All-American Murder

by James Patterson

  Chapter 50

  Up on the third floor of the apartment complex, Aaron took out a key and opened the door to number 12.

  Turning to Jennifer Fortier, he explained that this was his uncle’s apartment.

  “There was a kitchen, a living room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom,” Fortier would say. “We got there and Aaron had got some wine out of the fridge. I didn’t have any because I don’t drink. We just sat. The boys were smoking, Aaron and Odin.”

  A half hour later, Fortier says, Hernandez left the living room, disappeared into one of the bedrooms, and started to call her name. Fortier walked over. Aaron was sitting on the bed. The two of them talked for about ten minutes. Then, Fortier says, Aaron leaned in kissed her.

  “He kissed me and I pushed him away and told him, ‘No. I’m your nanny. I can’t do this,’” Jennifer recalled. “He said he understood, that it was okay and he wasn’t mad at me.”

  Aaron ended up falling asleep. Out in the living room, Odin was also sleeping. Jennifer borrowed her friend Amanda’s phone. “I called every cab place that I could to get one as soon as possible,” she would say.

  Fortier and DeVito left together, taking the cab that had finally arrived to the W Hotel in Boston, where their car was parked. Then, DeVito drove Fortier to Salem, New Hampshire, where Fortier’s mother was waiting to meet her for breakfast.

  All in all, Fortier’s ordeal had lasted for five or six hours.

  When he woke up on Saturday and found her gone, Aaron sent a text, on Odin’s phone, to Shayanna.

  I fucked up again, he wrote, at 8:57 in the morning, and fuck, I didn’t mean to but got drunk and too fucked up and O took care of me an somehow tol him about my other spot and I just woke up buggin I’m sorry and on way home.

  In the weeks and months that followed, police officers in and around North Attleboro would take it for granted that Jennifer Fortier had made up her story. As far as they were concerned, it was obvious that “Hernandez had been banging the babysitter.”

  If Fortier’s cell phone was dead, why did she wait until the very end of the night to use DeVito’s? And what was DeVito herself doing, during the duration of this ordeal?

  Whatever the answers were, the cops reasoned, Fortier’s trip to Franklin gave Aaron Hernandez a reason to be suspicious of Odin Lloyd, and anything Odin might have said to Shayanna’s sister.

  In truth, any number of things could have caused Aaron and Odin to argue, earlier that evening or afterward. Aaron could have told Odin about the double murder, then had second thoughts. Odin might have overheard something about the shooting of Alexander Bradley. Or, Aaron might have seen Odin speaking to friends of Safiro Furtado and Daniel de Abreu, and grown suspicious.

  Law enforcement officers would also come to believe that (despite his supposed affair with the nanny) Aaron was bisexual. If so, the possibilities shifted: The police wondered if Aaron had made a pass at Odin. If Aaron was bisexual, their reasoning went, he had gone to great lengths to conceal it. If Odin had rebuffed him, there was no telling what Aaron would have done.

  Of course, there were other possibilities: Aaron and Odin had gotten drunk, gotten stoned, and had some stupid, drug-induced misunderstanding. Or, Aaron was so paranoid that he had picked an argument over nothing. In the past, Alexander Bradley had reined Aaron in, to an extent. But now, Alex Bradley was gone—or, not quite gone.

  If anything, Bradley’s refusal to quite go away might have set the stage for Odin Lloyd’s murder.

  The fact of the matter is, no one knows. What we do know is that, within twenty-four hours, Odin Lloyd was dead.

  Chapter 51

  That Sunday—Father’s Day, June 16, 2013—Aaron Hernandez texted Brian Murphy. He caught the agent just as Murphy was sitting down in church.

  Murphy knew about the threatening texts from Alexander Bradley. He had advised Aaron not to reply. He’d been in the room for a phone call between Mark Humenik, general counsel for Athletes First, and Bradley’s lawyer.

  Murphy and Humenik had discussed the possibility of a monetary settlement—Bradley was asking for $1.3 million—with the lawyer. But the phone call had failed to produce an agreement.

  Aaron’s agent had also directed him to Ropes & Gray, a law firm with offices in Boston.

  Murphy had been a lawyer himself. After graduating from Harvard Law, in 1995, he’d spent a few years working at Ropes & Gray. He knew the firm’s lawyers in Boston well, and had flown there, after the texts from Bradley began to come in, to discuss the matter with them and with Aaron.

  Despite their best efforts, the texts kept on coming.

  Don’t understand why if you was man enough to shoot me you ain’t man enough to compensate me, Bradley had written.

  And: I guess I’m a bitch cuz when I think about what you did I cry.

  And: How I felt when you did me like that in front of them niggas was heartbroken and ego-torn. Dog, niggas in my hood was saying ‘this nigga let this Bristol ass nigga smoke him.’ Thought I was retarded till I started coming through and hitting niggas up for spreading rumors about me or my kids.

  And: I’m not going to allow you to go on living this high life without compensating me for that bum sucker shit.

  Despite Murphy’s advice, Aaron couldn’t help but engage. Time and again, Hernandez told Bradley he loved him. That there was no one else he could trust. And, at times, Bradley adopted the same affectionate tone: If you really loved me and then you’d want to settle this. And whatever is in store for us is in store. If we’re going to be cool again that’s what it’ll be but it gotta start with resolving this incident that went down.

  Listen, Bradley told Hernandez, again, I hate that it comes to this but you can’t go through life consequence free when you do certain shit. You should want to do this if you really miss and love me. It’s crazy enough in itself that I really don’t even feel a way toward you, in the sense that I don’t even think about trying to hurt you or anyone you love. It’s really like I have forgiven you, but you gotta do what you gotta do, meaning you know this conversation thing is inevitable. I hate the fact that I even gotta handle this like this. You shoulda been offering this to me. But just like it was real when it happened to me, it’s real. It’s going to happen to you if we can’t resolve this. And I know you know that I don’t lie about this shit. You were my brother, best friend, and a lot of things to me…

  But, for all of Bradley’s pleading, Aaron had not offered to compensate him. If Bradley was trying to game him for evidence, Aaron would simply deny having shot him. But, of course, Bradley knew who had shot him. He knew that Aaron knew. This made Aaron’s denials all the more infuriating. And so, Bradley finally took action.

  For months, Bradley had been threatening to file a civil lawsuit against his former friend.

  “You’re the closest thing to the police without being the police,” Hernandez had told him.

  (“The matter of me trying to sue him, he was trying to equate that to me being a snitch,” Bradley would say.)

  Nevertheless, on June 13, Bradley had finally filed the lawsuit.

  Now, with Bradley backing him into a corner, Hernandez was texting his agent.

  Maybe the lawyers could get him out of this jam.

  Chapter 52

  The sun was sinking slowly in Boston. Odin Lloyd’s football team, the Boston Bandits, had just arrived at a high school football field for a Father’s Day scrimmage against the Eastern Mass Seminoles.

  Lloyd’s coach, Mike Branch, was unloading gear in the parking lot when he saw a brand-new black Chevy Suburban roll in.

  “Nice car,” the players said. But it wasn’t the SUV that had the coach’s attention. It was the driver.

  “Odin?” Branch said.

  The coach knew that Odin did not own a car. If anything, Odin was known for his habit of showing up to football games on a BMX bike.

  “Whose car is this? You ain’t got no goddamn car!”

  Lloyd told Branch that he shouldn�
�t worry, but Branch did not let the matter drop.

  “I’m just going to go to the glove box and see whose car it is,” he told Odin. “Odin was like, ‘You know whose car it is!’ That’s all that he had to say.”

  “How’s it hanging with that dude?” Branch asked.

  “He’s all right,” Lloyd said. “He’s cool. He dropped some money at the bar the other night.”

  Lloyd had played for the Bandits since 2007—the year that Aaron began playing for Florida. Since then, Coach Branch had seen Odin lose his job as an electrician and go to work as a day laborer for a landscaping firm. The coach knew that the work was hard. “He was busting his ass with the landscaping,” Branch remembers. He would ride Odin’s ass about getting onto a better career path: “I know he didn’t want to be a police officer,” Branch says. “I’m like, ‘Why not go into firefighting? You’re big. You’re strong. You care about people.’”

  Branch worked as Chief Probation Officer at the district court in Brockton. He took his coaching role seriously. His players thought of him as a big brother, and he took an interest in their off-field lives. When Odin fell in love with Shaneah Jenkins, he took notice.

  “He was out in Connecticut, working for the electric company,” the coach recalls. “They put him up at a hotel, she worked at the hotel, and he liked her, so he kept working and working. He kept going down to her shift and talking to her. I knew that he was getting hooked because I’d be like, ‘Yo, we’ve got a game. We need you. I need you this week.’ But he would tell me that he couldn’t make it.”

  Now, in Jamaica Plain, Branch watched Lloyd greet his friend Darryl Hodge—a running back who ran like a track star and treated Odin like a brother. The two of them had planned on hanging out after the scrimmage and watching game five of the NBA finals. But Odin’s boss had called to say that he would be needed early in the morning. They got barbecue with the rest of the Bandits instead, with Odin dropping Darryl off afterward in the SUV, which Aaron Hernandez had rented and loaned to him.

  Just as he was pulling up in front of Darryl’s home, at around nine in the evening, Lloyd received a text from Hernandez.

  Earlier that day, Aaron had gotten a text from Brian Murphy: They are voluntarily withdrawing lawsuit so we can engage in settlement talks without this getting to the media, the agent had written. Huge win for us. Call me.

  Murphy had informed Bradley’s lawyer that, if he did file the lawsuit, Hernandez would have no incentive to settle. Aaron “had clearly not done what was being claimed,” the agent says, “but the negative publicity was not welcome. We may have been willing to pay a small price to avoid that.”

  According to Murphy, the lawyer wanted to settle, and agreed to withdraw the suit. It’s also possible that the lawsuit was withdrawn due to a filing error. Whatever the case was, Murphy was happy to pass along the news.

  But if Aaron had managed to escape at least one of the traps that Bradley had laid for him, he was about to get himself into far more trouble over Odin Lloyd.

  I’m coming to grab that tonight, Aaron told Odin. u gon b around I need dat and we could step for a little again.

  Odin looked at the text and told Darryl that they’d catch up soon.

  But the next time that Darryl would see Odin’s face, it would be on the news.

  Chapter 53

  Two minutes after texting Odin Lloyd, Hernandez texted Bo Wallace: Please make it back CuZ, I’m Def trying to step for alittle.

  Then Aaron texted Odin again: Whaddup.

  Aite where, Odin replied.

  Idk it don’t matter but imam hit you when I’m dat way like Las time if my phone dies imma hit u when I charge it which will be in a lil.

  One minute later, Aaron texted Wallace again: Get ur ass up here, he wrote.

  Wallace and Carlos Ortiz were at Tanya Singleton’s house in Bristol, a hundred miles southwest of North Attleboro. Aaron told them to hurry, but they were still driving at midnight, when Lloyd texted Hernandez again.

  We still on? Odin asked.

  Surveillance footage from the security system at Aaron’s house shows Wallace and Ortiz arriving at Hernandez’s house eight minutes later. Aaron’s nanny, Jennifer, lets them in and they go down to the basement to wait for Aaron’s arrival.

  Twenty minutes later, Shayanna’s Audi Q7 pulls up and Aaron and Shayanna get out. Bo and Carlos walk outside to greet them, then the four of them go back inside. In the living room, surveillance cameras capture Hernandez passing a gun from one hand to the other before he accompanies Wallace and Ortiz back to the basement. A little while later, they head back upstairs, go outside, and climb into a Nissan Altima Aaron had rented.

  Over the course of the next hour, Lloyd got five calls from Wallace’s cell phone. Then, at two thirty in the morning, Hernandez picked Odin up at the Dorchester home he shared with his mother and sisters.

  One of those sisters—Shaquilla—was sitting in a car down the street when Hernandez pulled up. She watched Odin get into the Altima. A half hour later, he sent her a text: U saw who I’m with, Odin had written.

  A law enforcement official familiar with the case says that, after picking Odin up, Aaron blew through tolls on the Massachusetts Turnpike and fired a Glock .45 at road signs they passed.

  The official also believes that Hernandez hit a traffic cone on the turnpike, broke off his driver’s side mirror, and kept driving.

  Inside the Altima, Odin kept checking his cell phone. It had been ten minutes since he’d texted Shaquilla. Ten minutes and no response.

  Odin sent another text: hello.

  Eight minutes later, Shaquilla finally replied: my phone was dead who was that?

  Lloyd responded: Nfl.

  Lol you’re aggy, Shaquilla wrote back—cell-phone shorthand for “aggravated.” But inside the Altima, the mood had turned.

  One minute later, Odin sent Shaquilla one more text: just so you know, he wrote.

  After that, there were no more messages.

  Chapter 54

  Odin Lloyd’s mother, Ursula Ward, had gone to church—the Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit, in Mattapan—on Sunday morning. Afterward, Odin pulled up at the house to wish her a happy Father’s Day.

  “Mom,” he said. “You look so beautiful today. I love those colors on you.”

  Ursula was wearing earth colors: A dirt-brown top along with a brown skirt that had yellow, green, and gold “entwined into the whole.”

  “I wore the same outfit at his funeral,” Ursula says. “I know he loved to see me in it.”

  Ursula had raised Odin by herself, in Saint Croix and Massachusetts, where she worked as an aide in a senior citizens’ home. “He was one of those kids,” she says now. “His smile alone would brighten your life.”

  In 2011, Ursula Ward lost her job. By the summer of 2013, she had used up her unemployment and was paying her mortgage by dipping into her 401K. “It was a struggle,” she says. “A really right struggle.” But Ursula was a strong woman. She had gone back to school. Her church and her children gave her life meaning. Odin—Ursula’s only son—was her pride and joy.

  Ever since Odin had met Shaneah Jenkins, he had been happy and full of purpose.

  “Mom,” Odin would tell her. “She’s the one, Mom. I’m really serious with her. She’s going to be my future wife.”

  Afterward, Ursula says, she grew to love Shaneah “like she’s my child.”

  On his way out of the house that Sunday, Odin had told his mother that he was on his way to a scrimmage. “Mom, you know I love you,” he said.

  At nine thirty on Monday evening, a call from Trooper Eric Benson came through.

  “Ms. Ward,” Benson said.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know Odin Lloyd?”

  “Yeah. That’s my son.”

  “Okay, ma’am. I’m sending two detectives, and probably two detectives from Boston Police, to your house.”

  Ursula did not allow herself think, immediately, that anything had happened
to Odin. But then her daughter Olivia started to cry.

  “Why are you crying?” Ursula said.

  “Mom, they don’t just send the police to your house for nothing,” Olivia said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mom,” Olivia said. “I watch enough CSI.”

  “She kept saying these things,” Ursula recalls. “Well, I am not going to think anything bad. Maybe my son is in a hospital. Maybe he needs blood. That’s why they’re coming over here. She’s like, ‘No, mom.’ I say, ‘Take the negative thing and get out of my room, please.’ She walked out of the room, and went into her room, and started crying. I was already in my pajamas, so I got up and put on some clothes. At about ten thirty, they arrive at the house.

  “I don’t remember who answered the door. But I remember it was four officers that came up the stairs. One asked me a bunch of questions. I said, ‘Listen. I am not answering any more questions until you all tell me what is going on with my son.’ One said to me, ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but your son was shot and killed.’

  “I fell to the floor. I said, ‘Someone just took my heart out.’ Then I jumped right up and said, ‘First of all, why you are coming here talking foolishness to me? How do you know that was my son?’ He said to me, ‘Ma’am, he had his wallet in his pocket with his driver’s license.’ And I just fell right back down again.