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16-Yr-Old Girl Accused Of
Orchestrating Mom's Murder

By James Langton in New York and Olga Craig
The Telegraph - UK
12-5-4
 
To friends and family, Rachelle Waterman was a fairly typical teenage girl. Clever at school, she was a keen singer in the high-school choir and a star member of the volleyball team.
 
She was also an outgoing and popular young woman who, in common with many 16-year-olds, worried that she was overweight, moaned that life was boring in the small town in Alaska where she lived, and rowed incessantly with her mother.
 
There was no outward sign that Rachelle was anything other than a normal, angst-ridden, teenager. Until, that is, her mother was murdered.
 
Rachelle, according to police evidence, was crying crocodile tears for a mother she had secretly hated and wanted dead. And she was hiding a horrific and gruesome secret from her family. Not only had she allegedly orchestrated her mother's murder but she had callously kept an online diary for more than a year. In it, she had written down her most intimate secrets for the world to see.
 
Only the day after forensic tests confirmed what Alaskan state troopers suspected ñ that the body found inside the still smouldering mini-van was, indeed, that of Mrs Waterman ñ they arrested Rachelle along with two local men with whom the schoolgirl had had sexual liaisons.
 
Rachelle, police had discovered, had become depressed and despondent and, during the previous months, increasingly hostile towards her mother. She had allegedly planned the murder ñ which was carried out by her former lovers ñ and then casually commented in her "diary" four days after its execution: "Just to let everyone know, my mother was murdered."
 
The story of how Rachelle Waterman allegedly committed matricide ñ a crime for which she and her co-conspirators now face charges of first-degree murder ñ makes compulsive, if macabre, reading. Her internet diary, created on the LiveJournal website, has been visited by thousands eager to read the words of the teenager nicknamed "the LiveJournal murderer": if she is found guilty, Rachelle's ghoulish claim to notoriety will be as the blogging world's first killer.
 
Rachelle, pale and pretty but plump in a photograph ñ which has recently been removed ñ on her school website, began having arguments with her mother as soon as she reached her teens. Their conflicts were not out of the ordinary: they rowed about her school grades (which were slipping slightly), her habit of staying out later than allowed and the suitability of her clothes.
 
But her "diary" entries revealed another, more disturbed, side to Rachelle: that of a young woman increasingly disillusioned with her parents and her life, and possibly clinically depressed. In her initial pieces, written when she was 15, in September 2003, she says: "I live in the suckiest place on earth, a shit hole in Alaska." She talks of hating her breasts, which she thinks are too big, and her anxieties about her rows with her mother, who was a popular classroom assistant and did voluntary work with the local scouts and brownies.
 
Chillingly, nine months before her mother's murder, she writes: "Don't you hate it when the little pieces of shit pile up to the point you're at breaking point and you want to scream and cry at the same time. I don't know weather [sic] to kill somebody, myself, or just curl up into a fetal position under my covers and lay there for a couple of days. Either wayÖ I'm not good. Current mood: depressed."
 
According to police evidence, the teenager recruited Jason Arrant and Brian Radel, both 24 and both former sexual partners, to commit the murder. Arrant was a janitor at Craig High School and Radel had owned a store where Rachelle had worked in her spare time. Together, the trio plotted how to kill Mrs Waterman. It is believed that they abandoned at least one attempt in September.
 
Then, three weeks ago, she allegedly told her two former lovers that she would be out of town on the weekend of November 14, playing volleyball in Anchorage. Her father Carl "Doc" Waterman, an estate agent and one of the town's most prominent figures, would be away on business, she told them. Geoffrey, her older brother, no longer lived in the family home. With Mrs Waterman home alone, it was the perfect opportunity for them to abduct and murder her.
 
Early on the morning of November 14, police say that Arrant dropped Radel, a powerfully built, shaven-headed man, near the Waterman's home. He forced Mrs Waterman into her own mini-van, then drove out of Craig to a rendezvous with Arrant. Rachelle's original plan had been to stage what would appear to be a drink-driving accident. But by the time the two men met up Mrs Waterman was already dead after being bludgeoned over the head several times by Radel. It was a beating that shocked police officers were to describe later as "brutal".
 
In a quick change of plan, the two men then drove the van and Mrs Waterman's body to an abandoned logging camp, 30 miles outside town. There, they doused her body and the van with petrol and set fire to them. Then they drove Arrant's truck to another remote spot, where they burned it too to destroy any remaining evidence.
 
When a local man on a hunting trip chanced across the charred remains in the burnt-out car, local police knew at once that, with a population of just 2,000 in the coastal town which can be reached only by aeroplane, the chances were very high that the murderer was local.
 
Robert Claus, one of the state troopers, was friendly with the Waterman family. He was aware of the strained relationship between mother and daughter and of Rachelle's former relationships with Arrant and Radel. Police decided to take Arrant in for questioning. He had no alibi for the day of the murder and quickly admitted to his part in the crime, naming Radel as an accomplice.
 
Initially both men tried to protect Rachelle, but they confessed when they realised that they were facing murder charges. Four days later, on Friday, November 19, the teenager was arrested at her family home. The following Wednesday, on the eve of the Thanksgiving bank holiday, all three were charged with first-degree murder at Craig district court. Rachelle, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, looked ‐anxious and withdrawn as she listened solemnly while the charges were read out.
 
Only then was the true extent of Rachelle's website diary, which linked her with her mother's murder, revealed. While her earlier entries were mainly concerned with films, music and teenage anxieties about weight, increasingly they began to centre on the conflict with her mother. With each entry, her references to her mother ñ whom she referred to as the "female parental unit" ñ became more and more cold.
 
On the eve of Rachelle's high-school prom, she and her mother had a furious row about the dress she intended to wear. On her website, she writes about how "the parental female unit spent a while on how I am ugly and fat and couldn't pull it off".
 
A month later, on April 16, more ominously, she writes: "I had a bad night and a bad day. This is my warning to all of you: if you piss me off you die."
 
Further entries reveal that Mrs Waterman is becoming increasingly concerned about Rachelle's weight gain, her choice of friends and clothes, and her deteriorating school grades. According her daughter, Mrs Waterman wanted Rachelle to go to a "fat camp" to lose weight.
 
In June, Rachelle tells how she stormed out of the house after a row, failing to come home. The next day she writes: "Well, I am grounded, last night my mom went psycho bitch on me and cast me out. So I went to crash at someone's house then she freaked out, wanted me home in case I told someone. Wee for loving parental units."
 
By late summer, the police believe, Rachelle had begun hatching plans to have her mother murdered. On September 13 she writes a poem entitled Ode to Suicide. It reads: "Pain consumes my body, eating awayÖ Tearing at my flesh, no more tears left to cry. Nobody loves me, nobody cares. Why continue on? I want out of these snares."
 
Within another month Rachelle is grounded again, this time for receiving 89 per cent in a maths tests. "I have computer restrictions," she complains.
 
On October 16 she records that she has got hold of benzoic acid, a food preservative. Then moans because it is not lethal.
 
Almost a month later Rachelle travels to Anchorage to represent her school in the state volleyball championships. That weekend, while she is being feted on court, her team coming fifth in the tournament, her mother is being bludgeoned to death by Rachelle's former lovers. When she and her father ñ who was away on business in Juneau ñ arrive home the next day, they find Mrs Waterman missing and telephone the police. That night, knowing that her mother is dead, Rachelle shows no remorse or concern, writing in a carefree manner about shopping: "It was an okay trip. Did shopping, played v-ball and that's about it. Not much to tell, well I got these incredibly awesome boots that go up to my knees. I absolutely love them."
 
Four days later Rachelle makes her final entry: the chilling, unemotional disclosure that her mother has been killed. "Just to let everyone know my mother was murdered," she writes. "I won't have computer acess [sic] until the weekend or so because the police took away my computer to go through the hard drive.
 
"I thank everyone for their thoughts and e-mails. I hope to talk to you all when I get my computer back." The next day Rachelle was arrested.
 
Last Sunday, under overcast, grey skies, Mrs Waterman was buried in the local cemetery in Craig. Almost the entire community of the small town attended the service. "Doc" Waterman and his son helped carry the coffin of the woman who was loved by the community in which she had spent her entire life: by everyone, that is, except perhaps her own daughter.
 
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.
 
http://telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/12/05/water
05.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/12/05/ixworld.html
 

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