by Robert Scott
“I didn’t watch the movie. I didn’t do it.”
“So it’s just a coincidence?”
“It would have to be.”
And now, Richard Tuttle got to the important aspect of the greeting card under the doormat at the Helmicks’ residence in Whitewater. The prosecutor had Miriam agree that she had purchased a greeting card on June 22, 2008. She would have had a hard time denying it, since she was caught on store security videotape.
Tuttle asked, “That’s the day you planned this whole thing to pull a ruse on the sheriff ’s department that somebody was out to get you and they had planted a card at your door. You started on June twenty-second by purchasing the card, correct?”
Miriam answered, “Yes.”
“And the murder was on June tenth. That’s a passage of just twelve days. What about the police interview of June nineteenth at your house?”
Miriam answered that an officer there had been “mean to her.” So Tuttle asked what she meant by this, and Miriam said, “He spoke to me in a very mean-spirited way.”
Tuttle countered, “You know that, that conversation was recorded?”
Miriam said that she hadn’t known that, and then she added that the officer had spoken that way after he had left the house, so he probably hadn’t had the tape recorder on at that time.
Asked about housekeeper Trish Erikson’s testimony, Tuttle wanted to know why Erikson would say that Miriam and Alan had had an argument on the day before he died. Miriam disagreed with Trish’s comments and said that she had not had a spat with Alan that day. She added, “I was just irritated with the way he wanted things done. I didn’t argue with him over it.”
Tuttle countered, “Ms. Erikson indicated that she had never been in the house when it was like that before.”
“Well, she only comes in the house once a month. She doesn’t see me enough.”
As far as canceling the horseback-riding lesson for Portia Vigil’s daughter, Tuttle said, “You told her a falsehood, correct?”
Miriam answered, “I told her what Alan asked me to tell her.”
“What about that he went to the Delta Elks Lodge, instead of stopping to see Portia, he got drunk, drove home, and had you put him to bed early. That was his creation?”
“That was his creation. But I didn’t say he got drunk. I said he had a bit too much to drink.”
“Would you agree, Ms. Helmick, that’s a pretty elaborate lie for him to concoct on his own?”
Miriam responded by asking a question: “Why couldn’t he do it on his own?”
“Well, it’s a pretty elaborate lie. And this is a man who was sick a large part of the year. Why didn’t he just say to Portia, ‘I’m sick,’ if he wanted to pull something over on her?”
“I have no clue.”
“In fact, at the time you told Portia that, you didn’t know that we would be able to talk to Chris Ranker and confirm that Alan never went to the Delta Elks Lodge that day, right?”
“I mean, I would have no . . . Why?”
“Would you agree that you were caught in a number of mistruths on what was going on in the afternoon and evening of June 9, 2008?”
“I just repeated what he asked me to say. I wasn’t happy about it.”
“You didn’t communicate to law enforcement on June 10, 2008, this whole elaborate set of mistruths that Alan supposedly directed you to say. You didn’t think it was important on June tenth after he was murdered?”
“There was a lot going on that day for me to remember everything.”
Richard Tuttle’s questioning of Miriam Helmick had been very pointed and unrelenting on December 3, and it only intensified the next day of testimony on December 4, 2009. Right off the bat, he questioned Miriam’s testimony that she only had contacted one person about dating in Florida, Charles Kirkpatrick. Tuttle now asked if she had actually contacted another man, named David Benables. (There was some confusion as to whether the last name was Benables or Venables.) Tuttle contended that she had contacted David by phone.
Miriam said she didn’t recall that name, and Tuttle countered it should have been easy to do so. David was rich, and had an English accent. Once again, Miriam said that the only man she remembered talking to on the phone was Charles Kirkpatrick.
Tuttle once again zeroed in on the greeting card placed under the doormat, and he wanted to know why Miriam had placed it there. Miriam responded, “The reason was that I didn’t think that they (law enforcement) were paying attention to me, especially after I reported the white truck the first time. Nobody bothered to ask me about it, come out and check on it, and I didn’t think they would believe me a second time. So I did the note to see if it would call their attention to the property.”
Tuttle related that law enforcement couldn’t respond directly to her, because she had already asked that everything go through her lawyer. And Investigator Jim Hebenstreit had even contacted the lawyer about this so-called white truck that was prowling around the Helmick home. Miriam said, “She didn’t tell me that they had done anything about it.”
Tuttle continued that Miriam had the opportunity to talk to Investigator Mike Piechota about the white truck on June 19, when he was out at the Helmick residence, and she hadn’t done so. Miriam claimed that on that occasion her lawyer had told her not to have a conversation with anyone associated with the investigation team.
Now Tuttle tried tripping Miriam up on her description of the driver of the white truck. She had testified on direct that the man had light-colored, curly hair. But when she spoke with her neighbor Josh Devries, she said the driver had curly black hair. Miriam responded that Devries must have heard wrong and that she always claimed the driver had light-colored, curly hair.
As far as being afraid of this driver, Katie Turcotte had testified earlier that Miriam told her that she was putting powder down on floors, to see if anyone disturbed the powder. Miriam testified now that Turcotte had gotten this wrong. Miriam had only talked about doing that, but she had never actually carried out the plan.
Tuttle was very skeptical about what he called a “cat-and-mouse game” between the supposed “real killer” and Miriam. Tuttle wanted to know if anything was stolen from the house when the person was supposedly coming inside the home after Alan’s murder and disturbing things there. Miriam answered that she didn’t notice anything that was stolen.
Tuttle asked her about some comments she had made at the time that she wished the killer would just come in and kill her as well. Miriam answered, “Half the time I wished that he did come back. I was having a tough time surviving. If he had come back, I probably wouldn’t have cared.”
CHAPTER 45
“THERE’S A ROGUE KILLER LURKING OUT THERE?”
Soon it was back to the greeting card, and Richard Tuttle asked, “When you told Penny Lyons, Colleen Scissors, Josh Devries, Merredith Von Burg, and Katie Turcotte about the greeting card, you were just acting at the time, weren’t you?”
Miriam responded, “Yes.”
“You were an actress?”
“Just briefly.”
“So you were acting when it comes to the greeting card, but you’re not acting when it comes to the suspicious white vehicle?”
“No. At the time, I was under the impression that nobody really cared, that nobody was going to come out and check anything. My attorney didn’t talk with me about it. Nobody called me back on it. I was out there all by myself, not knowing what to do. I’d never been in a situation like this before.”
“Okay, so you took the very dramatic step of buying a greeting card at City Market, writing out this threatening message to the grieving widow, ‘Alan was first, you’re next. Run, run, run.’ Planting it under your doormat, and pulling a big ruse on everybody, correct?”
“Yes.”
“How did you expect this to turn law enforcement in the direction of finding your husband’s killer?”
Miriam replied, “I thought that maybe they might monitor the road or come out and wa
tch the property.”
“But the entire time you lived there, from Alan’s death until you skedaddled out of town in July, nobody actually harmed you in any way, shape, or form, did they?”
“ No.”
As far as any security measures that Miriam did while she was there, she said she left the police tape on the door. Tuttle was incredulous about this and asked, “The tape wasn’t really going to stop a suspect from entering the house, correct?”
Miriam answered, “No, but you hear it rip off.”
“So, in the middle of the night when you’re in your bedroom, you would hear the tape on the front door rip off?”
Miriam replied, “I slept on the couch in the living room. I didn’t sleep in the bedroom.”
Sarcastically Tuttle said, “Well, that’s convenient! Why were you sleeping on the couch in the living room?”
Miriam responded, “Because I didn’t want to sleep in the bedroom. I didn’t want to be in there alone. The living room was in a central part of the house where I felt comfortable.”
Tuttle asked, “Is it safe to say that during this time frame, you were afraid you could be knocked off, whether you were in the house or down by the horses or anywhere, because it’s an isolated property, correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“Regardless of the ruse you pulled with the greeting card, you were afraid of this person in the white truck. And yet you asked Katie Turcotte to come out that same night and start feeding your horses, correct?”
Miriam answered, “I did. But she wouldn’t have been at the house.”
Tuttle queried, “But she would be down at the barn by herself, and you were exposing her to danger, weren’t you?”
Miriam disagreed and said, “I felt like somebody was after Alan and me. I didn’t think they would go after Katie.”
Tuttle didn’t take that for an answer, and he added, “So she’d be safe, even though there’s a rogue killer lurking out there? Coming by your property, going into the house, playing this cat-and-mouse game, and you thought she would be safe?”
“Well, I figured that she probably wasn’t a target.”
Moving to a different area of questioning, ADA Richard Tuttle wanted to know about all the traveling that Miriam said she did on the morning of June 10, 2008. Tuttle asked if she would agree that she made it known pretty quickly to the 911 operator and first deputy on the scene that she had been gone all morning and had arrived home to find Alan Helmick dead on the kitchen floor. Miriam agreed with that assessment.
Tuttle asked if it was correct that Alan was supposed to have gone to the Clifton Water offices to pay a bill that morning, and then he was going to take a truck in for servicing at a place called Shiners, on Highway 50. After that, they were supposed to meet for lunch, but there was no set time. Miriam disagreed with the last part, and she said that they had settled on a time of 11:00 A.M. at a Mexican restaurant named Dos Hombres. Later she had called him, because she wanted to change the restaurant to a Chinese place in Grand Junction.
Tuttle was very skeptical of Miriam’s explanation of why she had gone so many different places on the morning of June 10, with gasoline rates being so high at that time. He said she had gone to Walmart, and then clear across town to a Safeway, located on Horizon Avenue, just to buy a bag of carrots. Then she said she went back to a City Market at a different location in town to check on Alan’s prescriptions, and then backtracked eastward to a Hastings Bookstore to buy some coloring books for Alan’s granddaughters. Tuttle wanted to know why Miriam couldn’t have bought all those things at one location, at the Walmart store.
Miriam replied that she traveled to all of those locations, because the best items were at those establishments. She didn’t mind traveling around, since she wasn’t going to meet Alan for lunch until after eleven o’clock.
As far as lunch went, Tuttle wondered why Alan wasn’t calling her back, if she left so many voice messages for him. She said she thought it was because he had been upset with her the day before. So Tuttle wanted to know what he was upset about, and Miriam said, “He was keeping me at arm’s distance and didn’t really want to talk about things. When we talked about him doing errands that morning, he basically made it sound like there was no way I’d want to go with him because I didn’t want to sit in the truck all morning. It’s like he wanted to do it by himself. I was trying to understand what he wanted.”
If there had been friction between Alan and Miriam that morning, then Tuttle wanted to know why there was nothing in Miriam’s voice messages that indicated tension. Miriam answered, “I’m not the type of person to drag out anything like that. I supported him in whatever he did. So if he was having a tough time of it, I wanted to support him.”
“Well, if he didn’t want to be bugged by you, why did you keep leaving him voice messages?”
Miriam seemed to be breaking down more and more by this point. She replied, “I—I—I can’t . . . I don’t know how to explain why people do what they do.”
“So you’re really not getting along. He doesn’t want to talk with you, yet you leave him four voice mail messages spaced fairly evenly apart as you journey through town, telling him what’s going on and what you’re thinking about, and that sort of thing. You had just seen him forty-five minutes earlier when you left your first voice message?”
Before another question was asked, Miriam said, “Before he got to the shower, I gave him a hug and a kiss. And he went into the shower and I didn’t have a chance to really talk to him very much. We had discussed over coffee what we were going to do for the day. I still wanted him to know that no matter what was going on, up in his head, that I still loved him. So when I left the first message, it was very sweet.”
“Okay, so it wasn’t like you were on that bad of speaking terms, according to your testimony. He was going to meet you for lunch that day, correct?”
Miriam said that was so, but she added, “He was very agitated, and I was trying to understand that. I could only do what I could do. I just wanted him to know he had support.”
If Alan was so agitated, Tuttle asked, why was he willing to meet Miriam for lunch? Miriam answered that he wasn’t so much agitated with her, as he was about his businesses and his bad health over the previous year.
Richard Tuttle got back to the germane point, that Miriam went to a lot of places that morning, because she wanted receipts that she could later show to officers. Miriam said that wasn’t true. Tuttle then claimed that Miriam’s plans had been disrupted when Sue Boulware told her not to drive out to Loma, because gasoline was too expensive.
Miriam replied that the price of gas didn’t concern her, and said, “I could have driven out to Loma after lunch if I’d met with him.”
Tuttle asked, “Isn’t it fair to say, Ms. Helmick, that when Sue Boulware nixed your idea to go out there and pay the bill, you had to come up with a way to spend two or three hours wasting time?”
“No,” Miriam replied.
Tuttle added, “You had to find a way to have documentation of where you had been?” (So that Miriam could prove to police she was not home when Alan Helmick was supposedly murdered by an intruder.)
“No. I actually enjoyed being out a little bit. I liked putting the window down. It was a very nice day. I enjoyed doing it, even though I didn’t know some of the routes. This had nothing to do with whether I wanted to go to Loma or not.”
Tuttle asked, “Why not just mail the check to Sue Boulware?”
Miriam replied that she was just trying to be nice, because Sue was concerned about being paid. According to Miriam, she wasn’t trying to create alibis on June 10, 2008; she was just running a lot of errands on a nice day, and was enjoying driving around the area.
CHAPTER 46
“THAT GREETING CARD LED THEM TO THE REAL KILLER, DIDN’T IT?”
Richard Tuttle asked why Miriam had the receipts for all the items she bought that day so conveniently stuffed in a pocket, instead of her purse? So convenient,
in fact, she could readily pull them out and show officers where she had been. Miriam said that she often just put her receipts in her pocket. She’d learned that when a woman went to a store parking lot and opened her purse to put receipts inside, she became a target for theft.
Tuttle didn’t buy it. He responded, “You have a bunch of receipts in your purse from other shopping trips, yet these receipts on this day are in your pocket, and most of your cash is in your pocket, correct?”
Miriam claimed that her purse was overflowing with receipts, and that was the reason why she had stuffed those particular receipts in her pocket.
As far as the 911 call, Tuttle wanted to know why Miriam sounded so calm during it. He said, “You were pretty patient for having just come home and found your husband violently shot and bleeding to death on the kitchen floor. Would you agree with that?”
Miriam stated, “I didn’t know he’d been shot.”
“You knew something was desperately wrong with him, right?”
“Yes.”
“It was a pretty horrific thing to walk in on. And yet you were pretty patient with this rookie dispatcher, who didn’t even know where Whitewater was. Would you agree with that?”
Miriam answered, “I may have been patient on the outside, but it really kind of upset me when he couldn’t get the address the first or second time. It was very annoying.”
“You took the time to spell out S-I-M-I-N-O-E for him, correct?”
“Yes. He couldn’t get it right. So I had to spell it for him.”
When Tuttle said, “What I’m saying is, it’s not really consistent with a wife who just came home, startled to find her husband shot dead on the floor.”
Jody McGuirk objected, saying, “This is testifying.”
Judge Robison disagreed and overruled the objection. Then Robison told the jurors, “Comments made by attorneys are not testimony. They can certainly ask questions, and they do so during the course of a trial.” It may have been a polite way of telling Tuttle to actually ask a question of Miriam.
