Killer Triggers

by Joe Kenda

Darnell Dimond lied reflexively when Ax and his handler chased him down. They took him to a nearby police substation, where a lab tech performed a gunshot residue test on him. The kid gave the lab tech his real name at that point, forgetting his earlier lie.

  We talked to him three times between 1:25 a.m. and 4:30 a.m., usually for a half hour or less. During the second meeting, Dimond asked to speak to his father. Our detective asked him his age again. He said he was eighteen, and as an adult, he didn’t have the right to call in family members, and we didn’t want them around that early in our interrogations into a murder case.

  When we talked to him the third time, he again asked to call his father. We refused again because he still maintained that he was eighteen years old. He also told one of our guys that he had two kids.

  After that third interview, we formally arrested him and told Dimond we were taking him to our adult detention facility. At that point, he claimed he was only seventeen years old. We figured he was lying again because he didn’t want to go to big-boy jail, but we ran his name through the computer database, and lo and behold, we found his correct date of birth. Dimond really was two months away from his eighteenth birthday—still a juvenile in the eyes of the law.

  We learned this only after the little shit had lied to us at least five times, saying he was already eighteen. Based on the crime, the law still allowed us to charge him as an adult. We locked him up for felony murder, attempted aggravated robbery, and conspiracy to commit aggravated robbery.

  dumb cop, nice cop, sneaky cop

  To get to the truth and file formal charges, we had to wade through a huge pile of lies spewed by both Dimond and Lucero. They danced around the truth for several hours. We interviewed them separately, of course. That’s the good thing about having two suspects: you can play them and their lies against each other. I’ve never seen it fail with two young guys who have heard all the stories about what happens inside prison walls, where older, stronger, more powerful inmates turn them into prey.

  When you interview two suspects separately, there’s a lot of back-and-forth and coming and going—all part of a proven strategy. If you aren’t getting anywhere with one suspect, you leave the room for a while, then come back and say, “Your friend is telling a different story, and we find it very interesting.”

  You then leave for a while, letting the guy stew over it. Then you play them against each other.

  “Well, your friend says you did it, and he told us some things that checked out. So what do you say about that!”

  I don’t play tennis, handball, or racquetball. This was my favorite sport. And I was very good at the game, as were the detectives on my team. If you played it right, you won, and bad people were locked up or sent to an early grave.

  The one thing you don’t want to do during an interrogation is piss off a suspect. This makes them more likely to either clam up or lawyer up, and neither of those options furthers your investigation. Early in my career, I tended to get frustrated and blow up at them. I learned not to do that. I am trainable—just ask my wife.

  After learning my lesson (probably more times than necessary), I set a new goal. I became Mr. Helpful. I became the cop who brought them a bottle of water or a cup of coffee. I played the fumbling Detective Colombo card, too. I dropped papers on the floor and forgot things, to convince them that they were much smarter than this dolt with a badge. So you could say I was an actor even before they gave me a television show.

  I played a very convincing moron. Criminals are not often clever, but they are cunning. If they think you’re an idiot, they’ll think they can play you, and you play along while setting the trap.

  Rumor has it that I’ve been heard to say things like: “I don’t even understand why you’re here. What did they arrest you for?” “I don’t get it, so would you explain it to me?” “Oh, first I have to advise you of your rights, is that okay? It’s just a formality.”

  You want the suspect to think you’re just curious and trying to figure out why you are both in this awful room. Most people want to be understood, and they often will incriminate themselves while trying to explain why the person they killed deserved it, asked for it, or just mistakenly walked into a knife seventeen times.

  I also used diversion to keep them off guard. Instead of asking, “Why the hell did you shoot your grandfather in the head?” I would say, “Do you have any pets? I’m a dog man myself.”

  Diversion questions serve a couple of purposes. They throw off a suspect who is primed to play defense or not talk to you at all. He wants to talk about pets. I guess I can do that. Nothing against the law about owning pets, right?

  Those off-the-wall questions also take their minds off the fact that they have been arrested and taken to a police station or jail and they are now facing a potentially life-changing event. I want them to forget all that. I talk to them like the guy sitting next to them in a bar, like some curious half-drunk guy who wishes them no harm and might give them a ride home.

  Another technique is to get them to repeat their stories over and over. “I forgot what you told me last time. Can you run through that again?” I do remember, of course—every single word, even if I don’t write it down. I’m looking for the first lie. Tell me a lie, because if you do, I’ll know I’m talking to the right guy.

  Innocent people don’t lie. And once a lie is on the table, you beat them over the head with it. “Two hours ago, you said you went somewhere else. Were you lying then? Or are you lying now?”

  Once they lied to me, I could go from their best bar buddy to their worst nightmare in a split second. This is tag, and you are it, you piece of shit!

  flipping friends

  Having two young suspects to work with is easier in many ways because you separate them and play them against each other. Along the way, you carefully push the buttons, leading them to think that their buddy in the other room is ratting them out. You unleash all their fears and paranoia while avoiding specifics and offering vague but ominous innuendo about the flow of information coming from the other guy.

  Sometimes, I cranked up the pressure by offering colorful stories about the wonders of prison life. The swell sleeping accommodations. Bunk mates! The daily cuisine. The close camaraderie with fellow criminals. And, of course, the presence of sexual predators who are happy to make up for the lack of female companionship in their own creative ways.

  Fear is in the mind, and in suspects whose partner in crime is also in custody. Their minds race with the worst possibilities. As law enforcement officers, a.k.a. the good guys, we are allowed to plant scary thoughts and then stand back and watch the bad guys turn white with fear as their imaginations run wild.

  It doesn’t take long to pry out the truth when you have two guys in separate rooms, each worried about being ratted out by the other. You get down to the nitty-gritty quickly.

  Some of them will lawyer up. But a good lawyer knows that we are very skilled at flipping one bad guy on the other. If the attorney knows his client is not the actual shooter or is somehow less culpable than the other guy, he will offer to make a deal. Something along the lines of, “My client will offer a statement of what happened, in exchange for a plea deal . . .”

  Then his client becomes your star witness after waiving his rights. You learn that there is no loyalty among murderers and thieves. They are street survivors, all about self-preservation. Most of them would roll over on their mother in a heartbeat if they thought it would keep them out of prison or off death row.

  In this case, our friends Allan and Darnell quickly turned on each other like two tomcats eyeing the same tabby. Darnell came across as the more cooperative of the two. We voted him most likely to flip on his buddy.

  Initially, he claimed to know nothing about the Elshire shooting. He said they had just been hanging out at his girlfriend’s place before they ran into Ax and his handler.

  “We saw the dog a
nd got scared and ran,” he said.

  The kid had some skills as a liar.

  We had more skills as truth-seekers.

  We let him talk a bit, then took a break and sat down with his pal Al. We asked Lucero what he knew about the shooting, and he said, “Maybe I know who did it.”

  To which we responded, “What do you mean ‘maybe’? If you know who did it, you’d better tell us right now.”

  It took him less than two seconds to throw his buddy under the bus. Lucero said Darnell shot and killed Mr. Elshire in a robbery attempt. Lucero claimed that he had watched the shooting from across the street. He noted that Darnell had carried three guns that night and dumped them as they left the scene.

  We asked about the condom packages scattered everywhere. We had traced them to a nearby STD clinic run by the state department of health. They had bowls of condoms in the place to encourage people to avoid spreading sexually transmitted diseases.

  Frick and Frack claimed they had found a big pile of them in the parking lot that night and stuffed them in their pockets. The condoms had fallen out during the robbery and while they were running away. We believed some of that story. A more likely scenario was that they planned on delivering the condoms to gang friends whose drug mules put narcotics in them, swallowed them, and transported them for distribution.

  We wanted to know where the murder weapon and other guns had ended up, so we pressed Lucero to help us find them. We didn’t tell him that we’d already found one, which wasn’t the murder weapon. Lucero led us to the place where he said Darnell had thrown two more guns over the fence while fleeing the scene of the shooting.

  We returned to our discussions with Darnell and fed him the news that his buddy was pointing the finger at him and had helped us recover two more guns, including the likely murder weapon.

  “Your boy Allan gave you up,” our detective told him.

  Human nature being what it is, Darnell promptly flipped on Allan, claiming he did the shooting.

  And so the dance continued.

  One of our eyewitnesses had said she was fairly certain that the shooter wore gray pants. We had Darnell in a talkative mood, so we pushed him to describe what they each were wearing that night. He said Allan was wearing gray pants.

  He also said they had changed clothes at the apartment where Darnell’s girlfriend lived with her parents. We paid a visit to that apartment and found their clothing there. The girlfriend said Allan had worn the gray pants. In the pockets, we found shell casings and live .25-caliber rounds, which matched the murder weapon.

  We took it all back to headquarters. We showed the pants to Allan Lucero, and he denied they were his. I threw them at him and told him to put them on. They fit perfectly.

  Hey, it wasn’t quite Cinderella and the glass slipper, but it worked for me. I was ready to put the squeeze on Allan Lucero to get his confession. We hadn’t let him talk to his parents yet, but once we reached this stage, we brought them in because the law required their presence before we could get a signed statement.

  The Luceros came. Both were in tears even though their son was still stone-faced and denying that he was the killer.

  His parents urged him to tell the truth, which seemed to have very little impact on him.

  We had an ace that we hadn’t played, so we tossed it on the table.

  “Allan, do you remember when you ran across the street that night and almost got hit by a car? Well, she saw your face, and she identified you as the shooter.”

  The kid was cornered, and he knew it. The presence of his parents made it unbearable.

  “I shot him,” he said.

  He tried to justify it by saying he wanted money to help his parents pay the overdue rent.

  Nice try, kid, but you don’t get to take the life of a good man because you’re trying to help out at home. He also claimed that Darnell had borrowed the guns, including the murder weapon, and had watched the whole thing go down.

  Once a suspect has lied to me and I’ve called him out, he often will try to minimize or legitimize the crime or his involvement in it. Lucero claimed that Mr. Elshire took a swing at him. At one point, he even claimed the old guy pulled a knife. He was trying to justify shooting a guy who had just walked to the drugstore to get his wife some Rolaids.

  With his sobbing parents beside him, our admitted killer said he had screamed “I’m sorry!” after shooting Robert Elshire. Then he ran, forgetting to take his victim’s wallet.

  He joined Darnell across the street, and they took off. They went to the apartment where Darnell’s girlfriend lived with her parents. There, they changed clothes and hung out until they thought it would be safe to go back and get the borrowed guns.

  That’s when they got the Ax.

  After we sorted out all their lies, we charged them both as adults for first-degree murder.

  Two days after Dimond and Lucero were formally charged, the late Robert Elshire was honored by the participants in the Pikes Peak Ascent and Marathon, who wore patches on their arms in his memory.

  twisted truth

  Since they were charged as adults, Allan Lucero and Darnell Dimond both received life sentences without parole. Unfortunately, Dimond had twisted the truth enough during our investigation to squirm his way out of prison after just six and a half years.

  He initially told us he was eighteen years old, so we had refused to let his parents sit in on the first interrogation. Later, we learned that he was really seventeen, but we had already talked to him without his parents by then.

  While in prison, he found a lawyer to challenge our case against him. In 2000, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled four to three that even though Dimond was interrogated as an adult because he had lied about his age, the statements he made during his interrogation should not have been admissible as evidence during his trial.

  Apparently, four of the high-court dudes thought we should have time-traveled and fixed that, which is why I say you should never trust a man who wears a robe to work.

  The Supremes did not set Dimond free, but they did say we would have to schedule a new criminal trial, in which we could not use much of the information from the first trial. The prospect of holding a second trial was further complicated by the fact that when this ruling came down, Dimond’s partner in crime, Allan Lucero, was on the lam.

  The admitted shooter in this case had decided to get out of prison, too, but he did it without a lawyer. Lucero and two other inmates climbed a twelve-foot fence topped with barbed wire, and absconded. Lucero was still AWOL when prosecutors were deliberating whether to retry Dimond. In the end, it was decided that we would have a hard time getting a conviction in a second trial, given the circumstances.

  So the prosecutors offered Dimond a deal: plead guilty to a charge of serving as an accessory to murder, which was punishable by no more than six years in prison and three years parole.

  Dimond, then twenty-three, took the deal and a get-out-of-jail-free card because he’d already served that time.

  When this happened, Robert Elshire’s family was disconcerted, to say the least, because Dimond served only six and a half years of a life sentence and Lucero was running free. Elshire’s daughter, Connie Williams, made a good point. She told a local reporter, “The only person who got a long-term sentence out of this tragedy was my father.”

  Her anger and frustration were probably not all that soothed when Lucero was caught after twenty-four days on the run. They found him holed up in the Springs Motel, just a hundred yards from the central offices for the Colorado Department of Corrections.

  At a press conference announcing Lucero’s capture, a spokeswoman for the DOC noted that his hideout had been just across the parking lot. She said, “We have appreciated the irony.”

  Lucero was lucky they found him before I did.

  And he was lucky that Ax had retired from the job.
r />   calling out the hounds

  Writing about my favorite four-legged crime-stopping companion called up memories of other K-9 unit members I worked with over the years. And since everyone loves a good dog story, I thought I’d share them with you.

  If you are a cat person, just skip ahead to the next chapter.

  We usually had twelve to sixteen canines with the department. Most of the time, they are in training or working. Theirs is not an easy life by any means, though they are very well cared for. Typically, these are Belgian Malinois or German shepherds, or a mix of those two breeds. These are not prissy purse puppies. They are large and intimidating beasts, for good reason.

  The dogs and their handlers go through fifteen weeks of basic training, followed by six-to-eight weeks of field training, as well as four hours of ongoing training per week. Those dogs considered “dual purpose” get eight hours’ training per week.

  While K-9 units were first trained and deployed by law enforcement in Belgium in 1899, the first American city to train and use them was New York City, in 1911. Canines didn’t come into widespread use by police departments across the USA until the 1950s.

  They quickly proved themselves invaluable in our line of work. I checked recently, and my former department had eight patrol dogs, four bomb squad dogs, three airport security dogs, and one “undercover” dog assigned to assist the Metro Vice, Narcotics, and Intelligence divisions.

  I had enormous respect and affection for our canines. I was very popular with them, perhaps because I kept a box of doggie-bone treats in my office. I was not above bribery, but only when it came to my furry friends.

  This stash of treats resulted in one minor calamity thanks to a new K-9 recruit named Fonto, a German shepherd who was roughly the size of a Shetland pony. This dog was young, gangly, and not quite in full control of his massive body.

  One day at police headquarters, Fonto’s handler unleashed the dog, which was common on a quiet day. Fonto had already discovered my box of treats tucked in a corner, so he made a mad dash for my office.