Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle (110 page)

Within minutes of the verdict, Jay Hebert was in front of microphones again: “I am somewhat shocked. Especially as quick as this verdict was. I didn’t think it would be a second-degree murder charge. I respect it, but that wasn’t what I expected.”

Although the prosecution had asked Sarah’s parents not to make a statement to the press until after the sentencing, Charlie and Gay Ludemann did speak briefly.

“It’s a tragedy for both sides,” Charlie said. “That’s all I have to say.”

Gay added, “My husband said it. Justice has been served.”

Rachel Wade’s friends remained after others had left. The press was not allowed to photograph them, and they were escorted out of the courthouse through a separate exit.

Sarah’s friends found small solace in the fact that Sarah herself provided the evidence that led to her killer’s conviction: the voice mails of a nasty Rachel Wade making threats.

Rachel’s defense was based on the premise that she was afraid of Sarah Ludemann, but that was hard to believe after listening to the aggressive and bullying tone she used on those voice mails.

How different the case might have been if those voice mails had been erased.

Rachel’s case might also have been boosted, at least a little, if portions of written police reports stemming from earlier incidents had been allowed into evidence, but they constituted hearsay, Judge Bulone ruled. Read those police reports in front of the jury and there was a much better chance of a compromise verdict, manslaughter. They might have established that Sarah was harassing Rachel.

But the mitigating nature of those documents was limited. Sarah never mentioned weapons. The worst incident, the one involving a Taco Bell parking lot, included Sarah’s friend attacking the car of Rachel’s roommate with Silly String. One could easily imagine Lisset Hanewicz making fun of a girl who brought a knife to a fight because she was afraid of Silly String.

Another factor had to be that if one police report was allowed into evidence, they all would have to come in. Hebert didn’t want the jury hearing that his client had “threatened to slit [Erin Slothower’s] throat,” or that both Slothower and Ludemann were afraid of Wade.

The prosecution, on the other hand, would not want the jury to hear that Joshua Camacho told police that “Ludemann was just trying to antagonize Wade into a fight.”

Although it was true that insults and threats were hurled in both directions, the pattern seemed to be that Wade’s threats were always more violent, intense, and vicious.

On the Monday after the verdict, Jay Hebert said everyone in his camp was still in shock. He’d seen Rachel that morning and “all of this” was just starting to sink in. Rachel Wade was under psychiatric observation over the weekend, but not because of any specific thing she did or said, but because of an abundance of caution by the sheriff’s office and the jail.

Hebert said, “They felt it was in her best interests to be monitored. She has since been returned to her own cell. I think she is doing remarkably well under the circumstances.”

He criticized the composition of the jury. They were a mixed group: a couple of teachers, a couple in the marina business. His complaint was not so much with the jury as with the jury pool from which they were plucked. No young people—those who would be most apt to understand this case’s language and nuances, most apt to understand what his client was going through. Methods of youthful communication, high-tech stuff, were a key point in the case. A youthful jury might have better understood how young people “talk smack.”

Hebert said he “mock trialed” the case with both older and younger jurors, and the reactions to Rachel Wade’s voice mails were very different. “We talk like this,” the younger mock jurors had said. Hebert thought the underrepresentation of young adults in Pinellas County jury pools should be corrected.

Then Hebert sounded defensive. If he was being blamed for allowing a jury that was thinking “guilty from the get-go,” the public needed to know how difficult the process could be. During the brief time lawyers got to spend with prospective jurors, they had to learn and gauge their priorities, their life experiences, and their predilections.

Hebert’s critics were unmoved. A jury of “peers” need not be comprised of citizens demographically similar to the defendant. It need be comprised only of people who are eligible to serve on a jury. There was no guarantee, despite Hebert’s frustration, that a jury solely comprised of nineteen-year-old females would have delivered a different verdict.

Also on Monday, Rachel’s father, Barry Wade, spoke out. He said that his daughter was holding up as well as could be expected, and that she had been “very, very surprised” by the verdict. The family had tried to prepare themselves for the worst and hope for the best. He himself had been surprised. He knew some of the evidence (the voice mails, for instance) would be difficult to overcome. He thought the jury would choose manslaughter. His daughter was a “very good person,” a fact obvious to anyone who knew her. Everybody had “nothing but great things” to say about Rachel. No one thought she could intentionally hurt someone. Unfortunately, she was part of today’s generation with the way they communicated and talked back and forth, the e-mailing and the texting and so forth. That was what had caused the situation to escalate—but Rachel was basically a very good person. High-tech communication wasn’t the only catalyst, however. A lot of the tragic situation was the creation of Joshua Camacho and the way Rachel felt about him, although Barry was at a loss as to what his daughter saw in Joshua.

Camacho, he noticed, had a certain amount of control over the girls and had them following him and doing what he said. He was like a Svengali, using hypnotism and mind control, or something. Barry believed that Joshua could have easily stopped all of the drama between his “friends with benefits,” but that wasn’t going to happen. Camacho
fed
off the drama. He told them to fight for him. That was just his mentality. He was never going to tell them to back off because instigating was too much fun. He was right in the middle of it, stirring things up.

“He
played
the girls,” Barry said, starting to show emotion. “And they were both wonderful girls.”

Barry said that the morning after the incident, Rachel told him the same story she’d told in court: she had brought the knife in hopes it would scare the other girls away.

Unfortunately, the dad added, with today’s kids, “nothing scares ’em.” There was a time when you would have stayed away from a person with a knife, but it wasn’t the case anymore.

He’d spoken with a neighbor who confirmed Rachel’s story that Sarah had been harassing his daughter during the hours before the incident.

Also, he wanted it noted that Sarah was not the only one Rachel was afraid of. There really was an issue with Janet Camacho, and Janet had threatened his daughter “many a time.” Rachel was very afraid of Janet, and she knew Janet would have Sarah’s back.

“Our lives are upside down,” Barry Wade said.

Realizing the pain he and his wife were experiencing, he could only imagine how much suffering the Ludemanns had endured.

If he could talk to the Ludemanns—and, of course, he could not—he would ask them to look deep in their hearts and look at Rachel and realize that she was a good person, and that there was the possibility that Rachel had no intention of using the knife that night. The incident exploded in seconds, and the biggest mistake Rachel made was bringing the knife in the first place. That was what he would say; although, obviously, none of that was going to bring their daughter back.

In most cases, a guilty verdict brought great joy to the police and prosecutors who’d worked it, but lead investigator Michael Lynch didn’t enjoy this one.

“There were no winners on either side of the aisle,” Detective Lynch said.

One side lost a daughter to violence, and the other side lost a daughter to prison, maybe for life. He said he was pleased at the outcome, but he found no joy in the circumstances.

The detective had been aware of problems between Rachel Wade and Sarah Ludemann long before that violent night. Charlie Ludemann had contacted the detective regarding the threats that Rachel Wade had made toward Charlie’s daughter.

Lynch was a father himself, and cases like this made him worry about his own children. High-tech communications made it harder to be a young person. Teenagers were an impulsive and emotional lot. In the old days, putting distance between them cooled off youthful combatants. Today, with a variety of instant forms of communication, what might formerly have been a cooling-off period might be used to enflame a situation and send it spiraling out of control. Thank goodness, in Pinellas Park, there had not been an increase in murders because of instant communications between young people.

This case was still the exception rather than the rule. But the number of harassment and stalking cases in this age group was on the rise in Florida. Hostilities were not only growing because of text messages but also because of photographs that could be easily taken and instantaneously disseminated.

Sure, Sarah had done a better job of preserving Rachel’s messages than vice versa, but Lynch was still satisfied that the battle of words, verbal and written, between the two was not a one-way street. Both girls made inflammatory statements. There were Sarah’s words of antagonism on Myspace, although he felt the point was moot. Everyone was responsible for her own actions. Rachel was responsible for what she did, no matter what Sarah Ludemann might have done or said to anger her.

“Rachel needed to step back and act as an adult,” Lynch said. “We forget that she is an adult, and should have had the self-control to take herself out of the picture.”

Lynch added that during his investigation, he never found any evidence that Joshua Camacho wanted the girls to fight over him, either in messages from him to the girls or in girl-to-girl communications. The detective did, however, believe—based on the personalities involved—that Joshua enjoyed the fact that there were girls fighting over him. If the detective had found evidence that one or both of the girls were fighting under Joshua Camacho’s instructions, Joshua might have been arrested.

“We certainly would have talked to the state attorney’s office about that,” Lynch concluded.

Detective Lynch never turned down a teaching moment, and he reminded anyone who might be receiving threats through their cell phone or computer to
save those messages,
and to bring them promptly to the attention of local law enforcement.

“The idea,” he said, “was to nip the situation in the bud so that it didn’t escalate and spiral out of control, as it did in this case.”

Why, in his opinion, were young women of low self-esteem so common? A kind of “pimp and ho” subculture permeated America’s youth. It was certainly evident in this case, with a flock of women fighting over one scrawny male, who seemed like a creep to outsiders.

Lynch didn’t have a good answer. He could only guess. The social/sexual rules were being determined by young men. That was for certain. It was either give in to the demands or risk being kicked to the curb.

“That was Joshua Camacho in a nutshell,” Lynch said. “He would use bits and pieces of those he met, and then he would trash them just as quickly as he found them.”

Maybe these girls just wanted to fit in, to feel like they belonged, and perhaps they wanted to have an interesting story to tell when they got back to their friends.

“It’s hard for me to believe that there are that many people out there who would allow their daughters to have such low self-esteem,” Lynch admitted. He had two young daughters, who were still small, but he was very conscious of keeping their egos inflated. He and his wife tried to build their self-esteem. They hoped that when the girls were older, they would feel that no one was good enough for them. They should demand the best in how they were treated, no matter what.

Plus they were being trained to be polite and respectful of their elders, qualities that seemed lost much of the time today. His intuition told him that most parents wanted their children to be the best, strive for the best, and to insist that others treat them the best.

Taking this case specifically, Sarah’s behavior was somewhat understandable. She’d been a big girl, with a weight problem. She had been teased in school; and all of a sudden, she had status because she had a boyfriend. It made a certain sense that she was willing to fight for him.

But where was Rachel coming from? Here was a girl who seemed to have everything going for her. She came from a middle-class home; both parents were still living at home; she was good-looking and popular. She could have had anything she wanted, another boyfriend, any boyfriend she wanted. In many ways, Rachel was not a typical teenager. She had lived on her own for years at that point. Very unusual.

“Heck, we’ve got officers here at the PPPD that still live with their parents,” Lynch said. “Rachel was one of those kids who said, ‘I want to be on my own. I can make it on my own.’ And she did it. Until that bad night, she had been somewhat successful. She’d earned her GED. She had an apartment. She had a job.” Most cases like this involved kids who were products of broken homes. Not this one.

How low was the self-esteem of this crowd’s teenaged girls? There was even status in becoming pregnant. Being a baby mama allowed a young girl to lay some claim forever to the father. It was as if the young woman were saying, “Not only have I been there and done that, but the baby is proof!”

“Pinellas Park is not by any stretch of the imagination a community with an epidemic unwed pregnancy problem, but it was common in this group,” Detective Lynch said.

That night Jay Hebert went on CNN’s
Issues
program and pleaded his case. That brought the ire of criminal profiler Pat Brown, who said Rachel Wade should consider herself lucky that she was not charged with first-degree murder because, based on the facts as Brown understood them, this was a premeditated killing. Wade was a “jealous stalker,” in Brown’s opinion, as well as a psychopath.