by Joe Kenda
He struck the first blow to the head of Schmidtke, and then Kevin Moore, Dominic Perea, and Shawn Stancil joined him in punching and kicking him when he went down in the street, the girls said.
This made sense, given the blood traces on the clothing and shoes of the four who were in custody. Then, to our surprise, the girls added two more names.
They said Phenix had two younger friends who joined in the beating: Robert Dean and Dan Davis, both white kids. Dean was a ninth-grader we hadn’t heard of before, but I had interviewed Davis.
He was the kid I talked to at the crime scene, who offered up the first bits of information on the nature of the attack. Maybe he had thought that being helpful then would keep us from tracking him down. He was wrong.
We went to his house that day.
“What’s up?” he said upon answering the door.
“We’re the guys you lied to about not being involved in the attack on the two soldiers that night,” I said.
“I was there, but I was pulling people off of him,” Davis stammered.
“We have witnesses who tell a different story,” I said. “They said you were kicking him when he was down.”
I waited for the next flurry of lies. This kid was on the defensive. It wouldn’t take him long to crack under pressure. He didn’t have the instincts of a hardened criminal, who can lie to your face for hours without end.
“I was just trying to break it up,” he said, his voice cracking.
“But you kicked him?”
“Just once.”
“In the head?”
“No, I was kicking his feet, I swear. I wasn’t really trying to hurt him. I couldn’t have hurt him enough to kill him.”
At that point, I thought we had the truthful version of his role. This kid was not a jock. And he wasn’t a hard-ass. We had him for assault but not murder.
“Turn around and put your hands behind your back,” I said. “We are taking you in for further questioning in the murder of Layne Schmidtke.”
We advised him of his rights and gave him a ride to the county lockup.
Then we went to the home of our sixth and final suspect, the youngest of the bunch, Robert Dean. He was only fourteen years old but big for his age—six feet and 160 pounds. He was a tough-looking kid for as young as he was.
When he came to the door, the first thing I looked at wasn’t his face; it was his shoes. Rust-colored stains, once again.
“How’d you get blood on your shoes, Mr. Dean?”
He didn’t have an answer. He knew right then that he was busted.
Without further ado, we advised him of his rights and took him to join his friends behind bars. We would later learn that Dean was no stranger to trouble; in fact, he was on probation for felony theft when the attack on the soldiers occurred.
At that point, we had six teenagers, fourteen to eighteen years old, none of them ever in serious trouble before. A couple of them top athletes and decent students. We knew that it wouldn’t be long before those who were least culpable began to offer information against those who had dealt the killing blows. Teen loyalty ends when a prison sentence begins to look like a real possibility.
Bring in the parents and the lawyers, and let the negotiations begin.
Seven months after the fatal attack on Layne Schmidtke, we received the reports on the blood samples taken from the scene. The results were mixed.
The blood on the shoes of Kevin Moore and Shawn Stancil was from the victim, but the blood samples taken from the clothing and shoes of the other suspects could not be linked to Schmidtke. It was marked “Unknown.”
This wasn’t what we’d hoped for from our physical evidence, but we still had enough eyewitness testimony to file murder charges against all six suspects. Although three of them were juveniles, the district attorney’s office charged them all as adults. The charges ranged from manslaughter to first-degree assault.
The legal maneuvers, media games, trials, and sentencings went on for a year and a half. I’ll spare you the boring details, trials, and tribulations. In the final accounting:
Anthony Phenix, eighteen, the star quarterback who was identified as the individual who returned to kick the fallen Layne Schmidtke in the head, was found guilty of second-degree murder and a crime of violence and sentenced to twenty-three years in prison.
Dominic Perea, seventeen, was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to sixteen years in prison.
Shawn Stancil, sixteen, was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to sixteen years in prison.
Kevin Moore, eighteen, was found guilty of reckless manslaughter and sentenced to twelve years in prison.
Daniel Davis, nineteen, pleaded guilty to attempted assault and was sentenced to six years of probation.
Robert Dean, fifteen, was found guilty of negligent homicide and received a sentence of four years of probation.
There was a lot of hue and cry during the trials and afterward about charging juveniles as adults and sending them off to prison upon conviction. I’ll leave that debate to the social scientists and criminologists. I think justice was served in this case, but ultimately, everyone lost, including you and me.
We lost Layne Schmidtke, who seemed to be a decent human being, whose children deserved a father. We lost what might have been very productive years from all those who went to prison. We lost a bit more of our sense of security and sanity in our world.
Mob violence to this extreme is quite rare, but it does happen, and it never makes any sense at all. They were young and driven by emotion and anger and the desire to be part of the pack. They didn’t consider the consequences. They didn’t think about the fact that someone might get killed, or that his death would result in their being arrested and sent to prison for a good portion of their lives.
Tragedies like this happen when people can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality. The adolescent mind is particularly prone to this problem, and in this case, they paid a heavy price, but not nearly as heavy as the one paid by Layne Schmidtke and those who loved him.
And those are the people my fellow detectives and I work for.
one more thing
There is an interesting postscript to this story, a final twist.
Because of this incident and others involving violence along the Ave in the early 1990s, the city of Colorado Springs instituted a curfew to get all those under the age of twenty-one off the street at a decent hour. One of the first people arrested for violating that curfew was none other than young Robert Dean, the youngest of the defendants and the one who had received the lightest sentence of all those convicted in the Schmidtke homicide.
And so, Robert Dean had his probation revoked. He went off to prison for three years. If he’d just stayed home, he would have been okay.
Folks, you can’t make this stuff up.
Chapter Eleven:
Pulling the Trigger
The title of this final chapter reflects the fact that while writing this book, I actually did pull the trigger and put an end to something, but not someone. I killed my own Homicide Hunter television series on the Investigation Discovery channel. After nine seasons, it was not a difficult decision to make.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed filming every episode of the show. The series changed my life in many ways, all for the better. So I am grateful to Discovery and all who were involved, but I think we all agreed that it was wise to get out while the getting was good.
The show was based on cases I worked as a homicide detective or the head of the homicide division during my twenty-three years with the Colorado Springs Police Department. There were 387 cases to draw from, and we built shows around the most interesting ones. We were running out of material, honestly, and I wanted to maintain the integrity of the series. Fans need not despair. The show will play on in reruns, probably into eternity and beyond.
The network agreed to retire Homicide Hunter, but they asked me to stay on for a new show in which I serve as the host to other detectives. We will review their cases from around the country. Think of me as the color man in the booth, with the other detectives serving as the play-by-play guys.
We’ve already filmed the first season, and I think fans of Homicide Hunter will enjoy this new approach to the true-crime genre. This series will be easier on this ol’ gumshoe. The cases are fascinating, and even better, I was not involved in the original investigations, physically or emotionally.
Doing the television series has generated many incredible experiences for my family and me. We’ve had a blast. This crazy turn in my life has brought one surprise after another.
I’ve reflected a lot on my career while writing this book and completing the first television series. It’s been one hell of a run, and I thought I’d share a few highlights with you from my second career as an accidental television star.
going hollywood
During the first season of filming Homicide Hunter, I was definitely the rookie on the set. Maybe they were trying to make me feel more comfortable by choosing to do my first series of interviews for the show on location in an abandoned jail.
The creepy old place was owned by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. The decor matched Hollywood’s vision of hoosegow hell. They had me surrounded by a camera crew in the middle of a cellblock that still smelled like sweat and urine. The place reeked of misery. It was a reality crime show, after all.
So I played along. They rolled the cameras, and I began yapping away about my life in crime.
But suddenly the director yelled, “Cut! ”
Yes, they actually do that.
I’d seen enough movies about movies to know what “Cut!” meant, but the next words out of the director’s mouth weren’t so familiar.
“We have a flyer!” he said.
Now, all the windows in the old jail were broken or missing altogether, and I assumed that a bird had flown in.
A jailbird, maybe?
“Where’s the bird?” I asked the crew. “I don’t see it.”
The camera operators stared at me as if I were speaking a foreign language.
So, like a rookie, I had to ask.
“Okay. Define what the director means by ‘a flyer,’ ” I said.
“One of your hairs is out of place,” a camera operator said.
“Oh, man, you Hollywood people need to get a life,” I said as a makeup person dashed up and plastered goop all over my hair.
Fast-forward a couple of seasons. We were filming again, but in a different location. We had developed a simple routine. The director would say, “Roll,” and I’d just yap and yap until the director told me to shut up.
On this occasion, I was about ninety minutes into describing a complex case. I had launched into the setup in the story, describing the discovery of human remains on Gold Camp Road, when the sound guy, who was new to the crew, yelled “Cut!”
Sound guys don’t call “Cut.” Directors do that.
“What are you doing?” I said. “And why now?”
The new sound guy looked as if he’d blown an artery, but it was worse than that.
“I just realized the cameras and the sound are not synched,” he said.
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.
I realized that everyone was waiting for me to blow my stack since we’d just wasted ninety minutes of my precious wisdom.
“Well, I assume this means we need to back up on ol’ Gold Camp Road,” I said. “When you’re synched up, let me know when to start over.”
“Aren’t you upset?” asked a cameraperson.
“Would that change anything?” I replied. “Nobody died, did they? Is anyone wounded and in need of an ambulance? If not, then let’s just get back to the story.”
I had no animosity or harsh words for the sound guy. He knew that he had screwed up. He didn’t need me to tell him anything.
Filming a show is expensive. He’d wasted valuable time. That wasn’t tolerated among these professionals.
Needless to say, I never saw the sound guy again. They may have taken him out and shot him, but if so, nobody told me.
I never became one of those demanding television stars with an attitude and a posse of lackeys. Is there even such a thing as a “diva detective?”
a welcome change
I didn’t get all pissy about screw-ups, because I truly was grateful for every minute of this late-life career switcheroo, and not because of its impact on my finances.
If money were important to me, I would not have been a cop for all those years. If I have money, I spend it. Otherwise, I don’t need much. The hike in income from my television work was nice because I could do special things for the wife and kids, like take family vacations.
Strange as it may sound, doing a television show gave me back a more normal life. For the first time in nearly three decades, I could walk among normal humans and feel welcome.
As a homicide detective, I couldn’t escape the sense that anyone I dealt with either hated me or feared me. I understood where they were coming from. My arrival rarely brought good news. Either someone had died, or someone was facing arrest.
Then I retired, and for seven years I drove a school bus for special-needs kids. For the first time in my life, people were happy to see me when I showed up. I could have done that job for the rest of my life.
I loved those kids and they seemed to love me—even the kid who threw a shoe at me nearly every day. He wasn’t trying to hurt me. He was just showing me that he had a good arm.
Once I entered show business, my world changed even more dramatically. It was a jarring experience. I have never felt so welcomed. Suddenly, strangers in airports, restaurants, and all sorts of places were genuinely excited to see me. A woman walked up to me in an airport and said, “Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Joe Kenda?”
“Why, yes, they have,” I said.
“Oh my gawd, you even sound like him,” she said.
Then it hit her.
“Oh, no! You are Joe Kenda, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am,” I said.
Now, back in my days with the homicide division, if someone recognized me like that, I probably would have taken a step back and put a hand on my gun as a warning. I actually did that once in a shopping mall, to a lady who just wanted to thank me for solving a murder.
Yes, I was that screwed up, dangerously close to being unhinged. But now I’m fully hinged. I even enjoy being recognized, most of the time.
I was walking out of a Virginia Beach restaurant when this clean-cut guy in a nice suit stared at me from across the street. His eyes widened to the size of silver dollars, and he darted into the street in my direction.
A cabbie flying down the street had to smoke the tires to avoid smoking him. The guy hardly noticed. He walked up to me and said, “Do you know who you are?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” I replied. “And I have a driver’s license with my picture on it in case I forget.”
“Oh, man, that sounded really stupid, didn’t it?” he said.
“Yes, it did, but I’m Joe Kenda. Who are you?”
He wasn’t really crazy, just a fan who was shocked to see me in the flesh.
Nearly all my encounters with fans have been pleasant, although there was one woman who became overly affectionate in front of my wife.
“If I’d had a knife, I would have stabbed her right in those silicone boobs,” Kathy said.
There was one occasion in which I might have been a bit judgmental when dealing with a fan. I was staying at a high-dollar hotel in Beverly Hills because I was filming a promotion for the network.
My lawyer had an office down the street. He invited me to dinner. So I went out fr
ont and waited for him on the street at the hotel entrance.
As I stood there, a new Ferrari roared up, and a dapper guy about my age popped out of the driver’s side. He tossed his keys to the valet and then went around to open the passenger door.
Out stepped this twentysomething beauty in a skirt six inches long and heels six inches high. She had a lovely figure enhanced by DuPont.
The guy grabbed her hand as if claiming a trophy, and they walked toward me.
“You’re Joe Kenda!” he said.
He snatched my hand and would not let go. He told me his name, but I didn’t really hear him. I was fighting with my inner smart-ass.
I lost that battle, and as I looked at his young friend, the words just leaped out of my mouth.
“This must be your niece!” I said.
My former fan turned purple.
His girlfriend chirped angrily, “I’m not his niece!”
I smiled and gently said, “I knew that, honey.”
Without further ado, they left me at the curb.
Yes, I probably lost that fan, but the geezer should pick on someone his own age.
all in the family
Just as I’ve had to adjust to being more popular with the general public, Kathy and our grown daughter, Kris, and son, Dan, have had to make some adjustments, too. They didn’t grow up with a beloved celebrity dad. They grew up with a cranky cop dad who loved them and wanted to be with them but was often pulled away by violent criminals.
Mostly, my wife and kids are relieved now that they no longer have to worry about the threatening phone calls I used to get. Or angry parents of criminals showing up at the front door wanting to massage my face with a tire iron.
The kids used to hide their father’s identity to avoid being threatened by scumbags I’d arrested or sent off to prison. Now they hide it to avoid autograph seekers and people wanting me to solve their family mysteries.
Hiding is easier for Kris because she is married and her last name is different. Most people never make the connection between us. But every now and then, someone surprises her with a question about her strange old man.