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You are now listening to True Murder The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History and the authors that have written about them Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Good evening. This is your host Dan Zupanski for the program True Murder, The most Shocking Killers in True Crime History and the authors that have written about them. Sarah Ludeman was new to love the panelas Florida seventeen year old was a late bloomer. When she fell for a boy, she was blind to the world of sex, drugs, and drama s whirling around her. Soon, Sarah had a bitter enemy and eighteen year old waitress Rachel Wade. Both girls were head over heels with a cocky two timer named
Joshua Camacho. On a warm spring night, their passions erupted into violence. A knife flashed under the street lights. When the fight was over, one girl was dead and the other charged with murder. In an emotion packed courtroom, the whole story took shape, a troubling tale of conflicting lives, tangled sexual affairs, and the high price of having the
right feelings for the wrong guy. The book this feature this evening is called A Knife in the Heart by my special guest journalist and author and returned guest, Michael Benson. Welcome to the program, and thank you to agreeing this interview. Michael Benson.
Good, good evening, Dan thanks for having me.
Good evening. Thank you. Now let's maybe set the stage with this Panela's Park here, what type of community is and tell us be because both of these young women grew up in these grew up in this neighborhood. So tell us about the Danella's, Florida neighborhood.
That was a really good well. Panella's Park, Florida is a working class town. It's between Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. It's landlocked, even though it's near the Florida Shore, the east shore the west shore rather and it's an industrial city. Most folks have blue collar jobs. And although most people are getting by, it's not a
place of much upward mobility or ambition. I don't want to paint the entire city, it's too broad a brush, but it certainly seems like it's the case in this particular pack of people, that there's a segment of the population that gets stuck in place, casting kind of a malaise of an onn we of a cloud of depression that affected both the grown ups and if by chain reaction. You know, they're teenage children, right, you know, And the book takes place in kind of a mean Girl's Gone wild,
world's second drugs and unfortunately, in this case murder. It was the early morning hours of April fifteenth, tax Day, two thousand and eight, just about exactly four years ago, and it was between an eighteen year old high school senior and nineteen year old waitress. She had dropped out of school and had her own apartment, and the feud was between the young woman had been building up for many months over a boy, and it was inflamed by
social networking. They taunted each other on my Space, and with each new tweet or whatever you want to call it, there were great escalations of fury and cattiness. The fight took place in the middle of a quiet residential street. Sarah Ludeman, who was the younger girl, is a student. She brought along two friends and the nineteen year old
who was Rachel Wade, considerably smaller than Sarah. She didn't bring any friends with her, but she did bring a knife and the fight lasted no more than five seconds, and when it was over, Sarah lay in the street, mortally wounded by a stab wound to the heart. There was no more.
Yeah, So what precipitated this though, because you talk about she was she came with the kitchen knife. So explain how it was that Sarah and her friends came to be at Rachel Wade's apartment or home. Tell us tell us the scenario.
And Yeah. During the during the evening that this occurred, hostilities had been growing. Rachel wanted to spend the night with the boyfriend, Joshua, but Joshua had Sarah over and Joshua was staying at the time with his sister and uh. Insults went back and forth, and they had driven past each other's houses. They were shouting things.
And.
Rachel had reason to believe that she was going to be jumped by more than one girl and armed herself and to protect herself with a kitchen knife, with with with a kitchen knife. She grabbed the kitchen knife and put in her purse on her way out the door, and then she went over to a friend's house where she thought that she would be safe. So the go ahead.
Now, why wasn't she safe at this location? How did how did Sarah?
Well, you know what happened. She she goes over to her friend Javier's house. And Javier, the boy was an ex boyfriend and then a polsonic friend at the time. And uh, Javier has a friend over named Dustin Grinds and they're hanging out in the front yard and Javier's mom is asleep in the house. So instead of taking Rachel fear who fears that she's going to be jumped into the house where she wouldn't be seen, fell hanging
out in front of the house. And when a friend of Sarah's drives by and spots them, that word travels fast and everything, you know, there's you know, there's a rumble in the middle of the street.
What was no Now you're saying it's someone that Rachel thought she might be jumped by more than one person. And they had this long or at least in terms of teenage life, a long standing feud that was getting escalated and gone on for months.
There had been a break, there was it was, it was really bad for a while, and then there was a break and then it it started up again.
Now, how soon was the actual threat where she actually apparently said I will kill you.
Well, you know, the one thing that we'll get into is that Rachel is a victim of her own big mouth. She was a She's a diminutive, blonde, kind of sweet looking, but when she felt threatened, she really could let loose with you know. She was she was a barker, not a bier, was her reputation. She was. She she could just go into a tirade of insults and you vulgarity, and she used that as a way to keep people away, right and and to and to hurt back when she
felt that she had been hurt. But I think the fascinating thing about this case, and I don't know if you agree, but it's that there are eyewitnesses, and the eyewitnesses coming to jams. There's Sarah's witnesses, and there are Rachel's witnesses, and they don't agree on much. You know, Rachel's friends all spoke of a small woman defending herself against three larger women who had jumped her, and Sarah's friends folk, of Rachel charging at Sarah and immediately plunging
the kitchen knife into Sarah's chest. Yeah, so yeah, I just should also say that by the time this happens, the News Park Police Department is really sick of these kids there, They've been a problem for years. There's drug dealers, there's uh and every every move, every social move, seems to be dramatized into something straight out of West Side Story. There's car chases, all kinds of reckless driving. And you know, just just a few days before the murder, several local
high school kids have been killed in a car crash. Right, and now you've got you know, Sarah screaming to Havre the boy's house in her in her parents minivan, almost going up on two wheels to make the turn, and screeching to a halt three feet away from the nose of Rachel's car.
So it's.
But the other thing is that Joshua Camacho, who's the boy the warring party's share. He is an instigator, and he has told them both, you know, if you love me enough, you will fight for me. He's been there.
And describe this guy too, because he talked about diminutives, like tell me what, because we got photos of this guy posing. You know, he's got tattoos, he's a gangst that kind of guy. So, but describe who he really what he is like a statute, really right.
I mean, if if you had a guess what he looked like, based just on the behavior of his women, you would guess that he was a tall, dark and handsome The truth was really different and in a way more interesting. He was an undersized pretty boy who didn't work for a living but instead leeched from his girlfriend. There's a guy who made playing women into a science. He had a baby with one teen girlfriend. He lived for a time in Rachel Wade's apartment for free, and
he took Sarah Ludman's virginity at Rachel's trial. He described this relationship with all of these women as friends with benefits. The no emotion at all, His controlling nature, his need to play puppet master came through loud and clear. I thought when you learned that he had instructed Sarah not to wear shorts in public, no matter how high it was outside, because he decided that he wanted to be the only one who got to see her legs. And Sarah didn't even question it. She wore long pants.
Yeah. Yeah, Well they're young though, and and I mean a lot of this stuff, I mean, controlling people is nothing new. I mean there's a lot of a lot of jealous controlling people both sexes ques true. But it's interesting what I would what you did talk about, and what I was going to ask, because we want to make sure that this wasn't out of character for these
young girls. They lived in this sort of world, and you did describe this over exaggerated sort of world they thought they were living in, you.
Know, right, And it was it was a promiscu permission us crowd, a warning to readers with you gentle sensibilities. That quite a bit of sex talk going on. As one cop put it immediately following the murder, it wasn't over a love triangle as much as it was around a love hexagon. Rachel Wade discovered sex at a very tender age. She was a classic example of too much
too soon. And Sarah Luna, on the other hand, was an overweight girl, large teased by friends and a late bloomer with boys, and Joshua Camacho was her one and only. In terms of scheduling, Josh's girlfriends were perfectly complementary to each other. You know, Sarah was a high school girl with a curfew and had to be home early, and Rachel was a restaurant waitress who wasn't available until late, so he could see both every night, and they never ran into each other until if this night, Rachel has
the night off and I'll help breaks us. So Camacho is the consonant player.
And.
You know he uh, he gives, no, really gives, not that he convinces each girl that they are his one and only, although anybody from the outside looking in can tell immediately what sort of person he is, you know, not just scheduling, but I think the two girls were complementary as well in terms of their uh personalities, sexual and otherwise. You know, Rachel's shoot applebeasts, waitress with a
wild lifestyle. She's a sexual experimenter, and she's unfortunately just as intense out of the sack as she is in. And Sarah she's she switched schools so she could be closer to Joshua Camacho. She adores him completely, you know that.
Why excuse me, why is it that Rachel is living with a friend, or why is she not living with her parents?
Well, that's you know, that's Rachel's only fifteen. When troubles start, she lives at home with her with her parents, but she gets busted for skipping school in order to have sex with her older, technically adult boyfriend, and Rachel's parents had the boy arrested and charged with statutory rape. That incident for Rachel begins a pattern of running away from home. She disappears for a couple of days, and she returns home with it, you know, sometimes with a detailed explanation,
sometimes with a vague explanation. Each time, Rachel's parents called the police and follow the report, and the police, in quite a few cases, they just went to the house of whoever her boyfriend was, found her and brought her home. Now, sometimes Rachel ran away simply because she had a better offer than to sleep at home with her parents, whom other times she ran off because of violent argument she had,
most with their mother. Once Rachel threw a knife in her mother before running out the door, asked why the Waves continued calling the police even though they knew where Rachel probably was Bury Wade. The dad said that he'd been advised by the police to keep a paper trail of everything because all that documentation, all that documentation would come in handy when it came time to take further action regarding Rachel's behavior. Now, I should mention that a
large contributor to this entire tragedy as drugs. Yes, they're all smoking pot and there's a frightening number of the city's young people who are addicted to an opiate pain killer. They call them roxies. The brand name I guess was roxy Codon. There are blue pills and some kids called them blues. There's been a major most likely Yeah, yeah, I think it's very similar, just maybe a different manufacturer.
But there's been a major theft at the pharmaceutical warehouse and one hundreds of thousand of these pills were stolen, and it causes a tragic wave of serious drug addictions throughout Florida. Kids are taking the pills unaware that they're becoming addicted to the same active substance that's in herod. Sure, so there's a tendency anyway for young people to feel immortal. They don't feel anxiety about danger the same way older
adults do. They're careless, they're reckless, and the natural tendency was exacerbated by the roxies, which further removed in additions and created a pain free illusion of euphoria. Too. Many of Penel's Park's teenage girls were skipping school, hanging out with older boyfriends who had apartments of their own. They're taking drugs, having sex, and making babies. But our insight into Rachel during the Lucky landslide.
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Those years is a beautiful young woman named Lisa la France, and she is also interesting from my point of view because she was the only witness I had who can honestly claim to be friends with both Sarah and Rachel.
Right.
Alisa and Rachel had boyfriends who were roommates when they were teenagers, and they spent a lot of time together having sex and taught taking drugs in close proximity. And while our best info is that Rachel, for all of romantic behavior, was no longer doing drugs, Lisa developed a severe paink addiction. You know, Roxy's took over my life, is what she told me. And that long before the murder, Lisa was visiting Rachel at Rachel's apartment and they had
a fight. There was the way's final way of taking care of the runaway problem, as they allowed Rachel to quit school and get her own apartment, and that it was almost working, you know, she had a job, she'd gotten her ged. But Lisa and Rachel are together in Rachel's apartment not long before the murder, and Lisa's slurring her words and acting out of it, and Rachel gave her an ultimatum, you know, quit the pills or they
couldn't be friends anymore, and Lisa chose the pills. She said she was high all the time, She was high the night that Sarah died. And I'm personally happy to report that Lisa's since gotten off drugs and she seems cheerful enough, gainfully employed and taking it one day at a time. Right, So let's talk about the voicemails.
Yes, that's evidence, as it turns.
Out, business months before the murder, during the first few between Sarah and Rachel over Joshua, Rachel left a series of voicemails on Sarah's phone, and as it turns out, these tapes were one of the most psychologically effective pieces of evidence for the prosecution. They're threatening, they're obscene, and even though they occurred months before the murder, so that in terms legal terms the relevance was diminished, their emotional
power remained very strong. I mean, they were so spary that Sarah called the cops who recommended she saved the recording that she did, and that's how they ended up being evidence against Rachel at the trial. So Rachel, whose voices on those tapes is just monstrous. She delivered a profanity strewn, manic monologue of insults and threats. She sounded pretty flashly, like the type of person who would stab
someone in the chest in cold blood. Every time I listen to those voicemails, I get the distinct impression that there's something wrong with Rachel, something organic, some synapse in her brain that isn't firing correctly. She sounds for all the world as if she's written out a speech ahead of time and then is reading it as fast as she could.
Right.
So, I mean later on, I think it becomes important because her defense attorney has no choice but to put her on the stand because he can't allow those tapes to be her testimony.
Well, plus she's bleeding self defense, so she has to take the stand.
That too. Yeah, So let's go through the witnesses. The eyewitnesses. There are two girls in the minivan with Sarah. Sarah's driving her father's minivan. Sitting in the front seat with her. First and foremost is Janet Kamacha. She's Joshua's sister and she is the original tough girl. You know. She's both friends with Sarah and she hates Rachel's guts because she thought Rachel was a bad influence on her own After Rachel Wade had stabbed Sarah. It was Janet Camacha who
grabbed Rachel and gave her a good beating. First, at first, Janet takes off one of her sandals and starts smacking try to get the knife out of her hands, smacks Rachel over the head with it. And later Janet had Rachel by the hair and she's dragging her around the Javier the Boy's front lawn, and Rachel makes no attempt
to use her knife on Janet, you know. Somehow during this altercation, Rachel manages to free herself for long enough to run away and throw the knife away as far as she can, and the flagger found on a neighbor's roof right, and the prosecution claimed that Rachel was trying to hide the weapon, while the defense made the also reasonable claim that she got rid of the knife and self defense that she was afraid Janet was going to take it away from her and use it on her.
And in court, Janet was very, very pregnant and nonetheless had a tough girl strut as she entered and exited the courtroom, and while on the stand, she kept staring at Rachel high beings on, almost licking her chops, obviously thinking about what she would do if she could just have five minutes alone in her room with Rachel Wade sitting in the double seat of the Vand.
I wanted to ask one thing, though, wasn't she stabbed twice? Like? Where exactly was she stabbed? And then? And was she stabbed twice in this very specific spot in the chest? You say the chest?
But she was like the first wound, uh is up in the shoulder and it's just a flesh woe. It would have been it would have been a matter of stitches, right. The second the second stamp, which is a fraction of a second later, goes through the skin, through the muscle between the ribs, through the plural sack, and into the heart itself.
Right, And.
So she had mustered up a considered amount of strength in her anger in order.
Did she did Sarah die right away? How long? Was it?
Pretty quickly she managed. She manages to get her cell phone out, and she calls Joshua and she says it hurts, and then collapses on the street right next to her van. The driver door is still open. Yeah. Uh, And you know what what happens at that point, of course, dependent which eye witness what sting to. So, yeah, as I said, there were the wors. Sarah had two friends with her, and sitting in the back seat is Julisa Smith, who
is another a larger girl. She's gonbe five eight something like that, and she's related to the father of Janet Camacho's babies, so they're related by marriage, and Jalsa sometimes comes over to babysit, and naturally Julica's memories support the prosecution, but she has elements of her story that aren't in
anyone else's version. She says she missed key action because she dropped her phone and the back popped off, and she was picking that up and putting the phone back together as things were going on, and she remembered holding Janet back physically so she couldn't attack Rachel when everyone else remember Janet beating the Tara out of Rachel, with Julisa doing nothing to stop her. But still, it was Julisa first realized that Sarah had been stabbed and had
collapsed to the pavement. It was Julia's screams that Sarah Sarah's been stabbed then that alerted the others that there was a medical emergency. Uh Julisa, when she did get her phone back in one piece, also successfully called nine one one and reported the stabbing. Now over on Rachel's side of the eyewitnesses, you have Javier, la boy and he is gonna be her best friend. He's decided that
he has seen it. He's the only the only eyewitness was sees things exactly the way that Rachel herself sees them. Yeah he yeah, he uh. He sees three girls piling out of the van at once, whereas Sarah's friends say they don't get out of the van until after the stabbing. Yeah, that's pretty one on one fight, but yeah, Dan, Javier says that all three girls get out of the van at once and charge it at Rachel, who then has
to defend herself. Now, during the first few months that Rachel's in jail, it's Javier who becomes her boyfriend, and he's we have tapes with him on the phone reassuring her that that this is all temporary and everything's gonna be okay once the jury realizes the truth. You hear them daydreaming about their life together. They're gonna get married, have children. They talk about what they're gonna name their children after Rachel as he quitted and Vire's Javier's friend.
Dustin grimes, he's he's just happens to be over visiting Javier. He doesn't he doesn't have he doesn't have a dog in this fight. But he so probably I would think that he has the least biased viewpoint. And but yeah, and he's the closest as close as we get to.
An impartial witness and potentially potentially.
Potentially Yeah, and he does say things that please both signs. He he says that Rachel moved forward away from her own car and towards Sarah's with a knife in her hand, not a girl on the defensive. But he also says, and this was, you know, absolutely thrilled the defense attorney. He says that all three girls in the van get out at the same time and come charging towards Rachel
and the other. The other interesting thing about Dustin is that he enlisted in the military actually murder, and he knew that he was going to be overseas during the trial. So his testimony was recorded earlier in the same courtroom with all the same parties president except for the jury, and then the TV tape was played for the jury and they had a synchronized things that the jury would be seeing pieces of evidence as they were introduced on
the tape, and it was his courtroom procedure. It was it was a little odd.
Yeah, he knew that there was no cross denomination. So it's a whole lot less strenuous than obviously going to court.
They're right exactly, And it's just interesting that you tend to think of a of a trial that is being at libbed, that it's being played out sort of off the cuff, and when you go back to a tape that was made months before and you play it and it fits in perfectly, you realize that this trials are pretty well scripted.
What I wanted to ask you is that because you've written, you know what, over forty books, and true crime is not the only thing you've written about, but definitely you've written you understand the legal process in your mind. When you were looking at this case before the trial, and when I'm looking at it too, did you have your did you have an idea of what technically is self defense? She came out of the home with a knife in the purse was really not The definition of self defense
doesn't mean a jury won't take it that way. But that's a little bit of a stretch of self defense, isn't it.
Well. I think I think that there's there's a standard rule. You don't bring a knife to a fist fight. Yeah. Now, the other thing that complicates matters is that Florida has a new stand your ground rule, right or you know many states. Yeah, and they say that if you can,
you should run. But Florida, it's it's too sissy, and they're having they're having a lot of they're having a lot of acquittals uh with self defense uh defenses because it says you are allowed to stand your ground even though you are being attacked, which you know is the case here, and you.
Can want and you're supposed to be able to use force plus one. And if you have three people, you you know, bringing your fist to a fist fight and still doesn't work out with three people.
You know, it's assuming that three people are actually attacking her, that's right, you know. I think there's there's strong evidence that the girls attacked that Julisa never hurt anybody, and the Janet and Sarah attacked Rachel one at a time.
I think it's it was an interesting case in that I didn't know what the verdict was going to be, right, Yeah, I mean unless there is a you know, unless there's a strong legal ending, chances are it doesn't become a book because you don't want to put the word allegedly in five thousand times you're writing a book. Yes, But the question afterwards was, you know, was she charged properly the charge? She was arrested that night and charged with
second degree murder? Right, and what's that correct? Was?
You know?
Second degree murder means that Rachel deliberately killed Sarah with that knife, but she decided that she decided to do it on the spur of the moment. Uh. And some something thought that Rachel was undercharged because really, premeditation only takes a matter of seconds, and wasn't the fact that she had the knife with her in the first place
evidence of premeditation. And then there were others who thought that Rachel was overcharged, that she should have been charged with manslaughter, that she had a reckless disregard for Sarah's safety. It was true, but she had not intentionally killed her, That she didn't have the skills to purposely do the damage that she did. She was just flailing.
Was there a question of that she had stabbed her once, like you say, a surface wound, but then went in for the not for the kill, but the lethal stab wound that went right to the heart quickly, you know, I mean this was lethal. Was there a question of that? And she was just defending herself. Wouldn't have the stab itself. Most people, whether they're stabbed fatally or not, are not going to keep attacking. So was there any question about that incident?
So you know, there was not an eyewitness who could identify when the stabbing took place. Two girls. It all happens so fast. The girls come together in the middle of the street and there is just, you know, a mad flurry of motion, hair and arms and screaming, and then they separate and at first everything's, you know, everything just the okay. Sarah walks back to her van, standing up, and Rachel backs off and moves away, and it looks like it's over, and it's not until Sarah goes down.
She's believes most of her bleeding is internal. Chaos erupts again, but there's you know, we don't have anybody who says, yes, she stabbed her once and that wasn't good enough. She stabbed her again. The two stamps were were yeah, part part of a flurry of motion that nobody on either side could distinguish. Mm hmm yeah, so.
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But I mean her Her defense believed that her actions were protected under floor's right to stand your ground law and that she'd been jumped three on one and that rendered the use of the knife justifiable. I had, you know, I had no idea what the jury was going to do with this case. You look at Rachel at the opening of your program, the most notorious and shocking killers.
The shocking thing about Rachel Wade being a killer is that she looks completely harmless, you know, moments after the murders, over sitting on a bench in front of Javier's house, and she has a cop, she can bum a cigarette. She looks like a sullen cheerleader.
What was her actions like after her arrest in terms of now you get a lot of cases in this one, obviously they look very closely at the person's behavior after and if there's any visits, phone calls. So what was the behavior right after that? How was she was still cocky? I mean, what was she like?
No, no, she was she was quiet. She seemed a little dazed. She sat there and watched as the ambulance pulled up, and she lied. I mean, this was the thing. She lies. She said she hadn't know, she didn't know Sarah got stabbed. No, no clue. Yeah, she remembered everything except stabbing Sarah, which is probably not the way to go because it seemed phony. Bologni. Sure, we talked for a second about about the families, because the two families
in this case are they're really heartbreaking. Yeah, I mean, I know it's it's harder to lose a daughter to death than than to lose her to prison. Maybe, but she just can't fix sides. So yeah, with the right but the lutemants. Anyway, This is what the eighth or ninth true crime book I've written. And the families the victims always make my heart go out. They that never changes. They they want to do their best to protect their
child's legacy, and yet they want private. They sometimes treat writers like me like unwanted traveling salesmen, and others treat me like others treat me like free of charge therapist. I'm using my shoulder to cry on and that's fine.
You know, I'm injecting myself into their lives. The Ludmans were of the latter group, although I didn't do me any good because by the time I got to them, they had already participated in the national TV show dealing with their daughter's death and had signed an exclusivity agreement to not give interviews to anyone else. So our discussions were brief, but they did. There were plenty of things.
That I did know.
I knew that their despair knew no bounds of intensity. Charlie Ludeman was a large man with bad knees, a cab driver who, along with his wife and only daughter, only child had moved to Florida from New York City because they wanted to be where it was safe. Yeah, and when Sarah died, Charlie repeatedly dialed Sarah's cell phone so he could listen to her recorded voice saying Hi, wake for the beef. He realized that was the only chance he was going to have to hear her voice
from then on. He had some with Sarah's ashes injected under his skin as part of a tattoo, so he'd carry a little of her around with him forever. On the other side, Rachel's mom had a long suffering mother. She had an older son. There was a Rachel had an older brother and he no longer lived at home. You know, he was estranged from the family for reasons that are never spoken out loud, and we just know
that Rachel can't stand him. And then came Rachel after the brother had moved out, and she caused even more grief. She ran away again and again. As Rachel's mom would put it, she had the hotsy taxis. She had taste her grown men, and she wanted more. And it was it was Rachel's mom who really freaked out the most when she heard that Rachel was being charged with murder. It was the last straw she just broke, you know, she just when she thought she couldn't be hurt even
more about her children, Rachel went and did it. It was as if she stabbed her own mother in the heart. The woman withdrew into a shell and seemed in a deep state of shock both during the days after Rachel's arrest and culminating in court where at one point during the proceedings, you know, mom buried her face in her husband's chest and just violently shudders for you know, seemingly forever. And Rachel's dad, also in a state of shock, was physically trying to keep his wife inside her skin. She
was shaking so hard. It's really very rough to watch.
Well, Rachel had a lot of friends, high school friends as well, that attended the child, didn't they.
Yeah. Yeah. The place was packed with young people, and one of the true TV reporters who was covering the trial in person, said that during the breaks, the hallway outside the courtroom sounded like a high school cafeteria with all the chatter going on this extremely young crowd. Rachel of France was there, and a lot, a lot of Rachel's waitress friends.
Of a lot of Rachel's friends and a lot of Sarah's friends had really their best friends, had advised both these women or counsels these women, or especially in Sarah's case, had actually spoken to him and said, that's it. I'm off this guy. This guy's done it again. So there was a lot of advice from their friends and a lot of friends to say, listen, you guys deserve better of this guy.
Well, that's true, and of course they did. But if it has to do with the social networking, you're when you put something to a social network that embarrasses somebody, it's not private. It's as if you're doing it with
everybody standing around watching. And I mean one of Sarah's most interesting friends was was Ashley love Lady, and she was important to the evening's events because, if we believe the official version of the story, it was Ashley who spotted Rachel hanging out in front of Javier's house and told Sarah then her two friends where Rachel could be found. When first interviewed by the police, actually denied a role, and after a day's thought, she realized that this was
too important for her to lie. About She just not been sure how much trouble she'd be and if she admitted to what she'd done. Ashley was the trial's first witness and got the emotional ball rolling when she burst into tears as she discussed the way that Panela's Park girls were abused by their men. Actually had dated Joshua's older brother.
Now what what was what was Joshua doing like after the during this trial? Was he posting anything on his Facebook account or pardon me is MySpace account? What was was there any activity like that from this Joshua?
Now? You know, he he drops out of the situation. He refuses to go with Sarah's father to see her body in the hospital. He is not allowed to attend her funeral. He only appears at the trial in order to testify.
And he.
She's you know, he's lost his he's lost one girlfriend to death and the other one to jail. And the third Aaron Slothauer, who is the mother of his child. You know, she's always going to be around. She's she's an interesting character too. She refused to give to give interviews, but she did talk a little bit with me. She was Joshua's first girlfriend. They'd met in grammar school and they had a child together, and once she got pregnant,
of course he lost interest. And for her part, she was a real life teen mom, and she understood that Joshua was useless and she was going to have to step up and be the responsible one. You know. She went back to school, she earned a college degree, she was pregnant. While she was pregnant, she was working full time. She had her life together, and by the time Rachel killed Sarah, she was out of that world.
You know.
She didn't hear anything about it until the next day. And when I finally got her to make a comment, what she said was, you know, the whole thing is just so sad, crazy teens, so caught up in their own drama that someone had to die.
Yeah, it is interesting. It is interesting. Yeah, it is interesting too that josh did not I mean, he couldn't go, He couldn't attend the trial as being a witness. But after he did appear as a witness, he could appear at the trial. So I thought it kind of odd that he didn't, that he just I mean, despite the advice, I mean, this kid really turned as much as he had,
this tough guy persona that he was presenting. He took the advice of I guess that you know the prosecutor and his parents or whatever, and he really did not act like the character is portrayed it earlier in your account.
Of absolutely not. He In fact, he ran away. He went to New York. I think he's now returned to Florida, but he went into hiding. He's an interesting sidebar. The first journalist to interview Rachel's parents after the murder was a woman named Laine did Gregory, and she was a features writer for the Tampa Bay Times, and it was during her first days of covering the case that she
learned that she had won a Pulitzer Prize. And she turned out to be a tremendous asset to my book because she offered me a lead that led to a whole new mind of information, that being the Rachel prison tapes. When Rachel was first thrown in jail, she thought that it was a temporary thing and soon enough everyone would calm down to figure out that she was just defending herself and she'd be a free woman once again. So she used up a lot of her phone time having
phone sex with boys. She seemed to think that it was the only way for her to keep their attention interestingly enough. When she wandered to more serious subjects, they seemed to their interest flagged, so she kept talking about sex, and apparently prisoner phone sex is not that uncommon, despite the fact that everyone knows all conversations are being recorded by the authorities and anything they say can be used
against them. Rachel's dad warned her early not to discuss the stabbing, but he didn't say, you don't have phone sex with your boyfriends. And the recordings of those conversations are very revealing as we try to figure out, you know, what makes Rachel tick. She asked one guy what was the first thing he was going to do when he saw her, And he says he's going to grab her
and squeeze her and kiss her neck. And she said the first thing when she saw him, she was going to become his little head monster and she was going to take care of business. This guy wasn't as good at phone sex as she was, and he kept trying to put the action inside the jail with Rachel and her cellmates, and she wasn't going to go for that. So it's the tapes start out with hot chat with this boy named Jeremy, and then he loses interest when he realizes that she's not gonna be home next week.
And then she starts in with Javier, little boy, and she's smart enough to cut out the porn and move to more romantic things with Javier. He's a little bit classier guy. And Daniel, as I said, they talk about their their life together and how they're gonna get married. And now, unfortunately, you know, this is all being taped, and the prosecutors the uses the tape later on to attack, you know, the boy's credibility. On the stand, you'd say anything you want to marry her. But as you said that,
the trial is both shocking and spectacular. I mean, it's just high drama. The jury had to decide if Rachel had murdered Sarah Ludemant because it was three on one, or if she had a right to defend herself with deadly force, and the presentation of the eyewitnesses formed a perfect framework for the telling of the story, which was made things relatively easy for me. The wildly different ways that the eyewitnesses saw things. It proves once and for all that memory is a vague thing that we argue
to support our beliefs rather than the truth. And how easily influenced you know it we are, how imagination joins hands with memory so easily, especially during a shocking moment and the most dramatic moment of the trials, when Rachel Wade takes the stand in her own defense. It's a risky move for defense attorney Jabor, but like you said, in a self defense case, have to put her on and in the you know, ultimately doesn't doesn't really pay off.
It goes well during direct examination. He rather stringently controls her words through carefully constructed sentences. You know, they worked as a team, describing for the jury the fear Rachel felt and how she was jumped by multiple girls, and how she feared she was gonna be beaten to a pulp. And she thought, me, maybe Joshua had a gun, maybe his sister had the gun, maybe he'd lent the gun to Sarah. She felt she had a very good reason to armed herself that night. But the purpose of the
knife was never to use it. It was just to show it. And the sight of that blade was going to cause the gang to back down and there would be peace in the world. That was the plan and he's gone horribly wrong. It was so tragic and whoo who.
So gunn goes okay, so go ahead, go ahead.
Direct examination goes well. But then Rachel's turned over to prosecutor sus Hannahwiz, who lights into her like a wolverine. So Hannah Wiz speaks very fast. She interrupts Rachel's answers. She yelled, and Rachel did not take it well. She lost control of her emotions that began to babble and words filled out, completely out of her attorney's control at this point, and she said stuff. It was damaging. Yes, she threatened to murder Sarah. Yes, she carried out that threat. Oh boy.
Yeah.
But you know, as I said before, before we get too critical of you know, mister Abert, he's got to put her on not only because of the self defense but because of those you know, those damn tapes of of her threatening Sarah and the voicemails.
But what did you think of the of the argument that he put forth. Anyway, it seems almost on the line of not being able to be eligible for self defense by saying that, well, she just brought out the knife because she thought they may have a gun. Well, that's almost the definition of it doesn't matter. You went to a robbery, you didn't know that you were going to encounter any difficulty, and the guy ends up dead. Guess what murder?
Yeah, I don't think. I don't think anybody bought the thing about the gun. It was perfectly the gun. The gun. The gun wasn't mentioned during preliminary hearings. It was a late entry into the into the story or of a desperate less did attempt.
Yeah, but I'm saying, though, what did you think of his I mean, he didn't really even have a good argument anyway, when you in terms of actual self defense, if you were already brought out a weapon in case and then something else happens, that's not much of a self defense excuse either. And that's this what's wrong as he could present, that's.
Right all he could only use it to address her state of mind. Yeah, that that she is and if he knew. He never said she was afraid. He always said she was in fear if I was a god affectation and not quite sure what that was supposed to accomplish, But that was that was the reason that he introduced
the gun. And he even called Joshua Camacho to the stand to talk about the gun, and he got him to admit that at one time we had a gun, but Joshua was not in the mood to cooperate anyway and gave yes and no answers and said he didn't remember a lot and wasn't on the stand for very long at all.
What was Rachel Wade's demeanor? Like it had they done a pretty good job in that direct examination of sort of like lots of times it will change almost their appearance to look as wholesome and innocent as possible.
And then she was dressed in white and black, both innocent and in mourning. She was allowed to wear I make up the day that she testified, but she went without I make up. Otherwise she seemed to be very well rehearsed, she gave answers. By wrote, she seemed very very demure, very soft spoken, tiny little voice, and it's it's amazing to watch it all crumble. Second, you know,
miss Haniwitz lights into her, they start the other. They immediately start yelling at each other, and you know, poor Jay Avery's sitting there just going a home because the jury is hearing the voice they heard on the tape start to come out once. Once Rachel gets agitated, you start to hear that manic sound that there's something wrong with this girl sound to her voice, and yeah.
So uh, talk about one last question. I want to ask for one of the last ones, who were the most compelling witnesses and for who did they speak on behalf of in your mind?
I was most impressed, I think with Janet Camancho. Janet Camacho had a clear sense of who the good guys and the bad guys were and came into that evening with that sense. Just the whole fact of I didn't like Rachel because I thought she was bad for my brother's That's that's strong character assassination right right for the
cherry to hear. And the way she looked, she was stared at the defendant while she testified, you know, and it's just very very very very strong, a strong woman who made it very clear that she attacked Rachel because Rachel had just stabbed her friend. And this whole notion of three girls jumping her was was nonsense. They would have had a fifth sight, you know, it would have
been broken up in thirty seconds. Maybe somebody that had a bloody lip, and that would have been that except Rachel brought a knife, and that was why found compellerve.
I talked to Detective Local Ahead, Sorry.
Okay, I talked to the detectives of the lead detective Michael Lynch, and I asked him, you know, why do the girls in this story have such low self esteem? And he told me that he couldn't believe that there were so many fathers out there in Panel's Park, and he presumed everywhere else as well, who allowed their daughters to have such dangerously low opinions of themselves. You know,
we're worthless without a boyfriend. I have to have a boyfriend all the time or else there's something wrong with us. And reminded me when they asked Stephen King about the difference between Harry Potter books and the Twilight books, since the Harry Potter books are about stepping up team work, facing your fears, and the Twilight books are about the importance of having a boyfriend.
Yeah, this is my book.
A Knife and Heart is the is the anti Twilight books. If there's a lesson to be learned here, it's that it's not at a point important to have a boyfriend you grow up, be happy. And he says that he has daughters of his own, Detective Lynch, and that he is constantly just inflating their egos, and when he is girls are older, he wants, you know, he wants them to think that no one's good enough for them and to demand the very best and how they're treated no matter what.
Well. I think the thing is, I think we forget how it was when we were young. I mean, the thing is a lot of I think kids have been forced to grow up much much younger, and I think they look at everything much more seriously. And I don't think it's that much of a surprise. I have a nineteen year old daughter that is in a serious relationship with her boyfriend for the last three years. I mean when I was at age, I couldn't even possibly grasp that,
and I was not that kind of person. But I think kids have changed in that respect and they take these things much more seriously. But you do add a mix of drugs and low self esteem and maybe estrangement from their parents, or at least at least there's not as close as they could possibly be, and like you say, just this confluence of things and you get this sad and tragic end result, But there is a fair amount
of these people posing and making threats. That's what I find too, that a lot of younger people make threats without understanding that somebody might take those threats that they do daily and take them quite seriously.
Well, I spoke to a psychological counselor named Katy Morelli, and she told me that there's a change in brain chemistry that happens to people when they have sex. Biologically attachment forms and the brain changes from shared experience produced potent emotions, causing normally mild people to reserve, to resort to violence. Teenagers aren't adults, so it's a strong immature attachment.
Passion stirs up primal possessiveness. And you know, there's a strong chance that that Rachel had problems at home, that she entered entered the world with a certain void, because most girls don't drop out of school and run away from home just because of an unwanted curfew. You know, it's it's clear that she was a difficult child with whom to cope, and that there was maybe maybe a
mismatch in temperaments between the parents and the child. You know, she for whatever reason, didn't have any faith in herself as an individual. She combined that with poor decision making, extreme anger management difficulties, and you know, there you go, and she's she's down. A boy who's narcissistic. He's got an inflated sense of self importance, an exaggerated need for admiration, and as it's true with many narcissists, he appeared arrogantly,
self assured and confident. Although that turned out not to be the actual case. We could see by observing his behavior that he reacted poorly when things weren't going his way. You know, long before the murder, he punched Sarah. At one point, he pulled a gun on Rachel. You know, his work history demonstrated the lack of ambition, you know, perhaps because he feared competitive situations and he lived his
life avoiding the risk of failure. So, you know, narcissists, with their intrinsic lack of regard for others feelings, they prey on people with dependent personalities. They feed off of others and enjoy being fought over, enjoy manipulating their sexual partners. Josh's girls were prayed for the opportunist narcissists and he was drawn to them like a shark to blood.
Do you also think it's somewhat interesting commentary too, that it is very quite rare for women to kill in comparison to the vast majority of being men. However, there seems to be a slight increase, especially in younger younger people, in terms of fighting in this kind of context, or
parents killing their parents or killing siblings. And what I thought was interesting is that you talk about Rachel, but you know, Sarah did go there with a couple of women, a couple other women in a van, and you know, to you or I, I'm fifty three years old, so I'm saying, man, that just sounds like a bunch of guys,
and not all guys would have done that. So it seems oddly rare, or not rare, but odd odd that you do have this nineteen year olds in a van over a boyfriend getting out of a van and somebody with a knife and somebody spotting someone else. It seems high drama and very very serious. It almost seems like the kinds of things that boys would do, say over a drug debt or something. Sure, it seems seems out of place for young women to be acting like thugs.
It's almost unique. It's uh uh a detective when she says that, you know, ninety five percent of all murders involve a male, and it's very uncommon for the I mean, the remaining five percent girl woman on woman, girl on girl crime is very is very rare to begin with, and especially in a combative situation like this. You know, I said, there is there is an uptick in violence among teen girls, but it's the you know, she looked
at me wrong type of fight. There's hair pulling and scratching, and then that it gets broken up and there's a lot more cursing at each other, but nobody really gets hurt. You know, she's he hopes this is a one of a kind kind of incident.
I want to ask you too, Michael. We've got just a few minutes left. We've got about five minutes left, But I want to ask you how did you come to write visign. I know that you've handled all kinds of really heavy, heavy stories that other authors might back away from, very very intense. Why what what about this story? I want made you want to write about this, this case itself?
Well, I think it had to do with in its own way, as I just said, it's it's it's pretty bizarre. I mean, it's not it's not a serial killer, and it's not spooking. It's not a horror story like the stories I usually tell. It's it's a it's a it's a psychological drama. And the question is, and I'm not even sure I answered it adequately, the question is how how did these girls get this way? You know, what, what is it? What is it about today's society, about
maybe that region, maybe America, maybe maybe the world? What is it about today that allows this to happen? Uh? As you said, yeah, they sound like their guys been defeminized completely.
Yeah, absolutely, Yeah.
And it's the and it's the the scrawny little male who wants to be kept yeah like trop.
Exactly yeah and not yeah, like you said, this a little a little guy too, you know, just posing it's right, incredible.
Yeah. So anyway, uh, my next book, we're going to get back to what's more in character. I think for me, it's true horror film of a book. I believe it's gonna be I believe it's gonna be called Mutilator the Art Gallery Butcher. It's the story of Elton Brutus Murphy, a former sailor who had once tried out to be a navy seal, who claimed to hear voices in his
head that ordered him to rape and kill women. Uh for years, he says, he's been the voices, which also told him that he was a special chosen one, perhaps a god himself, the Lord Brutus, he called himself. And the body of Joyce Wishart was found on Wednesday, January twenty one, two thousand and four, on the floor of her Palm Avenue art gallery in Sarasota, Florida. She was strangled and mutilated. After death, her crotch was surgically removed.
And the thing that makes this book different for me was the killer's willingness to share with me his story. And he describes in great detail his slow descent into madness and for the first time details and how he killed and mutilated his victim.
Wow, so I can relate. I can relate that problem. I'm looking forward to that guy.
Yeah, you want to. My job is to keep ladies from going to sleep at night or returned to form with that one.
I've heard that one before. I'm going to read the book.
But not at night, had me today night, And of course I'm still conducting an investigation into a cold case double homicide. The hook being that the victims were classmates of mine. Two girls fourteen and sixteen, took place near my rural home, grewsome sex mers changed that neck of the woods forever, certainly changed my world. And I'm working with a private detective in Don Tubman up in Scottsville, New York, and we're gonna find out who did it.
It's forty five years later, but we're going to give them, the mother one of the victims some closure.
Very interesting, very interesting, good work. Good luck to with that Imperial on Earth something.
Thank you all. Well, we already have We're getting close.
Ah, Paul, I hate I'd love to hear about that. And of course we'll have you back on the program talking about those two very very interesting books that I'm sure you'll be pumping out of your incredible book factory that you have going on there and where you live. I want to thank you very much for coming on the program. I'm very engaging, another engaging interview and a great book. And for those listening, it's been a knife in the heart. Michael Benson's latest true crime soon to
be best selling classic, No Doubt. Thank you very much, Michael, have yourself a good evening and talk to you soon.
Good Night,