All-American Murder Read online

  “Any search is antagonistic,” Trooper Donovan says. “It’s not like police show up at your house and you make them coffee. But we didn’t show up with a SWAT team or anything like that, and the party was winding down anyway. I wouldn’t say people were running away. It wasn’t like a bunch of gang members sitting there, drinking forties on the porch. It was more like a family cookout.

  “While searching the house, we saw a picture that someone ended up selling to TMZ—a selfie Aaron had taken, where he’s holding a Glock up in front of a mirror. So we knew there was a connection to Aaron. But more importantly, there was a garage. The windows were painted over, but somebody had done a crappy job so we could see inside, and we saw a Toyota 4Runner. The garage was part of our search warrant, so we asked Gina whose car it was.”

  Hernandez had left the car there a year earlier, Gina said. No one had driven it since. That much seemed true: The SUV had been detailed, but it was covered in dust and cobwebs. Its battery was dead. But the license plate number—635035—matched the number on a 4Runner that could be seen on surveillance footage taken from Cure, the nightclub in Boston, on the night of the double murder.

  “We wrote the license plate down,” Donovan says. “A Rhode Island registration. We had no idea what it meant. And we were there in Bristol all night.

  “The next day, we had a meeting. No matter where you were, you either called in to the meeting or tried to get to it. Mike Elliott was there. Eric Benson was there. Bill McCauley, the Bristol County DA, was there. McCauley had spoken with Patrick Haggen, the Suffolk County DA, and Pat had told him, ‘Hey, Hernandez was at a club last summer where there was a shooting, and we’re looking for a silver SUV with this license plate.’ It wasn’t even official—it was casual, Pat had just happened to mention it. But when Bill mentioned this, I looked at my notes and thought, Ah, what do you know? This is the car that we found in Bristol.”

  In the course of their search of the house on Lake Avenue, police recovered a DOC intake sheet for Ernest Wallace, a Connecticut Prison ID card for Carlos Ortiz, a Kel-Tec gun box, a box of Speer Lawman brand .38-caliber cartridges (containing forty-seven shells), a box of Punta Hueca brand .38-caliber cartridges, four child’s drawings—and a bag full of clothes that matched the ones Aaron had been wearing that night.

  But the police had more than the car Aaron had been driving on the night of that murder, and more than the clothes he had worn.

  As soon as ballistics came in on the .38 Special, they also had a murder weapon: the gun recovered from Jailene’s car was the same one that had been used to kill Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado. By June 27, the day of Hernandez’s bail hearing for the Odin Lloyd murder, the results of the parallel investigation into the 2012 murders had leaked, with Boston’s Fox affiliate breaking the story.

  “Hernandez being looked at in connection to double homicide in Boston,” the headline read.

  Part Nine

  Chapter 75

  It was a little past nine in the morning, on February 25, 2014, and Aaron was in his cell in the Special Management unit.

  On a previous occasion, as corrections officers were locking him in for the night, Hernandez had beaten his chest like King Kong. “I’m like that truck,” he had said. “Tough. I’m built for this shit.”

  Now, Aaron set out to prove how tough he was.

  Exiting his cell, which was unlocked at that hour, he approached Corrections Officer Kevin Sousa, who was escorting a shackled inmate down a set of stairs.

  According to Sousa, Hernandez “had a smile on his face.”

  Still, Sousa was suspicious. He ordered Hernandez to back up and return to his cell. But Hernandez refused the order, and punched the shackled inmate in the face.

  Another corrections officer called a Code Blue. Two COs restrained Hernandez, who turned to the inmate he had punched and said, “Go ahead, run your mouth now!”

  When the scuffle was over, the inmate Hernandez had punched explained that, on a previous occasion, Hernandez had passed by his cell and said, “Why you looking at me?”

  “I’m a Patriots fan,” the inmate had said.

  According to him, the beef was just “typical jail shit.”

  “I don’t want to press charges against Hernandez and you will never get me in court to testify,” the inmate told the COs. He had a bruised elbow and a bump on his head. (“I could give two shits about a bump and a bruise,” the inmate said.) But he was proud of getting in the last word.

  “You’re a bitch,” he’d told Hernandez, as they were being separated. “I still look good enough to fuck your girl.”

  Afterward, Hernandez was charged with assault and battery and given two weeks of straight-up solitary confinement. Publicly, Sheriff Hodgson voiced his surprise over the incident. “We were so worried about protecting him,” he said, “we never thought that he would be the aggressor…”

  Privately, Hodgson had already gotten to know Hernandez well enough to see just how troublesome he could be.

  Within a few weeks of arriving at the jail, Hernandez had been led out into the hall for a routine search of his cell. Watching the officers going through his correspondence, he had gotten upset.

  “You’re not allowed to read my legal mail,” Aaron yelled.

  Three times, Hernandez had to be told to back away.

  When the search ended, the officers asked Hernandez about a piece of paper he was holding in his hand. They had seen what Aaron had written on it: “MOB.”

  Hernandez told them that the acronym meant “Money Over Bitches.”

  The officers told him that, in prison, “MOB” meant “Member Of Bloods.”

  Hernandez became enraged. “What if I don’t give this back to you?” he asked. “What the fuck you all gonna do about it?”

  The officers told Hernandez that he would be given a disciplinary report.

  “I don’t give a fuck about no disciplinary report,” he replied. “I’ll eat the motherfucker.”

  In the end, Aaron did get the report—and, to the officers’ amazement, he did eat it.

  When Sheriff Hodgson found out, he went to see Hernandez in his cell.

  “I walked through the door,” Hodgson would say, “and I looked at him and just went, ‘I am so disappointed in you. I can’t believe that you acted the way you acted.’”

  “Well that’s bullshit,” Aaron replied, testily. “They was going through my stuff!”

  “Excuse me,” the sheriff said. “Why are you yelling at me? Am I yelling at you? What I’m seeing right now, that’s not the Aaron Hernandez I know.”

  Aaron calmed down. He had grown to respect the sheriff, even to trust him to an extent. On several occasions, the men talked about their lives, their faith, and lessons imparted by their fathers. But while Hodgson administered pep talks, it fell to his staff to discipline Hernandez.

  Once, after Aaron had been placed on disciplinary detention status, he managed to have a care package delivered from the jail’s commissary: cakes, breakfast bars, and two dozen honey buns.

  “I’m smart, dude,” Aaron told Major James Lancaster, the following day, when corrections officers asked him about the delivery. “I knew you were going to be coming this morning for this stuff.”

  When Lancaster told Hernandez he was not allowed to order food in detention, Hernandez said, “I know. That’s why I ate as much of the food as I could before you came in.”

  Major Lancaster ended up confiscating four honey buns. True to his word, Hernandez had eaten the other twenty and kept the wrappers to show the officers, in case they accused him of passing honey buns out to other inmates.

  “Could I eat the last four honey buns?” Aaron asked.

  “No.”

  “Why?” Hernandez said. “I am so hungry!”

  Other infractions were far more serious. One month after testing positive for Neurontin, Hernandez was cited for possessing paraphernalia signaling his allegiance to the Bloods. Five weeks later, when a corrections officer d
enied him an extra meal, Aaron called the officer “a scared bitch” and said that, when he got out, he would kill the officer and shoot his family.

  “After stating this, inmate Hernandez appeared to make a noise that sounded like a machine gun,” the officer wrote in his report.

  “I did not say I was going to kill him or his family,” Hernandez said, in his own defense. “I said if I see COs that act tough in jail, out of jail, I’m going to slap the shit out of them.”

  Several disciplinary reports describe fights that Aaron got into with other inmates, and occasions when he was found with improvised tattoo guns, or “fishing lines” that were made from torn sheets and tubes of toothpaste, and used by prisoners to pass notes.

  “He is constantly kicking his cell door and screaming at the top of his lungs,” corrections officer Joshua Pacheco wrote in one report, “utilizing profanity at times when he wants something, regardless of how minuscule it is. It is not uncommon for Hernandez to kick his cell door constantly until an officer approaches his cell merely to ask the officer for the current time, this to him is comical, causing a disruption in normal operation within the unit.”

  All in all, in the course of ten months that he spent in the Bristol County jail’s segregated unit, Hernandez racked up 120 days in solitary confinement.

  He seemed to hold Officer Pacheco in special contempt. Once, while Aaron was in the middle of one of his workouts, he told the officer that he had a peculiar dream:

  Thanks to a disciplinary report that Pacheco had given him, Aaron had dreamed that an upcoming visitation with his daughter had been canceled.

  “But,” Aaron told the officer, “the dream changed locations. You and your family were on vacation and I was chasing you.”

  Hernandez was glaring hard at Pacheco as he said this. The only weapon at Pacheco’s disposal was a canister of Mace. He was thinking of reaching for it when Aaron said, “then the dream ended,” and turned back to his workout.

  Pacheco reported the incident as a threat to his family. Aaron denied this: “It was just a dream,” he explained. “Was not meant to be threatening and was taken out of context.”

  Hernandez got off with a verbal warning. But a month later, in July, he had another run-in with Pacheco.

  Lunch for the Special Management inmates arrived in Styrofoam containers. The stench of the gray food inside crept into every corner of the unit. On July 5, it was Officer Pacheco’s turn to deliver it. As Hernandez saw the officer approach, he yelled: “I need to be your father figure and show you how to be a man! Show you how to have your balls drop! I didn’t know the Army created little boys and not men!”

  When Pacheco left the unit, Hernandez called out again: “I haven’t had any more dreams about you,” he hollered.

  Chapter 76

  Fatherhood, and father figures, came up often in Hernandez’s conversations with Sheriff Hodgson.

  “There’s a saying my father used to always use with my twelve brothers and sisters,” the sheriff recalls telling Aaron. “He used to say, ‘Always remember, God writes straight with crooked lines.’”

  “What does that mean?” Hernandez had asked.

  “That there are certain things that are going to happen, you’re not going to know why or how, but they’re going to happen. Do you read the Bible?”

  “I used to. My coach in Florida used to get me into the Bible stuff.”

  “Did you find it useful?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Well, you’ve got a Bible in your cell. When you get back there, I want you to read it, and talk to your father, and think about what I told you about crooked lines.”

  “I can’t talk to my father,” Hernandez said.

  “If you don’t, then you won’t be able to access all of the things that he taught you.”

  “I’ve only gone to my father’s grave once.”

  “That’s something you’re going to have to do,” the sheriff said. “You put an emotional wall up because you were so hurt by the loss of your father. All of the lessons he taught you are on the other side of that wall. The only way you’re going to pull the wall down is to talk to him.”

  “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “Okay,” said the sheriff, and left it at that. But when he saw Aaron again, he brought the matter back up.

  “I didn’t talk to my father,” Aaron said. “But I did read the Bible. The weirdest thing happened: I opened it, randomly, and it was all about me.”

  “You remember what I told you about crooked lines?” said the sheriff. “Opening that book randomly, and finding something about yourself, is what I was talking about.”

  On yet another occasion, Hernandez told Hodgson that reading the Bible had caused him to cry.

  “My father told me never to cry in front of another man,” Aaron said.

  “Really? Why would he tell you that?”

  “I don’t know. My father cried about everything. And he had an ugly cry.”

  “When would your father cry?”

  “At my football games.”

  “Because you lost?”

  “No. Even when we won.”

  “You know why that is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s because your father was sitting there watching you, feeling so proud about what a great player you had become.”

  “Aaron’s father was thirteen when his father died,” Hodgson explains. “I said to him, ‘Your father is sitting there, thinking, not only how proud he is, but how sad it is that his father couldn’t be there to see you play. That’s what your father was crying about. He wasn’t telling you not to cry in real life. He was telling you not to cry out on the football field.’”

  Aaron seemed to take it all in. He told the sheriff that he felt himself changing. Even Shayanna had remarked, during a phone call, upon how calm he seemed, and how nice he was being to her. Maybe, Aaron said, the sheriff had had something to do with it.

  Chapter 77

  By the start of 2014, the police had effectively wrapped up their investigations into the murder in North Attleboro. “We had learned about the incident in Providence,” Trooper Donovan says. “We had learned about the incident in California. We had tracked the guns from Hermosa Beach to Massachusetts. We were tracking down the armored car in New York. With every rock we turned over, more rocks appeared—2014 was shoring up the evidence we had, combing through it, and preparing witnesses for the prosecution. Witnesses like Bill Belichick, who never got called, as well as all of the witnesses who did.”

  “If they had people in Bristol they wanted to interview or anywhere in Connecticut through the prisons, they would come down, we’d facilitate,” says a law enforcement official in Bristol. “Just background knowledge because we knew all these people. They’d come down, we’d hook up with them, find the people, bring them in and they would use our interview room. There’s probably a couple hundred interviews they did that don’t really have relevancy at the end of the day. They were ruling things in, ruling things out, seeing if there was anything out there that they were missing. It was very thorough—as thorough as anything I’ve ever seen, the distance they went to in order to loop in Hernandez. The distance was incredible. And they had other things going on elsewhere, Florida and California.”

  If the DAs were unusually thorough, it was because the police in Bristol, North Attleboro, and Boston had gone to unusual lengths in their own investigations.

  Eric Benson, Michael Cherven, Michael Elliott, and Special Agent Michael Grasso of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives had made several trips to Florida to trace guns that were shipped up to Aaron. They had zeroed in on Oscar “Papoo” Hernandez in Belle Glade—Papoo was subsequently indicted—and traced a pipeline that TL Singleton had used to send drugs, as well as guns, up from Georgia to Bristol and North Attleboro.

  According to a source close to the investigation, Singleton had been “famous” among drug dealers in Central Connecticut. “Virtually
never been caught. A couple of nickel and dime things but nothing of substance. He’d never held a straight job in his life but always had money.”

  It turned out that the police in South Carolina had had better luck than the cops up in Bristol: On February 12, 2013—the day before Aaron Hernandez shot Alexander Bradley, down in Miami—Singleton and another man, named Johnny Booze, had been pulled over for driving 80 on a 70 miles per hour stretch of I-95.

  When the police searched the car, they found large quantities of cash, cocaine, and heroin.

  Both men had been charged with trafficking, though charges against Booze would later be dropped.

  “TL would bring pills and weed up,” a person close to the investigation recalls. “He’d bring stuff up for himself and Aaron would get that stuff. Aaron was throwing money at him.”

  “The path for the guns? TL is sort of that path,” another law enforcement official explains.

  Chapter 78

  But TL Singleton was dead. Tanya Singleton had been charged with conspiracy to commit murder after the fact. And Carlos Ortiz and Ernest Wallace had already been indicted as accessories after the fact to the murder of Odin Lloyd. (Prosecutors subsequently upped the charges to murder.) Their trials would not start until well after Aaron’s was over.

  Shayanna Jenkins had been charged with a single count of perjury—prosecutors alleged that she had lied, twenty-nine times, to Aaron’s grand jury. Among other things, prosecutors would say, Jenkins had lied about: conversations she and Hernandez had had about Odin Lloyd’s murder; a conversation she had had with Wallace after the murder; the number of guns she had seen in her home; the removal of items from her home; and whether she had threatened the women who had cleaned her home, after the murder, with deportation. (The prosecutors ended up dropping these charges in light of Shayanna’s testimony during Aaron’s trial.)