“My friend called me . . . there’s a guy raping her.”
“I’d like to, to report an incident . . . I just found a dead lady . . . there’s blood everywhere . . .”
The words of Christopher Watcheston’s victims bring home the horror of a night more than two years ago.
Their shaky voices betray the fear, confusion and trauma in the wake of a barbaric attack and murder of a mother of five as she tried to make her way home on a cold winter night.
It’s a straightforward case: although he has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, the 24-year-old has admitted to stalking, sexually assaulting and killing 41-year-old Arcelie Laoagan, a woman he’d never met. About all that will likely be at issue over the coming days of the trial, which began Monday, is Watcheston’s state of mind.
As the day unfolds, the Crown details a laundry list of agreed statements of fact — her blood was found on his jean jacket, his semen was found in her lifeless body, she suffered “blunt cranial injury” — not all that different to what you’d hear any night tuning into a TV show like CSI. Shocking, horrible, but so unreal and Hollywood-like it doesn’t have the power to greatly affect the spectators who didn’t know Arcelie.
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If it weren’t for those wretched 911 tapes, played throughout the morning as Arcelie’s crying mother and sister sit listening in the gallery, it might all seem such a long time ago. And those of us in the media might be able to pretend this is a job we can forget about at the end of the day. For close to an hour we sit silently, listening to the people who were collateral damage in this brutal murder.
There is a friend who received a terrifying call made by the victim in the midst of being attacked, who called another friend and both making desperate pleas for help from police.
Melchor Padilla, I’m quite certain, will never be the same after getting the call on his cellphone from Arcelie, telling him a man was sexually assaulting her. “She called me,” he can be heard saying on the 911 recording, “and I don’t know what to do now.”
Nor will her close friend Rowena Cabela, who, like Arcelie, came here from the Philippines in search of a better life. “She called my friend,” Cabela can be heard saying in a timid, shaking voice, “and said she was being attacked by a man.” When the 911 dispatch tells her they’ll look into it and call her back, she answers with a quiet “thank you, thank you very much.”
Even a stranger is never the same after being confronted with such brutality. Stumbling upon the body in the early morning hours of May 18 on her way to work, Josee Lefebvre is clearly traumatized as she describes through tears the state she finds the body in: “her pants are all the way down to her ankles and she’s not moving . . . she’s pretty much half-naked.”
Throughout the playing of the 911 tapes, Arcelie’s soft, quiet voice rings out through the courtroom. As police try to contact the victim on her cellphone, it goes repeatedly to voice mail. “Hi, you’ve reached Arcelie. Please leave your message.”
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