Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle (84 page)

Twelve forty-five
A.M
., on April 15, 2009, the call came into the Pinellas Park Police emergency center.

A male operator said: “Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

“We have someone on the floor who has been stabbed. We need an ambulance. Please help,” said Javier Laboy.

In the background, the operator could hear a woman yelling, words a mile a minute, barely intelligible Spanglish, except for the punctuation of bilingual profanities.

The caller, talking to the woman, not the operator, said, “Hey, Janet.” It sounded like an effort to pacify her, but his words failed to break her momentum.

Multiple raised voices could now be heard. The operator asked for, and received, the address of the incident. Judging from the background noise, the dispatcher felt it was ongoing.

The operator asked, “Where was the person stabbed?”

“She’s on the floor.”

“Where is the person who stabbed them?”

“She’s right here, too.”

“Where are they?”

“Right here in the driveway.”

“What is the phone number you are calling from? Help is on the way.”

Javier still had the fast-talking woman in his ear. He didn’t hear the question, and it had to be repeated. This time it registered and he gave the operator his cell phone number.

“And where is the knife at now?”

“It’s in her hand. You’d better hurry up and get here quick.”

“They’re already on their way.”

Just then, the operator heard a fresh urgency to the voices on the other end of the line, which he interpreted as new violence.

The caller said, “Whoa. Whoa. Janet, Janet, Janet, back up. Janet! Janet!”

“Sir?”

There was the sound of a dial tone for a few seconds; then a second operator, a woman, came on the line, “Police.”

The male dispatcher said there was an assault in progress and gave the address, and that was the last the caller heard from him.

“What’s going on?” the female operator asked.

“There was a fight and someone was stabbed.”

“Who stabbed her?”

Again the caller was distracted by the chaos around him. “Get inside,” he could be heard saying.

“Sir, can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Sir, what happened?”

“We were hanging out. There was a fight.”

“Who was fighting?”

“The girls. Oh, her eyes are rolling. God! Oh, you got to hurry.”

“They’re on their way. Calm down, sir. Just tell me what happened.”

“There was a fight and they tried to jump her. She pulled out her pocketknife trying to defend herself. By the time we got there, it was too late and she was already stabbed. She’s on the floor.”

“Was it a male or a female who was stabbed? Female? It was a female who was stabbed?”

“Yes.”

“A female stabbed her? Is the female still there?”

“Yes, everyone is still here.”

“How many subjects are there?”

“One, two, three, four, five, six. She’s stabbed in the chest.”

“All right, just stay on the phone with me, okay?”

“All right.”

“Where is the knife now, sir?”

“I—I—I—I have no idea.”

“Okay, if you find it, don’t touch it. Help is on the way.”

PPPD corporal Ty Ku was the first to arrive on the scene. Sarah was on the ground next to the van, part of her legs were underneath the vehicle. A witness, who the police officer later learned was Javier Laboy, had removed his orange T-shirt, which was used to apply pressure to Sarah’s upper left chest.

Sarah had a very shallow pulse and was experiencing labored breathing. Her eyes were slightly open and her stare was straightforward. Kneeling beside the victim, Officer Ku called out a request for an “officer survival trauma kit” for a puncture wound.

Officer John Coleman, who had answered several of the Rachel Wade runaway complaints, went to his patrol car, grabbed the kit, and returned to the victim.

The kit contained a long sterile dressing. When it arrived, the orange shirt could be removed. He would later say he thought the girl’s wound was the biggest puncture wound he’d ever seen.

At one point, she stopped breathing and a bubbly fluid came from her mouth. As Ku applied pressure with one hand, he used the other to reposition Sarah’s head to open up her airway.

Officer Coleman tried taking Sarah’s pulse along her carotid artery. There was a pulse, but it was very weak.

Next to arrive was Officer G. D. Weaver. Ku looked up from the victim for an instant and shouted that the “subject”—that is, the suspect—was inside the residence. Officer Weaver went back to his car to get his ballistic shield from his trunk, but after seeing the subject (Rachel Wade), he realized that he would not need it. Weaver noticed that a crowd was gathering; he went to assist with crowd control.

Corporal Vernard “Rick” Wagner, 2003 PPPD Officer of the Year, was in charge of securing the crime scene with police tape. On the north end of the scene, he attached one end of the tape to a neighbor’s fence, the other end to another neighbor’s outside waterspout.

The ambulance arrived, and was followed quickly by Officer William Peterson, who parked his car across the road to prevent anyone from fleeing the scene by car. With two EMTs and three paramedics now on the scene, Ku and Coleman left the victim. Ku retrieved his camera from his car. He took eighteen digital photographs of the crime scene, including several of Rachel Wade.

Rachel had not gone in the house, as Javier had told her to do. She sat on a bench in front of Javier’s house and watched the surreal chaos she had caused. Javier recalled that she had a blank look on her face. Javier said it didn’t look like she “was there with us.”

Rachel’s phone rang. It was Joshua. Sarah said she had gotten hurt. What was up?

Rachel said she was at Javier’s house. She’d just had a fight with Sarah and she thought Sarah
might
be hurt. Joshua hung up, ran to Sarah’s house, two blocks away, and told Sarah’s parents that Sarah had been in a fight and was hurt.

Together Charlie and Joshua went to Javier’s house and arrived in time for them to see Sarah still lying in the street, with the paramedics frantically working on her.

Sergeant William Lowe, who was working crowd control, recalled one young man who ran down the street to the scene, screaming. He hurled threats, saying he was the victim’s brother and would see his revenge. (Of course, Sarah Ludemann was an only child.) Lowe told the unidentified man he had to stay outside the police tape, but the guy kept mouthing off, using words that could only inflame the situation: “Someone get stabbed, someone gonna get stabbed.” Other police at the scene identified the troublesome bystander as Joshua Camacho.

Officer M. Turner and the search dog Dax reported to the crime scene, the same human/canine team that was once sent to the Wade household to search for a runaway Rachel. The team had just arrived as Joshua went berserk at the crime scene. Dax was positioned between Joshua and EMS activity. The dog remained in that position until Joshua retreated to the end of the street.

Charlie Ludemann couldn’t move quickly, but he could move relentlessly. He pushed past police tape and toward his daughter, until Sergeant Tina Trehy intercepted him and talked him away from the van. But not before the father got a good look. Charlie said he was going back home to get his wife.

Charlie’s memories came in the form of horrible snapshots and sound bites. Lights everywhere. Flashing. Areas taped off. Rachel sitting there as if nothing had happened, smoking a cigarette. Charlie yelling his daughter’s name. Sarah not responding. Sarah as a little girl singing. A police officer in his face, asking him who he was.

“That’s my daughter lying on the ground,” he said. Sarah lying in a pool of blood.

Charlie trying to get her to respond to him, but she couldn’t even lift her head. Charlie knowing she was dead, and there was nothing anyone could do.

Rachel sitting on a bench, like nothing had happened. Rachel smoking a cigarette. Charlie screaming that Rachel was a “stupid bitch.” Why did she need a knife? Why couldn’t she fight with her hands?

Detective Kenneth Blessing asked Janet Camacho what had happened. Janet said that she, the victim, and their friend Jilica Smith were on their way to McDonald’s when Rachel threatened to stab Sarah. They met in the street.

Rachel had been the complete aggressor, Janet said. She murdered Sarah.

“What happened to the knife?” Detective Blessing asked.

“I think she snuck it to one of her boyfriends,” Janet said, meaning Javier and his friend Dustin Grimes.

Detective Joe Doswell interviewed Jilica Smith, who also said that Rachel had threatened to stab Sarah, but she claimed that the victim had shown her a text to that effect. She’d seen a red car driving by when she was outside Janet’s house, with a couple of girls in it.

Later, when they got to this scene, Sarah had barely made it out of the minivan before Rachel charged her and the fight started. Jilica said she got a good look at the knife. It looked like a kitchen knife to her, and she would never forget the way Rachel smiled as she held it.

When Blessing finished with Janet, and Doswell concluded his interview with Jilica, both women began walking home. But they didn’t make it far. They were intercepted, put into a patrol car, and were parked in it so that they could see the front of Javier’s house.

Did either of them see the person who stabbed their friend Sarah? Sure, they said. It was Rachel Wade, sitting right there on that bench.

Officer William Peterson separated Javier Laboy and his friend Dustin Grimes; then he took their written statements. Peterson later characterized those statements as “evasive.”

Javier and Dustin told identical stories. All three women got out of the van simultaneously. They charged at Rachel, yelling. Sarah, in particular, was yelling as she aggressively approached Rachel. At first, Sarah and Rachel went at it; then there was a moment when Sarah and Janet were beating Rachel at the same time, two on one. Officer Peterson thought both witnesses needed to be interviewed again and said so when he turned them over to Detective Blessing.

Sergeant Tina Trehy was in charge of keeping an eye on Rachel Wade. Police would wait for a less hectic moment to interrogate her. They wanted to get this right.

As Trehy observed, Rachel kept moving her tongue to her bottom lip and bottom teeth. She complained that she thought she had cut the inside of her mouth during the fight.

Paramedics lifted Sarah Ludemann onto a gurney and put her in the ambulance.

Officer John Coleman escorted the ambulance to the hospital, which arrived at 1:21
A.M
. Doctors and nurses worked over her for one hour and eight minutes.

PPPD detective Michael Lynch might have gotten a relatively late start in his career as a cop, attending the academy when he was twenty-six, but law enforcement as a career choice had always been in the back of his mind. Some of Lynch’s work history before the police academy served him well in readying him for life as a peace officer. He’d been a dive technician, working on dive equipment in a little shop. He was in the insurance industry for a while. He was a tour operator, working for his mom, taking groups of senior citizens to Europe and Alaska. Putting those experiences together, his job history prepped him well for police work. He didn’t think he would have been an effective police officer right out of school. A few years of maturity helped him immensely.

And he
was
an effective officer—awarded the 2007 Officer of the Year Award to honor his work on a series of high-profile bank robberies in Central Florida, with the suspect being dubbed the “Band-Aid Bandit,” and for the successful conclusion of a murder case, which went to trial that year.

He loved working in investigations. He enjoyed solving mysteries, assembling jigsaw puzzles. He wouldn’t have been happy as a road officer his entire career.

Lynch joined PPPD in December 1997, was a patrol officer for two years, and after that a detective. In 2000, he joined the agency’s SWAT crisis negotiating team.

Lynch was a lifelong resident of Pinellas Park. As it happened, he had been a senior at Pinellas Park High School when Jason Harless and Jason McCoy came to school with guns and murdered Assistant Principal Richard Allen.

That incident made the national news and gave the city a reputation for youth violence, but Pinellas Park didn’t deserve that tag. During his years as a cop, Lynch had come to believe that the kids of the city were no more violent than anywhere else in the country. Sure, there was youth crime, but it predominantly consisted of fistfights. He was used to reporting to scenes and finding the victim with, at worst, bloody knuckles and a broken nose.

In the past couple of years, there had been a rash of bullying-type crimes: online bullying cases that had made the news; people bad-mouthing each other on Myspace or Facebook; a lot of words flying back and forth. Enemies, who might in the past have cooled off when they were apart, were now linked via cell phones and the social networks. They could insult one another at any time of day or night, and do it in virtual public. Everybody saw it, everybody heard it, and it spread like wildfire—so that embarrassment blended with anger, forming a potentially violent cocktail.

There had also been a tick upward in youth crime due to a new drug problem in the area—prescription pills. Back in the late 1990s, the city went through a heroin phase and police got used to reporting to the scenes of overdoses.

But that went by the wayside; and a few years back, there had been a rash of robberies of local pharmacies, with major thefts of pills with codeine in them. Those pills had been used to hook an unacceptable percentage of the area’s juveniles.

Drug dealers discovered that Floridian kids, the ones who were out for kicks, were more apt to pop a couple blue Roxicodone pills than stick needles in their arms. Business improved.

Despite this, Detective Lynch was unaware of another local youth fight that could rise to the level of violence he saw that night in front of Javier Laboy’s house. This was new. He could only hope it was an isolated incident.

Detective Lynch saw only the occasional girl-on-girl violence, which he called “she-looked-at-me-wrong” fights. They happened, but they rarely involved weapons or serious injuries.

Lynch arrived at the scene of the stabbing about an hour after it had happened. Since he was the on-call detective, he became the case’s lead investigator. The first thing he did was talk to the first responders, who “gave him the lay of the land.”

“Victim’s name?”

“Sarah Ludemann.”

The detective felt his shoulders slump just a little. He was familiar with this case. Sarah’s father had contacted him in the past about his daughter being harassed by another girl.

In some ways, the early investigation was easy. For one thing, no apprehension would be necessary. All of the parties were still on hand. The accused was right over there, calmly sitting on a bench. All of the eyewitnesses were also present, which again simplified things. The witnesses had naturally divided themselves into two camps. The Rachel witnesses were standing in a driveway. Sarah’s friends were down at the other end of the street.

In addition to the young adults who’d been on the scene since the stabbing, several curious and concerned neighbors were on the street. Lynch was told Sarah’s parents had been there earlier. As Lynch looked around, he felt a sense of déjà vu.

He’d been on this street before, for another murder not long before. He recognized some of the family members from that other case standing nearby and observing. In fact, the boyfriend of a family member from the earlier case was among those who attended to Sarah as she lay in the street. Lynch saw him now, stained and shocked.

The detective canvassed the scene, paying particular note to the bloodstained articles of attire on the street next to the victim’s minivan. About two feet away from the driver’s door was a portion of a light-colored bra, cut off Sarah by the EMTs so they could better access her wound. Almost under the vehicle was a pair of bloody white sandals, which Lynch correctly assumed were Sarah’s. Ten feet from the van was a blood-soaked orange T-shirt, which Lynch would later learn was Javier Laboy’s.

He made sure that a line of communication was kept open with the hospital in case there was an update on Sarah’s condition.

The priority at the crime scene shifted to finding the weapon. The canine team searched but was unsuccessful.

Rachel said, “Knife? What knife? They came over to jump me. I don’t know where the knife is.”

Lynch spoke with Dustin Grimes and Javier Laboy, who said that yes, they knew she had a knife with her, but they had no idea where it went.

Sergeant Mark R. Berger grabbed Lynch by the arm and pulled him aside. He’d just heard from Lieutenant Kevin Riley that the victim was not good. This was probably going to end up as a homicide investigation.

Lynch thanked him. They agreed to keep that under their hats for the time being.

Sergeant Tina Trehy was still staying with Rachel Wade in front of Javier’s house, and was now joined by Officer C. D. Burns.

“I was just defending myself,” Rachel kept saying. “It was obviously really stupid, because it did not change anything.”

Rachel described how frightened she had been that Sarah and her friends were planning to jump her. She claimed to have called 911 earlier in the night when she thought they were following her. She discussed the swerving car that had almost hit her and had preceded the arrival of the van by a couple of minutes. She thought the swerving vehicle was a Jeep.

“After the fight, Javier told me to go inside the house, but I didn’t want to disturb his mother so I stayed outside,” Rachel babbled.

Officer Burns frisked Rachel and confiscated from her person a phone, keys, and a pack of cigarettes.

“Have any weapons?” Burns asked.

“No,” Rachel replied.

At no time did she seem upset. At no time did she ask how Sarah was. Rachel complained that she was chilly. Her light blue jacket had been ripped off during the fight. Trehy went to her car, grabbed a sterile yellow blanket—each blanket was sealed in plastic and was thrown out once used—and gave that to Rachel.

Javier’s mother, who’d been asleep, was up now. She came outside and talked to a police lieutenant for a few minutes. He asked if they could search her house for the weapon, and she said fine.

Seeing that Rachel still looked cold, even with her sterile blanket, Javier’s mother went back in the house and came out with a jacket for Rachel to wear.

Trehy searched the kitchen and did find a black-handled knife next to the kitchen sink, but it wasn’t the weapon. There were still small pieces of food adhering to the blade.

Detective Adam Geissenberger, who had been so busy during Rachel Wade’s runaway phase, did not take an active part in the investigation into the death of Sarah Ludemann. His brief written report from that night does, however, provide one interesting tidbit. Joshua Camacho had arrived at the crime scene, screaming and hurling threats that blood would be shed in retaliation. Police took this seriously enough that a “suspicious person” call was put out over the radio for Joshua’s brother Jay, who was, according to one report, in his car and on his way to Javier Laboy’s house. If he was on his way, Jay never arrived.

Meanwhile, Joshua went with the Ludemanns to the hospital, trailing the ambulance. Sarah was wheeled into the emergency room, where ER doctors frantically attempted to save her life. Gay went with the gurney. Charlie and Joshua stayed in the waiting room.

The mother turned to the doctor and pleaded, “Please take her to surgery.”

“I can’t,” the doctor replied. “I have to have a pulse first.”

Gay held her daughter’s hand and rubbed her legs. She begged her daughter to respond, telling her that they were going to stop trying to save her if she didn’t respond.

At 2:29
A.M
., Sarah was officially pronounced dead. A doctor invited the Ludemanns and Joshua Camacho to view the body.

“You ought to come,” Charlie said to Joshua.

“No, I can’t see her like that,” Joshua said.

“You’re the reason she’s like that!” Charlie said.

Joshua left. They didn’t see him after that.

Charlie later recalled, “I walk in there. There she is. Pale. Cold. I lost it.”

Gay added, “She was our life. We lived and died for her. And she’s not here.”

Amy Tyson, a victim advocate, arrived at the hospital and tried to comfort Sarah’s parents.

Detective Lynch was still canvassing the crime scene when he received a call from an officer at the hospital informing him that the victim had expired.

He notified the state attorney’s office that this was now a confirmed homicide investigation.

After that phone call, Lynch kept the information to himself. Rachel Wade didn’t know, and he wanted to keep it that way—until the time was right.

Since Rachel Wade was still not under arrest, Lynch asked her if she would be willing to return to the police department to talk to him some more about what had happened between her and Sarah. She voluntarily agreed to come. Lynch then talked her into signing a Consent to Search form, which meant police could go over Rachel’s car thoroughly without first obtaining a search warrant. The search of the Saturn yielded nothing of evidentiary value.

Lynch ordered that Rachel’s car be moved to the driveway, where it could be picked up at a later time by her parents. Detective Doswell and Sergeant Trehy would accompany Rachel from the crime scene to the police station. Rachel rode to the PPPD headquarters in the front seat of Trehy’s car. No handcuffs. Doswell followed close behind.

Lynch asked Trehy to transport Rachel to the police department, so Rachel was put in the back of Trehy’s patrol car.

“You okay?” Trehy asked.

Rachel said yes, for the most part, but she did have a headache and her stomach was upset. At the station, Rachel was placed in an interrogation room and was told to wait for Detective Lynch.

Back at the crime scene, the minivan was impounded at the request of the forensic team from the county sheriff’s office. A truck with “JOE’S TOWING” painted on the side arrived and removed the victim’s vehicle.

Finished at the scene, Lynch went to the hospital to observe Sarah’s wounds. A hospital staffer escorted Lynch to the body and pulled back the sheet so he could see. The victim, whose clothing had earlier been collected, had “two significant stab wounds” to her upper left chest. Stab wound number one was in the victim’s upper left shoulder, just below the shoulder blade.

Comparing it to the face of a clock, the wound was oriented to a position of one o’clock at the top to seven o’clock at the bottom. Stab wound number two was directly over the area of the left breast. It was oriented from twelve to six o’clock.

The wound over the breast was larger than the wound in the shoulder—two to three inches long. The shoulder wound was one to two inches long.

The detective noticed no defensive injuries—that is, injuries the victim might have suffered while trying to protect herself, which are most commonly found on the hands or arms.

After Lynch concluded his examination of the victim’s body, he called Investigator John Rush, of the Pinellas County Medical Examiner’s Office. Rush said he would send the county transport to the hospital to bring Sarah’s remains to the medical examiner’s (ME) office. An autopsy was scheduled for ten-thirty in the morning. An employee of the ME’s Office, Steve Sellick, took custody of Sarah’s body.

Lynch needed to speak to Charlie and Gay Ludemann, who were still in solemn discussion with victim advocate Amy Tyson.

Lynch introduced himself to the Ludemanns and “let them know where we were at in the investigation.” He stressed the importance of the upcoming autopsy.

“Did you have any advance knowledge of the events leading up to Sarah’s death?” Lynch asked.

The parents said they were unaware of the night’s events, except for what they’d been told since the stabbing.

Charlie said, “My daughter left our house at eight-thirty to go to Taco Bell, and she never came back.”

Detective Chris Piccione remained at the crime scene and went door-to-door speaking to neighbors to see if anyone saw or heard anything. No one was helpful.

John Wilkes heard loud voices but saw nothing.

Brent Godels, who was visiting his grandmother, also heard shouting, plus a loud pop that he thought might’ve been a gunshot.

Binh Nguyen heard loud screaming right outside his house, but he didn’t know what it was all about until the ambulance arrived.

After what seemed like an eternity of waiting around while the nightmare refused to end, Janet and Jilica were through, as far as the cops were concerned. Done for the time being, anyway.