C
HAPTER 14
“I J
UST
F
ROZE
L
IKE
A
P
RAIRIE
D
OG
.”
Trying to get a handle on Alan Helmick’s financial dealings, Investigator Jim Hebenstreit went to see Bob Cucchetti on June 18, 2008. Cucchetti was an accountant with the firm of Cucchetti Baldwin and Co CPAs. Cucchetti told Hebenstreit that Alan had been his customer for almost twenty years. Cucchetti said he didn’t know Miriam very well, but he did know that the first year that Alan and Miriam were married, they didn’t file a joint return. According to Cucchetti, it was because Miriam had “problems with the IRS from a pervious marriage or something.”
Cucchetti related that Alan and Miriam had filed jointly for their 2006 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax returns, but they had not yet done so for the tax year 2007. Asked if this was unusual, Cucchetti said no; Alan routinely asked for a time extension.
Investigator Hebenstreit asked Cucchetti about Alan’s financial ventures into a dance studio and horse-training facility. Cucchetti answered, “Alan was always optimistic, but I told him he was going to lose his ass on those businesses. And he did. As far as the dance studio went, Alan financed it, but Miriam ran it. Both the dance studio and horse business were financial losers.”
All in all, Alan had financial interests in the Title Company of Delta, A. Hughes LLC, Dance Junction LLC, Creek Ranch Sporthorses, Helmick Mortgage Corporation, and Crista Lee LLC. Miriam Helmick was only listed as co-owner of Dance Junction and Creek Ranch Sporthorses. And even with those, she was only a 5 percent owner of each, while Alan was a 95 percent owner. Cucchetti didn’t know if the Helmicks had a prenuptial agreement or any estate planning. That was not part of his business dealings with Alan Helmick.
Investigator Hebenstreit looked further into Alan Helmick’s financials and noted that Alan had accounts with American National Bank and Wells Fargo. Hebenstreit obtained Alan’s bank statements, copies of canceled checks, tax records, personal financial statements, and real estate information. Among the documents Hebenstreit received from American National Bank was a personal financial statement completed by Alan and dated November 27, 2007. This was part of a statement by Alan to request a maturity date on two financial loans.
On that financial statement, Alan had documented his total assets as $3,487,650. This included $1,300,000 in real estate and $2,120,350 in marketable securities.
Hebenstreit noted that all of the businesses were in Alan’s name, and Miriam had none in hers. In fact, she did not have a checking account or even a credit card in her name. All she had was a 5 percent interest in the dance studio and a 5 percent interest in the horse-training facility. Whatever money she had, Alan apparently doled out to her.
Hebenstreit spoke with a loan officer at American National Bank named Alan Watkins, who had some very interesting things to say. Watkins told the investigator that when he first learned of Alan Helmick’s death, he wondered if it had anything to do with a letter the bank had just sent Helmick. Watkins said that for the previous three or four months, he had been trying to contact Alan Helmick concerning problems with his accounts. Watkins added that he had sent letters to Alan, left voice messages, and had even gone by the Helmick residence. Not once, however, did Alan respond to these messages. Watkins said that had not been the pattern with Alan Helmick until the previous three or four months. Watkins even wondered if Alan had committed suicide because of these financial situations.
On June 19, Penny Lyons went over to Miriam’s house in Whitewater. As Penny recalled, “Miriam had a cleaning van out front, and I assumed it was to clean up the bloodstains in the kitchen. I met Miriam in the garage, and I didn’t want to go into the kitchen because of the cleaning. We got into her car a while later, and she mentioned that she’d forgotten her purse in the house. I said I’d go get it. So I went into the house, and when I opened the door from the utility room to the kitchen, I didn’t realize that the towels were already picked up from the floor.
“I froze when I went in. I just froze like a prairie dog. I couldn’t take my eyes off it! There were still bloodstains on the floor.”
Penny said later that she realized that law enforcement had allowed Miriam to be back in her home a few days after Alan’s murder. She couldn’t understand why Miriam hadn’t already cleaned up the bloodstains.
Penny continued, “We went to a Walmart on North Avenue in Grand Junction, and I told Miriam I’d buy her a cell phone. She was extremely concerned about her son, Chris, and she had no way to reach him because the police had taken all her phones. So I bought her a phone with so many minutes on it. It wasn’t like Verizon or BlackBerry or something like that.
“She was having a lot of trouble because she didn’t have any money. She didn’t have access to any money, and that made even just basic living very difficult. She didn’t have money for feeding the horses, groceries, or gas. So I purchased that phone for her.”
Another person law enforcement investigators spoke with was a woman named Laegan McGee. Laegan took dance lessons at Amour Danzar in Grand Junction in 2004 and 2005. Laegan said later that she began dating a dance instructor there named David Griffin. David was going to move to another city; and around that time, Laegan was introduced to a new dance instructor, who called herself Francehssea. Later, Laegan learned that the woman’s real name was Miriam.
Laegan recalled about Miriam, “She told me she was looking to start a dance studio with her former professional partner. I don’t remember his name. She said they had been on the pro circuit together. She indicated that he had been her boyfriend at one time. She also said that they had been looking around for a place to start, and that was when an offer came in from Barbara Watts, who owned Amour Danzar to be a manager there. Miriam thought Grand Junction was a great place to start, because it was somewhere that had a low cost of living and didn’t have a high-quality dance studio.”
One night in the spring or summer of 2005, Laegan and her boyfriend, David Griffin, went to a bar/restaurant on Main Street in Grand Junction called Boomers. She recalled of this particular night, “Miriam was with a gentleman there. I did not know who the man was, but David did. David pointed him out to me and said that the man had been a student of his at the dance studio.
“David and I were seated about three-quarters into Boomers, and they were back in toward one of the pillars in a darkened area. David said to me, ‘Don’t look.’ So, of course, I looked. I saw Miriam, and she had her hand under the table, on the man’s right leg. And when she saw me, I tried to turn away quickly, because I wasn’t supposed to look.
“But she caught my eye and did one of those kind of waves like you do when you accidentally pull out in front of somebody in your car. Kind of like, ‘Oops.’ Ten or fifteen minutes later, she came over by herself. She kind of singsonged, ‘You know, I hear wedding bells.’
“I was kind of disoriented because David hadn’t filled me in about information of who the man was she was sitting with. I said to Miriam, ‘Your boyfriend in Florida?’ That’s because that person had been with her approximately a month before. And she said no. ‘It’s Alan over there. Do you want to go meet him?’
“And then she said, ‘He’s going to buy me a house. He’s going to buy me horses. He’s going to build me my own dance studio.’ And she was ticking those things off on her fingers. I said, ‘Wow, that’s really fast.’ She didn’t really respond to that.
“When David and I were getting up to leave, David knew Alan (Helmick) from having taught him previously. And Alan and Miriam came over, because David waved them over. And we were standing there talking. And David and Alan kind of talked briefly, like have you seen so-and-so. And Miriam told me that he owned several businesses. I was still kind of shocked by the suddenness of all of this. I was still trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. I was going to wait for David to fill me in on who was what, and what and where.”
Since it was now known that Miriam had managed a dance studio in Grand Junction for a woman named Barbara Watts, before opening up her own dance studio, Investigator Chuck Warner contacted the Harrison County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO) in Gulfport, Mississippi, where Watts lived. The Harrison County Sheriff ’s Office gave Warner information as to how he could contact Watts. Until contacting HCSO, Warner had tried on thirty different occasions to reach Barbara Watts by phone, and he had received no return calls.
An officer for HCSO eventually contacted Barbara Watts and put her on the phone with Investigator Warner. Warner asked what Miriam’s relationship had been with Watts, and she said that she had hired Miriam after Miriam had come to Mississippi from Florida. Miriam had told the dance studio owner that she needed a new start in life because her husband had recently shot himself in the head. Two years before that, her daughter had died from taking aspirin while having an ulcer.
Miriam started attending the dance school, Amour Danzar, and wanted to work there. Watts told Investigator Warner that Miriam was very good, and got even better under training. Miriam started teaching on her own, and she also did book work in the office.
Miriam wanted a man named Anthony Keith Coppage, who went by the name Keith, to come teach at the school as well. Watts said that when Keith arrived, he showed up in a wrinkled shirt that looked as if it hadn’t been pressed for days. He didn’t have dance shoes or even good clothes, but Watts added that Keith did a fine job once he was properly outfitted. He was a good dance instructor.
Later, after Keith left, Watts noticed that the money collected from a Friday-night dance party was missing. Miriam generally collected that money and put it into a safe after the parties. Miriam, who was living in a cottage in back of the dance studio, told Watts that she had no idea where the money had gone. The studio owner assumed Keith had stolen it before taking off. Later she would think otherwise.
As well as the dance studio in Gulfport, Barbara Watts owned a dance studio in Grand Junction, Colorado, and the woman who managed the place was going to quit soon. Miriam asked if she could manage that studio, and Watts agreed that she could. Just before Miriam left, there was a Christmas party and Watts decided to pay for it by a credit card rather than cash. While they were at an Outback Steakhouse, Watts noticed Miriam looking at the wad of money she had not used for the party. At that point, Watts told Investigator Warner, “I knew something was up with her.”
On the way home from the party, Watts and Miriam sat in the front seat of Watts’s car. The employer recalled placing a checkbook on the front seat between them. Later on, she could not find the checkbook. Even though this concerned her about Miriam, she couldn’t prove it and decided to send her to Grand Junction, Colorado, anyway. As a safeguard, however, she wanted all the clients to pay by check and not with cash.
Watts and Miriam flew to Colorado, where they stayed in a hotel. At one point, Watts left the room to get some ice, leaving the door ajar, since she was already suspicious about Miriam. When Watts was gone from the room, she heard the door shut. She said that she returned with the ice and stood outside the door, listening. She thought she heard Miriam rummaging through suitcases. Watts told the investigator that she believed a lot of her money was gone when she returned to the room; but once again, she could not say for sure if this was so.
Despite this, Barbara Watts still let Miriam stay on as manager of the dance studio in Grand Junction. Watts even left Miriam with a credit card for business expenses. After a while, Watts started getting charged for things on the credit card that were not related to business. And Miriam would not return Watts’s phone calls. When she finally reached Miriam, she demanded the credit card back. Within a few days, she got it.
Time passed, and Watts was going through her canceled bank checks and noticed that some bank statements seemed off. She contacted her bank, and they faxed her copies of canceled checks. She noted that some of the check signatures were not in her handwriting.
Soon she went to her other bank and found that the same thing was occurring there. Watts was sure by now that Miriam had stolen some of her checks in Gulfport and was forging them. She wanted Miriam returned to Mississippi so that she could be arrested.
On top of that, Watts heard that Miriam was trying to set up her own dance studio in Grand Junction and was “stealing” Watts’s dance students right out from under her nose. One of those students was Alan Helmick. In a bold move, Watts faxed Alan documents about Miriam and warned him about her.
Then, in a clever ruse, Watts contacted Miriam and told her to come back to Gulfport, Mississippi, for more dance training. Surprisingly, Miriam complied. As soon as she did, she was arrested.
Apparently, Miriam was able to raise bail. Once she did, she got in her car and left Gulfport. In response, Watts said, she faxed Alan Helmick every damaging thing she could about Miriam that same day. “Like bank statements and such. I warned him and told him not to let it happen to him,” she said.
Around that same time, Watts went to the cottage, where Miriam had been staying, to retrieve a computer that was there. She found two envelopes. One of them was marked
Personal,
and the other had no writing on it. The envelopes were pasted shut, but when she held them up to the light, she could see that they contained her altered bank statements.