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

by Steve Jackson

  “I felt she was my own daughter. I would have done anything for her. I would have died for her. She had a smile that warmed anybody’s heart.”

  When the horrible news came that night back in April 1997, Bob said, his wife began crying and screaming “as if she was feeling Jacine’s pain as she was raped and murdered.”

  Bob, too, acknowledged that nothing would ever be the same. “Our marriage is shaky at times now. I pray ours will last. … All I can think about is what happened that night to Jacine. I can’t imagine how she felt.

  “We couldn’t bear the thought of the way she was, her body violated. We had her cremated. We saved some stuff for Jacine but we can’t bear to look at it. We’ve gone through a lot of therapy. It’s affected my job. I just sit there and stare. This is my reality.”

  Bob turned to look at the judges, each one in the face, as tears poured down his own cheeks. “I’m not looking for revenge,” he said. “I’m looking for punishment that fits the crime. Lucas Salmon will have the comfort of family and friends. Jacine didn’t have that chance. She was by herself and alone.”

  The next day, the final day of the hearing, Lucas Salmon stood at the defense table and spoke for the first time. The traditional apology was called allocution and was allowed without the prosecution being able to cross-examine him.

  Throughout the trial and the hearing, Salmon had certainly played the role asked of him by his defense attorneys. He sat quiet as a mouse, doodling on a legal pad—the inept, immature, social misfit living in a fantasy world as the “adults” around him argued over his fate. But now he spoke clearly, almost eloquently, and with a strong, certain voice.

  Salmon said he wished he’d pleaded guilty from the beginning and not let his attorneys talk him into a trial. He hated himself for what he had done.

  “It seems pretty disingenuous to apologize now for something I could have stopped two years ago,” he said. “If I could give up my life to bring Jacine back, I’d do that, but we all know that can’t be done.

  “Just as no member of my family asked for leniency, neither will I.”

  Neither did prosecutor Dan Zook when he gave his closing arguments. He went over the evidence and how it proved the aggravating factors. As he reviewed the details of the murder, the Luiszers dropped their heads and covered their ears.

  “Being raped by one man is an extreme horror, but two people?” Zook said. “Doesn’t that qualify as cruel and heinous? Doesn’t that add horror and torture? The defendant did what only can be described as evil.

  “There was often a place where he could have stopped. Where the voice of reason and humanity gives you the chance to stop.”

  Instead, the time they took to attack and then consider what to do next only made Jacine’s torment “prolonged and remorseless.” Then Salmon and Woldt high-fived each other “to celebrate what they did. And this,” he said, showing the photographs of Jacine’s bloody, battered body, “is what’s left.”

  Zook concluded his thirty-minute closing, “Isn’t life so precious … that society has the right to exact the highest penalty for a crime so random, vicious, cruel and heinous?”

  After the prosecutor took his seat, Cleaver delivered the defense closing. She stressed that Woldt was the one who’d come up with the idea and that Salmon had been under duress, afraid of losing his friend. “An oddball … friendless, but harmless.”

  She recounted the testimony of her experts that Salmon was wholly under the influence of Woldt, “a psychopath and sexual sadist.”

  “But for the acts of another, he would not have committed this crime,” Cleaver said. “Lucas Salmon is mentally ill. Do we execute the mentally ill in Colorado?

  “He did a horrible thing and a terrible thing, but he is not a horrible and terrible person. I wonder what more violence can accomplish here. I know there are people in Colorado who have compassion and mercy and understanding.”

  Cleaver sat and Zook rose again for rebuttal. He countered Cleaver assertions by reading from Salmon’s confession.

  “‘We both agreed it was something we would like to do,’ ” he read, then looked up at the judges. “Does this sound like duress?”

  Then, finally, it was over. Outside the courtroom, the Luiszers told the press that they were not impressed by Salmon’s apology.

  “It’s too little and too late for signs of remorse,” Bob said. “His saying he’s sorry doesn’t make it okay. I don’t forgive him.”

  Peggy said that while she felt Lucas Salmon was sincere, “he should have said so right after the murder, not waited two years.” Now, it didn’t matter. “Apology not accepted. It never will be,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “He’ll get his in prison.”

  June 24, 1999

  The courtroom was again packed. The atmosphere so tense that every little sound seemed magnified, every emotion on the brink of breaking loose like an avalanche. The judges had deliberated for a week, but now they were ready to pronounce Salmon’s fate.

  Before reading their verdict, Judge Parrish sternly warned against any outbursts. “This is an emotional time for everybody here, a solemn time and a serious time,” he said.

  Parrish glanced around the courtroom as if looking to see if anyone was about to disobey his order. Then he proceeded. “I asked the judges and myself to make certain they had made their decision with legal and intellectual honesty, and I’m convinced each of us has.”

  Peggy Luiszer sat quietly, lost in thought about another tragedy. That morning as they drove down to Colorado Springs for the umpteenth time, they’d passed through Castle Rock where just two days earlier, a man named Simon J. Gonzales took his three young daughters— Rebecca, ten, Katheryn, eight, and Leslie, seven—to a fast-food restaurant. He then went to a store, bought a gun, and shot the girls to death inside his truck. That night, with their bodies still inside the vehicle, he drove to the parking lot outside the police department and, after firing several shots at the building, died in a hail of gunfire. He left a note saying he’d killed his daughters to get even with his estranged wife.

  Peggy didn’t understand how Gonzales could have taken the lives of his three precious children. She’d only had one child herself, a beautiful, vibrant daughter, and would have given anything to have her back. But there was no real answer to why Gonzales did such a horrible thing, just as there had been no real answer to why Salmon and Woldt had done such a horrible thing.

  The judges had no answer either. In their written opinion, the panel noted up front that their decision was not a comment on the guilt or innocence of Woldt, who had yet to be tried. There was no getting around mentioning the co-defendant, however, as “Salmon’s involvement is inextricably linked to Woldt’s alleged involvement.”

  The panel agreed that the prosecution had proved most of its aggravating factors, including that the murder had been “especially heinous, cruel and depraved,” and that the “acts were done in a conscienceless or pitiless manner which was unnecessarily torturous to the victim.”

  The judges’ decision continued: “While it borders on the absurd to speak of murders in terms of their being senseless, it is noted that the more common reasons people kill each other are not apparent in this case—for example, greed or revenge. This murder was senseless to the degree that it was for the purpose of carrying out a twisted fantasy causing enormous and unquantifiable pain and damage to others for momentary gratification.”

  As mitigators, the judges accepted Salmon’s age and lack of maturity. And while he had lived in a religious family, attended Bible study and a Christian college and so knew that what he was doing was wrong, they said, under Woldt’s “considerable domination,” his ability to conform his conduct to the requirement of the law was “significantly impaired.” The judges noted that Salmon’s life before the murder stood in “stark contrast” to what he did to Jacine Gielinski, and also allowed that he had cooperated with the police, at least after he was caught.

  When
it came to the third step in the process, the judges said there was no doubt that the aggravators far outweighed the mitigators. “The horror of Jacine Gielinski’s death is virtually incomprehensible, and it is the judgment of the panel that this aggravating factor alone outweighs the mitigation found to be present in this case,” they determined. That meant that Salmon fell “within the legislatively defined category of persons eligible for the death penalty.”

  There was only one more step, the fourth step, during which the judges had to decide whether, all things considered, Salmon “deserved” to die. But here they could not agree.

  Judge Frasher’s was the dissenting vote that saved Lucas Salmon’s life. At the start of the hearing, Cleaver had tried to have Frasher removed from the panel, arguing that the former public defender had a conflict of interest because he had worked with one of Woldt’s lawyers, Doug Wilson. But now he was the man who saved her client.

  Frasher noted that the “presumptive sentence”—unless proved otherwise—was a life sentence. “I am unaware of any modem historical precedent in the State of Colorado for the execution of an individual with the characteristics of Lucas Salmon,” he said. “The imposition of the death penalty on Lucas Salmon in this case would substantially lower the threshold for the imposition of the sentence of death in the state.

  “It is human instinct to want to strike out at the perpetrator—to strike out at Lucas Salmon, to smite him dead as a symbolic act of retribution and vengeance for Jacine Gielinski and her family. Additionally, there is an emotional temptation to feel that the imposition of a sentence less than death demeans the value of Jacine Gielinski’s life and the profound tragedy of her death or trivializes the depth of the loss sustained by her family and friends.

  “As tempting as it may be,” he continued, “I am not permitted, nor should I be permitted, the luxury of seeking vengeance out of the righteous emotionality which understandably surrounds this case. It is my conclusion that I am not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the execution of Lucas Salmon is necessary and appropriate.”

  So in the end, it was the proportionality review that had swayed one judge. And one judge was all the defense needed, as the Danny Martinez case had shown.

  Judges Booth and Parrish disagreed with Frasher. Even if the crime was Woldt’s idea, “Lucas Salmon willingly signed on and, in time, fully embraced the horror,” Judge Booth wrote. “He never argued against it. Never suggested that they keep this in the realm of fantasy. Salmon’s previous lifestyle was respectable, his service to others laudable, but his crimes were horrific.

  “That nobody has been sentenced to death in the past twenty years in this state who has Salmon’s characteristics is not surprising,” Booth said. “Salmon is unique.”

  Arguing that Salmon didn’t deserve the death penalty because he didn’t fit the profile of other men on death row ignored all the aggravating factors, Judge Parrish said. “Especially the horror of the crime itself in the calculus of the propriety of the death sentence in this case. The loss to the family and friends of Jacine Gielinski is enormous. Whatever action is taken by this panel, the death and manner of death of Ms. Gielinski will never be comprehensible.

  “For this sentencer, the only adequate response beyond a reasonable doubt, in light of the circumstances of this case, is a measure of justice in fair and equivalent proportion to the actions of the defendant. He should be sentenced to death.”

  The decision was not read aloud in the courtroom. All Parrish said was that “as this is not the unanimous conclusion of the panel, by operation of law, he is sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.”

  Neither Lucas Salmon nor the Luiszers reacted emotionally to the announcement. Bob Salmon stood and reached over the barrier to hug Lauren Cleaver, breaking into loud sobs. Friends of Jacine raced from the courtroom, also crying.

  However, not until she was outside the courtroom did Peggy allow her eyes to fill with tears. Even then she spoke matter-of-factly. “We’ll live with the decision. Eventually justice will be done. I can’t imagine being twenty-three years old and living to die in jail. He’s not going to make fifty years in prison.

  “I’m done with the case now. It’s out of my mind. But I don’t forgive him, and it isn’t going to weigh heavy on my soul for not forgiving him. He’ll get his in prison, I have no doubt.”

  Bob Salmon also addressed the media outside the courtroom. Wiping away his tears with a tissue, he said, “I think there is some value for Lucas to wake up every morning for the next fifty years knowing what he has done.”

  Looking over at the Luiszers, he added, “I just hope that this gives them a chance for, perhaps, closure.”

  Afterward, the Luiszers and other family members, friends, and some members of the press went to a restaurant across the street. They’d grabbed copies of the judges’ thirty-nine-page opinion and learned of Frasher’s dissenting vote, though they were not surprised.

  Day after day, they’d watched his demeanor. He rarely took notes or seemed to pay much attention to the witnesses. He never participated in the discussions when the lawyers raised objections, or asked for a conference before the judges over legal points. Worse, he seemed to have made his mind up before the hearing even began, and that the only question for him was how he was going to explain his reasons.

  So they had braced themselves for the inevitable conclusion. At the restaurant, the Luiszers and their supporters gathered in front of a television screen to listen to the noon news about the judges’ decision. When Frasher’s face appeared on the screen, Peggy reacted not with words but by raising her hand and extending her middle finger.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “The careless flow of time.”

  The reaction to Judge Frasher and his decision roared in fast and furious. The judge and his colleagues on the panel declined to comment, noting that there was a second trial and a potential death-penalty hearing still to come. But it seemed that just about everyone else had something to say.

  “He just didn’t seem involved at all,” Bob Luiszer told the press. “Everyone could see it. We were just wishing his mind was there. But knowing he had practiced with Doug Wilson for eight years, it’s no wonder he took the defendant’s side.”

  District Attorney Smith praised her prosecution team, pointing out that for two years they had sacrificed their personal lives—skipping vacations, working long unpaid hours. She then took the unusual step of criticizing a judge, saying Frasher’s decision demeaned the value of Jacine’s life and her family’s loss. “Lucas Salmon has been given the gift of life, a gift he took from Jacine Gielinski by torture and for his own pleasure, a gift he does not deserve,” she said.

  “We do have judges who do not believe in the death penalty,” she said. “There is an obligation under the law for any judge who believes he could not in good conscience follow the law in a case to recuse himself. “Judge Frasher’s opinion contains an extensive discussion of how ‘meaningful’ a life sentence is. It sounds as if this judge, a former public defender, is opposed to the death penalty in principle as it is written. Two judges agreed that death was the appropriate penalty.”

  Former Colorado Springs police detective Pat Crouch, who’d taken Salmon’s confession, said to the Gazette, “You’ve got to ask yourself where the justice is. The DAs met the burden of proof. Why haven’t the judges?”

  The tactics of Salmon’s defense team were the subject of a biting cartoon by Chuck Asay that ran in the Gazette. (Reprinted courtesy of Chuck Asay and Creators Syndicate Inc.)

  The Gazette took informal polls around the city, whose residents far and away thought Salmon should have received the death penalty. The reporter talked to students and faculty on the University of Colorado campus with the same results. “He’ll be fed and clothed with a place to sleep; he’ll be a ward of the state,” Nina Gomez, a communications professor who had Jacine in several classes, told the newspaper. “This punishment does not fit the crime.”r />
  A reporter went over to the Foothills Elementary School and talked to parents who were watching their children on the playground. They, too, voiced their frustration and disgust with the justice system, some of them noting that their faith in the system had been eroding ever since a more famous case captured the nation’s attention. “I am not surprised,” one such woman said. “Ever since O.J., I’m not surprised by anything.”

  State Senator Ray Powers, the Republican from Colorado Springs who sponsored the bill creating the death-penalty panels, lashed out at Frasher, saying he ignored the facts in the case. “I think it’s very difficult to explain to the public how this could have happened,” he said. “If this case, as much as I know about it, doesn’t qualify for the death penalty, I don’t know what case will.

  “My thought was that judges would base it on the facts, and not emotion or philosophy. This judge has done a disservice to our state and the victim’s family and friends.”

  Gazette columnist Ralph Routon chastised Frasher. “Jacine Gielinski and her parents deserved three judges who cared enough to have an open mind and pay attention. … James Frasher didn’t care. He took the easy way out, and then drove back to Pueblo. We can only hope, some day, he has to face Peggy and Bob Luiszer.”

  The newspaper also ran an editorial, noting that within hours of the decision its offices had been flooded with e-mails, letters and telephone calls registering “indignation, disgust and disbelief.” The newspaper followed suit: “If Salmon’s repugnant crimes don’t merit the death penalty in a society where most people support capital punishment, then pray tell what does?”

  The decision, according to the editorial, would further call into question the efficacy of the new death-penalty panels, which had meted out the ultimate penalty once in five tries. “It is troubling to contemplate whether the jury in the Salmon trial itself would have done any worse if it had weighed upon his punishment. It might even have done better.”