Journal of the Dead (18 page)

After the reporters hiked down into Rattlesnake Canyon with Mark Maciha and fought to see the world through Kodikian’s eyes, they usually swung back to Carlsbad and interviewed a man who never would, Chunky Click. He’d welcome them into his office, where they would immediately be confronted, everywhere they looked, by the face of John Wayne.

Click had been collecting Duke memorabilia since he was a kid, and when he became sheriff, he transferred as much of the collection as he could to his office. There were movie posters, autographed black-and-white still photos, line drawings, all of them framed. None of these, however, compared to the centerpiece that sat immediately behind his desk: a bookshelf with seventeen china plates from the Franklin Mint, each with a different
rendering of Wayne from one of his movies. There was Wayne bulldogging up the beach in
The Sands of Iwo Jima,
Wayne wielding one eye and a pistol in
True Grit,
Wayne the Searcher, Wayne the Flying Tiger. They gleamed like altarpieces. Click would talk Wayne as long as you liked.

Another thing that caught the eye were his pistols and gun belt. When he wasn’t wearing them, they were usually hanging from the coat rack, two steely Colt .45s with butterscotch grips inlaid with Masonic emblems of silver, turquoise, and coral. His tooled leather gun belt, equally elaborate with his initials in silver and gold, had holsters specially crafted by inmates at the Terrell Unit, the prison in east Texas that hosts the state’s death row. Click was friends with the warden. Getting the holsters properly sized had been tricky since Click couldn’t just give the prisoners one of his guns. The sheriff solved the problem by laying a revolver on the Xerox machine and faxing a copy over to the prison. It was a no-nonsense solution, similar to the way he would come to view the Kodikian case.

“I don’t care what anyone says,” he professed, “people just don’t do that to their friends. I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy. I believe he had every intention of killing him.”

In the months immediately following the killing, the visceral disbelief Click had first felt upon reading the journal gradually became refined into a targeted argument as to why Kodikian’s story, as he joked, “didn’t hold water.” Along with the arguments Mark Maciha was making about how Kodikian and Coughlin should have been able to find their way out of Rattlesnake Canyon, Click added crime scene evidence and what little he had learned about Kodikian’s character. He had read Kodikian’s ’97
travel piece, and latched on to the episode where he nearly got lost in White Sands during the sandstorm.

“I think that’s where he got the idea that he could have some kind of adventure in the desert, back in ninety-seven” the sheriff said. “He went to the desert on that trip, camped out in it. He knew what he was doing. He says so himself in that article that he spent only fourteen nights with a roof over his head. That means he camped out over fifty times. I don’t care what anyone says, this guy was comfortable roughing it.” (Conveniently enough, he left out the part where Kodikian returns to his car to find he’d locked his keys inside.)

One of the things that bothered Click most was the unopened can of beans the investigators had found. If the friends had been so desperate, Click said, then why hadn’t they at least attempted to drink the syrupy water and sodium solution the beans were packed in? Severely dehydrated people had been known to drink a lot worse (the radiator coolant from Langewiesche’s story comes to mind). “It would seem to me like the most basic thing,” said the sheriff. “If you have water, or any kind of liquid, you’d try to drink it.”

The sheriff was also quick to grab on to Maciha’s discovery of what appeared to be their first night’s campsite, a mile and half up the canyon. “That’s an awful long way to go if you’re just looking for a place to pitch a tent for the night,” he said. “It’s just one more thing.” Could Kodikian have lured his friend off the trail, then intentionally hidden the map? Could they have been closet homosexuals in a lover’s quarrel? The sheriff seemed certain the answer was anything but the one Raffi had already given.

Most troubling of all was the torched sleeping bag. Rattlesnake Canyon brimmed with brush fields and dry wood, including a dead
walnut tree immediately behind the campsite where Mattson had found Kodikian. Why, Click wondered, had they bothered to burn something as tentatively flammable as a sleeping bag for a signal fire? Had they wanted to, they could have run around the canyon floor with a burning stick and started a wildfire so large that it would have been impossible not to notice. Faced with death, what man would hesitate at committing arson in the middle of nowhere?

Click saw only one explanation: “He killed him in his sleep, then burned the sleeping bag to hide the evidence.”

Trace evidence from the crime lab in Albuquerque added weight to this argument; they had found sleeping bag fibers on the hilt of the folding knife Kodikian had used to kill Coughlin. Kodikian could have wiped the blade clean on the sleeping bag after he had used it for cutting cactus fruit, or their supposed suicide attempt, of course, but Gary McCandless—another Kodikian skeptic—doubted it. “The fact that the fibers were found on the hilt, and not in the stab wound or on the blade itself, makes sense,” he said. “The fibers would have been pushed up into the hilt as the knife penetrated the bag, then Coughlin’s chest.”

Not even the journal, the strongest piece of evidence supporting Kodikian’s story, made Click second-guess himself. He still pointed to what David Coughlin
hadn’t
written in it as the most important insight it offered: “Never, not once, does Coughlin write in that notebook that he wanted to die, or that he wanted Raffi to kill him,” he said.

“But what do I know?” he’d ask reporters after offering his speculations; “I’m just a redneck.” The obvious analogy was that he had cast himself as the moral enforcer in an old western. There he was, sitting in his office surrounded by his Wayne posters, wearing
his pistols and his star, playing the part everyone expected him to play: the straight-shootin’ sheriff for whom everything was as black and white as a John Ford movie. Sometimes, when the answers eluded him, it seemed as if he would break character and admit that Kodikian
could
be telling the truth, but he’d remember himself. Somebody had to point out that, if Kodikian’s story seemed unbelievable, the reason was probably because it just wasn’t true.

All of these arguments sounded good—a crafty, cold-blooded murder was infinitely more accessible than the story Kodikian had told—but Gary Mitchell could atomize these theories unless the state provided the all-important motive. “There is a motive; we just haven’t found it yet,” Click was saying with a wink at the beginning of October, knowing full well that there was a police report citing Terry Connelly’s statement about Coughlin and Swan having “been intimate.” But by early November, neither Connelly nor Swan herself had come forward to confirm it, and with the trial less than two months away, Click was growing desperate.

As a last-ditch effort, he and McCandless decided to send Eddie Carrasco to Boston to team up with Travaglia for another round of questioning. It was a long shot, but maybe it was just what they needed to flush out the motive: a meeting between the city cop and the country cop.

Eddie Carrasco caught a flight east from El Paso on November 14. To save the county’s money, he flew into Providence, Rhode Island, then rented a car and drove into Boston. It was the second
time in his life he’d ever been to the East Coast. He got stuck in traffic for two hours on the way in, then lost in downtown Boston. In the end, he had to go to three different buildings, and ask directions from two different cops, before he found the FBI field office. Of course, some would say that happens to almost everybody who visits Boston.

Special Agent Travaglia was waiting for Carrasco, and the two men went right to work. Carrasco had only three days, so Travaglia had set up as many interviews as possible beforehand. Minutes after Carrasco arrived, Sonnet Frost walked into the office. She was friendly and open, and wanted to help, Carrasco could tell, but she had no more info than she had already told Travaglia. She found the “homosexual tension” theory totally improbable, a sentiment that would later be echoed by everyone who knew both men well. But she still had her doubts about Raffi’s story. “As a result of the interview, Frost did express her skepticism to the defendant’s account and suspected malicious intent or ulterior motives,” he later wrote in his report. “However, Frost had no information or inferences by anyone to believe that was the case.”

That afternoon, the two men drove out to Wellesley to interview the only man who had allegedly claimed to know of a possible ulterior motive: Terrance Connelly. The investigators had high hopes that together they could get the younger cop to affirm the statement he had supposedly made to Cunningham on August 9, about Coughlin and Swan “having been intimate on one occasion.” If he was willing to swear to it and it was true, they might be able to confront Swan with his statement and see if she would admit to an affair.

Connelly has never consented to an interview, so accounts of
the meetings come exclusively from Carrasco and Travaglia. According to them, as soon as the three of them sat down in the interview room at the Wellesley Police Department, the investigators’ hopes began to vanish.

“During the interview, it became obvious Connolly’s behavioral reactions were consistent as not being completely truthful,” Carrasco stated in his report. “He [said he] never had any problem with the victim or the defendant or negative thoughts towards either. He heard only good about the defendant. No one ever told him or made an inference about the victim and Swan having a sexual relationship.”

According to Carrasco, Travaglia became openly frustrated at Connelly. “He yelled at him,” Carrasco recalled. “He said something to the effect of ‘Hey, buster, that’s not what you said when I talked to you before. This is serious business; a man is dead. You better start cooperating.’”

Carrasco asked him if he’d be willing to take a polygraph test. Connelly said he’d do it, but he wanted to talk to Chief Cunningham first. The interview fell apart, and the two investigators told him they’d come back the next morning.

After meeting with Connelly, Carrasco and Travaglia dropped by the Coughlin house on Pilgrim Road. The detective gave the Coughlins a large envelope containing Dave’s clothes and personal items, and Bob Coughlin reiterated his belief in Kodikian’s story, and told Carrasco that he thought the case might result in plea bargain.

“What are your feelings about that?” the detective asked.

“Well, before anything’s done, I want to make sure that there’s nothing else,” Carrasco remembered Bob Coughlin saying.

When they returned to Wellesley the following day, Chief Cunningham joined the investigators and reminded Connelly, once again, about what he had said the day after the killing. And once again Connelly insisted that the chief had “misunderstood” him.

Eddie Carrasco asked Connelly again if he’d take a lie detector test; this time the young deputy hesitated. “He said something about wanting to talk to a lawyer first for advice,” Carrasco recalled. The detective kept the heat on, asking him if he’d at least make a taped statement that could later be run through a computer voice stress analyzer. Terry Connelly demurred.

“I believe what happened was that Terry thought long and hard about the ramifications of his statement,” Travaglia later said. “[He thought], ‘Hey, I may be called as a witness in trial. I better really rethink my position.’”

Travaglia and Carrasco still had a thin hope that some of the people who had witnessed Connelly’s earlier statement would confirm it and close a circle around him, but it soon became clear that the investigators were fighting a losing battle. Arnold Wakelin, the executive director for the town of Wellesley, “had no recollection” of Connelly even meeting with Cunningham. Chris Clark, the assistant director, did remember the meeting, but said that Connelly’s answer to Cunningham’s question about Coughlin and Swan having had a sexual relationship was more of an “impressionable shrug.” Whether the Coughlins had been in contact with Connelly, or with David’s coworkers at the town hall, is unknown, but it was clear that by November no one in Wellesley was vocalizing any doubt about Kodikian’s story. A few months later, Connelly left his job at the Wellesley Police Department.