- To friends and family, Rachelle Waterman was a fairly
typical teenage girl. Clever at school, she was a keen singer in the high-school
choir and a star member of the volleyball team.
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- She was also an outgoing and popular young woman who,
in common with many 16-year-olds, worried that she was overweight, moaned
that life was boring in the small town in Alaska where she lived, and rowed
incessantly with her mother.
-
- There was no outward sign that Rachelle was anything
other than a normal, angst-ridden, teenager. Until, that is, her mother
was murdered.
-
- Rachelle, according to police evidence, was crying crocodile
tears for a mother she had secretly hated and wanted dead. And she was
hiding a horrific and gruesome secret from her family. Not only had she
allegedly orchestrated her mother's murder but she had callously kept an
online diary for more than a year. In it, she had written down her most
intimate secrets for the world to see.
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- Only the day after forensic tests confirmed what Alaskan
state troopers suspected ñ that the body found inside the still
smouldering mini-van was, indeed, that of Mrs Waterman ñ they arrested
Rachelle along with two local men with whom the schoolgirl had had sexual
liaisons.
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- Rachelle, police had discovered, had become depressed
and despondent and, during the previous months, increasingly hostile towards
her mother. She had allegedly planned the murder ñ which was carried
out by her former lovers ñ and then casually commented in her "diary"
four days after its execution: "Just to let everyone know, my mother
was murdered."
-
- The story of how Rachelle Waterman allegedly committed
matricide ñ a crime for which she and her co-conspirators now face
charges of first-degree murder ñ makes compulsive, if macabre, reading.
Her internet diary, created on the LiveJournal website, has been visited
by thousands eager to read the words of the teenager nicknamed "the
LiveJournal murderer": if she is found guilty, Rachelle's ghoulish
claim to notoriety will be as the blogging world's first killer.
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- Rachelle, pale and pretty but plump in a photograph ñ
which has recently been removed ñ on her school website, began having
arguments with her mother as soon as she reached her teens. Their conflicts
were not out of the ordinary: they rowed about her school grades (which
were slipping slightly), her habit of staying out later than allowed and
the suitability of her clothes.
-
- But her "diary" entries revealed another, more
disturbed, side to Rachelle: that of a young woman increasingly disillusioned
with her parents and her life, and possibly clinically depressed. In her
initial pieces, written when she was 15, in September 2003, she says: "I
live in the suckiest place on earth, a shit hole in Alaska." She talks
of hating her breasts, which she thinks are too big, and her anxieties
about her rows with her mother, who was a popular classroom assistant and
did voluntary work with the local scouts and brownies.
-
- Chillingly, nine months before her mother's murder, she
writes: "Don't you hate it when the little pieces of shit pile up
to the point you're at breaking point and you want to scream and cry at
the same time. I don't know weather [sic] to kill somebody, myself, or
just curl up into a fetal position under my covers and lay there for a
couple of days. Either wayÖ I'm not good. Current mood: depressed."
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- According to police evidence, the teenager recruited
Jason Arrant and Brian Radel, both 24 and both former sexual partners,
to commit the murder. Arrant was a janitor at Craig High School and Radel
had owned a store where Rachelle had worked in her spare time. Together,
the trio plotted how to kill Mrs Waterman. It is believed that they abandoned
at least one attempt in September.
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- Then, three weeks ago, she allegedly told her two former
lovers that she would be out of town on the weekend of November 14, playing
volleyball in Anchorage. Her father Carl "Doc" Waterman, an estate
agent and one of the town's most prominent figures, would be away on business,
she told them. Geoffrey, her older brother, no longer lived in the family
home. With Mrs Waterman home alone, it was the perfect opportunity for
them to abduct and murder her.
-
- Early on the morning of November 14, police say that
Arrant dropped Radel, a powerfully built, shaven-headed man, near the Waterman's
home. He forced Mrs Waterman into her own mini-van, then drove out of Craig
to a rendezvous with Arrant. Rachelle's original plan had been to stage
what would appear to be a drink-driving accident. But by the time the two
men met up Mrs Waterman was already dead after being bludgeoned over the
head several times by Radel. It was a beating that shocked police officers
were to describe later as "brutal".
-
- In a quick change of plan, the two men then drove the
van and Mrs Waterman's body to an abandoned logging camp, 30 miles outside
town. There, they doused her body and the van with petrol and set fire
to them. Then they drove Arrant's truck to another remote spot, where they
burned it too to destroy any remaining evidence.
-
- When a local man on a hunting trip chanced across the
charred remains in the burnt-out car, local police knew at once that, with
a population of just 2,000 in the coastal town which can be reached only
by aeroplane, the chances were very high that the murderer was local.
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- Robert Claus, one of the state troopers, was friendly
with the Waterman family. He was aware of the strained relationship between
mother and daughter and of Rachelle's former relationships with Arrant
and Radel. Police decided to take Arrant in for questioning. He had no
alibi for the day of the murder and quickly admitted to his part in the
crime, naming Radel as an accomplice.
-
- Initially both men tried to protect Rachelle, but they
confessed when they realised that they were facing murder charges. Four
days later, on Friday, November 19, the teenager was arrested at her family
home. The following Wednesday, on the eve of the Thanksgiving bank holiday,
all three were charged with first-degree murder at Craig district court.
Rachelle, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, looked ‐anxious
and withdrawn as she listened solemnly while the charges were read out.
-
- Only then was the true extent of Rachelle's website diary,
which linked her with her mother's murder, revealed. While her earlier
entries were mainly concerned with films, music and teenage anxieties about
weight, increasingly they began to centre on the conflict with her mother.
With each entry, her references to her mother ñ whom she referred
to as the "female parental unit" ñ became more and more
cold.
-
- On the eve of Rachelle's high-school prom, she and her
mother had a furious row about the dress she intended to wear. On her website,
she writes about how "the parental female unit spent a while on how
I am ugly and fat and couldn't pull it off".
-
- A month later, on April 16, more ominously, she writes:
"I had a bad night and a bad day. This is my warning to all of you:
if you piss me off you die."
-
- Further entries reveal that Mrs Waterman is becoming
increasingly concerned about Rachelle's weight gain, her choice of friends
and clothes, and her deteriorating school grades. According her daughter,
Mrs Waterman wanted Rachelle to go to a "fat camp" to lose weight.
-
- In June, Rachelle tells how she stormed out of the house
after a row, failing to come home. The next day she writes: "Well,
I am grounded, last night my mom went psycho bitch on me and cast me out.
So I went to crash at someone's house then she freaked out, wanted me home
in case I told someone. Wee for loving parental units."
-
- By late summer, the police believe, Rachelle had begun
hatching plans to have her mother murdered. On September 13 she writes
a poem entitled Ode to Suicide. It reads: "Pain consumes my body,
eating awayÖ Tearing at my flesh, no more tears left to cry. Nobody
loves me, nobody cares. Why continue on? I want out of these snares."
-
- Within another month Rachelle is grounded again, this
time for receiving 89 per cent in a maths tests. "I have computer
restrictions," she complains.
-
- On October 16 she records that she has got hold of benzoic
acid, a food preservative. Then moans because it is not lethal.
-
- Almost a month later Rachelle travels to Anchorage to
represent her school in the state volleyball championships. That weekend,
while she is being feted on court, her team coming fifth in the tournament,
her mother is being bludgeoned to death by Rachelle's former lovers. When
she and her father ñ who was away on business in Juneau ñ
arrive home the next day, they find Mrs Waterman missing and telephone
the police. That night, knowing that her mother is dead, Rachelle shows
no remorse or concern, writing in a carefree manner about shopping: "It
was an okay trip. Did shopping, played v-ball and that's about it. Not
much to tell, well I got these incredibly awesome boots that go up to my
knees. I absolutely love them."
-
- Four days later Rachelle makes her final entry: the chilling,
unemotional disclosure that her mother has been killed. "Just to let
everyone know my mother was murdered," she writes. "I won't have
computer acess [sic] until the weekend or so because the police took away
my computer to go through the hard drive.
-
- "I thank everyone for their thoughts and e-mails.
I hope to talk to you all when I get my computer back." The next day
Rachelle was arrested.
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- Last Sunday, under overcast, grey skies, Mrs Waterman
was buried in the local cemetery in Craig. Almost the entire community
of the small town attended the service. "Doc" Waterman and his
son helped carry the coffin of the woman who was loved by the community
in which she had spent her entire life: by everyone, that is, except perhaps
her own daughter.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.
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- http://telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/12/05/water
05.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/12/05/ixworld.html
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