All-American Murder Read online

  In fact, Cherven had said, the documents were attached to each other with a paper clip.

  But after reviewing evidence that indicated that Cherven had entered the house empty-handed, and left again, seven minutes later, to conduct an interview at the North Attleboro police station, Garsh ruled against admitting the cell phones and iPads that the police had seized in their search.

  “The court credits none of this testimony,” Garsh had written, in a sharply worded ruling. “Even if Cherven had brought the affidavit in a folder along with the search warrant to the residence, and the court finds that he did not, indisputably he was not present ‘at all times’ during the search.”

  Given the harshness of the judge’s ruling, the DAs had good reason to leave Mike Cherven off of their witness list.

  But the downside of the DA’s decision was that Detective Arrighi, who had worked closely with Cherven during the investigation, would have to work twice as hard during James Sultan’s relentless cross-examination.

  On the stand, Arrighi appeared to be a bit nervous. Maybe it was just his manner. But Sultan seemed to smell blood.

  The lawyer came out swinging.

  Sultan interrupted Arrighi several times, badgered him, questioned his training. Time and again, he allowed a note of contempt to creep into his voice.

  “You peeked into the windows?” Sultan asked.

  “Correct,” said Arrighi.

  “You peeked into the garage?…You gave Trooper Cherven a boost so that he could peek into the garage? And then the two of you went into Aaron Hernandez’s backyard?”

  “Yes, sir. Correct.”

  “Were you invited to go into his backyard?”

  “No, we were not.”

  “And then you peeked through the windows in the backyard, right?”

  Sultan kept emphasizing the word: “Peeked…peeked…peeked…” implying that Arrighi and Michael Cherven had acted like trespassers and Peeping Toms. Moreover, Arrighi and Cherven were both dressed in street clothes. Their SUV was unmarked. How was Aaron to know they were cops? And what made Arrighi and Cherven think that Aaron was under any obligation to come to the door when they knocked?

  Next, Sultan attacked Arrighi for stopping Shayanna’s car, after she had dropped Aaron off at the North Attleboro Police Station.

  “Miss Jenkins and their baby started driving away?” the lawyer asked. “Right?”

  “Yes, sir. Correct.”

  “Driving home? Is that a fair assumption?”

  “Yes. Fair assumption, yes.”

  “It was eleven o’clock at night by then, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “And you and Trooper Cherven—or, Trooper Cherven—activated his blue lights and pulled her over, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “Now, when the two of you pulled Shayanna Jenkins, and her baby, over—at eleven o’clock at night—was she committing any traffic infraction?”

  “No, he just activated the blue lights—”

  “Will you answer my question,” the lawyer interrupted. “Was she committing any traffic infraction?”

  “No, sir.”

  Sultan gave the cop a long, questioning stare—as if to say, “Really?”

  “The baby was in the car, asleep. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  The implication, here, was that Detective Arrighi and Trooper Cherven had acted like creeps.

  Chapter 83

  The jurors had already visited Shayanna’s home in North Attleboro, as well as the clearing where Odin’s body had been found. They had heard testimony by Matthew Kent, the high school student who had found the body, along with testimony given by crime scene investigators, ballistics experts, forensic geologists, swabbing experts, and pathologists. A DNA expert who had worked on OJ Simpson’s case confirmed that the blunt found next to Odin’s body contained Aaron’s DNA, as well as Odin’s.

  There were dozens and dozens of witnesses.

  An employee of the Glock firearm company had told the jury that the black object they had seen Aaron holding, in surveillance footage taken from his house just after the murder, was, in fact, a Glock .45.

  The jurors had also seen the surveillance footage of Aaron taking the battery out of his cell phone, in the North Attleboro police station’s parking lot. It was the footage that Detective Mike Elliott had watched on the system that he had helped to install.

  A few days later, the jurors heard from Detective Elliott himself.

  Following a discussion of the surveillance footage, the lawyers turned their attention to the shell casing Elliott had found in the Enterprise dumpster, wrapped in a wad of Blue Cotton Candy Bubblicious chewing gun.

  James Sultan questioned Elliott’s methods: Why had the police placed items they had retrieved from the dumpster in the bed of a pickup truck, instead of waiting for Crime Scene Services to arrive? No one from Crime Scene Services was on site when the items were removed from the dumpster?

  “Was it raining that night, sir?” the lawyer asked.

  “I don’t believe so,” Elliott answered.

  “Were there dark rain clouds moving in?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “And do you recall that Sgt. Baker pulled his pickup truck next to the dumpster?”

  “Correct.”

  “You identified some photographs yesterday, about what happened at Enterprise that evening. Who took those photographs?”

  “Crime Scene Services.”

  “Well, those photographs were taken while the items were being recovered, right?”

  “Correct, sir.”

  “And Crime Scene Services didn’t show up until after the items were being recovered. Isn’t that correct, Detective?”

  “It is correct.”

  “So, who took the photographs?”

  “I believe I did.”

  “You believe you did?!”

  As he had with Detective Arrighi, Sultan kept hammering away: “You’re an experienced detective, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “You’re trained in the collection of evidence?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has anyone ever taught you to collect evidence that way, sir?”

  “No.”

  But, if Detective Arrighi had been nervous on the stand, Detective Elliott remained unflappable—and the evidence that he had gathered spoke for itself.

  The Enterprise branch manager, Keelia Smyth, had already told the jury about the piece of Bubblicious bubble gum Aaron had offered her on the day after the murder.

  Prosecutors had already established that, on the evening of the murder itself, Aaron, Ernest Wallace, and Carlos Ortiz had stopped at a gas station, filled up their car, and bought a cigar and a pack of Blue Cotton Candy Bubblicious. Video surveillance from the gas station’s security cameras had shown Carlos Ortiz stepping out of the Nissan Altima with a white towel, similar to the one found at the murder scene, draped over his neck.

  And there was another detail stuck in the jury’s minds: the same video footage had shown Aaron dancing, like a man without a care in the world.

  Chapter 84

  On Thursday, March 26, a bomb threat was called in to the courthouse.

  The evacuation was orderly, if tense.

  “There is absolutely no reason to believe that the interruption was in any way related to this case,” Judge Garsh assured the jury, after the building had been swept for explosives and cleared.

  The call was a hoax, it turned out. But the bomb threat set the stage for a sensational turn in the case: After months of speculation, in the media as well as the courtroom, about whether Shayanna would be called to the stand, it was revealed that same day that Jenkins would be testifying on Friday.

  The trial had gone on for two months already. But, as yet, there was no smoking gun.

  In fact, there was no gun at all.

  According to Assistant DA Bomberg, this was because Shayanna had disposed of the murder weapon. As a result, circ
umstantial evidence was all that Assistant DA Bomberg had to work with. But as that evidence kept piling up, it seemed, more and more, to point to Aaron.

  Shayanna had been there for most of the trial—though she was conspicuously absent when the nanny, Jennifer Fortier, testified. Shayanna wore the big engagement ring that Aaron had gotten her. She and Aaron smiled at each other whenever the opportunity arose. They blew kisses. They mouthed the words “I love you.” And when Shayanna did take the stand, she proved herself to be utterly loyal to Aaron.

  The prosecution had a problem: Lawyers are not allowed to call a witness whose testimony they know to be false—and, following her testimony before the grand jury, Shayanna had been indicted for perjury. As a result, Aaron’s lawyers argued, the DAs could not call Jenkins to the stand—unless the DA had reason to believe that her testimony would be substantively different on matters that she had been charged with lying about. Judge Garsh agreed, and ruled that the prosecution would only be allowed to question Shayanna about matters that were not elements of the perjury charges. Because Shayanna had been accused of lying about twenty-nine specific matters, this restriction put the prosecution at a distinct disadvantage. But Jenkins was at a disadvantage as well. Weeks earlier, at the prosecution’s request, she had been granted immunity from prosecution as an accessory to murder. But this also meant that she could no longer plead the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating herself. As a result, both sides had to tread carefully. Nevertheless, Jenkins’s testimony was more dramatic than anything that the jury had heard.

  The DA began by asking Shayanna about the night after Odin Lloyd’s murder.

  Shayanna described driving Aaron to the police station. Afterward, “when he got home from the police station,” she said, “when I had found out that Odin was murdered, I asked him if he did it. He said, ‘No.’ And that was the extent of our conversation.”

  She also recalled a text message Aaron had sent her, asking her to get rid of a black box that they had in the basement.

  She described a black gun she had found in a junk drawer, and the “stern look” she gave Aaron afterward.

  When she went back to the junk drawer, she said, the gun was no longer there. But when the DA showed her a still from a video of Hernandez holding a similar gun, she said the image was too vague to make out—“only a black blob it looks like”—and when he showed her an actual Glock, she recoiled.

  “It’s a secured firearm?” she asked, as the gun was placed in front of her.

  When the DA asked Shayanna if she and Shaneah were “close, as sisters,” Shayanna winced and did not answer.

  “Have you been in the past, ma’am?” the DA persisted.

  Shayanna grimaced. “I, I mean we’re…estranged, kind of,” she said.

  When the DA played the video surveillance footage of Shayanna and Shaneah embracing, Shaneah ran out of the courtroom in tears.

  When Shayanna resumed her testimony, on Monday, Shaneah was not in the courtroom. Whatever bond the two sisters still shared had been shattered, once and for all.

  The DA dove right in, asking Shayanna about her role in disposing of evidence that was crucial to the prosecution’s case against Hernandez.

  Specifically, the DA had in mind a black box that, he believed, contained the Glock .45 that Aaron had shot Odin Lloyd with.

  “I was instructed to take it out of the home,” Jenkins said.

  “Was it important to him for you to get rid of it?” the DA asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You were also asked [by a grand jury] whether you had taken certain steps to cover or conceal or hide the box when you removed it from the home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you recall doing that?”

  “Yes.”

  “In fact, when you took that box out, and concealed it, were you attempting to do that in a way so people didn’t know what you were doing?”

  “That’s correct.”

  Jenkins said that the box weighed about forty pounds and smelled “skunky.” She had assumed it contained marijuana. But when Bomberg asked her if she had looked inside of the box she said, “No.”

  When she was asked how she had disposed of it she said, “A dumpster.”

  When she was asked to be more specific she said, “I can’t remember.”

  Over the course of ten hours of testimony, Shayanna had uttered the phrases “I can’t remember,” “Not that I can remember,” “I can’t recall,” “I’m not sure,” and “I have no idea,” so many times they began to sound like a mantra.

  Chapter 85

  The following day, March 31, turned out to be every bit as dramatic, as Robert Kraft took the stand.

  Contrary to all expectations, the story he told seemed to tilt the whole case on its axis.

  The seventy-three-year-old billionaire was suffering from a head cold—you could hear it in his voice as the clerk swore him in. But Kraft’s sense of humor remained intact.

  On the stand, he seemed folksy, informal—more like your everyday Patriots’ fan than their owner.

  “Sir, do you work?” the DA asked.

  Kraft chuckled and smiled.

  “I think so,” he said. “Yes. I work at One Patriot Place.”

  “And what do you do for work, sir?”

  “Whatever they ask me to do.”

  “Do you run a business?”

  “Yes. We’re in [the] packaging and paper business, private equity. And we have two sports teams.”

  The DA asked Kraft about Wednesday, June 19, 2013. Did he recall going to Gillette Stadium on that day?

  Kraft did. He remembered the news vans parked in the stadium lot, and helicopters hovering overhead.

  “I went directly to the weight room,” Kraft said. “I saw two of our strength coaches and Aaron Hernandez.”

  “At that time did you ask to speak with him?”

  “Yes. There’s an office connected to the weight room that I brought him into…I understood there was an incident that had transpired and I wanted to know whether he was involved. Any player that comes into our system I consider part of our extended family, and I wanted to get him help.”

  “Did you say this to the defendant?” the DA asked.

  “Yes,” said Kraft. “He said he was not involved. That he was innocent. And that he hoped that the time of the murder incident came out. Because, I believe, he said he was in a club.”

  There were gasps in the courtroom: jurors had already seen video surveillance footage of Hernandez, Wallace, Ortiz, and Lloyd, taken just before the murder. They had been at a gas station, not a club. No testimony the jurors had heard had placed Aaron at a club on the night of the murder.

  Moreover, how did Aaron know when the murder had been committed?

  It was obvious to everyone in the room that, if Kraft was telling the truth, Aaron had lied to him on June 19.

  Lied stupidly, in a manner that actually seemed to implicate him now.

  Afterward, Kraft said, Aaron “hugged and kissed me and thanked me for my concern.”

  “And after that,” the DA asked, “did you see the defendant again?”

  “No.”

  Kraft had been on the stand for ten minutes, about the length of his conversation with Aaron. But ten minutes was all it took to do lasting damage to Aaron’s case. And on the following day, April Fool’s, Alexander Bradley took the stand and drove several more nails into his former friend’s coffin.

  Chapter 86

  Judge Garsh had ruled against telling the jury about Bradley’s claim that Hernandez had shot him, and about the civil lawsuit that Bradley had filed.

  The jury did get to hear about Bradley’s own rap sheet: the drug busts, the shooting in Hartford. Within two and a half minutes of taking the stand, Bradley admitted to being a drug dealer.

  Nevertheless, his testimony proved to be damning.

  Bradley told the jury that Aaron had purchased as much as four ounces of weed from him, at a cost of $1,200 to $1,500, on
a weekly basis starting in 2010.

  According to Bradley, Aaron smoked as much as an ounce a day.

  Hernandez was paranoid, and believed that he was being followed by helicopters, and the police, Bradley said.

  Bradley also told the jury that, when he stayed at Aaron’s house in North Attleboro, which he did “quite often,” he slept in a room in the basement.

  During the course of one visit, two years earlier, in November of 2012, he’d gotten a look at a “small, black” lock box that Aaron kept by the bar area in the basement, or in a closet next to a trophy case.

  Aaron’s defense team hoped the jury had the conclusion, from Shayanna’s testimony, that the box she had gotten rid of contained nothing more than forty pounds of marijuana. They had also tried to block Bradley from testifying, filing a motion that claimed that the risk of a mistrial was “unacceptably high.”

  But the motion had failed, and what Bradley said next helped to undermine the idea that Shayanna had only helped Aaron get rid of some weed.

  “This black box,” Bradley was asked. “Did you ever see it in an open condition?”

  “Yes,” Bradley said.

  “And who opened it?”

  “Mr. Hernandez.”

  “And when it was in an open condition, did you ever see any of the contents inside?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did you see inside?”

  “There was a firearm. Money. Marijuana joints.”

  Bradley described the firearm: it had been a semiautomatic pistol, he said, “silver-grayish colored, with a brown handle.”

  Bradley also said that, in the course of a trip to Miami, he had seen Aaron holding a Glock pistol.

  Oscar “Papoo” Hernandez had been in the room at the time, Bradley said, tying Aaron to a gun prosecutors believed to be the murder weapon, and to the man prosecutors believed had furnished him with that gun.