Journal of the Dead (14 page)

Judge Lyons gave Raffi permission to leave Eddy County to visit
Mitchell, and he and his father made the three-hour drive up to Ruidoso. As they drove north to Roswell, then east, the sun-bitten land gave way to cultivated fields, which in turn gave way to the dark and crowded pine forests of the Sacramento Mountains and New Mexico high country. It was a different world, Ruidoso, a mountain playground with casinos, a horse track, and a ski resort.

Mitchell’s office was a church of oak. Bookcases, paneling—all of it was natural and unfinished except for his desk, a huge and beautifully gnarled laminated crescent. On the wall behind it a large oil canvas depicted life on the range. Hal Kodikian left his son alone with the tall lawyer, and it was there, in that venerable den of rawhide and wood, that Gary Mitchell became the first person to hear Kodikian’s full version of what had transpired in Rattlesnake Canyon.

“He hadn’t told his father, or his mother, what had happened,” Mitchell said in a light New Mexico drawl. “That just wasn’t his way. He wanted to spare them the pain. You know, I’ve represented some evil men, but Raffi Kodikian isn’t one of them. His was a case of bad luck.”

As Mitchell listened to Raffi’s account of his and Dave’s ordeal in the canyon and the mercy killing, an old story his father once told him surfaced in memory: A man was driving down one of New Mexico’s empty highways when he suddenly came upon the burning wreck of a truck. The passerby pulled over to investigate and heard screams coming from the flame-engulfed cab. There was no way the passerby could reach the trucker, and when both men realized there was no hope, the trucker yelled for the passerby to kill him before he suffered the horrible death of being cooked alive. Since New Mexico is the kind of state where it’s typical for
people to carry guns in their cars, the passerby ran back to his car, grabbed his rifle, and shot the trucker dead. Other cars had stopped by then, too, but when the highway patrol finally arrived, none of the onlookers said anything about the shooting.

Mitchell couldn’t remember where or when the trucker incident had taken place. Maybe it never had; such legends came with the landscape. Whether it was real or not was less important to the lawyer than the idea that it could have been, and Raffi’s story was a living cousin. David Coughlin had been the trucker, Kodikian the passerby, and if the case went to trial, he would have to turn the jury into the approbative onlookers.

Another story Mitchell quickly latched on to was one of oldest in the West: the tenderfoot. Mitchell was a connoisseur of western lore; he had a degree in American history and kept in his truck a well-worn copy of Paul Horgan’s masterpiece
Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History,
which he dipped into between court sessions. But it didn’t take an expert to see that Kodikian fit the tenderfoot profile perfectly. He had come from the East, ignorant and overconfident when it came to the power of the desert. He had neglected to bring enough water with him, failed to mark his surroundings; and sure enough, tragedy had ensued. “These boys just didn’t know what they were getting into,” he would later say. “Raffi wants to live and write in a Hemingway style, but he doesn’t have the Hemingway ability to survive.”

But cases weren’t won on stories alone. They were won on the law, and in this department Mitchell knew that Raffi had a problem.

He told Raffi up front that his defense might have to somehow revolve around the idea that he wasn’t in his right mind when he killed Coughlin. In other words, insanity, but as far he knew insanity
had never been used in a case like his, simply because there had never been a case like his. Precedents were thin, which meant that defenses would be, too. In a worst-case scenario—a conviction—they could ask for a pardon, which he thought Raffi had a good chance of obtaining, thanks to the mitigating circumstances of their desert ordeal.

Insanity. Pardons. To Raffi, none of it sounded good.

Mitchell’s first job was to get Kodikian permission to return home to Pennsylvania. To get the process moving, all he had to do was pick up the phone and call his good friend and former client, Chunky Click. The two men had seen each other often since Click’s own trial. They lunched together whenever Mitchell breezed into Carlsbad for a court hearing, and if there was a trial, they might even end up drinking a few beers together at Click’s house. Mitchell knew Click well enough to know he’d want something before he’d support allowing Kodikian to leave the county. They jawed for a few minutes, inquiring about each other’s family, then he agreed to let the sheriff’s investigators interview Kodikian, provided they didn’t ask him any questions about what happened after the friends had arrived in the park.

The interview took place in the sheriff’s office, on Friday, August 13. Kodikian, Mitchell, Eddie Carrasco, and John Andrews sat down in the conference room, and Raffi told the investigators about the road trip, naming the cities and places they’d visited, and any addresses he could remember. Carrasco then left the conference room, then Jim Ballard came in with a search warrant for an example of Kodikian’s handwriting. Also present was Hal
Kodikian, who watched quietly as his son filled in the standard forms with letters of the alphabet, days of the week, names, and occupations. Afterward Ballard read from a copy of the journal and asked Raffi to transcribe. This was particularly important, because the investigators had noticed earlier that two of the journal entries were signed “David” and appeared to be in a different handwriting than the rest of the content. One was from Friday, August 4; the other from the Saturday, August 5, David Coughlin’s last day of life.

“I do not know what to do right now,” Ballard slowly dictated from the journal, “but I am in utter agony and I know you would understand.”

Kodikian began to write, then stopped. He asked his father to leave the room, sobbed quietly for a few moments, then continued. It was the first time Kodikian showed remorse in front of the investigators. After he was finished, Ballard put the test in an envelope and mailed it to the U.S. Secret Service office in Albuquerque for handwriting analysis.

D
avid Coughlin’s memorial service was held on a rainy Saturday afternoon a week after the killing. It was the kind of warm, airy drizzle that comes to eastern Massachusetts during the late summer, barely a tenth of an inch, but enough to make a few of the mourners wonder.

“Dave definitely would have considered that funny,” one of them later said. “I could almost hear him laughing at it, saying, ‘It just figures the damn water would come
now.’”

Only hours before the ceremony began, Judge Lyons had given Kodikian permission to return home—an unusual privilege for a man charged with murder. Most of the guests at Coughlin’s funeral had not yet heard the news that his killer had been set free. Quite a few of them, in fact, had never even heard of Kodikian before the killing, and were surprised that the newspaper and television reports were referring to him as David’s “best friend.” It was plain enough from the turnout that Coughlin had a lot friends. More
than three hundred mourners filled the pews at Saint James the Great Catholic Church, a grand and elegant brick house of worship next to Route 9 in Wellesley.

The list of speakers was long. There were people from college, people from the town hall, people from high school whom he hadn’t spoken to in years. Over the past week, Kodikian’s bizarre story of what happened had made Coughlin’s death larger than his life; many of his friends had been unable to begin processing the pain because they didn’t have a clear picture of what had happened. Many never would. But on that day, at least, they tried to put aside their astonishment and speculation and remember their friend.

Coughlin’s family sat in the front pews, the eyes of the entire congregation upon them. They had come to say good-bye to their son and brother, but people were also looking to them in order to know how to be. So far, they had remained silent about their position on Kodikian’s story, avoiding a merciless media assault. Outside the church, camera crews from the Boston TV stations were setting up, their lenses trained on the doors in order to make brutally public that awful, personal loss on the family’s faces. Even now, reporters who had snuck in were sitting in the pews behind them, quietly taking notes, fishing for anything that would move the story forward. They would not be disappointed.

Toward the end of the ceremony, David’s brother, Michael, ascended the pulpit and began an emotional remembrance of his little brother. After telling an amusing story from their childhood in which David had once refused to eat his dinner beets, he drew some merciful laughter from the crowd, then at last made the family’s first public statement about the killing.

“This is very, very important to me,” he said, his eyes fixed on the nave. “Everyone here, please say a prayer for Raffi, because I know how much he loved David and I know how much my brother loved him.”

A heavy hush followed. How much of it was prayer, and how much of it was disbelief that Michael had expressed support for his brother’s killer so soon after his death, only the mourners know, but from that moment on, it was clear where the Coughlins stood: they believed Raffi. It came down to incredible heart and faith in their son’s choices, and a conscious decision not to embrace rage as a fulcrum to ease their loss. They had chosen the hardest road of all, and one that very few people at the funeral were prepared to go down at that point.

“Jaws dropped,” recalled Kristen Fischer, a childhood friend who was at the ceremony and is still mystified by Michael Coughlin’s words. “I mean, ‘Pray for
Raffi?’
What about pray for
David?”
Fischer had grown up right up the street from Coughlin and had actually been his first crush, one of those girls he liked but had been too shy to approach. In their junior year, however, Coughlin confessed his feelings for her in a letter. She never saw it. Perhaps sensing that his affections wouldn’t be returned, he crumpled it up and threw it away, but it came back to haunt him. Fischer’s brother, who was friends with David’s sister, Kathy, was over visiting the Coughlins and spied the discarded letter in a garbage can. Seeing his sister’s name at the top, he couldn’t resist fishing it out and reading it.

“It was a crush letter. It said things like, ‘I really like you, I haven’t been able to tell you’—the whole thing. And my brother just opened it up and pulled it out and read the whole thing in front of all his high-school friends. And they’re laughing away,
putting their feet up and joking, and David came in. My brother told me that his face just got bright red, then he grabbed the letter and left. He didn’t say a word.”

Coughlin’s contained reaction to what must have been one of his life’s most embarrassing moments, Fischer said, was indicative of his personality as a whole. She believes he would have faced his ordeal in the canyon with calmness and determination, and, more important, wouldn’t have placed his friend in the position of being the vehicle of his death.

“I could see him jumping off a cliff before he asked his best friend to put a knife in his heart,” she said. “Even if Raffi had it in him to kill him, I could see David not wanting to bother somebody else or hurt somebody else, or bring somebody else into his pain and his world of trauma and trial and tribulation. I could not see him dragging somebody else into his problems.”

David Coughlin had always admired the local police officers. As a kid, his favorite game was cops and robbers, and his two best friends were both sons of Wellesley cops; as a man, he had several friends who were cops themselves. Like him, most of them were local boys of Irish descent who went to the same bars he did after a day of working for the town. He’d joke with them about being the desk jockey stuck with fielding the complaints about the same parking laws they were enforcing, and they considered him one of their own. When word of his strange death went through Wellesley PD, they were not about to sit around and wait for the feds to figure out if there was another reason Raffi might have wanted to kill Dave. They were going to look into it themselves.