In bureaucratic terms, she was Confidential Informant No. Draped in an improvised shroud made from her Grateful Dead sweatshirt and an orange-and-purple sleeping bag, Hoffman had been shot five times in the chest and head with the gun that the police had sent her to buy.īy the evening of her death, Rachel Hoffman had been working for the police department for almost three weeks. Two days after Hoffman disappeared, her body was found in Perry, Florida, a small town some fifty miles southeast of Tallahassee, in a ravine overgrown with tangled vines. “She was with us,” he recalled an officer saying. They wanted to know if she might have run off with the money. Late that night, they arrived at her boyfriend’s town house and asked him if Hoffman was inside. By the end of the hour, police lost track of her and her car. Now she was on her way to conduct a major undercover deal for the Tallahassee Police Department, meeting two convicted felons alone in her car to buy two and a half ounces of cocaine, fifteen hundred Ecstasy pills, and a semi-automatic handgun. She had never fired a gun or handled a significant stash of hard drugs. Later, after failing to report for a test, she spent three days in jail. She was ordered into a substance-abuse program, which required regular drug testing. A year earlier, while she was a senior, police pulled her over for speeding and found almost an ounce of marijuana in her car. Hoffman’s legal worries were augmented by the fact that this wasn’t her first drug offense.
She believed that any charges against her could be reduced, or even dropped. Hoffman could face serious prison time for felony charges, including “possession of cannabis with intent to sell” and “maintaining a drug house.” The officer in charge, a sandy-haired vice cop named Ryan Pender, told her that she might be able to help herself if she provided “substantial assistance” to the city’s narcotics team. The cops seized slightly more than five ounces of pot and several Ecstasy and Valium pills, tucked beneath the cushions of her couch. When they asked if she had any illegal substances inside, Hoffman said yes and allowed them in to search. On her Facebook page you could see her dancing at music festivals with a big, goofy smile, and the faux profile she’d made for her cat (“Favorite music: cat stevens, straycat blues, pussycat dolls”).Ī few weeks earlier, police officers had arrived at her apartment after someone complained about the smell of marijuana and voiced suspicion that she was selling drugs. She was not a trained narcotics operative. In any case, Rachel Hoffman, a tall, wide-eyed redhead, was by nature laid-back and trusting. Perhaps what put her at ease was the knowledge that nineteen law-enforcement agents were tracking her every move, and that a Drug Enforcement Administration surveillance plane was circling overhead. “I’m pulling into the park with the tennis courts now,” she said, sounding casual. As Hoffman spoke on her iPhone to the man she was on her way to meet, her voice was filtered through a wire that was hidden in her purse.
Young mothers were pushing strollers near the baseball diamonds kids were running amok on the playground.
“It’s about to go down,” she texted back.īehind the park’s oaks and blooming crape myrtles, the sun was beginning to set. “I just got wired up,” she wrote at 6:34 P. On the passenger seat beside her was a handbag that contained thirteen thousand dollars in marked bills.īefore she reached the Georgia-peach stands and Tupelo-honey venders on North Meridian Road, she texted her boyfriend. A recent graduate of Florida State, she was dressed to blend into a crowd-bluejeans, green-and-white patterned T-shirt, black Reef flip-flops. On the evening of May 7, 2008, a twenty-three-year-old woman named Rachel Hoffman got into her silver Volvo sedan, put on calming jam-band music, and headed north to a public park in Tallahassee, Florida. In exchange for leniency, untrained informants are sent out to perform dangerous police operations with few legal protections.