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

by Steve Jackson

  In fact, she said, in a statement that brought gasps from spectators throughout the courtroom, his perception was so altered that he believed that he was the one being raped. “He felt Jacine grabbed him, disrobed him, and mounted him,” she said. “His main concern was to hurry home and confess his infidelity to his wife.”

  Lucas was merely sitting in the front seat watching what was happening, according to Rogers, when Woldt said, “ ‘What are you looking at?’ because in his frantic and dissociated state of mind these were the only words that would come out. What he really means to say was ‘please help me!’ or something like it to get the woman to ‘stop having sex with him.’ ” Woldt lay there and cried during intercourse, she said, and felt as if he was “being victimized.”

  According to Rogers, the next thing Woldt remembered was retrieving the knife, at Lucas’s direction, from the glove compartment in which they had placed it earlier in the day. Still in “a state of bewilderment,” Woldt found himself holding up the victim’s head while Lucas “ran the knife across her throat.” Lucas then told George to do the same, but George didn’t feel he could do it and refused. Lucas pressured him until George took the knife and swiped it across her neck.

  Salmon stabbed her in the chest and then handed the knife to Woldt, indicating he should do the same. “Although sickened and horrified,” Woldt felt that the only way to “be away” from the situation was to take the knife. Seeing no other options, Woldt turned his head away and plunged the knife at the victim’s chest.

  According to Rogers, Salmon wanted to cut out the victim’s genitals so that no semen could be retrieved for DNA testing. Woldt could not bear the thought of Salmon mutilating the woman’s body, she said, and so was able to think of an alternative, the mud.

  There was no indication of any formal thought disorder while speaking with Woldt, according to Rogers. “Nevertheless, over the months he has experienced several visual and auditory hallucinations of ‘angels’ visiting his cell. One time the ‘angel’ lay on his bunk, so Woldt took a sheet from the bed and slept on the cold cement floor so that the male angel on his bunk would be comfortable.”

  Those in the courtroom seemed stunned by Rogers’s testimony. Woldt was the rape victim? He was so determined to please others that he’d unwillingly gone along with Salmon’s plan to rape and murder Jacine Gielinski?

  A visibly angry Dave Young cross-examined Rogers, asking her if Woldt didn’t enjoy having sex with Jacine, “How was it that he had an erection and an orgasm?”

  Rogers shrugged. Even brain-dead people can have erections and orgasms, she said. To which Young retorted to the defense’s objections, “Are you saying he’s brain-dead?”

  The psychiatrist said she’d read Salmon’s confession and even Woldt’s earlier confession, in which he’d mentioned nothing about feeling like he was the rape victim or that it was all Salmon’s idea to abandon “the game” and really rape and murder someone. But that hadn’t changed her mind.

  Young asked why Woldt placed the knife in the glove box of the car if he didn’t intend to use it.

  “It was part of the fantasy, a part of the game,” Rogers said.

  “Do you think rape and murder is a game?” Young retorted.

  “Of course not,” Rogers sniped back.

  After Rogers’s testimony the rest of the trial was anti-climactic. Bonnie Woldt testified that she loved her husband but he had an “unhealthy attachment” to Salmon, who constantly pestered him about finding a girlfriend. She also denied making statements to friends that her marriage and sex life with Woldt were violent, or that she’d overheard her husband and Salmon talking about imitating what they’d seen in A Clockwork Orange.

  On rebuttal, the prosecution presented their own experts who denied that the calcium deposit would have affected Woldt’s behavior, at least not without causing other behavioral disturbances that would have been detected. In fact, one said there was strong evidence from tests to indicate that Woldt was faking his “mental illness.”

  In his closing argument, Dave Young hammered on the different stages at which Woldt had shown he was deliberating. He’d deliberated when he decided to follow Gielinski. Deliberated when he decided to rape her first. Deliberated again, for fifteen minutes, with Salmon as they tried to decide whether to kill Jacine, and then over the next hour or so, stopped what they were doing several times to deliberate over how to kill her. Then they’d deliberated when they shoved mud in her vagina to cover up evidence of the rape.

  “There’s no room for sympathy for this defendant,” Young told the jurors. “He certainly didn’t have sympathy for Jacine Gielinski.”

  Wilson countered that the case wasn’t about what happened to Jacine but why it happened. “Why is George Woldt’s brain malfunctioning?” he asked. “Why do the circuits not work?

  “This case is about why George did not exercise good judgment. She was killed. We are sorry, but why do we get to that point?”

  He said that the defense had promised in their opening statements to hold the prosecution to proving its burden beyond a reasonable doubt. Any hesitation the jurors now had was reasonable doubt, he said. Even the fact that the experts had disagreed was enough to show there was reasonable doubt.

  Wilson reminded them of the expert who’d testified, “If I were a mad scientist, I could not think of a better place to put a lesion or a tone than in the center of George Woldt’s thalamus.”

  But Zook came right back on rebuttal by saying the brain-lesion theory “is just an excuse.” He noted that Woldt had been trying to recruit others for years into raping and killing a woman “because he thought that it would be fun.

  “His guilt is as permanent as Jacine Gielinski’s death,” Zook said. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men … they can’t save him. They can’t excuse him.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “The more evil of the two.”

  March 23, 2000

  Judge Richard Hall cleared his throat and prepared to read the verdict. In her seat, Peggy Luiszer clutched at the photograph of Jacine that she had not been allowed to bring into the trial, and she feared the worst.

  After the Salmon jury reached its verdict so quickly, she had expected the same thing with the Woldt jury. To her, his guilt seemed even more apparent. But the jury had deliberated for more than three hours the day before and then went home for the night, then returned in the morning to deliberate for another hour. The delay did not bode well for her.

  The jury’s guilty verdict was applauded by the citizens of Colorado Springs, including cartoonist Chuck Asay. (Used with permission of Chuck Asay and Creators Syndicate Inc.)

  However, Hall soon relieved her of that notion. As Woldt sat staring straight ahead without any emotion and Peggy sobbed quietly, the judge read off the guilty verdicts. First-degree murder after deliberation. Guilty. Felony first-degree murder. Guilty. First-degree sexual assault. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. George Woldt would face a death-penalty panel.

  Soon afterward, the Luiszers met with the jurors, who told them that they never believed the defense theory about the brain lesion or psychological problems being responsible for Woldt’s actions. They described Rayna Rogers’s testimony and theories as “a joke.” They’d actually agreed on his guilt the day before, but wanted to sleep on it to be sure.

  Now, the Luiszers were going to have to go through the whole process of a death-penalty hearing again. Asked if they were worried about a similar outcome as with Salmon, Peggy said she felt that Woldt was “definitely the more evil of the two.”

  “We just want three judges who will listen and apply the factors,” she said. “If that happens, we can live with whatever they decide.”

  Whatever happened to Woldt in the future, she added, “I hope he has a really rotten time. He thinks he’s cool. I hope he gets knocked down a couple of notches I think he deserves to die.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “I don’t want to die.”

 
Six months later, so did a panel of judges—this time including Trial Judge Richard Hall and appointed Judges Douglas Anderson and Larry Schwartz, all of El Paso County.

  Yet again, Jacine’s family members had recounted their loss. Peggy Luiszer, clutching the urn containing her daughter’s ashes, once again tried to explain to strangers who Jacine had been.

  Except for the prosecutors, no one seemed to care that her whole world had been turned upside down. She couldn’t bring herself to go back to work or even to travel alone very far from her home. She couldn’t be alone with a man without feeling panic. When her husband touched her, all she could see was Salmon and Woldt on top of her daughter, doing the things they had done to Jacine. But how could she explain all of that to three judges? And even if she managed, would it matter?

  Doug Wilson and Terri Brake argued that Woldt’s life should be spared because he had suffered the brain lesion that had impaired his judgment. He also suffered from an obsessive-compulsive disorder stemming from his abusive childhood, they said.

  They brought in several experts to testify, including Dr. Jonathan Pincus, a Washington, D.C., neurologist. He said he’d interviewed 150 to 200 convicted murderers, many of them on death row, and found that their crimes involved a combination of three factors: mental illness, physical and/or sexual abuse as a child, and neurological disorder. Woldt had all three, he testified.

  As at Salmon’s death-penalty hearing, the defense attorneys were allowed to introduce proportionality evidence. Rather than calling a witness, this time the defense had put together a large book comparing the cases of other men on death row. They argued that Salmon had been the leader in the crime and had inflicted the fatal blows. Since Salmon had received a life sentence, they told the judges, singling Woldt out for a harsher punishment would be unfair.

  The prosecution had rebutted the brain-damage and personality-disorder testimony with its own experts. And this time, they were better prepared to counter the proportionality review with a review of their own, demonstrating how both Woldt and his crimes fit the profile of other killers on death row. While all the evidence pointed to the men being equally culpable in the crime, “It was Woldt’s idea,” they argued.

  After the defense rested its case, Woldt apologized. The smooth talker, the confident ladies’ man, was gone, and he handled himself with far less dignity than had the friend he’d talked into helping carry out his terrible fantasy. Crying and sniffling, Woldt told the judges that he had become a Christian. If allowed to live, he said, he would “honor God, read the Bible, and help others.”

  “I don’t want to die,” he pleaded. “Everyone knows that I did a horrible thing.” Then he turned to Jacine’s family. “I’m sorry I took her away from you,” he said. “I’m sorry for the last three and a half years. I don’t know what I can say. ‘Sorry,’ it’s not even good enough for me when I say this. Nothing I say, nothing I do is going to make this better. I’m sorry for what I did to you, I’m sorry.”

  Peggy and Bob Luiszer felt nothing but contempt for his apology. At least Salmon had sounded sincere. Woldt with all his sniveling simply sounded like the murderous coward he was.

  In her closing arguments, defense attorney Brake said Woldt was “not an evil person; he did a very evil thing.”

  But Zook noted that the cruelty of the crime far outweighed any possible mitigating factors. “You know the evil he has done,” he said. And then he repeated a line that prosecutor Eva Wilson had used six years earlier, when she’d asked a jury to sentence Nathan Dunlap to death: “If not this case, what case? If not now, when? And if not this defendant, who?”

  On September 6, 2000, the judges answered those question as Peggy sighed and wept quietly. If she and Bob had known this would take three and a half years, they would not have asked the district attorney’s office to pursue the death penalty, though they believed it was merited. But now these judges had handed down justice for all the pain Jacine had suffered, and for all the pain they had suffered.

  “The panel was struck by the senseless brutality inflicted by Woldt and Salmon on Jacine Gielinski,” the judges wrote in a sixty-two-page decision. “She was forced to suffer unspeakable pain and anguish during the time that she was held hostage. The kidnappers wholly ignored her pleas for mercy and the pitiful suffering she was enduring at their hands. It is obvious that Jacine Gielinski was merely a physical object to Woldt and Salmon, necessary to act out their mutual fantasy to kidnap, rape and kill, leaving no room for the least amount of human compassion for her plight.

  “The fact that they apparently exchanged high fives at the conclusion of Jacine’s killing speaks volumes of their lack of humanity toward her.”

  For the third time out of seven tries, a panel of judges had sentenced a man to die. In order to reach that decision, they’d determined that certain murderers were more deserving of the death penalty than others. Like Frank “Pancho” Martinez and Cody Neal, George Woldt was one of those murderers.

  This time, District Attorney Smith had nothing but praise for the judges and for her prosecution team, on whose lives this case had taken an “enormous toll.” The sentence, she said, “reaffirms that Colorado’s death penalty will be used for these most heinous crimes. We do not rejoice in seeing another person die, but it is truly the only just punishment for someone like George Woldt, who was willing to rape, torture, and murder merely for the sport of killing.”

  She also praised her prosecution team for the enormous sacrifice of their personal lives. “But the most important members of this team have been Bob and Peggy Luiszer,” and she pledged to fight Woldt’s appeals process “to the end.”

  Wilson and Brake slipped out of the courtroom after the verdict was read and could not be reached. Bob Salmon, who had attended the trial and sentencing hearing said, “I just feel bad for the Luiszers. They truly had a great loss that can never be replaced.

  “I think the sentence is fair. Quite frankly, if my son had received the death-sentence penalty, that would have been fair.”

  As with the Salmon case, many of the Woldt jurors attended the sentencing hearing, the judges’ announcement of their decision, or both. Juror Jamie Tepley, who after the trial described psychiatrist Rayna Rogers’s testimony as “a joke,” said it was impossible for the jurors not to have been deeply affected by what they saw and heard. “There were some emotional times when I’d go home and bawl,” said Tepley, who was about the same age as Gielinski.

  “It could have been any one of our daughters,” juror George Renaud, the father of a thirteen-year-old, told the Gazette as he wept outside the courtroom. He said he’d been sickened and frightened for his own children by the horrific evidence and brutality of the crime. The punishment fit the crime, he said. “Taking a life is not a game. For this case, the death penalty should take effect.”

  Woldt’s family didn’t attend the sentencing hearing, except on the day they had testified on their son’s behalf, and they weren’t present for the decision. But they had friends in the courtroom, many of them from the Korean-American Christian community, who groaned and shook their heads when Hall said the decision was death.

  Timmy Son said he thought that the sentence would be overturned on appeal. “I hope society gives him a chance,” he told the Gazette. “He was young and his background didn’t make him fit in society. I hope God gives him forgiveness.”

  The Rev. Young Lemon was confident that God would. He’d been meeting with Woldt for two months to study the Bible and pray. “He has dedicated his life to repentance,” Lemon told the paper. “Deeply in his heart he says sorry to Gielinski’s family and the Colorado Springs community.”

  Bob Luiszer said he and his wife had no plans now except “to go on with our grieving process, which has kind of been interrupted, and to try to carry on some kind of normal life.”

  Peggy Luiszer praised the judges. “They saw the truth for what it was, and I think the judges made the right decision,” she said. “I think they should have
done it in Salmon’s case, also, but that’s over and done with.

  “I hope he’s scared to death and thinking about his daughter and son… and when the time comes for him to be put to death that he remembers how he treated Jacine and maybe how she felt that night.”

  Asked what she was going to do with the photograph of Jacine she’d carried all that time, she replied, “It goes back up on the shelf in the family room, where it was the first night when I got that call.”

  Then there was another question. Would she attend the execution? She didn’t hesitate. “You bet.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  “A new normal.”

  After Woldt was sentenced to death, the Luiszers thought that while life would never be the same, at least they were done with trials and the cruelty of defense attorneys. But even that eluded them at first.

  After arriving at his home in Pueblo the day of the sentencing, defense attorney Wilson loaded his SUV, told his wife he was leaving for a bit, then went fly-fishing in a remote area of Colorado. He would later tell the Gazette that he was “devastated” and needed the time for a little soul-searching and reflection on the job he had done. Whatever conclusion he reached, it included one last parting shot for Woldt’s victims.

  A week later after the death sentence ruling, Woldt and his attorneys refused to attend the sentencing hearing for the other convictions, including the assault and attempted kidnapping of Amber Gonzales. Wilson told the press that because Hall had already handed down the worst penalty, the judge would probably sentence Woldt to the maximum number of years. So, according to the lawyer, there was no reason for him, Brake, or their client to be present. Wilson also said that he didn’t want to subject himself or Woldt, who had been placed on a suicide watch, to “being confronted” by Gonzales.

  The prosecutors tried to force Woldt and Wilson to attend the sentencing. Zook contended that Wilson was skipping it to give his client further grounds for appeal (his lawyer wasn’t present to represent him). Denison argued that the Colorado Victim’s Rights Act required that a defendant be present at the sentencing.