Dancing on Her Grave (8 page)

Griffith saw the perfect opportunity. Knowing that Agnes was planning a trip to Spain, he asked her to lend him the keys to that house. He offered to help with picking up the mail and maybe checking out the place, so he could possibly move in there with Louis Colombo. She trusted him and handed him the keys without knowing his real intentions.

Louis attempted to carry the tub inside the house by himself, but the tub started leaking. He then phoned Griffith and asked him to return with new plastic tubs, a sledgehammer, a handsaw, and some cleaning supplies. Griffith returned with the items, and Louis said that after he used the sledgehammer to break Debbie’s body out of the concrete.

At this point, Griffith sawed off both of Debbie’s legs with the handsaw, so she would fit into a smaller tub, then both men placed her torso and legs into two separate plastic tubs and covered her in concrete, stashing her in an almost reptilian way, like alligators hoard their catch underground, inside a swampy hole. Such a coldhearted, horrific act would be unfathomable to most people, let alone for Jason Griffith to do so to his own former lover. How could he not feel a thing after the sight of those dancer’s legs?

Louis said they then filled each of the plastic tubs with enough concrete to cover her torso and legs and placed the lids on the containers. He said they put the tubs into a closet and sealed the doors shut with some kind of sealant. Louis said they also sealed the tools they used in a closet in another room so nobody would find them. He said they left the first blue plastic tub and the broken concrete in the living room.

Once the interview was over, Louis Colombo led detectives to the address where he said they’d taken Debora Flores-Narvaez’s body. Judge Timothy Williams signed a search warrant for the residence, and detectives entered on January 7, 2011. Griffith had not yet been arrested. The broken blue plastic tub and the broken pieces of concrete were in the living room of the house, as described. A big piece of concrete left inside the blue plastic tub showed the clear impression of a hand, and there was also a large amount of long, dark-colored hair present. The front living room window was covered with a large sheet of black plastic. The window in the southeast bedroom was covered with a blanket and sealed around the frame with spray foam insulation. It had apparently been an attempt by Griffith and Louis to secure the home.

Later, in the early hours of January 8, 2011, detectives contacted Jason Griffith as he was leaving work at the Mirage Hotel and Casino. They asked him if he would be willing to go to the police station to answer some
additional questions related to the disappearance of Debora Flores-Narvaez. Griffith was told he was not under arrest at that time, but he questioned the detectives as to why he was not being read his Miranda rights. Detective Dean O’Kelley told Griffith he would be happy to read him his Miranda rights before detectives asked him any questions. Griffith agreed to accompany detectives to the Homicide office, and while en route there, he called and left a message for his attorney, Jeff Banks, telling him he was not under arrest but that he was being asked to come to the police station to answer some more questions.

Prior to the start of the interview, Detective O’Kelley read him his Miranda rights, and Griffith initialed and signed the card indicating that he understood those rights. During the subsequent interview, Griffith was told that detectives had found Debbie’s body, but he denied having anything to do with her death. He admitted to having rented the U-Haul truck but said that it had just been so that he could pick up a punching bag stand in the northwest part of the valley. When confronted about having driven to Henderson, Griffith claimed he’d gone to a friend’s house to get more workout equipment, but he refused to identify the friend. He also claimed that he’d been in possession of the only set of the truck keys at all times, other than when his friend had driven the truck to pick up the punching bag stand.

When confronted with specific questions related to
Debora’s death or the disposal of her body, which the investigators explained to him, Griffith told detectives he did not want to answer those particular questions without his attorney being present. Nevertheless, at the conclusion of the interview, Jason Griffith was arrested for the murder of Debora Flores-Narvaez. He was transported to the Clark County Detention Center to be booked and incarcerated. According to the arrest report, while en route to the detention center, Griffith told Detective Long that his ex-girlfriend had attacked him, and that he’d believed she had a gun inside her gym bag. He explained that what happened was not a “premeditated thing” and that it was “a heat of the moment thing that happened.”

Was Griffith attempting to set up mitigating circumstances for the murder? Possibly. He probably anticipated a harsh sentence and wanted to cover all the bases. He had, after all, gone to great lengths to conceal his crime. And “premeditated” does carry the possibility of death or life in prison without parole.

Griffith told Detective Long that it was after the incident occurred that he did “all the amateurish stuff,” later adding that Louis only became involved after Debbie was already dead, and that his roommate hadn’t really known what was going on. When Detective Long offered to take a statement about the events of Debbie’s death, however, Griffith still refused.

On Tuesday, January 11, 2011, Jason Omar Griffith
appeared in court for the first time. Due to the severity of the charges, his bail was denied.

Debbie’s sister, Celeste Flores-Narvaez, also arrived at the court, visibly shaken and filled with anger, looking to face the man accused of brutally murdering and dismembering her younger sister. The encounter between Debbie’s alleged killer and her sister almost became a scandal.

Celeste screamed at Griffith, “Look what you’ve done, you fucker!” and continued to shout expletives at him until she had to be removed from the courtroom by the bailiffs.

Afterward, outside the courtroom, she told the media: “I hope they do what they have to in order to send that devil straight to hell!”

Celeste said that at first she’d been infinitely sad, but now she was angry and demanded justice. On camera, she said about Griffith: “I want him to get the death
penalty!”

A City in Mourning

The first memorial service for Debora Flores-Narvaez was held at St. Viator Church in Las Vegas on January 13, 2011. A second one took place the next day, January 14, at the Luxor Hotel where the dancer had last been seen by some coworkers rehearsing for
FANTASY
. Her sister, Celeste, attended both, and was deeply touched by the offerings of flowers, as well as the various eulogies from Debbie’s friends and colleagues, all praising her little sister’s talent, her dedication, and, especially, her kindness to others. Before the body was transported to her native Puerto Rico, family and friends also held yet a third memorial, a vigil in honor of Debbie, a woman whose talent had lit up the stages of Las Vegas.

“Throughout the whole experience I felt just a sense
of the love that my sister had out there,” Celeste later recalled. “And I completely understand what she loved about Vegas, and that it isn’t just a party city. I felt complete support from the dancing and entertainment community. A lot of people think, oh ‘Sin City,’ they’re party people. But they have lives and they work hard for what they do; it’s their careers and what they’re skilled at. I felt pure love. These people literally became a part of my family, even complete strangers.”

Strangers were mostly who Celeste found at the church memorial, people who went to pay their respects to the beautiful, slain young woman; people who’d either seen her onstage or who’d followed the headlines and news reports of her initial disappearance, and then of her gruesome murder.

After the memorials, Debbie’s friends and colleagues organized a benefit, held at the Crown Theatre and Nightclub at the Rio on January 26. The show was open to the public, and part of the proceeds were donated to Shade Tree women’s shelter in Las Vegas, whose mission statement reads: “To provide safe shelter to homeless and abused women and children in crisis and to offer life-changing services promoting stability, dignity, and self-reliance.” Other monies were used to help the Flores-Narvaez family transport Debbie’s remains to her native Puerto Rico, where the family later held a private funeral in San Juan.

Celeste was unable to attend the benefit, since by then she’d had to return to Atlanta to her children. “But they sent me a video of it, and I cried all the way through it,” she recalled, still tearing up. “All the dancers from the community participated. I love Vegas now! I was fortunate enough to see the best side of Vegas.”

However, Celeste made certain her sister did not stay in Las Vegas.

“I took her home to Puerto Rico. I like to say I took her home in her brand-new shiny car,” she said with a smile marred by the memories, referring to the coffin. Celeste described her sister Debbie’s final resting place as overlooking a jungle, in a cemetery with “the most beautiful flowers, absolutely gorgeous; her place of rest is absolutely breathtaking.” She went back to visit when she could. “I plan on going every year to talk to her, to make sure she’s happy.”

After Debbie’s death, her older sister also had to deal with changes in their family dynamics. “My sister and my mother were best friends. I’ve always been the black sheep of the family,” she said with a laugh. “But I was the strongest one, strong and opinionated. My sister was closer to my mom and dad. My way of showing love was different. She was more affectionate. Now my mom calls me every single day and I’ve had to learn to be more open with her. I didn’t know how to be as affectionate with her as Debbie was. It’s now easier for me to say ‘I
love you.’ My father and I are pretty much the same, headstrong. His way of dealing with it is not showing his feelings. He is too proud.”

Elsie Narvaez, their mother, a petite, soft-spoken woman with a kind demeanor and a sweet voice, corroborated this.

“Debora and I were very close,” Celeste said in Spanish. “She was very warm and communicated with me always. When they were little, we were not rich or anything, but we had everything we needed, and played together with our dolls.” She added that ever since Debbie was a child, she had always wanted to look her best. “She liked her little dresses. And then, when she grew up, even though she wasn’t thinking of having children, she doted on Celeste’s kids like a mother.” Celeste’s two boys, at the time of their aunt’s death, were twelve and almost two years old respectively.

“My sister loved my older boy dearly!” Celeste said, recalling that the last call she had received from Debbie was to inquire what she should get her older nephew for Christmas. “The other day I was at a barbecue. As I looked at my son, I thought she will never see him grow up,” she lamented.

Celeste wrote often, and sadly, about her sister on Facebook. Her posts are public, there for the world to see. April 29, 2011, seemed to mark quite an inauspicious occasion for her, as she posted:

I’m up watching the Royal Wedding countdown, the family and friends, the groom’s men and the bridesmaids, and all the dresses. It’s a fantasy. Who wouldn’t want to have a gorgeous wedding? I start to think about how mine will be, and then I realize that the one thing I’ll never have is Debbie as my maid of honor. I wanted her to hold my bouquet and say that speech and toast on my behalf. It will never be a perfect wedding as I’d want it to be.

Everyone close to Debora Flores-Narvaez questioned why it happened, particularly why it happened the way it did, and whether there would be justice for their friend, their colleague, and, in Celeste’s case, for her sister.

Debbie’s former roommate, Sonya Sonnenberg, a beautiful and exotic-looking young woman who works as an aerialist—meaning she performs trapeze feats, on ropes, with scarves, while high up in the air—in Las Vegas shows, remembered that dancing was Debora’s “dream job.” Sonya was the person who called in the missing person’s report about her roommate to the police. “She missed two rehearsals in a row for
FANTASY,
which wasn’t like her, and we couldn’t get ahold of her so we called the police.

“I met her when she started working at
FANTASY
. And I moved in with her about a year or so later,” Sonya recalled. “I remember she was very passionate about life
and about everything pretty much.” Sonya said that as a roommate, Debbie didn’t cook, but she was clean, and liked to decorate. “She decorated with colorful, nice things,” she said. “And I remember her temper, too. She had one. She didn’t do anything halfway.” Although the two women were not “superclose,” as Sonya put it, Debbie did confide in her roommate somewhat, and regarding Debbie’s relationship with Jason Griffith, Sonya said, “I knew pretty much right away it wasn’t a good thing.”

As an accomplished aerialist whose work often takes her out of town, and even out of the country, Sonya had been away from Las Vegas and working in Arizona when investigators finally found Debbie and arrested Griffith. Sonya said she’d had a “bad feeling” when Debbie disappeared. Her reaction to her roommate’s death was even more extreme.

“I was out town when they found her body,” she said. “I got a phone call at five o’clock in the morning, from the police telling me she was dead. I collapsed. I actually fell on the ground and started crying, ‘that is a terrible, terrible thing.’” The aerialist noted that she’d been half expecting an outcome like this. “By then she had been missing for a month, so I was waiting for that phone call.” But if the phone call itself did not take Sonya by surprise, the circumstances did. “I didn’t expect we would find her alive, but I didn’t think he would go to those lengths,”
she said, referring to the dismemberment and concealment of the body.

Another of Debbie’s colleagues was Rene Delgadillo, who offered a fuller, and more violent, account both of the relationship and of what might have happened to Debbie. Rene, a choreographer and magician, fits the image of an old-fashioned magician, with his slicked-back black hair and moustache and catlike moves. Debbie had been one of the partners in his “Salsa Magic” act (which involved Latin dance), and the two of them had worked hard together, he said. They’d known each other for almost two years.

“She was having some issues with her previous boyfriend. She said he had beaten her up,” Rene said, referring to Jamile McGee. But recently, the dancer had been calling up her magician friend, Rene, about yet another relationship gone wrong.

“She was calling me crying and depressed, and I would ask what was wrong. Blu was cheating on her”—Rene referred to Griffith by his stage name—“and it was almost like a love triangle. And she would say, ‘I don’t care if he’s with another girl as long as he’s with me.’ I would tell her, ‘Debbie you need to get out of this thing before something happens.’ I saw the red flags. I knew something was coming, [but] I was in shock when that happened. I knew something would happen but not to that
degree. I was totally blown away. She was really secretive about it.”

Rene recalled one particular incident that attested to the violence in the relationship. The magician didn’t seem all too fond of his close friend’s then-boyfriend.

“One time, she came over to my house, and her car was all bashed up, the turn signals were broken, and she said she got in an accident. But things were broken inside the car, and then when I read the report, I saw that Blu had smashed her face against the windshield and that she broke some of her teeth inside her car. It didn’t add up. She didn’t seem to want to let go, but she was getting abused.”

Tennille Ball, Debbie’s high school friend from Baltimore, also had a sinister take on the entire incident.

“She was in love with Blu,” Tennille said about Debbie’s relationship with Jason Griffith. “And the way that he killed her was out of a horror movie. He just went too far. I don’t think anybody who is normal does anything like that. We all go through relationships like that, where we argue back and forth, but what he did was beyond belief. He’s a sociopath! And I believe he preyed on the fact that she loved him to lure her over there because he wanted to hurt her. It was his birthday weekend. He invited her over to watch
Dexter,
which was his favorite show? A guy who kills people and ties them up with saran wrap? Come on!” Tennille laughed sarcastically. And then
she added, “I come from a police family and I know how to look for clues. And when I started investigating it was all there, in black and white. She was going to testify against him in court after he assaulted her in October, so he thought he would just get rid of her.”

Both Rene Delgadillo and Sonya Sonnenberg went to the church memorial to pay their respects to their friend, as well as to the memorial at the Luxor Hotel. Tennille Ball, who lived across the country, could not, but she remembers her friend fondly. “I remember how much fun and how passionate she was,” she said.

“Fun” was the word Rene Delgadillo used to describe Debbie as well. “What I remember about her the most,” he said, “is how silly and how much fun she could be. She was a little feisty at times, but we laughed a lot. She was cheerful and extremely responsible, willing to give a hand to anyone. She was very kind.”

Even Debbie’s former lawyer, Luke Ciciliano, offered his view, as both a friend and an attorney.

“Debbie is someone who is full of life,” he stated, using the present tense. “I have a framed photo of her in my house and it says ‘Live, Laugh, Love.’ She was full of passion; she just loved experiencing things. She always saw the best in everybody, and she had such a passion for the dance I can understand why she was attracted to other dancers. She could sit around her apartment all day and watch dance videos.”

I soon learned that Debbie’s innate kindness and friendliness extended beyond her professional circle, as well.

About two years before I began to cover Debora Flores-Narvaez’s missing person’s case, I went to grab a late-night snack at a Denny’s with a colleague after our telecast. Denny’s is, of course, open all night, so like IHOP, it’s a popular establishment among those who work all hours. Our server at Denny’s was a nice man named Lorenzo Buitrón, the type of server who engages clients in easy, polite conversation and is helpful yet unobtrusive. He even gave us his telephone number, since both my colleague and I were relatively new in town, telling us he knew lots of people.

As it turned out, one of those people he knew was Debora Flores-Narvaez. When Debbie was first reported missing, he called the newsroom to ask us for more information about her disappearance. Later, as I went through a mental list of other people who might have been casual observers to Debbie and Jason Griffith’s turbulent relationship, Lorenzo came to mind, and I called him.

He knew even more about Debbie than I’d thought. Apparently, ever since she’d moved to Las Vegas and started working as a showgirl, she ate regularly at that Denny’s on Las Vegas Boulevard, just a few blocks away from the Luxor Hotel. (She always ordered the kids’ meal.)

About a year before she went missing, Debbie had begun to frequent the family restaurant with Jason Griffith, whom she referred as “my boyfriend.” “She was all over him,” Lorenzo remembers. They always requested a table in the back of the restaurant, away from the rest of the late-night crowd. She was always friendly and open with the server, whereas her companion hardly looked at him. Debbie would invariably pick up the tab.