C
HAPTER 2
“H
E’S
A
LL
B
LOODY
!”
Miriam left the Whitewater residence sometime around 8:15
A.M.
on June 10, 2008, to run a number of errands around the Grand Junction area. Her first stop was Walmart, where she called, via cell phone, horse trainer Sue Boulware and told her that she would be sending her a check that day concerning horse training.
At 9:03
A.M.
, Miriam phoned Alan from the Walmart parking lot and left a voice message on his cell phone. She said, “Hey, Alan. Love you. Just want to let you know I’m going to Walmart. So, um, thought I’d pick up the groceries there instead of going to City Market. I know you’re dropping off your prescription at City Market, but I’m gonna pick up groceries there instead of going two different places. Also, do you want salad this time?
“You didn’t really give me a list. You said just buy what I want. But that’s not really helping me. I think that’s it. If you’re gonna meet me for lunch, let’s meet at the Chinese buffet. ’Cause I don’t think I can do Mexican today. So if you want to meet me at the Chinese buffet—I know you wanted to do Mexican, but, anyway, once you get your car serviced, call me. Let me know. Love ya. Bye.”
After being in Walmart for a short time, Miriam went across town to a Safeway store on Horizon Avenue to buy carrots for her horses. Sometime after that, she phoned Alan’s cell phone again at 9:57
A.M.
and got his voice mail. “Hi, Alan. Haven’t heard from you, but I have a question. I know you were gonna clean out the truck. But did you happen to leave that bit in there? We can exchange it. I didn’t want to go in there without it. I didn’t want to spend my money on such an expensive bit. So if you have it in your truck, will you let me know? Or when we meet for lunch, we’ll go by and exchange it. Because we’ll be close by the equestrian shop then. So gimme a holler. Love ya. Bye.”
From the Safeway store, Miriam journeyed to a City Market in Grand Junction. Around that time, she once again phoned Alan, at 10:27
A.M.
, and did not speak with him directly, but got his voice mail, instead. Miriam said in a more irritated voice than on the previous calls, “Hey, Alan! You need to turn on your phone! When I went to pick up your prescription, they said you hadn’t been by yet. So, are we still gonna be able to meet for lunch? If not . . . well, give me a holler. Thanks. Bye.”
Then it was on to Hastings Bookstore to pick up coloring books for Alan’s granddaughters. And finally Miriam drove to a Chinese restaurant around 11:00
A.M.
By eleven-fifteen, Miriam’s next phone call to Alan sounded more worried than irritated. She said, “Gee, Alan! This isn’t funny anymore.” She said she had been sitting in front of a Chinese restaurant for fifteen minutes, and he was never late. She decided she would just go home at that point. If he was caught up in business somewhere, he should call her when he got home.
Miriam made her way through midtown Grand Junction, and then down the highway to Whitewater. She couldn’t bring all of the groceries from the car’s trunk into the house at one time, but she did bring her purse in and a few shopping bags. She walked through the laundry room, as usual, from the garage, where she had parked her car, turned a corner, and saw something that made her stop in her tracks. She first glimpsed an overturned wastepaper basket in the kitchen/work desk area. The next thing she saw was Alan’s legs on the floor. Miriam quickly turned the corner and saw that Alan was stretched out on his back, neither speaking nor moving at all.
Miriam dropped her purse and bag of items and rushed to Alan’s side. He was not only not moving, but he didn’t appear to be breathing as well. In a panic, Miriam reached for her cell phone and dialed 911.
An operator at the central emergency command post came on the line:
O
PERATOR
: This is Arnold. What is your emergency?
M
IRIAM
: (Sobbing) Somebody . . .
O
PERATOR
: Hello. Hello!
M
IRIAM
: (Crying) I came home and . . .
O
PERATOR
: Ma’am, where are you?
M
IRIAM
: (She gives him the address, but she is crying so much that he can’t understand it.)
O
PERATOR
: Ma’am, what is your address? (She gives it again, but he gets it wrong.) Ma’am, you need to calm down. What happened?
M
IRIAM
: My husband is dead!
O
PERATOR
: I need your address one more time.
Miriam had grown irritated by now, but she spelled out the address once more, very slowly. Still, the operator couldn’t get it right. He thought it was “Seminole,” and then “Feminoe.” Almost beside herself, Miriam spelled it out again— S-I-M-I-N-O-E. However, her problems weren’t over. The operator couldn’t seem to place Siminoe Road and asked what county it was in. She finally got him to understand that Siminoe Road was in Whitewater, Mesa County. She also said that the house had been burglarized.
O
PERATOR
: (turning to someone else in the command center) Someone else was there. A wife found her husband dead. (turning back to Miriam) I have to ask you a couple of questions. What’s the problem? Tell me exactly what happened.
M
IRIAM
: He was on the floor. And it was like somebody came in and robbed us. He has blood under his head.
O
PERATOR
: Okay. Are you with him right now?
M
IRIAM
: I’m in the hallway.
O
PERATOR
: How old is he?
M
IRIAM
: He’s sixty-two.
Then, in light of Miriam saying Alan wad dead, the next question must have surprised her.
O
PERATOR
: Is he conscious?
M
IRIAM
: No!
O
PERATOR
: Is he breathing?
M
IRIAM
: Nooo!
There was a long discussion between the operator and someone else in the command room. Perhaps they thought Miriam was so rattled that she couldn’t judge if her husband was really dead or not. The operator asked if she had seen what had happened. She said that she hadn’t. She had just returned home from shopping and found her husband on the kitchen floor.
The next question must have sent Miriam into a tizzy.
The operator asked, “Is there a defibrillator in the house?”
Miriam nearly screamed out, “No!”
Nonetheless, the operator was going to have Miriam try and revive Alan by cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
O
PERATOR
: I need you to lay him flat on his back and remove any pillows.
M
IRIAM
: He is on his back.
O
PERATOR
: Is there anything in his mouth? (Miriam said there wasn’t.) Okay. I need you to place your hand on his forehead and your other hand under his neck and tilt his head back.
M
IRIAM
: He’s all bloody.
O
PERATOR
: Where is he bleeding from?
M
IRIAM
: It looks like the back of his head.
The operator talked once again with someone in his office, and then back to Miriam. Despite her insistence that Alan was dead, the operator still began walking her through CPR. He had her do chest compressions, telling her, “Place the heel of your hand on the breastbone in the center of his chest. And then put your other hand on the top of that hand. I need you to push down firmly, two inches, with only the heel of your lower hand touching his chest. Listen carefully. Pump the chest hard and fast, twice per second. You’ve got to do this four hundred times. That’s only three and a half minutes. Tell me as soon as you’re done. I’ll stay on the phone with you.”
Miriam checked in with the 911 operator every so often, and told him it wasn’t working. In the background, he could hear her crying. Finally, seven minutes into the call, she got on the phone again and said, “It’s not working!”
The operator responded, “Have you done it four hundred times?” She answered that she was still working on it, but it wasn’t helping. Then he had her change tactics. The operator said, “I’m going to have you do mouth-to-mouth. With his head tilted back, pinch his nose closed and completely cover his mouth with your mouth. Then blow two regular breaths into the lungs. About one second each. The chest should rise with each breath.”
After Miriam did that a few times, he asked her if she had felt any air going out. She answered no. Then she added, “He’s cold.”
After a short period of that, the operator said, “Okay, I want you to give two breaths and one hundred pumps. Then two breaths and one hundred pumps.” Miriam said she would. During this period, the operator asked if anyone else was in the house. Miriam said no. The operator turned to someone in the command center and said, “She says no one else is there. There’s blood on the back of his head. She was shopping.”
Miriam came on the phone again, stating, “His mouth is full of blood.”
The operator replied, “You need to tilt his head to the side and clear out his mouth and nose. Don’t hang up. We just need to continue to help him until they get there. You may have to blow through some of the blood.”
After a short period, the operator asked Miriam, “You said it looked like someone had been there?”
Miriam answered, “I haven’t even gone into the other rooms. I’m in the kitchen and it looks like someone went through the drawers and stuff. His wallet’s on the floor.”
For the first time, the operator asked, “What’s your name?” Miriam answered with her first name. When he asked her last name, she spelled it out for him.
Throughout this whole period of time on the phone, Miriam could be heard, crying in the background. Then she let out a wail, “They’re here!”
Perhaps worried about who “they” were, the operator asked, “Don’t hang up! Is it an officer?”
Miriam responded that it was. After seventeen minutes and forty seconds of being on the phone with Miriam, the 911 operator said, “Okay, I’m gonna let you go, Miriam.”
She sobbed, “Thank you.”
He replied, “Okay. Bye.”
C
HAPTER 3
S
CENE OF THE
C
RIME
On June 10, 2008, Mesa County Sheriff ’s Office (MCSO) deputy John Brownlee was assisting another deputy on a traffic stop when he heard a message go out from a 911 operator. It was about a man in Whitewater who was “unconscious and bleeding” at his home on Siminoe Road.
Deputy Brownlee left the other officer at the traffic stop and made his way to Whitewater. However, as he recalled later, “I had never been in that subdivision before. I took a left road, instead of a right road, and ended up in back of the residence. One road went down to a barn, and the other to the front of the house. Eventually I got to the front of the house, and the garage door was open. I asked dispatch to run a plate for me to make sure I was at the right residence. I didn’t want to walk into somebody’s house, where I’m not supposed to be. Dispatch advised me I was at the right residence.
“I went to the front door, opened it, and announced myself. I could hear somebody inside, so I went inside. There was a male lying on his back in the kitchen area and a female kneeling by his left side. Dispatch had advised me that she was doing CPR as I was en route. But when I looked, she was not performing CPR or doing anything. She was just kind of kneeling. She turned around and looked at me, and I gathered she had just gotten off the phone with dispatch.
“The fact she wasn’t doing CPR, as she said, was kind of weird to me. I didn’t hear her crying or anything else. She did have some tears in her eyes, but she wasn’t bawling. She wasn’t erratic. She wasn’t too highly emotional at that point in time.
“I asked Miriam if there was anybody else in the residence. She stated that she didn’t know. I told her I’d be right back, because I wanted to clear the residence to ensure nobody else was in the residence at that point. I was searching for another family member, someone they didn’t know, a perpetrator. Just anybody.”
Deputy Brownlee didn’t find anyone in the house, and he went back to check on the male, who was on the kitchen floor. Brownlee recalled, “I touched Alan, but I did not feel a pulse. Also, he was very cold to the touch. There was a lot of blood at the scene.” Brownlee, who had a camera, started taking some photos of the area. The main reason was to show investigators, who might arrive later, exactly how things looked when the first officer arrived on scene. It was even before any paramedics were there. Brownlee knew from experience that paramedics could alter the scene dramatically.
Brownlee did notice about the area around Alan Helmick that “the drawers didn’t appear to be the way they would be in the way a normal house is kept. I found that kinda strange. Also, a trash can was tipped over. It struck me as odd, the cabinet drawers being open and the trash can down on the floor.”
There was also one more very jarring thing. Deputy Brownlee found a shell casing lying on the floor. He took several photos of it and began to wonder if Alan had been shot. Nothing had been mentioned concerning that by either dispatch or by Miriam.
Brownlee did not ask Miriam about this, but he did note that there was a little dog in the residence. Not wanting the dog to change the scene inadvertently, Brownlee put the dog in an adjacent room and shut the door. Brownlee noted that the dog never barked at him. He didn’t know if that was because Miriam was present or not. Brownlee wondered if the dog had barked if there had been an intruder.
Soon two other deputies arrived—Deputy Pennay and Deputy Quigley. Brownlee asked that Miriam go outside with Deputy Quigley. And when she did so, Miriam left two important items in the house. One was her purse, with almost all the money she had, and the other was her driver’s license. As to why Brownlee had Miriam leave the house, he later said, “We try to have as few people as possible in there. We can get footprints and people touching stuff, so we try to keep as many people as we can out of the scene.”
And as to why Deputy Brownlee did not allow Miriam to take her purse with her, he related, “Due to evidentiary purposes, we need to include those things that need to stay in the house. Even somebody’s purse and their ID. It could be important.” Brownlee admitted later that he didn’t explain this aspect to Miriam, and he wasn’t sure if some other law enforcement officer had later told her why.
Once Miriam was out of the house, Brownlee took more photos of Alan Helmick lying on the floor. Brownlee could see just how much blood was behind Alan’s head. Brownlee later described it as “a lot.” One thing that was odd to him: If Miriam had been doing CPR, as she claimed, there should have been a lot of blood on her clothing. Brownlee hadn’t noticed any blood on Miriam’s outfit.
Later that afternoon Josh Vigil, Alan’s son-in-law, who was married to Portia, came to the residence and was informed what had happened there. Deputy Brownlee noted about Josh’s demeanor, “He was kinda frantic. He was worked up.” This was just the opposite of Miriam. She had been teary-eyed, but never “frantic or worked up,” as Brownlee put it. Nor was she “catatonic,” as Brownlee had often seen other family members in situations like these—an individual so traumatized that he or she couldn’t respond to questions or follow orders. Miriam had basically seemed quite calm, answered all of Brownlee’s questions in a rational manner, and obeyed every order that he gave without complaint. In some ways, this was odd to Brownlee. She seemed to fit right in the middle of those two extremes. Brownlee thought she was very calm, considering the traumatic event that had just occurred.