Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle (94 page)

Hebert pointed out that Ashley had to go quite a ways out of her way to pass Javier’s house, that she had to go north and then south and then north again.

Ashley said she was just “working her way through the neighborhood.”

“Snaking your way through the neighborhood?”

“Yes.”

“Taking the most direct route?”

“Yes.”

“Not talking with Sarah that night?”

“No.”

She hadn’t spoken to Sarah or texted Sarah. She did not know that Sarah was looking for Rachel.

Hebert did get Ashley to admit that although she may not have specifically known about problems between Rachel and Sarah that night, she knew that there was a “pattern of drama” between the two.

She knew, for example, about the Myspace and Facebook exchanges between Sarah and Rachel. She knew about Sarah posting pictures of herself and Joshua at the beach. She knew that there had been comments about Sarah posted online.

Ashley agreed that the Sarah/Rachel drama was a two-way street.

Hebert asked Ashley if it was true that she once said about Sarah: “There was no stopping her that night.”

The witness agreed that she had said that.

When she was first interviewed, wasn’t it true she had not admitted telling Sarah how to find Rachel, the very point that had earlier made the witness cry because it made her feel responsible for her best friend’s death?

The question brought a quick objection, stating that it was redundant and that the question had already been asked and answered during direct examination.

Judge Bulone overruled the objection, and Ashley agreed that she had indeed lied to the detective about her role in the night’s activities. There were no tears this time when she said it. Instead, her chin tilted upward and she gave the defense attorney her best look of defiance.

Attempting to chip away at her strength whenever he could, Hebert pretended he didn’t hear her answer. He made her repeat it—which she did in a manner sure to be heard in the back row of the courtroom, perhaps in the hallway.

Wasn’t it true that five months later she called Detective Lynch and told him a different story?

“I called Detective Lynch the
next day,
” Ashley said firmly. Hebert’s attempts to fluster her weren’t working. She had her shoulders square to him and was ready for anything he could dish out.

Hebert tried some rapid-fire questioning, getting Ashley to reiterate the events at Janet’s house, dropping off the phone, seeing the girls come out of the house just as she was about to leave.

But Ashley answered in rapid-fire fashion as well, and Hebert’s attempt to make her contradict herself backfired. He asked her if she got out of the car when she got to Janet’s house. She said no, she stayed in the car; Jay came outside to get his phone. She put space between her words as she might when talking to a mentally slow person.

She didn’t talk to the girls when she was at the house. She did not talk to the girls until they were at the end of the block, at the four-way stop sign.

Yes, it was Janet Camacho who asked where Rachel was.

Hebert was scoring some points here. Ashley was expecting the jury to believe that just as it was a coincidence that she had driven past Javier’s house in the first place, it was coincidence that Janet had asked her if she knew where Rachel was, and—
what do you know?
—she’d just seen her just a few moments before.

Ashley explained that when the two cars stopped, they were both pointed in the same direction. Sarah rolled down her window and Ashley leaned across and rolled down her passenger-side window so they could talk. Was this brief conversation at the stop sign the only time she spoke to those girls that night? Ashley said it was.

Hebert showed the witness defense exhibit number three, an aerial photo of the pertinent Pinellas Park neighborhood, and he asked if she recognized it. After a long pause, Ashley said she did not.

The defense attorney pointed out Javier’s house on the photo and asked if this helped her to orient herself to what the photo showed. She said it did. He tried to show her which direction she was going when she passed Javier’s house, but she corrected him and said she’d been headed in the opposite direction.

Hebert asked to introduce the photo into evidence, but before he could do that, Dicus requested that he first be allowed to ask the witness a few questions in voir dire. Judge Bulone said okay.

Dicus held up the same photo for Ashley and asked her if she could tell which way was north. She said she could not. Despite that, she tentatively acknowledged that the photo accurately depicted Javier’s neighborhood.

Because there was no compass on the photo, wasn’t it true that she couldn’t tell which direction she was headed when she passed Javier’s house? Ashley very softly said that was true.

Of course, she had already testified as to which way she’d been driving when she passed the house, and matters of east-west, north-south, had nothing to do with it. She knew which side of her car Javier’s house had been on when she passed.

Hebert placed the photo on an easel facing the jury, and Ashley was allowed to get down from the witness stand to get a close-up look.

Rachel’s lawyer stood off to one side, a few feet, with his arms crossed over his chest. He tried to get the witness to figure out where on the photo Jay’s house was, based on him pointing out where Javier’s house was. She reiterated that she just knew how to get from one place to the other, not the names of streets or anything.

She also couldn’t find Janet’s house on the photo. She was, however, able to show Hebert which direction she was headed when she passed Javier’s house, and at which corner she had made the wide turn that might have been mistaken for swerving.

Hebert asked whose car she was driving, and she said it was a gold Camry, which belonged to her boyfriend’s mom. Her boyfriend wasn’t Jay at that time, but rather a guy named Jeremy.

Under rapid-fire questioning, Ashley maintained that when she saw Rachel, Javier, and the other guy standing in the driveway, she neither swerved nor sped.

“If somebody said that happened, they lied, correct?”

“I didn’t see it happen,” Ashley said. It was not a wholly satisfying response.

“Are you saying that you drove past that location fast?”

“I’m saying I drove by at a normal speed.”

“Okay,” Hebert said, removing the photo and the easel.

Ashley was allowed to return to the witness stand. Hebert made her acknowledge once again that Sarah was looking for Rachel that night. Ashley said this was true, repeating that it was because Rachel was sending her threatening texts.

“Would you agree with me that when Sarah is mad, she’s mad.”

“Yeah, she’s mad. She’s upset. Yeah.”

“And, in fact, there was no stopping her that night.”

“No, she … no.”

Hebert used this response to return to the discrepancy between Ashley’s defense deposition and today’s testimony, wherein she had withdrawn the phrase “in a rage” from her description of the victim’s demeanor.

Ashley now said that she had originally used the term to describe Sarah’s angry and frustrated demeanor. She did not want to imply that “her head was about to pop off, or anything.”

When she said Sarah was in a rage, that was also the time when she said there was “no stopping her”?

Yes, she agreed.

With that established, defense attorney Jay Hebert sat.

Wesley Dicus had a few questions on redirect. He wanted to make sure that the jury understood it was
normal
for someone to look at an aerial photo of a neighborhood and have difficulty determining directions.

The prosecutor asked Ashley if she had ever seen the neighborhood from an aerial perspective. Had she ever flown over Javier’s house in a helicopter, or anything like that?

The witness said she had not, and repeated that she couldn’t tell for sure from that photo which streets she had driven on or in what direction.

She then described the route she had taken for ASA Dicus in her own terms, again sometimes not even saying “left” or “right,” but using her hands to gesture.

In his cross-examination, Jay Hebert repeatedly used the phrase “no stopping her.” Three or four times. He used it as a way to describe Miss Ludemann’s demeanor.

Did she remember that?

She said she did.

He asked if that phrase, when she used it, had anything to do with fighting.

Ashley said no, it just meant that she was going to do what she wanted to do, and no one was going to talk her out of it.

On his recross, Jay Hebert sounded sick of the semantics and had a “let’s get real” tone to his questioning.

Wasn’t it true that Ashley knew that Sarah wanted to find Rachel and “end the drama?” And what could that phrase mean if it didn’t mean she was going to fight her?

“Not to fight, to confront,” Ashley said. “Not to have it end the way it ended, no. I didn’t think they were going to fight. They had never fought before.”

“You knew she was going there to fight.”

“No! I didn’t!”

And with that, Ashley Lovelady was allowed to step down from the witness stand and exit the courtroom, using the same shoulder-rolling strut with which she had entered.

Sitting in the spectator section of the courtroom, glaring at Ashley as she testified, was Jamie Severino. The two young women had long been enemies because both laid claim to Jay Camacho.

Jamie said it had nothing to do with them being enemies, of course, but she knew for a fact that many of the things Ashley had testified to were complete bullshit.

“She said that night she went to Janet’s house to give Jay a phone,” Jamie later said. “That was completely false. I had just bought him a phone. This was around tax time, so I had just bought him a brand-new phone, brand-new clothes, everything. She didn’t come by to give him a phone. I was over there that day and she came by to see what he was doing, to be
crazy
! She was stalking—kind of like what Rachel was doing. She didn’t talk to Jay. She didn’t come in the house. She didn’t even get out of her car. She drove by, and that was it. She parked outside for a second.”

Jamie didn’t even believe that Ashley was telling the truth about driving by Javier’s house and then relaying Rachel’s location to Sarah. Her theory was that Rachel told Sarah herself where she was.

This theory, however, failed to explain the car that sped down Javier’s block and, according to some witnesses, swerved in an attempt to intimidate Rachel.

The jury was hearing a story that made events seem so accidental, random, as if coincidence and fate had brought Sarah and Rachel together in front of Javier’s house.

Jamie didn’t believe it was that way at all. She thought it was all planned. Sarah and Rachel agreed to meet at that time, at that spot. Coincidence had nothing to do with it.

Jamie claimed the very premise—that Ashley was Sarah’s friend, and that was why she snitched out Rachel’s location—was faulty.

Ashley and Sarah were
not
buddies, Jamie insisted. In fact, Ashley had done some serious shit to Sarah, not just to Sarah but to the Ludemann family. They were
never
going to be friends.

Jamie had a theory: “Ashley was just
pretending
to be Sarah’s friend so she could get close to Jay.”

You would’ve thought that things would smooth out, become significantly less dramatic, after Sarah’s death, but that hadn’t been the case. Ashley had continued to bother Jamie, and a senior relative of Ashley’s even got into the act, saw Jamie at the store in November 2009, and chased her in her car. They both were pulled over. They both had to go to court. Charges against Jamie were dropped, but Ashley’s relative was nailed for reckless driving.

“The state calls Jilica Smith.”

Jilica was a black woman who wore part of her hair in a ponytail, and had a cascade of hair falling down the right side of her face. She wore tight white pants, a pink shirt, large hoop earrings, and had her voluminous black purse slung over her left shoulder.

Lisset Hanewicz did the questioning.

Jilica said she was twenty-one years old, and had been twenty at the time of the incident. She knew Janet Camacho because Janet was the mother of her cousin’s children. With a deep and musical voice, Jilica came off as far more mature than the previous witness. She explained that she knew Joshua because he was Janet’s brother, and she’d known Sarah through Joshua.

She did not know Rachel Wade. Not then, not now. On the night of April 14, 2009, Jilica had been at Janet’s house on 59th Street in Pinellas Park. She was living with Janet at the time. She didn’t live with Janet anymore. There were four people there that night: she and Janet, Joshua and Sarah. At some point, Jilica was outside with a friend, sitting in a car for about thirty minutes. Janet was outside, too, at some point. “She was in a green van, I think.” Janet was in a car parked “in her yard,” and the witness was sitting in a car “parked across the street.”

ASA Hanewicz asked if a vehicle caught her attention as she was sitting.

Yes, it did, Jilica replied. She saw a red car pass by. It caught her attention because it was speeding. She didn’t recognize the driver, but she saw blond hair.

“I couldn’t really make out if it was a boy or a girl,” Jilica testified. The car came to a halt at a stop sign at the end of the block, and maybe “she” drove past a second time.

“I don’t know. It was just driving by,” Jilica said.

When the vehicle was approaching, she was facing it. After it passed, Jilica had to turn around to see it. The vehicle Janet was in was facing in the opposite direction, so she could more comfortably watch what the car did after it passed.

At some point during the evening, Jilica was standing outside the house “texting or something,” when Janet and Sarah came out of the house and announced they were going to McDonald’s. That sounded good, so Jilica decided to ride along with them. The three young women got into Sarah’s green minivan.

Hanewicz asked the witness to whom did the car belong. Jilica said she didn’t know—just that Sarah was always driving it.