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

by Steve Jackson

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “He’s demented!”

  Colorado Springs

  If Smith had asked the same question of the citizens of Colorado Springs, the majority would have voted to hang the defendants from one of the ancient cottonwood trees that lined the blocks around the old courthouse, at least if the telephone calls and letters to the editor of the Gazette, the local radio and television stations, and the district attorney’s office were any indication. And that didn’t include the letters and calls to the jail from vigilantes offering to save the state the time and expense of putting Salmon and Woldt on trial.

  There were a few calls for restraint, such as letters written by Father Bill Carmody, the Respect Life director of the Colorado Springs diocese. But even state legislators from the area were calling upon the district attorney to seek the death penalty.

  In the climate of fear and anger immediately following the murder, there were letters to the Gazette pointing fingers at the inhabitants of the apartment complex where Jacine was abducted. The writers accused the residents of standing by and “doing nothing” while the young woman pleaded for help.

  Several of the residents wrote back to defend themselves. They noted that the attack occurred at the time of night when most were settled down for the night. They said that they did respond when they heard Jacine’s screams, but there was little they could do except yell at the men and dial 911 before the kidnappers drove off.

  People needed to place blame so that they could understand something that made so little sense. Some hurled vitriol at the parents of Salmon and Woldt. They’d raised a couple of sick perverts, which to the amateur psychologists in the community meant there had to be something wrong with them as well.

  Bonnie Woldt appeared in the Gazette complaining that she was being unfairly targeted. She’d seen the letters to the editor and heard from callers who denounced her for everything from having children by two different men, to failing to “stop the crime.”

  The harassment she felt took an official turn when she received a notice from the city’s housing authority on May 13 saying that she was being evicted from her subsidized apartment due to a federal policy aimed at discouraging crime in public housing. The policy, informally called “One Strike and You’re Out,” held that if anyone in subsidized housing was accused of a serious crime any individual or family in that residence also could be evicted.

  The policy was created to deal with rampant drug dealing and violence in large urban housing projects. But eight-months pregnant Bonnie said the notice gave her and her three-year-old son seven days to move out because “a guest” had been accused of murder. The newspaper article was sympathetic to the twenty-year-old, noting that her “only connection to the crime is her relationship to the men accused of committing it.”

  “I feel like I am being punished for something they did or are accused of” she complained.

  Bonnie’s dilemma brought expressions of sympathy. She was offered baby clothes and rides to the hospital when her time came to deliver. The Rev. Ted Haggard, pastor of New Life Church, urged Christian charity, though he also seemed to indicate that she had only herself to blame.

  “I don’t think it’s appropriate to be negative towards her. I think we need to be helpful towards her,” he said. “Everybody makes messes of their life to one degree or another.”

  The two killers certainly had done that to themselves, as well as to Jacine’s life. Barring some off-the-wall decision by a judge to suppress their confessions and the rest of the evidence, the trial was not going to be about guilt or innocence.

  Salmon had even begun his confession by acknowledging, “I, Lucas Salmon, am guilty of the crimes of kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder. I have been made aware of my right and have waived them.” He’d then finished by noting that he “voluntarily helped the officers find the crime scene,” and acknowledged that he had placed the knife in the trunk of his car and then gave the officers permission to search it. “At no time during the interview was I intoxicated, and at no time during my conversation with the police officers was I bribed, threatened or asked to make a deal.”

  The question at trial was going to be how guilty—as in first-degree murder after deliberation, or a lesser degree of homicide—and who, if either, was more guilty.

  Salmon had claimed that after watching Woldt rape the victim, he didn’t want to have sex with her. He also noted that it was Woldt who retrieved the knife from the glove box. However, he had for the most part accepted an equal share of the blame.

  Woldt had been much more inclined to point the finger at his partner. Yes, he’d raped her first, but it was Salmon who took charge and told him to hold her head up so that he could slit her throat. Then it was Salmon who had initiated the back-and-forth stabbing routine, Salmon who insisted that he cut her wrist deeper, Salmon who tried to smother her.

  In fact, during his interview, Woldt had insisted that all the talk of rape and murder had been just a joke to him, and he “couldn’t believe” that they had actually gone through with it. And he’d felt pressured to go along because Salmon had been badgering him about finding a woman with whom to end his virginity.

  Whether the two killers were conscious of it or not, the prosecutors knew when they first heard the slight differences in the confessions that the defense attorneys would latch on to the schism to make the other defendant look worse than their own. The prosecutors expected that the defense attorneys would move to have separate trials for that reason.

  The police and investigators for the district attorney’s office had immediately started the process of learning as much as they could about the defendants and their possible motives. Some of this would have been part of any normal investigation. However, the possibility of a death-penalty hearing made the background searches even more important and involved. If the defendants were convicted, as expected, the defense would introduce mitigators to explain why the crime occurred, such as traumatic childhoods or a mental illness that didn’t meet the legal qualifications for an insanity defense but that might save their clients from being put to death.

  A personality pattern for each defendant had quickly evolved for the investigators looking into the case. According to friends and family members, Salmon was a quiet but friendly loner, socially awkward but otherwise intelligent. He had been a regular churchgoer and kept a Bible in his car. The catalyst for change had apparently been Woldt. Those same people noticed he changed when he was around his friend, especially since moving back to Colorado.

  Woldt was another story. Former girlfriends and other friends talked about his general misogyny and his obsession with pornography, rape, and violence. He had shrugged off Salmon’s implication that watching A Clockwork Orange had triggered their desire to rape and kill. But the investigator soon learned that Bonnie Woldt told friends that she was aware that after her husband and his friend watched the movie, they had talked about finding a girl for just such a purpose. She believed, according to the friends, that they had been following another woman for two weeks before the murder.

  Bonnie also confided that she thought her husband would try to shift most of the blame onto Salmon and that would be a lie. But she was more worried about how she was going to support herself, her three-year-old son, and new infant, complaining that Woldt’s parents were not helping.

  The friends reported even odder statements. One told the police that Bonnie said she couldn’t understand why her husband didn’t come to her if he wanted to rape someone. She would have been more than willing to act out the fantasy. The friend said Bonnie had pouted that she thought she was prettier than Jacine and complained, “Why her and not me?”

  The police found and talked to James Wilson, who described himself as Woldt’s “best friend.” He told them about Woldt’s attempts to recruit him into abducting and raping a woman during their forays to the nightclubs.

  Lisa came forward to tell the police that her former boyfriend, Derrick Ayers, used to ha
ng out with Woldt, who would begin their evening forays with, “Let’s go rape some chicks and beat up some punks.” She recounted finding the rocks in her car and how Ayers eventually told her the story about Woldt wanting to kill a couple in the mountains. Her boyfriend had warned her to get her sister away from Woldt and his “strange ideas.”

  The police went looking for Ayers, who they found in a jail in Seattle, where he was being held for a variety of traffic violations. The detective first reached him on the jail telephone and asked about Woldt. “He’s demented,” were the first words out of Ayers’s mouth. He then went on to explain why.

  Ayers volunteered to return to Colorado. Once there, he agreed to have his statement videotaped because the prosecution team was worried that he was a flight risk. At least if he took off before the trial, they would have him on tape. Ayers wasn’t surprised that Woldt had talked someone else into helping him fulfill his fantasy. His former friend, he said, was “too chickenshit” to do it on his own.

  Over and over, the investigators heard from various people about Woldt’s constant teasing of Salmon about his virginity, or how Woldt manipulated Salmon by declaring they were no longer friends, just to see Salmon crawl to get back on his good side.

  It was clear that Woldt was the driving force leading up to the attack. He was a sexual predator who sooner or later, prosecutors believed, would have carried out his fantasy with or without an accomplice.

  Left on his own, Salmon might never have graduated from quiet loser to vicious killer. However, that did not excuse him from the full role he played in the crimes of April 29. No matter whose idea it was, by the time the pair struck Amber Gonzales, Salmon was, in his own words, “psyched.” And from the moment they spotted Jacine Gielinski, he was an equal partner in the rape and murder.

  In fact, the pair had gone to great lengths to make sure each was equally guilty. They’d held lengthy discussions on what to do and how to do it, traded the knife back and forth, and took turns putting mud up inside their victim.

  Neither had expressed much in the way of remorse, although they noted that killing a lovely young woman was the worst thing that had ever happened to them. Yes, Salmon had declined a lawyer, acknowledging that he was guilty and wanted to go on from there. He’d also waived his bond hearing, saying it was “not appropriate” that he be released. But he never said he was sorry for what he had done.

  The bizarre behavior of the two was sure to spur the defense attorneys to raise a mental defense. The definition for legally insane meant that Woldt and Salmon couldn’t tell the difference between right or wrong and were incapable—because of their mental state—to form the “intent to kill.” That wasn’t going to wash, as the confessions, as well as their attempts to disguise the rape, proved they knew that what they were doing was wrong. They’d said they felt that they had to kill her to prevent her from identifying them to the police.

  The admitted fantasy was to abduct, rape, and kill a woman because, as Salmon said, “it was something we thought we might like to do.” As Bob Luiszer told the press, “Their intent was what they did.”

  However, even if the defense attorneys were going to have a hard time establishing insanity, it didn’t mean that they wouldn’t raise other questions about their clients’ mental capacities. These questions might have led a jury to conclude that Woldt and Salmon were less responsible for their actions, especially if and when it came down to deciding whether to sentence them to death. That meant there would be a costly and time-consuming battle between psychological experts.

  The defense attorneys might also point to the clumsy murder as proof that their clients didn’t really know what they were doing. But from the prosecution’s point of view, just because Salmon and Woldt were particularly inept killers didn’t mean they didn’t try—cutting and hacking and smothering—until they eventually succeeded.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Death is different”

  May 22, 1997

  Colorado Springs

  A month after Jacine’s brutal murder, Salmon and Woldt appeared in court to learn that District Attorney Jeanne Smith had filed the paperwork to seek the death penalty against them. If her prosecutors were successful, at some point in the future they would be strapped to a steel table and injected with drugs that would essentially put them to sleep like dogs.

  The move was not unexpected. In fact, the neatly barbered Woldt and still bald Salmon showed no reaction to the announcement. The two local public defenders initially appointed for Woldt were gone. They’d been replaced by a special death-penalty team. The so-called “Dream Team” consisted of three attorneys handpicked from public defenders’ offices and all well known to the Fourth Judicial District Attorney’s Office.

  The lead attorney on the case was Deputy Public Defender Terri Brake, who’d represented Frank Orona for the murder of the elderly man in the case prosecuted by Dan Zook. Brake was known for her impassioned pleas to the juries on behalf of her clients. She frequently broke down into tears when delivering her closing arguments in death-penalty cases, begging for the life of the killer. Sometimes she did this a little too conveniently so that even some of her colleagues thought that the tears were drummed up on demand.

  Brake was the attorney who came up with the theory that Orona, who had several arrest convictions for male prostitution, “snapped” because the older man made “homosexual advances.” It was the height of cynicism for the liberal-leaning lawyer to play on the well-known conservative nature of Colorado Springs, the home of Focus on the Family and its anti-homosexuality agenda.

  Brake had most recently poured out the tears in June 1995 while pleading for the life of Robert Harlan. He had been convicted of the vicious rape and murder of a twenty-five-year-old woman, Rhonda Maloney, in February 1994. That time, the emotional appeal went nowhere and Harlan was sitting on death row awaiting execution.

  Doug Wilson, the head of the public defenders’ office in Pueblo, was the second chair for Woldt’s defense team. Generally cordial to his colleagues across the aisle in routine cases, he was Mr. Hyde when it came time to trying to save a client from the death penalty. He believed in flooding the prosecutors with waves of motions and stalling in every way possible, partly to dismay the victim’s family, hoping that they would give up and ask the prosecution to settle for life in prison.

  Wilson was also very hard to beat in court. He’d never had a client sentenced to death, even though he had defended more than two dozen cases in which the prosecution had at least considered that option, including the Eugene Baylis case, involving the shootings at the biker bar.

  The third attorney for the Woldt defense team was Andrew Heher. He was the counterpart to Gordon Denison, a lawyer whose job it was to know precedents and nuances, and how to apply them.

  Salmon was represented by Ed Farry and Lauren Cleaver, a lawyer from Boulder. Like Farry, Cleaver was in private practice. However, she belonged to the Alternate Defense Counsel—lawyers with death-penalty case experience who would represent indigent defendants if there was a conflict of interest for the public defenders’ office. In this case, because the public defenders were representing Woldt, there was a conflict.

  The defense teams had wasted no time filing motions and subpoenas. One subpoena demanded that the Gazette and three local television stations turn over any unpublished letters from the community about the case, as well as any taped interviews with citizens, including those that had not been aired.

  Wilson told Judge Parrish that the defense needed the materials to demonstrate that “there appears to be a lynch-mob mentality against these two gentlemen.” It was his opening salvo to get the trial moved to another city (a change of venue) because of pretrial publicity.

  The public’s mood also was important, he said, because he wanted to have the grand jury indictments charging the defendants dismissed. The grand jury, he said, had been subjected to intensive press coverage, making them “an extension of a lynch-mob mentality.”

&n
bsp; One unusual aspect of the proceedings was that the defendants had not yet entered a plea—guilty or not guilty. Nor would they, the defense teams said, until many of the motions had been settled.

  At the hearing, the Luiszers got their first taste of what was to come, and they didn’t like it. They knew that the road ahead was going to be long and ugly; they just didn’t realize how long or how ugly, and that it would be made all the worse because of the possibility that Salmon and Woldt faced execution.

  The so-called “ultimate punishment” had undergone a number of permutations over the past two decades leading to the Salmon and Woldt trials.

  In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as unconstitutional in the 32 states that had the sentence on the books mostly on the grounds that it didn’t allow judges, or juries, some discretion on when to impose it. Essentially prior to that ruling, a defendant convicted of certain crimes—particularly premediated first degree murder—was automatically sentenced to death. After the ruling, about 600 inmates on death row at that time had their sentences altered to life without parole.

  The decision didn’t sit well in many states including Colorado. In 1974, Coloradans had voted overwhelmingly—451,401 to 286,805—to bring it back. Then in 1976, the Supreme Court reversed itself and said that capital punishment was constitutional as long as judges, jurors, or both were allowed discretion and were given guidelines to follow. Colorado joined the other death penalty states in reinstituting the sentence, though with new rules.

  The biggest change was that capital cases were now divided into a guilt phase and a penalty phase, with a separate trial for each. For the penalty phase, most states created a process that included the consideration of aggravating factors that might qualify a crime for the death penalty, as well as mitigating factors that might explain why a criminal did not deserve to die, even if these factors did not excuse him of the crime.

  Aggravating factors included that the murder was committed in a particularly “heinous” or cruel manner, or committed to cover up the defendant’s participation in another crime, such as rape. Mitigating factors included the defendant’s age or mental state at the time of the crime, or if the defendant was a principal with relatively minor participation—although not so minor as to constitute a defense from prosecution—in the offense committed by another.