A CLOCKWORK MURDER: The Night A Twisted Fantasy Became A Demented Reality

by Steve Jackson

  “Then I pick up her legs, and George grabs her hair, and we swing her under the nearby van, and continue to push her under until she is somewhat concealed.”

  The pair had then wiped the blood off their hands with her sweatshirt before putting it and the knife in the trunk of Salmon’s Thunderbird. They didn’t go home right away. Woldt said it was because he didn’t want to face his wife and stepson “after what I had done.” So they drove around and talked. About the “stupid” mistakes they’d made in committing the crime, including being seen by witnesses.

  They began to talk about the ramifications of what they had done. Not just the possibility that their mistake would lead to their apprehension, but the eternal consequences. They discussed heaven and hell and their chances of making it into either and concluded they were bound for the latter.

  Only now did a split in the seam of their partnership appear. Woldt said that as they drove, Salmon began blaming him for the rape and murder because he was always talking about his fantasy of raping and murdering a young woman. However, Woldt complained to the detective that Salmon had badgered him into finding him a woman with whom to lose his virginity.

  At last the two had decided to go back to Woldt’s apartment. Salmon made one pass by the building to check for the police. The next time around, he pulled into the driveway, parked, and they went into the house. “We wash blood off our hands and shoes, sit down and watch T.V,” he wrote.

  “I hear a loud conversation, camosion [sic] going on outside, and look out the peephole. I see two police officers at die door. When I tell George, he tells me to turn off the light and T.V and to lie down.”

  However, the knocking and shouts woke Bonnie Woldt. She came out of her bedroom, demanding to know what was going on. George took his wife aside, Salmon said, to “to calm her down before letting her know what has happened.” Then someone broke the bathroom window, and they decided to open the door.

  Throughout their confessions, neither man expressed any sympathy for the victim. They didn’t know her name, nor did they ask to know. If they felt sorry for anyone it was for themselves for getting caught.

  Woldt told Bjomdahl, “Nothing this bad has ever happened to me before.”

  When Crouch asked Salmon how he felt about the murder, the young man replied, “Killing her was the worst experience of my whole life.”

  They apparently didn’t get the irony that nothing that bad had ever happened to Jacine Gielinski before, either, or that being murdered was the worst experience of her life.

  By noon, the investigators were out of questions and the killers were out of answers, except for one. They couldn’t really say why they decided to hunt someone they didn’t even know to rape and murder. Only that it was something they thought they might “like to do.”

  There was no doubt in anyone’s mind who listened to them then or later that they knew what they were doing and that what they were doing was wrong. The confessions were so detailed and, except in several telling areas, so identical it was as if they’d taken notes. Particularly striking and important for the prosecution were the steps they had taken to ensure that they were equally culpable— deliberating before acting, and taking turns with the rape and then with the knife.

  Yet, for all that they did tell the investigators, Salmon and Woldt left out one last telling example of their mindset that had nothing to do with philosophical discussions regarding heaven and hell or who was more to blame.

  As they drove out of the parking lot, Woldt had turned to his partner, grinning, and said, “Bet you’re dying for a cigarette now.”

  To which Salmon replied, “At least I’m not a virgin anymore.” The pair then high-fived each other as though their team had scored a touchdown in a football game.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Random Act Of Violence”

  Colorado Springs wasn’t immune to violence. Every month or so, the newspapers would carry the story of a new murder, but there always seemed to be some aspect to the crime that left the ordinary citizen (at least those who didn’t live in the “bad” parts of town) still feeling safe in their homes and neighborhoods. There’d be a gangland shooting, or a drug deal gone awry. Two lowlifes would get drunk and argue, and somebody would pull a trigger.

  In 1991, there was a notorious love-triangle case in which Brian Hood talked his lover, Jennifer Reali, into shooting his wife in a city park, trying to make it look like a robbery. Reali was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison; Hood was acquitted of murder but found guilty of conspiracy and solicitation to commit murder, for which he was sentenced to thirty-seven years. But that wasn’t the sort of threat that good, upstanding citizens worried about.

  In fact, most murder victims are killed by someone they know, and until the spring of 1997 random homicides in Colorado Springs were extremely rare. Of the thirty-four murders in the city during 1995 and 1996, only one had involved a victim being killed by a stranger.

  The brutal killing of Jacine Gielinski stunned the citizens of Colorado Springs, especially as it followed on the heels of another senseless killing that had also shocked the community. On February 14, Valentine’s Day 1997, fourteen-year-olds Andrew Westbay and Scott Hawrysiak were walking home from a party in the early evening when they were gunned down by two other teenagers, Jeron Grant and Gary Flakes, who just happened to be driving by. Several aspects of the crime made it stand out.

  One thing was the racial overtone. Both victims were white and the killers were black. Another was the location: the murders took place in plain sight of witnesses on a tree-lined sidewalk near the affluent Broadmoor area, not some gang-infested neighborhood or seedy, high-crime part of town. Then there was the cold-blooded brutality of the crime.

  The killer would later tell police that Westbay thought that Grant and Flakes were kidding as they taunted and pointed a shotgun at him and Hawrysiak—until they shot him. Then Hawrysiak tried to run but he was shot in the back and then executed as he lay on his stomach.

  Yet, the most unnerving aspect was that the teens were killed by strangers for no apparent reason. The killers didn’t know them; they’d never seen them before nor spoken to them. No angry words or gestures had been exchanged. Grant and Flakes said they just wanted to know what killing was like.

  Then the same day Jacine was abducted the police arrested Brian Eugene Thompson, thirty-seven, for the murder of his nineteen-year-old stepdaughter, Rebecca. Her nude body had been found March 29 at a construction site. Thompson confessed that he attempted to have sex with Rebecca and then, after she rejected him, he killed her by stabbing her in the throat. He said he did it because he was afraid she would tell her mother.

  Even that was easier to comprehend than what happened to Jacine. The citizens of the Springs were left to wonder what was happening to their town. Her death was the thirteenth homicide, and it was only four months into the year. But it was more than that: not only could innocent teenagers be murdered in broad daylight in a wealthy neighborhood, now according to the first statements by the police, young women driving in cars were being stalked, raped, and killed for no more reason than they were attractive and in the wrong place at the wrong time. If that was true, no one was safe.

  “There’s no evidence that we’ve been able to find to indicate any known relationship between the victim or the suspects,” Lt. Steve Liebowitz, the police department spokesman, told the press. “It appears to be a random act of violence.”

  Poor Foothills Elementary School had suffered more than its fair share of horrors. Two weeks earlier, a fifth-grade student had committed suicide, which was hard enough to explain to his schoolmates. Now teachers, administrators, school counselors, and parents had to try to explain why a young woman had been killed by two young men in the school parking lot.

  The media set about trying to find out as much as they could about the two confessed killers, only to learn that there wasn’t much. Salmon had graduated from Cheyenne Mountain High School and Wol
dt from Harrison, where neither had been anything more than an ordinary student.

  Neither had much of a criminal history. Woldt had been evicted from a previous apartment for not paying rent and had been sued for writing bad checks, according to court records. They both had traffic tickets. The press didn’t immediately catch the rock-throwing incident from the summer of 1994 because the records had been expunged after Woldt and Salmon completed the terms of their probations.

  The press showed up on King Street to talk to neighbors of the Woldts. Sylvia Ornelas told the Gazette, “They were pretty nice to me—gave me rides to the grocery store.”

  Most of the others, however, had a different opinion. “They were jerks,” said one neighbor, who asked not to be identified.

  Another, Candice Lewis, told a Denver Post reporter that Bonnie Woldt would visit her apartment and talk about her violent marriage. “She told me about how they would fight all the time and punch each other,” Lewis said.

  Tricia Martinez, who lived in the apartment directly above the Woldts, told the Rocky Mountain News, “We could hear them fighting. It sounded like he was hitting her. It frightened us because she was pregnant.”

  “That’s what makes it so scary,” Tricia’s mother, Juanita Martinez, added. “He didn’t look like he’d do something like that.”

  There wasn’t a lot of information coming out of the police department. Liebowitz would not say if the investigators knew whether the two killers had stalked Gielinski specifically or were simply cruising the area looking for the first female they could find. “We’re not into the motive part of this thing yet,” he said.

  The lieutenant also declined to say how she was killed “other than she sustained multiple traumas to the body.” The press noted that Gielinski’s family members reported that she’d been stabbed. But there would be no official word until after the autopsy.

  The autopsy was performed on April 30 by Dr. David Bowerman, the El Paso County coroner, who identified four deep stab wounds and one shallow one, which had struck bone and not penetrated any farther. There was a stab wound that ran through her left hand as though she’d had it on her chest when the killer struck. He also noted the slices to her wrists and neck, as well as dozens of bruises and abrasions on her face and body.

  Bowerman’s main task was to ascertain the exact cause of death beyond the fact that she’d been stabbed. It wasn’t the cuts to her neck. In fact, the manner in which the pair tried to kill Jacine by cutting her throat showed they were inept killers. Pulling a victim’s head back actually causes the major blood vessels—the carotid artery and jugular vein—to recede and therefore, in Jacine’s case, they had not been cut. Pushing her head forward when they slit her throat would have been more lethal. So while using a serrated knife had to have been painful, the two gashes Woldt and Salmon made were not fatal.

  The worst of the two cuts to her right wrist had nearly severed her hand and caused a significant loss of blood. But again, it was not the cause of death. Nor was the clumsy attempt at suffocation lethal, though it would have greatly added to Jacine’s agony and terror—fighting for breath as two men hacked and stabbed at her with a knife.

  Bowerman opened up Jacine Gielinski’s chest to examine the damage done by the stab wounds. Measurements showed that the wounds had been caused by a thin blade, only about a sixteenth of an inch at its widest. This important fact connected the murder weapon found in the trunk to the wounds of the victim.

  Two of the penetrating stab wounds had not struck any major blood vessels or organs and therefore had not caused her death. However, the other two had pierced three to four inches through her breastbone and into her heart. Simply put, she’d bled to death internally.

  The murder of Jacine Gielinski had been brutal, and her killers singularly incompetent, which had served only to prolong her torment. Almost more disturbing was the effort they made to destroy the evidence of the sexual assaults after her death. They’d packed Gielinski’s vaginal vault with mud. But like everything else to do with the crime, the killers’ efforts were clumsy, and Bowerman was able to find traces of semen. The traces would help identity Jacine’s assailants in case they tried to recant.

  Thanks to the work of a German scientist around the turn of the century, semen could be matched to blood type. Dr. Karl Landsteiner had led the research team that for the first time classified human blood into four major groups: A, B, O, and AB. In the years that followed, he and his associates had made a number of other advances in forensic (meaning applied to law) science having to do with forensic serology, or the study of blood.

  One was the discovery that most people are secretors, meaning that in addition to their blood, their other body fluids (saliva, sweat, urine, and semen) could also be classified according to the four major blood groups. Landsteiner’s group also discovered that a very small percentage of the population were nonsecretors.

  Almost a century later, Landsteiner’s work would enable Bowerman to send the semen samples, as well as the blood taken from Salmon and Woldt, to a crime lab to match the semen to the suspects. Even if one was a nonsecretor that would be damning in itself because it would show up in the tests. Given the small number of possibilities, it would constitute at least circumstantial identification.

  Given the time of night and the emotions involved, it was remarkable how well the killers’ descriptions of the attack matched the physical evidence on Jacine Gielinski’s body. In fact, after Crouch finished interviewing Salmon, the detective asked him if he would place a mark to indicate where wounds were inflicted on the appropriate places of a body drawn on a piece of paper. Salmon did one better by using two pens with different colors of ink, one to indicate the wounds he inflicted, and the other for Woldt’s. The diagram showing the placement of the wounds was a perfect match to the autopsy.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Why would I need a lawyer?”

  May 1, 1997

  Fourth Judicial Courthouse

  The investigation continued at a careful pace. Even with the detailed, written confessions and the witness identifications, the crime-scene technicians collected every minute bit of evidence, including samples from stains in the defendants’ underwear and hairs from the backseat of the car, for DNA testing. They identified even the tiniest drips of blood on the defendants’ clothes, as well as on the Thunderbird and the van, including bloody handprints on Salmon’s car where, if the confessions were accurate, Woldt had leaned to steady himself while standing on Jacine’s stomach.

  Every detail was important. When Detective Crouch read Salmon his rights on the morning of April 30 and asked if he wanted a lawyer present, the young man replied, “Why would I need a lawyer? I did this. I’m guilty. I’m responsible for killing her. I want to plead to it and go on.” But that didn’t mean that once the defendant got together with a defense lawyer, he wouldn’t be persuaded to fight the charges. Confessions and other evidence had been ruled as inadmissible for legal technicalities in the past, and it could happen again now.

  Everyone knew the stakes would be high. Jeanne Smith was now the District Attorney and she would take her time deciding whether to file the necessary paperwork to seek the death penalty, but few doubted that she would. That would mean a bitter fight, with the defense attorneys pulling out all the stops.

  The gamesmanship began early when prominent criminal defense attorney Ed Farry called the police station at 11 a.m. to inquire about the status of the murder suspects. An hour earlier, Bob Salmon, who identified himself as the father of Lucas, had called the police to ask if his son had legal representation. He was told that his son was an adult and that he had waived his right to have a lawyer present.

  Farry then called. He knew he had no right to demand to see the suspects, as they had not yet been charged nor had he been retained. But he was told that they were being interviewed by Crouch and Bjomdahl. The lawyer made a snide comment about the detectives and their “McDonald’s interviews” and said, “I suppose it’s
too late to tell them not to talk.” It was, indeed.

  On May 1, 1997, Salmon and Woldt appeared in court together before Fourth Judicial District Court Judge David Parrish to be advised of their rights and to hear the charges brought against them, including kidnapping, first-degree sexual assault and, of course, first-degree murder after deliberation, which carried the possibility of the death penalty.

  Parrish had served on the bench since 1978, first as a county judge and then beginning in 1981, as a district court judge. In 1996, a judicial performance commission had described him as courteous and qualified. Basing its findings on interviews and surveys from attorneys, law enforcement officers and jurors, the commission had listed his retention rating as a very favorable 87 percent.

  At that first appearance, the press heard some of the details about the crime as Chief Deputy District Attorney Zook submitted police affidavits necessary to justify the charges being brought against the pair. According to the affidavits, Salmon and Woldt had been planning for two weeks to abduct, rape, and kill a woman, but Jacine Gielinski had been chosen at random. The victim had been sexually assaulted in the backseat of the kidnappers’ car. Then her attackers had cut her throat and stabbed her in the chest with a steak knife. The report noted that Woldt stood on her stomach while Salmon tried to smother her with her own clothes. And that they’d used mud to try to hide the evidence of their rapes.

  Based upon the severity of the allegations, Parrish ordered the defendants held without bond. He also appointed lawyers to represent them.

  Salmon’s father had hired Farry. But having been told that death-penalty cases in Colorado could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, he now asked Parrish to appoint Farry so that taxpayers could pick up the tab. The judge approved the request and also approved two public defenders to represent Woldt.