All-American Murder
Copyright © 2018 by James Patterson
Cover design by Anthony Morais
Cover photograph by Getty Images
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ISBN 978-0-316-41268-1
E3-20171212-NF-DA
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part One Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Two Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part Three Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Part Four Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Map
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Part Five Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Part Six Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Part Seven Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Part Eight Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Part Nine Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Part Ten Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Part Eleven Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Coda
Epilogue
Photos
About the Authors
Books by James Patterson
Newsletters
To Bill Robinson, who got this thing cooking
Prologue
Matthew Kent ran track and played football at a high school in Attleboro, Massachusetts. After school, he worked out at a gym called Answer is Fitness. Then he would run, two miles north, to his house on Homeward Lane. The route went through an industrial park and into a clearing. The path turned to gravel, then dirt. On the far side of the clearing, at Landry Avenue, it turned into pavement again.
On June 17, 2013, Matthew did not get as far as the pavement.
It was a Monday. The day before the last day of school. Matthew had gotten to the gym at four. By the time he got out, an hour later, the weather—which had been beautiful all day—had started to turn. Clouds were gathering. The wind had started to gust. Matthew was running through the industrial park.
Suddenly, at the far end of the clearing, he stopped.
There was a man, lying on his back near a dirt pile.
Matthew called out to him: “Are you all right?”
The man did not answer. Matthew walked a bit closer, until he was about twenty feet away.
“Are you all right?” he asked again.
Once again, there was no answer.
Detective Mike Elliott was nearing the end of his eight-hour shift at the station when the transmission came over the radio: A guy down. A “possible sudden” behind the Corliss Landing industrial park.
Lieutenant Michael King, of the Massachusetts State Police, was coaching his son’s little league team when he got the call—he was already on his way down to the clearing. Assistant District Attorney Patrick Bomberg would arrive shortly after, along with uniformed police officers and members of the North Attleboro fire department. But North Attleboro PD Captain Joseph DiRenzo beat everyone else to the scene.
The captain had left work at four. He was less than a mile away from Corliss Landing when the call came in, and he showed up, in shorts and a T-shirt, at 5:38.
DiRenzo saw right away that they were dealing with a homicide.
“There were rounds, and what appeared to be bullet wounds to the torso,” he says. “When I knelt down and touched the body, I could clearly tell that rigor mortis had set in.”
The man on the ground was lying faceup. His left fist was clenched over his chest—one of several places he had been shot. He was young. He was black. His eyes were half-open.
Flies were buzzing around the man’s nostrils.
DiRenzo made note of the sneaker prints that had been left in the dirt. He saw a baseball cap, a white towel, and a partially smoked marijuana blunt lying on the ground. When he looked up, he saw something else: Dark, menacing clouds. A storm coming in from the west.
Soon, it would rain—heavy rain, which would wash away crucial pieces of evidence.
“It could not have come at a worse time,” DiRenzo recalls. “We have the body itself, tire marks, shoe prints, and rounds. All of a sudden you could see the trees bending over, clouds moving in in slow motion. It was a moment of, ‘Holy shit, we’ve gotta do something here!’”
The fire department had brought tents and tarps that the police could use to cover the crime scene. The cops worked quickly, trying to stay ahead of the storm. They measured, logged, and photographed as
much as they could. But they also had to be careful not to contaminate the location.
Everyone had to park one hundred yards away from the body, in order to preserve the tire tracks. Everyone, including the firemen, had to wear boots and gloves, or have the bottoms of their shoes photographed for comparison purposes in preparation for the eventual homicide investigation.
The man had been standing when the first shot hit him. The detectives made note of the dirt the man’s heels had kicked up as he fell—it was the kind of detail that a rainstorm would wash away.
The man had been shot several more times after falling.
Boom, he goes down, the cops thought. Then, when he’s down: Boom, boom, boom. You could definitely tell, somebody wanted to make sure he was dead. And the shell casings are right there—one in the dirt and three more in a little indentation in the ground right next to the body. They’re all right there. Whoever did this was brazen. It’s crazy—not even bothering to pick up the brass?
The police put tarps over the tire and sneaker prints, set a tent up over the body, and covered the body itself with a tarp, placing rocks around the tarp’s circumference to keep the wind from blowing it away.
There was nothing more they could do before the storm passed.
The rain lasted for twenty minutes—a half hour at the most—but it was heavy. Forty-mile-an-hour gusts shook the trees that stood around the clearing. The temperature dropped by twenty degrees. When the rain stopped, a state trooper named Michael Cherven removed the tarp and went through the dead man’s pockets:
Sixty-four dollars and seventy-five cents in cash. Two sets of keys for an Enterprise Rent-A-Car. A cell phone.
“His cell phone?” one of the officers said. “For Christ’s sake, you’re gonna kill someone, take his cell phone!”
In the man’s wallet, they found an ID: Odin Lloyd. Twenty-seven years old. The face in the photograph matched the victim’s.
Back at the North Attleboro police station, Detective Elliott and Elliott’s colleague, Detective Daniel Arrighi, waited outside of the room as a state trooper named Eric Benson called the car rental company and spoke with a manager named Edward Brennan.
“I’m investigating an apparent homicide in North Attleboro,” Benson said. “We’ve recovered two sets of keys to a black Chevy Suburban, Rhode Island registration 442427. We have reason to believe that the person who rented it may be in danger.”
Brennan looked up the number.
“Oh, no,” he said.
Outside of the room, the detectives strained to hear Trooper Benson’s side of the conversation. A few moments went by.
Benson opened the door.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said when he saw Elliott and Arrighi. “The car was rented by Aaron Hernandez.”
Part One
Chapter 1
It was November 23, 2006, and Aaron Hernandez’s high school football team—the Rams—was suiting up for the Battle for the Bell.
Played annually on Thanksgiving mornings, the Battle was a grudge match between Aaron’s school, Bristol Central, and its crosstown rival, Bristol Eastern.
Bristol, Connecticut, is a working-class town—football country in the middle of a state where soccer and crew are the suburban sports—and the Battle drew thousands of people to Muzzy Field, an ancient, minor-league baseball stadium that had hosted Babe Ruth at one time, and had been scouted as a film location for The Natural.
Every year, going all the way back to 1959, bragging rights had been at stake: Would the Rams get to lord it over the Lancers for twelve more months?
This year, the stakes were especially high. If the Rams won, they’d advance—for the first time in nineteen years—to the state championship. If they lost or tied, it would be the end of their season, and the end of Aaron Hernandez’s high school football career.
The Rams were confident as they ran out onto the field in their red-and-white uniforms. They had good reason to be. With Aaron Hernandez as their team captain, the Rams had won all but one of their games. Everyone favored them over the Lancers, who had bigger players on their team but had lost four of their games that season. Everyone knew that, on this day, a win by the Rams would push them into the playoffs.
Once again, all eyes were on Aaron Hernandez.
Aaron was a quadruple-threat athlete. He ran track, and was the best player on the school’s basketball team. He had speed, dexterity, good reach, great hands. When he played baseball, he was the pitcher. On the basketball court, his dunks were legendary. And on the football field, he ducked, dodged, and stutter-stepped like a basketball star.
At 6′1″ and 245 pounds, Aaron already had the body of an NFL player. Big and fast, he was the kind of tight end who’d always be the offense’s primary option.
He was the best athlete that Bristol Central had ever produced.
“Bristol Central had become the powerhouse of the state,” says Armando Candelaria, who was coaching high school football nearby in New Britain. “And Aaron Hernandez was the big name in Connecticut football. New Britain is a bigger city than Bristol. Our rivalry goes back to 2001, when Aaron’s brother, DJ, was on Bristol Central’s team. Our rivalry went from there to Aaron’s own rise in football. In 2005, I remember game planning for Aaron. Planning just for him.
“He was like something you’d see on ESPN’s 30 for 30 series. A man among boys, even as a junior. When we played him the second game of his junior year, he caught four balls for a hundred and eighty yards—on a losing effort. In college, he could have played tight end or defensive end—it didn’t matter. You knew who the best player was when he walked onto the field. He was. Definitely.
“I was the defensive coordinator, the secondary coach. It was my responsibility to stop Aaron. But he was very, very hard to block. He’d run away from the whole game. There was nothing you could do about it. From the coaching point of view, his numbers were unbelievable. As a senior, on both sides of the ball, he was dominating. His junior year as a tight end put him on the map. He would give you two hundred yards receiving as a tight end. I remember one game: DJ was a senior. Aaron was a freshman, but he didn’t look like a fourteen-year-old kid. He ran a shallow cross, coming across the middle, and turned it up against seniors. To do that at fourteen against varsity kids speaks volumes.
“In his junior year, we started calling him ‘The Big Guy.’ We started to play a tough man underneath him—whoever got at his feet—and then we’d have a man eight yards on top of him, in case he got free of the first guy. Double coverage the whole time. That was easier said than done because my staff and I did not anticipate how physical he was. He was a lot faster in person than he was on film, and he would get free from the first defender and get open in front of the second defender. That made the game plan difficult during his junior year. We still got the win, but he made it known that you weren’t going to double him.
“Everyone talked about his size. No one talked about his feet. He had really good basketball feet. His athleticism and speed took over. His footwork and balance. When you saw it live you understood, the kid was a born athlete.”
“The thing that stood out to me,” says Ian Rapoport, who covered football for the Boston Herald, “was the first time I saw a guy fall down. He was the first football player who played like a basketball player, making defensive backs fall down. The kind of player who made the press box go, ‘Wow!’ An incredible, freakish athlete, with unbelievable versatility and talent. The first time I saw him, I thought, This guy’s got game. He could start and stop on a dime. It was amazing.”
Chapter 2
Aaron knew that the Lancers’ coach would double-team him at every turn, just as every other opposing coach had all season long.
“From a coaching perspective, the philosophy had to be to figure a way to take Aaron out of the game plan,” says Sal Cintorino, who ran the football program at Newington High School and went on to coach Bristol Central. “That was what everyone tried to do. We’d try to
put two guys on him, try to influence Matt Coyne, who was their quarterback at the time, to go in a different direction. But Coyne had so much confidence in Aaron. He didn’t care who covered him. He’d throw right into the coverage. Somehow, Aaron would come away with the football.”
Given how well Aaron had been playing, Bristol Central should have steamrolled the Lancers straight back to their side of town. But, just after kickoff, dark clouds full of rain, slush, and snow filled the sky.
Although it was just a few degrees above freezing, the cold did not bother Hernandez. He had played beautifully in the cold in last year’s Battle, making seven catches for 112 yards, scoring a touchdown, leading the Rams to a thirteen-point victory. More troubling was the fact that the Rams were a passing team—and, Aaron knew, passing teams did not do well on rainy, windy football fields.
The Lancers took a 7-0 early lead in the game, moving fifty-five yards on eleven plays. In the second quarter, the Rams’ coach, Doug Pina, adjusted for the rain and moved Aaron into the backfield. Hernandez did not disappoint. He ran straight up the middle, plowing straight through the other team’s players. He made a short but explosive touchdown run that opened up a 14-7 lead. But stripped of their passing game, playing in the mud, the Rams struggled to maintain their advantage.
“It was a bad day,” Pina recalls. “The field was a mess. Our quarterback was having a lot of trouble throwing.”
“It was the coldest I’d ever been,” one of Aaron’s teammates remembers. “I remember being out there, just stepping in puddles when I was on the field. Down in the line your hands would sink into the mud.”
“The downpour was torrential,” says Cintorino. “The rain was sideways.”
Aaron’s teammates on the sidelines wondered if Bristol’s Parks Department had let the game go forward because the department employee who had made that call was biased toward Bristol Eastern.