Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle (106 page)

Over at the prosecutors’ table, Lisset Hanewicz was slightly coiled, a body of potential energy. It was go time, and the prosecutor was ready to pounce.

“Good afternoon,” Hanewicz said icily.

“Good afternoon,” Rachel said, trying to gather herself, gird her loins for the onslaught she knew was coming.

Hanewicz’s tone shifted immediately. She was all at once sarcastic and incredulous, but mostly accusing. She pointed a finger of guilt at Rachel with each and every question.

“You said during direct examination that you cooperated with the investigation.”

“Yes.”

Wasn’t her cooperation lying? Hadn’t she lied to the detective that night? She gave a detailed statement and left out the fact that she’d had a knife. How was that cooperating? The detective had to confront her about the fact that she’d had a knife. Rachel had been forced to admit she lied. How was that cooperating?

“I never said that I didn’t have a knife. I—I just never mentioned it.”

“You never
mentioned
it! It was like a small detail that you completely forgot, right?”

“I didn’t forget.”

“You said you don’t remember the point when you stabbed her.”

“I don’t physically remember stabbing her,” the defendant insisted.

“You remember everything else!” Hanewicz said, trying to show the other side of Rachel’s personality. The prosecutor wanted the jury to see and hear the girl who’d left those messages on Sarah’s phone machine. She waited for a response but got none, just a steady gaze and a couple of sniffles, so she continued.

“You remember everything before. You remember all of the threats. You remember everything after, right?”

“Yes.”

“You just don’t remember …
that.
”

“Yes.”

“Then how can you remember if you acted in self-defense?”

“I just remember swinging my arms. I don’t remember stabbing her.”

“You had the knife in your hand, right?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that con-
veeeeeen
-ient,” the prosecutor said. “So let me get this straight. You lied to the police officer. You never told the police officer that you couldn’t remember stabbing her. Isn’t that true?”

Rachel’s sniffling stopped. She looked at her nails. “Yes,” she said.

“That was just an additional fact that you brought out later, correct?”

“Yes.”

“You never told the police officer about anyone threatening you with a firearm, correct? In fact, today during your testimony is the first time that you ever mentioned it, correct?”

“I’ve never been asked about it before.”

“Do you remember having a hearing in open court? It wasn’t that long ago, in late March, and you took an oath, the same oath you took here today, and you talked about the same issues you talked about today. You talked about the fear and all of the things that scared you, the threats and everything, right?”

“Yes.”

“But you never mentioned a firearm.”

“It was Joshua, and not Sarah, that threatened me with that.”

Jay Hebert asked for a sidebar, which broke Hanewicz’s rhythm. Sarah’s father was taking notes. When the sidebar ended, Hanewicz moved on to a new topic.

“How were you holding the knife, Sarah? I mean, Rachel … sorry.”

Rachel said she was holding it outward. “To the side, but out, with the blade pointing out.”

Hanewicz asked if she’d ever held it so the blade was back, and the witness said she had not. Did she remember giving testimony in a courtroom on March 30 of this year? Rachel did. Hanewicz had the defendant silently read a transcript of the March 30 hearing. Her recollection refreshed, Rachel admitted, at that time, she’d said that the knife was “facing behind her.”

Hanewicz asked, “The only one you intended on stabbing that night was Sarah, right?”

Rachel replied she had no intention of stabbing anyone. Hanewicz brought up the “stab you and your Mexican boyfriend” comment, and Rachel was adamant: “I did
not
say that.”

Hanewicz wanted to get it straight. Rachel had the knife, and she went at Sarah with it, but she didn’t think anything would happen? Rachel repeated that she didn’t plan on stabbing Sarah. She hadn’t thought Sarah would approach her—because she had the knife.

Rachel’s testimony had disagreed with all of the eyewitnesses in one glaring way. She said that Sarah had hit her twice while she was still within arm’s reach of the hood of her car, and that she hadn’t grabbed the knife until she was already under attack. No one else had seen it that way, and Rachel hadn’t told it that way during previous statements, facts the prosecutor wanted to make sure the jurors understood.

“You say you were at the hood of your car, right?”

“About a foot in front of the hood of my car, yes.”

There was also a conflict in Rachel’s argument that Hanewicz wanted emphasized: She didn’t think Sarah would follow through on her physical threats, and yet she felt physically threatened enough to bring the knife. It had to be one way or the other, not both.

Did she remember telling the detective that Sarah had threatened to kill her in the past, but she didn’t think that Sarah really meant it?

Rachel did recall that.

“So that night, you didn’t think Sarah was going to hurt you?”

Again she said she did—but she understood the conflict in her logic, and she wasn’t quite sure what to do about it.

“You told the detective that you didn’t think she really meant anything by what she said.”

“She had never actually come through with her threats until then. She had never come to where I was or actually showed up.”

Hebert looked for an opening to intervene as the prosecutor scored points; but as long as Hanewicz maintained proper cross-examination, there was nothing he could do.

“She had come to your house. Isn’t that correct?”

“Yes, but face-to-face we had never had any contact. Before, she’d always been outside my apartment, where she couldn’t directly approach me.”

Hanewicz had another tough question: If Rachel was supposed to be hiding, why was she out in front of the house, indeed, by the street, leaning on the hood of her car? In fact, the prosecutor didn’t even ask it as a question. She accused: “You were hanging out there
waiting
with Dustin and Javier!”

Rachel apparently didn’t catch the key verb and quickly affirmed this was true. (She had admitted to waiting for Sarah with—as Hanewicz quickly pointed out—a knife.)

Wasn’t it true that Rachel went there because she thought Javier would protect her? Rachel agreed. But, Hanewicz pointed out, no protection had been offered. Javier hadn’t even tried to get Janet off her. All he did was yell. Some protection.

The prosecutor again directly accused the witness: Rachel had gone directly to Sarah and stabbed her. She hadn’t given anyone a chance to protect her. She’d made up her mind!

Rachel denied it.

The accusatory tone was unrelenting. Rachel said that Joshua encouraged her to fight for him; yet that night she told the detective that Joshua wanted the drama to stop. Rachel admitted that Joshua had instructed her to go home.

“You were upset because Joshua was with Sarah!”

Rachel interjected, “I’d known that for a while.”

“You wanted to be with him, but he didn’t want to be with you.”

Rachel disagreed.

Hanewicz continued her theory: “He said he was going to come over. You drove to Joshua and Sarah’s location to see what was going on.”

“No.”

Dustin saw her!

Rachel said Dustin was lying.

“You heard the voice mail. You said you were going to
murder
Sarah!”

“Yes,” Rachel said with a sob.

“You said Sarah had told you the same thing, but you are the only one who actually followed through on her promise. Isn’t that true?”

“Yes,” Rachel said, with fresh tears flowing.

With this response from his client, an answer that could only be construed as an admission, it was Jay Hebert’s turn to sit up a little straighter and scribble a quick note in his yellow legal pad.

Hanewicz continued her grueling cross-examination. She made Rachel admit that she had no way of knowing if Sarah was going to have a weapon that night. For all she knew, Sarah merely wanted to talk smack to her. Rachel admitted that she had not considered an actual face-to-face meeting likely.

“No one ever really approaches people anymore,” the defendant babbled. “They just talk to them.”

“No?” the prosecutor queried.

“No!”

“So everybody just goes out there and stabs people in the heart. Is that what you’re saying?”

“No.”

“You knew that you had stabbed her a minute after it happened, correct?”

Rachel spit out phrases between sniffles: “Yes. Couple of minutes. Maybe a minute.”

Rachel admitted she had heard Jilica screaming, “You stabbed her!” She admitted that she’d sat on the bench and watched police search for the knife, watched canine teams search, without telling anyone she’d thrown it on the roof.

“You call that cooperation?” Hanewicz asked. “That was how you cooperated? Because, when they told you she was dead, you finally admitted where you had thrown the knife away.”

Rachel was silent.

“Huh?” the prosecutor said, well aware that the witness hadn’t said anything.

“No,” Rachel finally said, although it was difficult to determine exactly what she was denying. Mostly, she was disagreeing with Hanewicz’s attacking tone.

“Why did you throw the knife on the neighbor’s roof?”

With that question, the dam broke. Words came spilling out of Rachel’s mouth.

Jay Hebert couldn’t govern her words now.

The defendant said, “Because I didn’t know what happened, and I didn’t want anybody else to get ahold of it, and I didn’t want anything to be done, and I didn’t want anybody to be hurt that night.”

“You didn’t know what happened? You said that you saw blood!”

“I saw blood, but I didn’t physically see her stabbed, and I didn’t know how severe the situation was.”

Some jurors must have wondered: How could she sit and watch the grieving, the urgency of the paramedics, hear the siren of the departing ambulance, without suspecting the situation was severe?

“You say you didn’t know she was stabbed until after Jilica yelled that she was stabbed?” Hanewicz asked.

“I didn’t know where she was stabbed or how severe it was,” Rachel said. Then she played the “young blonde” card big-time and dramatically added, “I… was …
scared.
”

Rachel elongated the final word, and Hanewicz clipped it with her follow-up: “I thought you didn’t know what happened.”

“I didn’t know
exactly
what happened, no. I don’t remember doing it, and I did not see her. She walked directly away from me, and I didn’t see her anymore after that.”

“You had the knife. You knew she was stabbed, and you wanted to get rid of it.”

“I didn’t want anyone else to get ahold of it because Janet instantly attacked me after that.”

“Oh, so you were worried that Janet was going to take the knife away from you?”

“That—or that I would retaliate on Janet also, and I didn’t want anybody to get hurt. I had already seen blood.”

“You didn’t want to retaliate against Janet?”

“I didn’t want to retaliate at all. I didn’t think I would have to, if they saw a knife.”

“You say that it was self-defense because you got jumped, but the
only person
you stabbed was Sarah.”

“That’s because I got attacked.”

“You did not want to act in self-defense with Janet?”

“I didn’t know how badly Sarah was hurt, and I didn’t physically want anyone to get hurt.”

“If you knew that Sarah was hurt, but you didn’t know how badly, how was that operating in your mind when you were fighting with Janet?”

“I saw blood.” She’d never even “encountered” a fight before, she explained. She didn’t think they would actually physically attack her if they saw the knife.

“So the epiphany of what happened is when you saw the blood?”

“Yes. During the fight with Janet, I got rid of the knife,” Rachel said.

“
During
the fight with Janet?”

“Yes.”

“No! You had to go someplace and give it a good heave, right?”

“Janet was chasing me around the yard.”

Eager to get that image out of the jury’s head, Hanewicz asked her next question quickly: Wasn’t it true that Rachel didn’t stab Janet because she didn’t hate Janet?

Rachel said it was not true. She had not intended on using the knife on a specific person. She had planned to show it in case someone attacked her, and Sarah happened to be the one who attacked her.

The prosecutor was confused. Hadn’t Janet attacked her? Hadn’t Janet gotten the best of her? Yet, she hadn’t used the knife on Janet. Rachel agreed that was true.

Hanewicz paused, moving on to a new topic, and the moment of quiet was softly punctuated by Rachel’s rhythmic sniffles. The prosecutor, calmer now, slowing the pace a bit, asked if it was true that Rachel and Javier Laboy had wedding plans?

Rachel said it was—and yes, those plans were made after Sarah’s death.

Hanewicz made Rachel repeat that she did not deny making those phone calls to Sarah.

“You say you don’t like drama, but you were on the phone talking to Joshua and you knew he was with her.”

“With her? No, I did not.”

“At some point, you did, and you were still having these conversations,” Hanewicz fired back. When Rachel acknowledged that was true, the prosecutor asked, “Why were you even bothering?”

“Because I still had
feelings
for him.”

“You hated Sarah.”

“I didn’t hate Sarah. I didn’t know her to hate her.”

“So you leave those kind of voice mails to friends?”

“No.”

“Because those voice mails you left, they’re not friendly.”

Screaming now, the prosecutor quoted Rachel from the taped messages she’d left Sarah, including the swearwords. “And for that, you were going to murder her? For putting a photo on Myspace, you were going to murder her?”