yes.”
“What does that term mean to you as you sit here today in your generation?”
“It means that you aren’t dating exclusively and you can see other people.”
“It means you can have sex with other people without cheating on anybody?”
“Yes.”
“Were you aware that that was part of Joshua’s philosophy?”
“At the beginning of our relationship, no. But when he continued to see and see the other girls, yes.”
“Did he cheat on you with Erin?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Did he cheat on Erin with you when he was dating Erin?”
“I’m not positive that they were dating, but not that I’m aware of, not while we were together.”
“Did he cheat on Sarah with you when he was with Sarah?”
“They were seeing each other. As far as I was concerned, they weren’t dating.”
There was clearly a distinction in Rachel’s mind between “seeing” and “dating.” Both included sex, but “dating” came with expectations—or perhaps only pretensions—of monogamy.
“That was because he told you they weren’t dating so he could see you?” Hebert asked.
“Yes.”
Rachel testified that on the night of the incident, it was Joshua’s plan to come over, have sex, and spend the night with her.
Yes, she knew his sister Janet. No, she didn’t find Janet pleasant. Rachel explained, “There were a couple of times when I went over there to the house, where he stayed with her sometimes, and spent the night, babysat her kids. But after a couple of times of that, she came over to my house and she told me I was a bad influence on him and she didn’t want me to see him anymore. And if I did, she was going to come after me.”
“Can you tell me some of the specific threats that Janet made to you?”
“She said that she was going to kick my ass, and she actually came to my door of my apartment, where I lived alone, and tried to break my door down. Other than that, she threatened me, not physically, but verbally over the phone.”
“What sort of verbal threats?”
“Just that she was going to come after me and to stay the ‘eff’ away from her brother,” Rachel said, censoring herself.
“Let’s talk about the threats that might have been made toward you by Sarah Ludemann. These threats were ongoing?”
“Yes.”
“And they went on for months at a time?”
“Yes.”
“Obviously, you’ve been sitting here in court and you’ve listened to threats you made on tape. Can you tell me some of the threats that were made toward you by Sarah?”
“She said she was going to kick my ass, same thing. She knew where I lived, that I should stay away from her man, and that I shouldn’t put pictures up on my Myspace because she had found out where I lived because of that, and she would come to my house.”
“Did she ever threaten to beat your fuckin’ ass?” Hebert did not censor himself.
She had, more than once, probably more than ten times, and that went on throughout the buildup to this situation. The threats she dished out were similar in tone to those she received, same kind of language. That was the way she and Sarah talked. When she talked to Sarah, it was never pleasant.
“Tell me about the Myspace. Tell the jury about the Myspace.”
“When I was dating Joshua, on Myspace I did like a lot of couples do and posted a lot of pictures of us. I bought a dog for him and we took pictures of the dog. I would get frequent comments from her for putting up the pictures and [that] I was an idiot for putting up the pictures because she was dating him.” Rachel felt harassed.
Hebert let out a long sigh, as if he were hesitant to introduce an unpleasant topic: “Now, during the time you were dating Joshua, did you ever see a gun?”
At the prosecution table, Lisset Hanewicz sat up a little bit straighter when she heard that question. She immediately began to scribble notes on her yellow legal pad.
The defendant answered the question in the affirmative.
“Could you tell the jury about that?”
Rachel explained that, personally, she did not like guns. “I had a friend who got shot once,” she said. “And Joshua brought the gun into my house, and I didn’t even care for a BB gun, and he brought a gun in a backpack one night when he came to spend the night, and I told him to get out of my house with it. And when I did, he said he had been joking about, you know, how he didn’t care, and waving it around, and pointed it at me and told me that I would never leave him because we were actually having a conversation about how he was seeing other girls.” Her words came out rapid-fire, like a babbling brook of consciousness.
Yes, he pointed the gun at her. She took it seriously and was afraid.
No, she’d never seen the gun at Janet’s house.
“You didn’t break up with him when he pointed the gun at you, did you?”
“Actually,” the defendant responded, “at the time we weren’t seeing each other exclusively. We were just kind of back and forth.”
Hebert asked his client to explain the five voice mails that they’d heard earlier. She’d said some pretty awful things. What had she been thinking?
Rachel replied that she’d been upset; she’d been receiving harassing phone calls. “Sarah said she was going to kick my ass and I just retaliated out of anger. She’d harassed me. She’d come by my house, and I was upset when I said it. Truthfully, I was scared.”
“Had you ever had a physical confrontation with Sarah—with Sarah and a group of her friends?”
Rachel told the Taco Bell/Silly String story: how she and Courtney Richards were chased by a car with six girls in it, how they were forced off the road, jumped, and how Richards’s external mirror was smashed.
“Were you harassed at your place of work at Applebee’s?”
“Yes, Sarah and her friends would come in, as well as Erin and her friends, and they would bump into me. I was a waitress. They’d spill beer on my customers or they’d complain about me to my manager and make things up. They would bother me while I was in the process of trying to serve my customers. We had karaoke night and they would go up and sing songs. ‘Girl Fight,’ I think, was one of the songs, and it was just a constant ongoing problem at my place of work.”
It was so stressful. All of those incidents, the fear of being attacked, were on Rachel’s mind that April 14, but she did not set out that day to kill anyone. She first became concerned that day when she was in her apartment and received private phone calls from an unknown caller. She finally answered one, thinking maybe it could have been Joshua. But it was Sarah, who said something about being outside Rachel’s house.
At first, Rachel wasn’t sure if Sarah was bluffing; but after she hung up, she heard a car beeping outside. She heard screaming females. This was before Rachel went to Javier’s house, the same night that Joshua said he wanted to come over and spend the night, a fact that couldn’t have pleased Sarah if she’d known. As a result of the phone call and screams from outside—which Hebert referred to as the “mayhem”—Rachel debated over what to do. She called a couple of her friends. One was sick and the other was “with someone,” so she called Javier Laboy, who offered her sanctuary. She didn’t call her parents. She didn’t call the police. She lived alone and she just wanted to get away from her apartment. So, upset, crying, and scared, she called Javier. She told him she didn’t know what was going on, but they were outside her house. She asked if she could come over, and he said sure.
“At that moment, you were in fear of the situation with Sarah and Janet and everyone else that might be involved?”
“Yes.”
“What did you
do before you left your house?”
“I grabbed a knife.” It was a kitchen knife that had been on the kitchen counter. She put it in her purse.
Rachel testified that she felt a need to arm herself because she’d never been in an altercation like that before. She figured if they approached her and she had the knife, they would either be satisfied that “I was scared, or they would just leave because they would be scared.” The knife was for protection because she was “in fear,” because she didn’t want to fight. She told no one where she was going. Only Javier knew, a guy she had dated about three and a half months earlier. She wanted her location to be a secret. She wanted to go somewhere where she was unlikely to be found, and she didn’t think anyone would look for her at Javier’s.
“You arrived at Javier’s house and there was calling going on and texting?”
“Yes. Calling. No texting.”
Hebert prompted his client to admit that she called Joshua, and Joshua still wanted to come over and spend the night with her.
“He mentioned that, yes.”
“Did you notice that Josh was starting to sound a little bit more intoxicated?”
“Yeah. I didn’t know what he was doing. I couldn’t really tell what he was doing, but yes. It got to where I couldn’t read him. He was slurring a bit.”
“So you pull up at Javier’s house. Is Javier there?”
“Yes.”
“His friend Dustin—did he arrive at some point in time?”
“Yes.”
Rachel, Javier, and Dustin were out in front of the house. Perhaps there was a juror or two who thought just then that Rachel was not acting like a girl who was hiding. She was acting more like someone in need of backup. Hebert did not ask her why she didn’t go inside. Instead, he showed her a photo taken the night of the incident, and she identified the red car as hers.
“At some point in time, a car drives by. Do you remember that?”
She did. She’d been standing near the back end of her car, speaking to Javier and Dustin. She looked up and a car was driving normally down the street. Then it swerved. She didn’t recognize the car. It wasn’t a car she’d seen before. She did recognize that there was a single female in it. The car swerved so that it drove only a couple of feet away from her. Javier had to pull her out of the way. Rachel went from feeling safe to unsafe in a flash. She couldn’t hide. They were hunting her down. After the swerving car, she went in her car and took the knife out of her purse. A few minutes later, a van came around the corner.
“Please tell the jury where you were sitting.”
“Toward the middle of the hood of my car,” the defendant said.
Again, some jurors thought, Not hiding.
The van flew around the corner, no stopping, and headed toward her. It stopped about five feet from her. It would’ve hit her, chopped her in two, if it hadn’t quick-stopped. Yes, she was afraid. She was “in fear,” as Jay Hebert liked to say.
She’d seen that green van before, and she was able to recognize the two girls in the front. Sarah was driving and Janet was in the passenger seat. There was a third girl, sitting in the backseat, whom Rachel didn’t know, but she later learned was Jilica Smith.
“Sarah got out of the car first and walked around to the front of the car. Janet and the other girl also got out of the car and started to walk toward me. Janet got out of the passenger side and Jilica walked around the back of the van and approached my right side. Sarah immediately engaged me in a fight. She grabbed me by my hair. I slid off the front of the car, and I was just on the edge of it. I was just about two steps in front of my car and she grabbed me by the top of the head and had me slightly bent forward, and she hit me about three times.”
“Who came at who?”
“Sarah came at me.”
“She attacked you?”
“Yes.”
Hebert showed defense exhibit number two to Rachel. It was a photo taken by police that night of Rachel’s car, taken from the front. Hebert asked her where the fight occurred, and Rachel pointed to a spot on the street about three feet in front of her car and just on the passenger side of center. The fight happened quickly, she explained, and she was knocked down.
“When you got up, you had the knife?”
“I had to grab it because it was on the hood of my car, yes.”
Hebert unashamedly led his witness, putting the words he wanted to hear in his client’s mouth: “You had the knife out. You were showing the knife, hoping it would scare her … warn her?”
“Yes.”
Janet and Jilica saw the knife. Sarah saw the knife. Rachel didn’t even grab the knife until she’d been hit three times in the head. Sarah was still hitting her after she grabbed the knife, and Rachel swung her arms back in retaliation—to defend herself. She didn’t know if Sarah had a weapon. She didn’t know if Janet was armed. Either one of them might have had a knife or a bat or a gun. Even if they weren’t armed, they could have beaten Rachel to death with their fists. So Rachel defended herself.
“When did you know that you had stabbed Sarah Ludemann?”
“When I heard Jilicia,” Rachel said, mispronouncing the name to sound like “Jilisha.”
“When I heard her scream and I looked down and I saw blood, I knew. I didn’t know who had been stabbed or where. I have no recollection of actually doing it. I heard Jilicia scream that Sarah had been stabbed, but Sarah had already walked away and she was no longer in front of me to physically see that.”
“Did you personally see blood and know something had happened?”
“Yes.”
“And that whole contact with Sarah lasted about how long?”
“Couple seconds.”
“Did you ever mean to stab her, to kill her, to murder her?”
“No.”
“Almost immediately after your fight with Sarah, you were attacked by Janet?”
“Yes.”
“About how long was there between your fight with Sarah and your fight with Janet?”
“About a second.”
“Had anybody mentioned that Sarah had been hurt?”
“Yes.”
“Was that after you fought with Janet?”
“No, Janet attacked me at the same point in time that Jilicia was yelling.”
“So you were getting beaten down by …”
“Janet.”
Hebert noted that Rachel was afraid of Janet Camacho, didn’t know what Janet was going to do, didn’t know if Janet had a weapon, but she didn’t try to stab Janet.
“Why was that?” he asked.
Struggling to get the words out, Rachel sputtered, “Because I’d already seen the blood on the knife and I never had any intention of using it. I didn’t want to hurt anybody.” So she let Janet beat her up. Not once, but twice.
“How would you describe your emotions when you saw the blood and the whole scene?” Hebert quickly decided that the question was too open-ended. He wanted absolutely to govern which words Rachel used in her testimony, so he added, “Were you in a state of shock?”
She was. She’d had no idea what had happened. She just knew somebody was stabbed. She knew it was Sarah, but she couldn’t see her. And she threw the knife on the roof. After that, she was just “being quiet.” When the police came, she went over and sat on the bench. She’d seen cops get out of their cars with guns drawn.
“And did you cooperate with their investigation?”
“Yes.”
At the state’s table, Hanewicz wrote something on her notepad in large letters.
In the audience, Charlie and Gay Ludemann glared at Rachel. He had a deep frown; she had a bemused smile—the audacity of this girl to be such a bald-faced liar.
On the other side of the courtroom, Rachel’s father sat with his arm around his wife’s shoulders, literally holding her up. Rachel’s mom, wiping away tears, was seemingly without bones, careening through a never-ending tunnel of despair.
Rachel said that at no time t
hat night did she feel she had any choice but to defend herself. She had no idea what might have happened to her if she hadn’t brought the knife. She might have been seriously injured or suffered great bodily harm.
Hebert’s questions ignored the fact that Rachel had been beaten up, anyway, twice in fact—attacks that left her barely marked.
Hyperbole now painted the defense attorney’s urgent queries: “The blows that you inflicted, those blows were done in self-defense after you were struggling several times with the aggressor, Sarah Ludemann?”
Several times? The whole fight lasted five seconds! Still, Rachel replied in the affirmative. This exchange was filed in the jury BS file—right next to Rachel’s claim that she’d been punched twice before she grabbed for the knife.
Hebert wanted to talk size. Rachel stood five-four; and at the time of the incident, she weighed somewhere in the vicinity of 110 or 115 pounds. Sarah was much bigger. Taller. Heavier. Stronger. When Sarah hit Rachel, she hit her in the head.
Hebert asked, “Do you remember if Joshua ever instructed you to carry a knife for protection?”
“Yes, he did. While he was living with me, he did, but especially after he moved out and I was living in a new apartment,” Rachel replied. “He used to tell me to keep a knife on me, when he wasn’t around, for protection.”
Janet had testified that Rachel smirked after stabbing Sarah. Rachel denied that.
“Did Joshua tell his girlfriends, including you, that ‘if you love me, you will fight for me’?”
“Yes. That was his philosophy. He didn’t want us to go against him. He wanted us to fight against each other, and not be mad at him for what he was doing.”
“No further questions, Your Honor,” Hebert said, his tone indicating that if the jury didn’t recognize the truth after hearing that, they never would.
“Ms. Hanewicz, cross-examination?” Judge Bulone asked.
Over at the prosecutors’ table, Lisset Hanewicz was slightly coiled, a body of potential energy. It was go time, and the prosecutor was ready to pounce.
“Good afternoon,” Hanewicz said icily.
“Good afternoon,” Rachel said, trying to gather herself, gird her loins for the onslaught she knew was coming.
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