All-American Murder Read online

  Chapter 87

  By the end of the trial, prosecutors had all but proven that Aaron had been in the clearing on the night of the murder.

  With closing arguments approaching, Aaron’s lawyers felt that they had no choice but to admit it.

  Aaron had been present, James Sultan explained, shocking everyone in the courtroom—but only as a witness to Odin Lloyd’s murder.

  Ernest Wallace or Carlos Ortiz had killed Lloyd while out of their minds on PCP, the lawyers claimed. But neither Wallace nor Ortiz had been called to testify. In the end, Aaron’s defense lasted less than one day, with only three witnesses called to the stand:

  Dr. David Greenblatt, a professor of pharmacology at Tufts, who described the behavioral effects of PCP. (Aaron’s cousin Jennifer Mercado had testified, previously, that she had seen Wallace and Ortiz smoking PCP.)

  Eric Carita, a forensic consultant who had swabbed the Bubblicious chewing gum that one of the shell casings had stuck to, and sent to Texas for processing.

  Jennifer Smith, the forensic analyst who had processed the sample and established a link to Aaron’s DNA. Smith explained that DNA can be transferred from one object, then onto another, then onto a third object—a process known as “secondary transfer.” It was “extremely likely,” Smith said, that DNA on the gum could have been transferred onto the shell casing.

  On the following day, April 7, James Sultan presented his closing argument in Aaron’s defense.

  The approach that the lawyer adopted now was low-key, but eloquent. Sultan’s late father, Stanley, had been a writer, a college professor, and a colleague and close friend of Sylvia Plath’s.

  Now, Stanley’s son brought the measured tones of the seminar room into Judge Garsh’s courtroom.

  “It’s been a long trial,” Sultan told the jury. “We started back in January. Slogged through those mountains of snow. And now, it’s spring.”

  “There’s plenty of evidence,” Sultan said. “You heard from more than 130 witnesses. There are more than 430 exhibits, some of them voluminous. I submit to you, there are really two ways you can go about analyzing the evidence: The right way. And the wrong way.”

  The right way, Sultan said, was to start with the presumption that Aaron Hernandez was innocent.

  Hernandez and Lloyd had been friends, Sultan said. “Aaron and Odin shared a passion. A passion for marijuana. Odin was very skilled at rolling blunts. Odin would roll blunts for Aaron and they’d smoke together…On the first weekend of June 2013, Aaron and Odin were together at Club Rumor in Boston, where they went for Shayanna’s birthday party…The following weekend, Aaron and Odin were together at a club in Providence. And on Friday night, June fourteenth—a night you’ve heard a lot about—Aaron and Odin went, again, to Club Rumor in Boston. Were they friends? Obviously, they were friends. They were future brothers-in-law. But the prosecution wants to deny the obvious. The prosecution has presented, through its evidence, a number of possible theories of why Aaron would want to murder Odin. Let’s go through those, and see if they make any sense.”

  Theory #1, Sultan said, was that Aaron had killed Odin because Odin had been rude to his friend Alexander Bradley.

  The lawyer did not even bother to point out how ridiculous this theory was.

  Theory #2 was that Aaron and Odin had argued at Rumor.

  But, according to Sultan, this theory rested entirely on the testimony of a single, unreliable witness.

  Theory #3 was that Aaron was worried about Odin telling Shaneah about their misadventures with Jennifer Fortier and Amanda DeVito.

  But hadn’t Aaron already told Shayanna about their trip to his “other spot”?

  “What about infidelity?” Sultan asked. “Is Aaron worried that Shayanna’s going to find out that he was out chasing after other women? What did Shayanna tell you? She told you she knew all about Aaron’s interest in chasing other women. She didn’t like it. But she hoped he’d outgrow it.”

  Then, shifting gears, the lawyer asked the jury to consider whether Aaron could really have been stupid enough to kill Odin Lloyd himself.

  “If Aaron planned in advance to murder Odin, why would he do so in his own town…in an open location less than a mile from his home? If Aaron had planned in advance to murder Odin, why would he leave keys to a car he had rented in Odin’s pocket? Along with Odin’s cell phone and wallet? And for that matter, why did Odin still have his cell phone? If Aaron had planned in advance to murder Odin Lloyd, why would he bring along two witnesses? And if Aaron had planned in advance to murder Odin Lloyd, why was a blunt found at the scene? A blunt shared by none other than Aaron Hernandez and Odin Lloyd, two friends who shared an interest in marijuana?”

  As for the box that Shayanna had removed from the house: Had the police found any marijuana during their searches of Aaron’s house? Given how much Aaron smoked, didn’t it stand to reason that they had not because the heavy box that Shayanna had placed in a black bag and removed from the basement, after the murder, was full of marijuana, and nothing but marijuana?

  “Is it possible that the murder weapon was inside that bag that Shayanna removed that day?” Sultan asked. “Of course it’s possible. Of course it’s possible. Anything is possible. But a murder charge, a murder conviction, can’t be based on possibilities, on guesswork, on speculation. That’s not good enough.”

  Had Aaron made all the right decisions? Sultan readily admitted that Aaron had not. “He was a twenty-three-year-old kid,” the lawyer said. “Who had witnessed something. A shocking killing. Committed by somebody he knew. He really didn’t know what to do, so he just put one foot in front of the other. Keep in mind, he’s not charged with being an accessory after the fact. You couldn’t even find him guilty of that if you wanted to. He’s charged with murder. And that he did not do.”

  Chapter 88

  James Sultan used the full ninety minutes that he had been given to deliver his closing statement.

  Now, William McCauley took his turn.

  There were no witnesses to the murder. There was no clear motive, or murder weapon. But the DA took his time sorting through the evidence that he did have, step by step.

  Hours after the murder, McCauley told the jurors, Ernest Wallace, Carlos Ortiz, and Aaron Hernandez had all been captured, on video, lounging around Aaron’s swimming pool, drinking smoothies that Shayanna brought them.

  If Wallace or Ortiz had just killed Odin, the DA asked, would it make sense that Aaron would be hanging out with them, so casually, so soon after the murder?

  Again, and again, the DA pointed out that, in every piece of video evidence that they had seen, Aaron had “controlled” the actions of everyone around him.

  “The defendant controlled every aspect of that trip,” McCauley said, referring to the drive that culminated in Odin Lloyd’s murder.

  Then, switching from a scalpel to a blunter instrument, McCauley started to hammer away.

  “He’s the one,” the DA said. “He’s the one…He’s the one.”

  The jury deliberated for more than six days before they returned with their verdict.

  Sitting next to each other in the courtroom’s front row, Terri Hernandez and Shayanna Jenkins embraced each other and burst into tears.

  It was as if all the air had been sucked out of the courtroom.

  The jury had convicted Aaron Hernandez of murder in the first degree.

  “Madam foreperson,” the clerk asked. “By which theory or theories—deliberate premeditation and/or extreme atrocity or cruelty?”

  “Extreme atrocity or cruelty,” the foreperson said.

  Sitting across the aisle from Terri and Shayanna, Shaneah wiped tears away.

  Odin’s mother, Ursula Ward, cried and started to rock back and forth.

  Standing between Sultan and Fee, dressed in a gray suit, a white shirt, and a polka-dot tie, Aaron licked his lips and mouth the word “unreal,” but betrayed no outward emotion. He sat down while the jury convicted him of the additional charges
—none of which mattered, as he would already be sentenced to life.

  Judge Garsh took a few moments to thank the jury.

  “This truly is a people’s court, with you, the people, ruling,” she said.

  As she did so, a court bailiff knelt down and placed shackles around Aaron’s wrists and his ankles. Then, Aaron was made to stand again.

  Turning to his mother and his fiancée, he mouthed the words, “It will be okay.”

  “Stay strong,” Hernandez told Shayanna as he was led out of the courtroom.

  Chapter 89

  Later that day, Judge Garsh heard impact statements by Odin Lloyd’s uncle, one of his sisters, and Ursula Ward.

  “It doesn’t feel like Odin is not here,” Odin’s sister Olivia Thibou said in her statement. “It feels like just a bad dream and I’m stuck between living and reality and this dream world where he’s just not here and I haven’t had a chance to speak with him.”

  “A lot of people won’t see from outside the value and riches he had,” said Odin’s uncle. “It wasn’t material, the wealth he possessed.”

  Ursula Ward, who had dressed Odin up all in white for his funeral, and had the words GOING HOME stitched into the side of his casket, said, “The day I laid my son to rest, I felt my heart stop beating for a moment. I felt like I wanted to go into that hole with my son…I’ll never get to dance at his wedding. He will never get to dance at my wedding. I will never hear my son say, ‘Ma dukes. Ma, did you cook? Ma, go to bed. Ma, you’re so beautiful. Where are you going, Ma? Did you get my permission to go out? I love you, Ma.’ I miss my baby boy, Odin, so much. But I know I’m going to see him someday again. That’s giving me the strength to go on. We wore purple in this courtroom every day because it’s my son’s favorite color. I forgive the hands of the people that had a hand in my son’s murder, either before or after. I pray and hope that someday everyone out there will forgive them also. May God continue to bless us.”

  Then, less than five hours after the jurors had delivered their verdict, the court handed down its state-mandated sentence: “You’re committed to MCI–Cedar Junction for the term of your natural life, without the possibility of parole.”

  Hernandez stood, stoically, throughout his sentencing. He knew the word on Judge Garsh: Remarkably, no case that had come before her had ever been overturned on appeal. He knew that his finances were dwindling: His salary was gone; his lawyers had been expensive; Ursula Ward and her lawyer, Doug Sheff, were still pursuing a wrongful death lawsuit against him.

  But Aaron’s spirit had not been broken.

  “They got it wrong,” Hernandez said, as he was transported from the courthouse to the state prison. “I didn’t do it.”

  Part Eleven

  Chapter 90

  During Aaron Hernandez’s first week at Cedar Junction, the Department of Corrections learned that he had five enemies (“keep-aways,” in DOC terminology) at the prison. As a result, Hernandez was kept in isolation. Before the week was out, he was relocated.

  This time, he ended up Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, a maximum-security facility in Shirley, Massachusetts.

  Souza-Baranowski was the state’s newest prison. It was also crowded, with ninety inmates crammed into cell blocks designed for sixty, and extremely violent.

  “Fights, slashing, and suicide attempts cause the whole institution to freeze up on a regular basis, if not daily on a bad week,” says Leslie Walker, who runs Prisoners’ Legal Services, a nonprofit in Massachusetts.

  At first, Hernandez was housed in the prison’s Orientation Unit. Corrections officers conducted hourly rounds, but there was time to interact with other inmates.

  Within a few days, one of those inmates had given Aaron a new tattoo.

  Tattoo guns at the prison were primitive: Motors came from typewriters. (In the absence of motors, inmates sometimes used homemade waterwheels.) Hollowed-out BIC ballpoint pens served as shafts. Needles were just straightened-out paper clips. Ink (always black) was made from pages torn out of thin-paged Gideon Bibles. Inmates burned the pages, caught the soot, scraped it together, and mixed it with water—a painstaking operation. But in Aaron’s case, the process resulted in an elaborate, professional-looking five-pointed star on his neck. The words written across it—LIFETIME LOYALTY—were commonly associated with the Bloods.

  Out of the prison’s 1,100 inmates, 750 were confirmed gang members. When a corrections officer was asked how prisoners were supposed to survive in such an environment, the officer thought for a moment, then said, “Affiliate.”

  Prison officials spotted the new tattoo quickly, and disciplined Hernandez for getting it. But in most respects, Aaron presented himself as a model prisoner. After a month in Orientation Block, he was eager to find his place among the regular inmates.

  Aaron wrote the administration several letters pleading his case.

  “I have been here over a month and have no yard, $30 canteen, no gym etc,” he wrote in one letter. “I know I really cant be bunked…because people could easily steal my shit, letter, law paperwork, and sell it and could do anything to get money and publicity which will continue to kill my cases like media has already done.”

  All that Aaron wanted to do was get comfortable, “start his bid,” and find his proper place in the prison, he said. Since entering prison, in 2013, he had been trying to enter general population. He had no enemies at Souza-Baranowski. In fact, he knew and trusted a few inmates he’d known on “the streets.”

  With no further infractions on his record, Aaron’s request was granted and he was moved into “pop.” But despite his appeals and assurances, Aaron was soon reverting to his old ways.

  Chapter 91

  Aaron’s first fight at the prison was a “two-on-one” fight.

  According to prison officials, Hernandez was part of the two. According to another source, the fight was gang-related.

  Afterward, Hernandez was taken to a segregation cell. A corrections officer visited him to check for marks and bruises, only to find that Hernandez had blocked the door.

  When the officer finally managed to enter, he saw that Aaron’s knuckles and one of his elbows were red.

  As he put Aaron in restraints to take him down to see medical staff, Hernandez became “agitated and insolent.”

  “You just making up shit,” he said to the officer. When the medical check was complete, Aaron became agitated again. “This place ain’t shit to me,” he told the guards. “I’ll run this place, and keep running shit. Prison ain’t shit to me!”

  All in all, between May of 2015 and October of the following year, Hernandez racked up a dozen disciplinary offenses. The list included three fistfights, two offenses related to smoking, two prison tattoos, and the possession of a sharpened, six-inch metal shiv.

  But, for Aaron, there was more to the prison than fighting. There were books to check out of the library. K2, synthetic marijuana, wasn’t too hard to get in the prison. It was odorless, colorless. It didn’t show up in urine tests. K2 could cause paranoia, hallucinations, and psychotic episodes. But it also created a feeling of euphoria. If Aaron was using the drug, it would have helped him face the anxiety of his upcoming trial for double murder.

  Aaron was a “normal” inmate—“which was weird,” a corrections officer at the prison recalls. “He fit right in.”

  Before long, he had made a few friends.

  A petty criminal named Kyle Kennedy was one of them.

  Kennedy had used a butcher knife to hold up a Cumberland Farms in Northbridge, Massachusetts. He walked out with $189, but crashed his getaway car. Arrested immediately, he was put into an unlocked cell at the local sheriff’s station—at which point, Kennedy simply walked out.

  He got three blocks down the road before the police picked him up once again. Now, Kennedy had an escape on his record—a crime that would ultimately land him in the federal prison system. “He was brought down to a local police department in Central Mass, these small little police stations,�
�� Kennedy’s attorney, Larry Army, explains. “The police, when they arrested him for that, didn’t lock his cell the right way or they didn’t lock it. The kid’s all fucked up, realizes it, and basically opens up his door and walks out the front door of the police station. ‘He’s like, “What’s your problem? Nobody told me I couldn’t leave.”’ So, because of this ‘escape,’ he’s classified as a Level 1 security risk. Out of 120 guys in his cell block, one hundred were in for life. The other ones are there for twenty-plus years. Then there’s Kyle, this kid who’s there for two or three years. And then enter Aaron…”

  Hernandez had heard about Kennedy when Kennedy was imprisoned at Cedar Junction, the prison Aaron had spent a few days at after his trial. “There was an issue that occurred,” Army says. “Kyle was in the middle of taking care of it. Aaron had heard about it. So, Kyle does something over here. Aaron hears about it over there. He writes a letter and basically gives his respect. Then, all of the sudden, Kyle is transferred to Aaron’s prison. Completely happenstance. But nothing happens that shouldn’t happen.”

  Though the pertinent prison records have been redacted, it appears that, not long afterward, Aaron petitioned prison officials to make Kyle Kennedy his bunkmate.

  Chapter 92

  Aaron’s friends and his family adjusted, as best they could, to his incarceration.

  Though they had never married, Shayanna changed her name to Jenkins-Hernandez. She continued to raise Aaron’s daughter, Avielle.

  Despite their fights, and the fact that he had stabbed her, Terri continued to live in Bristol with Jeffrey Cummings.

  DJ, who had started in on a promising career as a college football coach, found his opportunities dwindling after his brother’s arrest.