Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I wish I understood what "Reader from Cairo" was rambling on about. What harrassment? how does someone in the USA harrass an Egyptian?
Anyway, I found this a fascinating read. I read it in 5 hours at one sitting as I couldn't put it down. It is a pity that the author didn't interview the family of the victim or Raffi - it surely would have added to it. The end of the book also left me with many questions that were not addressed such as how did Raffi manage to lift his friend's body, bury it and move very heavy rocks to cover the body when he was seemingly so dehydrated. Why did David give up so fast - he was stronger and bigger than his friend and surely could have survived.
It's a fascinating tale, and I would definitely recommend it to all true crime fans. Anyone know where Raffi is now and what he's been up to? That would be interesting....

Could you kill your best friend if he were dying in the dessert? The moral dilemma posed by this question became a real life choice for Raffi Kodikian in July of 1999, and the aftermath of his decision is the basis for this excellent tale.
A few years ago, the murder of David Coughlin by his best friend, Raffi Kodikian during a brief hiking trip through the Carlsbad Caverns made headlines and raised eyebrows. Jason Kersten has made the tale vivdly compelling and oddly sympathetic to all parties in this recounting of the tragic events.
Kodikian allegedly killed his best friend "to ease his misery under the roiling sun" - the two had roamed the Cavern trails for three days in searing heat, and with no water. What was originally planned as an overnight camping expedition became a three day journey, plagued by vultures, hallucinations and a sense of desperation on both mens part - even though they were within a few hundred yards of a ranger's station.
The ensuing criminal investigation, and arrest of Kodikian (he eventually pled guilt to second-degree murder) ellicit great sympathy for Kodikian, even though the author suggests there may have been more of a motive than was originally presented in the press. Yet the book shows that the dilemma faced by Kodikian impacted every aspect of the invesatigation, as well as confounding the investigating and legal parties involved. The real joy of this book is reading the mental wrestling engaged in by almost everyone involved, from the prosecutors, to the families, to Kodikian's own attorney, who admits the matter befuddles him to this date.
This page is a suprising page-turner - the writing style is very free flowing, and the characters are extremely well presented.

This rather insubstantial book covers the case of two friends from back east who got lost while camping in the New Mexico desert. Just half a mile from their car, Raffi Kodikian and David Coughlin succumbed to dehydration and heatstroke, and then Kodikian supposedly murdered his best friend Coughlin out of mercy. Jason Kersten has done little actual investigation of his own, and mostly rehashes court testimony and existing reports, often at great length. Kersten also badly needs a fact checker, who would have caught some frequent errors like the implication that the Potomac River flows through Philadelphia (only two states off). A calendar would have also helped. At one point, Kersten says that August 13th of the year in question was on Friday, then later in the same paragraph he says that the previous Friday was the 4th. Later in the book, August 6th is given as a Wednesday. These careless slip-ups don't exactly inspire confidence in the rest of the book. Kersten also raises some important mysteries about the case but doesn't bother exploring them in depth, such as how the two friends were able to carry 50-pound rocks around their campsite when they were supposedly near death from dehydration. The fact that the lawyers didn't dwell too much on this and other mysteries in court apparently eliminated Kersten's interest in investigating further. The basic story of friendship and suffering leads to some real page-turning drama, and you really feel for all the people involved in the tragedy. But ultimately, Kersten's account just feels like a long feature article for a certain type of men's magazine. [~doomsdayer520~]

Kersten is an author who would be better off sticking with writing little articles for his immature men's magazine. Living in New York (I was surprised he'd even been to New Mexico for his reasearch) Kersten could not have been less qualified to write this story nor have given a more innaccurate portrayal of South East N.M. I am a resident of N.M. living no less than one hour away from the area concerned in the book, and I myself have visited many of the canyonlands around this area for much of my life; contrary to what the author makes it seem the Chihuahuan desert is not a virtual gehenna with danger lurking everywhere, the yucca plant cannot tear through denim like it is "paper mache" despite what Kersten's extensive desert experience would tell you; tumbleweeds(a trade mark of the West) which the author refers to being present here in the 16th cent. in one of his multiple, partially accurate historical anecdotes, are a variety of Russian thistle, not brought to the U.S. until much later. Also contrary to one of Kersten's ridiculous stereotypical references, most people in N.M. DO NOT carry firearms in their vehicles. These are just a few of the many spurious accusations made by the author. I think Kersten should take a few history lessons, research what he attempts to assert, and learn better grammar before he tries to write another book.

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.

I read a two sentence blurb about this work of nonfiction and immediately had to read it. Two young friends on a camping trip and one of them winds up dead of a supposed mercy killing by the other. The book does not disappoint. It recounts the tale honestly and fairly of the two men whose overnight camping trip in the Southwest went horribly wrong--and the aftermath that followed. Jason Kersten writes well. The book reads like a compelling magazine article--but the story clearly merits a full-sized book. Kersten stays focussed on the story and thankfully does not take any tangents to fill page space. Enjoy.

This book was ultimately unsatisfying . . . two young men go out into the desert, being so DUMB it is hard to believe. Almost no water, inadequate supplies, no trail smarts. They get lost. One of them dies, and the survivor's story is not very believable.

Did he kill his "friend"? If so, why? The law has spoken, the survivor got, as one reviewer put it, "a slap on the wrist," and the young man is still dead.

The book has to be unsatisfying, because only the survivor knows the truth. However, as a real-life mystery, the story is interesting. As a window into the stupidity that sometimes overtakes even relatively intelligent human beings, it's worth your reading time.

That said, I've only given it 3 stars, because I wanted more: The writer has obviously done a lot of primary research, but the difference between an okay book and a really good one would have been more analysis; more speculation; more conclusions. To be fair, the survivor is alive and free, and there may be legal restrictions on what can be said . . . but I wanted more from the writer. And so the star level stays at 3.

Raffi Kodikian and David Coughlin met during their college years, in the mid-1990's, and bonded over air guitar and Cheers, movies, mutual friends, and shared confidences. Some five years later they decided to take a road trip west together--David was moving from Massachusetts to California--one leg of which brought them to New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns National Park. They meant to camp out in the park for one night and see the caves before taking off again. But Carlsbad was as far as they got. Raffi and David hiked into Rattlesnake Canyon, a "remote, mostly unheard-of rift in the Chihuahuan Desert," and pitched a tent, but in the morning they were unable to find the trail they'd followed in. Days later they still hadn't found their way out, and they'd long since run out of water. When rescuers arrived on day four--on August 8, 1999--Raffi was still alive, if dehydrated, and he admitted to having stabbed David to death just that morning by way of ending his friend's suffering.

Jason Kersten tells the story surrounding Raffi's fatal stabbing of David in his compelling book Journal of the Dead. Kersten covers the history of his subjects' friendship, the particulars of their trip cross country and of their fateful stay in Carlsbad, and the ensuing arrest and prosecution of Raffi. Along the way Kersten discusses myriad related topics--the affects of dehydration on the body, the near absence of precedent for mercy killings in survival situations, the legal defenses considered and rejected by Kodikian's counsel.

Kodikian's case is inherently fascinating because of its ambiguity: Raffi was neither obviously innocent nor clearly guilty of having acted from malice aforethought. Kersten--who refuses to state his own opinion on Kodikian's guilt or innocence--does a wonderful job of explaining the arguments from both sides of the courtroom, addressing those issues which tend to exonerate Kodikian and unpacking those parts of his story that don't quite add up. (One troubling aspect of Kodikian's case, for example, is that he was released from the hospital--he walked out of the hospital himself--after only one hour of treatment, hardly what one would expect for someone who was allegedly so severely dehydrated that he had contemplated suicide.) Because Kodikian refused to be interviewed for the book, Kersten reconstructs what happened to the friends in the desert from other sources, including courtroom testimony and physical evidence. Kersten's account left this reader, at least, unsure of what to make of Kodikian, and appreciative of the legal system's apparent wisdom in dealing with his case.

Kersten is a good writer. His book is punctuated by well-turned phrases that reward rereading: "So that morning he [Coughlin] stood in a driveway outside an apartment building in the town of Milford, forcing himself to part with the woman who name was all poetry: Sonnet Frost." Perhaps by way of padding the story, which grew out of a 2000 Maxim magazine article, Kersten includes information not strictly pertinent to the case: a history of the town of Carlsbad, the story of an ill-fated Confederate campaign across the Rio Grande, a horrific tale of dehydration and death in the Sahara. These make for interesting enough reading. But sometimes Kersten's book is more drawn out than it needs to be. His account of the early stages of the friends' road trip is unnecessarily long, for example, and the 50-odd page account of Raffi's sentencing hearing at the end of the book likewise might have been abbreviated. But this complaint is relatively minor. Kersten succeeds in elucidating for readers the fascinating case of Kodikian's mercy killing--or murder--in a manner that, happily, leaves the mystery of the story unresolved. It's a very good true crime story.

Debra Hamel -- author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2003)

I thought that this book was excellent and, as they say, could not put it down. I thought that it was very well written AND researched and that the author was meticulously fair, giving plenty of ammunition to both those who feel that Kodikian is a stone-cold killer and those who believe that there were extreme mitigating circumstances. As for those who criticized the author for not interviewing Kodikian, I found that criticism silly--if the guy is not going to give an interview, what can you do? I'm sure he tried. I did find some sloppiness in the editing. Take for example, the issue of dates. At various times, we are told that the killing occurred on Sunday, August 8. However, page 113 tells us that Friday was August 4 and Saturday was August 5. This of course impossible if Sunday was the 8th. Then, on page 197, we are given a third possibility (albeit through a witness) that Thursday was August 6. Obviously 2 of these 3 scenarios are wrong. How did the editors miss this? Finally, I have always been somewhat puzzled about the concept of a "suspended sentence". It sounds me me like a completely meaningless concept because the sentence always seems "suspended" into perpituity and is never actually served. So what is the point of a suspended sentence at all? Why not just give the actual sentence?

If you like true crime books, this is one for you. The author does a great job of giving you the tales of the trials, and evidence, and lets you form your own conclusion of guilt or innocence.
This is a true crime story that does not give a black and white conclution. Even when the judge finishes the trial, you are not quite sure if it is an appropriate judgment. I personaly don't know if the person (Raffie) commited the crime out of mercey or not, so I relly don't have my own oppinion of innocence or guilt, but the stroy itself is done professionaly as well as interesting. I couldn't put this book down!!!