Killer Triggers

by Joe Kenda

  The airheads on television are much more about self-promotion than truth promotion. So for them, the beating death of an American soldier in downtown Colorado Springs was Armageddon.

  This did not make my job any easier. Our homicide bureau and the whole police department were already under the gun because 1991 was breaking records for bloodbaths.

  Fifty cops were assigned to major crimes, but I had only eight homicide detectives, and we ran ourselves ragged that year. When the television reporters were screaming about this case, some politicians and others called for the creation of a “special unit” with a huge team of investigators pulled in from other divisions.

  Here’s a little lesson from law enforcement 101: You can’t just transfer any breather in blue into the homicide department when things get busy. We aren’t salesmen hawking hardware at Home Depot. We couldn’t just pull in more help from the staff in the Appliance Department.

  The homicide division doesn’t have an extra-guy closet. We investigate complex crimes and make cases that are later scrutinized by highly paid defense lawyers and appeal-averse judges who like nothing more than to find a mistake so they can cut a defendant lose.

  There’s no room for temps in our trade. The stakes are too damned high.

  the magnificent eight

  We couldn’t afford to slip up or let anything slide in this case. But that was okay. We were a very tight team, highly experienced and relentless.

  I was the lieutenant in charge, but I rarely pulled rank. We called ourselves the Magnificent Eight.

  I was the conductor. They were the orchestra. I pointed in a direction, and they went there. We made beautiful music out of murder and mayhem that year. We worked our asses off.

  We became so hardened to gore that I would order pizza delivered to the crime scenes. We didn’t have time for leisurely lunches. Our backs were against the wall. We owed the victims and their families our best efforts. That’s what kept us going.

  The killing on the Ave was our toughest case only because of the numbers involved. Suspects. Witnesses. We could have filled the high school gym with them. This was a nightmare of a case, but if it were easy, anybody could do it. Homicide investigation can be the most frustrating and the most euphoria-inducing job in law enforcement.

  Nobody wants to help you, let alone see you coming. You are on the ultimate hunt, searching for an elusive quarry—one that may even be smarter than you (as much as that hurts to admit).

  Our eight-man team was made up of passionate detectives with complementary skills. Besides me (the world’s greatest and humblest detective), the Magnificent Eight included . . .

  The Computer Wizard, who could break into the Pentagon if we needed it to happen. (Note to the FBI: Just kidding. We would never do that!)

  The Matrix Master, another tech-savvy guy who could navigate the federal system and track bad guys down like nobody’s business.

  The Interrogators, two brilliant brain burglars who could get inside the heads of suspects, reveal their lies, and pry out their secrets. They didn’t need to torture anyone. They could scramble brains with mere words.

  The Enforcer, a big, powerful physical specimen who could walk into a room and intimidate even the toughest criminals—but not his boss, of course.

  The Locksmith, who could open any drug dealer’s safe or door. For fun, he broke into very complicated pay-phone locks and replaced coins with dollar bills just to mess with the telephone-company guys.

  The Bruise Brothers, our own dynamic duo of expert street fighters, who were always prepared to wade into battle if we ran into hostiles or heavy resistance. One of them, who had a dark sense of humor, liked to joke that his version of reading a suspect his rights would go like this: You have the right to remain silent, if you can stand the pain.

  As leader of this pack, I tried to keep them sharp and motivated. We shared a passion for solving crimes and putting killers behind bars. The Magnificent Eight were also big on mottos. One of my favorites was “Nobody does dead like we do.”

  bloodied suspects

  After twenty-four hours on the Schmidtke case, we had three kids in custody: two runners and a gawker, all of them found with bloodstains on their clothing. Once we had gathered all the information we could at the crime scene, we brought them in one at a time, starting with the gawker, Shawn Stancil.

  At first inspection, he seemed like a stand-up kid, but then, mob violence often involves good people gone bad. He was just sixteen years old, with no criminal history.

  Stancil was also an athlete at Fountain-Fort Carson High School, which kept coming up as a common denominator for both suspects and witnesses.

  This was interesting since most of the students at that particular high school, located about sixteen miles from downtown, were the offspring of soldiers serving at nearby Fort Carson.

  They were military brats and proud of it. While other high school football teams have uniforms with two colors, the Trojans of Fountain-Fort Carson proudly wear three: the red, white, and blue.

  Why would kids from that school target two guys who were obviously off-duty soldiers? The answer to that question would come, but only after many hours of investigation and interviews.

  Our first man up, Stancil, seemed more like the type of kid who’d want to become a soldier, not beat up on one. His father was in the army, stationed at Fort Carson, same as Schmidtke and Reeves.

  When we asked him why he was found with blood on his shirt, Stancil said he’d been hanging out with his girlfriend on the Ave when he saw the attack on the two soldiers.

  He told us he jumped in instinctively, to break it up.

  Then whose blood is on your shirt?

  Stancil said it probably came from one of the attackers. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—ID any of them.

  We weren’t sure what to make of him. Blood test results on his shirt would tell us more. We collected his clothing and delivered it to the crime lab for analysis.

  But we locked him up to keep him safe—and away from anyone he might be trying to protect.

  Next up: our two bloodied crime scene runners, Kevin Moore and Anthony Phenix. Both were seniors from Fountain-Fort Carson High School and members of the football team. In fact, Phenix was their star quarterback.

  He did not have an arrest record. And he came across as a decent kid who felt sympathy for the victim and his family. But for the blood on his clothing and his flight from the scene, we might have been tempted to give him a pass.

  The QB was fast, but not fast enough.

  Phenix claimed he’d just been hanging out on the Ave like everyone else, having fun with the guys, talking to girls, and chillin’, which I gather is cooler than playing it cool.

  The QB said he heard a bunch of commotion, walked over to see what was going on, and suddenly found himself in the middle of a brawl. He figured the blood on his clothing flew off one of the other combatants.

  He also recalled that as he stood in the crowd, someone hit him on the back, so he spun around and started swinging. He didn’t remember anyone specific being a target of his punches, but he knew that the people around him were standing, not fallen on the ground like the victims.

  I wasn’t impressed. His story was plausible but not convincing. Again, the blood on his clothing would tell us more. In the meantime, we benched him in the county lockup.

  That left us to chat with bloodied runner number two, Kevin Moore, linebacker on the Trojan football team. He looked the part: six-two, lean, and muscular.

  Mr. Moore added a new twist with his rendition of that fateful night.

  He was the first to admit that he’d been drinking booze that night. He claimed that he and a friend guzzled a mix of wine and beer called “jungle juice” before heading downtown.

  This conveniently resulted in Moore passing out in a friend’s car once they got there. Moore t
old us that his drunken slumber was interrupted by a friend who said his quarterback buddy was involved in a fight and needed help.

  Moore’s story was that he jumped out of the car, shook off his drunken coma, crashed through the crowd, and dragged Phenix away, protecting the star and playing the hero. Somewhere along the way, blood was smeared on his clothing, including his shoes.

  The source of the blood on Mr. Moore’s footwear was of special interest to our investigation. He claimed that he had not kicked anyone. He ran from the scene only because it might hurt his reputation to be caught at a murder scene. The Trojans linebacker portrayed himself as yet another innocent, an accidental participant in a fight that resulted in a vicious murder.

  Interesting. Not one of these upstanding citizens arrested with blood on their clothing admitted to starting the fight or punching or kicking the two soldiers. They were all just babes in the woods.

  Or wolves in the pack.

  a threat leads to a break

  My merry band of hard-boiled detectives suspected that all three were lying, but we needed proof. We knew that it could be months before we got the crime lab results on the bloodied clothing, but all we could do in the meantime was keep talking to suspects and potential witnesses, not to mention their nervous and protective parents.

  Nobody was happy with us, including us.

  Then we got a break. The mother of a Fountain-Fort Carson High School student called and said her daughter had information to share on the Ave killing, but she was afraid. And she had good reason to be. Someone had called her daughter and threatened her.

  The caller said she’d better not tell the cops what she’d seen, or she would be next.

  My, my, my, someone out there was very nervous about this young lady talking to us, which made us very interested in doing just that. But first, we had to assure the teen and her parents that we would protect them.

  We offered assurances along those lines, and then Tanya Starr and her parents came in so we could hear what she had to share with us.

  Tanya coughed up some useful information, but it wasn’t anything she saw. It was what she had heard.

  After the fight on the Ave, she shared a ride home with a classmate, a male, who said something that terrified her.

  “So we killed that dude, so what?” she recalled him saying.

  Excuse me if my weary detective heart pounded out a dramatic drumbeat upon hearing that.

  This was a potential breakthrough in the case: an actual person who claimed to be a participant in this murder.

  An uncaring, vile, and loathsome person, maybe, but one that we of the Colorado Springs Police Department homicide division would love to engage in further conversation.

  In the next moment, Tanya became my favorite teenager in the world outside immediate family. She offered up the name of the classmate who had claimed responsibility for the killing and then threatened her: Dominic Perea, a seventeen-year-old senior at Fountain-Fort Carson, whose circle of friends just happened to include our three blood brothers behind bars: Anthony, Kevin, and Shawn.

  stepping it up

  A quick check revealed that Dominic had a bit darker past than the other three. He’d been involved in several fights, according to juvenile reports. This was another reason Tanya and her parents took him seriously when he threatened to kill her if she told anyone what he’d said in the car.

  We also noted that Perea was Latino while the other three in custody were Black, which matched up with witness reports that the attackers were racially diverse, including those two and a couple of white kids we had yet to track down.

  After talking to Tanya, I put the pedal to the metal. Perea had threatened her life, so we wanted him locked up, for her safety if nothing else.

  Tanya had given us a good description of what Dominic had been wearing on the night of the attack. We wanted to test it for bloodstains as well. We ordered up a search warrant and paid a visit to his home.

  There, we had a chat with Dominic and his mom. They prove to be tight-lipped and models of cleanliness, too.

  Dominic staunchly claimed he was not involved in the Ave fight—never even saw it, even though he was downtown.

  “Well, if you weren’t anywhere near the fight, you won’t mind if examine the clothes you were wearing that night, will you?” I asked in my nice-detective voice.

  “I washed them,” came the reply from Dominic’s mother. “I’m kind of a neat freak.”

  The mother explained that she routinely picked up the clothes her son had worn, and cleaned them the next day.

  She was a tidy thing. Or very crafty when it came to protecting her son.

  We might have left their home feeling frustrated and concerned about Dominic Perea and the alleged threats he’d made to my favorite unrelated teenager/witness.

  Except that I had a flash of brilliance, if I do say so myself.

  It wasn’t really a flashy flash, just a simple astute observation.

  Mindful of our other suspect with the bloodied footwear, I checked out Dominic’s shoes as we prepared to leave.

  Mom hadn’t thought of that. But I did.

  Her bad.

  There were small rust-colored stains on Dominic’s shoes. Definitely looked like blood to my well-trained eyes.

  “What’s that on your shoe?” I asked in my slightly less nice detective voice.

  Dominic and his mother stared down like a couple of dogs who’d been caught shredding the couch cushions. Neither offered an explanation.

  I didn’t give them the chance to dream one up.

  “I’ll be taking those for examination as possible evidence in this case,” I informed them in my don’t-fucking-mess-with-me detective voice.

  Then I looked at Perea’s mom, who was struggling to hide her distress, and said, “Oh, and I’ll be taking your son into custody, too, for further questioning in this case. Let’s go for a ride, Dominic.”

  Never in my life have I been so grateful for unwashed sneakers. Yes, it’s the little things that make a homicide detective grateful, especially when they lead to bigger things, like murder convictions.

  the elusive why

  I have been known to say that the why of a murder doesn’t matter to me a whit, or at least not as much as the who, what, when, and where. Yet, I have to admit, the why intrigued me in this case.

  Why would a group of teens who had never been in serious trouble viciously attack a pair of nonconfrontational and nonthreatening off-duty soldiers—especially teens who wore red, white, and blue on the football field at a high school full of army kids?

  No one we talked to had offered any clues to the why, and that was bugging me. But then, I was all too familiar with the teen code of silence. Don’t trust adults. Be loyal to your friends, even if they aren’t really your friends.

  Now, the other part of that code is that teens will talk to each other. In fact, they will talk their asses off even if they’ve been told to shut the hell up.

  So I called a few teachers and administrators I knew at Fountain-Fort Carson High and told them to keep their ears open for any hallway or locker-room chatter about the latest killing on the Ave.

  A few days later, the principal of Fountain-Fort Carson High School called. It was the most enjoyable visit to the principal’s office I’d ever made—and as a schoolboy I’d had more than a few.

  The principal informed me that school scuttlebutt had led him to a group of female students who may have witnessed the attack on Reeves and Schmidtke. He’d been told that they might have useful information.

  And so I gathered these girls and reminded them that an innocent man had been murdered.

  “So talk to me,” I said. “What happened that night? Why did Layne Schmidtke’s wife and two children lose him in our town?”

  The floodgates opened. They had a story to tell that th
ey’d been holding back too long. Their night on the Ave had turned dark when boys from their school tangled with two off-duty soldiers, they said.

  At first, I’m thinking, I know this already.

  But then the girls explained that this confrontation happened earlier in the night, and the two soldiers were both Black. It wasn’t Reeves and Schmidtke. These two soldiers were in a car and they drove away.

  “Okay, tell me what happened with the first two soldiers in the car,” I said.

  The two GIs had pulled up next to the girls to flirt with them. They exchanged words, and then one of the teen boys stepped in and told the soldiers to buzz off.

  More heated words were exchanged. More teens joined in. Someone kicked the soldiers’ car and invited them to fight. The soldiers weighed the odds and decided to beat it out of there.

  The encounter left the teen boys ramped up for a fight. There was talk of trying to find the guys in the car and beating them. Instead, they yelled at other soldiers passing by in cars or walking across the street. The teens who had been drinking kept fanning the flames of anger, and then Reeves and Schmidtke walked right into their fury.

  A couple of the girls spotted them, noted their military cuts, and warned them to walk away. One of them told me that she’d gone right up to them and said, “You might want to cross the street. My friends are in a bad mood and I don’t want to see anybody get hurt.”

  She said one of them told her they weren’t doing anything wrong. The two soldiers kept walking toward the group. The teens swarmed around them, yelling threats.

  “What are you doing on our corner! This is our turf!”

  Just as the soldiers turned away from their antagonists and prepared to cross the street, one of the teens punched Schmidtke. And then the mob mentality kicked in.

  We knew the story from there. What we didn’t know was exactly who attacked Schmidtke. We suspected it was Perea since he had a history of assault, but the girls said no, it wasn’t him.

  Instead, it was the charismatic quarterback, Anthony Phenix, who had no criminal record. The popular athlete was usually easygoing, the girls said, but after the encounter with the soldiers in the car, Phenix seemed to have a meltdown.