Dancing on Her Grave (12 page)

“But you don’t call the police at all?” asked DiGiacomo, perhaps anticipating how the defense might drill Casorso.

“Not at that time, no,” answered Kalae.

“And you knew you could get into trouble, right?”

If she had knowingly helped to hide Debora’s remains, Kalae could have been charged with “accessory after the fact,” which is often not considered an accomplice but is treated as a separate offender. Punishment for an accessory after the fact—basically anyone who intentionally helps an offender evade apprehension or prosecution—is always less than for the principal offender.

Kalae said, “I feared what happened to the woman I knew as Debbie Flores could happen to me.”

She told jurors that she’d broken off her relationship with Griffith after spotting him with Debbie Flores-Narvaez on Valentine’s Day, 2010. That seemed to be a pattern with Jason Griffith: a current girlfriend would either see him with another woman, or find out about another woman, and the relationship was over.

Despite their breakup, however, Kalae went on to say that she still heard frequently from Griffith, and that he would often complain to her about Debbie.

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department detective Dan Long testified in court later that same day. He spoke
about the moment he realized Jason Griffith and Louis Colombo had done something horrible to Debbie Flores-Narvaez, recalling his conversation with Louis about becoming a witness for the prosecution if he wanted to save himself.

“I made a comment during the interview and said, as long as there wasn’t anything weird with the body. And alarms went off, visual alarms went off, and my partner and I knew at that time, ‘okay, they did something to this body,’” said the detective.

Jason Griffith showed little reaction to the testimony. He simply continued to scratch the left side of his head as he listened and patiently sat next to his attorneys in the courtroom during Detective Long’s testimony.

Later that night, after court had adjourned, Celeste posted on Facebook about her rage at Griffith’s calm courtroom demeanor:

“Shaking from head to toe uncontrollably with so much rage, hate and anger. Tears rolling down my face with the horror that I just saw. The torture she faced, the way she was rid and disposed of and planned to be forgotten for no one to ever see or find. I can only look and stare at evil’s face. . . . Evil itself shows No reaction, no remorse, no emotion. No sorrow. Nothing! Just a tall, proud stance. He feels my livid and furious stare and then he attempts to return the favor back only to lose, look down, shake his head in disbelief of the nerve I have for
him! Amazing to me, completely shocked at his response to me and the confidence evil has with no regrets. My head is spinning, knots in my stomach and feeling weak. Stress, anger and pain have consumed me entirely. Worst thing in life is feeling helpless. That I cannot do anything at all. To sit. Sit and wait. . . . Wait for justice to be served. Not by your own hand but by someone else’s and not know the sentencing yet. I keep asking myself, how? How the hell am I still doing this? How is it I’m still moving forward? How? Begging and praying for strength. God I’m reaching for you.”

On Monday, May 12, 2014, after a weekend’s rest, the jury was again called to appear for the second week of opening arguments at 10:30
A.M.

Everyone had expected Jason Griffith to take the stand, but instead, the jurors listened to the testimony from crime scene technicians and forensic investigators.

The jury was exposed again to the images of Debbie’s severed legs and torso after crime scene investigators had removed them from the tub of cement in preparation for the autopsy, which was performed the day after her remains were found.

Dr. Larry Simmons, a forensic pathologist with the Clark County Coroner’s Office who had performed more than eight thousand autopsies during his career, was one of the individuals to take the stand. “She had both her legs amputated away from the rest of her body,” he told the court.
“So they were severed. They were amputated at the hip and then there was an attempted amputation at the left arm through the shoulder area.”

During this forensic testimony, as he had the previous week, Griffith looked straight ahead, impassive and emotionless, even as the prosecutors showed the gruesome pictures of Debbie’s dismembered body. The photos did not appear to sit well with the members or the jury; a couple almost jumped out of their seats, and some covered their mouths with their hands. Some of the women just looked away. Some of the jurors gasped, and others were visibly shaken. Tears rolled down Celeste’s and her mother’s faces as other crime scene analysts also described in detail the condition in which they had found Debora’s body. As a news reporter, one would assume I am used to seeing and hearing about horrific cases, but it is very difficult to even write about this; I cannot imagine what her family felt as they saw those pictures.

“Once the first container was open, we found a head, and a torso, and arms,” said Dan Holstein, Metro crime scene analyst, adding that he found a pair of legs in the second container. The CSI analyst was referring to the bags inside the storage tubs where Griffith and Colombo had placed the body parts.

It was a long day at the courthouse. The jury also heard from the employees at Walmart where Jason Griffith had been captured on surveillance video purchasing items like
duct tape and cement, as well as from employees at the locations where he’d rented the U-Haul truck.

The following day, May 13, 2014, was even more significant. The prosecution concluded its arguments with the key witness, the man who saw it all: Jason Griffith’s best friend and roommate, Louis Colombo.

Louis Colombo, a tall, heavyset man of thirty-five who wore his long hair combed back in a ponytail, took the stand with a palpable sense of guilt. Throughout his more than two and half hours of testimony, his eyes filled up with genuine tears as he gave details of Debbie Flores-Narvaez’s tragic ending. In contrast, Jason Griffith did not cry and continued to show no emotion even as his friend described what happened to his ex-lover.

Louis remembered with what seemed to be true remorse the moment he left the apartment knowing Griffith and Debbie had been fighting to the point he witnessed Griffith grab her with both hands on her neck. Prosecutors asked Louis to demonstrate the manner in which he’d witnessed Griffith choking Debbie on the day she died. Louis stood up and showed exactly how Jason Griffith had had his hands wrapped around Debbie’s neck before he left their apartment on December 12, 2010. Louis Colombo practically acted out the murder itself, and it was hair-raising.

Confessing that he hadn’t wanted to get his good friend in trouble, Louis took everyone in the courtroom
step-by-step from the moment he left the apartment until they finally disposed of Debora’s body. He claimed to have left the two of them fighting but said that when he returned, he found Debbie dead with a plastic grocery shopping bag over her head.

He said that Griffith told him he’d been afraid Debbie was about to call an ambulance, because she was having trouble breathing, when Griffith approached her from behind and choked her to death.

“I saw Debbie lying on the ground,” Louis Colombo said.

“Did she appear alive?” the prosecutor asked.

“No, she appeared dead.”

“How could you tell?”

“She wasn’t moving,” Louis responded.

The prosecutors asked him directly how he and Jason Griffith had gotten rid of her body. The roommates had carried Debbie’s body to the bathtub so the dismembering would not leave blood traces.

“Who does the cutting?” DiGiacomo asked.

“Jason,” he replied.

“What does he use?” asked the prosecutor again.

“A handsaw,” Louis answered.

“Were you able to see what it is that he was cutting?” the prosecutor asked.

“I didn’t look. I just held the leg and closed my eyes and turned away,” Louis said.

“When it was done, did you see what condition the body was in? What did you see?”

“The limbs were cut off at the hip and there was a deep cut into one of the arms. I think the left arm.”

Louis Colombo stated the two had to go buy air fresheners and bleach to cover up the smell. “The smell still haunts me to this day,” Louis said.

“Every time I heard a siren I would get anxiety,” he said. “I could feel Debbie inside the house. I thought I would see her.” He’d known Debbie, after all, and had often seen her at the apartment he’d shared with Jason Griffith.

Debbie’s mother and sister sat through the testimony. Debbie’s mother used a handkerchief often to wipe her tears as she listened to the terrible details of her daughter’s death.

The prosecution
rested.

The Killer Takes the Stand

On Wednesday, May 14, 2014, Jason Griffith took the stand for the first day of what would turn out to be several days’ worth of testimony. The accused killer wore an elegant black suit, as he had every day of the trial, and he looked confident, as if he was about to play his trump card and convince the court that he was actually a victim in this case.

After the strong set of witnesses presented by the prosecution, Griffith had obviously decided to take the stand despite knowing that testifying could open him to potentially damaging cross-examination by prosecutors. It would be his only way of avoiding a Murder One conviction, his only way to explain, as he tried to do with the detectives upon first being arrested, that it had all
happened “in the heat of the moment” and was not a premeditated act.

When questioned by his defense attorneys over the next few days of testimony, Jason Griffith also appeared very emotional, unlike during his previously stoic appearances in the courtroom. Now he cried, clasped his hands to his face, closed his eyes, and took long pauses as if he was looking for the right words to describe Debbie’s final moments.

Despite these actions, however, it was noted that there were no visible tears.

Earlier that Wednesday, before Jason Griffith took the stand, Debbie’s ex-boyfriend Jamile McGee also testified for the defense. He told the court that Debbie was a violent person—even though she was the one who had won a $250,000 civil judgment against him in April 2010, claiming that she’d suffered scarring as a result of an assault by Jamile in which he kicked her stomach, dragged her from her car, and held her hostage in his apartment while continuing to beat her.

Once Jason Griffith took the stand—visibly agitated and pausing to compose himself—he told the jury how “clingy” Debbie had been and how he’d felt harassed by her since she was constantly coming to his house and work and wanting to spend time with him.

Griffith told the court how he’d had to call 911 many
times while they were together, as Debbie sometimes refused to leave his home. He said on one occasion, a police officer even laughed at him for complaining about “a hot girl” wanting to be with him, and he said Debora had played to that. “She would ridicule me. She would say, ‘You’re a man, they’re not going to believe you. They are never going to believe that I’m doing anything to you. Why do you keep calling them? They are not going to help you,’” Griffith said.

Griffith was not lying about having called 911 on Debbie. In fact, jurors heard fourteen separate 911 calls Griffith made to Las Vegas and North Las Vegas police asking them for help with his girlfriend. He alleged that when Debbie was mad, she would send him hundreds of text messages and call him many times in a row. “It escalated to thirty text messages a day, forty phone calls a day. It was almost laughable how many phone calls were coming in.”

“Any time I pulled back, she’d get really intense,” he testified, saying that Debbie handwrote on his car the words:
“I will kill you before I let another bitch have you. I will find you wherever you hide. Love always, your Destiny.”

He said again, “Whenever I try to disengage or pull away or attempt to ignore it, if I don’t cater to the phone calls, it gets violent. She starts getting really angry.”

Both the defense and the prosecution had been trying
their hardest to gather the best evidence possible for their cases. Both found good pieces of it in Griffith’s computer, which was linked to his iPhone, his personal phone.

Defense attorney Abel Yáñez looked at his client’s phone record and said he was amazed to confirm how many text messages and phone calls Debora made to Griffith within twenty-four hours.

“When I first saw the record, I thought it was a mistake. I said, how can a human being text so many times in a day?” But then, he said, he realized it was accurate. Debbie really had been bombarding him with attention.

But prosecutor Michelle Fleck painted a very different picture.

“You have to look at the text messages in context so you can see the progression, and Debbie’s anger,” she said later, after the trial. “It was based upon very specific behavior by him. For instance, he would be in a hotel room with a woman when they were supposed to go out on a date. And there were dozens of women!” said the prosecutor. “There was a girl in makeup, and another girl in wardrobe,” Fleck said. During Jason Griffith’s testimony, he also admitted that in addition to his relationship with Debbie, he’d been sleeping with two other female colleagues from the show
LOVE
at the time, as well as seeing a fourth woman, the dancer from the Cirque du Soleil show
Zumanity
, Agnes Roux.

Griffith said that Debbie knew about Agnes, and that
they’d considered a three-way relationship, but it had never developed.

“One time, in particular, Debbie couldn’t find him, and then she [became] worried, then angry, and then worried again. And it was because they had plans and he was basically torturing her,” Fleck said. She even dismissed the 911 calls. “If you go through the times he called 911, he is laughing, he is never scared, he is doing it because he wants attention. After one time he called 911 he text messaged her, ‘Makeup sex?’ He was using one of the busiest metropolitan dispatches in the country for his personal relationship counseling.”

Prosecutor Fleck seemed to have a great deal of respect for the victim. “That girl was true blue when it came to Jason Griffith,” she added. “Debbie was too smart for him. She was motivated, strong, passionate, interested in pursuing her own goals and dreams, and helping him with his career. Debbie’s problem was [that] she was a truth seeker.”

The next day, Thursday, May 15, 2014, Jason Griffith once again took the stand.

“Yeah, hell yeah, hell yeah and I’m scared, scared of this,” he said of testifying, not to mention what the outcome of the verdict might be, as well as any possible sentence.

Griffith spent almost five hours that Thursday telling the jury how threatened he’d felt by Debbie and explaining
how during the fight that led to her death, she’d told him she was going to kill him and then herself if he continued his relationship with Agnes Roux.

“‘You don’t give a fuck about me. You don’t care about me,’” Griffith said Debbie told him. “‘That’s why I brought it with me,’” meaning the gun Griffith claimed he thought she’d had. “‘I’m gonna kill you and kill myself.’”

He continued, “When she hits me, all these other times she has hit me, I’m in a position where I can get away. I’m in a position where I can just run. There is a hit, I can stand up and move. I’m sitting on the floor, and she’s over me, and hits me in the face.”

According to Griffith, during their heated argument, Debbie reached for her cream-colored purse, where he believed she had a gun. (She didn’t. In fact, there’s no evidence to show she ever owned a gun or carried any kind of weapon that day. “She never had a gun,” prosecutor Michelle Fleck said later. “Nobody who knew her thought she ever had a gun.”)

But Griffith nonetheless said, on the stand: “I want to stop her from getting to the purse,” as he alleged that he’d been defending himself against a woman he thought was armed. “I think she’s reaching for the gun in her purse, but I have no way to know,” Griffith testified. “I was telling her to stop. I pull her back toward me. She says, ‘I’m going to fucking kill you. I’m going to fucking
kill you,’” Griffith said, describing how Debbie, who was also very agile and athletic, kicked the heels of her high black boots against his bare shins and threw her head back against the bridge of his nose as he held her tightly from behind.

As he held her, he said he pleaded with her to stop, that he didn’t want to fight her.

“I thought she was listening to me, because she wasn’t moving anymore,” he said. “She wasn’t scratching me, or gasping for air.”

He told the jurors he grabbed her from behind, and held her up in the air as he fell backward. Jason Griffith demonstrated this with all the grace and agility of a dancer. He said Debbie’s hair was in his face as he pleaded with her to stop fighting.

“I didn’t understand what happened. I thought she was going to get up,” he said on the stand. Griffith said he thought Debbie had finally calmed down, but she wasn’t saying anything, or moving.

“I sat there for ten minutes waiting for her to get up. I’m praying, ‘please God she’s going to get up, she’s going to be ok, she’s going to move, she’s going to get up,’” Griffith said.

“Do you stay in the studio? Do you leave? What are you doing?” Abel Yáñez, the defense attorney, asked.

At that point, Griffith said, he left. Leaving Debbie’s lifeless body in his apartment, Griffith said that he instead
went to see his new girlfriend, Agnes, the woman he called the “love of his life,” and acted as “if nothing had happened.” He did not tell Agnes what happened to Debora.

“‘I’m going to spend the rest of my life in jail because no one’s going to believe me,’” he said he thought. He said he didn’t call the police because he was frustrated about how they never took him seriously, claiming the officers always made fun of him, telling him a beautiful woman couldn’t be dangerous. “It was not my first thought to call these people who never believe. Metro is, shoot first and ask questions later. I’m not calling them with a dead body in my house,” he said.

Griffith said it was his roommate, Louis Colombo, who later put the plastic bag over Debbie’s face, to determine if she was breathing. But Louis had earlier testified that he’d found Debbie’s body with the plastic bag over her head already. Griffith’s explanation made no sense. Why on earth would Louis Colombo place a bag over his roommate’s ex-lover’s head?

Griffith also claimed that it was Louis who’d sawed off Debbie’s legs, disputing testimony from his former roommate, who said that Griffith had done the sawing.

The biggest contradiction was Louis’s testimony of how Griffith told him he killed Debora. According to Louis, Griffith told him he’d grabbed her by the base of
her throat, then approached her from behind and choked her to death.

Jason Griffith disagreed—he said it happened as they were arguing and he tried to calm her down. According to him, Debbie’s head had somehow become accidentally wedged in his elbows as they fell backward on the floor of his studio apartment.

Toward the end of his testimony on May 15, Griffith explained how and why they got rid of her body, now in the bathtub.

“Eventually it’s going to start to smell, so we talked about covering it, and the idea comes to cover it with concrete. We take the body and start putting it in bags.”

Shortly after this, both sides, the prosecutors and the defense, rested for the day. Jason Griffith was expected back in the courtroom at 9:30
A.M.
to finish his testimony. The prosecutors had yet to question him.

The past two weeks had been extremely difficult for the family, and even for those of us who unfortunately only got to meet Debbie after her death. I had difficulty sleeping, and fell asleep thinking of Debora’s last moments of
life.