Journal of the Dead (25 page)

“Eventually he started yelling for a doctor and saying he needed to go to a hospital. And I didn’t have the heart to tell him that nobody was listening. So I started yelling with him. And then he stopped yelling and he looked at me and he said, ‘I just realized.’ And I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘This is it.’ And I think I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘They’re not coming.’ And I said, ‘No.’

“After sitting there all day on Saturday and nobody showing up and we were over two days late, we had no hope that they even knew were down there. We had figured that the kid who had
taken the permit had put it in the wrong file or it was in the trash or it was gone, that they didn’t even know we were in the canyon. And we had absolutely no hope of getting out of there. We figured that some hiker was gonna find our bodies. And Dave turned to me and he said, ‘Let’s do this.’ And I knew what he was talking about and we talked about how we were gonna end our lives.

“We decided that since I was stronger that he would cut my wrist first and then I would cut his. I don’t think that either one of us really had the strength to do it to ourselves. So I sat next to him and we got a knife and he tried cutting my left wrist. Either the knife we were using was too dull, or he wasn’t pushing as hard as he should have been. But it wouldn’t break through the skin all the way. We cut across my wrist, went down it. We tried each of the knives we had and none of them worked. I knew if I made any sound it was gonna be that much harder for him so I didn’t make any. But I think he knew that it hurt and I really don’t think he pushed as hard as he could have. We eventually gave up, we stopped, and we were both beside ourselves. We didn’t know what we were gonna do, how we were gonna handle it. I bandaged up my arm. I don’t really think I was worried about it getting infected, I just didn’t want to look at it. And we actually tried it again, but it didn’t work. He put down the knife and we pretty much decided that we were gonna have to go through whatever we were gonna have to go through, that we weren’t gonna end it early. We abandoned the idea of committing suicide. They tell me that Dave had slashes on his wrist. I don’t remember trying to cut his. What I remember was deciding that if it didn’t work on me it wouldn’t work on him so we didn’t bother. There’s a possibility we did but I just don’t recall it.

“Dave started throwing up again. He spent the whole night on his hands and knees, throwing up. I was awake most of the time and I eventually started throwing up too. It wasn’t as bad as Dave, but it happened maybe a half-dozen times for me. I don’t know how many times Dave threw up. He was on his hands and knees the whole night, and when he did stop it wasn’t for long. He couldn’t sit down. He tried to sit down, he tried to straighten his legs out sometime early in the morning and he couldn’t. His body was frozen. We eventually got him to the point where he could sit upright and he was trying to lay down because he was exhausted. And every time he tried to lay down a little bit he started getting sick. We tried it with him sitting in front of me and me sitting behind him and I would take his arms like this and he would lean back and I’d try to ease him down, but every time we’d gotten a couple inches he’d start throwing up again. And then he’d come back and we’d do it again and he’d get a bit further and get sick again. We tried that countless times, I don’t know how many times we tried that.

“Eventually he got down on his back, and as soon as he did he turned to me and said, ‘You’ve got to end this.’ And at first I wasn’t really sure what he meant and he said, ‘Get the knife.’ And I said, ‘No.’ I said I wasn’t gonna do that. And he reached up and he grabbed me right there and he squeezed me hard, real hard, and he said, ‘Stop fuckin’ around.’ He said, ‘You know they’re not coming.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I know they’re not coming.’ And he said, ‘So then get the fucking knife.’ So I did, and he said, ‘Put it through my chest.’ I was bawling. He said, ‘Get next to me and put it through my chest.’ He said, ‘Don’t fuck up.’ I got next to him and I pushed it through his chest. But I fucked up and I hit his
lung, because when I pulled the knife out, air came out. I told him I had to do it again. And he said, ‘Okay.’ And this time I thought I hit his heart. Blood came out and he said, ‘Pull it out.’ I did. I asked him if he was still in pain and he said no, that he felt a lot better, and he smiled.

“I held his hand the whole time. He started getting weak and I covered his face with a T-shirt. And then he died.”

L
es Williams began his cross-examination with a question that, to this day, has no definite answer.

“You think the map that the rangers found is not the one that you had, is that correct?” he asked.

“I don’t think it’s the one we had, no. You’re talking about the topographical map?”

“Right.”

“I don’t think so.”

“And you think that you had that map up until the fires?”

“I believe so. I don’t remember which day we burned it, but I do believe we threw it in the fire.”

“So I take it the map wasn’t a help to you in finding your way out?”

“I had never used a topographical map before. I had seen them. I knew what they were approximately, but I had never actually used one. We tried to make sense of where we were in relation to
that map, but we couldn’t. I don’t know how much experience Dave’s had with it. He seemed to know a little bit more about it than I did, but we couldn’t justify the mountains and the hills that were around us with where we thought we were. And then we saw that the foundation wasn’t where the map said it was, that made us question the entire map we had and whether or not it was accurate. We stopped even trying with the map eventually and just threw it in the fire.”

“So the map was… You did have the map when you found the foundation, when you went up on the hill and came back down?”

“I don’t remember. I remember that we had looked at the map and that we had … I think we had walked by the foundation when we had the map. We had walked by the foundation when we were going up the mountain on Friday, so we knew that it was there. So I don’t know if we had the map Friday afternoon or not. We may have already burned it, but we were aware that the map showed a foundation. I think that map did…. We had two of them. One was like a copy that the park hands out with the rules and the other was the topographical map. I believe the topographical mentioned the foundation but I’m not positive.”

“The first camp that you went to … You mentioned that you were in a hurry to get out there and get camped because you got there at about six o’clock in the afternoon?”

“No, we left about six o’clock in the afternoon, left the visitor center. We got into that camp I’d say somewhere around eight or eight-thirty. And at that point the sun had left the canyon floor, and it was starting to get dark.”

“Now that camp was quite a ways from where you enter Rattlesnake Canyon, right?”

“Yes.”

“About two, two and a half miles?”

“Okay.”

“If you were just gonna stay the night, why did you go so far back to find a place to camp?”

“Because we thought that there was actually a camping area. We didn’t realize that you were just supposed to camp along the trail someplace. It said, ‘Don’t camp on the canyon floor.’ So every time we went around a corner or went around a turn—because it runs like that, it’s an ‘S’ through the mountains—we figured that the campsite was just around the corner. We would get around the corner and it wasn’t there so we tried one more. And we did that probably two or three S’s until we just said we gotta camp here. I don’t even know if there is a campsite or an area that’s designated for camping, but at that point we realized that it was just too far away and we were gonna camp where we were.”

“Now you say that when David asked you to kill him, your first answer was no.”

“Yes.”

“So you knew what he was asking you to do at that time, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You knew that he wanted you to kill him and he was going to be dead and he was never going to recover?”

“I
was going to be dead,” Kodikian said brusquely.

“He was going to be dead when you killed him?”

“He was going to be dead, and I was going to be dead shortly after, yes.”

“So you knew what you were doing?”

“In the sense that I remember it, and that then I knew what he needed, yeah. I recognized the situation, yeah.”

“So I take it that when you said that you thought you were both going to be dead that you didn’t think it would matter, since both of you were going to be dead?”

“What I thought I was doing was keeping my friend from going through twelve to twenty-four hours of hell before he died,” Kodikian said with an undeniably self-righteous edge. “That’s what I thought I was doing.”

“But I mean, you knew that you were killing him?”

“Yes, yes sir.”

“You didn’t think that you were killing the devil or anything like that?”

“No.”

“And since you said no the first time, you could have resisted. In other words, you could have decided
not
to kill him, couldn’t you.”

“I could have made that decision, yes. I could have crawled out from under the tent and gotten away from him and just listened to his pain from a distance, yeah. I could have done that.”

“And it seems that you do suffer from remorse, that you’re sorry you did this, because you realize that if you hadn’t killed him, he’d still be alive, don’t you?”

“For about the last nine months, for about the last eight months, I’ve felt that way, yeah. It has not been until recently that whether or not Dave would have survived has been called into question. I don’t know now that he would have survived that, and to a certain extent if I found out that he wouldn’t have it would
make me feel a little better, knowing that he wouldn’t have made it and that I did the right thing, I made the right decision. I don’t know now that he would have walked out of that canyon alive. And if he had there’s a good chance that he wouldn’t have walked out as the Dave that I know.”

“Well, he certainly wouldn’t have
walked
out.”

“No, he wasn’t gonna walk out of there.”

“He would have flown out with you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So it wasn’t mental illness that made you kill him, it was mercy—is that what we’re saying?”

“That’s the way I see it, yeah.”

Williams, paused, letting the admission sink in.

“I have no further questions,” he said, and left the podium.

His cross-exam couldn’t have lasted more than ten minutes, and many in the audience were surprised that he hadn’t grilled Kodikian further. He certainly could have attempted to corner him about his haziness about the missing map, the burning of the sleeping bag, and why—with not one, but four sharp knives in their possession—their suicide pact had been only skin deep. In Williams’s defense, the bottom line was that he chose to believe Kodikian based on the facts he had in front of him, and having been convinced of his remorse, knew that there was no need to be cruel. He already had a conviction the moment Kodikian agreed to a plea bargain, and from then on there was only one thing he was intent on proving: that Raffi Kodikian knew what he was doing when he killed Coughlin. He had succeeded magnificently when Kodikian admitted precisely that, despite the fact that Raffi’s own lawyers had gone to great lengths to show the contrary.

Mitchell and Boyne, in fact, attempted to throw Kodikian’s mental abilities into question even further with their next three witnesses, all mental health experts, who testified that Kodikian was, in fact, all but mentally handicapped when it came to his spatial and visual recognition abilities—and yet somehow, quite miraculously, wasn’t aware of it. Dr. Thomas Thompson, a neuropsychologist, went as far as saying that, based on written tests Kodikian had taken a week earlier, that “a topographical map would have been impossible for him to read,” and that his foray into Rattlesnake Canyon was “a disaster waiting to happen.”

None of them, however, were able to account for why Coughlin had apparently been just as clueless. The closest they came was a suggestion that, because Kodikian had such strong verbal abilities (Mitchell would even call Raffi a “genius” when it came speaking and writing), he may have influenced Coughlin’s decisions for the worse, overconfidently leading his friend deeper into the demon’s mouth. “It was a bunch of junk,” Les Williams would later say of the psychologist testimony; he had never disputed that Raffi and David had been lost to begin with, and didn’t think Mitchell needed an expert to explain how people stayed lost in a national park wilderness, especially once they were out of water. In fact, Williams thought the expert testimony gave Raffi and Dave far too little credit. “They did a lot of things right,” he pointed out. Following headlights, leaving notes, seeking shade during peak temperatures—all of them were logical moves, they just hadn’t been enough.

Even Raffi himself was reluctant to believe some of the experts in his own corner, a few of whom he had met only a week earlier and, in their defense, had a very limited basis on which to judge him.
Dr. Thompson, for example, testified that people with strong visual and spatial abilities were typically “really good home builders, really good craftsmen who build furniture, people who can take and visualize and conceptualize and move these things around in their head,” his point being that Raffi totally lacked those skills. Clearly Thompson hadn’t seen the cages Raffi’d designed and built for his pet snakes, which incorporated just about every skill he supposedly didn’t possess.

Whether true or not, the visual-spatial recognition theory was certainly good for a joke. Back at the Stevens Inn later that day, Raffi was hanging out with Jeff Rosen and Kevin Guckaven, who had come out to New Mexico to support their friend and provide character testimony. They were staying four doors down from him, and when Raffi told them he was heading back to his room, Rosen and Guckaven couldn’t resist the open shot.

“Kev and I said, ‘Raff, don’t get lost. You’re just gonna go down to the left, four doors. We know you have no sense of direction, right?’ Rosen remembered.