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

by Steve Jackson

  The defense attorneys had not cared about the victim. The way Zook saw it, their trial tactics weren’t about justice or a defendant’s rights. They were about winning at any cost. In fact, the “homosexual advances” defense became the “defense theory du jour” used by other defense attorneys in subsequent trials when trying to explain why their clients would kill another man.

  Sometimes Zook wanted to quit. But then he’d win a conviction and the victim or the family would call to thank him or write a card. It made it worthwhile.

  The photograph of Heather was still in his desk drawer four years after her killer was caught. Now as Zook listened to Salmon and Woldt confess their crime, he wondered what new photograph would be added.

  He marveled at how Bjomdahl and Crouch could stay so calm; they’d even sent out for McDonald’s breakfasts— two Egg McMuffins with sausage and two orange juices. During the breaks, they would compare notes and discuss what questions to ask to check the stories against each other. It might help them decide if they were being told the truth, but it also might give them some insight into the reasons behind the crime and how each defendant would act in the future.

  For instance, Salmon wrote out in his confession, “The roots of this incident date back to approximately a month ago. My friend, George Woldt, and I viewed a film called Clockwork Orange.

  “This film depicted graphic scenes of violence, betrayal, and rape. It was then that we first became interested in the act of sexual assault. We only joked about it at first, but as time went by we both agreed it was something we would like to do.”

  When Bjomdahl went back and asked Woldt about the film and its role in their crime, he’d shrugged and acknowledged that he’d watched the movie with his friend, but only found it “somewhat interesting.”

  The detectives and Zook knew they had to do it right the first time. Once the defendants asked for lawyers, “lawyered up,” that would be it for questioning. When the detectives ran out of questions, they asked the suspects to write out their statements on yellow legal pads. Both agreed and were left alone for more than an hour.

  Much of what the young men said was nearly identical, even to the wording of their conversations. However, each of the suspects tended to place a greater share of the blame on the other, especially Woldt.

  Salmon maintained that after watching the movie, the concept of raping and killing a woman remained a fantasy until a week before Jacine’s murder. “It was then that we began formulating ideas and possibilities of performing the act,” he wrote. “We took the risks into consideration and did not believe that they were high enough to keep us from doing it. … So we began picking places where we could accomplish our idea.” They were committed to the act, he said after George brought out the steak knife and placed it in the glove box.

  However, Woldt said that the reason they’d been following women was because his friend was a virgin. He complained to Bjomdahl that his friend had badgered him until he felt obligated to help him find a woman for sex. It was Salmon, he said, who’d first placed the steak knife in the glove box, though they’d both agreed that the woman had to die so that she could not identify them.

  One of the most chilling aspects was that others had come so close to becoming victims, including a child and an older woman. They learned of yet another near-victim during one of the morning breaks.

  For reasons known only to themselves, the suspects had not mentioned their attempt to kidnap Amber Gonzales. But she had been watching the morning news on television when she heard about the arrest of two men who had kidnapped and murdered a young woman. A chill passed through her body; she knew they were the men who’d hit her with their car in the Garden of the Gods that previous afternoon. She told her father, and he brought her to the police to tell her story.

  Shown a photo lineup, Gonzales immediately picked out Salmon and Woldt. She told the detectives about the $170 sunglasses that had mysteriously disappeared from the scene of the attack. The detectives then called investigators going over the Woldt apartment looking for evidence and asked if they’d seen any sunglasses that matched the description of Gonzales’s. The answer was yes, they’d been found in the dresser used by Salmon.

  When Bjomdahl went back in and asked Woldt about Gonzales’s allegations, the suspect said he had “totally spaced out” the incident. He then proceeded to say that although it had been his idea to go to the Garden of the Gods that day, it was Salmon’s idea to “follow her.”

  Salmon had another story. “We regularly visited Garden of the Gods and clubs. We began to look for victims of our crime to be [but] had little luck until Tuesday. We left the house at 2:45 p.m. on Tuesday. We headed for Garden of the Gods Recreation Park. We drove around for a while before coming upon a young lady about eighteen years old. She was jogging on the paths, and as we passed, we noticed she was attractive, and decided to pick her up.”

  They drove around again, talking about how they were going to abduct her. “This time we decided to hit her with the car,” Salmon wrote. “We were in George’s car and he was driving. He hit her going about 15 miles per hour. She flew forward after the initial hit. She had badly scraped her knees and her arm, but had no problem getting up immediately. She was coherent, and we asked her right away if she was all right.

  “George got out of the car, walked up to her, holding her arms, and I had then gotten out of the car, and walked around the car and stopped.”

  At this point, Salmon said, he saw the sunglasses and picked them up. He told Crouch that he felt bad about hitting Gonzales, but he didn’t try to stop it either. “George let go of her…. We got back in the car, and drove in her direction. We continued to ask her if she needed a ride, and if she was all right. She continued to dodge our questions, and we drove off.”

  George had chastised him for not helping. Salmon said he used the excuse of the bushes getting in the way. Crouch asked him how they felt when they left the Garden of the Gods.

  “We’re psyched about it, excited, and it made us more determined to find someone,” Salmon replied.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Not a virgin anymore”

  Although Dan Zook and the detectives interviewing Salmon and Woldt knew from the investigators at the crime scene that the victim had suffered a number of what appeared to be knife wounds, they were not prepared for the horror of Jacine Gielinski’s final hour. Nor did they expect the cold, matter-of-fact way it was presented to them by the two young men who sat in the interview rooms, clad in orange jail jumpsuits, calmly describing a young woman’s worst nightmare.

  The two young men differed on whose idea it was to follow the pretty blonde in the red sports car. “We were on Austin Bluffs, and came to a stop at a red light on Nevada,” Salmon wrote. “I glanced over into the girl’s direction, but could not see her because of the lighting. George said he wanted to follow her, and I said okay.”

  Woldt claimed that it was Salmon who suggested that they follow the woman. He said, however, that he’d responded, “Yeah, we’ll get you one.”

  After turning into the apartment complex behind the woman, they’d come up with a fast plan to surprise her by pretending that they lived in the complex. She’d just about reached the security buzzer when Woldt pounced.

  “George grabbed her from behind, putting his left arm around her stomach and his right hand over her mouth,” Salmon wrote.

  “He began carrying her to the car before I helped, picking up her legs. … We got to the car, and opened the passenger door. He began putting her into the back seat. I got the keys and went around to the driver’s side and got in. I started the car and left.”

  Neither Salmon’s version nor Woldt’s mentioned the brutal assault the witnesses described for the police at the scene. And Jacine might as well have been a sack of groceries for all the resistance she put up in the killers’ version.

  Salmon said he saw the witnesses and thought, even as he was leaving the complex, that there was a good chance someone had ta
ken down his license plate number. “We took a left on the street we were on before, and drove for about fifteen to twenty minutes through a residential area, before coming to a school parking lot,” he wrote. “We entered the school’s south entrance, and found a secluded spot near a white van. I parked and shut the car off.”

  Woldt and Salmon then talked about what to do next as Jacine cried in the backseat, lying on Salmon’s Holy Bible, begging them not to hurt her. The two men decided to go ahead and rape her, although in their statements they described it as “having sex” with her, as if consensual.

  “I asked George if we should knock her out first,” Salmon claimed. “He said, ‘No.’ ”

  Salmon claimed that when Woldt told him to go first, he’d refused. His friend then said, “Whatever,” and proceeded to “have sex” with the woman. The assault lasted five minutes, Salmon said, during which the woman had cried and continued “to whimper, ‘Please don’t hurt me.’ ”

  In Woldt’s confession, he said Jacine was compliant, even assisting by removing her own pants. Then when he was not able to get an erection, she’d followed his directions to manually stimulate him until he was able to have sexual intercourse.

  When he was finished, Woldt told Salmon it was his turn. “We then traded places,” Salmon wrote. “He got into the front passenger’s seat, and I got into the back seat. At this time the girl was on her knees, facing the driver’s side of the car with her head down.” Jacine was again told to manipulate her assailant’s penis to enable him to rape her.

  When at last they were through, the two men exited the car. They ordered Jacine to crawl out of the car backward. She did so leaving behind a garnet tennis bracelet and ring her parents had given her at Christmas lying on the same seat as Salmon’s Bible. Her attackers made her lie face down on the cold pavement. They placed her shirt over her head so she could not look at them but otherwise made no attempt to cover her nakedness.

  As she lay there—batttered, degraded, frightened, and shivering—Salmon and Woldt began to talk about what to do with her. They spent the next ten to twenty minutes, depending on which story the investigators chose to believe, discussing the next step in their terrible fantasy. Adding to the macabre scene, part of the time they spoke in high-school German.

  During the oral part of the questioning, the investigators asked them why they did not stop at this point. They had had time for reflection, time to make a moral choice and at least mitigate the damage already done. The girl was asking for mercy. But there was none to be had in that dark hour on that black night. They decided she had to die. She had seen their faces. She could identify them. Moreover, her death was part of the fantasy.

  “At this point, George and I had a discussion on who would cut her first, and how it would be done,” Salmon wrote. “I said I didn’t want to do it. He got upset. He said I had to do it, that I had to make the first cut.”

  Woldt fetched the knife from the glove box and handed it to Salmon, who knelt in front of Jacine. “I took the knife, and prepared to cut her throat,” he wrote. “I told George to lift her head up by the hair, and to cover her mouth.” Reaching down, Woldt had pulled Jacine’s head up by her hair. The shirt still covered her face, but her neck was exposed.

  “I then made my attack,” Salmon wrote. “I placed the knife low on her throat, near her clavicle. I made a cut about 6 to 7 inches in length and pulled the knife until it was away from her. She did not scream, but made a light moaning sound.”

  On this point Woldt’s account concurred. “Lucas told me to hold her head up so I did, and he cut her throat,” he wrote. “She was still breathing so Lucas handed me the knife to do the same as he did.”

  The two men told their victim to roll over on her back, but to leave the shirt over her face so that she could not see them. Perhaps hoping that following orders would move her attackers to pity, she complied.

  Woldt placed the knife about an inch above the wound created by Salmon. “I cut her throat as well.”

  Salmon noted, “Again, no scream. We began to discuss again what we should do next.”

  As they described their vicious attack for the investigators, the killers talked about the life and death of Jacine Gielinski as though they were on the high-school debate team and she was the audience. The investigators and Zook were struck by how even hours later, they talked and wrote about their participation in Jacine’s ordeal without emotion and with no sign of remorse.

  They could have been moviegoers reviewing the last film they’d seen. In fact, they’d shown more passion when the Egg McMuffins arrived than at any other point in their interviews.

  The killers said they were surprised by the relative lack of blood from the two gashes in the young woman’s throat. Apparently, killing her wasn’t going to be as easy as it looked in the movies. So they took some time to discuss how they might accomplish their task.

  The further they got into their confessions, the more deviations there were in their stories. According to Salmon’s written confession, “We decided to stab her in the chest. I again told George that I did not want to do this, and that I may get sick. But again, he convinced me to take the first one.”

  However, according to Woldt’s account, after he cut the young woman’s throat, “I quickly handed the knife back to Lucas, and he said that he was going to stab it into her heart. I said, ‘Isn’t there a bone there?’ Lucas said to stab hard enough to get through the bone.”

  Salmon now knelt at Jacine’s right side, facing her exposed chest. He then brought the knife up “about level with my mouth” above her while Woldt held the shirt down on her mouth. “When I struck her,” Salmon wrote, “she screamed a faint scream.”

  “Now George took the knife from my right hand with his right hand. I had moved up to her head to hold the shirt over her mouth while George took my place at her side. He too brought the knife up about as high as his mouth, and brought it down. Every time the blade sunk until the hilt of the knife hit her body. This time no scream.”

  Woldt’s version was that Salmon “stabbed her and said, ‘Your turn,’ and hands me the knife. I stabbed her.”

  After Woldt struck, the two young men traded places again. “At this time I made two consecutive strikes,” Salmon recalled. “On my second she brings her hands up to where the wound is and screams. It is muffled by the shirt.”

  Despite her grievous injuries, Jacine did not give up. She was still alive, moaning and feebly moving her hands. But the pair wasn’t through with her. They switched once more. However, there was a slight interruption. The steak knife had hit bone and bent; Salmon straightened the blade as best he could by stepping on it before handing it back to his friend. “Again he stabs as I muffle the scream,” Salmon wrote. “This time much fainter.”

  The murder was not going well at all. They’d cut her throat twice and stabbed her five times in the area of the chest they thought contained her heart. “By now we can see and hear blood gushing from her wounds,” Salmon wrote, “and with each breath we could hear the blood gurgling in her mouth.”

  Blood was everywhere. Pumped out with each beat of her heart, pooled beneath her body, splattered on the sides of the car and van, and smeared into the clothes of her killers. But there was no quick end to her suffering. The men once again stopped their assault to discuss what they could do to finish her.

  They came up with the idea of smothering her. Salmon began stuffing her shirt into her mouth as he pressed down. But Jacine wasn’t through fighting for her life. She lifted her hands and weakly tried to remove Salmon’s grip.

  “At this point I was so terrified that my whole body was shaking because she was still alive,” Woldt wrote. “Lucas took the clothes on her face and pressed down to suffocate her. At that time he told me to step on her hands so she wouldn’t move them. I did, but it wasn’t working.”

  Woldt, who was still holding the knife, then cut her right wrist twice: once superficially, but the next so deep it nearly amputated her hand.
“She lets out a small whine,” Salmon wrote.

  Slicing the woman’s wrist, Woldt conceded, was his idea. But when the first cut hardly bled it was Salmon who insisted that Woldt “slice her again deeper.”

  One more time, the men stopped their attack to consider why she wasn’t dying as expected. Despite Salmon’s best attempts, she was still getting air.

  The men told her to put her hands on her stomach. Even at this late stage in her torment, Jacine tried to cooperate, but she was too weak to do it on her own. So they helped her. Then as Salmon smashed the clothes into her face again, Woldt stood on her hands, pressing them into her stomach to “force the air out.”

  “Lucas said she wasn’t breathing anymore,” Woldt wrote. But when he got off of her, they saw that she was still trying to draw in air.

  “We think it works,” Salmon noted. “But then she starts to roll around and throw her arms around. We try it again.”

  Woldt stepped back onto Jacine, balancing himself with his hands on Salmon’s car. “This time George moves his feet up and down on her stomach to force the air out, while I press even harder,” Salmon wrote. “After a minute goes by, she appears to have stopped breathing.”

  Finally, more than an hour after they began by raping her, Jacine Gielinski was dead. She had been kidnapped and beaten into submission; raped twice; forced to lie on cold, hard asphalt, naked and alone in the dark of night, far from anyone who cared about her as a human being; and made to listen to her captors talk about how to kill her.

  The detectives who interviewed them kept their professional demeanor, but behind the facade they were stunned. They were used to shootings and stabbings—they’d seen crimes horrible to imagine. But Jacine Gielinski’s torment was not only gruesome and horrific, it had been needlessly drawn out because the killers were particularly bad at their work.

  Even then, they were not through with the young woman. “We then take mud from a nearby ditch, and take turns shoving it into her vagina,” Salmon wrote. “First George, then me. We figure this will help avoid evidence from semen samples.