Journal of the Dead : A Story of Friendship and Murder in the New Mexico Desert

Rating:
Summary: Good, but an interview with Kodikian would've made it better
Review: I had not heard of this case when I discovered this book at the library. I'm not a fan of the true-crime genre, but the jacket description intrigued me. A man murders his best friend as an act of mercy in an unforgiving landscape. I must admit, I couldn't put it down. I read it straight through in one sitting. I even enjoyed the historical anecdotes, the desert lore, descriptions of flora and fauna, and the quite useful information the entire story provides in the form of a textbook "what not to do" case.

The book states that the only interview Kodikian granted was with Connie Chung for 20/20. It's a shame the author did not get one for this book, but the information of the journal entries and testimony rounded the story out adequately.

Rating:
Summary: EXCELLENT STORY--EXCELLENTLY TOLD
Review: I might as well tell you right off the bat. I think the guy murdered his friend and managed to get off with a virtual slap on the wrist. You might come to a different conclusion after reading this rather short book, and that's fine. Just do yourself a favor and read it. The victim, the suspect, the cops, the lawyers, and a collection of friends and family members come across not only as real people, the kind you might meet at a bus stop, but also as interesting people. The description of the desert is brutal. The description of the crime is fascinating. The story moves quickly. You are finished before you know it.
There is one glaring fault. The editing is terrible. All through the book, sentences pop up with a word missing. Even so, what the author meant is clear and the story still glides along.
This is an excellent, true story told excellently.

Rating:
Summary: Haunting
Review: I think a lot of us are fascinated with tales of treks across the desert, about what the desert can do to the unwary and unprepared. We can see those vultures circling and we can feel the chapped lips, the mouth so dry that we can hardly speak, and we can see the shimmer of the heat on the dry rocks and sand and hear the wind whispering, and we can be enveloped by the silence.

In this true crime tale Maxim magazine senior editor Jason Kersten expands on an article he wrote for that magazine and turns it into a modest book. It is a engrossing story about two young men, close friends, who travel west and get lost in Rattlesnake Canyon in the Carlsbad Caverns National Park without any water. As dehydration, fatigue, and hopelessness set in, the two men prepare to die. One of them, David Coughlin, is vomiting violently, hour after hour. He is in such pain that, so the story goes, he asks his friend Raffi Kodikian to kill him, to put him out of his misery.

Some hours later the next day their camp is spotted and the rangers come. They find Kodikian alive in the tent. He tells them where Coughlin's body is and confesses that he stabbed him through the heart as an act of mercy.

What makes this story work, and what makes it worth an entire book, is the uncertainty that still exists about Raffi Kodikian: did he kill his friend, as he claims, because he could not bare to see him suffer anymore, or did he have a more sinister motive? Kersten's narrative clearly leans toward the idea that Kodikian's action was a delusional mercy killing; however most of the law enforcement people mentioned in the book find Kodikian's story unconvincing. Kersten himself allows that in all the literature he could find, there was only one story of a mercy killing in the desert. Apparently it is an extremely rare event. Furthermore, the Rattlesnake Canyon they couldn't find their way out of is not that big. As Kersten terms it, Rattlesnake Canyon "is just a crack--five miles long, seven hundred feet deep..."

Another factor that makes this story interesting is the law itself and the defense chosen by famed New Mexico lawyer Gary Mitchell and his assistant Shawn Boyne. Since New Mexican law defines a mercy killing as a murder, period, and is not a complete defense to the crime, the lawyers had to come up with something better. Boyne made an argument for "involuntary intoxication" and it seemed to fit. Only problem was, according to the legal definition of that defense an agent of intoxication was required. Instead what they had was lack of water. Curiously, they might have argued that the juice of the prickly pear cactus fruit was the agent, but for some reason they did not. Kersten reports that eating prickly pear cactus fruit was probably part of the reason Coughlin vomited so violently.

Finally I have to say that Kersten does an excellent job with limited resources. He was not able to interview Kodikian, who refused his entreaties, so he had to reconstruct the story from the trial transcript and from interviews with other people, none of whom, of course, was in the canyon with the two men. Kersten also does a fine job of placing the story within the historical context of the New Mexican desert and deserts everywhere while making it clear how people die of thirst and how the law works in cases like this.

However, as I finished the book, I was left somewhat dissatisfied as other readers were, not so much because I found Kodikian's story unbelievable or even because I doubted it, but because I felt that I did not really know Kodikian. We can see that "he appears to be," as Kersten reports, "quite a well-adjusted young man" who "had good friends" and appeared to enjoy life. Kersten adds, "He could be me or fifty people I know." (p. x) In fact the only negative thing anybody said about Kodikian was that he could be stubborn.

I wondered as I finished the book if a stubborn person may be more likely to believe in his own judgment against the laws of men and be more willing to do something forbidden than the average person. I wonder, but I don't think that fully explains it. I really believe that the desert can do crazy things to our minds, especially when we are tired and thirsty and the implacable terrain shimmers and dances into a confusing mosaic as we become more and more removed from conventional reality and from hope. At such times in such circumstances we may very well become confused about what is right and what is wrong. At least I think that is what happened to David Coughlin and Raffi Kodikian.