Joshua did admit to owning a gun on April 15 of the previous year; and though he denied ever discussing that gun with Rachel, he admitted showing the gun to Sarah.
Hebert asked again if Joshua had asked the girls to fight for him, and the witness again denied it.
Hanewicz objected: already asked and answered.
Judge Bulone sustained.
Joshua said he didn’t know where he got the gun, but this answer was stricken from the record when Hanewicz objected and the judge ruled it irrelevant.
“Did you get rid of that gun after April fifteenth of last year?”
“No.”
“Do you still have the gun?”
“No.”
“Then where is the gun?”
“It’s … I don’t have it no more.”
Hebert asked his last question: “And you never threatened Rachel?”
“No.”
The state had no cross-examination, so Joshua Camacho was allowed to step down.
After a brief conference with his second chair, the defense team rested. It was not a dramatic high point. There must have been jurors who wondered about the relevance of Joshua having a gun.
It had been a long day; it was 5:22 P.M. The judge asked the prosecution if they were going to be presenting any rebuttal witnesses.
“Just one,” Hanewicz said.
Judge Bulone called a ten-minute recess.
Detective Michael Lynch was reminded by a bailiff that he remained under oath. Judge Joseph Bulone gave the witness a cheerful “Welcome back.”
Lynch testified that yes, Javier Laboy was among the witnesses he had interviewed. The interview, a full interview, took place at the police station only hours after the incident. Although, during the interview, they went over Javier’s memory of the incident in some detail, Javier, at no time, mentioned that Rachel Wade “took two steps back” when the confrontation with Sarah took place. Rather, Javier had described a “mutual combat fight” that took place in the street between the two vehicles.
Lynch also interviewed Rachel that night, and she, at no time, mentioned that there had been a knife or that someone was stabbed. In fact, Rachel claimed she didn’t know that Sarah was stabbed. Rachel’s original story of her own movements was drastically different from the scenario she testified to in court. She initially said that she’d been leaning on Dustin’s car when the van pulled up, by the driveway. Lynch had to confront Rachel with portions of her story that were strongly inconsistent with other eyewitness reports. Others had seen her with the knife; they’d seen the fight. Lynch asked Rachel how it was that she didn’t know anything about that. It was only after he confronted her with the evidence that she admitted to having a knife.
During that same interview, Rachel stated that Joshua had told her earlier that night that she needed to stop what she was doing. She said Sarah had threatened her in the past, but she didn’t really believe Sarah meant it. At no time did she mention that she was in fear that night that someone might have a gun. At no time during any interview, which Lynch knew of, did the defendant even mention a gun. Although she admitted that Sarah’s threats had frightened her to some extent—even though she didn’t believe Sarah would follow through—she never mentioned being afraid of Janet Camacho.
Judge Bulone admonished the jury not to watch the news and instructed them to be back the following morning for closing arguments.
Chapter 12
DAY THREE
On the rainy morning of July 23, the trial’s final day, Rachel Wade sat demurely at the defense table, wearing a gray short-sleeved jacket over a white collarless shirt.
After giving the jury lengthy instructions, Judge Joseph Bulone said,
“You will now be hearing the closing arguments from both sides. Both sides have been allotted equal time, but the state is allowed to divide its time between argument and rebuttal.
“Mr. Dicus, are you ready?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Proceed.”
It is a common strategy during closing arguments for the lawyer who goes first to hijack key words and phrases he anticipates will be used by the other, to deflate them and thus diminish the effectiveness of the opponent’s argument. This technique, when executed properly, can cause the opposition to rewrite their argument at the last second, to practically ad-lib in front of a jury. That was what Wesley Dicus did here. The defense had called this case a tragedy. In voir dire, every juror had to agree with Jay Hebert in his assessment that this was a tragedy.
A tragedy for Sarah—and a tragedy for Rachel, Hebert liked to say.
“And even in his examinations of the witnesses, he worked that word ‘tragedy’ in whenever he could,” Dicus said. “Well, jury members, nobody disputes the tragic nature of what happened on April 15, 2009. It always has been a tragedy, always will be. When Rachel Wade armed herself with a knife for what at least was going to be a confrontation, at most a fistfight, yeah, that’s pretty tragic.”
The prosecutor asked the jury a series of questions:
Was it tragic that when Sarah Ludemann pulled her van up, stopped and got out, that Rachel Wade did not stand her ground, but advanced upon Sarah Ludemann?
Was it tragic that it only took five seconds for Rachel Wade to meet Sarah Ludemann, “punch her,” as Dustin Grimes said, with a downward motion, twice in the chest, and then turn around, walk away, and announce, “I’m done”?
Was it tragic to hear Janet Camacho take the stand, a person who testified that Sarah Ludemann was close to her, very attached to her, that they had movie nights together, and that she was a friend of the family?
Was it tragic to hear Janet testify that when Jilica Smith told her that her friend was stabbed, and she walked around the van, she saw Sarah lying on the ground, foaming from the mouth, dying?
Was it tragic to hear how Janet turned back to Rachel Wade and yelled, “You stabbed her! You stabbed her!”
Was it tragic to hear how Rachel Wade almost laughed and said, “I don’t care”?
Dicus then answered his own questions: “Well, murder is always a tragedy. That’s why there is justice.”
He explained that you can’t have justice without two things: truth and accountability. And that was where the jurors came in. “You are the truth seekers,” he said.
He told them that they must examine each piece of evidence. Did it fit into the puzzle easily—or was it misshapen and needed to be crammed in? The pieces that fit were the truth. Those were the ones jurors could “hang their hat on.”
The misshapen pieces were not true and should be discarded. Using that process, they would find that the state’s case was truth and that they had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Rachel Wade was guilty of second-degree murder.
“Use common sense,” he said. There were several witnesses at this trial who lied. Some had told white lies, self-protective lies, which were not germane to the issues being decided. The question of whether or not Janet Camacho’s children were home while there was vodka drinking and weed smoking going on came to mind.
Then there were witnesses who lied about “crucial evidence.” Javier Laboy and Rachel Wade had planned to get married and had plans to have kids. That was crucial evidence. That was evidence that Rachel Wade and Javier Laboy had both lied under oath during a preliminary hearing.
Dicus said, “When someone takes an oath and is lying in this manner, when they show that they have no respect for the oath they took today, can you ever depend on what they say? Can you rely on what they say? Can you hang your hat on it? No, you can’t.”
When determining the credibility of a witness’s statements, jurors shouldn’t look just at the words alone. They should look at the person delivering the statements—how did the words come out? What was the emotion behind them?
Dicus tried to discredit Javier Laboy’s testimony. Laboy testified that he hadn’t seen the knife in Rachel’s hand—but on the 911 tape, he had said there was a knife in Rachel’s hand. Al
ert jurors may have deflated Dicus’s point by remembering Javier’s explanation for this: that he hadn’t seen the knife, but rather the information about the knife in Rachel’s hand was relayed to him as he spoke to the operator.
What else did that 911 tape say? Dicus asked. Javier loved Rachel. That was bias. Javier protected Rachel. You could hear it in his voice. When the operator asked him, “Who stabbed her?” He said, “Uh.” He was conflicted. He refused to give Rachel’s name.
Javier lied under oath. He was biased toward the defendant and could not be trusted. Rachel lied under oath also. She had been uncooperative during the investigation. She, too, couldn’t be trusted.
Dicus moved to the crux of the argument. The defense wanted the jury to believe Sarah Ludemann attacked Rachel, that Rachel Wade was protecting herself. But, he explained, the facts indicated otherwise. If they looked at the testimony of an unbiased witness, they would find the truth. Dustin Grimes said Rachel approached Sarah. His allegiance, if he had any, could only have been to Rachel and to Javier. He didn’t know Sarah, Janet, or Jilica from Adam. Yet he told the truth.
The last thing the state needed to prove in order for the jury to convict was that there was an unlawful killing by an act imminently dangerous to another, demonstrating a depraved mind without regard to human life. Did Rachel Wade’s actions fulfill that definition? Dicus said they did. She plunged the knife into Sarah’s chest, not once but twice, so hard that she bent the blade. Dicus showed the knife to the jury one more time. That blade went through skin, the fatty tissue of Sarah Ludemann’s breast, her rib bone, lung, pericardial sac, and ultimately her heart.
The defendant, stoic up until this point, crumbled. She winced, swallowed hard, and her eyes welled with tears.
Dicus said, “Common sense tells you that when you do that to a person, it is reasonably certain to kill or cause great bodily harm. You don’t plunge a knife into someone’s chest unless you have no care whatsoever about whether that person lives or dies. That’s indifference to human life! Janet Camacho told you about that when she said, ‘Are you serious? You stabbed her?’ And Rachel Wade said, ‘I don’t care.’”
Was the act done of ill will, hatred, spite, or illegal intent? The state, Dicus said, didn’t have to prove that she acted with all of them, just one. And to do that, they needed to look no further than the voice mails. The Rachel on those tapes wasn’t the same one the jury heard testify. Dicus walked over to a tape player and pressed a button, and the jury again heard the voice mails.
In the courtroom, the defendant’s mouth fell open at the sound of her own voice. Her recorded words were rapid-fire, as if they were rehearsed, or maybe she was reading. There were never more than a few words between obscenities.
There was something artificial, something just off about the cadence, and the defendant seemed shocked by her voice, her choice of words, as if she were having an out-of-body experience. Could that really be her on the tape? Could this really be her sitting at the defense table, then and there, stuck in the nightmare?
By the last voice mail, the defendant was softly weeping as she heard her recorded voice:
“You don’t know when to stop. You haven’t learned your lesson yet, and I’m the fuckin’ teacher. I’m warning you now, keep fucking with me, Sarah, and you and Erin both are dumb psychotic bitches. I’m warning you now, I am going to show you psycho! So stop fucking with me. You are fucking with the wrong person, and you’re fucking with the wrong thing that I care about. So keep it up, keep playing your motherfucking game and I am going to teach you how to grow up real motherfucking quick.”
Dicus stopped the tape. He told the jury that they were allowed to listen to the tape as many times as they wanted while deliberating. Rachel had said her words weren’t serious. But Sarah sure must have thought Rachel was serious. Why else would she have saved messages for nine months? Why else would she have played them for her friends?
“For one reason, and one reason only,” Dicus said. “If Rachel Wade ‘showed her psycho,’ if Rachel Wade made good on her guarantee to murder her, her friends could tell the police that this was evidence and justice could be had.”
You could hear the anger and ill will in her voice, the hate and spite that grew in Rachel Wade for nine or ten months, unbridled and unresolved, until April 15, 2009, when it finally came to a head. And they all knew how it ended.
“It ended in murder in the second degree,” Dicus said.
He discussed “reasonable doubt.” The doubt that the defense was trying to cast was self-defense, that Rachel was justified in the use of deadly force.
Dicus reviewed the facts: Sarah was the first one out of the car. Sarah alone was stabbed. Was Sarah armed? No. Rachel knew she didn’t have a weapon. She knew she didn’t have a gun. During cross-examination Rachel said, “I wasn’t worried about a gun with Sarah. I was scared about a gun with Joshua.” It was Sarah and Rachel, one-on-one, a confrontation that Rachel walked up to, walked ten to twelve feet to create.
“That’s not self-defense,” the prosecutor concluded. “The only one who used justifiable self-defense in this case was Sarah Ludemann.”
Sarah had just gotten out of the van when Rachel was on her. Dicus mimicked the motion for the jury. His right hand was clenched into a fist, as if holding the handle of a knife and cocking his forearm upward, ready to stab downward. Sarah knew she had to stand her ground and fight back. She brought her arms up and tried to punch her attacker in the head. Sarah tried to defend herself, but it was no use. Two quick jabs with the knife—one deadly wound.
Dicus invited the jury to look carefully at all of the evidence. If they did that, there was only one verdict they could possibly come up with: guilty as charged.
The prosecutor sat down, and Jay Hebert stood up.
Hebert began a methodical argument, reviewing the state’s case, witness by witness, in the order it was presented. Leading off had been Ashley Lovelady, who—as Sarah’s best friend—had clearly come into the courtroom with a heavy heart.
“These are teenaged girls. This was incredibly difficult,” Hebert said. “She acknowledged that Joshua was a cheater, that he cheated on Erin, on Rachel, and on Sarah.” Joshua liked the term “friends with benefits.” Cheaters cheat. If he was in a relationship, he cheated. Ashley understood what was going on in Sarah’s life: the Facebook, the Myspace, the texting, the phones, the hate, and the banter.
According to Ashley, and only Ashley, she went to Janet Camacho’s house to drop off a cell phone. The problem was that these were kids with inchoate personalities—and this was the way they talked. They hedged. They cut corners. They ignored nuance.
As her defender spoke, Rachel Wade was without expression. She expertly used a fingertip to pluck a loose piece of mascara from a lower lash. Rachel’s lips were dry and she held them clenched tightly. At one point, she tried to moisten her lips with the tip of her tongue, but her tongue was dry as well.
Throughout his closing, Jay Hebert used far too many pronouns and too few proper names. “She did this to her” and then “she did that to her”—it reached the point where the jury had to be confused. When Hebert did use proper names, he sometimes got them wrong. “She did that to Sarah. I mean Rachel.” Most of the time, he corrected himself, but it added to the jury’s strain, trying to understand.
There were problems with Ashley’s testimony, but Hebert was inclined to give her a pass—for the most part. Chalk it up to the verbal sloppiness that so often accompanied teenage-itis. It was just a symptom of the way teenagers thought, he said. A little bit scrambled up. Still, there was one facet of Ashley’s testimony that he wanted to emphasize because it was “really her only role in this case.” That facet involved the moment Ashley said she came in contact with the van.
“She doesn’t admit to swerving and trying to hit my client as she drove by, but at some point she knew that my client was at Javier’s house. And if you’ll remember when I asked Rachel and I asked Javier, ‘Did you
discuss where you were with anybody else in the world?’”—Hebert raised his palm to the jury and moved it slowly in a large circle, indicating he meant the entire world—“‘Did you tell anybody that you were going to a safe house?’ They said no.”
So there was only one way that Ashley knew where Rachel was. She must have driven past Javier’s house. The jury had heard Dustin Grimes’s testimony that Ashley swerved and that she was speeding. They had Javier’s testimony that he had to pull Rachel out of the way so she wouldn’t be struck by the speeding vehicle.
There was disagreement about when Ashley told the occupants of the van where Rachel was, and about which direction the vehicles were pointing when the info was relayed, but everyone agreed Ashley did tell Sarah where Rachel was. Ashley didn’t want to admit it at first. She didn’t want to be blamed. But she told the truth eventually. Reaction to Ashley’s info was instantaneous and extreme. Sarah was angry, in a rage. She slammed her foot on the accelerator and left rubber.
Hebert noted there were four eyewitnesses, four plus Rachel herself. The state called only three.
Was Jilica Smith credible? Jilica didn’t admit to smoking or drinking. Jilica said Janet and Sarah were in Janet’s house when the red-car-with-a-blonde stopped at the corner. Janet testified she was outside and approached the car. Chased it off. Kids partied, Hebert said with a shrug. Fact of life. They had faulty memories, imprecise communication skills. He poked at the air with a stiff forefinger, more of a jab than a stab. “That. Is. The. Way. Teenaged. Girls. Talk. She’s not telling the truth. It didn’t happen,” he said.
If they couldn’t believe which direction the cars were pointed or who was talking to whom, then how could they believe the story about “your Mexican boyfriend” comment? Were we supposed to believe Jilica’s version of that story? She’d mentioned it here in court, but had skipped that part during her initial police interview. Jilica said as soon as the minivan encountered Ashley Lovelady that “all hell broke loose.”
Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle Page 90
