All-American Murder Read online

  Oscar “Papoo” Hernandez had also been indicted for lying to Aaron’s grand jury.

  Odin Lloyd’s family had filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Aaron Hernandez.

  The families of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado had done the same.

  Alexander Bradley, who was still pursuing his civil suit against Aaron, had gotten into an altercation at a Hartford nightclub called the Vevo Lounge Bar & Grill.

  Shots had been fired outside of the club. Bradley was hit three times in the leg but managed to get to his car, grab his own gun, and fire ten or twelve rounds into the club.

  On May 15, 2014, Aaron Hernandez himself had been indicted for two counts of first degree murder, three counts of armed assault with intent to murder, and one count of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon—charges resulting from the investigation into the double murders in Boston.

  One month later, on Friday, June 20, Hernandez’s lawyers filed a motion to have Aaron moved to a jail that was closer to Boston.

  “In order for Hernandez to receive constitutionally guaranteed effective access to and assistance of counsel, in both cases, he needs to be held in a facility that does not require his counsel to drive up from two, up to three to four hours round-trip each time they need to meet with him,” the lawyers argued. But there was more to the motion than that.

  The motion also contained several e-mails between Sheriff Hodgson and prosecutors. According the lawyers, they suggested an unprecedented degree of cooperation between DAs and the sheriff.

  Hodgson had “abandoned his role as a professional jailer and energetically embraced his role as a full-time agent of the District Attorney,” the lawyers claimed, taking every opportunity to speak, publicly, about his most famous inmate, and engaging in “self-promotion and virtually non-stop publicity of every imaginable kind.” (Sheriff Hodgson denied all of these charges, and said that speaking, publicly, about Hernandez provided Aaron’s fans with a valuable object lesson.)

  According to the lawyers, Hodgson’s actions had poisoned the potential jury pool.

  Moreover, they argued, Aaron’s life was in danger in Bristol County. Because corrections officers at the prison were under the impression that Aaron had threatened CO Joshua Pacheco’s life, his safety could no longer be guaranteed. (This impression was false, the lawyers claimed. Four days earlier, Aaron had been arraigned on charges of assaulting an inmate and threatening Pacheco.)

  Sheriff Hodgson scoffed at the idea that anyone in his jail would retaliate against Hernandez. “I have a staff that is very professional,” he told TMZ. “They understand they’re dealing with a high-profile person and go the extra mile to ensure his safety, and other inmates’ safety.”

  Nevertheless, on July 7, the lawyers’ motion was granted.

  Two days later, Hernandez was moved to Boston’s Suffolk County Jail, where he would spend an uneventful and incident-free six months.

  Then, on January 8, 2015, Hernandez was sent back to Bristol County Jail, where he would remain for the duration of his trial for the murder of Odin Lloyd.

  Part Ten

  Chapter 79

  Bristol County’s Superior Courthouse stood like a sentry at the corner of Main and Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts.

  It was January 29, 2015. A cold, clear day in the decaying industrial city. Aaron Hernandez’s murder trial, presided over by Judge Susan Garsh, had already been postponed, several times, because of blizzards.

  Today, the trial would finally be starting.

  Outside, it was the usual media circus, with TV reporters huddling in their news vans for warmth as they waited for Aaron to arrive at the courthouse.

  Inside, Hernandez was brought to Courtroom 7 on the building’s fifth floor. Through the windows, he had a view of Braga Bridge and beneath it, the Quequechan River. But Aaron did not look around the courtroom as Assistant DA Patrick Bomberg—one of four prosecutors assigned to the case—laid out the Commonwealth’s position.

  Aaron did not glance at Shayanna, who was sitting with Terri and DJ, as Bomberg did so.

  Shaneah Jenkins, who had graduated from college and enrolled in law school, was also there in the courtroom, sitting far away from her sister and next Odin Lloyd’s mother, Ursula.

  It was an obvious sign of the rift that Odin’s death had caused between the sisters.

  Ursula was wearing purple, Odin’s favorite color.

  Aaron was dressed in the same dark suit he had worn to his indictment, seventeen months earlier. As he had on that occasion, Aaron kept his composure and showed no emotion.

  Everyone in attendance knew that the trial would be long, complex, and sensational. The British did not play American football, but British tabloids would cover the case closely. So would the New York Times, Fox News, CNN, and faraway media outlets in Hawaii, Alaska—even Fiji.

  At Sports Illustrated, the in-house legal analyst, Michael McCann, geared up to file long, daily dispatches.

  For the prosecutors, the stakes were remarkably high: Bristol County District Attorney Sam Sutter had signed up to prosecute the case himself. But just before Christmas, Sutter had been elected mayor of Fall River. Now, First Assistant District Attorney William McCauley would be leading the prosecution.

  McCauley and Susan Garsh had clashed in the courtroom before.

  In 2010, the assistant DA had prosecuted George Duarte, a New Bedford man who had shot and killed a fifteen-year-old boy. McCauley had won that case, but criticized Garsh for exhibiting “unnecessary, discourteous, and demeaning” words, tone, and behavior during the trial. But if there was no love lost between the judge and the DA, Garsh was bent on presiding over Aaron’s high-profile trial. When McCauley asked for another judge, citing the “well-known and publicly documented history of antagonism” between them, Garsh denied the motion.

  She would also allow the case to be taped for broadcast, guaranteeing it an even more permanent place in the twenty-four-hour news cycle.

  For Aaron Hernandez, the stakes could not be any higher: McCauley had charged him with murder in the first degree. If his lawyers, Michael Fee, James Sultan, and Charles Rankin, lost the case, Hernandez would be imprisoned for life automatically, without the possibility of parole.

  But Hernandez was not the only person on trial.

  The law enforcement officials who had investigated Odin Lloyd’s murder would find themselves under blinding public scrutiny. Whatever mistakes they had made would be held up for the whole world to see.

  The NFL itself had entered a prolonged period of public scrutiny: accusations relating to armed robbery, kidnapping, forced imprisonment, and sexual assault (Keith Wright), dogfighting (Michael Vick), child abuse (Adrian Peterson), domestic violence (Ray Rice, Lawrence Phillips, Greg Hardy), drug trafficking (Travis Henry), DUI manslaughter (Josh Brent), conspiracy to commit murder (Rae Carruth), and murder-suicide (Jovan Belcher), were hitting the league on a regular basis.

  In 2011, Dave Duerson, who had played for the Bears, Giants, and Cardinals, committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. His suicide note read, PLEASE, SEE THAT MY BRAIN IS GIVEN TO THE NFL’S BRAIN BANK.

  In 2012, Junior Seau, who had played for the Patriots as recently as 2009, committed suicide in the same manner.

  Seau, Duerson, and Belcher were all found to have been suffering from CTE—chronic traumatic encephalopathy—a degenerative brain disease caused by multiple blows to the head.

  Other scandals had hit close to home in New England: Spygate. Deflategate was just over the horizon. If Bill Belichick had shown himself to be a coach who won, at any cost, it seemed fair to ask: What had the Patriots known about Aaron’s past when they drafted him? Had they turned a blind eye to the violent acts he’d committed while playing for the team?

  The families of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado had already expanded their wrongful-death lawsuit against Aaron Hernandez to include the Patriots and the team’s owner, Robert Kraft Enterprises. What would a guilty verdict mean for tha
t lawsuit? And if Aaron Hernandez was found to be not guilty, how would the verdict affect the millions of dollars still left on his contract, at the time of his termination from the team?

  Aaron’s trial would fuel the feeling that the NFL was its own world, with its own rules—rules that had long since gone out of alignment with core American values.

  Hernandez believed he could get away with anything, up to and including murder. He’d gotten away with so much, for so long. He’d been rewarded with fame and riches. A verdict of not guilty would also prove that his sense of impunity had been justified all along.

  In effect, it would prove that organized football had encouraged a monster—or even created one.

  Chapter 80

  Because the DA’s office had decided to try Hernandez for first-degree murder, which called for premeditation, Assistant DA Bomberg would have to make the jury believe that Aaron had planned to kill Odin Lloyd before murdering him.

  Putting Hernandez at the scene of the crime would not be enough.

  But the prosecution had a mountain of circumstantial evidence, including the text messages that Odin Lloyd had exchanged with Hernandez before he was murdered. Those went a long way toward establishing premeditation, while surveillance footage that seemed to show Aaron holding a gun indicated that he was the shooter.

  It took Bomberg fifty minutes to lay out his case.

  In his own opening statement, Michael Fee dismissed that case out of hand: “You just heard quite a story,” the lawyer said. “A dramatic story. An exciting story…It’s just a story. And it’s not true.

  “We are here,” Fee continued, “because the police, and the prosecutors, targeted Aaron from the very beginning. As soon as they found out that Aaron Hernandez, the celebrity football player, the New England Patriot, was a friend of Odin Lloyd’s, Aaron never had a chance. It was over. They set out on an investigation, ladies and gentlemen, collected evidence, in order to support the story they just told you, even when that evidence they collected should have led them in another direction. They locked on Aaron, and they targeted him, even when they developed evidence that two other men—who, unlike Aaron, were not friends with Odin—were with Aaron and Odin that night. The evidence will show that the investigation was sloppy and unprofessional.”

  In a sense, Aaron’s defense strategy was akin to the one OJ Simpson’s lawyers had used: A famous football player, framed. A botched investigation.

  But OJ Simpson’s lawyers had had Detective Mark Fuhrman’s history of racist outbursts to work with, while Aaron’s investigators—Michael Cherven, Michael Elliott, Eric Benson, Daniel Arrighi, and several other officers, all appeared to be solid, even exemplary, cops.

  Aaron’s defense would depend on his lawyers’ ability to convince the jury, and the judge, otherwise.

  Chapter 81

  On February 1, 2015—three days after the start of the trial—the Patriots won Super Bowl XLIX.

  Hernandez, who had no TV privileges, missed a good game, dominated by his former teammates Brady and Gronk. Soon, the Patriots would be going to the White House to meet with Barack Obama. But on that day, and most other weekdays, Aaron would be woken at six and asked to put his feet and hands through openings in his cell door. Then, he would be cuffed and loaded into the van that carried him to and away from the courthouse in Fall River.

  This was Aaron’s life now: off to the courthouse, then back to Special Management—a small, triangular unit, which prison officials had painted blue, yellow, and white. There were only eight cells in the place. Each one could hold two men, but Aaron was always imprisoned alone, bunking by himself and moving, at the whim of prison officials, between Cell 1 and Cell 2 on the unit’s ground floor.

  Both cells had tight, vertical windows, offering a view of the space corrections officers called no man’s land—a panorama of razor wire, tarmac, and glass, which could not compare with the view from the courtroom. Once a day, Aaron was allowed to work out in the 8’x12’ cage in the jail’s recreation area. There were always more books to request from the jail’s library. And going to court had become a daily diversion.

  On February 5, the sixth day of the trial, prosecutors called the first of several law enforcement officers to the stand. Captain Joseph DiRenzo was an imposing man, with close-cropped hair and wide shoulders. He had spent twenty-six years on the force in North Attleboro. Second in command in the department, he ran the patrol division, supervised the chief of detectives, as well as internal affairs, and handled the department’s day-to-day duties.

  DiRenzo described his arrival at Corliss Landing, where he had knelt down by Odin Lloyd’s left flank to inspect the body.

  He described the bullet wounds: “A hole, with some ripped shirt, blood around it. There were flies around it. There were flies around his nose, also.”

  Step by step, he walked the jury through the measures that he and his officers had taken to protect the crime scene as a strong storm blew in. He described how State Trooper Michael Cherven had gone, methodically, through the dead man’s pockets: “He would go through the pocket and announce what he was doing to the other troopers and officers that were there, so that they could mark it down. He went through one pocket, inventoried what was there. Went through the other pocket, emptied it, inventoried what was there, and announced it.”

  DiRenzo himself was methodical and calm as Aaron’s lawyer James Sultan tried, aggressively, to convince the jury that he and his men had somehow contaminated the crime scene, rushing their investigation because of the storm that was coming, even though that storm was still far away.

  Sultan did not succeed. But he had another opportunity six days later, when North Attleboro police officer Edward Zimmer took the stand. Zimmer, a nine-year veteran on the force, had also worked the crime scene, setting up a perimeter, and logging arrivals.

  Zimmer had stayed on the scene for hours, carefully documenting the movement of evidence.

  Within three minutes of his cross-examination, James Sultan succeeded in getting Zimmer to admit to an error in his logbook.

  “Is that log accurate?” Sultan asked.

  “Yes,” Zimmer said. “There is one typo.”

  “There’s a mistake on the log. Correct?”

  “Yes. There’s one.”

  Within a few minutes, Sultan had scored one more point: Why did Zimmer’s logbook describe the shell casings and the towel, but not the baseball cap and the blunt?

  Zimmer had only recorded what was reported to him, he said.

  These small points may have opened a modicum of doubt about notes that the North Attleboro police had taken from the scene. On the one hand, they seemed to point to the fact that, if the police had made errors in their investigation, those errors were inadvertent and small.

  On the other hand, they were still errors.

  Chapter 82

  This was how murder cases progressed in real life: point by minuscule point until a picture began to emerge, like a pointillist painting.

  The prosecution scored body blows with video evidence, a steady parade of expert witnesses, and pained testimony delivered by Shaneah Jenkins and Ursula Ward, who choked up when she was shown a photograph of her son’s corpse.

  “I understand that this is very emotional for you,” Judge Garsh told Ward. “But it’s very important that you manage during this time you are testifying to retain control of your emotions, and not to cry while you are looking at any photo that may be shown to you.”

  Shayanna’s sister told the court about going to her sister’s house after Odin’s death, and about Aaron’s attempt to comfort her by telling her, “I’ve been through this death thing before.”

  When the DA pulled up video surveillance that showed Shaneah coming into the house and giving her sister a long, strong hug, Shaneah began to cry, took a tissue out of her purse, and dried her tears.

  Shaneah also said that Aaron had not visited Odin’s family after the death. Aaron and Odin had been friendly, she said, but not
especially close.

  Given Aaron’s defense—based, in part, on the idea that Lloyd and Hernandez were far too friendly for Aaron to have had anything to do with the murder—this information was less than damning. Still, it was enough to cast doubts on the relationship Aaron’s lawyers had set out to describe.

  The defense scored smaller points, like the ones they had scored with Officer Zimmer.

  But on February 12, Detective Daniel Arrighi took the stand.

  The prosecution was already at a disadvantage, insofar as Arrighi went. During the lead-up to the trial, Judge Garsh had ruled that the text messages that Odin had sent to his sister, immediately before his death, would not be admissible.

  The texts were hearsay, Garsh had said, because they were statements, made out of court, by someone who could not be called to testify.

  This was a heavy blow for the prosecution. But Garsh had also ruled that evidence seized in the course of one of the searches at Aaron’s home in North Attleboro would be inadmissible.

  A state trooper named Michael Bates had deprived the prosecution of that evidence by filling his paperwork out sloppily, and failing to properly transfer a few details from the affidavit to the search warrant.

  The judge didn’t think that there was anything malicious in the mistake. According to testimony Trooper Mike Cherven had given on June 18, 2014, the omissions shouldn’t have mattered at all because he had carried both documents into Aaron’s home at the time of the search, and had made them “available at all times” for the duration of the search itself.