Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle (111 page)

Rachel’s sentencing hearing was held in the same Largo, Florida, courtroom as her trial, on Friday, September 3, 2010. She wore her dark blue prison uniform. There had been a startling change in her appearance. Her youthful appearance was fading fast. Her makeup-free face had grown puffy since her conviction. She’d developed jowls. Her hair wasn’t dyed blond during the year and a half she’d been in jail, and there was just as much dark as light in her hair, which now hung limp to the middle of her back.

The Ludemanns and the Wades were present. All four parents wore black. Both sets of parents gave statements at the hearing; both expressed sympathy for the other. At no time did the Ludemanns and the Wades make eye contact.

Letters written on both sides were read into the record. One of Rachel’s teachers, now retired, wrote:
Concerning the Rachel Wade case, I am asking that you consider reducing her sentence. I’m sure Rachel was on the brink of cracking.

Jo Anne Reuter, Sarah’s aunt, wrote:
To say I cannot comprehend teenagers today is an understatement. How sad that the interaction between Rachel and Sarah had escalated with no one intervening to stop it.

Barry Wade said, “Two beautiful young girls both made the same decision to get involved with someone who not only didn’t love them, but used and demeaned them. These girls were so much alike. Now they have both lost their dreams and their futures.”

Charlie Ludemann said, “I’ll never get to hold my daughter again, never get to see her get married, never hear her laugh at my dumb jokes. The only way I can hear her voice is when I call her cell and she says, ‘Hey, this is Sarah. Leave me a message and I’ll call you back.’”

When it was Gay Ludemann’s turn to speak, she placed two large photos of Sarah on an easel and turned them to face the judge. “Remember, Judge Bulone, this is my daughter. She lives in a cemetery. I go visit her.”

Rachel herself took the witness stand and gave a statement, which she read from a piece of paper without looking up. To the Ludemanns, she said: “‘I never wanted our worlds to collide like this, especially over a boy, and a worthless boy at that. I am so sorry to be the one that caused you this pain. I need you to know that I, too, was just a teenaged girl, not a monster or the murderer, as it may seem. Some days I feel like it should have been me.’”

At that moment, Gay Ludemann did feel sorry for Rachel. She thought of how hard it must have been for Rachel to say she was sorry for killing their daughter. “And she wanted us to believe, she truly wanted us to believe that she was sorry,” Gay later said.

Gay might have been feeling sympathetic, but Judge Bulone was not.

“The murder was no accident,” Bulone said. “It took a lot of force to plunge that knife through skin, through fat and bone, through someone’s heart.”

He said he had been tempted to give Rachel Wade a life sentence. He didn’t believe she was sorry for what had happened that night. He felt that when she put that knife in her purse, she was “almost hoping” she would have an opportunity to use it on Sarah.

“The issue is the defendant tried to conceal the evidence in the case, and actually did a good job of concealing it when she threw the knife onto the roof of a neighbor’s house. This court will sentence her to twenty-seven years in the Department of Corrections. The actions of Rachel Wade have caused a lot of pain,” Bulone said. “I hope now healing can occur.”

Rachel Wade, sobbing, was led from the courtroom. Even with best behavior, she was spending the next twenty years behind bars. By the time she was once again a free woman, more than half of her life would have been spent incarcerated.

Gay Ludemann’s moment of sympathy was over. She had hoped that Rachel’s sentence would be twice as long. She’d been hoping that she’d be long dead by the time Rachel was released, so she would not be around to see her.

Barry Wade did the math—and was overwhelmed by the cruel chunk of Rachel’s life that would be past before she could again be free.

Sitting in the spectator section during the two-hour hearing was
St. Petersburg Times
reporter Lane De-Gregory, who spent much of her time during the sentencing hearing looking for something that was not there. She kept looking for some sort of connection among Rachel Wade, her parents, and her grandparents, who were all in court. With the exception of Rachel’s older brother, who never came to the courthouse for his sister’s trial, Rachel’s whole family was there.

DeGregory kept thinking Rachel was going to turn around and make eye contact with them, or see them and have some sort of emotional reaction. But there was nothing. It didn’t seem so much like she was going out of her way to ignore them. It was more like she didn’t care enough to make a connection with them.

The journalist didn’t know if it was self-preservation or if Rachel was just trying to get through the moment. However, she had just learned that she was going to be put away for all these years, and Rachel still didn’t want to turn around and look at them.

“You figure at a time like that she would want to look at her mother, blow her a kiss or something,” DeGregory said.

Jay Hebert wasn’t sure if there would be an appeal. Such a move was expensive and labor-intensive. The Wades couldn’t afford it, although there was a possibility that the court might appoint a public defender to handle the appeal, as they clearly qualified for it. If there was going to be an appeal, the grounds would be that the judge’s instructions to the jury were too complicated. The jury did not understand the difference between second-degree murder and manslaughter. The maximum sentence for manslaughter would have been eleven years. Asking for a second trial was risky, however, as there was always the chance that state attorneys would decide to up the ante and charge Rachel with first-degree murder, in which case a conviction might mean life behind bars without the hope of parole.

The Wades left the courthouse without comment.

When only a few stragglers remained in the courtroom, Charlie Ludemann was overheard saying, “I’m not happy, but what can you do?”

“Where from here?” the Ludemanns were asked.

“To the cemetery,” Gay said. “To tell Sarah the news.”

On November 19, 2010, the case was featured on the
20/20
TV program, with Ashleigh Banfield reporting. Lisset Hanewicz told Banfield why the voice mails were the key to getting a conviction. People often said, “I’m gonna kill you,” when they were upset. But Rachel had said, “I’m gonna
murder
you,” and then she went out and did it. It was as if Sarah had kept those voice mails so that the world would know what had happened.

Banfield also interviewed Rachel, whose take on the events that ruined her life remained unchanged. It was Sarah’s fault. Everything was Sarah’s fault. She didn’t hate Sarah. She hated the situation. She didn’t understand what made Sarah so mad, why she came at her like that. Sarah was
with
Joshua. Sarah had everything she wanted.

Banfield asked what Joshua had? He seemed like such a
loser.
What gave him such control over his harem?

Rachel said it was the way Joshua made her
feel
when they were alone. “Like he really cared about me,” Rachel said. Joshua told her he didn’t care about the other girls, and she believed him. “I believe everything that he said to me,” Rachel said.

Had he visited her in prison? No.

Written? No.

Did she still love him? No.

Any feelings at all for him? No.

Rachel said she “talked to Sarah” all the time, telling her that she was sorry, how much she hoped they could have been more mature, that they could have sat down and had a civilized conversation, that they could have just walked away. They both deserved so much better.

Rachel Wade was a sex addict. Judging from the intensely prurient nature of her jailhouse correspondence, she probably still is. Her behavior from age fourteen on—a precocious reliance on sex as a balm for her feelings—was much like what one might expect from an abuse victim.

What made this situation blossom into tragic violence? For one thing, according to New Jersey psychological counselor Kathy Morelli, there is a change in brain chemistry that happens to people when they have sex. A biological attachment forms. Brain changes that come from having orgasms together produced potent emotions, causing normally mild people to resort to violence. Teenagers weren’t adults, so it was a strong yet immature attachment. Passion stirred up primal possessiveness.

Morelli agreed that there was a strong chance that Rachel had problems at home. Most teen girls did not drop out of school or run away from home because of an unwanted curfew. This wasn’t to say that Barry and Janet Wade were bad parents, but there might have been a disconnect of some sort in the parent-child relationship. Perhaps there was an underlying and undiagnosed depression in Rachel or in the family (as this is usually hereditary). The parental relationship was strained for some reason. It is clear that Rachel was a difficult child with whom to cope, and there was a mismatch in temperaments between parents and child. (Pregnancy during the teenaged years was a common trigger.) Date rape and promiscuity could also be part of a constellation of behaviors that included
shoplifting
. It was clear that Rachel had very low self-esteem, beginning for whatever reason (temperamental, underlying learning disability, underlying depression, a not-so-overt disconnect with her parents) and then reinforced by poor decision making. Extreme anger usually masked fear, depression, and helplessness.

Joshua Camacho, on the other hand, was narcissistic. He had an inflated sense of self-importance and an exaggerated need for admiration. As was true of many narcissists, he appeared arrogantly self-assured and confident, although this may not have been the actual case. Case watchers could see by observing Joshua’s behavior that he reacted poorly when things weren’t going his way. He punched Sarah, pulled a gun on Rachel. His work history demonstrated a lack of ambition, perhaps because he feared competitive situations. He might be living his life avoiding the risk of failure.

Narcissists, with their intrinsic lack of regard for other’s feelings, preyed on people with dependent personalities. They fed off others and enjoyed being fought over, enjoyed manipulating their sexual partners, and didn’t have a well-developed sense of self. They were often abused (at least emotionally), so they got their feelings of efficacy by surrounding themselves with subservient others. Sarah, Rachel, Erin, and no doubt others were all prey for the opportunist narcissist, who was drawn to those with low self-esteem like a shark to blood.

As for the cyber bullying, Morelli believed all parents of teens should have a monitor on their child’s smart phones and computers, access to his or her online social network accounts as silent friends, and they should check in to see what was being said in their minor child’s world. Parents were woefully uninformed about how to parent in the cyber age and needed a presence online as silent friends. They needed to know where their teen was going in the virtual world, which was a real place, not imaginary. Cyber threats were real threats, and these needed to be reported. Sarah’s friends served as the virtual bully gang egging her and Rachel on. In teenaged naivete, the Sarah camp thought it wasn’t real, and no violence would occur. But it did.

The fact that the Internet played such a key role in this case was interesting to psychology professionals because the phenomenon was still so new. There was a researched and documented “online disinhibition effect” in the virtual world, a world where people were more apt to express the unedited id, for they felt protected by their online avatar.

Education regarding Internet practices was the best way to bring awareness about this effect. Those with underdeveloped identities (teens, for instance) took on avatars and railed against the world. They thought they were somehow veiled and empowered by their avatars. So adolescents who didn’t have fully developed self-identities could easily get lost in their avatars, become intoxicated by their feeling of power, and allow unedited violent feelings to come to the forefront.

That point was again made through tragedy in March 2011 when there was another battle of teen tweets, this time in Brooklyn, New York. It turned out there didn’t have to be a boy at the center of Internet violence. Tweeting about money could also be incendiary.

Eighteen-year-old Kayla Henriques was arrested and charged with second-degree murder for the fatal stabbing of twenty-two-year-old Kamisha Richards. The young women were friends. Kamisha gave Kayla $20 for diapers for Kayla’s eleven-month-old baby; then Kamisha learned Kayla had spent the money on something else. Three days before the stabbing, the young women began a war of words on an Internet social network site, which escalated without restraint.

Kamisha Richards concluded the word portion of the war with the phrase: Ima have the last laugh. She went to Kayla Henriques’s apartment and demanded her money back. The argument started in the kitchen, and finished in the bedroom, where Richards was stabbed.

Henriques stayed calm, she said, and tried to save her friend. An ambulance was called immediately and she applied pressure to the wound, but it wasn’t enough to save Kamisha Richards, who made it into the apartment’s hallway before collapsing and dying.

Insults were hurled in public, which meant each girl had to be both angry and embarrassed, a volatile mix even in the most mature egos.

This was more evidence that the Internet could take a little disagreement and turn it into a big one, the social network providing mob mentality.

Maybe so, but Jamie Severino had another explanation. She believed the secret villain in this story was drugs. She felt Rachel was taking them, and they were affecting her decision-making process.

“Why else would she decide to do something stupid like killing somebody?” Jamie asked.

Ah, but Jamie Severino was not Rachel’s friend. Lisa Lafrance was, and she insisted that drugs had nothing to do with Rachel’s actions.