Killer Triggers

by Joe Kenda

  The Eric Houston murder investigation, led by yours truly, was the first in Colorado to solve a murder with DNA evidence. But this science was still very new in those days, and to try it, we had to beat up our district attorney and wear him down to get permission—and spend public funds of about $2,500.

  There were only a couple of reliable testing places at the time. We shipped the bloody socks and clothing from Houston’s dingy motel room off to a Cellmark Diagnostics lab in England for comparison to blood samples “donated” by our suspects, Anaya and Chavez.

  But once we had the results, they gave us enough information to confront our two suspects and make them squirm. We brought in both Arthur Anaya and Bobby Chavez for questioning—separately, of course.

  Arthur wasn’t hard to find. When we went looking for him, we found it quite interesting that he had just been sentenced to prison again for another horrifying crime. A year earlier, he’d shot someone with a handgun—his own niece. Twice.

  Before he could get settled into his new prison cell, we brought him in for a visit and presented him with a warrant for first-degree murder with his name on it.

  “I’m not gonna say a word,” he said.

  “That is not a problem, Mr. Anaya. We have a lot of words for you, starting with ‘Your ass is grass.’ ”

  Arthur Anaya didn’t have to give us anything. He had already given us all we needed. He was a blood donor. We took samples from him, and thanks to the new DNA testing methods, we had scientific proof that his blood was found at the scene of Eric Houston’s murder.

  We had run a DNA test and found that blood and hair samples from the floor and the sink in Eric Houston’s residence matched Arthur Anaya. Once we homed in on him, we also found jewelry and other property he had stolen and concealed in an apartment, as well as a letter he’d written, in which he said he was sorry he killed Eric Houston.

  We had more than enough evidence to charge Anaya and put him away for a long, long time. His badass buddy Bobby Chavez was also headed for a cell. We matched his fingerprints to those found on a vodka bottle in Houston’s motel room. We tracked down Chavez in Trinidad, Colorado, where he was working for a laundry service. Apparently, he was trying to clean up his act.

  It was too late. We charged them both with first-degree murder and won convictions on both.

  Obviously, Eric Houston’s life meant nothing to these two cold-blooded career criminals. They snuffed it out for a cheap boom box and cassette player. I hope they got some good tunes out of it, because now the music has stopped for that pair of assholes.

  I’m fairly certain Sir Alec Jeffreys never set foot in the Armadillo Motel, or even Colorado Springs, but his research and discovery certainly had an impact on this difficult and drawn-out case.

  Eric Houston’s life meant something to my homicide squad and to me. We kept searching for his killer, and eventually, we caught a big break, tapped into some first-class forensic technology, and put two very bad men away for the rest of their lives.

  Now, it did take us about nine years, but that is the reality of being a police detective. The Hollywood gun battles and sexy-sidekick version may be fun to watch for a couple of hours, but in the end, it is meaningless. Solving Eric Houston’s murder was not meaningless. Putting those two vicious pricks away was not meaningless.

  Sure, the day-to-day grind of long investigations, and the hot leads that turn into cold crap could drive me bat-shit crazy, but when the prison doors closed on Arthur and Bobby, the feeling was better than sex!

  Chapter Ten:

  A Killer Pack

  the trigger: jealousy, revenge, and rage

  Nevada Avenue is a divided four-lane roadway running through the heart of Colorado Springs. In the early 1990s, the downtown stretch of this busy thoroughfare was lined with fast-food joints, bars, and other businesses that attracted the late-night young and restless crowd.

  Cruising in cars and packing the sidewalks, everybody who wanted to see and be seen headed to the Ave back then.

  If you were a teenage girl, you probably left home looking respectable enough, but on the way, you and your girlfriends changed into outfits less suited for church and more likely to attract male attention.

  Not that males of that age require any enticement.

  Olympic-caliber flirting and posturing were prevalent. Guys flexed and strutted like peacocks on parade. Just the sight of so many females tormented them into dazed foolishness.

  Raging hormones and the age-old competition for the attentions of the opposite sex added volatility to the scene. The potential for mayhem increased with an incendiary mix of horny high school dudes, long-haired frat boys, wannabe gangbangers, and off-duty GIs sporting high and tight military cuts.

  Just add alcohol, stir up conflict, and all hell could break loose—and did.

  In the early 1990s, the party atmosphere along the Ave slowly gave way to darker behaviors. Fights became more common as the summer began, and the levels of violence heated up with the weather.

  In July 1991, a sixteen-year-old was shot five times with a rifle while he sat with his girlfriend in a vehicle outside the Original Hamburger Stand in the popular area. That marked our eighteenth killing in what would prove to be a deadly year.

  With blood in the air and the zoo in an uproar, Colorado Springs PD assigned special details of patrol officers to cruise and walk the Ave on nights when the wild ones went a-prowling in large and lustful hunting parties.

  Our guys tried to calm down the kids, but we didn’t have the troops to post up at every corner or to counter human nature at its worst.

  mob mentality

  Even pampered pets have been known to turn vicious when prowling in packs. Neanderthals hunted in gangs, and gangs still act like Neanderthals. Cops know all too well that their fellow men and women aren’t all that far removed from primal cave creatures.

  Whether it’s members of the Crips shooting it out with the Bloods, or fans of the Hurricanes thumping fans of the Gators, our allegedly advanced species can devolve into a pack of human hyenas in seconds.

  Revenge. Jealousy. Alcohol-and-hormone-fueled barbarity. Whatever the provocation, emotional triggers get pulled, someone goes down, and the pack scatters, leaving victims dead and loved ones at a loss to explain the viciousness of it all.

  The Ave was still on an angry edge that fall when, on Sept. 11, 1991, two young Fort Carson soldiers, Army Specialist Layne Schmidtke, twenty-four, and his twenty-three-year-old buddy Army Sgt. Joseph Reeves, were strolling on a Saturday night through the partying crowds.

  Music was blaring from cars and bars. Hundreds of thrill-seekers packed the sidewalks and overflowed into the streets. The off-duty army buddies in civilian dress were heading back to Layne’s apartment around eleven thirty p.m., after a few drinks.

  These soldiers had not overindulged. They weren’t trying to pick up women. They weren’t belligerent or acting wild.

  Reeves would later note that they had mostly talked about Schmidtke’s recent return from duty in South Korea and his plans to leave the army soon. He intended to rejoin his wife, Jackie, and twin daughters, Jessica and Jennifer, in his small Minnesota hometown, where his family ran Schmidtke’s Dry Cleaning.

  Those hopes and dreams were destroyed in a matter of seconds.

  the ave becomes deadly

  As the two soldiers walked toward a group of about twenty-five teenagers hanging out on the sidewalk, a female in the group shouted what sounded like a warning of some kind. It was directed at them, telling them to be careful and to cross the street.

  Schmidtke and Reeves were just walking by. They didn’t understand the nature of her warning, but sensing the tension, they stepped off the sidewalk onto a crosswalk to avoid the teens.

  It didn’t matter. A muscular teenager confronted them anyway.

  “What are you doing on my block?” he said.
“This is our corner.”

  Two other male teens joined in, smelling blood in the air.

  Reeves and Schmidtke did not beat their chests and roar back at their challengers. Instead, they turned away from them, intending to cross the street.

  But the pack descended.

  Schmidtke never saw the first punch coming.

  Reeves turned and saw his friend take a hard punch to the back of his head. He ran, thinking Schmidtke was following. He did not see his friend go down.

  When he reached the other side of the street, Reeves turned and saw his buddy facedown in the street and under vicious attack.

  A pack of teenagers kicked at his head and upper torso. Instinctively, he curled into a fetal position, his hands wrapped around his head.

  Someone standing nearby yelled, “Cops! Cops! Cops!”

  Several girls and at least one boy were pleading with the attackers to stop.

  “So? I don’t care,” one of the attackers said to them angrily. “If you want, you can be next.”

  Reeves ran to help his friend, leaping and sprawling on top of him to ward off the blows. The attackers kicked at him, too.

  Reeves heard the dazed Schmidtke say, “What the . . . ?”

  “The police are coming!”

  The teens backed off. Most scattered. But one returned. He stood over the fallen soldier, reared back, and kicked Schmidtke in the head as if booting a football.

  Then he ran, too.

  Reeves crawled to a standing position but could hardly stay on his feet. Sirens blared. He stayed by his friend, hoping help was on the way.

  A crowd of seven hundred or more had gathered around the street corner. Calls poured into our emergency lines.

  Our patrol officers and the ambulance crew found Layne Schmidtke unconscious and bleeding from the nose and mouth. His bloodied and dazed friend told them strangers had attacked them for no reason.

  Witnesses told the patrol officers that two males in blue shirts and blue jeans were seen running toward a nearby building. One of the officers pursued them in his squad car while the other called for an ambulance and backup.

  The officer cut them off with his squad car. While cuffing them, he noticed blood on their clothing.

  As he returned to the crime scene, a police dispatcher reported that this was no longer just a street fight. A homicide had occurred.

  Schmidtke had died at Memorial Hospital thirty minutes after the attack. An American soldier killed on “friendly” ground by those he had served and protected.

  I was home and in bed after a long night investigating another murder when the initial call came in. The location did not surprise me: the corner of Nevada Avenue and Pikes Peak Avenue.

  Layne Schmidtke had died of blunt-force trauma resulting from multiple blows to his skull. From the looks of the report, every square inch of his upper body was battered repeatedly.

  His liver was lacerated, his ribs were broken, and a lung was punctured. If the head injuries hadn’t killed him, the internal bleeding would have ended his life eventually.

  What had he done to deserve such a brutal beating? And what sort of animals could possibly do this to another human being?

  a mob of witnesses and suspects

  Early reports were that we had a mob of suspects and a mob of witnesses. Our most reliable source, or so we thought, was the second victim, Joseph Reeves, who survived his injuries. The problem was, he had no idea what had triggered the assault.

  Reeves insisted that he and Schmidtke had done nothing to provoke their attackers. They had simply been walking down the street, discussing their plans for the future, when they were assaulted.

  There was no reason to doubt him. His confusion was as palpable as his grief over his lost friend, whom he had described as “a mild-mannered guy with a wife and two kids.”

  We had our hands full with this homicide investigation. We had to sort out eyewitness testimony from hundreds who saw, or thought they saw, the attack on the two soldiers.

  Their accounts and their descriptions of those involved often conflicted. People see crimes from different angles, filtered through their own experiences. And all too often, they lie.

  Our job is to sort it all out and somehow reach the truth.

  We weren’t stopping until we had it. I told everyone we talked to that we would never give up on this case. We would not get distracted or go on a vacation to the fucking French Riviera. This was a murder in our town, and we would lock up the killers.

  So lie to us all you want. We will figure it out.

  “We’re better at this than you amateurs. We do it every damned day.”

  red flags

  When I arrived at the scene, both beating victims had been taken to the hospital. There was a considerable amount of blood on the street—more like what you’d expect from a knife fight or multiple shooting.

  Our crime scene techs were all over it, taking samples, looking for anything in the street that might have belonged to the assailants or the victims.

  We had in custody two possible suspects with blood on their clothing. They had run away from us, which didn’t hurt my feelings or help their chances with a judge.

  As I gathered information and directed my troops, a patrol officer came up and introduced us to a third possible suspect, also with blood on his shirt. He’d been found on the street with all the gawkers, apparently unaware that his stained clothing said, “Arrest me.”

  I gave him the once-over, and he looked at me as if to say, “What are you looking at me for?”

  Instead of indulging my urge to kick him in the ass, I had him put in the back seat of a police cruiser after inviting him to contemplate what life in prison might be like.

  Next, a patrolman brought to me a kid who’d been running his mouth about what happened. A vocal member of the peanut gallery. He seemed to crave attention.

  This fifteen-year-old whistle dick might have weighed 150 pounds soaking wet. He had a terminal case of acne and appeared to be hyped up on something. Maybe it was a sugar high from eating too many Skittles.

  I’d go with that. He didn’t look as though he could afford meth. Yet.

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “Playboy,” he said.

  That wouldn’t have been my first guess. So I couldn’t help myself.

  “Why ‘Playboy’?”

  “Because it helps me get girls.”

  I marked this meatball as a waste of time but decided not to send him packing yet.

  “Well, I don’t see any starlets hanging on your arms, so how about you give me some ID.”

  As it turned out, the world’s most unlikely playboy actually did come through with some physical descriptions of the attackers, which would prove helpful.

  We also learned from other witnesses that the six or seven guys who attacked the soldiers were all about the same age, but of diverse ethnicities—Black, Latino, and white—which seemed unusual. There were other reports that most of the attackers attended the same high school, which would prove useful as well.

  But this would be a grinder of a case. And I would be the grist.

  talking heads

  What did not help the investigation was the sensational and overblown coverage of the killing by local television stations.

  The panic-inducing message blasted for months on the nightly news was “Killers on the Loose! Your Children Are Not Safe! Downtown Is a Killing Zone! ”

  Oh, yeah, citizens of Colorado Springs! Hide under the bed with a grenade in one hand and an Uzi in the other.

  It really irked me.

  The talking heads on TV kept calling this “the most violent murder in city history.”

  I called bullshit on that.

  I wasn’t nearly as old as the city of Colorado Springs, and yet I’d investigated much wor
se homicides just on my watch—murders that involved body parts being cut off and brain bits blown all over the place.

  That very year, we had a murder in which a guy was beaten to a pulp with an aluminum baseball bat. The coroner figured he’d been hit at least a hundred times. He was unrecognizable. Every bone in his body was broken. By the time that killer was done, the poor guy looked like a duffel bag stuffed with blood and broken bones. When we arrived and saw the carnage, I wasn’t sure it was a human body until I saw his shoes nearby.

  Certainly, the Schmidtke murder was a terrible and senseless crime, but the television toads were running amok with their coverage.

  Their reason for doing this had a lot more to do with boosting their station’s ratings and their own careers than with presenting the truth to their viewers.

  career climbers

  Can you tell that I didn’t have much use for television reporters? On the other hand, I learned to respect most of the newspaper reporters who covered crimes in our city. They seemed to be doing their best to get to the truth, even if some of them couldn’t find their ass with both hands.

  Being a television reporter or news anchor is considered a glamour job, which explains their blow-dried haircuts, professionally chiseled facial features, four layers of slathered-on makeup, and stylish clothing subsidized by their stations.

  Newspaper reporters, on the other hand, are known as “ink-stained wretches” for a reason. There is nothing glamorous about their job. They tend to look as if they slept on a park bench under yesterday’s obituary section. And unlike the TV trolls, they don’t get asked to host telethons or play in celebrity golf tournaments.

  Colorado Springs is not a prime television market. Most of the on-air “talent” had ambitions to work their way up to bigger stations, in bigger markets that paid more and moved them a step closer to network jobs. They hyped up their stories to make them seem important so that when managers at bigger stations looked at their résumé tape reels, they’d be impressed.