Jan. 08--When Boulder prosecutors file charges this week against Michael Clark in the 1994 shooting of city employee Marty Grisham, it will be the eighth cold case homicide in which the Boulder County District Attorney's Office has pursued charges against a suspect since 2008.
Six of those cases have been charged since District Attorney Stan Garnett took office in 2009.
Two others -- the 1997 rape and murder of University of Colorado student Susannah Chase and the 1987 murder of Carol Murphy -- were charged under Mary Lacy, Garnett's predecessor, and prosecuted under Garnett.
In some of those cases, like Chase's, a DNA match provided the key evidence that led to a suspect and then to a conviction.
But in other cases there was not a single breakthrough that led to the arrest. In cases from the 1980s and 1990s, the person charged with the crime -- or for whom an arrest warrant has been issued -- is the same one investigators suspected at the time of the killing and much of the evidence cited in arrest warrants was available to police and prosecutors at the time, raising questions about why charges weren't filed then.
Law enforcement officials, prosecutors and legal experts say a variety of changes -- in technology, in the culture of the Boulder County District Attorney's Office, in law enforcement investigative techniques and resources, and in Boulder County's population -- have led to prosecutors pursuing cases now.
'A new day'
June Menger, of Longmont, whose son, Sid Wells, was killed in 1983, called it "a new day in the Boulder District Attorney's Office."
Under Garnett, an arrest warrant was issued for Thayne Smika, a roommate of Wells' and a longtime suspect in the case. Then-District Attorney Alex Hunter made a deal with Smika's attorney that he would testify before the grand jury on the condition that he wouldn't be indicted. Smika hasn't been seen since 1986.
The arrest warrant includes new ballistics analysis that contends it is very likely that the gun found in the Smika home was the same one used to kill Wells, but other parts of the case have been in place for years.
"I am so proud of the Boulder police department and the cooperation they are getting from the district attorney's office. I have seen such progress since Stan Garnett got into office," Menger said. "He is so willing to listen. It means the world to the families to have these cases pursued."
Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle, who was a detective sergeant with the Boulder police department when Grisham was killed, said this district attorney is not as "risk-averse" as previous district attorneys.
"They're more willing to take hard cases," Pelle said of Garnett's office.
For 30 years, just two people ran the Boulder County District Attorney's Office -- Hunter from 1978 to 2000 and Lacy from 2000 to 2008.
Hunter and Lacy did not return a phone call seeking comment for this article.
Kathy Sasak, a longtime Boulder resident and Jefferson County prosecutor who now sits on the state cold-case task force as deputy executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Safety, said there are advantages to having longtime leadership and advantages to change. Previous district attorneys had been made "gun-shy" by losses in seemingly strong cases.
Losing a murder case is not just a matter of ego for prosecutors.
"As a prosecutor, I only get one shot at it," said Sasak. "If I lose, double jeopardy comes into it, and if that smoking gun comes up five years later, you're out of luck."
Not a sure thing
The cases brought by Garnett's office have not proved to be sure things.
A Boulder County judge threw out the murder case against John Angerer, who was accused of killing his girlfriend, Angela Wilds, in 2006 and leaving her body in a shallow grave in South St. Vrain Canyon. The judge didn't think prosecutors had enough evidence, and the coroner had ruled the cause of death undetermined. Garnett appealed the decision, but it was upheld by the Colorado Supreme Court. Prosecutors still consider the case open and could re-file charges if they find more evidence.
A Boulder County judge also threw out charges against David John Trujillo, who was accused of bludgeoning David Eugene Cox to death in 1994, but a district judge reinstated the case. It was scheduled to go to trial this spring, but Trujillo, who had been ill for a long time, died in December.
In the new case against Clark, a judge has yet to determine whether there is enough evidence to go to trial. Grisham was shot four times in the head and chest on the evening of Nov. 1, 1994, after answering a knock at the door. No one saw the person who pulled the trigger.
Clark, a friend of Grisham's daughter, pleaded guilty back in 1995 to stealing and forging checks belonging to Grisham, but he has always denied any involvement in the murder.
A man who shared a cell with Clark at the Boulder County Jail says Clark told him he committed the murder, and a friend who helped Clark obtain a 9mm handgun -- the same kind of gun used in the killing -- says Clark was worried about getting caught for the check theft.
When investigators reopened the case, they were able to track the gun sale and caught Clark in a number of lies about the gun, according to an arrest warrant affidavit. But so far, no physical evidence links Clark to the scene. DNA found in a Carmax container doesn't exclude him, but doesn't implicate him either.
A 'Reasonable likelihood'
Garnett didn't want to compare his office with that of his predecessors, saying only that he makes his own decisions about which cases to pursue based on the evidence he has now.
Other prosecutors, including Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey and his predecessor, former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, said the decision to file charges is a subjective one. Prosecutors need to have a "reasonable likelihood" of convincing a jury of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to justify filing charges in a case, and even within an office, attorneys sometimes disagree about whether that exists in a particular case.
Pat Furman, a University of Colorado law professor and defense attorney, said the number of cold cases is too small and the facts of the cases too variable to make broad comparisons between administrations. New evidence might close seemingly small holes in a case that would have led earlier Boulder prosecutors to bring charges if they had access to it. In cases where there is no "smoking gun," those details matter in building the cumulative weight of evidence that might persuade a jury.
Morrissey and Ritter said technological advances in DNA analysis and other forensics have been key in closing many old cases. In other cases, new witnesses come forward, perhaps after a divorce or other relationship change with the suspect.
Furman said family members of homicide victims -- both in Colorado and across the nation -- have successfully pushed for advances in DNA and other forensic technology to be applied to the old cases that remain open wounds for them.
Legislation in 2007 created the cold case task force within the Colorado Department of Public Safety and grants and fees pay for a crime analyst and training, especially for officers from smaller departments that might not get much experience in investigating homicides.
Victim advocates have helped create a culture that prioritizes pursuing cold cases, making it more likely that prosecutors will bring charges, Furman said.
More collaboration
Since 2004, the Denver District Attorney's Office has brought charges in 13 cold-case homicides and obtained convictions or guilty pleas in 12 of them. Prosecutors dismissed the charges after additional evidence cast doubt on the 13th case.
The vast majority of cases that are cleared by DNA involve female victims, like Chase, Morrissey said, because of a grim commonality -- they were raped before they were killed and their assailants left their DNA on the victim's bodies.
When there isn't DNA evidence, it can be much harder to break a case and can require collecting more puzzle pieces to present to a jury. Indeed, most homicides are solved within 24 hours of the killing, and those that aren't present investigators with a difficult path.
Boulder law enforcement officials said they've seen more collaboration from prosecutors under Garnett and more willingness to take on stickier cases. In an interview with the Camera after Clark was arrested, Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner said detectives worked hard to "tighten" the evidence but there also had been a cultural change in the DA's office.
"They're more willing to look at the evidence for what it is," Beckner said.
Gun-shy
If previous district attorneys were risk-averse, it was at least in part because of the difficulty of getting a conviction in Boulder in the 1980s.
"There was a time when it seemed like no matter how strong your case was, nobody was getting convicted," said Sasak, the DPS deputy executive director. "You lose a bunch of cases, and you become gun-shy."
Sasak said the demographics and politics of Boulder County have changed somewhat, such that it's less of an uphill battle to get a conviction. There are more people in the more conservative eastern part of the county, so juries are more diverse ideologically, she said.
But she also sees more leadership in the district attorney's office and a more collaborative approach to working with detectives.
To develop any homicide case -- and especially an old one -- detectives need to work with prosecutors so that they can develop the evidence that prosecutors think will make the case for the jury, Sasak said.
Sheriff Pelle said there also has been a change on the law enforcement side. Detectives both at the police department and the sheriff's office are far more experienced in investigating homicides today than they were 20 years ago.
The change is due in part to the still-unsolved 1996 killing of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, which was widely viewed as having been bungled from the beginning, was demoralizing to the Boulder Police Department.
Prior to the Ramsey case, the union contract required that officers rotate through the detective division every three to five years. After the Ramsey case, the department renegotiated the contract so that a core unit of career detectives works major crimes. The sheriff's office also has a major crimes unit.
"We have very experienced detectives who have been working a long time," Pelle said. "What they carry with them is a lot of institutional knowledge. New leads or new developments come up and you think, maybe this will break it loose."
Fewer cold cases
Boulder County has seen far fewer murder cases go cold in recent years. The most recent cold case is the 2004 shooting of Frank Santos on U.S. 36 near Davidson Mesa.
Beckner said some of that is "luck" in that more recent murder cases have presented strong physical evidence. There also have been a number of domestic violence or workplace homicides in which there was little doubt about the identity of the killer, as well as murder-suicides, in which there was no one to prosecute.
The 2006 murder of Wilds remains officially open.
A trial is set for May in the 2007 murder of Longmont woman Dana Pechin, whose live-in boyfriend reported finding her dead on their couch. He claimed she was beat up while running an errand the day before, but prosecutors believe physical evidence points to the boyfriend, George Ruibal, as the killer.
The question of why charges weren't filed earlier in some of these cases also raises the question of whether prosecutors might be overreaching now.
Furman, the law professor, said that defense attorneys might well disagree about how strong a case is or the severity of charges, but he hasn't seen any evidence that Garnett is operating outside the large gray area between open-and-shut cases and ones so flimsy that no one should charge them.
Despite the difficulties in pursing cold cases, it's well worth the effort, said Sasak.
"When somebody commits a murder and they are not brought to justice, we have murderers living among us and people getting away with murder," she said. "That's not okay."
Reviving Boulder County's cold cases
The arrest this week of Michael Clark in the 1994 murder of Marty Grisham, then the city's director of information services, is the latest development in Boulder County's unsolved homicides. Grisham was shot four times in the head and chest by an unknown assailant after answering a knock at the door around 9:30 p.m. Nov. 1, 1994.
Here's a look at some other infamous cold cases:
Susannah Chase was a 23-year-old college student at the University of Colorado in Boulder who was found brutally beaten in an alley near her home on 18th and Spruce streets on Dec. 21, 1997. She died the next day.
Boulder police arrested Diego Olmos Alcalde in January 2008 after his DNA -- which had been entered into a federal database -- turned up as a match to evidence recovered from Chase's body.
In June 2009, a Boulder County jury found Alcalde guilty of first-degree murder, sexual assault and kidnapping. He is now serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole at the Sterling Correctional Facility.
David Eugene Cox , 55, was found bludgeoned to death on Jan. 4, 1994, in his mobile home at Boulder Meadows in north Boulder. He was last seen alive on New Year's Eve 1993. An autopsy showed that he died of massive head injuries caused by a blunt object, which police said was a cast-iron teakettle.
Prosecutors believe David John Trujillo killed Cox. Boulder District Attorney Stan Garnett agreed to take another look at the case after he took office in 2009. Cox was arrested in May 2010, but the case was dropped in August after a judge ruled there was not enough evidence to try him. Boulder County District Judge Lael Montgomery later overruled that opinion.
Trujillo was set to go to trial this spring, but he died in December. He had been very ill for some time.
JonBenet Ramsey , 6, was found
dead Dec. 26, 1996, in the basement of her family's Boulder home on 15th Street. In 2006, a media circus descended on Boulder after John Mark Karr was arrested in connection with the decade-old case. He was exonerated after his DNA didn't match crime-scene evidence. In February 2009, Boulder District Attorney Stan Garnett gave control of the case back to Boulder police. The case remains open.
Angela Wilds ' badly decomposed body was found by hikers in the South St. Vrain Canyon on June 4, 2006.
After four years of investigation, police arrested her former boyfriend, John Angerer, in March 2010.
After Angerer was extradited from Alaska to Colorado, charged with second-degree murder and held for five months, he was released from custody in July 2010 after a Boulder County judge ruled there was not enough evidence for the case against him to proceed.
Boulder District Attorney Stan Garnett appealed the ruling, but the Colorado Supreme Court upheld the dismissal.
Sid Wells , 22, a University of Colorado journalism student from Longmont, was found shot to death Aug. 1, 1983, in a Boulder apartment that his mother owned.
The shotgun slaying received worldwide exposure because he had been dating Robert Redford's daughter, who also was a CU student. The apartment's resident Thayne Smika, then 24, was arrested, then freed after the District Attorney's Office determined the evidence was not strong enough to prosecute.
Boulder police reopened the case in 1997, but the district attorney determined that police still didn't have sufficient evidence to arrest Smika, who has since vanished. An arrest warrant for Smika was issued in January 2011.
Margaret Hillman , 14, was reported missing in September 1983 after a party at Heil Ranch, north of Lefthand Canyon. She left the party after telling her parents that she was going to ride home with a relative. Her parents reported the next morning that she had not come home. After an extensive search of the 5,000-acre ranch, officials found no trace of her. In July 1984, her body was found in a ravine less than a mile from where she was last seen.
Frank Santos , 37, was fatally shot at 10:18 p.m. July 9, 2004, as he drove toward Boulder on U.S. 36 west of McCaslin Boulevard. A bullet fired through the driver's-side window of his silver 1994 Chevrolet Cavalier hit him in the head. Police looked for the driver of a large, dark SUV that was seen on the highway about the time of his death.
Carol Murphy 's nude body was found by hikers near a trailhead in Lefthand Canyon on May 23, 1987. She had been strangled and her throat slit, authorities said. Her ex-husband, Kevin Elmarr, was convicted of first-degree murder in 2009 and sentenced to life in prison. DNA evidence showed that he had sex with the victim a few hours before her death, and witnesses saw him in the area where her body was found.
Dana Pechin 's death was reported by her live-in boyfriend, George Ruibal, in 2007. He told police he came home and found her dead on the couch under a blanket, where he had left her sleeping before going to work that day.
Her injuries looked at first as if she had been in an accident, but the coroner later ruled that she died of a head injury associated with strangulation. In 2010, Pechin's family hired an attorney to try to force prosecutors to file charges in the case. Ruibal was charged with second-degree murder in 2011, after additional investigation by Longmont police and a review by the state cold-case task force. He is scheduled to go to trial in May.
Fabian Del Rosario , a 20-year-old University of Colorado student, disappeared Aug. 28, 1987. A few days later, his brown Datsun was found parked on the east end of the parking lot of the now-razed Crossroads Mall. A substantial amount of del Rosario's blood was found on the passenger-side seat, and the case is classified as a homicide.
Bernadine Frost 's snow-covered body was found April 22, 1999, in a narrow walkway between two homes in the 1300 block of Coffman Street in Longmont. She was last seen at a gathering the night before with her boyfriend, Abel Lujan, who was considered the main suspect at the time. The couple left the party around midnight, and her body was discovered about seven hours later. A large bottle of beer was near her body, and her bike was leaned against a wall. Longmont police reopened the case in 2011.
Tammera Tatum , 30, was strangled to death in Longmont in 1993. Rudy Gaytan was arrested in January 2009 in connection with her death and attempted sexual assault while he already was serving a 72-year prison sentence at the time of his arrest for a 1996 rape conviction.
The homicide had been cold until evidence from the murder scene was re-submitted to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and Gaytan's DNA was found on items in Tatum's apartment and under her fingernails.
He pleaded guilty in April 2010 and was sentenced to another 72 years in prison, to run at the same time as his rape sentence.
Copyright 2012 - Daily Camera, Boulder, Colo.
