Privately, Woldt was even worse. He insisted that if she loved him, she had to submit to whatever his sexual desires of the moment were, including anal sex. She also noticed that he got sexually aroused on the few occasions when she stood up for herself. That’s when he wanted sex … hard, angry sex.
It wasn’t any consolation, but Lori noted that he reserved the worst of his temper for his mother. He told her and other friends that he wished she was dead and that he’d considered killing her. Once he and Lori were riding with Song-Hui in her car when mother and son got into a screaming match. Song-Hui stopped the car and ordered him to get out. He did, dragging Lori with him, but not before spitting in his mother’s face. Then, as they stood on the sidewalk, he blamed Lori for the fight.
Woldt met his next “best friend” when Lori’s sister, Lisa, introduced him to her boyfriend, Derrick Ayers. For a period of two months, the two young men were nearly inseparable. They smoked a lot of pot, watched pornographic and violent movies, and went out nearly every night, often to play pool at a place called Corner Pocket Billiards.
Lisa was jealous of how much time Ayers was spending with Woldt. But she had other reasons to dislike her sister’s boyfriend—not only did he mistreat Lori, but one day he’d suggested that Lisa should come to his apartment, alone. She turned him down, and in fact thought there was something wrong with him. When he wanted to go out with Ayers, he’d say something like, “Let’s go beat up some punks and rape some chicks.” He always said it with a smile, but there was something in his undertone that wasn’t joking.
After a while, Ayers also started to get uncomfortable with Woldt’s views about women. They were all “bitches” and whores, and then Woldt told Ayers that he preferred women who fought his sexual advances. Soon Woldt began asking if Ayers had ever thought about what it would be like to abduct and rape a woman. Then he upped the ante.
One evening, they went for a drive in the mountains west of Colorado Springs. Woldt was behind the steering wheel of Lisa’s car because Ayers’ license had been revoked. He headed for an area overlooking the city below that was famous for couples parking to neck.
As they cruised the gravel roads that wound along the forested mountainsides, Woldt talked about finding a couple parked at some desolate spot and attacking them. He said they’d rape the woman in front of the man, and then kill them both with large rocks.
Again, Ayers thought it was just more Woldt fantasy until his friend stopped the car, got out, and picked up two large rocks, which he put in the vehicle. The rocks would be their murder weapons, he said with a smile.
Ayers looked at his friend. Woldt had to be kidding, he thought. He was just trying to yank his chain. But a little farther down the road, they came upon a couple in a red sports car parked at one of the overlooks.
Woldt pulled in a few spaces from the couple in their car. This was perfect, he said. They’d drag the man out of the car and subdue him. Then they’d rape the woman and when they finished, kill them both, and throw their bodies off the cliff.
Now, Ayers was frightened. Woldt was smiling, but there was something else in his eyes. Hunger. Anger. Something. Whatever it was, Ayers didn’t want to see it anymore and insisted that they drive home. Woldt laughed. Of course, he was just kidding, he said. He just wanted to see Ayers’ reaction.
The next day, Lisa asked Ayers what the large rocks were doing in her car. He gave her a story about wanting to build a rock garden. But he also started to pull away from Woldt. His friend was weird, and he wasn’t at all sure that he was kidding.
Several weeks after the incident in the mountains, Ayers warned Lisa to get her sister away from Woldt. “He has some pretty strange ideas,” he said.
When Lisa insisted that he explain what he meant, Ayers asked if she remembered the rocks she’d found in the car. “They weren’t for any rock garden,” he said and told her about Woldt’s fantasy.
Without being specific—because she knew that Lori would never believe it—Lisa tried to steer her sister away from Woldt. But Lori insisted that she loved him and couldn’t live without him.
In the summer of 1996, Lucas Salmon returned to Colorado Springs from California and stayed with Lori and Woldt in an apartment they were renting. Lori thought it was cruel the way her boyfriend constantly teased Salmon about being a virgin. Crueler still was when Woldt suggested that she have sex with his friend to remedy the situation. It hurt that her boyfriend seemed to view her as his property to be handed out like candy. But he would soon hurt her worse when she found out that he was seeing another woman: Bonnie, the divorced mother of a two-year-old boy.
When Woldt left Lori a short time later and moved in with Bonnie, Lori tried to kill herself by taking an overdose of pills. The only thing that saved her was Lucas Salmon arriving at the apartment with his father and rushing her to the hospital.
The suicide attempt didn’t appear to trouble Woldt. However, he tried to use it to his advantage with his boss at the perfume store where he was working. His supervisor, Angela King, thought he was a good employee, except for his frequent absences from work. After yet another “no call, no show” she telephoned Woldt and said she had no choice but to fire him. He begged her for another chance, saying he’d been having a rough time because his girlfriend had killed herself.
By the end of 1996, Woldt was disappointed that his fantasy was no closer to reality. He’d tried with Wilson and Ayers to recruit an accomplice, but he was unable to bring them into his fold. He needed someone he could control and manipulate. He needed Lucas Salmon.
In January 1997, Woldt wrote to Salmon, who had been expelled from college for academic deficiencies, encouraging him to return to Colorado. Salmon had resisted, saying he had a job and was living with friends, even playing in a rock and roll band. But then Woldt played his trump card.
Bonnie was pregnant with his baby, and he’d given in to her suggestions that they get married. Her family lived back in Delaware, and that’s where they decided to go for the ceremony.
As he made plans, Woldt had first asked Wilson to be his best man. But when Wilson said he couldn’t make it, Woldt angrily said he was going to have to ask a “loser,” Lucas Salmon, to stand up for him. He did not, however, couch the invitation to Salmon like that. Instead he asked his “best friend” to be his best man.
Salmon agreed and arrived in Colorado on February 20. A few days later, the two young men flew back to Delaware. After his initial disappointment with Wilson’s rejection, Woldt was actually pleased by how things were turning out. Not so much for the sake of the wedding, but toward the implementation of his fantasy.
It was going to take a little work to wean Salmon away from all that church stuff, but he’d already seen signs that it was possible. Woldt began by suggesting they follow the young woman with the car troubles. “Let’s go in…”
CHAPTER TWO
“My Best Friend”
… and rape her.”
Tearing his eyes away from where the woman had disappeared into her house, Salmon looked back at Woldt. His friend was smiling, like it was all a big joke. But there was something else in his eyes, and it wasn’t humor. More like hunger.
Salmon understood the hunger, although at this point it still troubled him, gnawing at his psyche like a trapped rodent. Or as though he were in a television cartoon with an angel—the voice of his conscience—perched on a shoulder speaking into his left ear and a devil perched on the other whispering into his right. Only the devil sounded a lot like George Woldt.
Yet Woldt was his closest friend. He’d asked Lucas to be the best man at his wedding. It was so confusing, his soul so conflicted.
Lucas Salmon was the middle child born to Robert and Gail Salmon in a small town in northern California. His parents had married young and immediately began producing a brood—five children in six years—raising them in a fundamentalist Christian church after coming from dysfunctional families themselves.
Gail had been an only child and,
as she’d later tell psychologists trying to understand why her son did what he did, that made her the only witness when her father would beat her mother. Her mother had been raped when she was a teenager and after that considered “damaged goods” by her family until she got married to a man who treated her like property. Life actually improved when Gail’s father abandoned his wife and child.
Bob’s early circumstances weren’t any better. His father was a stem disciplinarian, a believer in the Biblical admonishment to not spare the rod when dealing with his children. Bob would later confide to the same psychologists who talked to Gail that during his childhood, his family “operated on guilt.”
His father taught him to “put women on a pedestal,” but several times his mother left the family for extended periods. She would eventually return, and the family would go on as if nothing had happened. Young Bob got the impression that part of the marital discord stemmed from his mother not being interested in having sex with his father.
Bob began dating Gail in 1968 when he was eighteen and she was sixteen. It wasn’t long before she wanted to get married. He said he wasn’t ready, but when she started dating someone else, he decided that he better give in or lose her.
Once married, the couple wasted no time producing offspring. The young couple had emerged from the difficulties of their early lives with strong Christian faiths and named the children after characters in the Bible, including Lucas, who was born February 9, 1976.
Lucas’s older brother, Daniel, would tell the psychologists that his parents were anxious that they be perceived as the perfect family in public, especially in front of church members. Infractions of the rules outside the home were later disciplined with a paddle. But there were secrets in the Salmon household that had nothing to do with the children misbehaving. Bob, then 28, became involved with the family’s fifteen-year-old babysitter. The scandal was followed by another involving a different babysitter.
Despite the transgressions, it was Bob who left Gail. He chose Valentine’s Day, after giving her a bouquet of flowers, to tell her that he wanted a divorce. Gail was devastated and believed that the reason was that he was having an affair with another woman.
However, Bob was still interested in keeping up appearances. According to Daniel, for a time after he left the family, his father came home on weekends and attended church with them so that the rest of the congregation wouldn’t know.
Lucas Salmon
In 1984, Bob Salmon married Nancy Smith and the two moved up to Bend, Oregon, a booming town on the east side of the Cascades near the Mt. Bachelor Ski Area. Smith would later tell investigators that the move wasn’t entirely by choice; a woman had accused Bob of sexual harassment and, given the nature of a small town, it was better that they leave.
After her marriage collapsed, Gail was often depressed and emotionally unavailable. Lucas, who was in the third grade when his father left, coped by creating an imaginary friend. He also occupied his time by learning to draw. Even when his parents had been together, he was the proverbial middle child—quiet, sweet-natured and ignored. Daniel was his father’s favorite and his mother doted on the youngest.
When Lucas was twelve, his mother announced that she was sending him to live with his father. Lucas actually welcomed the idea. He thought that it would be fun to be the only child in his father’s house. Therefore, he was disappointed when Daniel decided at the last moment to go, too.
Slight of stature and shy, Lucas was the target of bullies in his new school, and was generally teased by other students for his haphazard appearance. Although exceptionally bright (his IQ of 134 placed him in the top 10 percent of the population nationally), he was apt to leave the house for school with his shirt inside out or on backwards.
Still, it wasn’t all bad in Bend for Lucas. He participated on the school’s ski team, made friends, and in 1992 went to Germany as an exchange student, returning with a good understanding of the language. However, he was about to be moved again.
Bob Salmon owned a mail-order company called Motorcycle Accessories Warehouse. He began to court a woman who worked for him, Cindy Jones. She wasn’t comfortable with his advances while he was still married. But that problem had been rectified in 1991, when Bob had abruptly announced to Nancy that he was filing for divorce. Keeping with his penchant for dramatic gestures at such times, he told Nancy while they were at a hotel celebrating their wedding anniversary.
In 1993, Bob Salmon moved with his girlfriend and two of his sons to Colorado Springs. Again, the decision to move to a new city wasn’t entirely without an outside push. Jones would later tell investigators that Bob had been accused of sexual harassment for a second time and he’d opted for a change of scenery. However, Bob said that the move was Cindy’s idea and that he’d agreed because he wanted to be near the headquarters for Focus on the Family, a fundamentalist Christian organization that was headquartered in that city.
Located sixty miles south of Denver, “the Springs,” as the city was commonly known, sat in the shadow of massive Pike’s Peak, the 14,110-foot mountain that had inspired Katherine Lemon Bates to write the song “America the Beautiful.” In 1859, before there was a city, gold was discovered in the South Park area directly west, farther into the mountains, and “Pike’s Peak or Bust” became a popular slogan as vast numbers of fortune seekers poured into the Rocky Mountains. That particular spot was a funnel for all those people because it sat at the foot of Ute Pass on the south side of Pike’s Peak, the most accessible route to South Park.
In August 1859, two surveyors from Denver began looking over the bowl-like area in front of the mountain for a town site. While exploring, the surveyors came upon a beautiful, parklike area containing large, stand-alone sandstone formations. The giant, salmon-colored monoliths, some several hundred feet high and etched into convoluted shapes by eons of wind, rain, and snow, had inspired Native Americans to consider the spot to be holy ground. The newcomers were equally impressed.
At the turn of the century, a local railroad magnate deeded the land of the monoliths, known as the Garden of the Gods, to the city of Colorado Springs as a park. The park was only lightly developed, with winding roads and gentle paths. It was popular with bicyclists and joggers, or those out for a quiet drive past acres of scrub oak, spike-leafed yucca, prickly pear cactus, pinon, juniper, and Ponderosa pine trees.
Right up until the early 1970s, Colorado Springs had mostly been contained in the bowl bounded by the Rockies in the west, white sandstone bluffs (the bones of an ancient mountain range older than the Rockies) to the north and northeast, and the wide open prairie to the east and south. Founded as a gold-rush and railroad city, the town’s character in the last half of the century changed to that of a military town. Colorado Springs was literally surrounded by Fort Carson, a sprawling Army base, to the south, Peterson Field Air Force Base to the east, and the U.S. Air Force Academy, about twenty miles north of town. The encirclement was completed by the presence of the North American Air Defense command center, the nerve center for the country’s air defenses. It was hidden away in a man-made cavern that had been drilled into the side of Cheyenne Mountain to the southwest.
The presence of these facilities brought nearly thirty thousand active-duty personnel to the area. It was no surprise that many who left the service chose to remain in such a beautiful place, and those who put in enough time to retire could also use the military bases’ medical and shopping facilities.
As the city grew, it retained its small-town flavor and look. The tallest building downtown was fifteen stories, and that’s the way the city planners liked it. But the population grew quickly beginning in the early seventies, with housing developments spreading out of the bowl that had once contained the city. Developments spread east across the prairie, as well as south and, especially, north along the front range of the Rockies.
There were some holdovers from the glorious past. At the southwest end of town at the base of Cheyenne Mountain was the area known as the Broadmo
or. It was graced by large, million-dollar homes, some of them built by those who made their fortune in gold or silver or as railroad potentates. The area was known for its international ice rink, a longtime training area for Olympic stars, as well as the luxurious and pricey Broadmoor Hotel.
Post-high school educational opportunities abounded in the city. In addition to the Air Force Academy, there were two more four-year colleges. One was Colorado College, a small, well-regarded liberal arts school in downtown Colorado Springs that was generally populated by students from wealthy families. The second was the Colorado Springs branch of the University of Colorado, the main campus of which was in Boulder, about a hundred miles to the north on the other side of Denver.
However, at its heart Colorado Springs was a blue-collar town, a working man’s town. Mostly white, mostly conservative, it was a Republican stronghold as epitomized by the fact that the local newspaper, the Gazette-Telegraph, had been owned for years by the family of Bill Armstrong, a staunchly right-wing congressman during the seventies and eighties. The paper had been sold and renamed simply the Gazette, but it retained its conservative outlook.
Like any midsized city, the Springs had its troubles with crime. Gangs infested many of the high schools and neighborhoods. Outlaw biker gangs had settled into the area, often making their money by dealing the blue-collar drug of choice, methamphetamines or speed, and bringing a culture of guns and violence. However, in the nineties the city had a lower crime rate than many cities its size. Violent crime, including murders, rarely touched the lives of those citizens outside the subcultures that preyed upon each other.
A CLOCKWORK MURDER: The Night A Twisted Fantasy Became A Demented Reality Page 3
