Journal of the Dead (28 page)

Many attributed Kodikian’s light sentence more to Les Williams’s restraint than to Gary Mitchell’s sermons of the range. It wasn’t hard to imagine a younger, hell-bent prosecutor ratcheting up Kodikian’s sentence a month here and a year there by gratuitously dissecting some of his testimony. It could have been easily done. Williams could have asked Kodikian if he and Coughlin had seen the water towers from the top of the canyon. Had the answer been no, he could have shown how they were almost impossible
not
to see. He could have asked Kodikian how it was he had remembered, in great detail, the conversation he’d had with Kenton Eash, the climb up the slopes, and his dream about the machines, and at the same time been uncertain as to whether he’d burned the topo map or lost it. He could have asked Kodikian if he knew how Coughlin ended up with a three-inch bruise at the base of his skull.

But Williams had no evidence to prove that Kodikian had acted in rage, and Kodikian certainly wasn’t going to offer any, so he had stuck to the truth he knew and proven what he had set out to prove from the beginning: Kodikian had admitted he knew what he was doing.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” Williams said of the sentence. “Before we started the hearing, I thought about eight years would
be right. After we finished it, the two is fine, because we found out more. His remorse looked pretty real to me.”

Only Raffi Kodikian can say for sure what happened in the early hours of August 8, 1999, and whether or not he told the truth—and many believe he did—it is disputable that he got away with anything. Just before five P.M., his friends and family escorted him to the Eddy County Jail, and the following morning he was shackled, put on a corrections department bus, and taken to the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility to be processed. From there, he got on another bus and headed east, bound for a lockup near the town of Santa Rosa, where he would serve out his sentence. It was a trip of about four hundred miles in all, and it is safe to say that it was the loneliest one of his life. For the last hundred or so miles, the bus sped east along I 40, and right next to it, visible through the barred windows, was the older road the interstate had replaced. It was the cement fable itself, Route 66.

Carlsbad returned to normal after the hearing. The TV trucks and reporters raced north to cover the fire, and the motels along Canal Street once again sat mostly empty. That is not to say that things got boring, because, unlike the water, strange news never evaporates on that scratch of the map. Later that summer, a swarm of killer bees attacked an elderly woman in town, causing her to die of a heart attack in her own garden. That sad event was followed by an even sadder one, weeks later, when a section of natural gas pipeline along the Pecos exploded, shooting a stream of flames two hundred yards, right to a spot where ten people, including five children, were camping. All ten of them died. But the strangest story of all happened the following spring.

Almost a year after Kodikian’s sentencing hearing, Brian Tenney, a thirty-five-year-old Pennsylvanian, was hiking through Rattlesnake Canyon when he noticed an envelope lying on the canyon floor. Inside was a letter written two days earlier by a
woman named Emily Schulman. She explained that she was lost in Rattlesnake Canyon and needed help. In case it never came, she had also written her good-byes to her friends and family. The return address on the envelope was in Boston, Massachusetts.

Being from Pennsylvania, Tenney had heard all about the Kodikian case, and he knew he was walking over the same ground. “I thought it was a hoax someone pulled,” Tenney later told the
Carlsbad Current-Argus.
“I figured some college kid was watching me with binoculars laughing.”

His skepticism toward the note quickly turned to concern, however, when he came across torn-up bits of paper nearby. They were pieces of ripped-up business cards, with more notes from Schulman asking for help. He ran much of the way back out of the canyon, then raced back to the visitor center in his car.

Within minutes teams of rangers and law enforcement officers were winding down the Rattlesnake Canyon trail. Many of the same players were there, including Mark Maciha and Jim Ballard, both of whom noticed that Schulman’s car was parked in the exact spot where Coughlin’s Mazda had been. And after they hiked down into the canyon, their search for Schulman took them right past the spot where Lance Mattson had found Kodikian, lying next to the body of his friend.

They searched for hours in vain, until the sheriff’s office finally called in a search plane. But this story had a happy ending: the plane spotted Schulman shortly after three P.M. She was about a mile west of the exit trail, waving a T-shirt with all her might. When her rescuers finally reached her, she was almost out of water. She told them that she had come to the canyon two days earlier for a day hike, and missed the exit trail.

“It was weird,” Maciha later said over the phone. “I don’t know what to make of it. I really don’t know what we can do to make that trail any more visible.”

It was a bitter vindication for the families of both David and Raffi, who had always been of the opinion that Raffi never would have been driven to mercy killing if the trail had been better marked and rangers had noticed that they were overdue earlier. After the sentencing hearing, the Coughlins had even set up a fund to equip the park with GPS systems that hikers in the backcountry could check out at the visitor center, but Schulman was either unaware of it, or more likely never bothered checking in at the main desk.

After the
State of New Mexico v. Raffi Kodikian,
most of the law enforcement and legal professionals involved continued working on less-ambiguous cases, with just as much zeal. Gary McCandless and Eddie Carrasco went back mainly to busting drug dealers, and Les Williams happily returned to prosecuting them. Gary Mitchell continues to fight against the death penalty with great success. Shawn Boyne eventually got tired of the long hours, and she took a professorship at a university. Her involuntary intoxication defense made Law Review.

Chunky Click lost his reelection bid in November, then took a job in the police department in the nearby town of Loving. To this day, he still believes that Raffi Kodikian got away with murder.

According to prison officials, Kodikian was a model inmate. His good behavior, and changes in New Mexico state law giving corrections authorities more discretion over prison terms, reduced his time served to sixteen months. He was released in November 2001, and made it home for Thanksgiving.

David Coughlin will never make it home, but at least a part of him made it to what would have been his next stop on the road to California. “Dave has asked that his remains be cremated & thrown over the edge of the Grand Canyon,” Raffi had written in the journal, and his family took the words to heart. In August 2001, two years after he died in Rattlesnake Canyon, the Coughlins made the trek out to Arizona and scattered his ashes into the greatest canyon of all.

This book would have been far more difficult to produce if it weren’t for the assistance of many people. I thank them here, beginning with everyone who was willing to be interviewed, at times in spite of their reluctance. Journalism of the dead is an inherently difficult task, often involving asking people to access emotions and memories they’d rather not relive or make public. I am particularly grateful to those people who decided to share their memories of David Coughlin. They are the only voice he has left.

I’d also like to thank my fellow journalists, some of whom covered the Rattlesnake Canyon case themselves for their respective media outlets and freely offered their insights, help, and encouragement. They are: Kyle Marksteiner and Jose Martinez, Jim Kaminsky, Todd Katz, Jay Cheshes, Sheri de Borchgrave, Laurina Gibbs, Loch Adamson, Tanya Henderson, Sally Hawkins, Connie Chung, Scott MacBlane, Steph Watson, Alistair Bates, and Philip Jones Griffiths, for his wonderful photos and insight.

Then there are the information providers: all the wonderful folks at the Eddy County Courthouse, Sally Bickley, Sherry Fletcher, the
Northeastern News,
and Garmin International, for use of their GPS and topo maps, and anyone I’m forgetting.

Last but not least, my parents and Scott Waxman, Dan Conaway, and Nikola Scott. Their patience was a godsend.