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

by Steve Jackson

  Even the newspaper’s editorial cartoonist, Chuck Asay, weighed in after the decision. His commentary was drawn on two panels. One depicted two men high-fiving each other over a body on the ground and the caption read: April 29,1997. News Item—Lucas Salmon testified on tape he and George Woldt exchanged high fives when they finally succeeded in killing Jacine Gielinski. The second panel, dated June 24, 1999, showed the Salmon defense lawyers—one of them obviously Lauren Cleaver—high-fiving each other over the fallen body of Justice, with her sword on the ground next to a tipped-over scale of justice.

  Defense attorneys were quick to come to Frasher’s support. Cleaver called Smith’s accusations “outrageous.” She further angered Jacine’s family and supporters by calling his decision “a triumph for the justice system. I think this is an important case. I am very proud of the judge who refused to recognize vengeance as a valid form of government.”

  While everyone else was sympathizing with Jacine’s family, she said that the proceedings had not been easy on the defendant’s family or Salmon himself.

  “Bob sobbed in my arms,” she said of her client’s father. “It’s been a very tough time for them. They’re very strong in their beliefs in personal responsibility and I think, in many ways, they felt like if the law accorded the death penalty, they would understand that.

  “And Lucas wasn’t as nervous as everyone would think. He really doesn’t get it. I’m sure he’s happy. But he’s afraid to go to prison, as you can imagine.”

  Those who thought Salmon would have it easy in prison, she said, were wrong. “I think Lucas will be at the bottom of the totem pole as far as prison life.”

  Other defense attorneys praised Frasher. One who knew him in Pueblo said that while the judge’s “mannerisms” made him appear uninterested, “he really doesn’t miss much.” The lawyer said he’d seen Frasher at a party and the judge had talked about the overwhelming amount of evidence he’d pored through to prepare for the hearing.

  Defense lawyer and death-penalty critic David Lane noted that the U.S. Supreme Court held that whether or not to hand down a death sentence was a “profoundly moral” and individual decision. “We had a judge who decided that in Colorado, we don’t execute people with mental illness that rises to this level.”

  Phil Chemer, vice president of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar, told the Rocky Mountain News: “The legislature has seen fit to give this awesome task to three-judge panels. I can’t imagine a decision that would be more difficult. We have a trial, a lengthy sentencing hearing, the judges come up with a decision, and then some DA in the Springs pops off and says they don’t understand why he didn’t get the death penalty. That’s what we pay judges to do. Sometimes, Miss DA, you’re going to lose.”

  The debate raged into the summer. Senator Powers said he was going to introduce a bill in the next legislative session to change the state’s death-penalty system once again. If passed, his bill would have let the trial judge decide the sentence, as he initially had wanted to do back in 1995.

  Too many judges were philosophically opposed to the death penalty for the current plan to work, he said. “A lot of them were defense attorneys,” he added. “The judge from Pueblo was a defense attorney, which made it hard for him, when he’d been arguing against it for years.”

  Defense attorney Kaplan responded by saying that Colorado’s law should never have been changed in the first place. Powers’ latest proposal “irritates me to no end,” he said. “Who died and made him God? Justice should not be determined on the whims of a politician or on the whims of any individual.”

  If anything, the state should return to allowing twelve jurors to decide death-penalty cases, he said. Prosecutors “didn’t like jurors deciding because they thought it was too awesome a decision for an average citizen to make,” he added. “But guess what? Judges find it a pretty awesome decision also.”

  While the lawyers and politicians took shots at each other on the front pages of the newspapers, hundreds of Colorado Springs residents voiced their opinion in the letters to the editor pages of their local newspaper: “If consciously and deliberately prowling the streets in search of prey, a young woman chose at random, stalking her, patiently waiting for the right moment to strike, capturing her and taking her to a secluded lair to be gang-raped, beaten and stabbed repeatedly to death, then dumping her naked, mutilated body at an elementary school doesn’t warrant the death penalty, then what does Judge James Frasher think does?” Bill Schaffher wrote.

  “This has seriously shaken my faith in the justice system,” wrote Chee Woo Leong. “If judges can abdicate the duty of the judiciary to seek redress and justice through all means available—up to and including execution—then we have no justice available through government.”

  “Once again, we see a case of total incompetence by our judicial system,” wrote Bob Rose. “Lucas Salmon gets to live in prison, while another murder victim lies in her grave…. There is not justice when you can see the facts, yet have not the courage to carry out the sentence deserved.”

  “Well, the justice (or lack of justice) system strikes again,” wrote J.H. Anderson. “First there was O.J. Simpson and now there’s Lucas Salmon.”

  “All you murderers out there come to Colorado and commit your crimes,” wrote Daryl J. Muratori. “Let’s feel sorry for the criminal and give no consideration to the victims. I am leaving this demented state and country and could not be happier. We have lowered ourselves about as low as you can go as far as most of our politicians and judicial policies go, and I have had enough.”

  “James Frasher, you do not deserve to be called judge because it is obvious that you are anything but,” wrote Ron Lett. “You, sir, are totally spineless and incapable of carrying out the duties of a judge, and in my humble opinion, should resign immediately.”

  “If it is this easy for Lucas Salmon to get off after what he did,” wrote Jennifer Dreiling, who said she was afraid now to leave home for college, “how do I know that he didn’t talk someone else into doing the same thing, and that he won’t choose me or someone else? Thank you so much, Judge Frasher.”

  Occasionally, someone wrote in support. “No one, especially the state, should ever put a price tag on the sanctity of life,” wrote Bill Whitman, the director for Catholic Community Services. “It is irrelevant if it does indeed cost more money to put an offender in prison for life than to sentence that person to die.”

  “Because of Judge Frasher’s decision, Lucas Salmon will live on,” wrote Don Wonders, an acquaintance of Jacine’s. “But Jacine, for those who knew her, can only be the scent of a flower they cannot see, the echo of a tune they cannot hear, the glimpse of a paradise they can never visit. I sincerely hope that all of us will think of her more than just occasionally and that her name and memory will never be lost in the careless flow of time.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “It’s been forever.”

  In July, state officials announced that the Salmon murder trial had cost more than $1.25 million, the costliest of the five death-penalty cases argued in front of the three-judge panels. Of that, $310,422 went to Salmon’s lawyers and another $187,076 went to the defense investigators. More than $786,000 was for expenses, including $27,500 for mental exams, $12,500 for witness fees and travel, $10,000 for trial transcripts, and a whopping $400,000 for expert witnesses. Of the last category, the defense’s star expert, J.R. Meloy, billed the taxpayers the most: $70,000.

  So far, more than $2.5 million had been spent on prosecuting and defending death penalty cases since the inception of the three-judge panel. The impact wasn’t just economic; resources were strained as well. When judges were appointed to death-penalty panels, dockets had to be shifted to other judges for the duration of the panel.

  Defense attorneys said they’d warned legislators that prosecutors eager to seek the death penalty would put more defendants before those three-judge panels, adding to the state’s expenses. In turn, El Paso County District Attorney Smit
h, who also served as president of the Colorado District Attorney’s Council, blamed rising costs on defense attorneys, claiming they were trying to get rid of the death sentence by making death-penalty cases cost-prohibitive. When a man’s life was at stake, defense attorneys countered, they had the moral responsibility to incur any cost necessary to make the state prove its case.

  Also in July, Judge Parrish tacked an additional 184 years onto the twenty-three-year-old Salmon’s sentence for his other crimes such as the rape of Jacine and the attack on Amber Gonzales. It was the last of the judge’s involvement in the case.

  He was scheduled to preside over Woldt’s trial, too. But Woldt’s defense attorneys, Wilson and Brake, demanded that he remove himself, saying that his voting in favor of the death penalty for Salmon would preclude him for remaining impartial for Woldt’s trial. Moreover, they accused him of consistently ruling in the prosecution’s favor, as well as being rude, including interrupting them before they could finish their arguments, criticizing them in open court, and accusing them of “creating problems.”

  Parrish decided to step down to minimize the grounds for appeal should Woldt be convicted. “I believe that I would in fact be able to separate out matters,” he said at a hearing on the issue, “but I believe there is an appearance that a judge would find it impossible to do that.”

  Wilson later told the press, “It was the appropriate decision.” But District Attorney Smith was not so pleased. “I’m sorry that someone who was so familiar with the case is changing, because generally that results in some delays,” she said.

  However, Wilson would soon have reason to wonder if he should have asked for the change. Two weeks later the easygoing and tolerant Judge Parrish was replaced by El Paso District Judge Richard Hall. The new judge was a no-nonsense sort of jurist who was tough on lawyers, no matter which side of the aisle they were on. He was known to cut off wordy attorneys if he felt they were wasting his time, and to hand down tough sentences.

  Wilson had even accepted lengthier prison sentences in plea bargains for clients in the past rather than take his chances in Hall’s court. However, the judge’s reputation did not stop the lawyer from immediately renewing his demand that the trial be moved away from El Paso County because of all the publicity.

  Near the end of August, Hall announced that he was setting Woldt’s trial date for February 2000. It seemed a long ways off to Peggy Luiszer. “It’s been forever,” she said. “It’s going to be three years by the time this is done. That’s amazing to me.”

  The Luiszers had just met with Colorado Governor Bill Owens to voice their displeasure over the Salmon decision and the long delays. “We just let him know how ridiculous the whole court system is,” Peggy told the Gazette. “He knew all about the case. He was very caring. He even got teary-eyed.”

  She noted that the delay would prevent her from seeking a full-time job for that length of time because she would have to take another three weeks off in February to attend the trial, and then more time at the death-penalty hearing if he was convicted. Her husband, Bob, had used up all of his vacation time for 1999 attending hearings and the trial.

  A week later, Hall listened to the lawyers make their arguments for and against moving the trial. Brake contended that the intense media coverage of the Salmon trial and death-penalty hearing, followed by the anger expressed by the community after the decision, meant her client could not get a fair trial in Colorado Springs. She blamed attorneys on both sides—Salmon’s defense attorneys for portraying Woldt as a “sexual masochist” and the mastermind of the crime, and the prosecutors for making “disparaging and prejudicial” statements following the sentencing which, she added, made them too “emotionally involved” to try Woldt fairly.

  “The community is drowning in opinions and feelings that will have no basis in fact in Mr. Woldt’s trial,” Brake said. “The community is infected with passions about this case. I think the public here is numb to what the law is and is not.”

  Young countered, “This crime happened in this community, and this community has the right to try this case.”

  After the lawyers had their say, Hall didn’t waste any time. He said the trial would go forward in Colorado Springs. However, he said, he might rethink his decision if it became impossible to seat a jury that could be fair.

  Having lost one battle, Wilson was ready to start another. Now he accused the prosecutors of reneging on a year-old promise to seek nothing more severe than a life sentence for Woldt if Salmon got life.

  The prosecutors knew from long experience with Wilson that the defense attorney would say just about anything, even accuse the district attorney’s office of all sorts of illegalities and questionable ethics, if it served his purposes. But they felt this accusation was below the belt.

  However, Wilson insisted that it was true. So Hall decided to have another hearing and this time put the lawyers on the stand under oath.

  Wilson testified that when the prosecution was seeking to continue Woldt’s trial so that they could find an expert of their own to counter the defense’s medical expert, Zook promised he would not seek his client’s death if Salmon was sentenced to life.

  What’s more, Wilson said, the prosecutor offered to consider a plea deal for Woldt based upon mitigating medical evidence, even if Salmon received the death penalty. He said the conversation occurred during a break as they waited for Parrish to return to the courtroom during a hearing.

  “I said to Zook on the break: ‘You better not fuck me on this,’” Wilson said. “He smiled. I smiled. We sat down.”

  Wilson said that when he asked Zook to put the offer down in writing, the prosecutor declined, saying he didn’t want the Salmon defense team to learn of the deal. The defense attorney added that he didn’t push the issue or discuss the promise with Parrish because he didn’t want to mess up the potential deal for Woldt.

  Taking the stand, Zook testified that the entire conversation never took place. The only discussion he said he had with Wilson during that hearing was on an entirely different matter. No one at the district attorney’s office believed that the conversation had happened, either. No one else heard the offer, and they were all present during the hearing. For another thing, they all knew that Zook didn’t have the authority to make such an offer without first getting District Attorney Smith to sign off on it, and any offer of this magnitude would have been in writing.

  Someone was lying. This wasn’t a matter of a misunderstanding about what was said. Before Salmon’s trial, Cleaver had asked Wilson—on the record—if his client Woldt had received any promises or deals “whatsoever” if he was tried second. He told her and Judge Parrish that there were no promises or deals. But now he had just told Judge Hall that Zook had made this promise. It couldn’t be both ways.

  In the end, Judge Hall tried to be diplomatic about it, but he sided with the prosecution. “This is not a conclusion that one side was lying or doing anything inappropriate,” he said. “This is a real good example of why things need to be on the record so we don’t have these types of disputes later. I am simply not persuaded that a promise existed.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The “devil made me do it” defense.

  February 3, 2000

  “There’s going to be ample evidence to show Mr. Woldt was the ringleader. He had this idea years before and recruited Mr. Salmon.” Deputy District Attorney Gordon Denison turned toward the defense table where his counterpart, Andrew Heher, was waiting to retort.

  As the prosecution team’s appellate attorney, Denison wasn’t well known to the public, unlike the other attorneys in the case—Zook and Young for the prosecution and Doug Wilson and Terri Brake for the defense. His was a world of motions and countermotions and brief arguments in front of the judge, out of the limelight but no less important.

  If he didn’t do his job right, the Salmon and Woldt cases might come back to haunt the prosecutors on appeal. Now, with jury selection for Woldt’s trial just a few
days away, he was fighting a defense motion that might upset the entire prosecution strategy to send the defendant to death row.

  In Salmon’s trial, the prosecutors had contended that both killers played an equal part in the abduction, rape, and murder of Jacine Gielinski, and even that at certain stages, such as who was the first to stab her, Salmon had been the leader. However, the strategy in Woldt’s trial would be to essentially portray him the same way Salmon’s lawyers had: as the sexual sadist who’d created the fantasy and then masterminded turning it into reality.

  George Woldt laughs during a hearing. (Photo courtesy of the Colorado Springs Gazette)

  Woldt’s defense team, however, was now calling foul with Heher arguing that they shouldn’t now be able to “change their story. … They made their choice. If they flip-flop and suggest Mr. Woldt is more culpable and should be sentenced to death because he was the ringleader that should be absolutely forbidden.”

  Denison shook his head. The older he got, he observed society becoming more at ease with the abdication of personal responsibility. During Salmon’s trial and sentencing hearing, the defense lawyers had argued what the press had labeled the “devil made me do it” defense. It was all Woldt’s fault—Lucas Salmon would have never raped and murdered a young woman without his evil partner. He was immature. He was teased. He knew right from wrong but was incapable of exercising free will because he was worried about losing Woldt’s friendship.

  And here came Woldt’s defense team. This killer wasn’t responsible for his actions, either. They were claiming that his behavior was due to a tiny, and not uncommon, calcium deposit in his brain. According to them, he’d been pressured into raping and murdering Jacine because of Salmon’s incessant complaints about being a virgin. He hated his mother and his father hit him.

  It was always someone else’s fault. In the wake of the Columbine shootings, the so-called experts in human behavior even blamed the media with its bloody video games, misogynist rap music, and violent movies. Salmon and Woldt had watched A Clockwork Orange and the film had somehow (at least according to Salmon) inspired them to stalk young women for the purpose of raping and killing them.