All-American Murder: The Rise and Fall of Aaron Hernandez, the Superstar Whose Life Ended on Murderers' Row
James Patterson
To Bill Robinson, who got this thing cooking
Prologue
Matthew Kent ran track and played football at a high school in Attleboro, Massachusetts. After school, he worked out at a gym called Answer is Fitness. Then he would run, two miles north, to his house on Homeward Lane. The route went through an industrial park and into a clearing. The path turned to gravel, then dirt. On the far side of the clearing, at Landry Avenue, it turned into pavement again.
On June 17, 2013, Matthew did not get as far as the pavement.
It was a Monday. The day before the last day of school. Matthew had gotten to the gym at four. By the time he got out, an hour later, the weather—which had been beautiful all day—had started to turn. Clouds were gathering. The wind had started to gust. Matthew was running through the industrial park.
Suddenly, at the far end of the clearing, he stopped.
There was a man, lying on his back near a dirt pile.
Matthew called out to him: “Are you all right?”
The man did not answer. Matthew walked a bit closer, until he was about twenty feet away.
“Are you all right?” he asked again.
Once again, there was no answer.
Detective Mike Elliott was nearing the end of his eight-hour shift at the station when the transmission came over the radio: A guy down. A “possible sudden” behind the Corliss Landing industrial park.
Lieutenant Michael King, of the Massachusetts State Police, was coaching his son’s little league team when he got the call—he was already on his way down to the clearing. Assistant District Attorney Patrick Bomberg would arrive shortly after, along with uniformed police officers and members of the North Attleboro fire department. But North Attleboro PD Captain Joseph DiRenzo beat everyone else to the scene.
The captain had left work at four. He was less than a mile away from Corliss Landing when the call came in, and he showed up, in shorts and a T-shirt, at 5:38.
DiRenzo saw right away that they were dealing with a homicide.
“There were rounds, and what appeared to be bullet wounds to the torso,” he says. “When I knelt down and touched the body, I could clearly tell that rigor mortis had set in.”
The man on the ground was lying faceup. His left fist was clenched over his chest—one of several places he had been shot. He was young. He was black. His eyes were half-open.
Flies were buzzing around the man’s nostrils.
DiRenzo made note of the sneaker prints that had been left in the dirt. He saw a baseball cap, a white towel, and a partially smoked marijuana blunt lying on the ground. When he looked up, he saw something else: Dark, menacing clouds. A storm coming in from the west.
Soon, it would rain—heavy rain, which would wash away crucial pieces of evidence.
“It could not have come at a worse time,” DiRenzo recalls. “We have the body itself, tire marks, shoe prints, and rounds. All of a sudden you could see the trees bending over, clouds moving in in slow motion. It was a moment of, ‘Holy shit, we’ve gotta do something here!’”
The fire department had brought tents and tarps that the police could use to cover the crime scene. The cops worked quickly, trying to stay ahead of the storm. They measured, logged, and photographed as much as they could. But they also had to be careful not to contaminate the location.
Everyone had to park one hundred yards away from the body, in order to preserve the tire tracks. Everyone, including the firemen, had to wear boots and gloves, or have the bottoms of their shoes photographed for comparison purposes in preparation for the eventual homicide investigation.
The man had been standing when the first shot hit him. The detectives made note of the dirt the man’s heels had kicked up as he fell—it was the kind of detail that a rainstorm would wash away.
The man had been shot several more times after falling.
Boom, he goes down, the cops thought. Then, when he’s down: Boom, boom, boom. You could definitely tell, somebody wanted to make sure he was dead. And the shell casings are right there—one in the dirt and three more in a little indentation in the ground right next to the body. They’re all right there. Whoever did this was brazen. It’s crazy—not even bothering to pick up the brass?
The police put tarps over the tire and sneaker prints, set a tent up over the body, and covered the body itself with a tarp, placing rocks around the tarp’s circumference to keep the wind from blowing it away.
There was nothing more they could do before the storm passed.
The rain lasted for twenty minutes—a half hour at the most—but it was heavy. Forty-mile-an-hour gusts shook the trees that stood around the clearing. The temperature dropped by twenty degrees. When the rain stopped, a state trooper named Michael Cherven removed the tarp and went through the dead man’s pockets:
Sixty-four dollars and seventy-five cents in cash. Two sets of keys for an Enterprise Rent-A-Car. A cell phone.
“His cell phone?” one of the officers said. “For Christ’s sake, you’re gonna kill someone, take his cell phone!”
In the man’s wallet, they found an ID: Odin Lloyd. Twenty-seven years old. The face in the photograph matched the victim’s.
Back at the North Attleboro police station, Detective Elliott and Elliott’s colleague, Detective Daniel Arrighi, waited outside of the room as a state trooper named Eric Benson called the car rental company and spoke with a manager named Edward Brennan.
“I’m investigating an apparent homicide in North Attleboro,” Benson said. “We’ve recovered two sets of keys to a black Chevy Suburban, Rhode Island registration 442427. We have reason to believe that the person who rented it may be in danger.”
Brennan looked up the number.
“Oh, no,” he said.
Outside of the room, the detectives strained to hear Trooper Benson’s side of the conversation. A few moments went by.
Benson opened the door.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said when he saw Elliott and Arrighi. “The car was rented by Aaron Hernandez.”
Part One
Chapter 1
It was November 23, 2006, and Aaron Hernandez’s high school football team—the Rams—was suiting up for the Battle for the Bell.
Played annually on Thanksgiving mornings, the Battle was a grudge match between Aaron’s school, Bristol Central, and its crosstown rival, Bristol Eastern.
Bristol, Connecticut, is a working-class town—football country in the middle of a state where soccer and crew are the suburban sports—and the Battle drew thousands of people to Muzzy Field, an ancient, minor-league baseball stadium that had hosted Babe Ruth at one time, and had been scouted as a film location for The Natural.
Every year, going all the way back to 1959, bragging rights had been at stake: Would the Rams get to lord it over the Lancers for twelve more months?
This year, the stakes were especially high. If the Rams won, they’d advance—for the first time in nineteen years—to the state championship. If they lost or tied, it would be the end of their season, and the end of Aaron Hernandez’s high school football career.
The Rams were confident as they ran out onto the field in their red-and-white uniforms. They had good reason to be. With Aaron Hernandez as their team captain, the Rams had won all but one of their games. Everyone favored them over the Lancers, who had bigger players on their team but had lost four of their games that season. Everyone knew that, on this day, a win by the Rams would push them into the playoffs.
Once again, all eyes were on Aaron Hernandez.