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

by Steve Jackson

  The public got their first look at the defendants in the evening broadcasts and on the front page of the next day’s Gazette. They had appeared in court wearing their bright orange jail jumpsuits—bald Salmon looking dumbstruck and Woldt with every hair in place and a half smirk on his face. The photographs in the newspaper were accompanied by a story in which one of Salmon’s brothers, who wasn’t identified, said the family was “in shock… . We’re very sorry for the victim’s family. This should not have happened.” Contacted at his home, Woldt’s father declined to comment.

  It was a hard day to escape death in the newspaper. On the same front page was a story with the parents of Jon-Benet Ramsey at a press conference proclaiming their innocence regarding the death of their six-year-old daughter. The child had been murdered on Christmas Day in John and Patsy Ramsey’s million-dollar home in Boulder, Colorado. The story had been front-page fodder for the national mainstream and tabloid press ever since. But no one had been arrested for the latest “crime of the century,” although the Boulder District Attorney’s Office had intimated that the parents were prime suspects.

  “I did not have anything to do with it,” Patsy Ramsey told the television cameras, microphones, and assembled reporters. “I loved that child with the whole of my heart and soul.”

  The murder of Jacine Gielinski was a much more local affair and the Gazette did the usual day-after reporting. That included a story in which another young woman, a twenty-three-year-old dental hygienist, called the paper to talk about her experience of having been raped thirty-six hours before Jacine was murdered. She, too, had been beaten into submission, but the stranger who attacked her had then cried and talked about God and the power of prayer.

  “I keep thinking about her,” the woman said. “This girl was living her everyday normal life. And I was living my everyday normal life. She must have known she was dying. I had that fear. We both knew that fear.”

  In the same story, Gail Hoagland, the executive director of the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault, noted that rape is not a crime about sex. “It has to do with power. It has to do with anger,” Hoagland said. “So we need to begin teaching kids, starting very young, appropriate ways of handling anger.”

  The newspapers and electronic media had more to feed the public when they learned that Salmon and Woldt had tried to snare another victim earlier on April 29, when they struck Amber Gonzales with their car in the Garden of the Gods. The incident had been classified as a hit and run; however, now the district attorney was going to add to the charges facing the killers by tacking on first-degree assault and attempted kidnapping.

  The Gazette also quoted a female high school friend of Salmon. She recalled a “decent student” who enjoyed drawing landscapes and animals. He was shy and polite, she said, opening doors for girls and cheering for friends during sports events. He’d told her that he was going to work after graduation to save for college. She remembered that he always carried a Bible in his car and attended church regularly.

  The young woman told the newspaper that she almost didn’t recognize him from the courtroom photographs and television broadcasts. In the past, she said, “He was always smiling.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “How cold their hearts must be.”

  May 3, 1997

  Littleton, Colorado

  No one felt like smiling that Saturday outside the Colorado Community Church in Littleton. It was a beautiful spring day, the sort Jacine would have spent outdoors in the sun and warm breezes that presaged another glorious summer in Colorado. It was a summer she would have spent camping with friends and family, stuffing S’mores into her cheeks, playing softball, visiting her girlfriends, and waiting for training camp to open for the Denver Broncos.

  Instead, all that remained of Jacine were her ashes in an urn inside the church and the memories shared by her family and friends.

  Nearly a thousand people showed up for her memorial service in addition to the gaggle of media. As they waited for the crowd to enter the church, Bob and Peggy Luiszer stood in the sun behind the church with other members of the family and Jacine’s best friends, hugging and crying and wondering why they were there.

  Jacine Gielinski

  In the time it took for Jacine’s heart to stop pumping, the world had changed for the Luiszers. They had gone to bed one night, a happily married couple, working two jobs, looking forward to yearly vacations and camping trips, trying to help a daughter get through college, dreaming of a future that included wedding bells and grandchildren.

  Then before the sun rose, they were something different. Now they were the parents of a murder victim. That made them different than almost everybody else. But they were only just beginning to realize that nothing would ever be the same.

  The media onslaught began the morning of April 30. Big, boxy television trucks with satellite antennae on top parked up and down the block of the Luiszers’ house. Reporters walked up to the house and rang the doorbell, wanting to talk. Their voices were sad, their faces drawn, as they commiserated over the Luiszers’ loss…. now, if you could just answer a few questions, we’ll be on our way.

  The Luiszers didn’t know what to do. There was nothing in the parents’ handbook about dealing with the press after one’s child has been brutally murdered. At one reporter’s request, Peggy handed over Jacine’s high school graduation photograph, but after that she wouldn’t have anything to do with them. They’d gathered around her house like vultures, a reminder of the reality she was facing even as she wandered around, commanding herself to wake up…. wake up…. wake up.

  Bob Luiszer had done his best to cope with the media and take the burden off his wife’s shoulders. “It was strictly random,” he told the Denver Post when asked if he thought the killers intended to stalk and kill Jacine in particular. “The intent was what they did.”

  He wanted to be left alone, too, but understood that the members of the press were doing their jobs. Still, if he had to talk, he preferred to recall the vibrant young woman who called him Dad and promised that he’d give her away on her wedding day. “Everybody loved her. She was very outgoing and friendly and touched a lot of people’s lives.”

  Bob held up pretty well until one reporter asked if they had any other children. He shook his head. “Just her,” he said, as his voice broke. “She was it.”

  Another neighborhood friend, Tammy, took over intercepting the press on the telephone. As Peggy drifted from room to room in tears, asking unanswerable questions to the mute walls, she could hear her friend berating overly aggressive reporters: “What kind of goddamn human beings are you? These people just lost their daughter.”

  Lost? Lost? Lost people came home, Peggy thought. Jacine wasn’t ever coming home, she was gone, dead. Murdered!

  The Luiszers knew that Jacine was well liked, but nothing had prepared them for the overwhelming response of both friends and strangers. The house was filled to bursting with flowers until the Luiszers were begging visitors to take some home with them.

  Cards and letters of condolence arrived by the boxful. Although many of the messages caused Peggy to cry, some of the tears were tears of pride for the young woman she’d raised, such as the letter from the girl who had been the overweight child on Jacine’s childhood soccer team. Now a young woman, she wrote that she would never forget the one teammate who reached out when no one else did and taught her to believe in herself.

  Another was from the developmentally disabled girl whom Jacine had taken under her wing in high school. “She was my best friend,” she wrote. “She was the only person in school that would ever say ‘hi’ to me.”

  Others had to cope with the press as well. Jacine’s friends were, of course, devastated. They had been counting on Jacine to be their maid of honor, to be there when they needed a shoulder to cry on or someone to celebrate with, to raise her children with their children. Now, they were left trying to describe to reporters what made their friend so special.

  Jami
e Koons attempted to explain the effect of Jacine’s smile on other people, then gave up except to note that it captivated all who were fortunate enough to experience it. “You could see it from miles away.”

  Jamie Hammers, who had known Jacine since they were both two years old, said she was closer to her than her own sister. Jacine was sincere and good; whatever happened to her killers would not be enough.

  Mark Drury, the athletic director for Littleton High and Jacine’s former volleyball and basketball coach, recalled how it was Jacine who brought him a cake to commemorate his one hundredth coaching victory. “She was the glue,” he said, of the teams she played on. But she was more, including the much-loved babysitter of his children. “My eleven-year-old son broke down crying when we heard.”

  Peggy avoided most of the news accounts of her daughter’s murder by her own choice, as well as the efforts of her family and friends. However, by accident she was passing in front of the television in time to see one newscast. Before she realized what she was looking at and could turn away, there was the film of her daughter’s body lying naked under the white van. It hurt her that Jacine had remained there for hours before she was taken away. What disturbed her the most was seeing the breeze blowing her baby’s blond hair. She must have been cold, she thought, and the tears fell down her cheeks again.

  One afternoon, Peggy felt she had to get out of her house where she’d been since that night and went over to her motherin-law’s house. Standing in the living room, she happened to glance down at the couch where a newspaper was lying, and there on the front page were drawings by a courtroom artist of Salmon and Woldt. She stared for a moment. She thought they were ugly and frightening, particularly the one with the bald head and the odd, protruding eyes. When it struck her that they were the last two faces her lovely daughter saw before she died, she felt the bile rise in her throat and thought she would throw up.

  When the coroner in El Paso County called to officially notify them of the cause of death, the Luiszers had asked if they needed to drive to Colorado Springs to identify the body. He told them that it wasn’t necessary. They could come if they wanted—he’d done his best to “make her presentable”—but he recommended that they stay home. He agreed with Peggy’s therapist that they wouldn’t want their last memory of Jacine to be of her cold and lifeless corpse.

  The Luiszers had opted to have their daughter cremated. Now, as the big church filled nearly to standing room only, the only tangible things they had left were photographs and an urn with her ashes.

  The two-hour service passed in a blur of friends and family talking about how much they loved Jacine, how she would be missed. Afterward, about a hundred mourners gathered at the Gielinski house.

  It was also a time of reflection, as noted in the journal kept by one of Jacine’s teenage cousins, Amy. She recounted how her family had been called at 4:30 in the morning on April 30 to be told that Jacine had been murdered.

  “I was at a loss for words,” she wrote. “I didn’t know what to think or do, and I didn’t even cry until at least an hour after I heard the news.”

  Amy had gone to school that day only to be overwhelmed when the class began discussing a rape scene in a book they were reading and some of the other boys and girls “laughed and joked” about it. “Eyes glazed over, I thought, ‘How cold their hearts must be.’”

  Still, she had tried to go through the motions for the rest of the day. Finally, her algebra teacher asked what was wrong. “My cousin was raped and murdered last night,” she replied. The teacher had been too shocked to say anything.

  Amy didn’t understand why this was happening. Rape and murder were something that happened to people whose stories she read in newspapers, not her family. Her family had driven to the Luiszers’ after school. “How heavy their house felt,” she wrote. “I retreated to Jacine’s room and plopped myself in the middle of her bedroom floor.” There, enveloped by memories of playing with Barbie dolls and surrounded by walls covered with photographs of her laughing, smiling cousin and her friends, dried corsages from school dances, stuffed animals, and high school yearbooks, she had questions she wanted answered.

  “God why did you do this to us?” she wrote. “We are a perfect Christian family. We live by your Word. How could you allow this to happen?”

  Amy thought back to Christmas Day 1996, the last time she saw Jacine. It troubled her that she couldn’t remember if she hugged her cousin when she left. “Or if I expressed my love for her.”

  Peggy Luiszer was troubled by the same thoughts. After friends and family were gone, leaving just her and Bob and their memories, the house seemed empty of all joy. She wondered if that feeling would ever change. She was beginning to regret following the advice of the coroner and her therapist and wished she had gone to Colorado Springs to look at Jacine’s face one last time.

  I never got to say good-bye, she thought. I didn’t get to tell her how much I loved her.

  The Monday following the memorial service, the Luiszers again drove to Colorado Springs at the request of the district attorney. Up to this point, there had been a feeling of unreality—that sooner or later they would wake up and this would have all been a nightmare. But now they were going to go talk to people about the reality of Jacine’s murder and the two young men accused of committing it.

  Normally, the sixty-mile drive south along the front range of the Rocky Mountains was enjoyable. Roofed in by robin’s-egg-blue skies, Interstate 25, the major north-south thoroughfare, separated the beginning of the green and grassy plains in the east and the pine-and fir-clad mountains to the west. The last of the spring snows still glimmered in the sunlight on purple Pike’s Peak, hovering over their destination.

  They should have been driving down to see Jacine play volleyball or take her out to lunch “just because.” Instead, a feeling of dread crept up on them with every mile and landmark they passed. The town of Castle Rock, the halfway point, was named after a several-hundred-foot-tall sandstone bluff. More than a century before, pioneers in their covered wagons had thought it looked like a castle from across the prairie. Just north of the Springs was the U.S. Air Force Academy, identifiable by the triangular spires of its chapel against the mountains. Then there was the green-and-white highway sign put up to designate the exit for the Focus on the Family headquarters.

  On that day they had no idea then of how many times they would make that drive in the months ahead and how they would come to hate it, but they knew it would never be easy as they passed the hotel where Jacine had been working on the north end of town. There would always be that reminder, and probably others.

  This visit was at the invitation of the district attorney, Jeanne Smith, to meet the prosecutors and investigators assigned to the case. They arrived and were whisked to a large room with tables set up in a U-shape. Standing and sitting around the tables were a cadre of police officers, detectives, and prosecutors, as well as assorted other personnel from the district attorney’s office—the combined forces arrayed against the defendants.

  As the Luiszers entered, those around the tables turned and rose to meet them. They were soon feeling overwhelmed as they were escorted from grim, sympathetic face to grim, sympathetic face, and handed business cards and consoling laments “for your loss.”

  Although they didn’t realize it at the time, one of the most important introductions was to a petite woman with short silver hair named Barbara Buchman, who they were told would be the Victim’s Advocate assigned to their case. Peggy knew looking at her that at last she had met someone at last who would understand what she was going through— maybe not firsthand—but in her heart. Buchman handed her a business card and told her to call if she ever had any questions, or just wanted someone to talk to, any time, day or night.

  Deputy District Attorney Dan Zook was introduced as the attorney who would take the lead in the case. He was accompanied by a younger attorney, Dave Young, who would be something called “the second chair.” They were both good-looki
ng, Peggy thought, and seemed confident, as did a third deputy district attorney, an older man named Gordon Denison. His job as an appeals specialist—an expert on the precedents and technicalities of the law—was part of the reason Smith asked them to come to the meeting.

  Smith herself came off as straitlaced though she, too, softened to express her condolences. But she was all business after the introductions, when she told the Luiszers that her office was considering whether to pursue the death penalty against Salmon and Woldt. She said that she and her staff felt the punishment was warranted given the “heinous” nature of the crime, and that everything possible had been done to ensure that the prosecution would be successful.

  She apologized for Jacine’s body being left beneath the van for so long. But, she explained, it was all part of the extreme care the police and her office were taking to preserve all the evidence. The handwritten confessions given by Salmon and Woldt were damning, and the police had taken the extra step of having them notarized so that there would be no question as to their authenticity. She was confident that all the legal details had been followed to the letter and that they would hold up in court against the inevitable challenges by defense attorneys.

  However, Smith said she wanted one more thing: the Luiszers’ blessing. It would be a long, bitterly fought process that could take a year, even two years, the district attorney warned. The defense attorneys would probably try anything—from stalling to begging to intimidation—to wear the Luiszers down so that they would throw in the towel and ask the prosecutors to settle for life in prison.

  “We won’t pursue this if you don’t want us to,” she said.

  Bob and Peggy looked at each other. There was no other hesitation. These guys dying sounds good to me, Peggy thought.

  “We’re behind whatever you want to do,” she and her husband said.