Read Journal of the Dead Online
Authors: Jason Kersten
People of every kind continue to die in the southern deserts—adventure travelers, desert lovers, nature seekers—but the kind it kills most are still the Spanish speakers. It kills them more than ever, an average of nearly four hundred a year. Their deaths are so
common that they make national news only when an especially large group gets lost and wiped out while on its way to a better opportunity. The names of the places they die are now also called sectors—Del Rio Sector, Marfa Sector, El Paso Sector—divisions of the U.S. Border Patrol, which usually finds the bodies. Their stories are case files.
Given the sheer volume of migrant fatalities, the U.S. Border Patrol seemed like the best place to begin a search for precedents of mercy killings in the desert. Almost every agent with a few years of field experience has come across the sad figure of a migrant’s corpse curled up in the brush, a victim of dehydration or hypothermia. But while there are a few tales of lost migrants hanging themselves from trees, and plenty about bandits murdering isolated trekkers, there appear to be no documented cases of Kodikian-style mercy killings. Out of over a hundred active and retired agents who’ve served on the southern border, not one of them had ever encountered, or even heard of, a similar case.
“All of us have seen a lot,” said Frank Hawkins, a retired Border Patrol agent with over twenty years in the field. “But it is very uncommon to see a mercy-killing or a suicide.”
Hawkins, who is now a Episcopal priest in Rosenberg, Texas, believes the reasons for a lack of migrant mercy killings are very specific: “A smuggler puts together a group of aliens on the other side of the border. Among this herd are a few folks who may know each other or even be related to one another, but most groups are made up of total strangers. There may be a husband and wife traveling together, or two cousins, but they are only two out of a large group. The smuggler stresses the necessity of leaving behind anyone who can’t physically endure the hardship of the trip.”
“If an agent was to encounter [a mercy killing], I would think it would have made headlines,” said another agent who’s been on the border nine years. “I read about the Carlsbad situation, and I have a little trouble swallowing the story—that’s my personal opinion.”
Although there seem to be no documented cases of mercy killing in America’s deserts, there’s at least one story, unknown to anyone involved in the case, that is strikingly similar to Kodikian’s. It comes from the Great Sahara, a desert so old, hot, and mercilessly vast that seventeen Chihuahuans could fit inside it. In 1991, the noted author William Langewiesche was visiting Tamanrasset, Algeria, when a local judge showed him a diary the police had recovered from the desert near the Niger border. It had belonged to a Belgian woman who perished along with her husband and five-year-old boy when their own road trip went terribly wrong. Although the diary itself is now lost in the turmoil that has since swept through that land, Langewiesche had a chance to read it, and wrote about the remarkable story it told in his book,
Sahara Unveiled:
Partway to the border, as the desert descended into the great southern flats, the Belgians took a wrong turn. When they understood their mistake, they still had plenty of gas, and they set out to retrace their route. This was not easy, since the ground was hard-packed and rocky. But getting lost was part of the adventure, a memorable game for carefree Europeans. We know this because the woman later wrote it down. People dying of thirst in the desert often leave a written record. They have time to think. Writing denies the incredible isolation.
The Peugeot broke down. The Belgians rationed their water
and lay in the shade of a tarpaulin. The rationing did not extend their lives; they might as well have drunk their fill, since the human body loses water at a constant rate, even when dehydrated. The only way to stretch your life in the hot desert is to reduce your sweating: stay put, stay shaded, and keep your clothes on.
The Belgians hoped a truck would come along. For a week they waited, scanning the horizon for a dust-tail or the glint of a windshield. This was a place, more or less, where the maps still insist on showing a road. The woman felt the upwellings of panic. She began to write more frantically, filling pages in single sessions. The water ran low, then dry, and the family grew horribly thirsty. After filtering it through a cloth, they drank the car’s radiator fluid. They arrived at the danger stage.…
After the radiator fluid was gone, the Belgians started sipping gasoline. You would too. Call it
petroposia.
Saharans have recommended it to me as a way to stay off battery acid. The woman wrote that it seemed to help. They also drank their urine. She reported that it was difficult at first, but that afterward it wasn’t so bad.
The boy was the weakest, and was suffering terribly. In desperation, they burned their car, hoping someone would see the smoke. No one did. The boy could no longer swallow. His name was Maurice. His parents killed him to stop his pain. Later, the husband cut himself open and allowed his wife to drink his blood. At his request, she broke his neck with a rock. Alone now, she no longer wanted to live. Still, the Sahara was fabulous, she wrote, and she was glad to have come. She would do it again. She regretted only one thing—that she had not seen Sylvester Stallone in
Rombo
III. Those were her last lines. She had lost her mind, but through her confusion must have remembered the ease of death in movies.
Movies, in fact, are the only places were mercy killing in survival situations seems common, specifically war movies. The scene in which a terminally wounded soldier begs a comrade in arms for a “mercy bullet” is frequent enough that we don’t think twice when we see it, and Raffi would later say that his ordeal in Rattlesnake Canyon “was the closest thing to what I’d imagine combat is like.” He probably got the analogy straight from Hollywood, because in real combat mercy killings are either not talked about or are extremely rare. Informal inquires on three different Vietnam veterans newsgroups visited by thousands produced not a single vet who had ever even heard of a mercy killing in combat, much less committed one. “That’s Hollywood shit,” one vet wrote about the mercy bullet scenario. “You keep on going till you can’t go no more.”
It would turn out that the closest thing to a legal precedent for Raffi’s case came from maritime law. The sea, like the desert, can drive one to desperate acts, and over the centuries a few men have been prosecuted for committing homicides that, under the conditions, were morally defensible. One of the most infamous cases comes from Britain.
In 1884, a racing yacht named the
Mignonette
set sail from England, bound for Australia. The owner of the yacht had hired Captain Thomas Dudley and a crew of three other men to transport the ship all the way to Sydney, but they never made it. Far off
the coast of West Africa, the
Mignonette
foundered in a storm and went to the bottom.
Dudley and his crew managed to escape in a dinghy, but their troubles were just beginning. They had almost no food and water, and, adrift hundreds of miles from the nearest shipping lane, their chances of survival were small. After nineteen days of seeing neither land nor sail, they were beyond desperate. They were starving and desiccated, their tongues black and swollen. The youngest member of the crew, a fourteen-year-old boy named Richard Parker, was particularly bad off, having drunk sea water despite the warnings of Dudley and the other men. As Parker lay semiconscious in the bow of the dinghy, Dudley made a decision that would go down in the history of criminal law.
Normally, castaways faced with death by starvation drew lots. The loser sacrificed his life for the others, who resorted to the taboo of cannibalism. The practice was common enough to have a term, “the custom of the sea,” but Dudley and his crewmates forwent the formality of chance. Knowing that Parker was likely to die soon anyway, they cut his throat, drank his blood, and survived another eight days—long enough to be spotted and rescued by a German vessel,
The Horatio.
Upon being rescued, Dudley told the
Horatio’s
captain—and later the British authorities—the truth. He could have hidden the killing easily, or even simply said that lots had been drawn, but he was a rigidly honest man. The British courts, which had long been searching for a case that would allow them to establish a harsh precedent against such practices, aggressively prosecuted Dudley and his first mate, Edwin Stephens, for murder. At their trial, Regina
v. Dudley and Stephens,
the crown rewarded Dudley’s
forthrightness by sentencing him and his first mate to death by hanging.
Luckily for the sailors, the public outcry against the sentence was so great that Queen Victoria immediately commuted the sentence to six months’ hard labor. The men served their time, then lived out the rest of their lives haunted by the ghost of a fourteen-year-old boy.
I
the weeks after the killing in Rattlesnake Canyon, Mark Maciha watched the incident evolve from a small newswire story out of Albuquerque into an international one. He now spent most of his time leading reporters and camera crews from as far as London down to the spot where Mattson had found Kodikian. Baby-sitting journalists, who often forgot to bring enough water themselves and had a way of turning the desert into an unnaturally noisy place, was not why he became a ranger. He preferred to be alone in the wilderness and cultivate its solitude. He put up with the reporters stoically, though, answering all their questions directly, with enough words to convey that he did not believe Raffi Kodikian’s story.
“It just doesn’t add up,” was the quote he most often gave them. When they asked why, he let the landscape do his talking for him. He took them to the overlook where Mattson had first spotted the
campsite, then pointed out that it had taken only ten minutes to walk to a point where the campsite could be seen. On the trail down, he stood them next to rock cairns and asked them to spot the next marker, which they always did. Once they reached the campsite, the reporters were confronted by a three-foot-high pile of stones, the same ones that had covered David Coughlin’s body, and Maciha encouraged them to try lifting some of the bigger ones. After they hefted a few, groaning beneath their weight, he asked them whether they could imagine lifting
all
of those stones, then carrying them thirty feet if they’d had virtually no food or water for three days as Raffi had claimed. He would gesture to a six-hundred-foot peak behind him, and explain that if the friends had climbed it, they would have seen the road they came in on.
But he saved his best argument for last. He asked the reporters to lead the way out, and they usually managed to sniff out the trail while he followed behind. There was only one reporter, Bill Gifford from
Philadelphia Magazine,
whose tour resulted in an unfavorable impression of Maciha’s theory. Gifford would later write that, during his visit, Maciha himself had led the way back, and walked right past the cairn marking the exit trail. “I always miss that,” Gifford had quoted Maciha as saying.
A month after the killing, Maciha made his way down into the canyon again for the umpteenth time, this time carrying with him photographs that had been developed from David Coughlin’s camera. In and of themselves they were unremarkable—shots of the canyon from various perspectives near the bottom. Two of them, however, showed the friends’ tent, pitched and ready to be slept in, sitting in a completely different location than where the rangers had
found them. Perhaps, Maciha wondered, if he could find the spot where the photographs were taken, he might find some remnant of their night there that would add another piece to the puzzle.
Once the ranger reached the canyon floor, he studied the photographs for points of reference—a familiar ridge line, promontory, or bend in the dry riverbed. Most of them seemed to be from a northern perspective, looking south, so he hiked north along the canyon floor, stopping every few minutes to line up another photograph. About a mile north of the access trail, he turned west up a side canyon, off the trail entirely. In the photos with the tent, there was a natural stone bench jutting out from a rock face, and after hiking another ten minutes he stopped dead in his tracks when he realized he was staring at exactly that.
There was no doubt about it: the friends had spent at least a night there. Maciha could even see a patch of cleared ground that still bore a slight impression from the tent. The ranger began searching the immediate vicinity, looking for anything they may have left behind. After about fifteen minutes of nosing around, he’d found a few boot prints, but other than the tent impression there was absolutely nothing. “Leave no trace …” the park’s backcountry camping guidelines read. Except for the tent imprint, it appeared the friends had done exactly that.
Why had they come all the way up here?
the ranger wondered as he prepared to head back. The spot was completely off the trail, isolated, a long way to go for a couple of guys who were supposedly planning on staying only one night. It would be another one of those prickly pear questions, the answer known only to Kodikian himself. By now Maciha was getting used to them.
As he turned to go, something on the ground caught the
ranger’s eye. It was about twenty yards away, a paper of some kind, rammed into the spiny base of a sotol plant. He must have missed it on the way in as he was attempting to line up the rock formation with the photographs. When he got within a few feet of it, he knew what it was immediately. He had seen it a thousand times before. It was a Trails Illustrated topographical map of Carlsbad Caverns National Park, identical to the ones they sold back at the visitor center. The $7.95 price tag on the front of this one indicated that that was exactly where it had come from.
Maciha reached for it, careful to avoid the sotol spines protecting it as effectively as punji stakes. How it had gotten there was anybody’s guess. Whether it was another work of the wind, or someone had intentionally hidden it, was impossible to tell. He placed it in a plastic bag.