Journal of the Dead (24 page)

“We had two bottles of Gatorade. I believe they were thirty-two-ounce bottles, but I’m not sure. It was that one,” he said, pointing again toward the evidence table, “and an identical bottle.”

“All right. So while we’re on the water situation, what we have here in the courtroom—one bottle of Gatorade, three bottles of water—was that all you had?”

“We had a second bottle of Gatorade, but we left it in the car because we didn’t want to have to carry it down in there. And we were just leaving it for when we got back. Our thought at the time was that we were just spending the night there. We weren’t planning on spending an entire day, we weren’t planning on touring the canyon. So we took less water than we needed.”

“Oh, one other thing,” Mitchell said. “Did you guys ever purchase a topo map?”

“Yes, we did. It suggested it in the literature that we had gotten at the visitor center, so I went into the bookstore and purchased one.”

“Do you know what happened to it?”

“I believe we actually burned it with some of the other stuff. We … by the middle of the week we were pretty much burning about anything that would burn.”

“So the map we have here in the courtroom may or may not be your map?”

“I don’t think it was. It’s a possibility, but I don’t think so.”

“All right. What time did you get to the parking spot, as best you recall, Raffi, where you guys go off down into Rattlesnake Canyon?”

“My best guess would be about six o’clock, maybe closer to seven.”

“All right, now I’ve got you up there, you guys take off. Raffi, I have a question for you: Did you ever stop at the top and take a good look all the way around you to orient yourself as to where you were?”

“We looked at the canyon on the way in. We were looking at what was in front of us. I’d say our first mistake—in hindsight—our first big mistake as far as getting lost went was when we got to the bottom of the entrance trail we didn’t turn around and look back at what we had just come down out of. We were looking ahead. We stopped for a couple of minutes and had some water, but we didn’t really look around to check out our surroundings.”

“By the time you got to the bottom of Rattlesnake Canyon, how much water did you have left?”

“I would guess we each had about a half bottle left. Half a pint for drinking. The third bottle we ended up using for cooking. We didn’t think about that when we went down, that we would need water for dinner. So we used that bottle for cooking and then we had the thirty-two-ounce bottle of Gatorade.”

“What happened to the Gatorade that night?”

“The Gatorade we drank that night.”

“And what happened to the water, the rest of the water that you had?”

“The one pint was used for dinner. The other two half pints were saved for the next morning for the hike out.”

“So you really have one pint of water left for the next morning?”

“When we woke up the next morning we had a pint of water left, yeah.”

“When were you out of water, Raffi?”

“We finished off that water when we got to what we thought was the exit trail.”

“What, in your mind, is the exit trail?”

“Well, it was the trail out of… The trail that we had hiked down into the canyon dumped out into a riverbed. We found a cairn and it looked familiar, and we saw a path going into the brush, so we presumed that that was the trailhead and we finished off our water there because we knew we had some more up at the car.”

“So, again: You’re at that point, do you drink the rest of your water?”

“Yes.”

“About what time of day was that?”

“I would say it was about eight or nine in the morning.”

“So at about eight or nine o’clock Thursday morning, the sixth of August, you’re out of water. Is that a fair statement?”

“Yes.”

“Just start telling the court what happened without my interruption,” Mitchell continued, and so Raffi took a deep breath and told the story of that first, lost day; how they had searched fruitlessly for the exit trail, sought shade, and ended up kneeling on the canyon floor and sucking rainwater from between the rocks and spitting it into their empty bottles.

“At the time I was unaware that you can’t ration water,” he said. “I’ve learned that, since.” He told of how they had found the cactus fruit, which became their only source of water and food for the next three days, and provided a long-awaited explanation to
Chunky Click’s favorite question: Why hadn’t they cracked the can of beans? “We presumed they were salted,” he explained, “and we knew that it was probably more of a gravy than water. So we really weren’t thinking about that, especially since we had the fruit.”

He told of how, as early as that night, they speculated about how long it would take before the rangers came looking for them. “We began right away questioning the way that the permit was taken,” he said, “whether or not the person that took it really knew where it was supposed to go and how it was supposed to be handled.” It was that same night that they saw the mysterious headlights that inspired the laborious climb out of the canyon the next morning.

“In hindsight, the only explanation I have is that we saw a plane, and we thought it was some kind of a park service truck that was doing a route,” he said of the lights, and described how the next morning they had left their tent and made the arduous hike up the canyon slopes.

“The tent was down on the canyon floor?” Judge Forbes interrupted. He, and everyone else in the courtroom, had been so still and quiet up to this point that it was easy to forget he was there, even though he was sitting right next to Raffi.

“The tent was down in the canyon floor,” Raffi affirmed.

“Could you see it?”

“We could when we were out on the edge of that mountain, at the tip,” Raffi replied, “but as we walked in we lost sight of the tent.”

Those would be the only two questions Judge Forbes would ask Raffi, who went on to describe their decision to remain up the plateau instead of continuing on to the plains below, where Dave
thought they might find a road. “There was no way that I was gonna be able to move, so I told him that if he felt he could get to it then he should go and send back help. He didn’t want to leave me behind and he didn’t want to go by himself,” he said, and briskly described their long afternoon in the plateau’s sweltering heat; the lack of shade, the biting ants, the exhaustion. When he spoke again, his voice was slow and heavy.

“Friday was when we first noticed the birds,” he said, as if he could see the buzzards circling in his memory. “They were probably about thirty feet above us. It would start with just one circling and then another one would come and then another one. And they would just stick around and watch us. We would wave our arms to let them know that we were still alive. And they’d disappear, and they would come back about an hour later.

“That was the first time that Dave and I had discussed suicide. My understanding of buzzards at the time was that they start before you’re done. That they’ll start attacking you as soon as you’re too tired to fight them. And the topic of ending it early came up. But that was it. It was just mentioned once and then we forgot about it for the time being.”

Raffi resumed his steady recounting of Friday, August 6; their attempt to drink urine on the way back to their tent; how they’d mistakenly thought the rangers had come and left water on the ranch foundation; and how Dave struggled the last few hundred yards back to the tent. It was then that they had seen what they thought was a new cairn.

“The first thing we both thought was that the rangers had come down and put that cairn up basically to cover their ass,” he told the courtroom, “so that nobody would say later the trail
wasn’t marked well enough.” He recounted how they resolved to try to pick up the cairn trail the next morning, then his disturbing vision of people in the canyon building machines to make their escape. “Me and Dave didn’t have what we needed to build the machines,” he said, “so we were gonna be stuck.”

He moved on to the following morning: their last, fruitless attempt to find the trail, the stone “SOS,” and the signal fire. “We started tossing everything we had that could burn into that fire, including my sleeping bag,” he said. “We threw mine as opposed to his because it was older and it was smaller and we just needed one for the night.”

So far, much of Raffi’s testimony about the ordeal in Rattlesnake Canyon had been consistent, in greater detail, with lines either he or Dave had written in the journal: “We will not let the buzzards get us alive…. Yesterday we never found the road but reached what seemed to be the furthest reaches of the park…. Nobody has come … returned to camp and built fire.” But by Saturday, their journal entries had mostly been either recollections of what they had already gone through, or good-bye notes to their family and friends—not what they were going through at the time. Consequently, the whole downward spiral that led up to the killing would be based almost entirely on Kodikian’s next words.

“And Saturday … Saturday was rough,” he said, slowing down again. “Saturday was long and mentally painful. I’ve never been so aware of every second that goes by. You didn’t have the distractions that you normally have in the day that speed things up. We just lied there. I remember several times looking at my watch and
thinking that an hour had gone by but it had been five or ten minutes. And mentally that was very taxing. Again, like going up the mountain that the end wasn’t in sight. It was Saturday that we cut the bottom out of the tent. The reason we did that was because the fly was open in front and in back and you could get a better breeze under the tent with just the fly than you could with the tent itself. So we dropped the tent part of it and we cut that out. And then we … A little while later we noticed that the rocks underneath the tent were cooler than the nylon or the plastic that we were lying on, so we cut the bottom of the tent out and just kept the outside of the tent to hold up the fly. And all day Saturday we moved rocks back and forth to get to the cooler rocks underneath. I remember we took small handfuls of pebbles and ran them down our back ’cause it felt like water. And that’s pretty much the way we spent Saturday. We had stopped eating the fruit. We weren’t at all hungry and it was almost like the water we were getting out of it was too thick with sugar, so we just stopped eating it, we had no desire to eat it.

“I remember that there was no cloud cover at all on Saturday. The sun was up the whole time and I remember thinking about the sun as like a guard, and his job was to beat us into submission and we just had to take it. Every once in a while a cloud would come and block the sun, and it was like someone was distracting it and we could breathe for a minute. And then it would disappear and the sun would be back and it would be right back to the whole thing over again.

“The sun went behind a cloud late Saturday afternoon. The birds had been there the whole time. They had been circling around us all day, over us all day. We crawled out from under the
tent and the sun stayed behind the cloud until night. And mentally and physically I was destroyed. I didn’t know if I could go through another day like we had just gone through. It was probably about an hour later that Dave started getting sick.

“He started vomiting and nothing was coming up. In the beginning, nothing was coming up—eventually mucus started coming out, bile. But it wouldn’t…. His voice all day Saturday had been getting progressively worse. I suspected … I could hear the mucus in his throat was staying there and his voice was sounding garbled. So it was difficult to understand what he was saying. When he started throwing up I figured that’s what was coming up, but he couldn’t get it out of his throat. He was throwing up and it would hang out of his throat and just stay there. He couldn’t get it to come out all the way. So I had to help him pull it out, pull it out of his throat because it wasn’t going to come out any other way. So I had to give him a hand and then pull it out of his throat for him. He was throwing up for a while, probably an hour. Sometimes it would be constant and then he would get a break and then he would start throwing up again.