Journal of the Dead Read online

  JOURNAL

  of the

  DEAD

  A STORY OF FRIENDSHIP AND MURDER

  IN THE NEW MEXICO DESERT

  JASON

  KERSTEN

  For Judy

  And he said to me, “Stand beside me and slay me; for anguish has seized me, and yet my life still lingers.”

  So I stood beside him, and slew him, because I was sure that he could not live after he had fallen; and I took the crown which was on his head and the armlet which was on his arm, and I have brought them here to my lord.

  —SAMUEL 2:1

  A good friend stabs you in the front.

  —OSCAR WILDE

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Part Two

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for Journal of the Dead

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Rattlesnake Canyon is a remote, mostly unheard-of rift in the New Mexican desert. Compared to monumental terrestrial clefts like the Grand and Bryce Canyons, it is just a crack—five miles long, seven hundred feet deep, and typically bone dry. But in the early hours of Sunday, August 8, 1999, it became a moral fracture as well.

  Most of the people who heard Raffi Kodikian’s story found themselves standing on one side or the other. Some believed that what happened there, though horrific, was an understandable act, committed out of compassion under incredible physical and mental duress. Others believed that nothing could justify such a decision, and that only the most careless, insensitive, or deranged human being would act as Kodikian had. And still more were convinced that the story Kodikian told was an ingenious lie, designed to hide the truth of an enraged murder.

  It was that very ambiguity, along with an interest in the landscape, that drew me to write about the Rattlesnake Canyon case in the January 2000 issue of Maxim magazine. After that piece was published, a message board was created on Maxim’s website, and hundreds of young men logged on to comment and debate whether or not Kodikian should be given leniency. The only thing people could agree on was that his story was extraordinary and just plain bizarre. His knife had pierced more than his friend’s heart. It had struck a collective nerve.

  As I began writing this book, I felt great pressure to take a side myself. Like most people, I simply could not imagine doing what Kodikian did, to anyone, much less my best friend. And indeed history tells us that the choice he made—despite the hellacious circumstances—is by far the exception, not the rule. The easiest explanation for Kodikian’s behavior has always been that he had motivations other than mercy, and there is certainly ample circumstantial fuel for that fire. But if that is true, then to me it makes his story even more extraordinary, because he appears to be quite a well-adjusted young man. Here was a guy who was raised in an upper-middle-class home by a loving family. He adored books and travel, studied journalism, fell in love during college, wrestled with jobs he didn’t like while pursuing his writing, and had good friends with whom he enjoyed laughing and drinking beer. He could be me or fifty people I know. As far as which side of the canyon I stand on, I will claim the storyteller’s privilege and say only that I’d pity anyone picked to be a juror on a case such as this one.

  Re-creating what happened in Rattlesnake Canyon presented certain problems; the only living witness, Raffi Kodikian himself, chose not to be interviewed about the matter any further. That portion of this book is therefore based on his court testimony, the journal the friends kept, and physical evidence, along with law enforcement documents, my own interviews, and explorations of the terrain. I present it as fact, and leave it up to the reader to believe it or not.

  For obvious reasons, I could not include all of the court testimony in the State of New Mexico v. Raffi Kodikian. For the purposes of narrative, I shortened both witness testimony and examination by the lawyers, focusing instead on those sections I believe constituted the crux of each argument. I did not, however, alter the chronology of testimony or the quotes used in any way.

  Last, if you come across Raffi Kodikian, please leave him in peace. What each of us decides to believe about his motivations probably says more about how we prefer to see ourselves than it does about him. Raffi is, as they say, square with the house, and my intention in writing this book wasn’t to make his life or the lives of the Coughlin family more difficult. It was to tell the story of a criminal case that was one in a million, and at the very least to make people more aware of the precautions they should take if they decide to explore the priceless treasures of America’s deserts.

  Rattlesnake Canyon, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico.

  PART ONE

  1

  There’s an old story people still tell their children in New Mexico. It took place in 1598, when the Spanish founders of Santa Fe were forced to cross the hostile Chihuahuan Desert. Stretching from central Mexico to just south of Albuquerque, the Chihuahuan nearly wiped out the two hundred colonists by sapping away their water. They wandered through the cacti and tumbleweeds half mad for a week, and were spared an excruciating death only by a fortuitous rain. Afterward, they came to call the most brutal part of the desert el Jornada del Muerto, “the journey of the dead.”

  Lance Mattson didn’t need to hear the old tales about the Spanish to know what the desert could do to people. As a twenty-eight-year-old ranger at Carlsbad Caverns National Park, which sits inside a desiccating arm of the northern Chihuahuan, he had heard far worse stories. Sometimes search-and-rescue crews found lost hikers rambling and incoherent—often they found them dead. But on the morning of August 8, 1999, as he drove into the park’s backcountry to check on a pair of overdue campers, he did not expect to find anything that dramatic.

  With him was John Keebler, a sixty-eight-year-old park volunteer. That morning, Keebler had been driving along a scenic route called Desert Loop Drive when he noticed a red Mazda Protegé parked at a trailhead. An hour later, he mentioned seeing it to Mattson, who realized that he had seen the car himself, two days earlier. The ranger went into a drawer behind the visitor center’s information desk, found a camping permit that the hikers had filled out, and discovered that they were three days overdue.

  Mattson was hoping the hikers—a pair of East Coasters in their mid-twenties—were just extending their stay. Park visitors, after all, rarely lost themselves in Rattlesnake Canyon, the backcountry area that the campers had listed as their destination. In fact, it was rare for people to get lost at all in Carlsbad Caverns National Park. With a total area of about forty-seven thousand acres, it is the sixth smallest national park in the country, and in its sixty-nine-year history not a single person had ever disappeared there.

  Back at the park’s visitor center, the thermometer read ninety-five, but now it was far hotter as the ranger stepped out of the air-conditioned park service truck and prepared to head down into the canyon, where the sun reflected off the limestone walls and turned the whole place into a giant convection oven that could easily surpass 110 degrees F.

  Before he started down, Mattson wrote a note for the hikers telling them to report back at the visitor center if they showed up, then left it under the Mazda’s windshield wiper. Then the two men started do
wn the trail into Rattlesnake Canyon. This was Mattson’s first search-and-rescue mission, and he wanted to get it right. Only a few months earlier, he’d completed the two years of training necessary to make a major career shift, from education ranger—a job where he had spent most of his time leading tourists on tours of the caverns—to protection ranger, which meant that he was now charged with the preservation of not only the park, but also its visitors.

  Keebler kept right along with him, despite his sixty-eight years. Mattson was glad to have him along. The older man had been volunteering at the park for fourteen years, knew the desert, and would provide an extra pair of eyes.

  After about ten minutes of steady hiking, Mattson told Keebler to continue down the trail without him. The ranger broke off a few hundred yards to the left, toward the canyon’s west rim. From there, he’d be about 675 feet above the floor and have a good view of the terrain below.

  Sure enough, he spotted the glimmer of a maroon-and-green tent almost the moment he reached the lookout. It was right at the canyon bottom, about a half mile away as the crow flies and 250 feet from where the entrance trail spilled into the canyon.

  Mattson yelled for Keebler to wait before proceeding down. The sight of the tent so close the exit trail made the ranger uneasy. “I didn’t know what was going on,” he later recalled. “I was thinking, you know, Why were the campers late if it was that easy to find them?”

  Twenty minutes later, they reached the canyon floor. Eons of flash floods had left the bottom covered with smooth, sun-bleached stones the size of footballs. As the pair made their way toward the campsite, the rocks clacked hollowly and swarmed with heat.

  “Let me go in front of you,” Mattson told Keebler when they were a few hundred feet away. The campsite ahead of them lay still and seemingly empty, so much so that the feeling Mattson had up on the overlook hardened. He entered the site cautiously, with his senses elevated.

  Camping supplies were scattered around the tent in what looked like a debris field: a portable cooking stove, food wrappers, a dirty sock, hiking boots, an empty Gatorade bottle, a blue bedroll, sunscreen, a camera case—everywhere he looked there was some significant item that should have been properly stowed. A few yards to the right of the tent were the sooty remains of two fires—a luxury strictly prohibited in the tinder-dry park. The place looked abandoned, as if the campers had run off and left everything. Glancing to his left, his eyes fell upon a group of rocks that had been arranged in letters—an incomplete “SOS.” The last “S” was only half finished.

  Mattson started scanning the cliffs to see if he could locate the campers somewhere, but there was nobody in sight. He turned to take another look at the tent, then realized it wasn’t a tent at all; it was what was left of a tent. The bottom and sides were ripped out, leaving only the rain-fly intact, and as Mattson looked closer he froze. There was a person inside, a young man, lying on his side, looking directly at him.

  “Please tell me you have water,” the young man said. His voice was raw, craggy.

  “Yes, I do,” replied the ranger. “Is everything okay?”

  “Why weren’t you here earlier?” the camper asked. He sounded dispirited and weary.

  “Well, we’re here now,” Mattson said.

  The ranger unsheathed the water bottle hanging on his belt and handed it to the young man. He was about five eight, with short black hair, Mediterranean skin, and a trim, athletic build. His name was Raffi Kodikian, twenty-five, from Doylestown, Pennsylvania—one of the hikers listed on the permit. As he put the bottle to his lips, his Adam’s apple surged like a piston, and Mattson noticed long red scratches running the length of both of his arms. They did not look like cactus cuts. Mattson remembered that there had been two names on the permit.

  “Where’s your buddy?” he asked.

  “Over there,” said Kodikian, pointing to his right. Mattson looked but saw nothing but stones, cactus, and scrub.

  “Where?” he asked again.

  “Right there,” he repeated, pointing in the direction of an elongated pile of stones about thirty feet away.

  Mattson saw the stones but not the other hiker. He was about to ask again when Kodikian spoke.

  “I killed him,” he said calmly.

  The ranger stood there for an instant, transfixed, as if he had not understood the words. They carried more information than he could digest, and he repeated them in his mind quickly. Had he heard that word correctly: killed? Adrenaline socked him in the chest, and he turned rapidly and faced Kodikian.

  “Do you have any weapons?” he asked.

  “A knife. I have a knife.”

  “Any guns?”

  “No.”

  “May I have the knife?”

  Kodikian calmly handed him a small folding knife, with what appeared to be blood smeared across the blade. Mattson did not take it, but instead let Kodikian set it on the rocks in front of the tent, then nudged it farther away with his foot.

  Sensing no immediate threat, the ranger walked over to the rock pile Kodikian had indicated earlier. It was laid out with attentive symmetry and great care, about seven feet long, knee-high, and two and a half feet wide. Some of the stones must have weighed over sixty pounds; others, no bigger than pears, had been wedged carefully into the cracks, thwarting any glimpse of what lay beneath. Almost immediately his eyes fell upon one rock in particular. It was flat and round, and seemed to emblematically crown the right end of the mound. The more he looked at it, the more it pulled at his stomach. He carefully lifted it from the pile.

  Now revealed to him was a blue plaid cloth with a rise protruding on its surface—the telltale arc of a human nose.

  Mattson turned in disbelief, asking by gesture the question he couldn’t yet formulate. What the hell happened here?

  Kodikian, still inside the ruins of the tent, offered an almost inaudible response.

  “He begged me to do it.”

  The body beneath the stones was that of David Coughlin, twenty-six, of Wellesley, Massachusetts—Kodikian’s best friend. Four days earlier, they had come to the park as a stop on a cross-country road trip. The pair had camped out for the night, then become lost trying to find their way out of the canyon and eventually run out of water. According to Kodikian, that morning—only hours before Mattson and Keebler arrived—Coughlin had asked his friend to help end his pain from dehydration. Convinced they would both die, Kodikian had obliged.

  It didn’t take long for the questions to begin. Mattson radioed in a medically equipped U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter out of Fort Bliss, Texas, then began treating Kodikian. Scattered across his arms and legs were light abrasions, rail-like cuts, and what appeared to be the red, painful-looking blooms left behind by insect bites—the small, signature wounds that the desert environment inevitably leaves on the body. What the ranger didn’t recognize were more symmetrical, horizontal cuts along each of Kodikian’s wrists.

  “How’d you get those,” he asked.

  “We were in terrible pain, especially my buddy,” Kodikian explained. “He was just miserable. We decided to end it, so we got the knives…” Kodikian paused for a moment and looked down at his wrists. “He asked me to do it for him. My knife was duller than his. That’s why I’m alive.”

  The cuts, the ranger noticed, barely penetrated the skin.

  Minutes later, Mark Maciha, the park’s head law enforcement officer, strode up to the campsite. He was shorter and darker than Mattson, with a compact build and thick black mustache. The park’s dispatcher had called him at his home, a bungalow just behind the park headquarters, and he had quickly gathered up a field medical kit with saline-filled IV bags, military rations, and extra canteens, then driven the four miles to the Rattlesnake Canyon trailhead. Like Mattson, he’d seen the campsite from the canyon rim and had been surprised how easy it had been to find.

  “When I arrived at the campsite, Lance told me Kodikian’s story,” he later recalled, “and at the time I didn’t think he was lying. But l
ater on I had a difficult time believing it.”

  In his twenty years of park service experience, most of them at desert parks, including Death Valley, Maciha had never heard of a lost hiker killing another out of mercy. But seeing Kodikian there beneath his ragged tent, haggard as a castaway, his only thought right then was that he needed help. Kodikian, he concluded, was dehydrated; his skin was dry to the touch and three times, when Mattson tried to give him some more water, he vomited—a sign that his water-deprived body was unable to absorb it too quickly. Maciha solved this problem by running saline directly into his bloodstream through an IV. Afterward, there was little for the rangers to do but keep their patient calm and wait for the Blackhawk. It was then that Maciha’s doubts began to take hold.

  “Where’re you from?” the older ranger asked Kodikian.

  “Pennsylvania,” replied Raffi.

  “Oh yeah? What part of the state?” Maciha asked.

  “Town called Doylestown. Near Philadelphia.”

  “The weather out there sure is different. It’s so green.”

  “Yeah,” Kodikian said. “How long before that chopper gets here?”

  “Not too long.”

  “Man,” Kodikian said, irritated. “My grandmother can fly a Blackhawk faster than those army boys can.”

  “Hey, they’re en route,” Maciha said. “Let’s just hang tight with me a little bit here.”

  Maciha fell silent. The conversation would later haunt him. Victims of heat and dehydration were often delusional and incoherent, but Kodikian’s level of awareness seemed, if anything, high. He was nowhere close to the worst case the ranger had seen, and the comment about the Blackhawk was unsettling. Nice sense of humor for a guy who had just stabbed his best friend, he thought.