Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle (91 page)

Rachel had long phone conversations with her mom during which very little was actually said. Janet Wade often just sighed with disappointment. At first, there was business to be taken care of. The Wades picked up Rachel’s dog, Tinkerbell, and took the valuables out of her apartment. But after a time, the conversations with her parents were reduced to minimalist audio poems of despair.

“Are you okay?”

“No, I’m not okay!”

Rachel had developed a rash in jail and this dominated her conversations with her mother. Rachel finally “went to medical” and got some antihistamines and cream.

Rachel learned in increments that she was notorious. At first, she told those she called “not to tell anybody.” Too late, she was informed; her mug shot was all over TV, front page of the papers. Reporters were everywhere. People who hadn’t known her since grammar school were weighing in on her situation. Rachel wondered how she was going to get a job when she got out.

During the first calls to Jeremy, Rachel blabbed endlessly about the circumstances of Sarah’s death. It wasn’t her fault. They jumped her. Three of them. She blacked out. She didn’t remember stabbing her, just striking out, and so on. She was injured. Janet Camacho wiped the floor with her. She had bruises, a busted lip, which Joshua had instigated.

“I went to fight her and I ended up stabbing her,” she said.

“How many times?” Jeremy asked.

“Two,” Rachel said.

Jeremy was often very stoned during his conversations with Rachel. His words slurred and Rachel regularly had to ask him to repeat. Jeremy had driven past the scene while Sarah was still down.

“I know she was stabbed, but I didn’t know your little ass did it,” he said.

“That shit’s gonna be on my conscience for the rest of my life,” Rachel replied.

“Why?” Jeremy asked. “Maybe that shit was
supposed
to happen.”

She told him that when she was booked, they wouldn’t let her wear underwear. “They made me bend over,” she said.

Jeremy asked her if she was “all fucked up and shit—you know, drunk and whatever?”

Rachel was not.

“Sarah who?” Jeremy asked.

“I don’t know her name. She’s a senior,” Rachel said. “I’m not a fuckin’ murderer. That’s not me. Are you dating someone? I was swinging because they were swinging at me, and I couldn’t drop the knife, because I guarantee one of them would have picked it up and stabbed me.”

Jeremy said he wasn’t dating anyone. He had talked to a couple of girls, and that was it. He had a question for her, too: “Why did she fight you if you weren’t fuckin’ with Joshua?”

Rachel said it didn’t matter. As long as Sarah
thought
Rachel still had feelings for him, Sarah wanted to fight.

Discussions regarding the stabbing ended after a day or so. Having talked to a lawyer, her dad told her to shut up about what had happened. He told her that she shouldn’t talk to her friends. She should talk to family only. That was the best way to make sure she wouldn’t say anything the prosecution could use against her.

Over the days, there was a slow realization by Rachel of the fix she was in. At first, she sobbed that she might be in jail for a couple of days; then, when bond was set so high, a lawyer told her she’d be inside at least six months to a year.

Janet Wade rejected the news. “I don’t know how they can tell you that,” she said to her daughter. “I think we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Dad blamed the environment, saying, “There were always problems” in that section of Pinellas Park where Javier lived.

A few days after the stabbing, Rachel had her period in prison and complained to her mother that not only didn’t she feel good, but they wouldn’t give her tampons. Pads only. Gross.

Using Jeremy’s phone, Rachel was allowed to talk to Javier. Compared to Jeremy, he sounded like a professor of diction.

“Hello, beautiful,” Javier said.

He told Rachel that he had seen the entire thing. He was going to testify at her trial that she was defending herself, and everything was going to be okay. She shouldn’t worry. He was going to get her out of there. In the meantime, he was telling everyone not to believe the bullshit on TV. Rachel said she hadn’t seen the TV coverage. Every time they started to talk about her on TV, a female corrections officer turned it off.

Rachel said she was concerned about Javier’s safety. Rachel and Javier knew that Joshua had a gun, because they’d both seen it. Joshua had called her minutes after the stabbing, screaming that he was going to shoot her. Both Joshua and his brother Jay had threatened Javier for taking Rachel’s side.

“Watch your back,” she warned Javier.

He told her he could take care of himself.

She also talked to her “homegirls” via three-way, and they sounded very young. Perhaps overwhelmed by the gravity of the circumstance, they spoke in baby talk, but still with the easy profanity of friendship: “Hi, baby. Fuckin’ love ya! Miss you
soooo
fuckin’ much!”

“Everything’s going on without me,” Rachel cried. She said that they should play the lottery, win it, and bail her out. Her folks lacked the funds.

Over the next few days, Rachel’s conversations with Jeremy became increasingly flirtatious. He was going to wait for her. He wanted her for a lifetime, so waiting for a year was no big deal.

“Will you marry me?” Rachel asked.

“Most likely,” Jeremy said.

“Most likely?” she said, feigning outrage.

“Duh,” Jeremy replied.

“I’m so lucky. I can stop lookin’ for a fuckin’ guy, ’cause I got one,” she said.

The conversations turned into “phone sex.” He called her “baby girl,” “sweetheart,” and “pumpkin.” They pledged their exclusive and undying love.

The prurient talk would commence with discussions of food. She couldn’t eat the jail slop, rice with some brown goop on it.

“I want some fuckin’ Church’s Chicken, so my fingers get all greasy,” Rachel would say. “I want a fuckin’ taco. You know how sick of Applebee’s I was. I saw a commercial for Applebee’s and I would love me some Applebee’s right now. When I get out of here, you are going to buy me a different kind of fast food for every meal. I’m going to start with KFC, then McDonald’s, then Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. I’m not kidding you. We’re gonna eat and then we’re gonna fuck. We’re gonna eat and then we’re gonna fuck.”

“I’m gonna have to bust you out of there,” Jeremy said, and Rachel giggled.

“When I get out, I’m gonna get one of them big bowls of whipped cream, and then I’m gonna give you something to dip in it,” she replied.

She told Jeremy that her roommate had stood on her bed so she could look out the window and talk to a guy. The roommate said her name was “Peaches,” and the guy asked if he could eat her peach. The roommate said she had a man on the outside, but she needed to make arrangements for the meantime. Rachel said she’d wait for her man.

All the girls in jail had phone sex. All she heard was “I wanna fuck.”

“What’s the first thing you’re gonna do when you see me?” Rachel asked.

“I’m gonna grab you and squeeze you and kiss your neck,” Jeremy replied. “Then I’m gonna pick you up and
ummmm.
What you gonna do?”

“I’m gonna go crazy! I like sex. You know how much I like sex. When I get out, I am going to go crazy.”

“They don’t feed the girls sausages in there. They’re afraid you use ’em as dildos.”

“There’s a sixty-five-year-old woman here. She’s flashing a guy out the window. Ewww.”

“You flash anybody out that window?”

“Fuck no. Why would I flash somebody? Ewww, now she’s talking about some guy who came all over his window. I wanna throw up. The only person I want to see come is you, baby.” Then she faced facts. “But there’s nothing physically I can do for you now. Do you think you can behave? Even if I’m in here for six months to a year, you can do it?”

“I hope so,” he said. “Right now, I’m lying in bed trying not to pass out.”

“You know I can’t imagine being with anybody else but you.”

“Not even Lil Wayne?”

“He doesn’t have your personality, but he is Weezy.”

“You got a point,” Jeremy agreed.

He told her that when he thought about her, he could feel a tingling sensation in his stomach, and he developed superhearing, like Superman’s, so he could hear through walls.

“That’s just withdrawal from not seeing me,” she said with a laugh. “When I get out of here, I’m going to take a shower, and then I’m not going to leave your bed. Never. You and me are going to do some freaky shit.”

“You’re a beast,” he said. “You’re my little head monster.”

“Is that what you’re going to call me? Your little head monster?” Rachel asked with a throaty laugh. She sighed and said, “You and me and Tinkerbell, lying on top of both of us like she does.” She said all she could think about was sex. “Me and you takin’ care of business!”

“I’m going to give it to you good, pumpkin,” he said.

She let out a quick earthy laugh. “Oh, baby, it feels so good when you say that. You can do whatever you want to me, baby, as soon as I get home.”

The hot chats didn’t last. Jeremy became impatient with Rachel’s pledges of fidelity. He knew her. She
needed
it. Needed it
bad.

He began to say things like, “You say that now. You only been there a week. Wait till six, seven months. You be doin’ sick shit in there.”

“Nooo,” she said.

“You and your roommate be doin’ it.”

“No, Jeremy.”

“No, it’s cool. Weren’t you gay once?”

“Yes, but there are no girls in here that I … Well, there’s one girl that I would consider—but no. No, thank you. It’s you and me, all the way, when I get out.”

“But it ain’t cheatin’, baby.”

“I don’t want that. I want you. I don’t want a girl. I don’t.”

“You guys are going to be spending a lot of time together.”

“I don’t care. I don’t care. I’ll do it myself. I got hands.”

“So she’s going to sit there and watch you?”

“No, she sleeps underneath me.”

Jeremy heard from a homeboy that someone in jail asked Rachel if she had a boyfriend, and she said, “I don’t know. Kind of. Not really, no.”

What was that about?

Rachel assured him that her days of promiscuity were behind her.

“I fucked up once. I’m not going to fuck up again. Believe me, Jeremy, this has been a
huge
reality check for me. Now I know who cares about me and who doesn’t care about me, and I know who I’m going to be with.”

But she spoke too fast.

“What?” Jeremy asked.

“That’s the old me, Jeremy!”

“What, a week ago?”

Besides the deteriorating trust issue, Jeremy’s life was in flux. He had to move out of one apartment, for unstated reasons, but he managed to move into another apartment, which was on a lake. There was an island in the lake and a little rowboat, so he could go on the island and chill.

But paradise was short-lived.

During her second week in jail, Rachel called Jeremy and found him a paranoid wreck. When the conversation started, he was smoking a joint outside his front door. He saw four cop cars go by and freaked out. Without dropping the joint, he ran and jumped a fence.

“I was straight, man, like the wind,” he told Rachel. He was on the phone, panting in an alley.

Rachel said, “Jeremy, what are you doing? What are you
doing
? Jeremy, drop what is in your hand.”

Jeremy said he couldn’t talk because he saw flashlights.

That call was followed by a period of Jeremy ignoring her calls. When he finally did answer, he told her that he had been kicked out of his lakeside apartment and he’d been robbed.

Rachel became angry, and that was it for that romance.

By the time Rachel went to trial, Jeremy was no longer in the picture, and Javier was. Javier was the one she wanted to marry and have a family with.

Presiding over Rachel Wade’s pretrial hearings, as well as her trial, was circuit judge Joseph A. Bulone, who had manned the bench since spring 2005. Before that, Judge Bulone was lead trial attorney prosecuting felony cases. He joined the staff of State Attorney (SA) Bernie McCabe in 1985, and built up an impressive set of stats: 150 jury trials, more than twenty of them first-degree murder cases. Before that, he was an attorney in private practice working for two years in Tallahassee in the areas of personal injury, insurance defense, family law, and criminal practice. He served as a vice chair of the Bar Grievance Committee and had been an adjunct professor at the St. Petersburg College Police Academy. Prior to earning his Juris Doctor degree with honors from the Florida State University College of Law, he graduated cum laude from Stetson University with a bachelor’s degree in political science.

Bulone was a veteran of capital murder cases. Earlier in 2010, he’d wielded the gavel at the trial of Richard T. Robards, a Clearwater, Florida, personal trainer who was accused of fatally stabbing two of his wealthy clients, Frank Deluca, sixty, and Deluca’s wife, Linda, fifty-nine. Robards had been a competitive bodybuilder and in 1995 won heavyweight and overall titles in the Tampa Bay Classic contest. He’d also worked as a male revue dancer. But he’d fallen on hard times and was living in a Motel 6 when he murdered the Delucas because they kept a lot of cash, jewelry, and collectible coins in their house. Robards was caught after a friend reported to police that he’d tried to recruit him to help carry away the Delucas’ five-hundred-pound safe. After Robards was convicted and the jury recommended the death penalty, Judge Bulone stated that death was appropriate, given the brutality of the murders. Both victims had been stabbed repeatedly, with both their throats and lungs punctured. One of them would have been alive to see the other attacked, and at least one was coughing up blood during the attack.

Going further back, in 2008, Judge Bulone was assigned the trial of Genghis Kocaker, a forty-four-year-old man with a history of violent crime who was on felony probation when he murdered Eric J. Stanton in Clearwater, Florida, in 2004. The murder was especially heinous, as Kocaker stabbed Stanton, a cabdriver, in his taxi; then he set the cab on fire, causing his conscious victim to be burned to death. The blazing vehicle rocked as Stanton tried in vain to kick his way out. Kocaker’s attorney argued that there was no evidence that his client stuck around to watch the horror. He also put forth that Kocaker had a multiple personality disorder caused by sexual abuse he suffered as a child, possible mental deterioration due to HIV, and a history of substance abuse. A jury convicted Kocaker and voted eleven to one for him to receive the death penalty, a recommendation that Judge Bulone solemnly adjudicated.

On a Monday morning during the spring of 2010, Bulone had a truly bizarre experience in his courtroom. Forty-year-old Matthew Mauceri was due in the courtroom to begin his trial on scheming-to-defraud charges. Trouble was, he was flying into Florida from out of state and his flight was delayed. He could have called the court and explained the situation, and there would have been a delay, but folks who are accused of scheming to defraud often employ complex methods of problem solving. Matthew gave the matter some thought and decided not to call the court. Instead, he called his twin brother, Marcus, and asked him to sit in for him. No one would know the difference. It was Matthew Mauceri’s own lawyer who suspected his client was pulling the switcheroo and instantly informed Judge Bulone that, contrary to appearances, he didn’t believe his client was present. The judge ordered the “defendant” fingerprinted, and the scam was quickly exposed. Now, instead of one twin being accused of fraud, there were two. Judge Bulone ordered them jailed—in separate cells.

Soon thereafter, Judge Bulone listened to Jay Hebert’s argument that Rachel Wade should not be prosecuted because she acted in self-defense under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law. The judge rejected the argument, saying, “She’s waiting there with a knife for something to happen. It’s almost like Clint Eastwood saying, ‘Go ahead, make my day.’”