Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle (87 page)

“I didn’t tell her anything about that,” Joshua said. “What happened next was that Rachel started putting things up on Myspace.” He didn’t remember the exact words. “Something like, ‘My baby’s in New York.’”

“‘My baby,’ meaning you?”

“Yeah.”

“Did she put your name on Myspace?”

“No. Just ‘my baby.’”

Lynch was incredulous: “Somehow this enrages people? Words on a computer screen? This upsets people? Are we being serious?”

“Yes.”

“You realize how absolutely ridiculous that is, right?”

“I know. I have told Sarah plenty of times.”

“So Sarah sees the mention of ‘my baby’ on the computer. Why does Sarah care enough to look at Rachel’s Myspace page?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“No, you are not. Tell me. Why did Sarah care so much about what Rachel was saying?”

“Because I don’t know. Because I don’t get what you are trying to say.”

“If Sarah thinks that you and Rachel aren’t dating, why is she looking on Rachel’s Myspace page? I’m not saying that it’s illegal or a problem. I just want to understand. Why in hell does Sarah care what Rachel has to say?”

“I asked Sarah that question so many times, too!”

“And what did Sarah say?”

“She said, ‘Because you’re mine.’ That’s what she always said. That’s what they would do. One would put something about the other on Myspace and they would get mad, even if it’s not true.”

“Did Sarah tell you that she had called Rachel, that she bitched her out or anything like that?”

“No, Sarah never told me when she did anything.”

“But you do know she was upset about something Rachel had posted on there?”

“Yes.”

“Was it normal for Sarah to get upset about things on the Internet?”

“Yeah, and they knew that. That’s why they did it.” He only knew about Rachel baiting Sarah with online comments. He didn’t know if Sarah retaliated.

“You said ‘back and forth’ before …,” Lynch pointed out.

“Yeah, but the texts came from Rachel,” Joshua said.

Lynch asked if there were any more incidents in the three weeks leading up to the tragic night? Joshua said there were not. The detective said he knew Joshua’s relationship with Rachel was tumultuous, to put it mildly. Lynch had read the police report: Rachel called the cops on him, Joshua Camacho, for kicking in the front door of her apartment. When did all that stuff occur?

“That was before I went to New York,” Joshua replied.

“Rachel’s been working at Applebee’s. Have there not been incidents out at Applebee’s involving you or Sarah, or anything like that?”

“No.”

“So there were no incidents during the three weeks before. Okay. In that case, what happened yesterday, or maybe the night before yesterday, that led up to all this?”

Joshua said it was about eleven o’clock on Tuesday night. Joshua and Sarah were playing video games at his sister Janet’s house. Rachel texted his phone.

“You don’t want to be with me because of Sarah,” Joshua remembered one text reading.

He texted back: No, I don’t want to be with you because I don’t like you no more.

Now Rachel was texting that she was going to get Sarah, that she was all staked out, and Sarah was going to have to come home sooner or later. Sarah’s parents were also calling, saying that she had to go home. Joshua told Sarah that for security reasons, he didn’t think she should leave.

Janet had a full house. Sarah and Jilica and his brother James, and his niece and nephews, were all there. Joshua knew Rachel had driven down the block a few moments before because Janet was outside smoking and saw it. So he texted Rachel: Why are you down this street. Go home.

Joshua said that Rachel texted back: I’m waiting for Sarah to come out.

“Before your sister told you about the car on her street, you were conversing with Rachel. Isn’t that correct?”

“She had texted me.”

“Did you call her back?”

“No, I did not.”

“I want your complete honesty here, because I am going to take your phone records and compare them against what you tell me. If I see you are calling her when you say you weren’t calling her, I am going to have a problem with that.”

Joshua said that was fine. He did not talk to her. He only texted her. They should check his cell phone, which was in his name. T-Mobile had the records.

Lynch became direct with Joshua. This data he was getting made a lot more sense if Joshua was sneaking over to visit Rachel every now and again. That would be the thing that would explain why Rachel and Sarah feuded, the reason why tempers were running so hot. They really were sharing a man.

Lynch said he had every reason to believe all of that was true. He’d heard a lot about Joshua. “The bottom line is you’re a player,” Lynch said. “You are stringing all three of these girls along—Erin, Rachel, and Sarah.”

“The reason I see Erin is because of my baby.”

“I understand that, and you’re just trying to be involved with the baby’s life, right?”

“Yeah.”

There was a pause and Joshua took the opportunity to correct something Lynch had said earlier. When he said there were no incidents during the three weeks before the stabbing, he didn’t mean that he and Rachel hadn’t had conversations. Well, they had had the same conversation several times.

“Rachel wanted to be with me—and I told her no,” Joshua said. He said no because, to be blunt, because of the
skank
factor: “Guys who knew where Rachel’s apartment was would come up to me—say, I was in a store—and they would say, ‘Hey, you know Rachel Wade?’ And they would think that I was still having sexual relations with her—but I don’t.” She had a mess of boyfriends, so many that Joshua couldn’t convince people he wasn’t one of them.

The way Joshua spoke made it seem as if there was a lull in the drama, Lynch analyzed, and then, all of a sudden, Rachel was suddenly furious with Sarah, texting threats to her.

Joshua agreed that there was a suddenness to it. “That’s why I didn’t want Sarah to go out there,” he added.

“But Sarah is twice Rachel’s size,” Lynch said.

“Rachel is small, which meant she had people with her, or she had
something.
Nobody in her right mind would want to go fight somebody….”

“What was the exact wording of the text? What was she going to do to her?”

“She said she was going to ‘beat her ass. I want my one-on-one.’”

“Are you aware of other incidents involving the two of them, chasing each other in cars all around the city, and crap like that?”

“Yeah.”

“And you couldn’t put a stop to that, right?”

“No.”

“So she was on your sister’s block. At some point did she leave? Did you go outside to see Rachel?”

“No, I didn’t want to go outside. I knew that Sarah would go outside, too, if I did. My brother went outside to smoke a cigarette and said that Rachel’s car had gone by again.”

Joshua sent Rachel a fresh text, telling her to go home. She just said she was going to get Sarah. “If I don’t get her now, I’ll get her at home,” Joshua recalled Rachel texting.

And all this time, Sarah’s stress level was on the rise, like one of those cartoon thermometers that pop, as her parents called telling her to get home. Sarah didn’t want her parents to worry so she didn’t tell them about Rachel’s threats. She lied and said she was in the middle of a video game and would be home soon.

Sarah finally said, “I’m going to go home.”

Janet Camacho said, “I’m not going to let you go by yourself.”

Since Sarah and Janet were going, Jilica went, too. His brother Jay left around that same time also, so Joshua was stuck at the house to watch Janet’s kids.

“And then I got a call,” Joshua said, voice quavering.

“They were going to go and get McDonald’s. Know anything about that?”

“No. I thought Sarah was going home.”

“If Sarah drove, how were Janet and Jilica going to get back home?”

“They were going to walk. We don’t live far from Sarah’s house.”

“How far?” Lynch asked. When he received no response, he added, “Are you sure that’s why they got in the car?” Lynch pointed out that from Janet’s house, Sarah’s house and Javier’s house were in opposite directions. One did not pass by one on their way toward the other.

“I don’t know what happened after they left, honestly.”

“Well, you’ve talked to your sister about it, obviously.”

“No, not that night. After that, I went to the hospital, and I—”

“No, I said you talked to your sister since it happened, right?”

“Yeah, I talked to her, but I didn’t talk to her about that.”

“They didn’t think Sarah was capable of driving home alone?”

“No, my sister wanted to make sure Sarah had people with her for when she got out of the car, in case someone jumped her outside her house.”

“So Janet wanted to be there as protection for Sarah?”

“Yes.”

“After they left, did you call or text your sister, or Sarah, or Rachel?”

“I called Sarah at one point and I said, ‘Where you at?’ And she was like, ‘I’m going to call you back in a minute.’” He didn’t know why she said that.

“That ride from your sister’s house to Sarah’s house should have taken two minutes. During that time, you called her?”

“Yes. I called right after they left. I asked her what she was doing. I wanted to make sure she wasn’t going to go after Rachel or anything like that.”

“When she called back, what did she say?”

Joshua started to cry. “She said, ‘It hurts,’” he said with a gasp. “I asked her, ‘What hurts?’ And the phone just went dead. I called my sister and I heard screaming. I ran to her dad’s house, and I had him drive us down to Javier’s house, and she was lying on the floor.”

“You mean to tell me she called you and said, ‘It hurts’?”

“Yes, and when she said it, I didn’t know what she was talking about.”

“When you called your sister’s phone, what did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything. All I could hear was screaming.”

“Then how did you know that they were at Javier’s house?”

“My brother told me. My brother had drove by there.”

“Was your brother driving a little white car, by any chance?”

“No, it was a brown car.” He knew nothing of a white car. “Right after he called Janet, I called Jilica. She was like, ‘We are outside that boy’s house.’ And I said, ‘What boy?’ And she was like, ‘Sarah got stabbed.’”

Lynch tried again to get Joshua to talk about conversations he might have had with his sister or her friend about that night. Joshua emphasized that he had not seen his sister since that night. There had been conversations, but not about this.

The last time he saw Janet, he called her from the hospital that night and asked her to come pick him up. When she did, he told her that Sarah had died, and Janet cried.

They started to drive away, but Janet had a panic attack and was hyperventilating. Joshua took over the wheel and drove Janet back to the same hospital from which they’d come.

“After that, I went to my parents’ house,” Joshua concluded.

“Are you telling me that you haven’t spoken to your sister or Jilica about how they ended up at Javier’s house that night?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Well, I don’t believe that for a moment,” Lynch said. “I want to be sympathetic toward you because you are obviously upset about Sarah, but please do not insult my intelligence. Anyone who was in this position would want to know what the hell happened. You can’t tell me you didn’t talk to your sister about this.”

“I am telling you the truth. I don’t know how that happened.”

“They were the last two people with your girlfriend when she died.”

“Every time I try to talk about it, I just start crying. I can’t talk about it.”

There was a pause as the detective wrote notes.

When Lynch resumed the interview, he returned to an old point. “Why were Sarah and Rachel on the phone? Why were they texting each other?”

“I don’t know. I know that Rachel said, ‘After I stab you, I’m going to stab your Mexican boyfriend.’”

“How would you know that?”

“Because my sister told me.”

“You told me that you hadn’t talked to her about any of this.”

“She talked to me before.”

According to Joshua’s time line, the Mexican boyfriend comment arrived on Sarah’s phone while Sarah was in her car, still in Janet’s driveway. Janet ran into the house to give Joshua the house keys and told him at that point the kind of stuff Rachel was texting.

“Why would you need the keys to the house if they were going to drive the few blocks to Sarah’s house and walk back?”

“You see?” Joshua said. “That’s the part I don’t understand.” All he knew was that Rachel said what she said, and everyone heard because of speakerphone. “And I was like, ‘Just take her straight home and come back.’”

Lynch was getting angry. “Why did Sarah go to Rachel looking for a fight? Did you ever ask your sister? Why did your sister take your girlfriend, who is now dead, to that house? Did you ever ask her that? She would still be alive if you had just taken her straight home. You didn’t say that to your sister? You sent your sister with Sarah to protect her, right? And, instead, they end up going to a house looking for a fight. Are you pissed at your sister? Are you going to say anything to her? Do we need to get your sister in here and ask her why, while you’re here? Why didn’t she take Sarah home, like she was supposed to? Why is that? Can you explain it to me?”

Joshua said he didn’t feel that Janet was responsible for what had happened.

“You sent her to go.”

“I didn’t tell anyone to go. I told Sarah to stay there. I told my sister—”

“You said, ‘Please escort her home.’ Isn’t that right?”

“I told Sarah not to go. She said her dad was going to be pissed.”

“And you told Janet and Jilica to go with her to protect her, right?”

“No, I didn’t tell them to go with her at all. I didn’t ask her—”

“How do you detour from going to Sarah’s house to going over there and getting into a fight? I’d be pretty pissed at my sister if I lost a girlfriend that way,” Lynch said. “And you haven’t even asked why they changed destinations.”