by Robert Scott
“So I had to go to other means. When I went to Florida, I couldn’t get a license. And I couldn’t get a copy of my birth certificate because I didn’t have any valid ID. And they were strict about it, because I wanted Chris to go get it. And I called them, and they said he couldn’t. It had to be me, or it had to be an attorney who had a copy of my valid ID. Which wasn’t happening!
“I went through all the boxes in the storage facility to see if I could find anything.” (This was possibly in Jacksonville, Florida.) “And I was about to send off for a certified copy of my driver’s license when they arrested me. There’s a lot of fishy stuff!”
Then Miriam and her brother talked about his family for a while, especially his kids’ activities, but she was clearly eager to get back to her current travails.
Miriam said, “My attorney told Chris if he ever had any messages for me to e-mail them, so I would get them. But he never did. But I’m glad he’s doing okay. I just wanted to let you know what’s going on here. Actually, I hardly know what’s going on except what I read in the newspaper.”
Her brother said, “I figure it will all work out okay.”
Miriam laughed and said, “Well, you’re not the one sittin’ here.”
He agreed about that.
Miriam added, “I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, but I think it will be all right. I think that the biggest thing is, I never said a word to anybody about anything. The DA doesn’t have enough stuff. They didn’t even turn on Alan’s computer to see that he didn’t have Internet access for two months. He’d been using mine for everything.” (This statement carried the implication that Alan had looked up about lethal doses of medication on the Internet.)
Miriam then asked, “Did you see Daddy?” Her brother said that he had done so the previous night. Miriam added, “Tell him . . . Well, don’t tell him anything. I’m not allowed to communicate with him.”
Truly surprised at this, her brother asked, “Why’s that?”
Miriam answered, “Because he’s on the DA’s witness list.”
“Oh, really!” her brother responded.
Miriam replied, “I found out about it through the newspaper here, but I don’t know if it’s true. Well, whether I get out of here or not, I want to write the book. Bye.”
It wasn’t until May 2009 that a preliminary hearing was held in the Mesa County District Court as to whether there was enough evidence to go to trial. ADA Rich Tuttle questioned witnesses, presented photos, financial statements, and CBI evidence. Miriam’s defense lawyers cross-examined the witnesses, but they did not reveal what their upcoming arguments would be.
Outside the courtroom, Tuttle told a reporter for Channel 11 News, “It’s really a kind of one-sided show, where the prosecution has the burden of making a standard, and that’s what the judge will rule on is whether we have put on sufficient evidence for the case to go to a jury trial.”
Most of the evidence Tuttle presented was already notated in investigators’ reports, but a few new things did crop up. One was that an autopsy report showed that Alan Helmick died of a gunshot wound to the head sometime between 3:15
A.M. and 12:15 P.M. on June 10, 2008. If he had been murdered at any time before Miriam left the house, supposedly around eight in the morning, then, of course, she must have been the shooter. If it occurred after she left, then there must have been another gunman, as she and her attorneys claimed. That the autopsy report could not pin down the time in a more exact manner left this question wide open.
As far as the gunshot residue test went, there had been no GSR on Miriam’s hands, body, or clothing, but there had been a small particle of GSR on the steering wheel of the car she had been driving on June 10, 2008. The prosecution declared this was proof that she had fired a gun on the morning of June 10. The defense claimed anyone could have fired a gun and then touched the steering wheel of the car. Or Miriam could have fired a gun preceding Alan’s death, and it would have nothing to do with his murder.
And for the first time, MCSO investigators revealed there had been one other suspect that they had looked at in the investigation. It was an individual who was an acquaintance of Miriam’s who lived in Boulder, Colorado. Investigators testified that this person had an alibi and was cleared of being a suspect. Just who that person was, they did not say.
Another interesting twist to the case was a contention by MCSO investigators that someone in the Helmick home on April 26, 2008, had rented the movie No Country for Old Men. Tuttle stated, “The movie, rented via Dish Network, includes a scene in which actor Javier Bardem’s character places an article of clothing in the gas tank of a car, lights it, and walks away into a pharmacy before the car explodes.”
Then Tuttle pointed out that four days after that movie rental, a rope-type wick was placed into the gas tank of a car Alan Helmick was sitting in, and the wick was set on fire. That the car didn’t explode was a miracle. And the main suspect in that car fire was Miriam Helmick. Less than two months after the car fire incident, Alan Helmick was shot to death in his own home.
In the end, district judge Valerie Robison ruled that there was enough evidence to go forward to a jury trial.
A few days later, Judge Robison was asked to make a ruling on whether evidence about the death of Miriam’s first husband, Jack Giles, would be heard by jurors in the upcoming trial.
ADA Tuttle contended that the death of Jack Giles was not a suicide, but rather was an instance of where Miriam had shot him to death and then made it look like a suicide.
Hebenstreit noted that Jack Giles was left-handed, but he was found clutching a revolver in his right hand, with his arm lying across his chest. Jack’s right thumb was in the gun’s trigger guard.
Tuttle added to the judge, “According to law enforcement authorities who routinely investigate suicides, this is an extremely unorthodox, if not extremely difficult, way to commit suicide.”
Judge Robison, however, responded, “Little, if anything, other than argument has been presented to indicate the defendant (Miriam Helmick) may have contributed to the death of Mr. Giles, or as asserted by the people that she murdered Jack Giles. Based upon all the evidence before the court, the court does not find by preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Giles was murdered and that the defendant committed the crime.”
The jury in the upcoming trial for the murder of Alan Helmick would not hear anything about the death of Miriam’s first husband, Jack.
By November 9, 2009, both the prosecution and the defense began questioning potential jurors. The parking lot across the street was filled with vehicles of the more than four hundred potential jurors who were going through voir dire. Security was tight, as court officers escorted the potential jurors through the security area and on to elevators to the actual courtroom. And as the Daily Sentinel noted, Nearly all of the hundreds of jurors have heard at least snippets, either through news reports or gossipy chatter among neighbors, about the allegations against 52-year-old Miriam Helmick of Whitewater.
The Daily Sentinel related that this was the area’s biggest trial since Michael Blagg had been found guilty of murdering his wife, Jennifer, in 2004. Blagg had received a life sentence in that trial.
Some of the questions asked of potential jurors, who had made the first cut, were about whether they had heard anything new about the case over the previous week, and whether it would be too much of a hardship to sit on a jury for four to five weeks. Another question was whether they could put out of their minds anything they had heard or read about the case, and only base their decisions on what evidence was presented in an actual trial.
Steve Colvin, the office head of the Grand Junction branch of the Colorado State Public Defenders, asked one prospective juror about the fact that she’d heard about the death of Jack Giles. Could she put that out of her mind in basing decisions, because no evidence was going to be coming into trial about Jack Giles?
Another problem for both the prosecution and the defense was that the Grand Junction area stil
l had a small-town feel to it, and many of the people either knew Alan Helmick, Miriam Helmick, or someone connected to the case. One prospective juror remembered Alan Helmick when he was a teenager. Another prospective juror worked at the Whitewater Post Office and heard all the talk about the murder case. Steve Colvin asked this prospective juror, “That (the murder) doesn’t happen every day, right?” The person replied, “Not in Whitewater!”
Finally, by November 10, 2009, a jury was impaneled for the upcoming trial. The jury was made up often men and six women, four of them being alternates. And one more detail was learned. Judge Valerie Robison ruled that Miriam Helmick would not be wearing cosmetics during the trial. This was because the sheriff ’s office had noted that eyeliner pencils and cosmetics were considered to be contraband in the jail where Miriam resided.
CHAPTER 31
A PATH OF GREED AND LONELINESS
Chief Deputy District Attorney (DDA) Tammy Eret had been an important component in the Michael Blagg trial of 2004. Now she was once again in a murder trial that had some similar characteristics of one spouse allegedly killing another, and trying to make it look like a burglary gone bad.
Eret began opening statements by telling the jurors that at the end of 2007, Alan and Miriam Helmick sat down with a life insurance agent. Alan wasn’t enthused about the idea, but in Eret’s words, “Miriam was raring to go.” Miriam later wanted the life insurance policy upped to a million dollars, but the limit for Alan was $250,000.
Wanting to implement that amount, the life insurance agent wrote and called Alan Helmick. Alan returned no messages, but Miriam did. She asked the agent, “Can we do this without him?” The agent said that would not be possible.
Alan Helmick eventually did take out a $25,000 life insurance policy, and Eret noted that six days after Alan’s murder, Miriam called the agent and asked how she could cash in that amount. The agent told Miriam that she couldn’t do so, because several monthly payments had been missed by Alan during the spring of 2008. And Eret contended that Alan missed those payments because Miriam was keeping all messages and mail from him.
Eret claimed that Miriam kept Alan isolated from friends and family for months, because she was raiding his bank accounts at an alarming rate. According to Eret, when Alan found out about this, Miriam murdered him and tried to make it look like a robbery gone bad. Eret declared, “When someone on the path to loneliness crosses paths with greed, the results are devastating!”
Eret also told the jurors that when Miriam’s desk at her business, Dance Junction, was searched, stacks of bills addressed to Alan were inside a drawer there, unopened. “She kept his phone. She refused to pass on phone messages to him, and she did everything to cover up her theft and forgery.”
Deputy public defender Jody McGuirk, of course, had a very different take about what had occurred in the Helmick household. McGuirk said that investigators ignored a series of leads, including a white pickup truck spotted on several occasions in the Helmicks’ neighborhood. McGuirk also said that two individuals, dressed in black, were spotted in the area at 6:00 A.M. on June 10, 2008—the same morning that Alan Helmick was shot to death.
McGuirk said that none of the other leads mattered to the investigators, because they’d already made up their minds that Miriam had murdered her husband. “From the get-go, she was treated like a suspect and not a victim.” In essence, McGuirk said, the investigators only collected evidence that would help what they believed had happened, and they ignored evidence if it veered off from that premise.
McGuirk did admit to the jurors that Miriam had made a “horrible error in judgment” when she purchased a greeting card and wrote on it: Allen was first. Your next. Run, run, run.
The deputy public defender said that Miriam had done so because no investigator was taking her seriously about mysterious things occurring at her home after Alan’s murder. And no investigator would take her seriously about the white pickup truck. According to McGuirk, the reason they didn’t was that they only wanted the pieces that fit into what they wanted to believe about Miriam being the prime suspect.
Actual testimony and admission of evidence began with the prosecution showing the jurors a series of photos of the crime scene at the Helmick home. Many of the photos were of Alan Helmick lying on the floor, with a pool of blood at the back of his head. Several drawers were open and a wastebasket was pushed over, but nothing else seemed to be disturbed. One photo after another depicted expensive items still untouched in the home.
Then the eighteen-minute 911 tape was played as Miriam spoke with the emergency operator. While the audiotape was played to jurors, Miriam sat at the defense table, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.
Deputy John Brownlee, the first law enforcement officer to arrive on scene on June 10, 2008, took the stand for the prosecution. On direct, he spoke of the things he had seen and how Miriam had acted when he got there. All of this went fairly smoothly until the subject of how Josh Vigil acted that day, as opposed to the reaction of Miriam Helmick, commenced. Steve Colvin asked Judge Robison for a sidebar, which was granted.
Out of the hearing of jurors, Colvin said, “I’m objecting to this witness (Brownlee) offering lay opinion testimony.” In other words, Colvin was saying that Deputy Brownlee was not an expert witness on how someone should react when they found out that someone they knew had been murdered.
Tammy Eret responded, “I would say that this evidence is proper.”
Judge Robison decided that the objection was overruled and Brownlee could state his opinion about how he viewed Josh Vigil’s reaction and Miriam Helmick’s reaction.
Eret questioned Brownlee, saying, “So Josh Vigil fell within the part of being very upset and crying?”
Brownlee responded, “Yes, ma’am.”
“What about the defendant? Did she fall within either one of these categories?” (The two categories were considered to be visibly very upset or noticeably not responsive.)
Brownlee said, “No, she did not. It was strange to me that she wasn’t like most people would react. When I asked her to leave the house, she went outside with Deputy Quigley. She didn’t ask why or make any protest.”
“Did she ask anything to you about whether you were going to do CPR or anything to save her husband?”
“No, ma’am. She never did.”
Eret wanted to know more about people who were non-responsive during an incident like what had occurred at the Helmick residence.
Deputy Brownlee replied, “They just shut pretty much completely down. You have to help them up because they’re not able to get up. They just kinda shut their bodies down.”
“When you looked around, were there any types of rags or washcloths or towels around the body to help clean some blood off or anything like that?”
“Not that I saw.”
Steve Colvin, on cross-examination, got Deputy Brownlee to admit that when he first entered the house, and saw a male lying on the kitchen floor, he knew there was a serious situation. And to be on the safe side, Brownlee searched the house until Deputy Pennay arrived. At that point, Brownlee returned to Miriam and Alan Helmick.
Colvin asked, “How long had you been in the house until you touched Alan Helmick to feel for a pulse?”
Brownlee answered, “It was about five minutes. He was cold to the touch and had no pulse.”
Brownlee agreed with Colvin that, in his opinion, Alan Helmick was already dead. For that reason, neither he nor Deputy Pennay did not do any CPR. Colvin wondered why Miriam should have done any CPR on a dead man, since she had already told the 911 operator that Alan was dead. Brownlee said it was his understanding that Miriam had told the 911 operator that she was trying CPR.
Colvin asked, “And when you saw the bullet casing on the floor, you knew that it was a crime scene, correct?”
Brownlee said that was so. And he also agreed with Colvin that he’d stayed at the Helmicks’ house for nearly six hours that day. Much of the time, he spent outside, maintaining secur
ity of the perimeter.
Colvin asked if Brownlee had put into his report of June 10, 2008, anything about his thoughts concerning the way Miriam Helmick had acted. Brownlee said that he had not. It wasn’t until his next report, thirty-six hours after he first arrived on scene, that he noted how he felt Miriam Helmick’s behavior was strange.
Colvin then asked how many death scenes he’d been to. Brownlee said about fifty. Wanting to know how many of those had been suicides, Brownlee answered ten to fifteen. Others had been accidents and natural deaths. When asked how many homicides Brownlee had been to, he admitted that the one at the Helmick house was his first.
Colvin queried, “Are you a trained psychologist?”
Brownlee replied, “No, I am not.”
“Are you trained in grieving processes or post-traumatic stress disorder or any of those psychological processes?”
“We have some basic classes, but nothing classroom oriented or anything like that.”
Brownlee did add that he’d taken training at the police academy and had follow-up courses on how to deal with people in traumatic situations. These included everything from traffic accidents to actual homicide.
Colvin asked, “You recall from training that the first thing they teach you about dealing with a traumatic event is that everyone acts differently, right?”
Brownlee answered that was true.
“When you first went there, she was not a suspect, right?”
“No, sir.”
“She’s a victim?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Because if you thought of her as a suspect, you wouldn’t have gone to clear the house and left her alone with Mr. Helmick, right?”
“Correct, sir.”
“Certainly wouldn’t have been turning your back on her, right?”
