All-American Murder Read online

  “You know throughout this whole thing—it taught me so many lessons about life. How people pretend to be one kind of person, but you find a monstrous person underneath. I never met the young man before. I can’t tell you he was a nice guy coming into the house. I can’t tell who he was. But I know who my son is, and I know that if my son knew anything negative about this individual, he would not have stayed around him.”

  Chapter 55

  Shaneah Jenkins’s first thought had been, “Odin’s calling.”

  It was late: just past one in the morning on Tuesday, June 18. Shaneah had tried Odin several times on Monday, without hearing back. She didn’t know where her boyfriend was. But, now, as she looked at the phone, she realized she did not know the incoming number.

  Trooper Benson was on the other end of the line.

  Benson had been out at the clearing where Odin’s body had been discovered. He had seen the storm roll in, watched the detectives as they scoured the crime scene for evidence. Back at the station, he had called Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and traced the keys Odin had had in his pocket to Aaron Hernandez. Then, he had placed the call to Odin Lloyd’s mother.

  A few hours later, the task of calling Shaneah had also fallen to him.

  Jenkins cried when Benson told her that Odin was dead. She recalled meeting him, at the Comfort Suites hotel she’d worked at in Southington. That front desk job (which Shaneah had gotten through Shayanna, who had worked at the Comfort Suites herself) was one of three jobs Shaneah had held down at the time, while putting herself through college.

  Shaneah was smart and ambitious, as well as hard-working. She’d planned ahead for her future with Odin.

  Now, she was alone in Dorchester and Odin would never be coming home. The only place Shaneah could think to go was her sister’s house. She arrived, along with her uncle Littleman and one of her nieces, just before six in the morning, entering through the garage and walking up into the living room.

  Shayanna greeted her there with a long, strong hug. Shaneah sobbed and Shayanna listened, sympathetically. Finally, Shaneah lay down on her sister’s sofa and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, from which she woke crying. She checked on her niece, who was sleeping beside her.

  Then, at around eight in the morning, she watched Aaron come through the front door.

  “I’ve been through this death thing before,” Hernandez told Shayanna’s sister. “It will get better in time.”

  Part Seven

  Chapter 56

  While Shaneah slept, Shayanna ran all over the house. First, she took a large, black garbage bag down to the basement, out of view of the home’s surveillance cameras. Moments later she came back up with the same black bag and left the house, taking her sister’s car.

  Inside of the bag, there was a box that Aaron had told her to get rid of.

  It was still morning and Shayanna drove around “aimlessly,” as she would put it, until she found a dumpster that called out to her. She tossed the garbage bag inside, along with the box that Aaron had given her.

  “I’d learned not to ask questions,” she would say.

  Aaron Hernandez had also been busy. Upon waking, he’d called for a cleaning crew to come to his house. Before long, three women had arrived and gone straight to work. (Prosecutors would later accuse Shayanna of threatening the women with deportation if they talked about anything they had seen.)

  That afternoon, Hernandez, Wallace, and Ortiz left the house. With storm clouds looming on the horizon, they drove to an Enterprise rental location to return the Altima he had used the night before. As they were driving, Matthew Kent, the high school student, jogged through Corliss Landing and stumbled upon Odin Lloyd’s body.

  At the Enterprise, Aaron told the location’s branch manager, Keelia Smyth, that the Altima had been damaged: A broken mirror, the dent in the driver’s side door.

  Aaron was polite—he offered Smyth a piece of chewing gum.

  What’s a twenty-three-year-old man doing with a pack of Bubblicious, Smyth thought. Aren’t you a little old for that?

  “I’m good,” she told Aaron.

  Hernandez told Smyth that he didn’t know how the car had been damaged.

  “I could tell he was lying,” Smyth says, today. “But he had full coverage on our vehicle.”

  The manager offered Hernandez a Kia Soul.

  Hernandez wouldn’t be caught dead in a Kia, he said.

  “I know, I know,” Smyth replied. “I’m just kidding you.”

  She gave Hernandez a Chrysler 300 instead, and Hernandez, Wallace, and Ortiz drove back to North Attleboro. It was just past five in the afternoon. Before the hour was up, North Attleboro police would be at the clearing.

  At five fifteen, Wallace climbed into the driver’s seat of the Chrysler, Ortiz climbed into the passenger seat, and the two men headed up to the apartment Hernandez had rented in Franklin. While they drove, police secured the crime scene, setting up the tent and tarps they would use to keep the rain from washing evidence away.

  Down at the station, North Attleboro PD traced the rental car keys that they had found in Odin Lloyd’s pocket back to Aaron Hernandez. They searched Odin’s cell phone and saw the last batch of texts that Odin had received and sent.

  But “at that point,” an officer involved with the investigation remembers, “we didn’t know any more. We thought that Aaron might be dead, too.”

  That evening, at twenty minutes to ten, Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Cherven and Detective Daniel Arrighi took their unmarked Ford Escape down to Aaron’s house and parked in the driveway. Lights were on all over the house—downstairs, upstairs. From the front porch, Cherven could see into Aaron’s living room. The large, flat-screen TV was on. There were half-full glasses on the coffee table. A bottle lay on its side on the couch. But when Cherven knocked on the door, and rang the bell several times, no one answered.

  Cherven ended up walking over to the garage, where Arrighi gave him a boost so that he could peek through the windows, which were high off the ground.

  There was a car inside. It was the Toyota Camry that Papoo Hernandez had used to ship guns up from Florida. But the police did not know that, and nothing about the car looked suspicious.

  Then Cherven and Arrighi went around to the backyard. Taking out their flashlights, they looked for signs of forced entry.

  “We progressed to the side of the home,” Detective Arrighi would say. “Then we walked towards the back area…There’s a large pool. A cabana. We looked inside the back quarters. There were windows in that location. We looked through.”

  They were no signs of a break-in.

  Aaron’s next-door neighbor happened to be the Patriots special teams coach, Joe Judge.

  When Detective Arrighi and Trooper Cherven knocked on his door, the coach told them he hadn’t seen Aaron since June 13, at a practice. He confirmed that Hernandez played for the Patriots, but said he did not have contact information. Judge had no idea when Aaron would be home, but offered to call the team’s head of security.

  Once he had done so, leaving a message on the security director’s voicemail, Cherven and Arrighi went back to their SUV, pulled it out of the driveway and into the street, parked across from the house, and waited.

  Chapter 57

  Inside the house, Hernandez called Brian Murphy.

  “Hey, Murph,” he said. “There’s a cop car outside of my house, just kind of sitting there?”

  “Okay, Aaron,” Murphy said. “Let me ask you a question. Did you do anything wrong?”

  “No. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Okay, then. Why is there a cop car out there?”

  “Well, I don’t know. You just never know what’s going to happen.”

  “I don’t understand,” Murphy said. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, why would you be concerned?”

  “Well, I don’t want them thinking—I think they’re waiting to get a search warrant.”

  “Listen, dude,” Murphy said. �
�Why don’t you just go up there and ask him what he wants, you know?”

  “Just walk up to the car?”

  “Yeah. Walk up to the car, ask him what he wants.”

  Half an hour after pulling out of the driveway, Trooper Cherven and Detective Arrighi saw Aaron walking toward them.

  Arrighi, who’d been sitting in the passenger seat, walked up and met him halfway, identified himself, and shook Aaron’s hand.

  “Did you rent a black Chevy Suburban?” the cops asked Hernandez.

  “Yeah,” Aaron said. “I rented it for my friend O.”

  “Who’s O?”

  “Odin.”

  “How do you know Odin?”

  “My girlfriend’s sister dates him.”

  “When was the last time you saw Odin?”

  “I was up his way yesterday.”

  Cherven asked Hernandez where Odin’s way was.

  “Boston,” Aaron said. He could not provide the exact address, but had it in his GPS. Then Aaron said, “I saw you out here on my security monitors. What’s with all the questions? I’m gonna have to speak to my attorney.”

  Hernandez walked back up the drive and went inside the house, locking the front door behind him. Cherven and Arrighi followed. A moment later, Aaron opened the door and handed Cherven a business card.

  “Ropes & Gray,” it read. A law firm in Boston.

  “We’re investigating a death,” the detective said.

  Instead of asking, “Whose death?” Hernandez slammed the door in the cops’ faces and locked it again.

  Chapter 58

  Slamming that door was a mistake on Aaron’s part.

  It wasn’t how innocent people acted.

  “If somebody says, ‘We’re here about a death investigation,’ I don’t even know if it’s possible not to say, ‘Who died?’” Lieutenant King, of the state police, says today. “But he doesn’t. At that point, we don’t jump to conclusions, but we do have to see it through. Clearly, it’s a lead we have to follow. At that point, he became a person of interest.”

  At the time, Trooper Cherven became suspicious enough to place a call to Assistant DA Patrick Bomberg.

  Bomberg was close friends with a Ropes & Gray lawyer named Robert Jones. The two men had known each other for twenty years. Now the DA called Jones and told him that he was at the North Attleboro Police Station. Bomberg was there in connection with a homicide, he said, and the police were interested in speaking with a Ropes & Gray client—Aaron Hernandez.

  In the meanwhile, Trooper Cherven and Detective Arrighi had returned to their vehicle. They waited there for Hernandez to come back outside.

  A little while later, he did. “I’ll follow you to the police station,” he said, “to talk.”

  Aaron left the house with Shayanna, who was carrying their daughter, Avielle. Shayanna put the girl in the back of their white Nissan Juke (the car’s vanity plates read HERNANDZ) and climbed in the driver’s seat. Aaron rode shotgun, with the officers following in their own car as they made their way toward the North Attleboro police station. When they arrived, Shayanna let Aaron out at the entrance and started to pull away. Trooper Cherven followed and flashed his blue police lights. Shayanna stopped. Cherven and Arrighi walked up to her car.

  Did Shayanna know that Odin Lloyd had been murdered? When Cherven told her that Lloyd was dead, she started to cry.

  Shayanna told the officers that she didn’t know Lloyd all that well, but knew that he dated her sister. She said that he smoked and probably dealt marijuana, and that the last time she’d seen him was Saturday morning. She gave the officers Aaron’s cell phone number, and said that she and Aaron had been home all day Sunday, she said. But Aaron was not there when she’d gone to bed, and had not come home at all that evening.

  Just then, Shayanna’s phone rang. It was Aaron. He told her that his agent, Murph, had said not to talk to the cops anymore.

  “She dropped him off,” an official close to the investigation remembers. “The baby was in the backseat. She was questioned in the parking lot—that’s when she said, ‘Odin’s a drug dealer.’ This must have been around eleven. Why would she leave Aaron at the station? She had the baby with her. But she left, and went home, and then she left again.

  “The reason, I’m sure, is that on the way to the station, Aaron had said, ‘Go home, get the guns.’ So she went home to get the guns. After that, triangulation—cell phone towers—prove that she drove to Franklin, and then to the state line between Connecticut and Rhode Island.”

  On her way to the state line, Shayanna drove to an ATM in Plainville, where she and Aaron had once lived. She withdrew the maximum—$500—then drove to an ATM in Coventry, Rhode Island, and made another $500 withdrawal.

  Having done so, Shayanna met up with Bo Wallace and Carlos Ortiz at a McDonald’s in Rhode Island.

  “You okay?” Wallace asked as she gave him the stack of bills. “Everything’s gonna be okay,” he said.

  Jenkins told Wallace, “Be safe,” before driving back to North Attleboro.

  Chapter 59

  Inside the police station, Hernandez was led to a second-floor interview room. He asked detectives for a phone charger. Then he asked if the lights could be turned off, and if he could lie on the floor—Aaron’s back was bothering him, he explained.

  Outside of the room, detectives dialed the cell phone number Shayanna had given them. It was the same as a number that Odin Lloyd had in his cell phone, marked on the dead man’s contact list as “Nigga Dis.”

  Inside the room, Hernandez’s cell phone rang.

  Half an hour later, Hernandez’s lawyers, Michael Fee and Robert Jones, arrived at the station.

  Patrick Bomberg met Jones and Fee down in the lobby. He told them that Hernandez was alone in an interview room, and said that the police wanted to question him in connection with a homicide in North Attleboro.

  Bomberg also told the lawyers that his wife was a partner at Ropes & Gray, and that the lawyers should be sure to disclose this to their client, along with the fact that Bomberg and Jones were old friends.

  Fee, who seemed to have assumed the role of Aaron’s primary spokesperson, assured the DA that they would.

  Aaron had not been placed under arrest. He had not been questioned yet. When his lawyers arrived, he was allowed to leave the station.

  Hernandez, Jones, and Fee walked outside and conferred for forty-five minutes.

  As they did so, Detective Mike Elliott made his way to the dispatcher’s room, where the controls for the police station’s security camera were located. Elliott had twenty-five years on the force. Back when the station was built, he had served as a tech and helped to install the security system. Now, in the dispatcher’s room, he picked Aaron and the lawyers up on an exterior camera.

  They had walked to a car in the station’s parking lot. One of the lawyers opened the driver’s side door. Luckily for the detective, he left it open. With the car’s interior light on, Elliott could see Hernandez climb into the passenger seat, take out his cell phone, and remove the battery. Then the lawyer removed another cell phone from a briefcase in the backseat and passed it to Aaron.

  At one in the morning, the lawyers walked back into the station. In a conference room, with two police officers present, Assistant DA Bomberg provided them with more information: a Dorchester man named Odin Lloyd had been found dead that evening.

  Lloyd’s girlfriend was the sister of Aaron Hernandez’s girlfriend.

  A set of rental cars keys found in Lloyd’s pocket had been traced to a car that had been rented in Hernandez’s name—the Suburban, which had already been found near Lloyd’s apartment in Dorchester.

  Michael Fee told Bomberg that his client had no objections to the DA’s friendship with Robert Jones. But, Fee said, Hernandez did not want to be interviewed that night. He was tired. He was not dressed appropriately for a video interview. And Fee himself wanted more time to consult with Hernandez.

  When the police asked to see Aaro
n’s cell phone, Fee declined.

  Chapter 60

  The police didn’t know what to make of the case. North Attleboro was Patriots Country. Aaron Hernandez was a local celebrity. What’s more, in every passing encounter they’d had with him, over the years, Aaron had shown himself to be polite, deferential, and outgoing.

  Every encounter, that is, that led up to the point of Detective Arrighi and Trooper Cherven showing up on his front door.

  “Hey,” a local cop said, at the start of the investigation. “I have a helmet that Hernandez signed!”

  “Lose your fandom,” the cop’s partner replied. “You realize we might have to shoot this guy, right?”

  Despite all the evidence they had collected—despite the rental car keys they had found in Odin Lloyd’s pocket—there were still cops in town who looked up to Hernandez.

  Detective Elliott had stayed at the station until well past three. Monday night had turned into Tuesday long before he went home.

  After a few hours of sleep, he’d woken up, put on his sport coat and tie, and headed back in to work. In the parking lot, he ran into State Police Lieutenant Michael King.

  King had stayed at the station until five or six in the morning, left for two hours, and returned at eight.

  No one else was due in to the station at that hour. But the local Enterprise Rent-A-Car office was already open. King and Elliott drove down, and discovered that Aaron had returned an Altima the day before and checked a Chrysler 300 out of the lot.

  They found that the Altima had already been cleaned—and that it had been damaged: the driver’s side mirror was gone and there were scratches down the car’s side.