Dancing on Her Grave (11 page)

The trial also had to be delayed once because the medical expert with whom the defense attorneys were working became very ill, so they had to file a motion to find a new expert.

It was all very frustrating, especially for Celeste, a single mother who flew to Las Vegas multiple times only to find out her sister’s murder trial was being postponed over and over again.

The prosecution and the defense were always polite over the phone, but the answer always came to, “We can only discuss the case after it’s over.” Of course they couldn’t discuss it without divulging anything about their plans of action. More than two years had passed, and it wasn’t over. Those of us in the media continued to wait for the story; Celeste waited to get justice for her sister.

After putting a lot of thought into it, I decided to write a letter to Jason Griffith. Yes, to Debbie’s murderer. It was an attempt to get into his head, so to speak, even though I didn’t think he would tell us the absolute truth.

All I knew was that his girlfriend, Agnes Roux, the woman he’d claimed was the true love of his life, wasn’t visiting him in jail. I knew that he was in solitary confinement, isolated, because the jail officers were worried he might do something to harm himself.

So on April 23, 2013, I sent this letter to Jason, hoping to get a reply.

Hi Jason,

How are you? I am writing this letter because I want to get to know the real Jason, the dancer, the star, not the person who is on trial. I know you studied dance at Juilliard and I want to know about your passion for the dance, and your craft and love of music.

I am not sure if you remember me. My name is Carolina. We spoke over the phone more than a year ago.

The day I’d met Celeste for the first time, she had given me Jason Griffith’s phone number. I’d called and spoken to him, but he hadn’t wanted to give me an on-camera interview to talk about his ex-girlfriend’s disappearance.

I am a journalist, but also a human being. Life has taught me there [are] always two or more sides to a story. There is no such thing as black or white to me.

I am writing a book about the incident. As you might know, it has been very easy to find out more about Debora, her childhood, her life.

I would like to be fair and know more about Jason, the father, the friend. I don’t want to know about the case or want you to tell me details about it.

I want to know if they are treating you OK there, if you feel better now that you are not isolated. Are you lonely? How do you pass the time?

I don’t want to describe you as someone you are not. I want to be fair to you.

I look forward to hearing back from you!

Carolina

He never answered, nor acknowledged my letter through his
attorneys.

The Trial

As she did in many of her posts, Celeste announced the date set for her sister’s murder trial on Facebook:

“Finally, finally, finally, it’s official. My little sister’s Debbie Flores murder trial will start May 5th.”

It was 2014, and it had been three and a half years since Debbie’s dreams had ended abruptly. It had been over three long years that her ex-boyfriend Jason Griffith had sat in jail, awaiting trial for her murder. I’d kept abreast of any progress in the scheduling of the trial, and Celeste had been despairing now for years, although at times, on Facebook, she tried to joke and reach out to her friends.

It had also been more than three long years for the Flores-Narvaez family to wait for justice to be served. Nothing could bring Debbie back to their next Christmas
celebration, but knowing that the man who’d ended her life would pay for what he did could close an important chapter in their lives.

But would he actually pay? Would the verdict turn out the way the bereaved family hoped and expected?

The trial finally began at 1:30
P.M.
on May 5, 2014. This was a big case for local news coverage in Las Vegas. It was a dramatic case that had not only moved the community but had also generated high television ratings. Every local station and newspaper had featured stories about Debbie Flores-Narvaez’s murder when it had happened. Now that the wheels of justice were finally turning, it was no different. The court was filled with reporters. Meanwhile, Debbie’s older sister had become very media savvy. While everyone waited for opening statements to start, Celeste conducted interviews with several local Las Vegas reporters who had not seen her in more than a year. They knew her, though. They knew how relentless she had been in the pursuit of justice of some sort for her little sister.

The trial took place in the Regional Justice Center. It started with a calendar call, a normal procedure in court, and both prosecution and defense stated that they were finally ready to begin.

Clark County District Court judge Kathleen E. Delaney presided. Delaney is in her forties, with dark hair and soft features. According to her biography on the
Department 25, Eighth Judicial District Court, site, she’s been a practicing attorney since 1990 and was elected to the district court in 2008. She took the bench in Department 25 on January 5, 2009. Judge Delaney was assigned to hear criminal, civil, and business court matters, and handled all appeals from the state’s Foreclosure Mediation Program.

The courtroom where
Nevada vs. Jason Omar Griffith
took place was Judge Delaney’s own courtroom. Judges are granted the liberty of decorating their courtrooms after their own fashion, and Delaney had covered all the courtroom walls with photographs of dogs, specifically basset hounds, to call attention to the plight of homeless canines in Las Vegas. (Basset hounds appear to be favorites of Judge Delaney’s, since her own judge’s site shows a photo of her surrounded by her own pooches of that breed.)

Before trial began, the judge had signed an order granting immunity to Louis Colombo, Jason Griffith’s roommate. While Louis could have been considered an accomplice, since he had certainly aided Griffith in the concealment of Debbie’s body, the prosecution felt it was worth making a deal. Louis Colombo would be a key witness for them, and his testimony would prove crucial to their case.

The judge interviewed more than eighty prospective jurors, until finally, three days later, the jury pool was
finally narrowed down to the twelve men and women who would decide Jason Griffith’s fate.

On murder cases, there are usually two attorneys assigned for the prosecution by the District Attorney’s Office, and two for the defense.

The lead prosecutor was chief deputy district attorney Marc DiGiacomo. A seasoned attorney with fifteen years’ experience as prosecutor, and ten on the Major Violators Unit, DiGiacomo obtained his law degree from the prestigious Jesuit Fordham University of New York. DiGiacomo looks like an academic, with a gray beard and a halo of gray hair, resembling an older, taller, and more massive Richard Dreyfuss.

He would be working alongside prosecutor Michelle Fleck, formerly of Special Victims Unit, who had then taken DiGiacomo’s place before moving on to the prosecution division. Fleck is an attractive blond woman with a finishing school look but the firm manner of a police detective. DiGiacomo refers to her as “an excellent litigator.” Fleck has a healthy respect for DiGiacomo’s skills as well. “Marc is brilliant, he is everything a prosecuting attorney should be,” she said about her colleague, and now partner in this important trial.

The defense attorneys were Abel Yáñez and Jeff Banks.

Abel Yáñez is a dashing Argentinian in his early forties, with black hair, green eyes, and a Grecian profile. His parents moved to the United States during the
Argentinian dictatorship, a time when many families fled the country. He remembers his parents always talking and complaining about how the government was violating their civil rights, how they were all over “people’s business.”

Griffith’s case had been randomly assigned to Yáñez, and he, as the lead attorney, chose to work with Jeff Banks. They had worked together on criminal cases before, and Yáñez felt Banks would be his perfect partner. He knew that Banks, a compassionate man also in his early forties with children of his own, would work tirelessly for the defense.

Yáñez opened his private practice in 2014, about six months before the trial started. He could have just handed the case to Jeff and a new public defendant, but since he knew so many details, he continued doing it pro bono (at no charge). It was a case he thought he could win, he said, or at least get a reduced sentence.

Yáñez told the jurors they would hear about the “violence, property crimes, stalking, threats, harassment all by Debbie Flores against Mr. Griffith as well as acts of battery and weapons.”

On May 8, 2014, Jason Griffith listened intently as the judge issued instructions to the jurors. Griffith, very well dressed in a suit, with a slight beard and looking a couple of pounds lighter than he had in 2011, sat next to his attorneys. Throughout the trial, he seemed to be trying
to avoid eye contact, especially with Celeste. His expression, however, was impassive.

Judge Kathleen Delaney told the jury that it was their duty “to apply the rules of law the facts as you find them from the evidence,” and said, “Regardless of any opinion you may have as to what the law ought to be, it would be a violation of your oath to base a verdict upon any other view of the law than that given in the instructions of the Court.”

She explained what the charges were against Jason Griffith, pointing out that the fact he’d been indicted for the crime was only “a formal method of accusing a person of a crime and is not of itself any evidence of his guilt.” She went on to say that his indictment charged him as follows: “on or about the 12th day of December, 2010 at and within the County of Clark, State of Nevada, the Defendant committed the offense of MURDER, to wit: did then and there feloniously, without authority of law, and with malice aforethought, kill Debora Flores-Narvaez, a human being, by strangulation and/or compression and/or means unknown.”

Judge Delaney defined the crime of murder as “the unlawful killing of a human being, with the malice aforethought, whether express or implied” and gave the jurors the legal definition of “malice aforethought” (aka premeditation): “Malice aforethought means the intentional doing of a wrongful act without legal cause or excuse or
what the law considers adequate provocation. The condition of mind described as malice aforethought may arise, not alone from anger, hatred, revenge, or from particular ill will, spite or grudge toward the person killed, but may result from any unjustifiable or unlawful motive or purpose to injure another, which proceeds from a heart fatally bent on mischief or with reckless disregard or consequences and social duty. Malice aforethought does not imply deliberation or the lapse of any considerable time between the malicious intention to injure another and the actual execution of the intent but denotes rather an unlawful purpose and design in contradistinction to accident and mischance.”

Judge Kathleen Delaney further explained what is meant by premeditation, or “malice murder”: “Express malice is that deliberate intention unlawfully to take away the life of a fellow creature. [ . . . ] Malice may be implied when no considerable provocation appears.” Perhaps most importantly, the judge also explained exactly how a crime qualified as first degree: “Murder of the first degree is murder which is perpetrated by means of any kind of willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing. All three (3) elements—willfulness, deliberation, and premeditation—must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt before an accused can be convicted of first-degree murder. [ . . . ] Murder of the Second Degree is murder with malice aforethought, but without the admixture of premeditation
and deliberation. All murder which is not murder of the first degree is murder of the second degree.”

Then, district attorney Marc DiGiacomo gave his opening statement.

“This is one of the most intense searches in modern Las Vegas history,” DiGiacomo said.

Jurors heard from various witnesses who testified about the days following Debora Flores-Narvaez’s disappearance and the search effort by Las Vegas police and her family; they heard from her roommate, Sonya, and from her sister, Celeste, who flew to Las Vegas from Atlanta and testified about what occurred when she contacted Griffith regarding her sister’s whereabouts: “He showed little concern. I felt like he was lying about not knowing where she was.”

Defense attorney Jeff Banks anticipated that the prosecution would present police photographs to the jurors as evidence during the trial, by saying, “They will show you pictures, and they will be gruesome and they will be shocking. But that does not change the fact that he was scared and he was afraid that she was violent, and Jason Griffith was defending himself on December 12, 2010.” Jason Griffith’s lawyers asked that the jury consider the man’s state of mind, suggesting that he had been acting in self-defense.

“She was a violent stalker who had repeatedly harassed him,” Banks told the jury.

The prosecution disagreed, saying there was no
evidence to support a self-defense claim. The prosecution spent more than an hour talking about Jason’s affairs with different women. “Griffith tried to hide his crime and maintain his life as a Cirque du Soleil performer along with his relationship with another woman,” DiGiacomo refuted, referring obliquely to Agnes Roux, one of the other women in Jason Griffith’s life during his time with Debbie. (Agnes was Debbie’s main competition with Griffith, since Debora knew he had deep feelings for the redheaded dancer. Even before her murder, the couple had many arguments because of the relationship Griffith had with the
Zumanity
dancer.)

Then came a most difficult task for the jury. As the defense had expected, the prosecution did show the jury graphic autopsy photographs of Debbie. It was incredibly jarring to see the young woman who had once been a model and dancer as a dismembered corpse on a video screen. Pictures of her torso and severed legs were part of the gruesome evidence the prosecuting attorneys showed the jury. The autopsy pictures were shown early on during the opening statements, so the jurors had a clear understanding of the magnitude of the dismemberment of Debbie’s body.

Prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo told the jury that evidence over the next several days would prove that Griffith was not only guilty but had intentionally killed his ex-lover by asphyxiating her with a plastic bag over her
head—and had twice tried to dispose of her body in six hundred pounds of cement.

“The problem for Mr. Griffith is, it’s painfully apparent that he never does anything alone,” DiGiacomo told the jury, referring to Griffith having enlisted the help of his friend and roommate, Louis Colombo, which would prove to be his downfall. DiGiacomo explained how Louis had witnessed Griffith as he “sawed the legs off [Flores-Narvaez’s] corpse to fit her remains in two smaller concrete-filled tubs that weighed less.” Her legs! Although Jason Griffith chopped up his ex-lover’s legs out of expediency and in order to fit her in the tub filled with concrete where he intended to conceal her body, perhaps it was a subconscious act of the worst kind. There was something especially disturbing about this image, Griffith’s horrific treatment of the dancer’s main artistic instrument.

The next day, on Friday, May 9, 2014, Kalae Casorso, one of Jason Griffith’s (many) former girlfriends, took the stand. During her testimony, she told the jury how she had demanded to know what was in the heavy big blue plastic tub of gray rocky material that Griffith and his roommate, Louis Colombo, wanted to store at her home. This is when she learned the truth.

“I asked what the heck it was. He asked if I really wanted to know, and I said yes. He kind of looked at me and said it was Debbie,” testified Kalae.

She said she felt “confused and stunned” at this revelation. The prosecution asked her twice why she didn’t call police.