God, formerly a staple of Salmon’s conversations, now seemed to be missing from his life entirely. He obviously knew that what he was doing was wrong when he closed his correspondence with: “Don’t let your mom read this letter.” But the note was so disturbing that the other young man showed it to his parents and then shared it with his church’s congregation, asking them to pray for Salmon’s soul.
As Salmon and Woldt drove past the blond jogger, they decided that she was a good target and sped up to circle around the park and come back for her. Salmon was both excited and frightened now that the moment of truth appeared to be at hand.
“The game” had sped up, too, ever since April 15 when Woldt told him he was going to have to move out of the apartment. Apparently, Bonnie didn’t want him living there after the baby arrived in a month.
Salmon began to cajole his friend that they needed to find him someone to have sex with before he had to leave. Living with the Woldts had only added to his sexual frustrations— lying there in the dark on his bed, listening to the loud sounds of their liaisons, or seeing Bonnie wandering around the apartment in her lingerie, or obviously nude beneath a bathrobe. Then there was the pornography that George watched like some people watched sitcoms.
For her part, Bonnie was tired of Salmon being around all the time, and tired that her husband spent more time with his friend than with her. She’d had a hard life— abandoned by her mother at age fourteen, in and out of foster homes. She’d been married once and had a three-year-old son as a result, but that relationship had been marred by violence, some of it instigated by her, and she’d finally been divorced.
Bonnie and George certainly seemed made for each other. She noted to her friends that she’d subscribed to the Playboy Channel and had her own collection of pornographic films before she started seeing Woldt. She confided to those same friends that her sex life with George was kinky and rough, and that her husband preferred anal sex, especially after they got into one of their frequent fights.
Although she sometimes felt sorry for Salmon when her husband ridiculed him for being a virgin, she wasn’t above joining in. One night in March, she and George had her foster sister, Adrianna, come over to the apartment. They told Salmon they were setting the two of them up. Salmon fell for it and clumsily tried to make his move, but Adrianna, who was in on the joke, wasn’t the least bit interested and the three all had a good laugh at Lucas’s expense.
Sometimes the humiliation of Lucas Salmon was unintentional. Once Bonnie actually did ask her biological sister, Celeste, over to meet him with the hope that the two might hit it off. Salmon was interested, but the girl was not.
Bonnie had noticed that the “nice guy” she’d met when she started seeing George had changed, especially since returning to Colorado for the marriage. Salmon partied a lot now and didn’t talk about God anymore—just sex and “bitches.” Where he used to be polite and a good houseguest, now he wouldn’t help clean up around the apartment and acted like he expected her to wait on him like he was her husband, too. He could be weirdly immature, once getting in a squabble with her three-year-old son and wound up biting the child’s thumb hard enough to make him cry.
Soon after she got back from her honeymoon, Salmon and her husband started going out nearly every night— they said to play pool at the Comer Pocket Billiard hall. At first she told her friends that she didn’t mind. She wanted George to “get it out of his system” because he was going to have to settle down when the baby arrived in May. But most of the time, George hardly seemed to care that he was about to be a father again. If she complained that he needed to get more involved with the impending arrival, he would stomp off and go somewhere with his friend. She resorted to writing him a letter begging him to go shopping for baby clothes with her as a way to show her he cared. She noted in the letter that they didn’t spend much time together anymore. He told her to get over it.
Now, she wanted Salmon out of the apartment and her marriage. Even George’s mother was on her side. Song-Hui told her son that Salmon needed to move out and find a place of his own. George had a child coming and needed to settle down.
George’s response was to spend even more time with Lucas. Especially after they watched A Clockwork Orange. After that, to Bonnie’s chagrin, the two men went out every night and often during the days they had off. In fact, they could hardly wolf down dinner and a couple of beers fast enough before they were out the door to “go play pool.”
As far as the baby went, George couldn’t be troubled. In fact the night of April 28, Bonnie thought she was going into premature labor and called her husband, who was out with Salmon, to come take her to the hospital. Both he and Salmon had showed up, looking miffed that their evening had been interrupted. Her husband got even angrier when the labor pains turned out to be a false alarm.
Bonnie was right that A Clockwork Orange seemed to have set something in motion. Lightly at first, like a saboteur probing the enemy’s defenses, George began to describe a fantasy to Salmon about abducting and raping a woman. He said it jokingly, ad-libbing from the movie about what fun it would be to go get “a little of the ol’ in-out.” Then Woldt suggested that, perhaps, it would be a way to resolve Salmon’s dilemma with his virginity. Kidding, of course.
However, it wasn’t long before they were talking about the fantasy five or six times a day, discussing how it could be pulled off without getting caught. But they added one more component to the fantasy … to avoid capture, they agreed that they would have to kill their victim.
They began to cruise the nightclubs and city parks looking for a “target,” at first treating it like a game, the game. Sighting a potential victim, following her in whichever car they were driving that night, Woldt’s Buick or Salmon’s Thunderbird. Somewhere along the line, the game began to grow more serious, fantasy began to dissolve into reality. They even considered the potential consequences and decided that the thrill would be worth the risk. Finally, it was no longer just Woldt’s idea. He might have conceived of it and lured Salmon as a fly fisherman teases a trout to the surface, but by the closing days of April they were equal partners in a conspiracy to rape and murder a young woman.
Every day they stepped further from thinking about it and closer to doing it. They often started their evening hunts by relaxing first at the Comer Pocket before moving on to scope the nightclubs. Soon they began to hunt during the day as well, driving slowly through neighborhoods and parks.
When they spotted a potential victim, the game would start. A lot of it was big talk, pumping each other up. They’d stalk a young woman, and Woldt would say something like, “You can fuck her pussy. I’ll fuck her ass,” to which Salmon happily assented. But always there would be something that prevented them from taking the final step. Too many witnesses. Or a male would appear on the scene, like a dominant lion, forcing the young hyenas to slink from the scene, their hunt frustrated.
They came close several times. One day, driving through a neighborhood they happened upon a little girl walking on a sidewalk alone. Woldt was driving and pulled over. He called out to the child, who was maybe nine or ten years old, and tried to get her to come over to the car. “Do you need a ride?” he asked nicely.
The child ran off, and Woldt quickly drove from the neighborhood. Excited and appalled at the same time, Salmon asked Woldt what he would have done if the child had complied with his request. “Raped her, of course,” Woldt said with a grin.
Woldt gave the same reply several days later, after they offered a woman who appeared to be in her late fifties a ride. She, too, had turned down their offer, never knowing how close she’d come to being the finish line in their game.
Somewhere about the third week of April, the stakes of the game jumped up a couple of notches when they took a steak knife from the Woldts’ apartment and placed it in the glove box of the car they were driving. The knife never made it back into the house, but was transferred, almost as a symbol of their commitment, to whichever vehicle th
ey were using.
One of their favorite hunting grounds outside of the nightclubs was the Garden of the Gods. There were a lot of women alone jogging, hiking, or riding their bikes, and even a few places they thought were secluded enough to carry out their plan. They’d formulated a couple of simple strategies. One was to pull up suddenly, grab the woman and force her into the car, beating and threatening her into submission with the overwhelming nature of their attack. Another was to actually bump the victim with their car and then to offer the dazed victim assistance to a hospital or to a telephone—except she would never arrive.
On the afternoon of April 29, 1997, the pair were again cruising the Garden of the Gods. Salmon, with his head shaved, was feeling particularly bitter. His father had recently fired him because several of his female coworkers had complained that he was making sexually inappropriate comments and using crude language. For some time the women had been afraid to do anything because he was the boss’s son. However, one day when he thought that they were talking about him behind his back, he stood up and yelled across the room, “I’ll have you fat bitches fired!” They decided that it was time they went to his father, who called him in and told him to leave. The worst part was he thought that his father should have fired the women, too. They’d played along, and it wasn’t fair.
Lucas was ready to bring the game to a conclusion. But that wasn’t to say that his conscience wasn’t troubling him. He kept his Bible, embossed on the front cover with his name, in the backseat of his Thunderbird, and it reminded him that God would not be pleased. But it was more important that he do what George Woldt wanted.
He’d known before he returned to Colorado that George was dangerous, but he believed that his friend would never do anything to hurt him, and that somehow, even standing on the precipice, his “best friend” would protect him from harm. He envied George Woldt and wanted to be like him—have sex with women and not care what other people thought of him. And he especially wanted George to quit teasing him about being a virgin.
Perhaps to quiet the pleas from his conscience and calm his nerves, he was drinking more—six or seven beers a night—and chain-smoking. Of course, that just meant the voice of George Woldt grew louder, more commanding. He believed that Woldt had “powers”; his “friend” had convinced Salmon that he could bend spoons with his mind and other feats.
They’d left the house a little before 3 p.m. that day. It was George’s idea to hunt in the Garden of the Gods. But it was still just a game until they came up from behind the blond woman jogging along the bicycle path at the side of the road.
Salmon hunkered down in the seat and looked back as they passed. So did George. They figured she was in her late teens and definitely attractive. “She’s the one,” Woldt announced. They decided to circle around and come up behind her.
Approaching the woman at about fifteen miles an hour, Woldt pulled over into the bicycle lane and struck her. She flew forward and sprawled into the gravel off the side of the road.
Woldt immediately stopped the car and got out. Stunned, Salmon followed more slowly; his friend was already approaching the young woman who had picked herself up off the ground.
“Are you all right?” Woldt asked. The men could see that her knees and an arm were bleeding though she didn’t appear to be seriously injured. Her mouth worked just fine, though, as she berated Woldt.
Eighteen-year-old Amber Gonzales was mad as hell. It wasn’t as if she had been out in the road or it was a blind comer. “What the hell were you doing?” she cried.
Woldt ignored her question and kept walking up to her. “Are you all right?” he asked again. Now, he grabbed her forearms as though to comfort her. “Do you need a ride to the hospital?”
Gonzales pulled away from him. Something was wrong with these two—the dark-haired one with the slight grin and his strange-looking bald friend, who stood near the car as if waiting for something else to happen. There was no way she was going to get in a car with them. “My father’s the park ranger,” she said. If they wanted to do something to help, they could help her find her $170 sunglasses that had flown off when they hit her.
Woldt gave up trying to get her to come with him. He and his friend made a show of looking for the sunglasses, but soon got back in their car and took off.
Amber Gonzales was jogging around this corner in the Garden of the Gods when Woldt and Salmon struck her with their car. (Photo courtesy of the Colorado Springs Police Department).
A few minutes later, Sabrina Bayles and her daughter, who were riding their bicycles on the path, came upon the young woman crying by the side of the road. Amber told them what had happened, which reminded them of the car that had passed them earlier that morning. They’d noticed that the male passenger with the shaved head had tried to hunch down in the seat as though he didn’t want to be seen. She’d been smart, they said, not to get in the car.
Meanwhile, Woldt turned on Salmon as they left the park. “Why did you just stand there?” he demanded. “We almost had her!”
Salmon tried to think of something to explain why he froze. He gave a lame excuse about the bushes on the passenger side getting in his way. And he’d stopped to pick up the woman’s sunglasses, which he now exhibited like a trophy.
Woldt didn’t stay angry for long. There had been too much traffic on the road anyway, and too many people around if the woman had put up any kind of struggle. Besides, her father was the park ranger, a cop. If he’d spotted them with her, there’d have been hell to pay. But the blood was pumping something fierce. “You excited?” he asked, grinning at his partner.
“Did you see the look on her face?” Salmon responded with a laugh.
They’d drawn first blood in the game. Now they were more determined than ever to finish it.
PART II
ACTS OF VIOLENCE
“It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.”
—Anthony Burgess, from the introduction to his 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange
CHAPTER FOUR
The All-American Girl
April 29, 1997
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Jacine Gielinski didn’t look over at the two young men in the Ford Thunderbird who pulled up next to her red Geo Prism at the stoplight. Nor did she notice after the light turned green that they had fallen in behind her, several cars back, and followed her to the apartment complex where her boyfriend was preparing a late dinner for her. As far as she knew, she didn’t have an enemy in the world.
Some of that had to do with her upbringing, as her mother had taught her the Golden Rule practically from the moment Jacine could talk: Do unto others as you would have done unto you. Her mother, Peggy Luiszer, impressed upon her not to judge people by the way they looked, the clothes they wore, how much money they had, or even their pasts. She was told that there was some good in everyone.
They were easy lessons to teach “Jace.” Being nice just came naturally to the little girl with the golden locks, merry blue eyes, and a smile that made everyone else around her smile back. From early childhood, she demonstrated an empathy for other people that couldn’t be taught. One such example occurred in the second grade.
Jacine Gielinski, pictured here about age five, loved being active. (Photograph courtesy of Peggy Luiszer)
Highlands Elementary was a safe, easy three-block walk along the tree-lined street from her home. However, another little girl in her class lived miles away and sometimes her parents made her trudge to school if she didn’t finish her chores in the morning in time to catch the bus. It meant the seven-year-old child had to cross dangerous intersections and navigate heavy traffic on her own, often arriving long after the bell had rung for classes to begin.
Yet there would always be one person waiting outside the school—rain, snow, or shine—to make sure she arrived safely. Jacine insisted on it and her teacher allowed
it, recognizing that this wasn’t a battle she was going to, or should, win with the strong-willed Gielinski girl.
Jacine never complained about being an only child, but then again, she was rarely alone. Her home was the playhouse for nearly every child close to her age in the neighborhood. Peggy and her husband, Bob Luiszer, learned to expect three or four other children to be in the house at any given time—and probably at the dinner table, the breakfast table, or both. Jacine was a born leader but not the sort to insist that the others play what she wanted. Whether it was Barbie dolls in her room or hide-and-seek outside, what mattered to her was that she was with her friends, many of whom remained as close as sisters and brothers throughout her life.
If there was one activity she loved more than any other, it was competing at sports. She learned to swim when she was five, and by age seven she had placed second in the breaststroke for her age group at the state meet. If she was not the top athlete in the pool, on the soccer field, or in the gymnasium, then she was one of the best, and she made up for any deficiencies by working harder and playing with more heart than anyone else.
The ultimate team player, Jacine loved playing sports and was known for her kindness and leadership. (Photograph courtesy of Peggy Luiszer)
Yet, for all her successes, she was never the sort of athlete who looked down her nose at those less talented. Just the opposite. Jacine was confident enough in her own abilities that she always trying to bring everyone else up to her level. She exhibited this trait at a young age on her soccer team. One of the other players was an overweight child, slow and unskilled. As the worst player on the team, the other girl didn’t play much during the games, and she was ignored or teased by the team’s star players. But Jacine stayed after practice and games to work with the other girl on her skills and conditioning.
A CLOCKWORK MURDER: The Night A Twisted Fantasy Became A Demented Reality Page 5
