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

by Steve Jackson

  Over the past two years, Young had spoken several times to Amber Gonzales, who said she had avoided getting involved with any men—a problem with trust—and could not even get herself to go past the place where she was struck by the killers’ car. She still was troubled by survivor’s guilt, looking for answers to the question “Why her and not me?” and finding none.

  Salmon and Woldt had both been charged with first-degree murder after deliberation, felony murder (in which the murder was committed to cover up another crime; in their case, sexual assault), first-degree sexual assault, and kidnapping. They’d also been indicted on charges of attempted second-degree kidnapping and second-degree assault for trying to kidnap Amber Gonzales. While the charges for the Gonzales assault might have seemed like overkill, if Salmon was convicted of murder, the additional charges would show that the attack on Jacine was not some spur-of-the-moment decision.

  In the days before the trial, Young had contemplated how to make his opening statements, which are generally used to give a jury an overview of the evidence that they can expect to be presented by the prosecution at trial. While they are not supposed to be argumentative, they can also set the emotional tone for the rest of the trial.

  Young knew that the defense was going to say that the rape and murder of Jacine Gielinski was Woldt’s fault— that Salmon had been either an unwilling participant or unable to resist his partner’s more powerful personality. As a prosecutor, he was going to have to show that Lucas Salmon was a full partner and that he had deliberated and formed the intent to kill her. Recalling how Salmon’s confession read as if he were writing a school paper on a movie he’d seen, Young decided that there was nothing he could say that would be any better than the defendant’s own handwritten words.

  “George and I then got out of the car and told her to crawl out backwards, keeping her face to the ground. At this point, George and I had a discussion on who would cut her first and how it would be done.”

  As he read, the jury leaned forward in their seats, listening with horror as Salmon described how he “took the knife and prepared to cut her throat. … I told George to lift her head up by her hair and to cover her mouth. I then made my attack.” One of the female jurors swiped at her eyes with a tissue, while others stole furtive glances at Salmon or bowed their heads as if praying. “Again, no scream. We began to discuss again what we should do next.”

  At the defense table, Salmon sat between his defense attorneys looking like an out-of-place store clerk or nerdy college student. He wore civilian clothes including a sweater-vest and button-down shirt, rather than the jail jumpsuit he’d appeared in during the interminable hearings leading to the trial. What hair he possessed had been allowed to grow back, softening his features from the harsh, shaved look he’d sported when he went hunting for a victim. He kept his head down as the prosecutor read his statement, doodling on a yellow legal pad, as if the proceedings had nothing to do with him.

  “By now we can see and hear blood gushing from her wounds … with every breath we could hear the blood gurgling in her mouth.”

  In the first row behind the prosecution table, Peggy and Bob Luiszer had stuffed red plugs into their ears when Young began his opening remarks. They had never read the confession nor asked to hear the details of how their daughter had suffered and died. They did not want to hear it now.

  “This time George moves his feet up and down on her stomach to force the air out, while I press even harder. … After a minute goes by, she appears to have stopped breathing.”

  On her lap, Peggy clutched a framed photograph of Jace, the one taken the Christmas before her murder. Now, as the actors in the courtroom moved through their scenes in silence, she reached for her husband’s hand and allowed the tears to roll down her cheeks.

  Standing in front of the jury, Dave Young briefly held up a photograph of Jacine. In it, she was smiling, happy. “They knew what they were doing,” he said. “Their plan was not only to rape someone, but to kill them.”

  After Young finished his opening statement, Cleaver got her chance. She knew better than to try to persuade the jury that her client was innocent of the charges and conceded as much. Her only hope—his only hope—was that she could convince at least one person on the jury that he was so far under the spell of George Woldt that he was unable to stop himself. “No matter how crazy that sounds as you sit here this morning,” she told the jurors.

  Having only that morning again argued vehemently against the prosecutors being allowed to exhibit even a small photograph of Jacine when she was alive, Cleaver now set up a four-foot-by-five-foot poster of Salmon and Woldt at a party. The poster depicted a smirking, confident Woldt in front of a shyly smiling Salmon in the background, the obvious implication being that Woldt was the leader and Salmon his shadow. Where the prosecutors were allowed to show the photograph of Jacine for a minute, the more than life-sized faces of her killers remained in front of the jury for the entire length of the trial.

  Cleaver said she would be calling five expert witnesses to the stand who would testify that Salmon “suffers from dependent personality disorder.” Such people, she said, have “pervasive and excessive need to be taken care of, have difficulty expressing disagreement with others, rarely initiate any projects, go to excessive lengths to get nurturing, and often feel helpless and alone.”

  Another of the defense’s mental health experts, she said, would testify that Salmon suffered a type of autism—a state of mind characterized in his case by daydreaming, hallucinations, and disregard of reality—that prevented him from thinking objectively.

  Salmon had the maturity of a “five-year-old,” Cleaver said, and “clings to reality by a thread. She pointed to where her client was doodling like the village idiot on a legal pad at the defense table, his head down. He liked to draw hot rods and old cars, she said.

  Going on, she said her witnesses would testify that Woldt manipulated Salmon into “fulfilling his sick fantasies,” which he initiated by having his friend watch A Clockwork Orange. Salmon “lacked the free will” to resist Woldt’s desire to act out the violence and rapes depicted in the film.

  “He could not use his own reflection,” she said. “He could not use his own judgment. Lucas couldn’t and didn’t think for himself.” Her client was a “very vulnerable … outcast with no friends,” she said. “One of the best days of his life was when Woldt told him the two were best friends.

  “Lucas Salmon was the perfect killing companion for a sexual sadist.”

  Cleaver contended that Salmon would have never been involved in Gielinski’s murder if not for Woldt. They would hear from Woldt’s wife, Bonnie, that Salmon was “a sweet young man” when she first met him, but that he changed to a darker personality after he spent much time with her husband.

  Bonnie Woldt had also told friends that she and George had a kinky, sometimes violent sex life, Cleaver said. The wife’s testimony in addition to that of the experts would show that George Woldt was a “crazed sexual sadist … a psychopath, who became sexually aroused by another person’s suffering and was fascinated by pornography, bondage and role playing.”

  Woldt hated his mother and took it out on other women, she said, noting that he had talked to two other men about his desire to rape a woman. But he was unable to fulfill his fantasy until he met Salmon.

  “This is a case about darkness, a case about loneliness,” Cleaver said. “It’s about a young man so lost that no one knew he was missing.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “A hole in my heart.”

  Sitting in the witness stand, Peggy Luiszer snipped open the clear plastic bag and removed the contents. She knew exactly what she was looking at on the witness stand, even through the tears that flooded her blue eyes behind their wire-rimmed glasses.

  “This is her garnet tennis bracelet we gave her for Christmas.” She’d promised herself to hold it together, but her voice quavered and drops rolled down her cheeks.

  Following opening remar
ks, the prosecution team had begun its “case in chief” with Salmon’s confession fresh in the jurors’ minds and entered into evidence so that the jury could reread it in the deliberations room after the trial. The prosecution team intended to keep their case short and simple. The facts would speak, in large part through Salmon’s words, for themselves. The more difficult task would be later, after the defense presented its case. Then the prosecutors would have to counter the defense team’s expert witnesses.

  In quick succession, the prosecutors called their first witnesses: the police officers who had responded to the crime scenes and to the Woldts’ apartment. The officers testified about conducting interviews with eyewitnesses, finding the knife and bloody sweatshirt, hearing the initial confessions of the killers, and finding Jacine Gielinski’s body beneath the van.

  “We were hoping and praying that we might be about to save somebody,” Officer Olav Chaney said, remembering how he and Sergeant Steckler ran from their patrol car to the van. “I got down on my knees and looked and knew at that time, there was not a chance.”

  The women who’d seen the abduction and taken down the license plate number made their way to the stand and recalled for the jury a night that they’d never been able to forget. Margaret Zarate wept as she described standing twenty feet from where Woldt was straddling Jacine in the backseat of the Thunderbird, punching her repeatedly in the face. He’d looked at Margaret Zarate three times, she said, the first “as if he was curious why I was there”; the second time he looked scared; and the third “he smiled.”

  Then Peggy Luiszer had been called to identify her daughter’s personal effects found in the backseat of Salmon’s car, next to where crime-scene technicians had found his Bible, embossed “Lucas Salmon.” Each piece of jewelry had been sealed for two years, requiring her to cut the bag open to release the contents and the memories each brought with it.

  The first time Peggy saw the defendants she’d been surprised at how small they were: less than six foot and slim; she had been expecting large, hulking monsters. Still, she thought that they were ugly and grieved that they were the last two faces her daughter had seen. It hurt her to think that Jacine may have wondered where her father, whose ghost had been haunting her, was as she suffered with those two hideous men doing such terrible things to her.

  Peggy hated them and would have gladly killed them herself. When the hearings for the pair had first started, the Luiszers were shocked at how close they were allowed to sit to the defendants—no more than ten feet and separated only by a low, wooden barrier. They’d even discussed jokingly but with an element of truth how they might accomplish killing them. They knew they’d never get through the metal detectors with a gun or a knife, but they considered how they might smuggle in a blowgun with poison darts.

  Of course, they had no idea where they would get such a murder weapon. More practically, they’d been approached by several people who said that for as little as $5,000, Salmon and Woldt could be killed in jail. If she’d thought it might actually work, Peggy would have paid any amount. She even joked that if she was caught, she could probably get off with a few months in a mental institution by hiring a good defense lawyer to argue that she was insane at the time.

  There were certainly times that she felt that she might lose her mind to anger and bitterness. Salmon and Woldt had taken more than Jacine’s life. “You have all these hopes for your kid and then they’re gone,” Bob Luiszer told a reporter from the Rocky Mountain News in July 1997. “It changes your whole life.”

  Peggy added, “Everything we had was going to go to Jacine when she got older. Not anymore. It rips a hole in my heart.”

  Worried about the graphic nature of the crime, the Gazette had run a disclaimer “Editor’s Note” with its coverage, stating: “The 1997 slaying of Jacine Gielinski was one of the most brutal in the city’s history. Readers may find some of the details in this story unsettling.” Even then, some readers had complained that they didn’t need so many details in their family newspaper.

  Yet no newspaper article could adequately express what the Luiszers had gone through in the two years since, or how much their lives had changed. They couldn’t go anywhere with friends without Jacine’s murder hanging like a dark cloud over them, even if everyone politely avoided the subject. They didn’t celebrate holidays like Christmas; Bob stopped baking his thousands of cookies to send to friends and relatives. Jacine’s birthday was just another day spent in tears.

  The grief wasn’t necessarily constant after two years of mind-numbing court appearances and dozens of trips to the courthouse in Colorado Springs. But it would sneak up on them unexpectedly when they least suspected, such as when they’d see a red car like Jacine’s or a song would come on the radio that she’d liked. Then all the memories would come flooding back, and so would the anguish.

  In some ways, they kept the memory fresh themselves. They didn’t touch her room except to add a large portrait of her. Peggy had a purple ribbon tattooed on her ankle; then Bob, who was normally rather conservative, surprised her by coming home one day with one tattooed on his arm. There were photographs of Jacine scattered all over the house; many of them were on the refrigerator, surrounded by two years of newspaper clippings about her case and other minders and trials.

  They were reminded of time passing and what they were missing. Jacine’s friends were going on with their lives, getting married, and having babies. Meanwhile, the Luiszers looked at each other and wondered if their marriage would survive, not because they fought or thought poorly of each other. It was just that all happiness seemed to have been sucked out of whatever future there would be when the trials and death-penalty hearings had come and gone. They were polite and friendly, but in many ways they were just two people who shared a house, a house full of memories that only increased the sadness. Neither had any interest in intimacy—the very thought of sex to Peggy reminded her of what Jacine had gone through and made her sick to her stomach. Bob would go to work sometimes and be fine, or he might just sit there, staring at nothing, and then begin to cry.

  Some friends acted as though having a child murdered was like a disease they or their children might catch, and made up reasons not to see them. Others were simply insensitive. Peggy told the woman who ran the child-care center where she worked that she needed to take a break because the sound of happy children was too much. The woman asked, “Well, when do you think you might come back to work?”

  They were no longer just a nice, middle-class couple. They were the parents of a murder victim and that made them different. Some of their friends and relatives had reached the point of suggesting that they “get over it.” Or they offered platitudes like “time heals all wounds,” which Peggy thought was bullshit; there were some wounds that time had no effect on whatsover.

  “This is her garnet ring,” Peggy said to the jurors. She paused to recover for a moment and then carried on. “This was her gold chain.”

  As the mother of his victim testified, Salmon sat with his head down, no expression on his face, drawing on the legal pad. Mercifully, his attorneys had no questions for Peggy and she was allowed to step down and flee the courtroom with her husband.

  The following day, near the end of the session, Dan Zook called Detective Pat Crouch, who’d since retired, to the stand to testify about his interview with Salmon. His testimony was key to demonstrating that the defendant was more than just a toy “wound up” by Woldt—that he’d participated in the planning and execution of the rape and murder of Gielinski as an equal partner.

  As the former detective noted, Salmon took pains to point out that they’d taken turns cutting and stabbing Gielinski. The defendant, he said, didn’t try to blame the killing on Woldt or claim that he was coerced.

  In fact, speaking in a monotone voice, Salmon has shown no remorse, only remarking that: “Killing her was the worst experience of my life.” Crouch noted that Salmon ate his breakfast from McDonald’s while calmly going over the details of the ra
pe and killing. “I would have thought it would be real difficult to continue eating while describing what happened,” he said. “But he had no problems with it.”

  On cross-examination by Enwall, the retired detective agreed with the lawyer’s statement that he thought Salmon’s behavior, given the circumstances, was “extraordinary.” Enwall asked Crouch if he thought that the pair intended to “torture” Jacine Gielinski. No. The detective shook his head. “There’s no doubt she felt a great deal of pain. They just didn’t know how to kill her.”

  When Crouch finished testifying, Zook turned slightly to the Gielinskis and nodded. They stood and hurried from the courtroom to avoid seeing what came next: the photographs taken at the crime scene on a four-foot-by-eight-foot screen.

  The jurors, of course, had no such option. Instead, they had to endure the scene of Jacine Gielinski’s nude body lying facedown in a large pool of blood. Other close-ups showed the slashes to her throat, the puncture wounds in her chest, and the wounds to her hand and wrist.

  As two jurors began to cry openly, the defense attorneys jumped to their feet and angrily demanded that the judge declare a mistrial. The photographs were “prejudicial,” they said. But the attorneys had been over this territory before. The photos were going to be admitted into evidence; the jury would just have to deal with them the best they could.

  For the first time in two days, Salmon stopped drawing and put his pen aside. However, he did not look up at the screen where the photographs were being displayed, but instead dropped his chin farther yet and stared at the floor beneath the defense table.