All-American Murder Read online

  Now if it aint gonna be this way say fuck it u aint gettn shit from me i file civil suit u loose it al n we hold court n da street u think im scared 2 die… (Bradley)

  I MISS U AND LOVE YOU and still watch videos of us having fun every single day and can’t believe this and will keep saying I can’t believe all of this cuz I truly can’t believe all of this shit is goin on!!…if I would really try and kill u when we were that close!! I wouldn’t and never would wanna hurt u and u kno that…Love u good nite. (Hernandez)

  Not to bother u but feel me on this, Bradley wrote back, sounding like a scorned lover. When u did that…its like u coming home 2 yr crib n catching ur broad in bed with another…U stole my trust n tore my ego.

  Chapter 45

  At around this time, Hernandez had Bo Wallace contact a company called International Armored Group and place a $120,000 order for a used armored Ford Expedition.

  Then, on April 19, Aaron showed up at the Chelsea Pub & Lounge, a few blocks north of his Hermosa Beach house. There, he began to drink—hard: double shots of Patrón Silver, alternating with the bar’s “Adios Motherfuckers” cocktail, which blended vodka, rum, tequila, and gin. This had become Aaron’s preferred way to drink: a shot of something stiff, followed by some sort of cocktail. On this night, the alcohol went to his head.

  Twice, Aaron tried to take his cocktail out onto the sidewalk in front of the pub. Twice, a bouncer had to come out onto the sidewalk to ask him to come back inside.

  It was a cool night in Hermosa Beach. Aaron could hear the sea pulling out, the cries of birds. The bar’s music blared from inside as he drank. He tried to ignore the bouncer, but the man was persistent:

  “Sir,” he said. “You can’t take drinks outside the bar.”

  Hernandez sighed as went back inside. He finished his drink, went to the bar, ordered another round, and headed toward the door for a third time.

  The bouncer stopped him before he could reach the sidewalk. This time, the bouncer asked him to leave. Hernandez refused, and sat down at a table to finish his drink. He did not seem to understand why he could not take it outside.

  As he sat there, fuming, Aaron began to curse at the staff. A few more bouncers approached, and he cursed them, too.

  It was the kind of conflict that Alexander Bradley had gotten used to defusing. But Hernandez had pushed Bradley out of his life. By shooting his friend in the head, he had tried to make it a permanent arrangement.

  Now, Bradley was one more thing that Aaron Hernandez felt paranoid about.

  Sitting there at the table, with the bar’s bouncers and staff all around him, Aaron hesitated for a moment. He’d already had run-ins with the cops in Hermosa Beach. If Shayanna had been less loyal, two weeks earlier, he would have gotten arrested.

  Aaron did not want to get arrested. Scowling at the staff, he paid his bar tab and left.

  Chapter 46

  That same week, in Florida, Bo Wallace walked into a True Value hardware store—a family-run shop located at the back of a parking lot used by parishioners of the First Baptist Church of Belle Glade.

  He passed a display of Wolverine boots and a rack that held silver machetes and cane knives, stopping at the “Guns and Ammo” counter, and asked the clerk for a .22-caliber pistol.

  According to Massachusetts State Trooper Jeremiah Donovan, Wallace liked small guns. “He likes having a little gun on him because it doesn’t stick out and it does the job,” Donovan explains.

  According to Carlos Ortiz, Wallace’s name for a .22 was a “deuce deuce.”

  The clerk had just the gun Wallace wanted. He pulled out a small silver-and-black Jimenez, and Wallace bought it, paying with cash that Papoo had given him, and left.

  Wallace knew Belle Glade well. He had grown up sixty miles south, in Miramar—another small, dying American town. His mother, Angella, still lived in Miramar and he would visit her often, swimming in the pool behind Angella’s house.

  It was a welcome break from the kind of trouble Wallace got into up north, in the company of his old friend Aaron Hernandez.

  A month later, on May 18, Hernandez and Wallace were drinking at Viva, a bar one block away from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. It was two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, and Viva was packed with football fans. But the Patriots had lost the championship game that year, and not all of them were happy to see Hernandez. When Aaron and Wallace exited the bar, a large group followed them out to the street.

  “Fuck the Patriots,” one man said. “I’m a Jets fan!”

  Once again, Hernandez decided to walk away. There were too many hecklers to deal with. Splitting from Wallace, he walked north, passing the Avon Cinema’s old, historic marquee. But the crowd from Viva followed him, heckling loudly.

  For once, Aaron was glad to see the police, who arrived quickly to break up the crowd. The cops were concerned that Hernandez was going to be assaulted—and a few men from the crowd did manage to break away and follow Aaron as he walked toward his car. But the police scrambled and detained them, too.

  As they did so, a Brown University police officer patrolling a few blocks away saw a man toss a small handgun under a parked car. The campus cop yelled after the man, who ran up the block, crossed the street, and disappeared from sight.

  The cop never got close enough to identify the man, with any certainty, as Ernest Wallace. But he did retrieve the handgun.

  It was the Jimenez .22 that Wallace had purchased down in Belle Glade.

  The gun was fully loaded.

  Part Six

  Chapter 47

  Aaron had been manning the grill all day. Three days earlier, on May 29, Shayanna had turned twenty-four.

  Now that the weekend had come, she and Aaron were going to party all the way through to Sunday.

  If Aaron had spent the past few weeks arming himself, preparing for an all-out war with Alexander Bradley, he’d done an excellent job of concealing his fears from his friends.

  Dozens of friends and family members had spent the afternoon at his place, jumping in and out of the swimming pool, drinking, eating off the grill. Shayanna’s sister Shaneah was there, along with her boyfriend, Odin.

  Once again, his mask was firmly in place.

  DJ Hernandez was at the house, too, along with Shayanna’s uncle, Azia “Littleman” Jenkins, and Aaron’s friend and henchman, Bo Wallace. Slowly, as the day progressed, people left, until only a dozen remained. Now, with nighttime approaching, that dozen piled into a party bus Aaron and Shayanna had booked for the occasion.

  They were headed to Rumor, a nightclub in Boston. The trip would take an hour each way, but inside the party bus the music was blasting and booze was flowing freely.

  When they arrived, Aaron and his friends found that Rumor was packed.

  This was no surprise—the club was one of Boston’s most popular nightspots. But Aaron Hernandez was a VIP, and the staff at Rumor made sure that he and his friends got a good spot to continue their party.

  The club closed at two. Aaron’s bus made its way back to North Attleboro. Odin Lloyd split off for home.

  Lloyd lived just a few miles away, in Dorchester. Unlike Aaron, who only played football, Odin played football and worked for a living. Like his girlfriend, Shaneah, Odin had dreams, and was willing to do whatever it took to realize them.

  But, Odin had to admit, hanging with Aaron Hernandez was fun.

  A week later, he, Aaron, Shaneah, and Shayanna were partying again, at South Street Café in North Providence. Odin and Aaron went outside, several times, to smoke marijuana. Hernandez’s nickname for Lloyd was “Blunt Master”—Odin was just that quick, rolling his blunts. Aaron went through blunts almost as quickly as Odin could roll them. And when a waitress stepped outside to ask Aaron and Odin to smoke somewhere else, Aaron laughed her off.

  The truth was that marijuana had never been a big deal for Aaron. The promises he had made before signing with the Patriots had all been forgotten. As time went on, an acquaintance reca
lls, Hernandez became brazen about it.

  “First of all,” the acquaintance says, “Aaron was always into drugs. Obviously, he had failed drug tests. But the crazy thing was, he became so flamboyant about what he was doing with drugs. I know for a fact that there was a player’s phone that he would take and do drug deals on. A phone right there, in the Patriots’ locker room.”

  It was as if Aaron was making the point, yet again, that everyday rules did not apply to an Aaron Hernandez.

  Another work week went by and then, on June 14, Odin was back at Rumor, along with Aaron Hernandez and Aaron’s barber and friend, Robby Olivares. A friend of Odin’s—a man named Kwami Nicholas—was also at the club that night.

  Along with other witnesses, Nicholas would later say that it looked as if Aaron and Odin were not getting along. Outside of the club, Nicholas said, Aaron and Odin got into an argument. Surveillance videos taken that night back Nicholas up: It shows Hernandez waving his arms angrily. Afterward, he and Odin gravitated toward different groups in the club. They remained apart for the rest of the evening.

  Some witnesses would say that Aaron was angry at Odin for talking to people, inside of the club, that Aaron had not wanted Odin to talk to.

  Some said that those people were friends of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado—the Cape Verdean men who had been gunned down outside of another Boston nightclub, a year previously.

  It’s also possible that Lloyd was talking to West Indian cousins of his at the club, and that Hernandez took those men to be Cape Verdean.

  Whatever the conflict had been, Aaron and Odin seemed to have resolved it by the time the club closed. They left together, with Aaron picking up a couple of women on their way home.

  One of those women, Jennifer Fortier, was the on-again-off-again nanny for Aaron’s daughter, Avielle.

  Chapter 48

  Like many NFL wives and girlfriends, Shayanna had come to accept the fact that Aaron would not—or could not—be faithful to her.

  A few years earlier, Shayanna had caught Aaron cheating and moved out for several weeks. When they reconciled, it had been on Aaron’s terms. “I made a decision that if I was going to move back with Aaron, I would have to kind of compromise on his behavior—and that included infidelity and everything that came along with it,” Jenkins would say on the witness stand.

  But Aaron did not go out of the way to flaunt his indiscretions. That was one of the reasons he’d gotten himself an apartment in Franklin.

  Located ten miles away from Gillette Stadium, the apartment was a crash pad for Aaron and his friends (Bo Wallace stayed there on several occasions), as well as a place to smoke weed. The Patriots’ director of player development, Kevin Anderson, had helped him to rent it in May.

  It was Aaron’s destination on the night that he and Odin Lloyd argued, and Aaron took Odin, Jennifer Fortier, and Fortier’s friend, Amanda DeVito, along for the ride.

  Jennifer Fortier was young and attractive. With her dark hair and high cheekbones, she looked a bit like a lighter-skinned Shayanna Jenkins. On the witness stand, she would say that she and Amanda had just left the club when they spotted Hernandez, who was sitting in an SUV with Odin Lloyd and Robby Olivares, the barber.

  “I just looked over and there he was,” she explained. “I walked by and I saw him, and I looked in and he saw me and said, ‘hello’—and then he said, ‘get in.’”

  Fortier says that she had asked Hernandez for a ride to her car, parked a few blocks away. Aaron said yes. She and Amanda climbed in the back, where Robby was sitting, and Aaron drove off in the opposite direction.

  Surprised, Fortier asked Hernandez to turn around. “I kept telling him I needed to leave, because I was the babysitter and I wasn’t comfortable.”

  Several times, Fortier asked Hernandez to bring her back to her car. But Aaron was already out on the highway. “There’s a rest area,” he told Fortier. “Do you want me to drop you off here?”

  The nanny refused. She had no idea where they were, it was the middle of the night, and the battery on her cell phone had died.

  According to Jennifer, Aaron, Odin, and Robby were high. “The three guys were smoking,” she would say. “And they were smoking what I would think was marijuana.”

  Ignoring the nanny’s objections, Hernandez drove “all the way back to North Attleboro to drop the kid that was sitting to the right of me off,” Fortier recalled. According to her, Hernandez told Olivares that he did not want Shayanna to see his car. The barber could walk to his own car, which he had parked close to Aaron’s house.

  Once he had let Robby out, Aaron drove Jennifer, Amanda, and Odin to the apartment in Franklin.

  Chapter 49

  Carol Bailey is a retired biology professor who still lives next door to Aaron’s old apartment in Franklin. On warm days, she sits out in the courtyard, minding her two cats and getting to know her neighbors.

  “It’s an apartment complex,” she explains. “I was in number 11. He was in number 12. We shared a common wall in the living room, kitchen, bathroom, and one of the bedrooms. Because the wall is made out of cement blocks, and extremely insulated, I wasn’t able to hear anything. But the hallway doors are not soundproofed at all. I had to pass his unit on the way out of the building. When I did, I could hear and smell anything from inside.

  “Number 12 had been empty for a while. Then it was bought by a local real estate agent. I would see him coming and going. A certain amount of work went into the place. I knew they were getting ready to rent it. Somebody mentioned that someone connected to the New England Patriots would be moving in.

  “Well, this is a not the high-rent district. This is an affordable area. I pictured a statistician moving in, or a groundskeeper. Goodness knows, I didn’t picture a football player! But one day, I went out into a courtyard and an SUV—a big one—drove in. I didn’t recognize it and thought, ‘Oh, this is someone who doesn’t live here.’ Then that person parked the car and got out. I said, ‘Hi! Are you moving in?’ He said, ‘Yes,’ and I said, ‘Oh, you must be my new neighbor!’ He said, ‘I’m moving in with my cousin, Aaron,’ but it didn’t register with me. He might as well have said ‘Alan,’ or ‘Adrian.’ But he was very pleasant, we had a very nice chat, and then he went in.”

  Bailey’s new neighbor told her that his name was “George.” Then, a day or two later, another vehicle that Bailey did not recognize drove into the courtyard. “This was a great, big, black Hummer,” Bailey says. “The guy who got out was tall. He’s got gray sweatpants and a gray hoodie. I said, ‘Hi! You must be my other new neighbor. You must be George’s cousin!’

  “He looked at me and grunted. That was it. I could see his face very clearly, and a little later I went online, looked up Patriots players, and saw one named Aaron Hernandez who looked exactly like the man I had seen.”

  Sometimes “George” and Aaron would come in together. Sometimes they came and went separately.

  “Whenever I would see George,” Bailey says, “he would give me a great big smile and wave and say pleasant things: ‘Nice day’ or ‘How’re you doing.’ Every time Aaron came or went and I said anything to him, he either ignored me or grunted. I didn’t see him very often. He probably came in later in the evening, when I had come in from the courtyard. But then I’d be sitting here, getting my supper, and all of a sudden, a strange smell would come in under my door from the hallway.

  “At first, I didn’t know what it was. It smelled like a skunk, and I’m a wildlife biologist, so I thought, ‘Oh my gosh! There’s a skunk in the neighborhood!’ But when I went out on my balcony and sniffed, there was no skunk smell outside, and as I got closer to my living room door, the smell got stronger. When I opened the door into the hallway, it was considerably stronger. I thought, ‘That’s funny. That skunky smell is coming from the hallway. Then, I began to notice that the smell would happen late in the afternoon, early in the evening, or later in the evening.

  “At some point, I asked a young couple who were nei
ghbors in the complex: ‘There’s a strange smell in the hallway and it seems to be coming from my new next-door neighbors. It smells sort of like skunk.’ They looked at each other and made funny faces. One said, ‘That’s pot.’ The other one said simultaneously, ‘That’s weed.’ I thought, ‘My gosh, that’s strange because that’s not what it smelled like when I was in college.’

  “One thing I neglected to mention is that, from that very first day that he walked by and grunted, wearing the hoodie and all, it occurred to me that my neighbor didn’t want it to be known who he was or that he was living here. I thought, ‘I will respect his privacy. I won’t say anything.’ If people asked I would say, ‘I don’t know.’ But no one asked. No one said anything. I got the feeling that other people didn’t know—or that, if they did know, they did like I’d done. They wanted to respect his privacy, too.

  “Then I found out that he had a mansion in North Attleboro and realized this was his getaway. He didn’t want to smoke pot at home with his baby and his girlfriend, so he came here to hang out and do guy things. There wasn’t so much smoke that it bothered me, and George was always very pleasant. I live on the third floor. If I was carrying heavy groceries, he was happy to help. One day he knocked on my door. He had a plug-in air-freshener in his hand and two little glass vases with liquid and sticks in them. He said, ‘Do you mind if I put these in the hallway? Because sometimes it smells out here and these might help. He put the plug-in at one end of the hallway, and the vials with the liquid and sticks coming out at the other end. One of those vials is still out there.”

  A few weeks later, Bailey recalls, “I was coming home and two reporters came out of their car. They said, ‘We have a video clip to show you from Florida.’ They opened up their laptop, or whatever the heck it was. They didn’t say anything else—they just showed me the video. It was someone being arraigned in front of a judge. The judge was saying, ‘Give us your full name please.’ He was talking to a black man with salt-and-pepper hair, like George had. The man looked to be about the same age as George. When the man said, ‘My name is Ernest George Wallace,’ I thought: ‘By golly, that’s George!’”