Pathological

by Henry Cordes

  So the defense at trial took aim at the state’s largely circumstantial case in the Dundee killings. And the state countered with its most potent evidence in those slayings: A stripper with a strange, remarkable story.

  CHAPTER 24: RYDER

  In the days after completing their search of Garcia’s Indiana home, the Omaha task force detectives started hitting Terre Haute’s strip clubs. They weren’t looking for lap dances.

  In interviewing people who knew Garcia, they had been hearing about Garcia’s affinity for strippers. It wasn’t a big surprise. They’d previously seen from his credit card statements that he dropped loads of money at strip joints. “We need to go to these clubs,” Davis told Herfordt.

  There were two strip clubs in Terre Haute, 6th Avenue and Club Koyote. What they had in common, Herfordt later said, was that they were “both absolute dumps.” Club Koyote, which seemed to be Garcia’s favorite, was set in a dilapidated, tan clapboard building in industrial West Terre Haute, with a sign out front billing it “The Wabash Valley’s Sexiest Night Club.”

  There were also two kinds of dancers in Terre Haute, the detectives would find. First, there were the students from nearby Indiana State University, good girls who took to the seedy stage to earn money for tuition. And then there were what Herfordt termed the lifers, the girls who danced because they “wanted to get crank and get crazy.” It was actually the lifers, he found, who tended to be most willing to talk to them.

  When the detectives went to the clubs, all the dancers they spoke with kept giving them the same message: “You need to talk to Ryder.” If anyone knew Garcia, they said, it was Ryder. She was his favorite. And there was even buzz that Garcia had once said something to her about killing people.

  Davis and Herfordt soon learned that Ryder’s real name was Cecilia Hoffmann. It didn’t take them long to find an address for her, a rental home in Terre Haute. While it seemed clear Hoffmann was one of the lifers, the detectives still feared she’d slam the door on them. But Hoffmann was quite welcoming, letting them inside and with no hesitation answering all their questions.

  She told them how “Dr. Tony” spent a lot of money at the clubs, particularly on her. She told how he had creepily starting coming on to her, which ultimately made her decide she needed to push him away. And then she dropped a bombshell statement: In an effort to impress her, he once admitted he had “killed a young boy and an old woman.”

  During the interview, Hoffmann shed a lot of tears as she recalled that day. She had chosen to believe Garcia was just kidding, the reason she didn’t report his words to anyone. Now these detectives were in her home investigating the very murders Garcia had alluded to. It hit home for Hoffmann that it really did happen. She had been that close to a killer.

  Neither Davis nor Herfordt had a lot of hope going into the interview. By the time they had tracked Hoffmann down, Garcia was big news all over town. Would she make stuff up for the media attention? They had to wonder.

  But now they were struck by just how powerful Hoffmann’s story was. All the emotion and tears helped wash away their doubts. She came off as honest and sincere. They were convinced she was telling the truth. “Wow, I think there may be something actually to this,” Davis told Herfordt after they left.

  When the detectives got back to Omaha, they naturally faced the same questions from task force leaders. She’s a stripper. Do you find her credible? Yes we do, the detectives assured.

  Kleine and Beadle also soon came to realize what an incredible witness Hoffmann could be at trial. They knew full well that the case in the Dundee killings was legally thin. The prosecutors even traveled to Terre Haute to visit personally with Hoffmann. Not only did they want to assure themselves of her credibility, they wanted to establish a relationship with her. After all, they needed her to fly out to Omaha to testify at Garcia’s trial.

  At some point, though, it seems Team Motta set out to make sure that didn’t happen.

  * * *

  Some two years after Hoffmann first met with Davis and Herfordt, the Mottas sent their own private detective to try to interview Hoffmann.

  Steven Yahnke, a former sheriff’s deputy, was a mountain of a man, standing about 6-feet, 6-inches. Court observers later dubbed him the “Amish Giant” because of his big frame, long beard and penchant for wearing a black fedora. With Garcia’s scheduled trial at the time just a few months off, Yahnke in June 2015 stopped in unannounced at Hoffmann’s home in Terre Haute.

  Later accounts of the tone and tenor of that conversation varied wildly. The defense would cast it as a candid interview — a moment in which Hoffmann admitted she made up the whole story about Garcia. The prosecution would cast the conversation as a case of misrepresentation and coercion.

  At one point as Yahnke stood inside Hoffmann’s house, he put Alison Motta on the phone. According to Hoffmann, Alison said words to the effect of: “Honey, I would love for you to disappear.”

  Omaha police officers became aware of Yahnke’s visit to Hoffmann before it even ended. Yahnke eventually said something that made Hoffmann suddenly question whether this imposing man who had flashed a detective’s badge really was the police officer she’d been led to believe. She contacted Ryan Davis in Omaha, emailing him from her phone. Hoffmann told Davis there was a man in her house at that moment telling her she didn’t need to testify at the Garcia trial. An alarmed Davis dialed her up right away.

  “We absolutely need you to testify,” he told her. Whoever this guy with the badge is, Davis continued, he certainly does not represent Omaha police. “If you don’t know who this guy is, ask him to leave,” Davis told her. “If he won’t leave, you call the police.”

  Hoffmann ushered Yahnke out. But that was hardly the last word on the incident.

  CHAPTER 25: WITNESS ON TRIAL

  A striking woman with a thin frame and long reddish brown hair, Cecilia Hoffmann strode into the courtroom and took her seat on the stand. It was the morning of the ninth day of Garcia’s trial — arguably the biggest spectacle in a Nebraska courthouse since Charles Starkweather went to trial nearly six decades earlier for his notorious 11-murder spree across Nebraska and Wyoming.

  Not that Garcia treated his trial as if it was any big deal. Up to this point, the 43-year-old defendant had taken a silent front-row seat for it all. Dressed in a gray suit and glasses as the 16-day trial began on Oct. 3, 2016, he sometimes slept, sometimes feigned sleep, sometimes scribbled on a piece of paper, sometimes grumbled to the deputies escorting him.

  Repeated psychiatric evaluations since his arrest had always shown Garcia competent to stand trial. But for reasons never explained, he never once spoke to his attorneys during the affair. Later, Motta Jr. marveled at his client’s silence. “Think about being on your own death-penalty case and not saying a word to your attorney during the entire four weeks,” he said. “To me, it’s stunning.”

  While Garcia had the same uninterested look on this day, seeing Hoffmann take the stand — for the first time in three years laying eyes on his favorite stripper from back in Terre Haute — surely had to somehow pique Garcia’s interest. Under questioning from Beadle, the 26-year-old Hoffmann soon began to testify to the pair’s “relationship” from 2012 to 2013.

  At Club Koyote, Hoffmann said, Garcia was gregarious. He flashed wads of cash and flaunted his medical degree. Outgoing and engaging, Garcia told anyone who would listen of his work as a doctor. “He was always laughing,” Hoffmann told the packed courtroom. “He was really funny. We would joke around a lot.”

  Even so, Hoffmann said, there was something different about his big-timing persona. Most of her customers didn’t want anyone to know they were setting foot in a strip club. She said it would take months for her to find out, for example, that one of her regulars was a real-estate agent, another, a cop. Not Garcia.

  “He liked to flaunt that he was a doctor,” Hoffmann said. “He wanted everyone to know th
at he was a doctor — that he had nice things, that he had a nice life.” So much so that Garcia introduced himself to the dancers as “Dr. Tony.” The dancers at Club Koyote soon embraced the nickname.

  They had plenty of reasons to do so: Three nights a week, Garcia would drop up to $100 — no small sum at the dumpy club. A big spender like that would get his due. Whenever he walked in, the deejay would stop the music, lean into the microphone and bellow: “Hey everyone, let’s welcome Dr. Tony to the club.” As one psychologist who later studied Garcia would put it, Garcia was like a strip club version of Norm from “Cheers.”

  After arriving, Garcia would typically make his way to Hoffmann. She admitted she took advantage of the attention Garcia showered on her. A handful of times she texted Garcia, asking him to take her to Olive Garden, her favorite restaurant. He would always oblige. She wasn’t interested in dating him, she said. She just wanted a free meal.

  “It’s not a good time of my life,” Hoffmann explained to the jury, looking down. “It’s not anything I’m proud of or happy about. I was obviously dancing. I was addicted to drugs. I drank a lot. It was just not a very stable time of my life.”

  Later, Bob Jr. followed up on the comment, asking her: “Nobody wants to be a stripper, right?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Hoffmann replied, a reference to some of her co-workers that elicited chuckles from the courtroom.

  In addition to their scantily-clad dancing, Hoffmann said she and her fellow dancers sold attention and affection, often competing for the right to perform an erotic private dance for a big spender like Garcia. “As soon as he would come in, I would leave whatever I was doing,” she said. At the same time, the attention from Garcia also stoked her ego.

  “He would always give me compliments and tell me, you know, how pretty I was or how great I am, or things like that that just really boost your self-esteem and just made you feel good. He was actually very nice.”

  To a point. Aspects of Garcia gave her pause, Hoffmann said. “There was definitely something about him that you could just tell was off,” she said. “Just this look in his eye or this face behind his smile.”

  Once, Hoffmann said, Garcia got down on one knee and proposed to her, offering up an invisible ring. The deejay called out: “Congratulations, Ryder and Tony, on your engagement.”

  Later, Garcia told Hoffmann that he had a dream that she had his baby. She politely laughed. Then Garcia pounded the dream story into the ground, for several weeks mentioning it every time he came to the club. “It definitely started getting creepy,” she said.

  Then came his creepiest tale. One night, as Hoffmann took a smoke break outside the club, Garcia joined her. Garcia had been pressing Hoffmann to date him. He had tried to kiss her after one of their Olive Garden dinners. She fended him off, telling him, “I don’t feel like we’re ready yet.”

  Now as they sat together, Hoffmann knew it was time to break away. Garcia was trying to get too personal. “Regulars, they start to wear themselves out,” she explained in businesslike terms. “You’ve got to let them go. Let another dancer take over.” But she wanted to let him down gently, she testified.

  “So I started off by telling him, ‘You’re too good for me, you know, I’m a bad girl, and you’re a good guy, you’re a doctor, and I just — I like bad boys.’

  “He just kind of looked at me and he said, ‘Well, I’m not really that good.’ ”

  Hoffmann paused.

  “He said, ‘Actually, I’ve killed people before.’ ”

  Hoffmann said she challenged him. “Oh, please, Dr. Tony, I know you’ve never killed anybody before. And he goes, ‘Yeah, yes, I have, actually.’ And I’m like, ‘All right, so — tell me about it.’

  “And he goes, ‘Well ... it was an old woman and a young boy.’ ”

  At the time, Hoffmann testified, she thought he was just kidding around. So she went along with it, asking Garcia why he would do that. “He said, ‘Well, they deserved it. ... Well, maybe they didn’t deserve it, but I had to, and I feel bad.’ ”

  * * *

  Even courthouse novices who witnessed Hoffmann’s testimony that morning could see just how damaging her words had been for Garcia. Motta Jr. in the ensuing cross-examination had a simple task, straight out of a defense attorney’s playbook: Crumble the credibility of the person who heard the confession.

  In other circumstances, that might mean grilling a police detective about his interview tactics. Other times, it means attacking a jailhouse snitch’s shady background. For Motta in this case, it meant attempting to expose a stripper’s deceptive ways.

  Motta started off by revealing a few things about himself: He acknowledged he had been to a few strip clubs in his day — chuckling a bit as Alison sat just behind him in the front row of the gallery. He then told Hoffmann he wanted to get “into the dynamics of being an exotic dancer a little bit, because I don’t know if the jury’s ever been to a strip club.”

  “Kind of the goal for a stripper is to entice the customer into getting a private dance — that’s one of the primary goals. Would you say that that’s true?”

  Hoffmann: “Yes.”

  Motta: “So I mean isn’t it also true that a part of the job for being an exotic dancer is to create the illusion in the customer’s mind that you’re interested in them; true?”

  Hoffmann: “Yes.”

  Motta: “So, I mean, you’ll do things in terms of trying to get a regular to dance with you, you’ll tell the guy that’s not good-looking, ‘Man, you’re a good-looking guy,’ right?”

  Hoffmann: “Yes.”

  Motta: “So that being said, lying plays a big part — or deception plays a big part in your job; isn’t that true?”

  Hoffmann: “Yeah.”

  Then after casting Hoffmann as dishonest, Motta challenged the reliability of her recollections. Motta pointed out that Hoffmann admitted she had been drinking when she divulged Garcia’s comments to Omaha police. And he pointed out all the statements Hoffmann had made to Yahnke that seemed to back off her original report of Garcia’s confession.

  Statements like: “I thought he said something and now I just think it’s been too long and I don’t think I was in the right state of mind to comprehend what he said.” And this: “I don’t remember what exactly the conversation ... was, and I don’t feel comfortable enough to risk a man’s life based on the bad part of my life.” And this: “I can’t stand by anything I said or did in that time of my life.”

  As Motta pressed her, Hoffmann struggled to come up with an explanation for her words to Yahnke. The best she could offer was that she didn’t remember making those retractions. “I’m not saying that I didn’t say (those things),” Hoffmann said. “I’m just saying I do not remember actually saying them.”

  No further questions, Motta said soon after. He surely believed that his pointed questioning had badly undercut Hoffmann’s confession claim.

  CHAPTER 26: BREAKING POINT

  In this high stakes back and forth, it was back to Beadle, who had another chance to question Hoffmann. And she had some work to do with her star witness — her reluctant star witness.

  Few people beyond Beadle and her fellow prosecutors knew at the moment just how reluctant Hoffmann had been to testify in this trial in the first place. After receiving a subpoena ordering her to come to Omaha, she went to court to fight it. An Indiana judge upheld the subpoena, informing Hoffmann she could be held in contempt of court if she didn’t show.

  So what did Hoffmann do the day before she was scheduled to testify? She missed her flight to Omaha. Beadle scrambled, panicked that Hoffmann might be bailing. She furiously called her. Hoffmann picked up. “What’s going on?” Beadle said, feigning calm.

  Hoffmann begged forgiveness. She had trouble getting her two young children to their babysitter’s. But she still planned to come. Beadle wasn’t convinced. In fact, she
didn’t know whether Hoffmann would show until she walked up the ramp at Omaha’s airport. It was 10 p.m. She was scheduled to testify in 11 hours.

  Beadle wanted to prep Hoffmann, to go over all the questions she might face. But she also wanted Hoffmann to get some sleep, to be fresh for the grilling she would surely face the next day. So the two just went over a few matters, and then Beadle had Hoffmann listen to a recording of the original statement she gave to Omaha police. “I didn’t want to overload her,” Beadle said later.

  After having weathered Motta’s cross examination, Beadle feared that Hoffmann might be nearing a breaking point. She had clearly struggled with all the questions about her inconsistent statements. Now it was the veteran prosecutor’s job to rehabilitate her star witnesses’ testimony.

  Talking at a feverish pace, Beadle firmly rejected any notion that Hoffmann had spontaneously recanted what she’d told the Omaha detectives. She noted all the times that Yahnke led her with his questions. She also noted that Yahnke was asking questions in front of Hoffmann’s boyfriend, who didn’t know anything about her life as a stripper — a life she had turned away from in the two years between her Omaha police interview and Yahnke’s visit.

  At one point, Beadle noted, Yahnke had suggested to Hoffmann that she was too drunk to remember what Garcia said. “He put a lot of words in your mouth, didn’t he?” Beadle said.

  “Yeah,” Hoffmann said.

  “You’ve always said, ‘I wasn’t lying,’” Beadle said.

  Hoffmann: “Yes.”

  Beadle: “You just didn’t want to (testify)?”

  “Exactly,” Hoffmann said. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do this. It kind of seemed like he was giving me an out.”

  Beadle jabbed a finger in the direction of Yahnke, sitting in the front row. She asked Hoffmann how she felt with the 6-foot-6 man towering over her in her house. “I was terrified,” she said.