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CRAIG, Alaska — What 16-year-old Rachelle Waterman seemed to want most in this tiny island village was a bad reputation. She wore a black leather dog collar and fishnet stockings to classes at
She dated older guys and danced suggestively with girls at school dances. She titled her blog "My Crappy Life: The Inside Look of an Insane Person," and spiked it with swear words, sexual innuendos, and smirking accounts of being an outcast. "Oh yeah, I also got voted Biggest Freak for my class — that makes me happy," she once wrote.
But among the 1,100 close-knit residents of Craig, few were buying Waterman as a true bad girl. To them, the teen was the prized daughter of the school board president and his equally civic-minded wife.
Like her parents, Waterman appeared to be the ultimate go-getter, singing in honor choir, suiting up for the volleyball team, and competing in Academic Decathlon. If she wasn't teaching younger kids about the dangers of drugs as a DARE volunteer, she was playing in pep band or working stage crew in community theater.
She could wear all the black clothes she wanted and talk tough to her friends and on her blog. To those in Craig, Rachelle Waterman was still a decent kid. But on a cold Sunday morning last winter, a gruesome discovery deep in the forest that covers
A hunter stumbled across the charred body of Waterman's mother, Lauri. Within days, the teenager was implicated, and people in Craig began asking themselves how much of the honor student's tough-girl act actually had been real.
"We all just thought of her as an extension of her mother, just somebody who is always doing something for somebody," said Scott Willburn, whose son Jon attended school with Rachelle Waterman. "People were shocked and stunned."
Dreadful homecoming
The second weekend of November 2004 was an exceptionally busy one for the Waterman family.
Sixty-year-old Carl "Doc" Waterman, a real estate agent, went to
"Well back from anchorage and it was an okay trip. I got kinda sick but oh well(.) Did shopping, played v-ball (got 5th, bah), and that's about it. Not much to tell, well I got these incredibly awesome boots that go up to my knees. I absolutely love them. will post pic later," she wrote.
Elsewhere in the house, her father was getting worried. He had been surprised when his wife didn't greet them at home. Now it was late and there was no sign of her or her minivan. "Doc" Waterman was convinced something was wrong. He reported her missing to the Craig police department.
The officer who took the call knew almost immediately that Lauri Waterman wasn't missing, but dead. At noon that day, a hunter trekking down a remote logging road had seen black smoke billowing over the evergreens. He summoned state troopers who found a minivan on fire and a charred body inside it. The body and the van were on the way to the lab for positive identification, but after "Doc" Waterman's call, there was no doubt about the victim's identity.
Lauri Waterman worked as a teacher's aide for special education students and spent her free time volunteering. She made biscotti for baked sales, chaperoned her daughter's trips, and scored every volleyball game played in the high school. She was a quiet woman who loathed the spotlight. People asked: Who would want to hurt Lauri Waterman?
Trooper Robert Claus was one of the first on the scene of burned-out van, but his suspicions were rooted not in the crime scene, but in his knowledge of the Waterman family.
His wife taught at the high school. His daughter went to school with Rachelle Waterman and had dated Geoffrey Waterman. The man Claus suspected was 24-year-old Jason Arrant, a school custodian. Rachelle Waterman had dated him the previous summer until Lauri Waterman found out and insisted they break up because of Arrant's age.
"Trooper Claus speculated that Arrant may have resented this and may have been involved in her death."
The trooper suspected Arrant, shy and aloof, might have had help from his close friend, Brian Radel, also 24. Radel was a 6-foot-4, 270-pound man with an interest in guns and the military. He had run a computer business where Rachelle Waterman once worked.
Based on Claus' information, investigators shared their suspicions with Rachelle Waterman. They asked if she would be willing to wear a wire in an attempt to get the men to discuss the crime.
She told them that "she was reluctant and believed it was sneaky, but she would think about it," Perhaps because of her hesitance to assist, investigators pressed her about her relationship with the men. At first, she denied having physical relationships with either man, but later she acknowledged she had sex with Radel the previous spring and had been intimate with Arrant when they were dating.
The troopers asked Rachelle Waterman if anything she had ever told the men might have led them to harm her mother. Waterman said she once told Arrant that her mother physically abused her, threatening her with a knife, beating her with a baseball bat and trying to push her down steps. She said Arrant became upset.
"Arrant tried to get her to go to the police, but she did not want to. She was depressed and suicidal about this abuse so he and Radel might have wanted to do something about it although she doubted they would commit murder."
The next day, troopers questioned Arrant and Radel. Both men eventually confessed and fingered Waterman as the leader of the plot. They said she asked them to kill her mother to stop what she claimed was horrible physical abuse.
Murder plots
Arrant said their first plan was to cement Lauri Waterman in a bathtub and use Radel's boat to dump her at sea. That plan fizzled when they could not think of a way to lure her to the boat.
The second plan was to gun her down in her car after she dropped off her daughter for volleyball practice. That plot, which they code-named "the hunting trip," was called off at the last minute.
According to Arrant, Rachelle Waterman had alerted him that both she and her father would be out of town. "She and Arrant agreed that it would be a good time to carry out their plan, because Lauri Waterman would be home alone," Claus wrote in a report.
Arrant told detectives that Rachelle gave him detailed instructions about how to enter the home and abduct her mother and that he passed the information on to Radel.
Radel admitted that he broke into the home, roused Lauri Waterman from bed, shoved her into her minivan, and drove outside town. The plan the three allegedly had devised was to make her mother's death look like a drunk-driving accident, and Radel apparently forced Lauri Waterman to drink a bottle of wine.
The allegations of extreme physical abuse by Lauri Waterman were implausible. The Watermans were kind, well-respected people who were protective of their daughter. No one in the community had heard anything about abuse, and neighbors described Lauri Waterman as a wonderful, caring parent.
Rachelle's blog provided no information about physical abuse by the woman she called "the female parental unit." The teen described only occasional arguments, including one when her mother nagged her about her weight.
She "wants to send me to fat camp this summer. I think it's rather hallarious. I mean, I agree I'm chunky, but if she sends me off I'll be the skinny girl and get sat apon," the 5-foot-4 125-pound teenager wrote. In other postings, she hinted at a positive relationship. She described them making Christmas cookies together and recorded other incidents that indicated they had a close bond.
"My parental unit asked me if I was depressed. I said 'yes' and apparently she might get me an appointment with dr so I can get some happy pills. Yey for me," she wrote.
The day the men confessed, the police seized her computer to look for evidence. Before they unplugged it, however, Rachelle made a final post.
"Just to let everyone know, my mother was murdered. I won't have computer acess [sic] until the weekend or so because they police took my computer to go through the hard drive. I thank everyone for their thoughts and e-mails. I hope to talk to you when I get my computer back," she wrote.
Details of a murder
The next day, they brought Rachelle into the Craig police station and told her that the men had accused her of being the driving force behind her mother's murder.
At first, the teenager insisted that she had no idea what Arrant and Radel were planning. The troopers continued, telling her "They've given you up." At one point, Sgt. Randy McPherron tried to persuade Rachelle to talk by detailing the painful way in which her mother died.
"[Radel] abducted your mother out of her bed. Forced her to drink a bottle of wine. Tied her up. Drove her out to the middle of nowhere on a wet, rainy night. Made her get down on her knees in the dirt, and he tried to snap her neck, because it looks good on TV. But you know what? It doesn't really work. Well, that didn't work, so he laid her down on the ground and he took a flashlight and he slammed it against her throat about 10 times."
"Why are you telling me this," the teenager asked. "Because I want you to understand what happened here. All right?
"That didn't work so he got on top of her and he pinched her nose off and held his hand over her mouth until she died. Then Jason and Brian went up to the end of that road and dumped five gallons of gas on your mother's body and set it on fire. Now, that's what happened and you knew it was going to happen and you didn't do anything to try to stop it," McPherron told her.
Eventually, Rachelle acknowledged that she had asked the men during the summer to kill her mother. She said she had told them lies about the abuse, exaggerating incidents and making up the stories of beatings. She said that she had called off the murder plan, "but they would not listen."
When she left for the volleyball tournament, she admitted, she was aware they might kill her mother that weekend. At first she told them that she had phoned Arrant to call off the hit, but later she acknowledged she had never placed the call. Still, she said, "I told them not to do it."
Seeking a fair trial
Just before the trial was to start in Craig last week, Superior Court Judge Patricia Collins granted a defense motion for a change of venue to
According to a defense survey, 94 percent of potential jurors on Prince of Wales Island had heard about the case and 66 percent of those believed Rachelle Waterman was guilty. The judge concluded that Waterman could not get a fair trial on the insular island.
Her father has stood by her since her arrest, monitoring the hearings in
"Talking through glass or in a room full of inmates is not really conducive to an in-depth conversation," he said, adding, "I'm sure her involvement is less than the troopers are alleging."
Her lawyer, Steven Wells, is tightlipped about the defense case. He may suggest that the teenager could not have anticipated what effect her tough talk, exaggeration and outright lies could have on Radel and Arrant.
Before her arrest, Rachelle Waterman often posted photos of herself on her blog looking fearless in her leather collar or seductive in a tight tee shirt. At her arraignment last year, she was dressed in a bulky orange jail jumpsuit.
Finally, it seemed, people believed Rachelle Waterman was tough. And she looked terrified.
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