All-American Murder Page 17

  TL Singleton died on the scene. According to the toxicology report, he had cocaine, PCP, oxycodone, and alcohol in his system at the time of his death.

  On Saturday, July 6, the Patriots announced that fans who had bought Hernandez jerseys could swap them out.

  By five o’clock in the afternoon, the team’s Pro Shop had processed 1,200 exchanges.

  The Hernandez jerseys would all be burned. Aaron’s sponsors, Puma and CytoSport (the makers of Muscle Milk), had already dropped him. And in the weeks and months that followed, the former Patriot’s reputation would suffer other indignities: EA Sports would remove him from their video games; Panini America, a trading card company, would take him out of their sticker books and replace his trading cards with ones that featured Tim Tebow; and the University of Florida would remove his name from the stadium in which he had played—a task that required the use of power tools.

  Chapter 70

  On Tuesday, July 16, three weeks after Aaron’s arrival at the Bristol County jail, Sheriff Thomas Hodgson held a press conference to discuss his famous new inmate.

  “Hernandez is locked in a seven-by-ten-foot cell for twenty-one hours a day,” Hodgson told the assembled reporters. “The rest of his time is spent in the exercise yard, making collect phone calls, or taking a hot shower. He doesn’t have any physical contact with other inmates, but that’s mostly for his own safety.”

  Reporters were given a tour of the Special Management unit, where Hernandez was being held in near-solitary confinement.

  “We’re assessing how the inmates are reacting to him right now in this smaller unit,” Hodgson said as he ushered the reporters into a gray cell.

  General population inmates were allowed outside, the sheriff explained. They could see trees and grass, and interact with other inmates. But for his own safety, Hernandez had been denied these privileges. He was allowed outside for just one hour a day, and during that hour he was alone, in a cement yard that contained three chain-link cages topped with tin roofs and razor wire. He worked out in one of the cages, running extremely short laps and doing push-ups, squats, and sit-ups as a corrections officer watched.

  The reporters wanted to know: How did Aaron Hernandez like this arrangement?

  “I think he’d like to be out in general population playing basketball,” Hodgson admitted.

  One of the several reasons that Aaron had not been put into general population was that Sheriff Hodgson was trying to determine whether rumors about his gang ties were true.

  “My gang investigators went in and interviewed him,” Hodgson says. “When they came out, they said, ‘We think he probably is tied into the Bloods. But we can’t be absolutely positive.’”

  Hodgson, who prided himself on his skills as an interrogator, decided that he would investigate the matter himself. On Saturday, his day off, he arrived at the jail in shorts and a golf shirt and sat down to speak with Hernandez.

  “I started talking casually to him,” the sheriff recalls. “About life and his family. Then I said, ‘I want to talk to you about those tattoos.’”

  “Oh, no, it’s not the Bloods,” Aaron said. According to Hernandez, the tattoos advertised a local gang from Bristol, Connecticut.

  Then Aaron said, “Hey, can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure,” the sheriff replied.

  “Did you wear those shorts in here to get me to relax?”

  “What are you, an idiot?” Hodgson said. “I’m on my day off. You think I’m going to get dressed up in a suit and tie to come and talk to you? You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  Hernandez laughed, the sheriff remembers.

  “Let me tell you something,” Aaron said. “I pay attention to what goes on. And I’m the best at reading people.”

  “I bet you are, but you’re not the best,” Hodgson said. “You’re not better than I am.”

  “Oh, yeah, I am.”

  “Really? Do you know about the key motivations in people?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are three different types of motivations in people: kinesthetic, auditory, and visual.”

  Hernandez looked perplexed. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “You’re a visual type.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because every time I talk to you, you’ll say, ‘That looks good.’ If you were an auditory type, you’d say, ‘That rings a bell.’ If you were kinesthetic you’d talk about your feelings: ‘That feels good to me,’ you would say.”

  Aaron was impressed. He said “Wow,” and Sheriff Hodgson felt encouraged to continue.

  “You know how to overcome your behaviors?” he asked.

  “No,” said Aaron.

  “Let’s say that you’re overweight, and go by a Burger King. You’ve already lost ten pounds, but now you’re thinking about hamburgers. You haven’t had one in a while. And now your body’s reacting to what you’re thinking. You argue with yourself, but you lose. So you get your hamburger and some French fries, and you’re driving down the road eating them, thinking ‘Son of a bitch. I should not be eating these.’”

  Aaron appeared to be paying close attention to the story.

  “The way you overcome that,” Hodgson said, “is to shatter the picture you have and create a new one. Take a picture of yourself, from when you were twenty pounds lighter. Stick it up on your visor. And whenever you think about breaking your diet, pull the visor down and look at that picture. It will reframe you, and teach you to refrain from the things you want to refrain from.”

  Aaron nodded. He said “wow” again. The sheriff may not have established the matter of whether he had ties to the Bloods, but Hodgson had taught Hernandez something about impulse control. And, of course, Aaron’s issues with impulse control were the very thing that had landed him in jail in the first place.

  Chapter 71

  As the summer wore on, and the days and nights he spent alone in his cell bled into one another, Aaron wrote letters, worked out, and read, requesting books from the jail library: Michael Connelly, Dan Brown, James Patterson.

  Hernandez was especially fond of Patterson’s Alex Cross novels.

  Aaron also made phone calls, and some of his friends made calls of their own. Taken together those calls told a story:

  July 12, 2013:

  Aaron Hernandez: Hey, [watch] what you say. The phone is recorded. What you up to?

  Tanya Singleton: I know, I know, I know. Hi, honey.

  Hernandez: You got my letter?

  Singleton: Yeah, I did. I—of course I did. I got you one. I got you a card and a letter.

  Hernandez: Watch what you write. They read that shit.

  Singleton: I—no, no, like I don’t know that.

  Hernandez: Well, I got to get going. I will probably call you, um, probably like once a week or something like that.

  Singleton: Yeah, that’s perfect.

  Hernandez: Yeah, and—I’ll also help you out with that, too. Obviously don’t say nothing, but I love you.

  Singleton: I know. I’m not saying nothing. I love you so much.

  July 28, 2013:

  Tanya Singleton: Um, I’m going back up there Thursday.

  Ernest Wallace: What, to go visit?

  Singleton: No. I have to be up there to be in front of the grand jury whatever ’cause they’re fucking dumb, but I got a good lawyer.

  Wallace: Wait up, wait up, wait up. You gotta go to court for what?

  Singleton: They subpoenaed me to go in front of the grand jury and I got a lawyer. That’s why I got, uh, a real nice lawyer, a good lawyer from over there.

  Wallace: Yeah, my nigga.

  Singleton: Yup.

  Wallace: My nigga got you with that?

  Singleton: You already know.

  Wallace: All right. Say no more.

  August 1, 2013:

  Shayanna Jenkins: Um, Tanya’s in jail.

  Aaron Hernandez: Tanya?

  Jenkins: Yeah.

&n
bsp; Hernandez: For what?

  Jenkins: I don’t know. Yup. So she’s in jail. She got arrested today.

  Hernandez: They picked her up by her house?

  Jenkins: No, she went for—she was—I don’t know. You probably should talk to your lawyer about it.

  Hernandez: Oh.

  Jenkins: But she told me to tell you that she’s gonna be just fine and to keep your head up and to know that she love you.

  Hernandez: Oh, my God. Let me call you right back.

  [15 minutes later.]

  Hernandez: Hey.

  Jenkins: Yeah.

  Hernandez: I knew about…

  Jenkins: Huh?

  Hernandez: I knew about that. I thought it was [inaudible]

  Jenkins: I’m just letting you know.

  Hernandez: Yes, they just being asses about it, but they get—they got to go out of their way to be assholes and, like, the longest she’ll do is, like, probably less than a month or a month until the grand jury is done, investigation, do you know what I mean? The only good thing about Tanya being locked up is she’s gonna lose weight.

  August 7, 2013:

  Ernest Wallace: Trust me, man, if I was in here for something that I know I did wrong…But this just came right out of the blue, out of nowhere. This is the last thing I thought was going to be happening to me.

  Angella Wallace: Oh, my God.

  Ernest: [He] had a fucking career. Forty-million-dollar football career.

  Angella: Everything’s gone.

  Ernest: Why would he jeopardize his life to go kill somebody a mile from his house?

  “You have a big mouth,” Aaron told his mother, in the course of one call. “There’s so many things I’d like—I would love to talk to you so that you can know me as a person, but I never could tell you and you’re going to die without even knowing your son.”

  “Well, if you feel like you can’t talk to me…” Terri Hernandez said.

  “How could I? How could I? You are not trustworthy at all…It’s so sad…I wish I could be closer to you but it can’t and it kills me, but I can’t.”

  “You would always tell me the bad things,” Terri said. “Oh, my God, such bad things. Why would you tell me these things?”

  Hernandez bristled.

  “Don’t even talk on the phone like that,” he said. “It is what it is. Why do you think me and Tanya are so close?”

  Chapter 72

  Everyone involved with Aaron Hernandez had had a bad year. But Tanya Singleton’s year had been especially rough. Her husband, TL, had died a month earlier. A cancer that doctors had found in her breast was spreading to her other organs. And now, she had been held in contempt, and incarcerated, for refusing to testify before Aaron’s grand jury.

  Prosecutors knew that Tanya had driven Ernest Wallace to Georgia and bought him a bus ticket to Florida. They also believed that she had offered to fly Carlos Ortiz to Puerto Rico to get him away from law enforcement officials investigating Odin Lloyd’s murder.

  They had offered her immunity in exchange for her testimony. But Tanya was dying. She didn’t care about immunity. And Aaron had offered her something more valuable.

  In yet another jailhouse phone call, Hernandez had told her that he had already set up a trust fund that Jano (her son with Jeffrey Cummings) and Eddie (the child she had had with TL) could access when they turned eighteen.

  “It already started off at $100,000 for them, do you know what I’m saying?” Aaron had told Tanya. “I think about seventy-five apiece or something like that and every seven years it doubles.”

  Assistant DA Patrick Bomberg would claim that Hernandez was lying: “He says, ‘I set up an account,’ and lo and behold he didn’t.”

  But Aaron’s word had been good enough for Tanya, who stood by her refusal to testify. In a series of phone calls, placed before her appearance before Aaron’s grand jury, she had told Ernest Wallace that she would do whatever she had to do for her children.

  “It’s by my choice,” Tanya said. “We didn’t fucking do nothing wrong, so they can kiss my ass. We don’t know nothing. I don’t know nothing. What the fuck they want me to say?”

  “Fuck them,” she said, referring to the grand jury.

  Chapter 73

  On several occasions, Aaron answered the letters he received from fans.

  Sometimes, over his objections (“Please, keep this private is all I ask!” he wrote to one correspondent), Aaron’s responses were leaked to the press or purchased by tabloids.

  Everything happened for a reason, Aaron told a fan, in a letter that TMZ published on August 1, 2013—the day that Tanya Singleton was jailed for refusing to testify in front of Aaron’s grand jury.

  “I know ‘GOD’ has a plan for me and something good will come out of this.”

  The accusations against him were false, Aaron said. “I’ve always been an amazing person,” he wrote, “known for having an amazing heart.”

  Aaron was strong, he said. Nothing would break him.

  “I fell off especially after making all that money but when it’s all said and done ‘GOD’ put me in this situation for a reason! I’m humbled by this ALREADY and it will change me for ever.”

  A few weeks later, on August 19, Radar Online published another letter, which Aaron had sent in July: “Stay away from all negative people so your always there for your little boy cuz I miss by little girl terribly an my biggest fear of all is she wont know daddy!” he had written. “She said daddy first time or should I say ‘DaDa’ and had to hear it from jail.”

  “Im a great dude don’t believe all the neg. publicity please!” Hernandez had added, in the postscript. “Media is the Negative of the fame!”

  Three days later, on August 22, Hernandez was formally indicted for murder.

  On August 27, he submitted a urine test that turned up positive for Neurontin, a prescription drug known to cause aggressive behavior and suicidal thoughts.

  On August 28—one day before the NFL reached a tentative $765 million brain-injury settlement with 18,000 retired players—Rolling Stone published a story suggesting that Hernandez was a habitual user of PCP, one of the drugs that had appeared in TL Singleton’s toxicology report. Among other things, PCP was known to cause hallucinations, paranoia, hyper-aggression, feelings of invulnerability, and violent behavior.

  “Friends, who insisted they not be named, say Hernandez was using the maniacal drug angel dust, had fallen in with a crew of gangsters, and convinced himself that his life was in danger, carrying a gun wherever he went,” the story in Rolling Stone claimed.

  But Aaron had bigger things to worry about than negative press.

  All summer long, Boston Police, who had stalled in their investigation of the 2012 double homicide, had been looking more deeply into the case.

  If not for Odin Lloyd’s murder, the murders of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado might have been forgotten: just two more cold cases in a city with a notoriously low clearance rate for homicides.

  But bad luck—and a nineteen-year-old woman named Jailene Diaz-Ramos—also played a part in this parallel investigation.

  Like the media, good fortune had finally turned its back on Aaron Hernandez.

  Chapter 74

  Two months earlier, on June 21, Jailene Diaz-Ramos had been involved in a four-car collision on I-91 in Springfield, Massachusetts.

  Jailene was taken to a hospital nearby. But when her car was searched, as was customary when cars were towed from accident scenes, the police recovered a Smith & Wesson revolver—a .38 Special—from its trunk.

  Jailene was from Bristol, Connecticut. She had been busted several times, for assault, disorderly conduct, forgery, criminal impersonation, larceny, failure to appear in court (twice), and driving with a suspended license.

  Now, the police were charging her with possession of a firearm without a license.

  As she was being booked, Diaz-Ramos told the police that the gun belonged to a friend—a football player named “Chicago.
” A few days earlier, she said, she had given Chicago and a few other football players a ride, and they had left all of their stuff in the trunk.

  Chicago’s government name was John Alcorn. Like his girlfriend, he had been arrested before, for disturbing the peace and failing to appear in court.

  He turned out to be a cousin of TL Singleton.

  The next day, June 22, an anonymous caller had contacted North Attleboro PD.

  The caller—who was later identified as Sharif Hashem, a bouncer at Rumor, the nightclub in Boston—said that he had information about a double murder. He gave specifics regarding the time and location.

  He mentioned an SUV with Rhode Island plates.

  And he said that the murder was connected to the Odin Lloyd investigation.

  When the dispatcher asked the man how knew all of this, the man said, “someone accidentally spilled the beans in front of me.”

  On June 26, several cars full of police officers had arrived at Tanya Singleton’s house on Lake Avenue.

  “From the surveillance video, we identified Wallace and Ortiz,” Trooper Jeremiah Donovan remembers. “We knew there were ties to Bristol. And when we got to the house, Wednesday evening, they were actually having a house party.”

  The little blue house was full of people. Out in the yard, more people had gathered around the grill.

  Aaron’s Uncle Tito stood in the doorway, watching the police arrive, with a tumbler of vodka in his hand. Detective Peter Dauphinais knew Tito. He walked up and said, “Hey, Tito, we have a search.”