In 1993, he’d been interviewed by David Vela, the head of the Colorado Public Defender’s Office, for a position as a lawyer with one of the most well-funded and aggressive— especially when it came to opposing the death penalty— offices in the country. Young learned that Vela was only interviewing two applicants for the one job. When he finished, Vela asked him, “You ever think you might be better off as a prosecutor?” At that point Young figured, correctly, that he probably wasn’t going to get the job.
A month later, he attended a bar association luncheon in Colorado Springs. He ended up sitting at a table with then El Paso County District Attorney John Suthers and his chief deputy district attorney, Jeanne Smith. Before lunch was over, he’d been offered a job. The pay wasn’t much, abysmal in fact, but he took the job thinking it would be a good way to get to know the judges and network with the lawyers in his hometown, with the eventual goal of going into private practice.
He’d worked four years and enjoyed the work, but he and Denise had talked it over and it was time to move on. They agreed that she would quit her job and stay home with their children at least while they were young. But he would have to take up the slack in the family’s finances, and the only way to do that was to go into private practice. When the call came that night, he reported to the scene figuring that he would begin the process but someone else would take over when he left the office.
On the way to the crime scene, Young thought about Walker’s comment. He wasn’t a big supporter of the death penalty and wasn’t sure at what point he would know what side of the fence he’d be on in a particular case. Other prosecutors who’d worked death penalty cases had told him, “You’ll know it when you see it.” Now he saw it when he arrived at the elementary school and a patrol officer pointed to where the nude body of the young woman still lay beneath a white van bathed in searchlights that also glimmered off a red pool of blood nearby.
Young was led to a minivan where Detective Todd Drennan and Walker had set up their command post. Long years of experience had taught Walker that homicides were rarely any more complicated than they appeared at first glance. He was constantly urging his guys, especially the young ones, “don’t Mickey Spillane these things.”
It wasn’t going to take Sherlock Holmes to catch the guys who did this particular murder, but in the past supposedly slam-dunk cases had been lost due to carelessness or over-confidence. They were going to do this by the book, so a decision had been reached to wait until daylight to approach the body. There was obviously no helping the young woman now. The only thing they could do for her was to seek justice, and they could only help their cause by being careful not to damage or overlook evidence.
Young was also well aware of the pitfalls that could botch even the most airtight case. The two suspects—whose names, he learned, were Lucas Salmon and George Woldt—had already been taken to a local hospital to have blood and hair samples taken for DNA testing. From there, they’d be transported to police headquarters to be interviewed. He’d been told that the suspects had been Mirandized and waived their rights to have a lawyer present and to remain silent.
In fact, they were talking to detectives even as Young waited in the van. During breaks in the interviews, their interrogators were relaying their information back to the command post at the elementary school. That’s how Young heard the initial details about the crime—how they’d chosen her at random, then abducted, raped, and stabbed her to death.
Poor girl, Young thought. He could see her well in the glare of the lights. Even though he knew the reasons, it seemed a travesty to leave her lying naked and unprotected in the cold air, the wind stirring her blond hair and drying the dark splotches of blood on her body. Her purse had been discovered at the abduction site, so he knew her name and a little about her: Jacine Gielinski, a twenty-two-year-old college student. He could see that she was well muscled, and athletic, which made him think suddenly of his wife. She was a runner and often went out alone after dark to put in her miles. He made a mental note to stop that practice at once.
The crime scene had been taped off, but extra precautions were taken to keep the school’s students and teachers from arriving and seeing the victim. The police had contacted the principal to close the school and then sealed the area as a precaution for those who might not get the word. It didn’t take long for the media to hear and begin arriving with their cameras, satellite trucks, microphones, notepads, and questions. They were kept beyond the tape.
At dawn, the crime-scene unit began the process of investigating and photographing. The investigators were meticulous; for example, a crane was brought in to lift the van above the victim so that they would not have to drive the van over any evidence or move the woman.
Samples were taken from the pool of blood, now mixing with water from a nearby pile of melting snow. A tire print where the suspects’ vehicle had backed through the blood was measured and photographed. Like an automotive fingerprint, it would tie the car in which the knife and sweatshirt had been found to the scene.
To the layperson, it might have seemed overdone. The police had the killers and their confessions. But no one on the scene needed to be told that confessions and physical evidence like a bloody knife had been thrown out by judges in the past. Someone willing to admit guilt in the immediate aftermath of a crime might start singing a different tune after he was teamed up with a defense lawyer.
While waiting for the sun to rise, Young had gone to the kidnap scene and the Woldts’ apartment. That way he would be able to visualize the story as it had unfolded. However, he didn’t need to be told that this case was worse than most. He could see that for himself back at the elementary school.
CHAPTER TEN
“We’re psyched!”
After their trip to the hospital, Salmon and Woldt were brought to the Colorado Springs Police Department’s operations center, a large redbrick building near the downtown area. There they were escorted to the second floor and seated in small, Spartan interview rooms illuminated by fluorescent lights and containing two chairs set on opposite sides of a table. A box of tissues, a notepad, and a pen waited on the table for the next ruined life to come through the door and make use of them.
Set into one wall was a large “mirror” that anyone who has ever seen a movie or television cop show knows is not really a mirror, but a one-way window. On the other side was another small room, through which the proceedings in the interview room could be watched and filmed.
Lucas Salmon has a blood sample taken at the hospital following his arrest. (Photo courtesy of Colorado Springs Police Department)
There were seven detectives on the homicide unit, which was a part of the Major Crimes Division. The seven were chosen from the ranks of the 530 officers on the force who had at least four years’ experience. Their job was to investigate aggravated assaults, missing-person reports, kidnappings, and murders.
They usually worked in three-person teams. One concentrated on the victim, gathering the so-called victomology. This detective became intimately familiar with the victim—likes and dislikes, hobbies, habits (both good and bad) and the names of family and friends. The second detective took charge of the crime-scene investigation.
On the third detective fell the responsibility of identifying and interviewing possible suspects? In this case, two of the unit’s most experienced detectives, Terry Bjomdahl and Pat Crouch, were each assigned to one of the two suspects.
Bjomdahl drew George Woldt. Pat Crouch got Salmon. In their fifties, the two detectives were both considered the department’s best at getting statements and confessions from reluctant witnesses as well as suspects. They approached their task with a similar philosophy. They treated even the most heinous murderer with decency. The detectives knew that most murderers were pretty typical people who found themselves in atypical situations, caught up in the heat of the moment, acting on impulse. Long years of experience had taught them that a gentle handshake and a soft voice would get them a lot further with
a suspect than the hard-nosed, in-your-face routine television cop shows liked to portray. They generally spent ten or fifteen minutes on casual conversation, sort of like letting a car warm up on a cold day. After making sure the suspect had again waived his Miranda rights, they would begin asking the questions meant to loosen the suspect’s tongue.
Sometimes it was difficult to sit and not react while listening to murderers or rapists describe their crimes. The detectives had families, people they loved, but they had to remain detached, at least while in front of the suspect, so that they could do their jobs and find justice for the victims. It would take all of their professionalism to hear Woldt and Salmon recite what they did to Jacine Gielinski.
George Woldt smirks as his blood is drawn for DNA testing. (Photo courtesy of Colorado Springs Police Department)
They weren’t the only ones who had to listen. Watching in the observation room and meeting with the detectives during breaks was Chief Deputy District Attorney Dan Zook. Twelve years older and more experienced than Dave Young, he would be taking the lead in the case.
Zook was another prosecutor who’d come out of law school figuring he’d be a defense attorney. He’d graduated from the University of Kansas Law School in 1979 never having had a former prosecutor as a professor. But his older brother was a prosecutor working for the district attorney in Colorado Springs, and he suggested that Zook apply. He’d been hired and worked there ever since.
He had no regrets. True, the money wasn’t what he could get in the private sector, but he’d been there long enough to make a decent enough wage to support his family and he enjoyed the work. He knew it sounded corny whenever he discussed his job, but it felt like he was doing the right thing. As a prosecutor, he had to believe that he could prove “the people’s” case beyond a reasonable doubt, or he didn’t file it, even if he knew in his heart of hearts that they had the right guy. His obligation was to do justice—not to any one person, but to the law.
Nothing was black and white. The prosecution also had to determine the appropriateness of the charge; for example, murder or manslaughter, both had resulted in the death of the victim but what were the circumstances of the crime. Was it premediated? Was it committed in the heat of the moment? What charge also included discussing the possibilities with the victims or, in murder cases, victims’ families. And it meant looking at the past records of the defendants to determine whether to pursue the tougher charge.
Zook didn’t think the issues were quite so clear for defense attorneys. It was their job to make the state prove its case, but they didn’t all go about it with the same integrity. Some of those who worked in that arena—the ones he respected—fought zealously but within the intent of the law without resorting to cheap tricks or theatrics, or ignoring legalities. But there were others who seemed to feel that ensuring a defendant’s rights to a fair trial gave them license to bend, fold, and mutilate the law. They felt it was fair game to get away with whatever they could, knowing the judges often bent over backward so as not to be reversed by higher courts, even if it meant letting the defense get away with murder, at least figuratively. The worst of the lot treated it like a game, even if they knew that their client was guilty as sin.
What really grated on him was the victim—a person who had dreams and goals, loved ones and a right to live—was often a casualty of the game. And sometimes justice was as well.
The El Paso County District Attorney’s Office had been stung two years earlier—losing what had appeared to be a slam-dunk murder case. In 1993, Eugene Baylis had been in a biker bar when one of the other customers threatened him. Baylis went home, armed himself to the teeth with a machine gun, four hand grenades and a handgun, and then went back to the bar, where he began blasting away. He killed two men and wounded six more in the parking lot before he was apprehended by police. The man who threatened him wasn’t even one of his victims.
Baylis had been charged with first-degree murder after deliberation and then District Attorney John Suthers had decided that the case warranted the death penalty. His second-in-command, Jeanne Smith, took on the case herself, doing most of the work, though joined at trial by Mary Maletesta, a death-penalty specialist with the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.
The Colorado Public Defender’s Office had countered with what the press called a “death penalty Dream Team” of experienced trial lawyers who also specialized in death-penalty cases. Although Baylis originally confessed that he committed the crimes because he was angry, at the trial in 1995 the defense lawyers came up with the theory that he’d killed the others in self-defense. The attorneys also spent a great deal of time painting the victims, and intended victim, as black as possible—vicious, cruel, depraved people—while Baylis was just an ordinary Joe looking for a social drink. They also filed more than four hundred pretrial motions, which Smith admitted afterward wore her down before the trial had even started.
Legally, the premise of self-defense is that the defendant felt his life was in immediate danger. But Baylis left the bar, drove miles to his home to fetch his weapons, and then drove back to the bar. All he would have had to have done was stay away from the bar to avoid his tormentor. Even if he felt threatened by the mere existence of the other man, the law didn’t make allowances for gunning down people in cold blood—much less people who had nothing to do with the initial argument—just because someone felt verbally intimidated.
The prosecutors felt that the theory was so ludicrous that no jury would accept it. Even if the jury somehow didn’t believe that the crime met the requirements for premeditated murder, they would have to find Baylis guilty of second-degree murder. So they were stunned when the jury returned a verdict of not guilty and Baylis walked away a free man.
Losing cases, however, wasn’t the worst thing a prosecutor had to deal with. Some cases simply left more lasting impressions, especially those involving the deaths of children and young women.
As a father, Zook had never gotten over the abduction and murder of a thirteen-year-old named Heather Dawn Church. Heather had disappeared from her home in the country east of Colorado Springs in 1991. She was babysitting a younger sister, her parents gone, when a neighbor heard a scream. When her parents arrived home later, Heather was missing.
No blood was found at the scene, and she disappeared without a trace. It was two years before her remains were found in the mountains west of Colorado Springs. Whoever had taken her had thrown her body off an overlook, where it was scavenged and scattered by wild animals. Not until her skull was discovered by a motorist on the switch-back of a road below the overlook—where it had either been carried or washed down the hillside in a downpour— did anyone know what had become of her. Even then, no one knew the identity of her killer.
The case remained unsolved until the El Paso County Sheriff persuaded a near-legendary lawman named Lou Smit to come out of retirement to take on the case. Based on a single fingerprint found at the scene and tenacious detective work, Smit was eventually able to bring Heather’s killer to justice. But the perpetrator’s plea of guilty to second-degree murder left a number of unanswered questions that had troubled Zook ever since. How long had her killer kept her alive and in fear? What had he done to her before he left her body in the mountains so far from the people who loved her?
Sometimes he thought about how he’d been sitting on his couch with his little girls watching television when Heather was snatched from the safety of her home, murdered, and left for the animals to devour. Ever since then, he’d kept a photograph of Heather in his desk drawer—forever smiling and happy, a soccer ball resting beneath her foot.
It was photographs like that which kept him going when sometimes he felt like throwing up his hands at the strange machinations of the system and the antics of defense attorneys. The autopsy photographs were terrible, but worse for him were the photographs that grieving mothers and fathers brought to him of their children in happier days, posing with soccer balls or blowing out birthday candles or jus
t smiling, looking forward to a future they would never know. He would never understand how someone could bring himself to rape and kill the victims in those photographs to satisfy his perverted lusts, but he could do something about it by getting a jury to find them guilty.
However, too often the victims were all but lost in “the system.” It was all about the defendants: their rights, needs, childhoods, and troubles. Meanwhile, families of the victims sat in courtrooms and listened to lawyers argue over their loved ones as if they were no more than a case file number or a legal question to be debated. Worse, they sometimes had to hear defense lawyers trash the victims and sometimes even insinuate that the victims were somehow complicit in their own murders.
Zook had prosecuted a first-degree murder case in which a nice, older gentleman with a wife and children was murdered by a man he’d befriended and given work doing odd jobs—Frank Orona, who’d recently been released from prison. The old man’s thanks was to be forced at gunpoint to withdraw money from his bank and then taken to a deserted field where he was beaten and stabbed to death. The prosecution sought the death penalty.
The defense attorneys, led by Chief Deputy Public Defender Terri Brake, had come up with the theory that their client had killed his benefactor because the old man had made “homosexual advances” toward him, the idea being that a jury would understand a man being upset to the point of murder for such a thing. There was no truth to the allegation, and the man’s family knew it, but that had not kept the allegations out of court or the media. Orona was convicted, but the jury sentenced him to life in prison rather than the death penalty.
It was Zook’s first and only death penalty case. He walked away disgusted, not by the jury’s decision as much as the defense’s tactics. Not only had the old man been savagely murdered, but his reputation had been besmirched, adding to the pain his family was already suffering.
A CLOCKWORK MURDER: The Night A Twisted Fantasy Became A Demented Reality Page 9
