Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle (80 page)

“I was in East Lake, near Oldsmar. I didn’t have phone reception and no one would give me a ride home,” Rachel explained.

Not that Rachel ever had a relationship with a boy that went smoothly, her relationship with Nick was particularly rocky. She still loved him and all, but … she no longer felt it was necessary to keep her blinkers on when it came to looking at other boys. Rachel liked to think of herself as an open person, a girl who always had her heart open for new romance.

Rachel ran into Joshua Camacho at a party. She hadn’t talked to him in a long time and was instantly smitten.

On November 9, 2007, cops were called, responding to a domestic dispute at Nick’s apartment. Nick and Rachel apologized for the noise, stated that they had been arguing about a relationship problem, but they were through, and the fight was not physical.

After fighting the good battle for many long months, after dealing with police on at least fourteen occasions when Rachel ran away, the Wades stopped calling.

Rachel had Nick, and the Wades understood that she was going to be there, with him, most of the time. You could see the defeat in their shoulders.

That didn’t mean, however, that the PPPD was through with Rachel Wade—or her friends. Or her enemies.

It was also at about this time that one small subsection of the Pinellas Park population—young people who knew Rachel Wade—did its best to keep the PPPD busy all by themselves.

The instant Sarah Ludemann had received her driver’s license, she demonstrated no fear of speed. Her father was a cabdriver, so it only made sense she’d drive like a pro, and that meant fast. She enjoyed playing road tag with her friends, weaving in and out of traffic, playing games of pursuit, playing chicken at high speeds.

At two in the afternoon on November 29, 2007, Sarah was burned by her own carelessness. She and three other drivers were allegedly using the roads as their personal playground. When the reckless parade of young people encountered a car accident on the road, the front car slowed down abruptly, starting a chain reaction that injured no one but caused medium to severe damage to all of the cars.

On December 6, 2007, cops were again called to Nick’s apartment, and this time it was Rachel complaining. She explained her live-in boyfriend got pissed because she was babysitting for a friend instead of being with him. She wanted to move out and return to her parents’ home. Nick threatened to throw all of her belongings in the lake. Rachel and Nick again agreed the argument was only verbal.

On December 21, with the holidays approaching, the kids of Pinellas Park were out in force. Officer Richard Bynum responded to a complaint of two cars full of kids fighting near the corner of 102
^nd
Avenue and Sixty-third Lane. The incident involved many familiar names, as well as names that would later become recognizable. Jay and Joshua Camacho, Sarah Ludemann, and Ashley Lovelady were in one car. Erin Slothower and three of her girlfriends were in the other. Police questioned all eight of them, and everyone agreed no blows had been thrown. During the questioning, cops confiscated a set of brass knuckles from an unnamed occupant.

Rachel’s on-again, off-again relationship with Nick was off again. During the evening of February 3, 2008, Rachel’s mom heard a commotion in front of the house. When she opened the front door, she saw a young man urinating on her lawn. Ten minutes later, Janet heard a noise again and went to investigate—now she found a young man urinating on her front door. The kid ran off and climbed into a waiting car, but Janet Wade got the license number.

“Ma’am, did you see genitals?”

“No.”

“Neither time?”

“No genitals either time.”

“Have any idea why young men are urinating on your property?”

“I’m pretty sure it has something to do with my daughter, Rachel.”

Rachel broke up with Nick Reynolds a week before, and things had been going poorly. The officer talked to Rachel, who said that she’d gotten a call from one of Nick’s friends, a guy named Eric, who said he’d been there earlier in the night, but he had nothing to do with any pissing. Sure enough, the license plate number belonged to Eric’s car. While looking for Eric, the cop encountered Nick’s dad, who explained that Nick was a friend of Eric’s, and he was the ex-boyfriend of Rachel Wade. Nick’s dad called Rachel’s mom and apologized for his son’s behavior. Janet Wade said she did not want to press any charges because there had been no property damage, but she did want a police report written up about it “in case they returned.”

Jamie Severino was not Rachel’s friend—heaven forbid—but she knew the Camacho family well. She was a hot chick and had dated Joshua’s brother Jay—and had had his baby, a daughter named Alliana. Jamie was with Jay when Erin was with Joshua, so the four of them hung out at the Camacho house.

Jay was older than the others, born in the spring of 1986. He wasn’t a big man, but—at five-foot-seven, 165 pounds—he was bigger than Joshua. Jamie met him through her cousin when she was in middle school.

“Met him a long time ago, probably in like ’04,” Jamie said in 2011.

Jay was well inked, sporting eleven tattoos. On his back were prayer hands with the words
ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE
; on his left arm was
M.O.B
.
JUANA
, and on the left side of his chest was
ASHLEY
. He had
LOVE
on his left hand, and
HATE
on his right. On his left shoulder was a five-point star; on his neck was
CLOWN NY
. There were two clowns on his right arm, with
GOOD TIMES
,
SAD TIMES
and
RAMON
; and on his left leg was
JC JAMIE S
.

Jamie Severino knew Rachel because Rachel’s ex, Nick, was Jay Camacho’s best friend, and for a time Jay and Nick lived together. For a time Rachel lived with Nick as well, even though she was just a kid. All of Rachel’s subsequent boyfriends would get to see Rachel’s intimate
NICK
tattoo.

Predictably, Rachel’s relationship with Jamie was stormy. The two had almost come to blows on several occasions. The first time came in high school when Jamie and Jay were first dating. Jamie heard from Rachel’s ex-boyfriend Jose, the one Rachel’s parents had arrested for having sex with Rachel when she was only fifteen, that Rachel was trying to “get with Jay.” That led to altercations at the mall and in school, with insults hurled back and forth—but no violence. According to Jamie, Rachel started the hostilities, and the two didn’t talk after that. Tensions eased somewhat when Rachel began dating Nick. Jamie felt that Nick was a bad influence on Jay.

Jamie said Nick was on pills at that time, and he got Jay on them also—but despite that, there were times when Rachel and Nick and Jamie and Jay would hang out together.

The girls still weren’t exactly best buddies, but they could be in the same room without a shouting match breaking out. Rachel was always careful that someone had her back if hostilities were about to erupt. When she was alone, she could be quiet—almost scared. But when she was with a guy or a group of girls—or on the computer—she’d get “all tough.”

“She used to say that Nick hit her,” Jamie recalled, searching for an explanation. “But every time I was around them, it was the other way around. I think she just did things to get attention.”

In high school, Jamie claimed, Rachel was always the one who was doing something to stand out. She wanted—maybe needed—to be the center of attention.

Jamie had no idea what made Rachel so angry. There was a lot of anger around, and maybe Rachel fed off it. Maybe something
happened to her
to make her that way.

One night—the end of 2007, maybe the beginning of ’08—Jamie, Jay, and Nick went out; Rachel stayed behind at Nick’s house. While they were gone, Rachel was “blowing up the phone,” trying to determine their location.

“We had just gone to the mall,” Jamie recalled. “I guess she figured that Nick was hanging out with one of my girlfriends. That was
her
style, not mine.”

Rachel would not be ignored. She texted Nick, saying she was going to kill herself. That brought the trio home. At Nick’s house, they discovered Rachel lying, passed-out, on the floor. There was a bunch of pills next to her. They had to take her to the hospital and have her stomach pumped.

Later on, when the media was paying Rachel a lot of attention, she would claim that she’d never done any drugs—but Jamie knew for a fact that that wasn’t true.

When Rachel lived with Nick, she definitely did coke, pills as well: “Roxies.” They were Roxicodone, a prescription painkiller containing codeine. In Pinellas Park, they were sometimes called “Blues.”

The peacefulness between Jamie and Rachel only lasted until Jamie learned that Rachel was hooking her friends up with Jay. One day Jamie learned
for a fact
that Rachel’s friend Lisa Lafrance had “been with” Jay.

Lisa wrote to Jamie on Myspace. The message went into graphic detail, explaining that Rachel had gotten them together and that Lisa and Jay had been “hanging out” every day.

Lisa remembered the incident well, although she didn’t think it was fair to say that Rachel had put them together. Jay and Nick were friends. They hung out all of the time, and Rachel and Lisa hung out at Nick’s. When Rachel was with Nick, Lisa was with Jay. Rachel had nothing to do with fixing them up. They had not needed fixing up.

When Jamie read what Lisa wrote on Myspace, she was pissed. Jamie and a seven-month-pregnant Erin Slothower were at the mall when they received a phone call, informing them that Lisa and Sarah wanted to fight them.

“There were maybe fifteen people hanging out, outside Nick’s house,” Jamie recalled.

According to Lisa, Jamie brought another friend with her: brass knuckles. “There was such animosity that I ended up fighting her, even though she had the brass knuckles on,” Lisa recalled.

“Lisa and me had an actual physical fight,” Jamie said. “And Rachel tried to jump in. Jay pulled her off. Afterward, Ashley and Sarah were like, ‘We want to fight you.’ And all this while Erin was, like, seven months pregnant. There was a lot of fighting going on, leading up to what happened.”

Jamie started in with Jay; and before long, Jay and Jamie were having a brawl, screaming and hitting each other. Rachel wanted part of this action.

Rachel went outside and screamed to Jamie: “Come on outside and I’m going to beat your ass. You’re a psycho! Let’s get away from the house and I’ll beat your ass.”

The cops were called. After being given a blow-by-blow description of events, Jay was arrested for abusing Jamie, his “underage girlfriend.” According to the police report, Jay grabbed Jamie by the neck and forced her to the ground. The girl was treated at the scene for minor injuries, bruises on her arms and neck, and declined a trip to the hospital. The fight, Jamie claimed at the time, started when Jay swiped the girl’s cell phone and her bottle of Roxies. When cops searched Jay, they found a pair of black brass knuckles in his back pocket.

Rachel Wade was eager to tell police how she saw the events. She expressed her opinion that the girl got what she deserved and had struck Jay before he retaliated.

A neutral passerby, who saw the incident, told police that it didn’t look to her like Jay was beating Jamie as much as he was trying to “fend her off.”

With Jay’s permission, cops searched his room and found two bottles of prescription medication—methylphenidate (generic form of Ritalin) and acyclovir (a generic medication for herpes)—which were confiscated.

As Sarah Ludemann would later learn, when Rachel had an enemy on speed dial, Rachel could be relentless. After the fight at Nick’s house, Jamie received phone call after phone call from Rachel, constantly challenging Jamie to a fight.

“If you come anywhere near me, I am going to beat your ass,” Rachel would say.

The night of the fight outside of Nick’s had historical importance because among the kids gathered, watching the action, was Sarah, who had come in support of Lisa with her best friend, Ashley Lovelady, and Joshua Camacho.

Why did Rachel react so strongly to the fight between Jay and Jamie? Jamie had a theory: “I think she was having sex with Jay when Nick wasn’t home. I’ve long thought they had a relationship going on. If so, that’s funny. I mean, that’s pretty
nasty
! Having sex with Jay and then going out with Joshua? Seems pretty nasty to me.”

After that, it was never a good thing when Jamie ran into Rachel. Jamie went to Applebee’s with friends, and Rachel told Jamie right in front of everyone that Alliana wasn’t Jay Camacho’s baby. This was apparently a standard riff for Rachel, who also liked to tell Erin that her baby wasn’t Joshua’s.

When it came to harassment, Rachel was a tenacious master. If you were on her shit list, she could completely tie up your cell phone, calling every minute for hours, leaving voice mails and sending texts. After a while, friends and recipients both had to wonder why she didn’t have something better to do. And the messages were disturbingly violent.

These young women lived in an “I’m gonna kick your ass” world, but Rachel kicked it up a notch:

Sadly, Rachel’s bloody threats had a desensitizing effect. She was a barker, not a biter—a mouthy bitch. When she started in with that crap with Sarah, nobody blinked. It was just Rachel being Rachel.

Jamie’s opinion of Joshua had changed over the years. At first, she thought he was pretty cool. Quiet and shy. He was a guy who “didn’t do nothing.” He stayed inside.

The Camachos were a religious family. The parents were strict with their kids, who practically weren’t even allowed out of the house until they turned eighteen. As soon as Joshua came of age and was let out, “he took after his brother and became a player.”

But now, Jamie didn’t think much of Joshua. He was a pint-sized mooch: “I don’t think he is good-looking,” she said of the bantamweight ladies’ man.