A Knife in the Heart. Michael Benson
we didn’t think so, but I think he put two and two together.”
Rachel and Lisa returned to Rachel’s apartment. That same night, someone entered Rachel’s building, ran up the stairs, pounded on her door, and then ran back down.
“They used to torment Rachel,” Lisa observed. Later that night, a car stopped several times out in front of Rachel’s building, honked the horn, and then left.
Lisa slept at Rachel’s that night; and when she went out to drive home the following morning, November 12, she discovered three of her tires were slashed. Lisa called the cops and told Officer Lawrence Kolbicka that she didn’t know for sure who did it, but the tires were still intact at ten o’clock the prior night.
She said her best guess was that the tires had something to do with the recent quarrel between Rachel Wade and Joshua Camacho. Joshua was angry because Rachel hung out with people of whom he did not approve.
Officer Kolbicka spoke to Joshua, who said he knew nothing about slashed tires. Joshua said the police “bothered him” and refused to answer further questions. Due to lack of evidence, the investigation ended there.
Two days later, a little after seven in the morning, police received a call from Charlie Ludemann. Officer Andrew S. Cappa answered the call. Charlie explained that earlier that morning his daughter Sarah and he had gotten into an argument as he was driving her to school. She was in a bad mood because she’d earlier had a fight with her boyfriend, Joshua Camacho. After arguing, Charlie took Sarah’s cell phone from her as a disciplinary action. At the next traffic stop, Sarah got out of the car and walked. Charlie called the cops. The policeman retrieved Sarah, who had yet to reach school. He scolded her for her actions, explaining that until she was eighteen, her father had every right to take her cell phone away from her, especially since he was paying the bills for it. Cappa drove Sarah the rest of the way to school and advised both daughter and father to calm down.
On February 25, 2009, police were called when a gang of young people, maybe fifteen to twenty of them, were circled in the street, surrounding a fight that was about to happen. By the time the police arrived, the crowd was gone, but members were quickly located. They had split into two groups and were milling about, a few blocks apart. Asking questions, police learned that the dispute had been between Joshua Camacho and Javier Laboy.
Javier explained that Joshua was mad at him because he “played baby daddy for five months to his son.” That is, Javier dated Erin Slothower. Joshua, Javier said, was packing a knife and brass knuckles. He knew because earlier a car containing Joshua cruised past him and Joshua waved the weapons out the window.
Police found Joshua in the other group, and his story, of course, differed. He said it was Javier who’d been hanging out of a car holding a knife and shouting, “I want to kill you!” Nobody was arrested, as there had been no actual physical confrontation. Police explained to everyone that there were better ways to solve their differences.
The incident was important because it took place outside Javier Laboy’s house, only a few feet from where Sarah Ludemann would be stabbed six weeks later.
Jamie Severino lent an insider’s expertise to those troubled times. Sarah didn’t do drugs—at least not when Jamie was around. Joshua and Janet Camacho smoked weed—smoked weed a lot—but Jamie never saw Sarah do it.
“I don’t do drugs, either, so me and Sarah would be sitting while they’d be smoking,” Jamie recalled. Not that Sarah was a saint. She was normal enough, unless the subject was Joshua; then she became “crazy, too.”
Jamie, like Lisa Lafrance before her, had her tires slashed. That was in March, and she had always felt Sarah did it. Sarah admitted it. Sarah had a problem with Jamie because Jamie was really good friends with Erin.
“She didn’t like the fact that Joshua was still seeing Erin,” Jamie recalled. Sarah’s thinking was any friend of Erin’s was an enemy of hers.
One thing Jamie noticed: If she met Sarah alone, Sarah was cool with her. But when Sarah was with her friends, it was a different story.
Just two weeks before Sarah was killed, she got into another fight. This one was with Erin. “It was a fistfight. No weapons. Joshua was there. They fought each other, and that was it,” Jamie recalled. “I mean, you shouldn’t fight at all, but it was a fair fight, and when it was over, they stopped messing with each other.”
After the fight, Sarah figured it out. Erin wasn’t going anywhere, so she might as well get over it. She couldn’t get Erin to stop talking to Joshua. They were always going to talk. They were parents, after all.
The young women reconciled with one another—“Let’s put everything aside” was how Sarah put it—and Sarah tried to recruit Erin to fight with her against their common enemy: “She had tried to get me to go with her to fight Rachel.
“That was a couple days before her and Rachel, but I didn’t go,” Erin remembered.
The last time Erin and Rachel spoke, Rachel said foul things about Erin’s son.
Erin explained, “I felt I was never going to get anywhere for my son if I continued fighting over Joshua.”
Chapter 3
LISA
Lisa Lafrance, born and raised in Pinellas Park, had known Rachel Wade since middle school, but they really started hanging out in ninth or tenth grade. “She was dating our friend Nick, and we had grown up with Nick,” Lisa explained.
Lisa and Rachel started out as enemies. The problem, of course, involved a boy. In what would become a familiar pattern, hostilities between Rachel and Lisa built up through phone calls and text messages. They had a fight on Rachel’s driveway. Lisa took complete blame for that. She’d started it. Rachel didn’t want to fight. Lisa had to go onto Rachel’s property to throw the first punch.
“Rachel liked to talk it, but she wasn’t violent. She wasn’t face-to-face confrontational,” Lisa said. After the fight, they became BFFs—best friends forever.
Even back then, Rachel was only “off and on” when it came to living with her parents. She began to date Nick, and then spent a lot of time at Nick’s. Lisa hung out there, too.
When they were hanging out, sometimes their activities were mundane. They played cards. But they were also bad girls. “We did a lot of drugs together,” Lisa remembered. Those were the days of smoking weed, snorting coke, and taking Roxies.
Lisa was with Rachel for one of their shoplifting busts: “We used to steal clothes, sell them at Plato’s Closet, and use the money to buy gas,” Lisa explained.
Lisa could never figure out what it was, but Rachel’s home with her parents was not a happy place. Her parents were nice, and they had her back no matter what, but they couldn’t prevent her from being a relentless rebel.
Constant rebellion brought animosity, which led to further rebellion. Rachel yearned to do her own thing in a world without rules—a world where she had no one to answer to.
Plus “she was boy crazy,” Lisa said. “She was always with a boy. The entire time I knew her, she was never without a boyfriend.”
She was so dependent on boys that whichever boy she was with became Rachel’s absolute priority. Parents were no longer necessary. Dealing with parents became intolerable.
“Her parents were great,” Lisa said. “They just didn’t know how to react when Rachel grew up, being as mature as she was for her age.”
Lisa noted that Rachel had a brother, who was just a couple of years older than Rachel. The siblings never got along; and in Lisa’s experience, he was never around.
“Rachel used to say they she and her brother fought all the time. She said that her brother hated her. She didn’t talk about him much. She didn’t like to talk about him. It was a sore subject.”
Rachel needed a boyfriend to validate her