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

by Steve Jackson

  Now, Heher was complaining because the prosecution wanted to present evidence that suggested Woldt actually was responsible for planning and carrying out the murder of a lovely young woman.

  Denison had the appearance of a mild-mannered librarian, but he was tougher than he looked both physically (he was an avid runner and had completed several marathons) and professionally. As an appeals specialist, he was what is known in the legal community as a lawyer’s lawyer. His oftentimes unsung job was to know the technicalities of the law inside and out. It was his job to know the precedent-setting cases and the most recent decisions by courts high and low, as well as steer the prosecution clear of mistakes that might result in a mistrial or a conviction being overturned. Andrew Heher was his counterpart on the other side.

  Denison had come late to his career in the public sector. For twenty years, he’d served in the army as a lawyer and judge. The only part he didn’t really like about the military system was that in his early years he had had to alternate between working as a defense lawyer and a prosecutor. It was good training, but his passion was for prosecuting criminals. The bad acts of human beings against other human beings angered him, and he saw prosecution as bringing some justice to the world.

  He spent the last years of his army career as a military judge where he had a reputation as a hanging judge. Lawyers working for the defense hated him, but when they were playing the part of prosecutor, they loved him. Near the end of his career, he was transferred to Fort Carson, the large army post south of Colorado Springs. He, his wife, Suzanne, and their three daughters fell in love with the area and decided to remain there when he retired from the military. They enjoyed both the scenery and the small town, family-oriented feel of Colorado Springs.

  Denison was pleased that he soon had a job with the district attorney’s office. The office reflected the conservative nature of Colorado Springs and surrounding El Paso County, which were compatible with his own outlook. The El Paso office was proud of its reputation of being tough on crime, as reflected in the statistics that showed they were loath to deal in plea agreements for the sake of avoiding trials.

  However, Denison soon learned that there were aspects to civilian justice that rankled him. He wasn’t used to the shenanigans and theatrics allowed in civilian courts. Military judges would not have tolerated much of it, and if they did, they wouldn’t have bought into it. Something else that struck him about civilian law was the amount of recidivism. The military courts cracked down hard on criminal activity. One strike and the accused was going to do time. A second strike, and the culprit was gone. There were no third strikes. But in El Paso County, he saw the same names come up time and again.

  Since starting at the district attorney’s office, Denison had worn a number of different hats, including that of trial lawyer. He didn’t like plea bargains, either, and his record for trying twenty-three felony cases in a year still stood. At one point, Denison headed up the office’s drug prosecutions. He’d enjoyed that in part because he got to go along with the police on raids and stakeouts. And he’d handled his share of murder cases.

  One of them involved a rare case of a teenager killing his parents. On the morning of December 17, 1992, a fifteen-year-old named Jacob Ind and his friend, Gabriel Adams, murdered Ind’s mother, Pamela Jordan, and stepfather, Kermode Jordan. Ind, who was said to have dabbled in Satanism prior to the murder, hired Adams to do the murder. But his friend botched the job by creeping into the house in the early hours and shooting but not killing the Jordans, and Ind had to finish them off with his father’s .357 handgun.

  The pair, each of them blaming the other, were tried separately by Denison and Bill Aspinwall. Allegations of emotional and sexual abuse by the Jordans of Jacob and his brother, Charles, surfaced at Jacob’s trial, as the defense lawyers tried to argue that the killings were done in self-defense. However, the prosecutors, bothered by the fact that Jacob had never shown the slightest bit of remorse, countered that Jacob was not in imminent danger and could have left the home.

  Both Ind and Adams were each convicted of two counts of first-degree murder after deliberation. Due to their ages, they were not eligible for a death-penalty hearing and were sentenced to two consecutive terms of life in prison without parole, making them the youngest prisoners in Colorado with life sentences. Ind, who did not testify during his trial, spoke out at his sentencing, contending that the justice system was not interested in what had caused him to kill his parents. “The system sucks big, fat, sweaty toe,” he said.

  If the allegations of sexual abuse were true, Denison understood that there might be an explanation, if not an excuse, for the Jordan minders. But once again, it was always someone else’s fault.

  The crimes and the reasons that defense attorneys thought that they should be excused was simply incomprehensible to Denison. But no crime he’d ever prosecuted, or even heard of, could compare to the depravity of what had happened to Jacine Gielinski.

  The first time he read the confessions by Salmon and Woldt, his blood had boiled. Perhaps it was because he had daughters in the same age range who’d driven alone at night down the same roads Jacine had traveled. Maybe because every time he drove north to Denver from his home he had to pass the apartments where she had lived and the road her killers had turned down to drive to the elementary school. Maybe it was all of those things, but Jacine’s murder haunted him and it made him sick to his stomach to hear the defense lawyers lay the blame on anything but their clients’ own sick fantasies and desires.

  As he told friends in his annual Christmas letter in 1998, the case had become “an obsession for me. It has been the greatest challenge and will become (hopefully) the ultimate accomplishment of my prosecutorial career.

  “Yet, amidst the challenge and excitement, I live each day with the suffering of Jacine and her parents and am saddened by man’s ability to inflict such pain on his fellow man.”

  Nearly three years had passed since Jacine’s death. Three years and hundreds of motions from the defense attorneys, arguments that their clients’ rights had been abused by some technicality, even making demands that because of some alleged infraction by the police or prosecutors, the charges should be thrown out. As if Salmon and Woldt should simply be allowed to walk away after what they’d done to Jacine. The defense attorney would consider that “winning.”

  Many of the defense motions were silly and easily countered, though that, too, took time and resources. Others challenges were more serious, such as the attempt to keep a key piece of evidence out of the Woldt trial: the testimony of Derrick Ayers, the former friend of Woldt who’d told police about their venture into the mountains and the defendant’s idea to attack a couple with large rocks. The testimony would show that Woldt had been trying to recruit someone to help fulfill his fantasy of rape and murder for years. And it was important to combat the expected defense tactic of claiming that it was Salmon’s constant complaints about needing a sexual partner that had pressured Woldt into going along with the plan.

  The legal problem was that Ayers was dead. Although he had a record of petty crimes, most of them traffic related, Ayers had turned out to be a pretty decent sort. He’d agreed to have his statement videotaped and remain in the area. Back then, the police had taped him just in case he decided to disappear, but making the record turned out to be a stroke of good fortune after Ayers was killed in a freak hiking accident when he fell off a cliff.

  Woldt’s defense attorneys argued that the videotaped testimony should not be allowed because they would not be able to cross-examine the witness. However, Denison had pointed out that there were precedents for using taped confessions and testimony from defendants and witnesses who, for one reason or another, later decided not to testify or had died or disappeared. Also, Ayers’s former girlfriend, Lisa, would be called to the stand to corroborate at least the most damning portion of her boyfriend’s contentions—the rocks she’d found in her car after the pair’s trip to the mountains.

 
; With all the legal machinations and delays, Denison felt sorry for the Luiszers. Not only had they lost their only child, but then the justice system had dragged them down a long, tortuous road, and it still wasn’t over. Despite all the lawyerly attempts to remain objective, he’d grown to like them and considered them friends. He’d gone out with them to dinner and they called each other before Bronco games. He saw how the heart had been ripped out of two people and how the system he worked for had made them victims as well. When he looked at his own daughters, he could imagine how devastated he’d feel if something that horrible had happened to one of them. But he knew the reality had to be infinitely worse.

  It made him all that much more determined to do the best he could, including winning battles like the current one over whether the prosecutors could present the case that Woldt was the leader in the rape and murder of Jacine.

  The prosecution wasn’t changing stories, he told Judge Hall, just the emphasis. “It isn’t a different legal theory,” he said. “It’s a different way of reacting to the evidence.” Judge Hall agreed. The prosecution would present its case as planned.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “It’s not a whodunit.”

  Despite a gag order prohibiting the lawyers for either side from commenting to the press, defense attorney Doug Wilson held regular press conferences. The swiftness with which the jury in the Salmon trial had reached its verdict (about an hour) indicated that he had a problem, because Woldt’s defense was going to be essentially the same: blame the other guy and claim his client had some sort of mental disorder that had prevented him from “deliberating,” the word that would ring in a death-sentence hearing.

  The prosecution had the same ammunition: the detailed verbal and written confessions, the physical evidence, the bombshell of Salmon’s videotaped statement to the psychologists contending that Woldt masterminded the crimes, and Ayers’s statement.

  Then there was the added problem of the media coverage, which had rekindled the community’s anger, as well as the general knowledge that Salmon had already been convicted. If it came to a sentencing hearing, Wilson and Brake could argue that if the pair were equally guilty, then they should suffer the same fate—life in prison. However, they were aware there was also the potential for a backlash from frustration with the Salmon sentence that could come back at Woldt.

  The defense attorneys were used to being seen as the bad guys. The press and the public accused them of being obstructionists and playing games, coddling killers and ignoring the victims’ rights. But Wilson saw it as trying to save a man’s life—that a state-sanctioned execution was not morally superior to murder. On top of that, another three-judge panel had sentenced a triple-murderer to death.

  About six feet tall, heavy set and balding, Wilson came from a background that hardly suggested that he would become a defense lawyer known for stopping at nothing to save the lives of murderers. As he would later tell the Gazette, he’d grown up in Ohio in a conservative Republican, middle-class family. However, the apple had rolled quite a distance from the tree. After a family vacation to Colorado when he was a boy, he had announced that when he grew up he was going to return to the state as a lawyer to “defend poor people.”

  He told the newspaper that he’d learned as a thirteen-year-old to distrust the government on May 4, 1970, when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on college students, killing four who were protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University. He was further influenced by the book To Kill a Mockingbird, identifying with the defense lawyer’s heroic, and unpopular, defense of a black man accused of rape in a southern town.

  Love him (as did those who worked with or for him in the public defenders’ office), or hate him (like the families of his clients’ victims), Wilson walked the talk. He and his wife had agreed not to have children so that he could devote his time to representing those too poor to afford an attorney, especially those facing state execution.

  He even carried a card in his wallet that stated: “I am opposed to the death penalty. If my death is the result of a crime, I do not want any person accused of the crime to face the death penalty. Please advise the court and all attorneys of this. I wish this card to be considered during any hearing in which the victim of a crime is allowed to speak.”

  Wilson certainly had not changed his spots while representing Woldt. He and Brake had even won a few of their motions, such as suppressing reports from the jail that Woldt liked to talk to other inmates about raping women. Wilson also complained a few days before jury selection was to start that the prosecution had not given him enough advance notice to deal with the proposed testimony of an inmate who claimed that Woldt had been faking his mental illness. Hall agreed, excluding the testimony from the trial, but said the inmate could testify if there was a sentencing phase.

  The main thing was that Wilson and Brake had managed to delay the trial for nearly three years. It hadn’t worked as far as getting the Luiszers and the district attorney’s office to throw in the towel. However, they could hope that the pool of potential jurors had either forgotten the details of the crime or weren’t even living in Colorado Springs when Jacine was murdered or Salmon was tried.

  In the weeks leading up to the trial, Wilson ignored the gag order to try a little damage control by talking to the media. That included discussing the “medical evidence” of the calcium deposit that affected his client’s ability to deliberate or control his behavior on the night of the murder.

  “How sick do you have to be?” he asked the press rhetorically. “That’ll be the jury’s decision. I believe that our experts have told us, he’s a pretty sick boy mentally.”

  Wilson had also complained long and often both in court and out that his client could not get a fair trial in El Paso County, especially after the Salmon trial. “Everything that came out in court was that Woldt was the bad guy,” he told the Gazette. “It was ‘blame us’ time. We had to sit here for two months getting attacked and we couldn’t do anything.”

  The defense lawyer said no one was trying to say Woldt wasn’t guilty of murder. But “our guy isn’t the Svengali that they painted him to be…. It’s hard to deny that he did it with those confessions out there that they made. It’s not a whodunit. It’s a why it was done. A normal person could not do this.

  “We’re presenting a defense that deals with the question of deliberation.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “It’ll be over soon.”

  March 1, 2000

  The opening statements in Woldt’s trial followed the same general pattern as that of his co-conspirator. Prosecutor Dave Young read from Woldt’s confession, and then there was the same brief glimpse of Jacine when she was alive. However, in this case Young said there would also be witnesses who would testify that Woldt had planned to fulfill his fantasy “for years.”

  Brake had opened for the defense while Woldt listened as though he were a college student observing a mildly interesting university lecture. Mannerisms others had noted in his past, such as his habit of sniffing things he handled or came near, seemed to have accelerated or, as more cynical observers thought, he was acting to help his lawyers’ arguments that he was mentally ill. He also walked with a curious stiff gait—the deputies in charge of security called it “the Woldt walk”—his hands hanging straight down to his sides rather than swinging back and forth with his steps. And when he looked at something to one side or another, he turned his whole body, rather than just his head.

  Pointing to her client, Brake said he was only “joking” when he’d talked to Salmon and other friends about kidnapping and raping a woman. He’d been under pressure from two sides: his wife, Bonnie, to get rid of their houseguest, and Salmon, who harassed him constantly about finding him a sexual partner.

  Then in April 1997, Brake said, Woldt’s brain “malfunctioned” and he went into a “catatonic, dreamlike state” in which the joke became a reality. The malfunction, she said, was caused by an abnormal, calcified growth in his brain
, which along with an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder made him incapable of using deliberation or controlling himself when Salmon insisted that they kill Jacine Gielinski.

  Peggy and Bob skipped the opening statements. Neither wished to hear a lawyer again talk about one of their daughter’s killers as if he were somehow the victim. But following the openings, Peggy was again called to the stand to tearfully identify her daughter’s jewelry and relive the night she and her husband got the telephone call that changed their world and who they were forever—forevermore the parents of a murder victim.

  Sometimes Peggy wondered if she would have the strength to go on. She was grateful for the cards and letters of support she received from friends and from strangers, many of them still expressing their own struggles to deal with Jacine’s death. But it was hers and Bob’s burden to relive the murder over and over, even if they still had never heard all of the horrible details. She’d told the press, “After a while you just get numb to it.” But that wasn’t really true. It still twisted in her gut like a hot knife, and for that she often blamed Doug Wilson.

  She hated him. He represented everything that was wrong with the justice system to her. It was all just a big game about losing and winning. To her, the defense attorneys seemed to enjoy listening to themselves talk and pretend that what they were saying made any sense. And she thought that Wilson was the worst of the lot. He dressed like a slob, as if he couldn’t be bothered to show respect for the proceedings. At first she thought that maybe it was because he didn’t make much money, but she’d learned that he made more than the prosecutors, who always dressed well. But worse than his physical appearance and gamesmanship, it seemed that he took every opportunity to make life even more miserable for her and Bob than it already was, even when that seemed impossible.