Dad: No idea about interrogation plan for daughter

Rachelle Waterman's father testified Thursday that if troopers had told him his 16-year-old daughter was a suspect in his wife's murder, he would have prevented her from being interrogated without a lawyer present.

Carl "Doc" Waterman took the stand in state Superior Court as a defense witness in his daughter's trial on conspiracy to commit murder charges. Rachelle Waterman, now 22, is being tried for the second time for her mother's murder; her first trial in 2006 ended in a hung jury.

Lauri Waterman, 48, was abducted in November 2004 from the couple's home in Craig, and was beaten and suffocated before her body was burned. She was inside her minivan, which was set on fire near the end of a logging road on Prince of Wales Island.

Two 24-year-old men, one a boyfriend and the other a former beau of Rachelle Waterman, pleaded guilty and are serving long prison sentences.

Waterman's boyfriend at the time, Jason Arrant, said Rachelle's mother was killed because she was physically abusing the girl. The former boyfriend, Brian Radel, was accused of carrying out the killing.

Carl Waterman testified that five days after his wife's body was found, he made eye contact and nodded with a Craig police officer while attending Radel's arraignment. He said he was not told that the officer and the lead investigator, Alaska State Trooper Sgt. Randy McPherron, were headed to his house to pick up his daughter for an interrogation.

McPherron has testified that Waterman allowed his daughter to be questioned and that they tried and failed to find the father at the arraignment.

"I would have told her not to talk with them without a lawyer," Waterman said.

Defense lawyer Steven Wells showed the jury pictures of what appeared to be a happy teenager. One, of mother and daughter together, was taken in late summer a few months before Lauri Waterman was murdered.

"Overall, I would say Rachelle and Lauri were pretty close," Carl Waterman said.

He said his wife was more concerned than he was about his daughter having a relationship with someone eight years older. "It caused me a bit of concern, but it caused Lauri a lot of concern," he said.

Lorraine and Donald Pierce, neighbors and longtime friends of the Watermans, said Rachelle Waterman had been in a rebellious stage for about a couple of years. She was argumentative and didn't like to follow her parents' rules, Lorraine Pierce testified.

"I didn't think she was bad -- just major growing pains," she said.

Rachelle was involved in school activities, played volleyball and softball, and participating in band, choir, drama and the academic decathlon. She was an above-average student.

During the trial, Waterman's attorney depicted Arrant as a young man desperately fearful that his teenage girlfriend would leave him for someone else. They said he felt that her mother was keeping them apart.

Prosecutors have said it was the teenaged girl who put the two men up to murdering her mother and then did nothing to prevent them from carrying it out on the weekend when she and her father were away from home, leaving her mother alone.

Arrant, who refused to testify in the second trial, has said Rachelle wanted her mother killed because the woman was abusing her daughter, including trying to push her down some stairs a few months before the murder was carried out.

The girl also told law enforcement her mother came at her with a knife and hit her with a baseball bat.

No evidence has been presented to show Lauri Waterman actually abused her daughter. Prosecutors have said the girl used the abuse stories to manipulate the two men into killing her mother.

An expert on brain development testified by videoconference Thursday that the adolescent brain is different from an adult's, particularly when it comes to impulse control, risk-taking and seeing things in the long term.

"They don't anticipate the consequences of their actions as well as adults," said Elizabeth Cauffman, a professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California at Irvine.

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