Prosecutors knew that Tanya had driven Ernest Wallace to Georgia and bought him a bus ticket to Florida. They also believed that she had offered to fly Carlos Ortiz to Puerto Rico to get him away from law enforcement officials investigating Odin Lloyd’s murder.
They had offered her immunity in exchange for her testimony. But Tanya was dying. She didn’t care about immunity. And Aaron had offered her something more valuable.
In yet another jailhouse phone call, Hernandez had told her that he had already set up a trust fund that Jano (her son with Jeffrey Cummings) and Eddie (the child she had had with TL) could access when they turned eighteen.
“It already started off at $100,000 for them, do you know what I’m saying?” Aaron had told Tanya. “I think about seventy-five apiece or something like that and every seven years it doubles.”
Assistant DA Patrick Bomberg would claim that Hernandez was lying: “He says, ‘I set up an account,’ and lo and behold he didn’t.”
But Aaron’s word had been good enough for Tanya, who stood by her refusal to testify. In a series of phone calls, placed before her appearance before Aaron’s grand jury, she had told Ernest Wallace that she would do whatever she had to do for her children.
“It’s by my choice,” Tanya said. “We didn’t fucking do nothing wrong, so they can kiss my ass. We don’t know nothing. I don’t know nothing. What the fuck they want me to say?”
“Fuck them,” she said, referring to the grand jury.
Chapter 73
On several occasions, Aaron answered the letters he received from fans.
Sometimes, over his objections (“Please, keep this private is all I ask!” he wrote to one correspondent), Aaron’s responses were leaked to the press or purchased by tabloids.
Everything happened for a reason, Aaron told a fan, in a letter that TMZ published on August 1, 2013—the day that Tanya Singleton was jailed for refusing to testify in front of Aaron’s grand jury.
“I know ‘GOD’ has a plan for me and something good will come out of this.”
The accusations against him were false, Aaron said. “I’ve always been an amazing person,” he wrote, “known for having an amazing heart.”
Aaron was strong, he said. Nothing would break him.
“I fell off especially after making all that money but when it’s all said and done ‘GOD’ put me in this situation for a reason! I’m humbled by this ALREADY and it will change me for ever.”
A few weeks later, on August 19, Radar Online published another letter, which Aaron had sent in July: “Stay away from all negative people so your always there for your little boy cuz I miss by little girl terribly an my biggest fear of all is she wont know daddy!” he had written. “She said daddy first time or should I say ‘DaDa’ and had to hear it from jail.”
“Im a great dude don’t believe all the neg. publicity please!” Hernandez had added, in the postscript. “Media is the Negative of the fame!”
Three days later, on August 22, Hernandez was formally indicted for murder.
On August 27, he submitted a urine test that turned up positive for Neurontin, a prescription drug known to cause aggressive behavior and suicidal thoughts.
On August 28—one day before the NFL reached a tentative $765 million brain-injury settlement with 18,000 retired players—Rolling Stone published a story suggesting that Hernandez was a habitual user of PCP, one of the drugs that had appeared in TL Singleton’s toxicology report. Among other things, PCP was known to cause hallucinations, paranoia, hyper-aggression, feelings of invulnerability, and violent behavior.
“Friends, who insisted they not be named, say Hernandez was using the maniacal drug angel dust, had fallen in with a crew of gangsters, and convinced himself that his life was in danger, carrying a gun wherever he went,” the story in Rolling Stone claimed.
But Aaron had bigger things to worry about than negative press.
All summer long, Boston Police, who had stalled in their investigation of the 2012 double homicide, had been looking more deeply into the case.
If not for Odin Lloyd’s murder, the murders of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado might have been forgotten: just two more cold cases in a city with a notoriously low clearance rate for homicides.
But bad luck—and a nineteen-year-old woman named Jailene Diaz-Ramos—also played a part in this parallel investigation.
Like the media, good fortune had finally turned its back on Aaron Hernandez.
Chapter 74
Two months earlier, on June 21, Jailene Diaz-Ramos had been involved in a four-car collision on I-91 in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Jailene was taken to a hospital nearby. But when her car was searched, as was customary when cars were towed from accident scenes, the police recovered a Smith & Wesson revolver—a .38 Special—from its trunk.
Jailene was from Bristol, Connecticut. She had been busted several times, for assault, disorderly conduct, forgery, criminal impersonation, larceny, failure to appear in court (twice), and driving with a suspended license.
Now, the police were charging her with possession of a firearm without a license.
As she was being booked, Diaz-Ramos told the police that the gun belonged to a friend—a football player named “Chicago.” A few days earlier, she said, she had given Chicago and a few other football players a ride, and they had left all of their stuff in the trunk.
Chicago’s government name was John Alcorn. Like his girlfriend, he had been arrested before, for disturbing the peace and failing to appear in court.
He turned out to be a cousin of TL Singleton.
The next day, June 22, an anonymous caller had contacted North Attleboro PD.
The caller—who was later identified as Sharif Hashem, a bouncer at Rumor, the nightclub in Boston—said that he had information about a double murder. He gave specifics regarding the time and location.
He mentioned an SUV with Rhode Island plates.
And he said that the murder was connected to the Odin Lloyd investigation.
When the dispatcher asked the man how knew all of this, the man said, “someone accidentally spilled the beans in front of me.”
On June 26, several cars full of police officers had arrived at Tanya Singleton’s house on Lake Avenue.
“From the surveillance video, we identified Wallace and Ortiz,” Trooper Jeremiah Donovan remembers. “We knew there were ties to Bristol. And when we got to the house, Wednesday evening, they were actually having a house party.”
The little blue house was full of people. Out in the yard, more people had gathered around the grill.
Aaron’s Uncle Tito stood in the doorway, watching the police arrive, with a tumbler of vodka in his hand. Detective Peter Dauphinais knew Tito. He walked up and said, “Hey, Tito, we have a search.”
“Any search is antagonistic,” Trooper Donovan says. “It’s not like police show up at your house and you make them coffee. But we didn’t show up with a SWAT team or anything like that, and the party was winding down anyway. I wouldn’t say people were running away. It wasn’t like a bunch of gang members sitting there, drinking forties on the porch. It was more like a family cookout.
“While searching the house, we saw a picture that someone ended up selling to TMZ—a selfie Aaron had taken, where he’s holding a Glock up in front of a mirror. So we knew there was a connection to Aaron. But more importantly, there was a garage. The windows were painted over, but somebody had done a crappy job so we could see inside, and we saw a Toyota 4Runner. The garage was part of our search warrant, so we asked Gina whose car it was.”
Hernandez had left the car there a year earlier, Gina said. No one had driven it since. That much seemed true: The SUV had been detailed, but it was covered in dust and cobwebs. Its battery was dead. But the license plate number—635035—matched the number on a 4Runner that could be seen on surveillance footage taken from Cure, the nightclub in Boston, on the night of the double murder.