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processing the urine’s waste than it gains from the liquid. Nonetheless, they filled up their pint bottles with urine which was a dark gold color, sampled it, and immediately gagged. David now began to stagger and it was all they could do to get back to their tents.
    “We will not let the buzzards get us alive,” Raffi wrote in their journal on August 7th, the hottest day yet. “God forgive us.” Then they decided on a ghastly course of action. They would each slit the other’s wrist. They pulled out their one knife and each took a turn at carving the other’s blood vessels. But, for whatever reason—fear, weakness, whatever—neither was able to do more than mark up the other person’s wrists. Now they were faced with having to take everything the desert could throw at them in a slow, agonizing final act.
    David began vomiting uncontrollably. Soon he was begging Raffi to kill him. Assuming they were both going to die, Raffi decided to oblige his friend. He took the knife out and tried to stab David in the chest. The first attempt was only partly successful. But on the second stab he achieved deep penetration into David’s heart, who started bleeding profusely.
    “Pull it out,” David then said.
    “I asked him if he was in pain,” Raffi later testified. “He said he felt better and smiled.” Raffi held David’s hand and put a tee-shirt over his head as David died. He then went back into his tent to await his own fate.
    Several hours later he heard footsteps. Ranger Lance Mattson approached the remnants of Raffi’s tent and was shocked to see someone in there.
    “Please tell me you have water,” Raffi rasped.
    “Yes, I do,” replied the ranger. “Is everything okay?”
    “Why weren’t you here earlier?” was Raffi’s croaking reply. The ranger handed Raffi a bottle of water, which he began, at turns, inhaling and vomiting.
    “Where’s your buddy?” the ranger asked.
    “Over there,” Raffi said, gesturing to a makeshift stone grave he had constructed. Matson saw nothing as he wandered around.
    “Where?” he asked again.
    “Right here,” Raffi pointed out. “I killed him,” he said calmly.

     
    The facts above come from the sometimes rambling journal they kept, as well as the testimony Raffi delivered under oath. The police, however, flat out didn’t buy it.
    “I don’t care what anyone says,’ the county sheriff said. “You just don’t do that to your best friend.”
    An equally skeptical county prosecutor stated, “You don’t get to kill someone in the state of New Mexico just because they ask you to.” One story that gained currency was that David Coughlin had trysted with Raffi’s ex-girlfriend, Kirsten Swan. The theory was that at some point in their traumatic journey David had confessed to Raffi, at which point Raffi became enraged.
    Raffi Kodikian pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and put his fate in the hands of the court.
    “It was mercy, not mental illness, that made you kill him?” the judge asked.
    “What I thought I was doing,” Raffi replied, “was keeping my friend from going through 12 to 24 hours of hell before he died.” David’s parents believed Raffi, and publicly supported him, while Raffi’s parents sat there weeping. Raffi listened intently. The judge sentenced Raffi to a lighter than expected 24 months, of which he served 16 months before being released for good behavior.
    This whole tale, which reads like a Greek tragedy, is brilliantly recounted in Jason Kersten’s book, Journal of the Dead—A Story of Friendship and Murder in the Desert. Kersten actually tells the story in a way that lends a kind of poignant dignity to the whole drama.
    The dread that so many people feel in the desert is not usually through imminent danger. Rather, it is something far worse—the desert’s implacable indifference. We are humans and our bodies are full of water. The desert will efficiently and inexorably suck it out of us. In the process, we become