by Robert Scott
So Tuttle did this by asking, “Do you think that for the circumstance you found yourself in, this kind of patience was normal?”
Miriam replied, “I don’t know, because I’ve not been in a circumstance like that.”
Tuttle, no doubt, would have loved to point out that Miriam Helmick actually had been in a similar circumstance in 2002, when her first husband, Jack Giles, supposedly shot himself to death. But because of the rules laid down by the court on those circumstances, Tuttle did not go there. Instead, he wanted to know why Miriam had told police right off the bat that it looked as if the house had been robbed. Her exact words had been “There’s stuff everywhere.” In fact, there hadn’t been stuff everywhere, but just a few drawers that were open.
To all of this, Miriam responded, “I was not rational during that time. I don’t know what you expect of me! I mean, I called 911 because he was gone. I don’t know how I should react.”
Tuttle came back with, “All I’m expecting from you is the truth, correct?”
Miriam responded, “You’re getting the truth!”
“Well, it’s not like the place was ransacked. Like Agent Morton from the FBI was talking about in a real burglary scene, was it?”
“I didn’t get up and look at everything. I just looked around me.”
“Where did you look?”
“I was in the kitchen. I looked around at the drawers and things.”
“Okay, do you remember telling Merredith Von Burg, Alan’s sister, in the first three days after the murder that you saw Alan’s ring, your ring, and watch, and they had been left by the bathroom sink.” Obviously, Miriam couldn’t have seen these if she had never gone past the area where Alan lay on the floor.
Miriam claimed she hadn’t said that to Von Burg. So Tuttle asked, “She’s dreamed that up?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know any reason why she would have an animus or motive against you?”
Miriam answered, “I didn’t say that! I think that with everything that went on, she probably just got it mixed up. I told her where my watch and ring were left before I left home that morning. I said by the sink. It was the bathroom sink.”
Tuttle asked if Miriam had a chance to see what items had been seized by law enforcement from the house on June 10. She said that she did. So Tuttle asked, after looking at that list, could she say with certainty what items were not on the list, and might have been stolen? Miriam answered that some jewelry was probably stolen.
Tuttle told her it was important to be exact about what items of jewelry had been stolen, because law enforcement could track those kinds of things through pawnshops. Miriam said that she had been as exact as she could have been.
Tuttle declared, “Most of the valuable items in your house were not taken. Would you agree with that?” Miriam said that she agreed. So then he listed those items: computers, four rifles, a handgun, items in a china cabinet. And then he said, “So from your perspective, it doesn’t look like a real burglary, does it?”
Miriam replied, “I don’t know. I’m not a professional.”
Tuttle continued, “You walk in. You see your husband prone on the floor, blood around him. You dropped your bags. You’re very startled. You go to him, and you kneel. And you’re just sitting there. And on the cell phone call to the 911 operator, he asks, ‘Is there anyone else there with you?’ And you answer, ‘No.’ Do you agree with that?”
Miriam said that she did.
Tuttle continued, “And yet, you hadn’t been anywhere else in the house?”
“I really wasn’t looking to see if anybody was in the house. Alan was my main concern.”
“Well, you knew some foul play had occurred, correct?”
“Yes.”
“You said that the house had been robbed, and he’s lying there in a pool of blood?”
“I wasn’t putting everything all together, as somebody still being there in the house. I was concerned with Alan. I didn’t know at first what had happened to him.”
“Well, did you think the house had been robbed and then he died of natural causes?”
“I wasn’t thinking like that.”
“In fact, they asked you more than once if there was someone else in the house with you, and your answer was no. You hadn’t gone anywhere else, and yet you knew for a certainty there was no one else in the house?”
“Well, I hadn’t seen anybody else in the house. I was mainly directing my attention to Alan.”
“There’s been a robbery. Your husband’s prone on the floor. Blood all over, and you’re not scared for your own life, as well as your husband’s life?”
“ No.”
“You weren’t scared at all?”
“No. I was very upset. He’d just died. I really didn’t care what was going on around me.”
“Okay, let’s talk what was going on around you. The dispatcher said you needed to place your hand on Alan’s forehead and your hand under his neck, and then tilt his head back. And your response was ‘He’s all bloody.’”
“I was talking about his neck.”
“Just his neck. That’s all you were talking about?”
“That’s all I saw.”
So Tuttle got into the fact that Miriam said there had been blood also coming from Alan’s nose and mouth. But when the first officer arrived, Tuttle noted, “There were no rags around or anything that you had even used as a rag to clean out his mouth, correct?”
“There wasn’t blood in his mouth.”
Tuttle shot back, “I wasn’t trying to quibble over what was in his mouth. What I’m saying is, there wasn’t any meaningful blood on your person or your clothes, correct?”
Miriam answered, “There was blood on my thumb from where I pinched his nose. That was all that was touched. I mean, he didn’t have it all over his body.”
“You testified that you had been injured.” (The prosecutor was alluding to her earlier testimony about her rib being broken.) “But in your police interview, you never mentioned the fact that you had been injured, correct?”
Miriam replied that she didn’t think that had anything to do with Alan dying.
“Well, on page sixty-four of the interview, you said, ‘I put my hands on his chin and turned his head to the side.’ You never told them you were trying to do this one-handed?”
Miriam responded that she had not told them that. She did testify, however, “I was trying to do the best I could. I wasn’t dwelling on my problem when I was interested in Alan.”
Focusing on another area, Rich Tuttle asked if Miriam had touched Alan Helmick’s body and then gone back to the car. Miriam said she had not. So Tuttle asked why there would be a particle of gunshot residue on the steering wheel of the car she had been driving on the morning of June 10. Miriam said she did not know why that would appear there.
Tuttle then got to the phone calls Miriam had to her brother in Florida, when she had declared she would sell her story to the highest bidder on television programs. Tuttle asked, “You’re looking to cash in on what’s been happening, aren’t you?”
Miriam replied, “It wasn’t that. I was just frustrated over the whole thing.”
“Well, you talked about staying in touch with 48 Hours and with Nightline. And this was all over the love of your life being killed in a very violent manner. And you were willing to cash in on that?”
“No, that’s not what it was about!”
“Was there ever a time you reached out to Jim Hebenstreit through your lawyer to ask about suspects they had developed in the case?”
“No. I figured that somebody would say something if they had.”
“You weren’t curious about who had killed the love of your life, Alan Helmick?”
“I was very curious. My job was not to do their work for them.”
“Well, in fact, your job was to lead them astray. Is that correct?”
“At that point, yes, I did.”
“When you say ‘at that point,’ we’re talkin
g about twelve days after the murder, correct?” (This was the incident of the card under the doormat.)
“I was very distraught. Very upset at the time. Very paranoid about what was going on. So yes, that’s what I did.”
“So you concocted a complete ruse to lead them on a wild-goose chase away from you and toward some phantom killer out there, correct?”
“I was hoping they would come out and keep an eye on the property and see who was coming onto the property.”
“Well, their job really isn’t supposed to be chasing phantom killers leaving hokey threatening cards on people’s doorsteps, is it?”
“No. But if they had actually contacted me or done something about the white truck or listened, then maybe I wouldn’t have been at that point.”
“They spent hours tracking down the card. And they spent hours doing forensic testing it, fingerprinting it, DNA—and it all came back to you, correct?”
“Correct.”
“It was all over this suspicious white vehicle that didn’t scare you enough even to make you leave the residence?”
“I didn’t have the money to leave the residence. When I got the money, then I did leave.”
“You did what you thought was best for Miriam Helmick, not for the investigation, correct?”
“I did.”
“And not to help them find the killer, but to lead them astray, correct?”
“It wasn’t my intention to lead them astray. It was my intention to bring them out to watch the house.”
“In fact, that greeting card led them to the real killer, didn’t it, Ms. Helmick?”
“No, it did not!”
Richard Tuttle uttered three more words after Miriam’s answer: “No further questions.”
Just how well had Miriam Helmick done on the stand? Her testimony and her bearing were gauged by the press. Reporter Amy Hamilton, for the Daily Sentinel, noted that Miriam broke into tears when she had to describe her first vision of Alan lying on the kitchen floor with blood around his head. Journalist Paul Shockley noted what at times seemed more like a duel of wills, rather than just testimony between Richard Tuttle and Miriam Helmick. His headline stated:
PROSECUTOR, HELMICK CLASH. And for Hamilton, Shockley, and everyone else who had been watching the trial, the question remained: who had won that battle of wills in the minds of the jurors?
CHAPTER 47
A VERDICT
On December 7, 2009, closing arguments began by Richard Tuttle telling jurors about all the things Miriam had done before and after the murder of Alan Helmick. According to Tuttle, the Helmick’s housekeeper, Trish Erikson, had seen all the tension between Alan and Miriam on the day before he died. Tuttle contended that Alan had finally discovered that Miriam had been forging his checks, raiding his bank accounts, and keeping important business information from him. In fact, according to Tuttle, it was Miriam’s actions that caused Alan to default on two major loans that were connected to his new business ventures.
In Tuttle’s estimation, things reached a flash point between Miriam and Alan sometime in the early hours of June 10, 2008. While Alan was near his desk in the kitchen, Miriam walked up behind him and shot him once in the back of the head with a .25-caliber handgun. Then she tried to make it look like a burglary gone bad. But Special Agent Robert Morton had spoken of how shoddy the staging of this was. Morton had called it “juvenile,” created by someone who didn’t know what a real burglary scene looked like. Many valuable items were untouched in the Helmick home.
Tuttle also contended that a month before Miriam had killed Alan, she had tried to do so by sticking a wick in a car in which Alan had been sitting, in an attempt to blow him and the car to pieces. According to Tuttle, she had gotten the idea by watching the movie No Country for Old Men only days before. The only reason she hadn’t succeeded was that the wick only smoldered, instead of catching on fire in the gasoline tank in the trunk area.
Tuttle also noted that Miriam never tried giving Alan CPR, as instructed by the 911 operator. And the reason she didn’t was because she knew Alan was already dead. Tuttle asked what did Miriam do when she moved to Florida after Alan’s death, and didn’t tell anyone she was going there? She immediately started contacting rich men on dating sites. Not only that, but by that time she was pretending to be a person named Sharon Helmick. According to Tuttle, Miriam always lied when it suited her.
Tuttle said that Miriam claimed that she was better off with Alan alive than dead. What she hadn’t mentioned was that she was entitled to a $25,000 insurance policy, and at least $100,000 from the estate, if not more. That was mandated by Colorado law, no matter what a prenuptial agreement might say. Tuttle insisted that for someone who had come to Grand Junction with $600 in her purse, that was a lot of money.
For his part, Steve Colvin refuted everything that Richard Tuttle had just told the jurors. Colvin stated that very early on, the investigators decided to zero in on Miriam as the killer of Alan Helmick. According to Colvin, they never seriously looked at anyone else as the killer, even though there were many leads that it could have been someone angry at Alan’s business dealings, people who landscaped his yard, or even just a random act of burglary on the house that had gone bad.
Colvin noted that a murder weapon had never been found, and no gunshot residue had been found on Miriam’s hands, body, or clothing. As far as the particle of GSR on the steering wheel of the car that Miriam had been driving that day, Colvin said that the vehicle had been driven to a police holding yard, and an officer could have inadvertently deposited GSR on the steering wheel from his own hands.
Colvin admitted that the greeting card under the doormat was a bad idea on Miriam’s part. But he insisted it wasn’t sinister, but rather a desperate act of last resort by Miriam to make the sheriff ’s office come out to the house and see a white pickup truck and its driver were lurking around the house.
As far as Miriam supposedly not being grief-stricken enough when she found Alan on the floor, Colvin said, “They thought she didn’t cry enough? That’s preposterous.” And he said that law enforcement and the prosecution combined one minor thing after another, and they tried to make them seem like all parts of a guilty conscience: things such as not cleaning up Alan’s blood for days after he was killed, or saying “I love you” too many times on her voice messages of June 10, 2008, or things even as minor as stuffing receipts into her jeans pockets rather than into her purse that day.
Colvin declared, “It’s no wonder law enforcement focused on Miriam early in the investigation. Alan’s family and friends never liked Miriam. They lined up to say she must have had something to do with his murder. She must have even poisoned him in the spring.”
Colvin, however, noted that Dr. Kurtzman shot this idea down. Kurtzman had not found any indication that Alan had ever been poisoned. And Kurtzman said that Alan had suffered a heart attack sometime in February or March, and that’s what made him so sick all spring. In fact, according to Kurtzman, it was lucky that Alan was alive at all when he was murdered, because his arteries were so clogged and his heart so weak.
As far as gaining money from Alan’s murder, Colvin pointed out, that other than checking about the $25,000 insurance policy, Miriam never tried to collect on anything else she was entitled to. She had simply left the Grand Junction area because she wanted to be near her son. No one in law enforcement had ever said that she could not leave the Grand Junction area.
And Colvin pointed out that Miriam didn’t date anyone new for several months after Alan’s death. Colvin granted that it was a mistake on Miriam’s part to be using Sharon Helmick’s name, but by that point she was desperate to have some form of identification.
Colvin told the jurors, “Nothing suggests she benefited from Alan’s death. Your decision has to be based upon the principles of law, beginning with the presumption of innocence. There has been a lack of evidence throughout this case, and that’s the basis for reasonable doubt. All their (the prosecution’s) theorie
s are based upon speculation.”
Tammy Eret had the last say to the jurors. In some ways, it was her last hurrah as a prosecutor for the Mesa County DA’s Office. She would soon be leaving that office to go into private practice.
Eret countered Colvin’s arguments one by one, stating that Miriam had plenty of motive to murder Alan Helmick. And the main motive was that he’d found out that she was forging his checks and keeping vital business information from him.
Eret also mocked Miriam Helmick’s testimony, about how she was right, and one person after another who testified with damaging information against her were wrong. Eret said that Miriam must be the “unluckiest person in the world” to have so many things misunderstood when it came to her.
Eret called Miriam a manipulative liar, who had come to Grand Junction, looking for a sugar daddy. Miriam had been so bold about this, she’d told many people at Barbara Watts’s dance studio exactly what she was looking for.
And according to Eret, Miriam was such a liar, she even lied to her own son, Chris. Eret said, “She told him that she’d been cleared by Mesa County authorities. That was not true. If she tells her son a story, what are you to her? Who can believe her?”
When it was time for the jurors to convene their deliberations, Mother Nature intervened and almost made that impossible. A blizzard was blowing outside, and one of the jurors from Palisade, a nearby town, had to be driven to the courthouse by an MCSO deputy. The jurors deliberated for five hours; by three in the afternoon, they had their verdict.
A cordon of bailiffs and deputies stood near Miriam Helmick at the defense table, and by Alan’s daughters in the gallery, as the jurors filed into the courtroom. When asked how they had found in the various charges against Miriam Helmick, the words poured out one after another: “Guilty.” Guilty of first-degree murder. Guilty of attempted murder in the car fire incident. Guilty of forgery. Miriam was acquitted on only one minor incidence of forgery because of lack of evidence on that charge.