Nearly five years after a Southeast Alaska jury failed to reach a verdict in the case of a teenage girl accused of plotting to kill her mother, Rachelle Waterman is being retried before an Anchorage jury.
Jury selection begins today in Waterman's second murder trial. The first witnesses are expected to be called Monday. Ketchikan Superior Court Judge William Carey last week ordered the trial moved from Ketchikan after determining it would be difficult to seat an impartial jury there.
Lauri Waterman, 48, was kidnapped from the family home in Craig in November 2004 on a weekend that her daughter and her husband were out of town. She was beaten and suffocated. A hunter found her charred body inside the family's still smoldering minivan off a remote logging road near Craig, a small fishing and logging town on Prince of Wales Island.
Rachelle Waterman was 16 at the time. She was an honor student, a gifted singer and an athlete. Both parents were well-known and heavily involved in the community. At the time of the killing, Waterman was at a volleyball tournament in Anchorage.
The case became infamous in part because of Waterman's blog, titled "My Crappy Life." Her last post before her arrest in 2004 began "Just to let everyone know, my mother was murdered."
Two men -- both eight years her senior -- pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and testified against her in the first trial.
Prosecutors said she asked the men, Jason Arrant and Brian Radel, to kill her mother because she was being abused at home. They tried to make it look like a drunken driving accident, according to testimony at her first trial. But they botched it.
In an interview with troopers days after her mother was killed, Waterman eventually admitted that she knew what the men planned and didn't stop them. At the time of her mother's death, she said, she was just friends with the men, though she also acknowledged she had been sexually involved with both.
Waterman's first trial in 2006 ended when a Juneau jury deadlocked 10-2 for acquittal.
The most incriminating part of her statement was thrown out on the grounds that troopers coerced her. The trial judge also threw out the charges against Waterman, since they were based in part on that statement.
In 2009, a grand jury handed up a new indictment charging her with murder, conspiracy to commit murder, kidnapping and other offenses related to what happened to her mother.
Carey, the Ketchikan judge, ruled Tuesday that most of the rest of the two-hour videotaped interview can be shown to jurors. In that part of the statement, Waterman admitted mentioning to Arrant and Radel something about killing her mother but said she wasn't serious. She said that when she thought they might be planning to do so that November weekend, she told them not to.
Waterman is 22 now. In court Tuesday, she looked nearly the same as she did back in 2004. She's been going to school and working out of state, her father, Carl "Doc" Waterman, said after the hearing. He said he wasn't supposed to say where. He still lives in Craig, he said. He walked out of the courtroom with his daughter. Waterman is not in custody.
Ketchikan District Attorney Stephen West tried the case initially and will try it again. He said he couldn't discuss specifically how this trial will be different. Some of the evidence will be new, he said. This time, he's joined at the prosecution table by Sitka Assistant District Attorney Jean Seaton.
Anchorage lawyer Steven Wells is representing Waterman again.
More than a year after the end of her first trial, someone began blogging again under Waterman's profile name on LiveJournal.com.
"22 years old, waiting to go to trial in December for the full deal in Jan. This is like Inception," the blogger wrote in a September post, one of the last ones. "I've gone through enough already, and I'll always be without my Mother. I think it's time to turn the page."
The posts surprised the defense team. The blogger was not Waterman, Wells said.
Find Lisa Demer online at adn.com/contact/ldemer or call 257-4390.
By LISA DEMER
ldemer@adn.com
Alaska Dispatch Publishing