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What began as a night of celebration ended in absolute tragedy when three 20-somethings with bright futures went into a Maryland apartment together, but only two came out alive.
A 911 call came through the Montgomery County Emergency Communications Center at 3:25 am on Sunday, October 13, 2013 & 24-year-old Taylor Gould was on the other end of the line. It was difficult for the dispatcher to get the necessary information as Taylor sounded intoxicated, she was often incoherent & setting the phone down at times. She was eventually able to relay that there was blood everywhere, but she didn’t know what happened.
Officer Dean Skiba & other first responders were quickly dispatched to the 16th floor of the upscale Blair East apartments, arriving eleven minutes later at 3:36 am. They had absolutely no idea what to expect when they reached the studio apartment in unit 1601 at 1220 East West Highway in Silver Spring, Maryland. Here, they met a clearly intoxicated Taylor at the door. She maintained that she didn’t know what happened while she was placed in handcuffs & sat in the hallway with police, wearing pink shorts & a t-shirt with blood streaked on her body.
Officers who went inside the apartment were met with a terribly violent scene, finding two bloodied young men lying on the floor. 24-year-old Rahul Gupta was groaning on the floor, covered in blood basically from head to toe. He was lying just to the left of 23-year-old Mark Waugh, a first year law student at Georgetown University, who was in a sitting position, his body slumped forward & motionless.
Medical technicians at the scene confirmed that Mark was sadly deceased while an autopsy later determined he had suffered six stab wounds as well as five cutting injuries. One stab wound to the chest punctured a lung while another to the left side of his neck severed his jugular vein, killing him in minutes. He’d also been stabbed twice in his left shoulder & once in his left arm. The cutting wounds to his left hand were consistent with defensive wounds as he raised his arm to protect himself from the attack. The bloodied murder weapon, a large carving knife, was found under Mark’s left leg.
Police reports indicate that blood was found throughout much of the apartment, including on the carpet, walls & ceiling. As a severely intoxicated Rahul was led to the bathroom, although he was saturated in blood, he confirmed that he wasn’t injured.
Based on the pattern of blood, a Bloodstain Pattern Analysis expert indicated that Mark had lived for a period of time & had moved around the apartment after he was first stabbed & cut, leaving a trail of his own blood, likely in an attempt to flee his attacker.
The attack began in the living room near the north wall where Mark received multiple injuries that resulted in significant blood loss. It’s likely that as he attempted to defend himself, he also tried to slow the flow of blood with his hands.
When he made contact with the north wall toward the sleeping area of the apartment, he had been either kneeling or crouching as his final resting place was on the right side of the bed where he was found in a sitting or partially prone position.
There was a significant amount of blood on the front of Rahul’s clothing in comparison to the back which suggests that he was facing Mark or in close proximity during the altercation while Mark had been losing blood.
When two uniformed officers spoke with neighbors in the adjoining apartments, neighbor Miguel Teodoro indicated that about 45 minutes before police arrived, he heard a loud bang followed by a man’s voice saying, call 911.
Investigators came to learn that Taylor Gould had met Rahul Gupta while they were undergraduates at George Washington University in Washington D.C., only blocks from the White House. The pair began dating during their senior year before they graduated in May 2012 with their Bachelor of Science degrees in biomedical engineering, a year & a half before this tragic scene unfolded.
Eight months later, in February 2013, while Rahul was in the process of working toward a Master’s degree in biomedical engineering at George Washington University, he moved into Taylor’s Silver Spring, Maryland apartment. While he focused on school, Taylor worked as a physics researcher for the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) & helped cover some of his bills.
At the time of his death, Mark had been a first-year law student at Georgetown University, a campus that is less than a mile-and-a-half from where Rahul was attending graduate school at GW. After graduation, he hoped to pursue a career in international law & public policy. He & Rahul had been friends for years since they met at Langley High School in McLean, Virginia.
Mark Waugh was born on June 26, 1990 in Washington, D.C. to parents William & Nancy Waugh & he had three brothers. He graduated magna cum laude from James Madison University (JMU) in Harrisonburg, Virginia with a BA in History in 2012.
During his younger years, he was active in the Boy Scouts before advancing to Eagle Scout. In 2007, when he was in high school, he’d been awarded a BSA (Boy Scouts of America) Medal of Honor after he jumped into action, performing the Heimlich maneuver to save a fellow student’s life who was choking on a bottle cap.
Mark had a very multifaceted background, having been one of the top debaters on JMU’s debate team. He lived in South Korea between 2012-2013, teaching debate at the Korean Debate Society Institute while he traveled extensively throughout Southeast Asia during that time.
According to his obituary, he was a witty, compassionate & intelligent guy who was known for his infamous shenanigans. He loved bacon, football & wrestling & goofing around with his brothers. According to his friends, he had a huge personality, he was always smiling & joking & he had a tremendously kind heart.
On the evening before Mark’s death, Saturday, October 12, 2013, Rahul & Taylor went to dinner at a steak house in D.C.’s trendy Dupont Circle to celebrate Rahul’s 24th birthday. Afterwards, they walked to a nearby bar to meet up with Mark as well as Rahul’s college friend, Josh White.
Over the course of an hour, the group had several drinks together before moving on to a second bar where they split off into two groups. While Rahul & Josh went outside to smoke marijuana, Mark & Taylor stayed inside chatting.
Rahul later indicated that while he & Josh had been outside, Josh told him that Taylor had been flirting with him. On the contrary, Taylor later testified that it had been the other way around. While she’d been talking to Mark inside the bar, she was telling him that she felt uncomfortable because she thought Josh was flirting with her.
Right around midnight, they were at a third bar called Buffalo Billiards when the mood began to shift. However, because the group was intoxicated, there have been a lot of disputes as to the crucial details from the night. Taylor has maintained that Josh was getting a little too friendly with her, sending her flirty text messages that she found really weird while Josh insists it had been the other way around.
Since Josh felt that Taylor had a tendency of getting flirtatious with Rahul’s friends, he asked her directly why she was that way. She told him that she loved Rahul very much so she could never do anything to compromise their relationship.
Mark just so happened to walk up to them during this moment in their conversation & when he heard her say, I couldn’t do that to Rahul, he apparently misunderstood & accused Josh of hitting on Taylor. He also confronted Rahul about the situation. Josh denied that this was the case, but since things had gotten awkward, Taylor wanted to leave.
Somewhere around 1:30 am, Josh headed home to his apartment in Woodley Park while Mark took a taxi back with Taylor & Rahul to their apartment about 6 ½ miles north of Washington D.C.
Taylor later indicated that she wanted Mark to come back with them to help her explain the situation to Rahul as to what happened between herself & Josh at the bar. However, according to Rahul, he doesn’t recall this conversation & just assumed that Mark was coming back to hang out.
According to security footage from the apartment building, the trio walked through the lobby together at 1:50 am before they rode the elevator up to the 16th floor. Taylor wore a red dress & black wedge heels, different clothing than what she wore when police arrived about an hour & a half later, while Rahul wore a plaid shirt & jeans, the same clothing he wore when police arrived.
The footage depicted Mark smiling & acting silly at times & although they all seemed intoxicated, no one appeared to be angry. Mark & Rahul seemed to be acting friendly toward each other.
During the gathering, while Mark used Taylor & Rahul’s bathroom, he sent several text messages to his friends & his brother about the awkwardness in the apartment that night. At 2:01 am, he texted his friend, My night is becoming historically awkward. Eighteen minutes later at 2:19 am he texted a message that became tragically ironic, I’m about to gnaw my hand off so I can leave in the ambulance. His final message was sent 36 minutes later at 2:55 am, Awake? I need help.
These messages made it clear that there was some sort of drama happening. Based on the last message, things were escalating & only 30 minutes later, Taylor called 911 as Mark lay dead or dying next to the bed in their studio apartment.
During the call, she was sometimes incoherent & often very vague. She said there was an emergency & she needed police, but she didn’t know what was wrong.
The dispatcher could hear Rahul’s angry voice in the background asking where the f*ck the police were, that things were f*cking serious right now. He told Taylor to shut up, to get the f*ck off of him, not to touch him. In a slurred voice she said that she didn’t do anything wrong while Rahul could be heard sobbing, Noooo!
During the 9-10 minute call, there were long pauses where Taylor would set the phone down or not answer questions at all. She explained that there was blood everywhere, but she didn’t know who was bleeding, she was scared & she wanted someone there.
As Officer Skiba tried to make sense of the situation, he was startled when Rahul said, They were cheating. My girlfriend was cheating on me. My buddy & my girlfriend were cheating. I walked in on my buddy & my girlfriend cheating. I killed my buddy. Since he was so drunk, it was difficult to know if his confession was believable, but he was immediately placed in handcuffs.
By 5 am both Taylor & Rahul were brought separately to police headquarters as suspects in Mark’s murder. While Rahul was placed in a holding cell at 5:05 am, he screamed at an officer stationed nearby that he was going to sue the sh!t out of all of you. He pounded on the door of his cell, yelling two or three times that he wanted a lawyer.
He also said, Please, sir, look, I f*cked up. He tried to stab me though. Guy’s a real dick. He tried to kill me & my family.
They were each questioned separately by veteran interrogator Detective Paula Hamill, who questioned Taylor first. Only three people knew the truth of what had happened in that apartment that night & one was sadly dead. The two surviving suspects were intoxicated & claiming that they couldn’t remember any details.
Taylor recalled something about playing video games, but since she’d been drinking, the next thing she knew, Rahul was telling her to call 911. As she sat on a couch at the police station, she acted shocked when Detective Hamill told her that Mark was dead. She asked how he died & said she thought that he was fine.
Detective Hamill felt convinced that they knew more than they were letting on, finding it impossible to believe that in a tiny studio apartment where so much violence had happened so quickly, they could have been unaware.
Taylor said she wished she knew what happened, but she couldn’t imagine herself ever doing something as terrible as stabbing Mark. She also couldn’t imagine Rahul doing it either, describing the idea of it as ridiculous & crazy.
She also didn’t think that she’d done anything sexual with Mark when referencing Rahul’s confession that he killed his buddy because he caught her cheating. She did say that if they found evidence otherwise, she wouldn’t deny it. When she & Detective Hamill discussed the fact that she’d changed from the underwear shorts she was wearing when police arrived, Taylor said she was surprised she would have worn them in front of Mark.
Detective Hamill couldn’t understand how someone who had the wherewithal to change their clothing three times wouldn’t have remembered how they’d gotten blood on them in the first place. The red dress she’d been wearing when they arrived at the apartment had blood stains all over it that made her assume that she must have been near Mark or Rahul at some point.
At 8:10 am, Rahul, who was the prime suspect since he’d earlier confessed to stabbing Mark, was moved from his holding cell into an interview room for questioning that lasted 55 minutes. While Taylor maintained throughout her interview that she couldn’t remember anything since she’d been so drunk, Rahul seemed to remember more. He acknowledged that while Mark was bleeding out, he had been conscious, he was talking & his eyes were open.
As he sobered up, he told Detective Hamill that he knew for a fact that he hadn’t killed Mark. Since he hadn’t been the one to do it, it must have been Taylor. Had he wanted to stab Mark, he said he would have remembered every detail of it.
On the other hand, Detective Hamill felt that if there was ever a time that he was going to be truthful, it would be when he was intoxicated & his guard was down which was exactly when he did confess.
Rahul said he found out that Taylor & Mark may have been going out behind his back & when they got back to their apartment, it was clear that something was going on based on their body language. He sat down & started doing his own thing, but when he noticed that Mark was bleeding, he immediately jumped into action & tried to stop it.
Five hours after they were brought to the station, Detective Hamill used a strategy she’s only used maybe twice in ten years, leaving Taylor & Rahul alone together in an interrogation room to see what they might say to one another.
When Rahul asked Taylor if she stabbed Mark, she said she didn’t remember what happened, but she didn’t think she could ever stab or attack someone. While Taylor seemed concerned for Rahul’s well being, asking if he was okay, if she could touch or kiss him, Rahul was agitated, wanting to get the f*ck out of there so he could poop & eat. He demanded that Taylor tell someone that he wanted a lawyer so he could leave.
While Taylor was released from custody, Rahul was charged with 2nd degree murder since investigators believed there was more evidence linking him to the crime.
When Rahul hadn’t responded to any of his family’s birthday wishes that Sunday, they knew that something was wrong. They were even more concerned when Taylor & Rahul hadn’t shown up to a planned birthday dinner with them.
The Gupta family had been living in the Washington D.C. area since moving from India in 1986. They built a lucrative printing business before moving to the affluent suburb of McLean, Virginia where Rahul met Mark Waugh during high school.
According to Rahul’s older sister, Sherene Gupta Rapoport, Mark had always been a really loyal friend to her brother & she wasn’t aware of any issues within their friendship. She described her brother as a mild-mannered, calm person who hoped to one day marry Taylor, start a family & help society.
On the other hand, some friends & acquaintances saw him as an overly competitive, confrontational person who had a temper, especially when alcohol was involved. According to an ex-girlfriend, he became a different person when drinking.
His parents hired defense attorneys Phil Armstrong & Jennifer Page who believed that he falsely confessed when he was drunk, disoriented & under stress. They claimed he had only done so in an attempt to cover for his girlfriend who had been the true killer. Once sober, he realized his mistake so he started telling the truth.
Detectives came to learn that after the trio went back to Rahul & Taylor’s apartment, they took vodka shots, Rahul smoked more marijuana & they all sat on the couch playing video games. Rahul had told Detective Hamill that while he was zoned out on the couch, drunk & high, he heard Taylor screaming. Realizing that Mark had been injured, he tried to stop the bleeding, basically hugging his body to put pressure on his wounds which is how he ended up covered in so much of his friend’s blood.
Rahul’s trial began in Montgomery County, Maryalnd a year & a half later on March 2, 2015 when he was 25-years-old. By this time, his charges had been increased from second-degree murder to first-degree murder & he pleaded not guilty.
The prosecution highlighted his confession to police as they arrived on scene, telling them that he stabbed Mark after he walked in on him & Taylor cheating.
Meanwhile, the defense argued that Taylor had killed Mark to silence him after she came on to him. Rahul’s confession had been false as he’d been intoxicated & filled with adrenaline after attempting to save his friend’s life.
Taylor, Rahul & Josh each testified that while they’d been out together at Buffalo Billiards, the last bar of the night, the mood began to shift right around midnight when there were accusations of flirting between Josh & Taylor.
Prosecutor Patrick Mays felt certain that at only 5’5” & 125#, Taylor wasn’t strong enough to have killed Mark as one of the stab wounds had penetrated seven inches & chipped a bone on the way through. Mark was considerably larger than her & fighting back. However, the medical examiner testified that any healthy adult could have caused Mark’s injuries.
Prosecutor Mays also pointed out that there were no markings on Taylor’s body that were consistent with an altercation while Rahul’s attorney highlighted a red mark on her hand below the knuckle of her right pinky finger. Pictures were shown of the mark that they felt could have come from sliding down the knife, striking the curved blade as she stabbed Mark. Her fingernails were bloody & one was broken.
One of Taylor’s contact lenses was found stuck next to the leather label at the back of Mark’s jeans while a long blond hair was found wrapped around the knife. More long blond hair was stuck to a blood stain on the wall & even clutched in Mark’s hand. The hair was never tested, but was assumed to belong to Taylor.
The prosecution argued that they weren’t talking about a clump of hair, but instead, strands. The hair could be easily explained since she lived there & there were strands of her hair found throughout the apartment, in every room.
Since both Rahul & Taylor lived in the apartment together, DNA & fingerprints wouldn’t help much in proving who had used the knife.
Defense attorney Armstrong argued that it had been Rahul who could be heard sobbing during the 911 call, performing CPR & trying to stop the blood, basically doing anything he could to keep his friend alive. This was why he was covered in Mark’s blood.
Taylor had changed her clothing three times between 2 am & when she was being interviewed at the station at 5 am., each of which had Mark’s blood on them. She couldn’t remember when she changed while acknowledging that she’d clearly interacted with Mark’s body because of the blood on her clothing.
When officers arrived at the scene, they found no blood on her face or in her hair. Based on the fact that her hair was dry & she was still wearing makeup,it was clear that she hadn’t washed up.
When Taylor took the stand, her story never changed from when she initially spoke with Detective Hamill on the morning of the murder. Since she had been blackout drunk, she wasn’t able to say exactly what happened that night. While she never once directly blamed Rahul, she maintained that she couldn’t have been responsible for Mark’s murder because she wasn’t capable of doing something so violent.
Prosecutors accused Rahul of attacking Mark in a drunken rage because he believed that Mark & Taylor were having an affair. They also focused on the interrogations of both Taylor & Rahul, saying that Taylor had been the more credible of the two. She admitted that she was too drunk to say whether she had been the person to stab Mark while Rahul claimed to have enough memory to insist that he hadn’t stabbed Mark, but not enough memory to tell investigators exactly what happened.
Jurors heard a recorded phone call between Rahul & his father after he’d been in custody for more than 15 hours. When he told his dad that he was in jail, he explained that he & Mark had gotten into a fight & he tried to get a knife. It sounded to lawyers on both sides that Rahul was admitting to holding the knife. Defense Attorney Armstrong believed that he was still traumatized by what happened.
When Rahul’s father asked who he’d gotten into a fight with, he said, Mark.
When Rahul took the stand in his own defense, he was calm & composed, testifying that when they’d gotten home from the bars that night, he & Taylor argued about whether or not she’d been flirting with Josh. She was already angry & upset & when they got back to their apartment, but she got even angrier.
Mark suggested he & Rahul leave for the night to give everyone time to cool off & while Rahul was looking for his shoes, he said he tripped & hit his head. This was something he had never told investigators. When he sat back up, he said that Mark had been attacked. He began screaming at Taylor, instructing her to call 911 while he tried to slow the bleeding & start CPR before first responders arrived to take over.
When cross examined, prosecutor Patrick Mays asked him how it would have been possible to have missed so much violence in a 500 square foot studio apartment.
Rahul pointed to evidence to support this theory, including the hair found on the knife, in Mark’s hand & attached to the blood spatter on the wall near Mark’s body. When he said that Taylor was known to carry a knife for protection, the State objected & the court sustained the objection. He maintained that he’d only confessed to officers while intoxicated to protect his girlfriend.
Mays presented text messages to the jury that proved that Rahul & Taylor’s relationship had been rocky, stating that it made no sense that he would’ve confessed to a murder to protect her. In the text messages, Taylor wrote that their sex life may not be salvageable, writing, You shouldn’t have to make yourself have sex with me.
Rahul’s defense attorneys argued that these specific messages had been hand chosen from two years of texts, many of which were loving in nature.
Rahul admitted that Mark never had the knife. When he was interviewed at the police station, he told officers that he thought Mark was suffering from a stab wound. This was information that had not yet been disclosed to him. Taylor on the other hand, had seemed shocked to learn that Mark had died & wanted to know how.
On March 16, 2015, after a two week trial & less than five hours of deliberation, the jury found Rahul Gupta guilty of first-degree murder. Two months later on May 27, 2015, he was sentenced to life in prison.
After the sentencing, Mark’s father, William Waugh, described his son as a gift from God. His death is a tragedy that his loved ones will have to carry for the rest of their lives.
Mark had been a 23-year-old just starting his life. He was in his first year of law school & he had a future that seemed wide open. When Mark had gone over to his friend’s apartment that night in 2013, he hadn’t been expecting danger. He was out with people that he knew & trusted. Rahul had been a close friend since high school & they’d been out that night to celebrate his birthday, an occasion that was supposed to be happy.
The exact details of what happened in apartment 1601 will likely never be known. Mark was stabbed to death in a room where the two surviving people claimed they didn’t truly know what happened. While Taylor claims to remember nothing, Rahul insists that he did not stab his friend.
The senselessness of that night is what no one can comprehend & a conviction will never restore what was taken. It will never give Mark’s family another birthday, another phone call, a chance to see him graduate, to see what his future held or the man he was on his way to becoming.
References:
- Fairfax Memorial Funeral Home: Mark Edward Waugh
- William T. Waugh v. Rahul Gupta
- Gupta v. State
- YouTube: STAYAWAKE – Crime & Psychology: There’s something about Taylor…
- CBS News: What happened in Apt. 1601?
- True Crime News: No memory of murder: Booze-filled night ends with friend fatally stabbed in couple’s apartment
- Fox 5: Ex-grad student sentenced to life in prison for killing best friend
- vLex: Gupta v. State
