< PREVIOUS ] [ 1995 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Go down the hall at the Chaffee County Judicial Facility, and you see pictures of the past judges since Tom Bowen in 1877. Among them is Mack Witty.
Last week, you could continue down the hall, turn left, and see his grandson on trial for first-degree murder.
It was our version of the O.J. Simpson trial. There were some similarities: no eyewitnesses, a glove played prominently in the evidence, and blood splashes and patterns were featured, along with DNA tests.
Perhaps the biggest difference is that Jeremy Denison, who graduated from Salida High School in 1993 with my older daughter, admitted to killing Richard Johnson, a 24-year-old undercover drug informant, on Jan. 24, 1995.
Denison said it was self-defense, that Johnson had attacked him when they were stopped on a back road eight miles out of town. Denison got the knife away from Johnson, who still came at him and even tried to run him down before crashing the car. When Johnson started out his car door toward Denison, the fatal cuts came.
The prosecution claimed that Denison had lured Johnson into the mountains with intent to kill him and steal his car. They said it was cold-blooded premeditated murder, part of some bizarre heavy-metal satanic ritual.
Not that the main prosecutors -- Kathy Eberling and District Attorney Ed Rodgers -- ever offered any evidence that such a cult was operating here. They just hinted at it, especially when Denison was cross-examined.
Johnson's tongue had been cut, so You slit his tongue
because that's what they do to drug informants, isn't
it?
Johnson's gloves were found in his car, not on his
body, and his sunglasses were some distance from the
corpse, so you took his gloves and his sunglasses to
humiliate the body.
And then, you hauled the body away to a ravine, and
you laid it there with the legs straddling a tree, in order
to further humiliate him, didn't you?
They made it sound as though the body had been hauled a great distance to some symbolic spot, when in fact the head was just a foot or two off the road, within a few yards of the crash and final fight -- right where you'd put a body if you were in a hurry to get it off the road.
Since many of the kids whose names came up in this supposed heavy-metal drug cult ritual were classmates of my daughters, I tried to remember anything about them that would support this prosecution theory.
I couldn't. Most of these kids were rather aimless. You wanted to tell them to get some interests, to get excited about something beyond hanging out and cruising.
Since the prosecution never provided any evidence of
such cult activity -- just hints and innuendo -- I suspect
that Rodgers found it in some handbook on how to inflame
rural juries.
Or he might have found it in the book To Kill a
Mockingbird.
There, the prosecutor tells the all-white
jury to protect their community, no matter what. In the
prosecution's closing statements here, they told the jury
they had to act to protect the community from this scourge
of gun-wielding pot dealers.
The trial did convince me that there was a conspiracy of gun-wielding types who encouraged our children to buy and sell drugs. This conspiracy was conceived and operated by the Salida Police Department, the district attorney's office, and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
Johnson, you see, was in a car with Denison that was stopped in Salida last December. They found some pot in the car, and Johnson -- already in trouble for guns and steroids in Alamosa -- offered to become a snitch. He'd wear a wire and encourage people to sell him drugs.
And so, you've got a guy in town in a flashy car. He's 24 and hanging out with a bunch of teenagers. He's trying to get them to sell him dope.
You try to tell your kids that there are certain crowds that it isn't smart to run with. And with the use of such informants, the police just make those crowds more attractive to kids. The friendly stranger isn't trying to get you hooked; he's trying to get you in trouble so he can get out of trouble.
As for the gun-wielders that Rodgers was trying to protect our community from, the only guns that came up in the trial were a sawed-off shotgun that Johnson waved, and a pistol held by John Means -- another informant.
Jeremy Denison was convicted of first-degree murder Friday afternoon and sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. Richard Johnson is dead. Wil Atkinson, a local pilot, died in a plane crash last winter while trying to fly Johnson's body to Cortez.
And so, two lives ended and another destroyed, all in an undercover effort that was supposed to protect lives.
After the verdict, Rodgers said the trial says
something about what happens when you get involved in
the drug world, and where it leads.
Well, the police and prosecutors got involved in the drug world, and we saw where it led. How many more people will die the next time they decide to protect us? Will the river rise high enough next spring to wash the blood from their hands?
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1995 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >