Dead of Night (16 page)

Chapter 21

One of the first of many law enforcement witnesses who had been scheduled to testify during the trial, Detective David Jenkins told the court about the more than five thousand tips that his office received after Brianna’s disappearance. He testified about the number of documents that had been created during the investigation, which exceeded 39,000. He also told of the extensive police search that took place starting immediately after Brianna was reported missing.

The search process included an exhaustive check of the license plate numbers of countless numbers of vehicles that matched the description that had been given by one of the rape victims. There were also the very many thorough and repeated checks of a tremendous number of fields, wooded areas, vacant houses, and much more, even down to checking the manholes in the area. Hundreds of members of the public joined in the search and combed likely locations throughout the area; then, once Brianna’s body was found, an equally large number of people offered DNA samples in order to eliminate themselves from any suspicion. Several people had contacted the police to claim they believed an ex-spouse was the murderer/rapist, Jenkins told the court, and the news of the receipt of those particular tips served as a great deal of incentive for many men who submitted their DNA samples to the authorities in order to be excluded. State and federal law enforcement agencies from several parts of the country had helped a great deal with the case and were involved in the search efforts, he said.

 

 

When John Latham, a foreman at J.W. McClenahan Co., Biela’s workplace, testified about his own personal knowledge of James Biela, he told the court what a good employee he thought that Biela had been and how he was one of the best pipe fitters on the job. The foreman clearly had no suspicion of Biela, not even when he noticed a child’s shoe in Biela’s truck, even though police had released that information to the public as part of the description that one of the rape victims had provided about what she had been able to see inside her attacker’s vehicle.

John Latham also didn’t suspect anything out of the ordinary when Biela asked him to lay him off from his secure, well-paid job on the same day that Brianna’s body had been found. John said he didn’t find it strange when he and Biela had discussed the case and John asked Biela how he felt about the body being found. According to the witness, Biela had said that “the bitch probably had it coming”; then he smiled. John said it never occurred to him to report the remark to police; he said that he thought Biela’s remark was one that a lot of men with Biela’s sense of humor might have made, despite its extreme inappropriate nature. Like so many others around Biela, John Latham had no idea whatsoever that his employee might have been involved in murder, rape, and kidnapping.

 

 

When Alberto Jimenez spotted Brianna’s body in a vacant field of thick, tall, dry grass adjoining his workplace, EE Technologies, his manager, Scott Ferris, testified that he had immediately returned to the location with Alberto to see what the man had found. Alberto led his boss through the high grass to where he had noticed Brianna’s body in a ditch, covered with a discarded Christmas tree. Scott Ferris said that when he walked up to within five feet of the body, he could see that the remains were those of a young white female, naked except for socks, lying flat on her back, faceup. He said that there was very little flesh left on the face, apparently the work of animals. The teeth were showing, he said, and it caught his attention that they were a very bright white. The rest of the body showed very little damage and “looked like a body,” he said, but “the face from the neck up looked different. You could see the teeth distinctly.”

Scott had brought along his cell phone in the event that he might need to report whatever Alberto had found. He immediately called the police to tell them a body had been located. He was questioned again by the authorities later on in the investigation, when it was discovered that Biela had actually worked for EE Technologies at one time. Scott checked the records and said that Biela’s employment with the company had lasted only two and a half months, and he did not know Biela during that time.

One of the officers who initially responded to Scott Ferris’s phone call described for the court what the authorities had found when they arrived at the scene.

Officer Victor Ruvalcaba observed quite a bit of decomposition on the head and face and much deterioration of the skin tissues. The body appeared to have been there for a period of time, he told the jury. He photographed Brianna’s body, describing the orange socks with yellow flowers, which were the only items of clothing she wore. He collected the two pairs of thong underwear that were found lying underneath her body. A large photo of Brianna’s legs, from the calf down and wearing the orange socks, was shown to the jury. Biela took several brief glances at the photo of his alleged victim’s dead body while it was being shown in court.

Ruvalcaba testified in a great deal of detail about the thong underwear. After donning gloves, he pulled the pair out of an evidence bag. He showed the jury where the DNA experts had cut the thong into pieces for analysis. Brianna’s mother, Bridgette Denison, was unable to remain in the courtroom when Ruvalcaba told the jury how Brianna’s socks had been removed and her body had been bagged for transport to the coroner’s office. Bridgette rose and walked out of the courtroom, stopping briefly at the door and leaning her head against the wall for a moment in an attempt to compose herself before leaving. Several concerned and equally upset friends and family followed her.

Forensic pathologist Ellen Clark testified that she could not say for a certainty exactly how long Brianna had been dead, but she said that in the course of her examination she had found stomach contents that would have been consistent with what Brianna had eaten at Mel’s Diner prior to her disappearance. Clark also testified that autopsy results confirmed that Brianna had been raped and strangled—and a pair of thongs likely used as the weapon of strangulation. It might have taken as long as four minutes for Brianna to die, Clark told the court.

 

 

Detective Jenkins testified about the search for Brianna’s killer and how it took a sudden turn in November 2008, when the investigators received a Secret Witness tip about a man who fit their profile almost exactly: James Biela. Biela was said to be obsessed with thong underwear; his truck matched the description given by Virgie Chin; his driver’s license picture showed a man who looked very much like the sketch made from Amanda Collins’s description.

“You put all that together, and this person shoots up to the top of the list,” Sattler said to Jenkins, who agreed with him.

Jenkins also said that the location of Brianna’s body, the field next to EE Technologies, was also a telling factor in the investigation. Biela had worked there, he said, and Carleen Harmon worked at a business that was “a stone’s throw” from the intersection next to the field.

After the Secret Witness tip was received, Jenkins said that he and some of the other detectives met with Carleen Harmon and asked her if they could take a DNA sample from her little boy, Biela’s son. She agreed and allowed the sample to be taken.

 

 

The prosecution’s witness, with arguably the most wrenching, emotional evidence against Biela, was Carleen Harmon. She spent several long and very difficult hours on the witness stand. After her testimony, spectators in the courtroom told the press that it was “impossible” not to feel sympathy for her. The judge had ordered the media not to show Carleen’s face and to disguise her voice, but that afforded her almost no concealment of her identity.

Carleen was nervous, embarrassed, and humiliated by the questions she had to answer in front of so many people about the extremely graphic detail of her sex life with Biela. At one point, she even apologized to her father from the witness stand for having to describe some of the sexual acts she didn’t want to have to discuss in his presence. It was undoubtedly an extremely painful experience for her, but Carleen showed a great deal of courage on the witness stand. She did what she felt that she had to do. She gave full and straightforward testimony against the man she had once loved, with whom she’d had a child.

The prosecution asked Carleen to start at the beginning with the details of her relationship with Biela. She said she first met him at Brew Brothers at the Eldorado Hotel Casino. She initially thought he was shy and quiet, but she said that she realized that he was “really funny,” once they began having a conversation.

Their relationship quickly progressed. Biela moved into her house a short time later; Carleen paid most of the bills. She testified that when she sold her house and bought a new one in Sparks, Biela’s name was put on the deed, even though he didn’t contribute anything toward the purchase. She also told the jury that she had bought Biela a Toyota truck so he could get to his job at Lake Tahoe in the winter.

When she told him she was going to have a baby, she said he seemed to be really happy about the news. She told the court that he was a good dad to their little boy. They continued to get along “fairly good,” she said, and their sex life was normal. He didn’t show any particular interest in women’s underwear, or in the thong underwear that she personally wore. Carleen said, “He never asked me specifically to wear them.” But things began to change around October 2007, she said, when he began to be “gone a lot. We were fighting almost every day.” He sometimes slept in the guest room when they were arguing, she told the court.

Biela had become very short-tempered, Carleen said, and was angry very often, sometimes leaving the house and being gone for several days at a time. When she asked where he had stayed while he was gone, he claimed he had been sleeping in the truck, she said. He also became very physically aggressive, throwing things and punching holes in the walls with his fists. Carleen claimed that even during these violent incidents, he never hit her.

When she followed Brianna Denison’s case online, Carleen said, the only remark Biela had ever made to her about the case was to claim that “if she wasn’t hot, nobody would care. That’s why it’s getting so much attention.” He said, “Her parents have money, and there are other people getting raped and nobody ever talks about those cases.”

Carleen said that she had followed the case closely from the day that Brianna had disappeared. “I read everything that came out about it,” she said. “It was scary.”

Biela’s employer had earlier testified that Biela had come to him and had requested to be laid off from his pipe fitter’s job on the day that Brianna’s body had been found. Carleen told the court that Biela never told her he had been laid off by his own request.

The following month, he moved to Washington State to work, and Carleen helped him clean out his truck prior to the move. She found a pair of her son’s shoes in the truck, which she threw away. She also helped Biela buy a travel trailer to live in while he worked in Washington. She and their son and her daughter went to spend two weeks with Biela while he lived there, and everyone enjoyed the visit and got along well, she said. Biela told her that he had to have a bigger truck to pull the trailer, so he traded in his Toyota before he moved back to Reno in September 2008. She was not in favor of trading in the truck, but she said that he had already made a down payment on another truck without telling her.

When Carleen went to Washington to help Biela move, she said she immediately got suspicious that he had been cheating on her while he was working away from home.

“The minute I got there, I started searching the truck,” she said. Under the front-seat armrest, she found two pairs of thong underwear. They were size small and pastel colored, used but clean.

“I was superpissed,” she told Elliott Sattler when he asked what her state of mind was at that point. She called Biela at work, she said, and asked him if he wanted to explain the panties she had just found in his truck.

Biela was silent. “I was upset,” Carleen said, adding that since she had found the panties, she now was certain that he was cheating on her. She met him at his job site and he was angry with her, she said. She yelled at him as he sped off, driving haphazardly.

“Tell me where you got them,” she said that she had shouted, telling the court she was “going crazy the whole time.” She testified that Biela had only pointed his finger to his forehead in a shooting simulation; then he grabbed the thongs and tossed them out the window of the speeding truck. Finally, Carleen said, the explanation that he came up with was that he had stolen the panties at a Laundromat.

After they returned home and resumed their now-strained relationship, Carleen saw descriptions on the news of the suspect’s truck in the Brianna Denison murder, along with police sketches of the suspect in the case. It never occurred to her that Biela could be a suspect, she said; she claimed that she didn’t notice any resemblance between the sketches and her boyfriend.

Carleen also testified that she had frequently searched their home computers after Biela had been online. She said that she found that he had spent quite a lot of time at various porn sites. She often changed the passwords on the computers, she said, in an attempt to keep him from going to those websites—a tactic that apparently had not worked.

Biela had previously made it a point to show a lack of interest in the Brianna Denison case; however, he became very nervous when he was called in and questioned about the murder by Reno police detectives. As soon as he returned home from the interrogation, he called for Carleen to come to him. She said that she found him upstairs in the bedroom, pacing back and forth. He told her what had happened and said that she was going to have to give him an alibi.

She didn’t question his demand for the alibi, even though she couldn’t—and didn’t—give him one. She tried to reassure him that he had nothing to be concerned about and everything would be all right. She still believed he was innocent and told him that being called in to talk to the police about the case was nothing to worry about; lots of people were getting questioned, she said. He started drinking heavily during the next few days, but Carleen still tried to support him. Even after she gave her consent for their son’s DNA to be tested, she still didn’t believe the man she lived with—her son’s father—could have possibly been involved in Brianna Denison’s death. It came as a complete, shocking surprise to her when she learned that Biela had been arrested.