At first, town officer didn't describe Waterman as suspect MURDER TRIAL: Defense grills him on jailhouse interview.

The defense tried to chip away Monday at the prosecution's murder case against Rachelle Waterman, grilling one of the key investigators about the pivotal moment when she was first implicated in the killing of her mother.

Mark Habib, then a Craig police sergeant and now police chief in the Southeast Alaska community, was cross-examined about his jailhouse interview with one of the two men in custody for the murder

In the days just after the Sunday, Nov. 14, 2004, murder, Habib didn't describe the teenage Waterman as a suspect in his notes, including what he jotted down during twice-daily law enforcement briefings as the investigation progressed, he acknowledged from the witness stand.

Yet, when Habib interviewed Jason Arrant on Nov. 19, he immediately zeroed in on Waterman and whether she had a role, according to a recording of that interview played in court Monday.

"In your notes -- the notes that you made at the time, OK -- there isn't anything that points to Ms. Rachelle Waterman's involvement -- again according to your notes -- until after you come out of the interview room with Jason Arrant, right?" defense lawyer Steven Wells asked.

"I don't believe there's anything in my notes," Habib acknowledged.

In fact, what he wrote down before the Nov. 19 interview was that both Arrant and another man, Brian Radel, said Waterman had nothing to do with the killing. Both eventually implicated her and pleaded guilty to the murder of Lauri Waterman. Arrant was Waterman's boyfriend and she also had had a relationship with Radel, men eight years her senior, according to prosecutors. Waterman, now 22, is being retried in Anchorage on murder and other charges after a first trial in Juneau ended with a hung jury.

Radel kidnapped Lauri Waterman from her home, then beat and suffocated her as Arrant watched, according to testimony. She ended up battered and muddy, so the men deviated from their original plan of a staged drunken driving accident. They put her in the family minivan and set it on fire.

John Bond, deputy state fire marshal, told jurors Monday that the minivan ended up "a burned-out shell." Jurors saw pictures from the scene of the body, mainly just a skull and some bones covered in ashes. Waterman didn't look at the pictures shown on a big screen.

During the cross-examination, Habib said he was just trying to get Arrant to tell the truth about what happened.

"This is not over. There's still one more person out there running free," Habib told Arrant during the November 2004 interrogation, according to the recording.

Arrant didn't say much for several minutes as Habib went over reasons why he needed to give up Waterman.

Arrant and Radel looked like two evil men who took Waterman's mother, but that's not the real story, Habib said. In fact, Arrant was showing 1,000 times more remorse than Waterman, Habib said.

"That girl played you guys," Habib told him.

Habib brought up his work relationship with Arrant's mother, a police dispatcher, and testified that he did so as a tool to soften Arrant up.

Waterman had told the men that her mother abused her.

In the interview, Arrant eventually told Habib that he asked Waterman what he could do to help her.

"She said it would be better if her mother was not in the picture," Arrant said, implicating Waterman for the first time. He told the officer that Waterman wanted her mother dead.

But when Habib pressed for what exactly Waterman said, Arrant told him that he couldn't remember, according to the recording.

Habib also testified that he had plenty of reason to focus on Waterman. She had initially lied to investigators about whether she had a sexual relationship with Arrant and Radel, he said. When he was interviewing other students at Craig High School, she came into the school office to see who he was talking to. At a time her mother and the minivan were still missing, Waterman told people her mother probably got drunk and drove off a cliff.

The trial resumes today with more from the prosecution. It's not yet clear if Waterman will testify when the defense begins to call witnesses. The case is expected to go to the jury Friday or Monday.

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