Dead of Night (18 page)

There had been a total of fifty-nine witnesses for the prosecution, and their testimony had taken nine days to complete. The defense had called only one witness, DNA expert Roger Vincent Miller, before resting. Now James Biela’s fate would lie with the prosecutors and the defense attorneys who would present their all-important closing arguments to the jury, beginning the following morning.

Chapter 23

The defense and prosecution were prepared and ready to begin their closing presentations on the following day, hoping to successfully make their final points to the jury. First, however, when court was called into session, Judge Robert Perry asked Biela if he was sure that he did not want to testify in his own defense. Biela had turned down the opportunity to speak on his own behalf earlier. The defendant had told Judge Perry that he would like to, but he said that he had chosen to decline the opportunity to address the jury on the advice of his attorneys. Biela once again told the judge that he was still certain that he did not want to testify at that time. “I would like to,” he said, “but I will follow their advice not to do it.”

There was a large crowd on hand to listen to the closing arguments, with over a hundred spectators packed into two courtrooms. Since that number of people could not have been accommodated in the main courtroom alone, a live video feed had been run to a second courtroom down the hallway.

Behind the defense table, in the first row of seats, Biela’s mother, stepfather, and brother were seated directly behind Biela. His mother fought back tears during the prosecution’s presentation, as she had also done during the other occasions she had been allowed to be present in court.

Behind the prosecution table, Bridgette Denison and her son and other family members and friends sat with several of the police officers, investigators, and detectives who had worked the case and who all had a keen interest in its outcome.

 

 

When the jury came into the courtroom, Judge Perry read them their instructions before Deputy District Attorney Elliott Sattler began his closing arguments. Sattler started with a shocking statement that immediately got the attention of everyone present.

“The bitch probably had it coming,” Sattler said, quoting Biela’s remark when he was told that Brianna’s body had been found.

“Think about a more chilling insight into the mind of the defendant,” Sattler said to the jury. They could probably assume, he said, that Biela had that same attitude toward all three of his victims.

Starting with the first victim, he told the jury that she had been raped at gunpoint by Biela in October 2007. “He shoved her underwear aside and brutally raped her,” Sattler said, adding that when the assailant got up, the victim saw his face.

“The face that haunts her dreams,” he said, pointing to Biela. “The face right over there.”

Sattler told the jury that DNA testing had proved that none of the other men in Biela’s paternal line—no one but Biela himself—could have been responsible for the assaults on Virgie Chin and Brianna Denison.

Virgie, who was assaulted in December 2007, didn’t see her attacker’s face, Sattler said, but she had been able to give the authorities many more details that pointed to Biela. While she was being held in her attacker’s truck, she saw a child’s shoe on the floorboard. Both the statement of Carleen Harmon and that of a coworker of his included the fact that they, too, had seen a child’s shoe in the truck.

The victim also said that her rapist had shaved his pubic hair, and Carleen had testified that Biela kept his genital area shaved or trimmed. And the victim had also asked for Biela to stand up in court so she could see his height and weight, and she then told the court that he was a match for the physical build of the man who had raped her.

Sattler then began a long and detailed account of what the prosecution believed had occurred on the night that Brianna Denison had been kidnapped and murdered. The final image of Brianna, he said, was in the video that had been taken at Mel’s Diner on the last night of her life. She was seen yawning, tired and ready to go home. She and K.T. Hunter went into K.T.’s unlocked house, and Brianna started getting ready for bed. She was texting back and forth with her boyfriend, Sattler said, who was unhappy that she had gone out that night with her friends.

“We know at that point the last time anyone, besides the defendant, sees Brianna Denison alive is when K.T. Hunter gives her that brown pillow, those two blankets, and a teddy bear so she can sleep on that couch,” Sattler said. Sometime after that, he said, “she’s snatched off that couch.”

Sattler said that Biela had seen her through the windows from outside, lying in full view on the couch in the unlocked house.

“Seeing her lying there, [Biela] decides this is an opportunity he can’t pass up,” Sattler told the jury, adding that Biela previously had raped a woman in October and another one in December.

“He decides he’s going to rape again,” Sattler said. “He opens the unlocked door, takes that pillow, and he shoves it over her face, and he pushes and he pushes and he pushes.” Sattler told the jury that Biela had pushed so hard that an investigator testified that she could see teeth marks on the pillow.

“He pushes so hard that it causes her to throw up blood,” Sattler said, adding that the hard part was what Biela then did to Brianna.

“It is reasonable to assume that Ms. Denison was taken into the defendant’s truck and he sexually assaulted her,” Sattler said. Instead of breaking Brianna’s neck, Biela used his obsession with women’s thong underwear to kill her.

“Biela wrapped [K.T. Hunter’s] underwear that he had just stolen around that woman’s neck and strangled her to death because she saw his face,” Sattler said, reminding the jury, “Dr. Clark testified that it may have taken four minutes to die.”

Sattler said that Biela then took Brianna’s body, carried it to the field near the place he had once worked, and threw a discarded Christmas tree over it.

Sattler reminded the jury of Carleen Harmon’s testimony that following that night, Biela became increasingly restless and “antsy.” When she called him on February 15 and told him she believed that Brianna’s body had been found in a field near her office—a field that she could see from the windows in the building where she worked—“his reaction was stone-cold silence,” Sattler said.

Biela asked that day to be laid off from his job. He soon moved to Washington State, Sattler told the jury, and things “cooled down” then.

“What does he do? He disposes of the truck,” Sattler said. Carleen Harmon was unhappy with Biela’s decision to sell the truck; she had just paid it off and did not think it made sense to sell it.

Biela sold the truck so that he could distance himself from the evidence in the case, Sattler said, but investigators had been able to retrieve some of the evidence, anyhow. They examined the fibers recovered from the carpet of the truck and found fibers that were linked to the socks that Brianna was wearing when she was killed, Sattler said.

When Biela moved back to Reno and met with a police detective who told him that he was a suspect in the Brianna Denison murder, his first question to the detective was “Who reported me?” Sattler told the jury.

After his meeting with the detective, Sattler said, Biela had called for Carleen Harmon, upset and crying, and told her what had happened. Carleen had told him that he shouldn’t worry, because police had talked to so many other people who were considered to be potential suspects during that time. Since she still believed in his innocence at that point, she allowed the authorities to take a DNA swab from their son. But instead of clearing Biela, as Carleen had believed would happen, police had made a positive match.

Biela was subsequently arrested for the murder. He told police that their evidence against him was “horseshit,” Sattler said.

It was Biela’s DNA that was found on Brianna’s body, Sattler said. “That’s him.”

Sattler had already mentioned Biela’s obsession with thong underwear, and he reminded the jury that Biela had looked at used thong websites on the very same day that he was arrested.

 

 

In the defense’s closing argument, public defender Jay Slocum used his presentation to explain to the jury the principle of reasonable doubt. He claimed that the crime lab should have saved half of the DNA samples so that the defense could have had them independently tested. If the crime lab needed to consume an entire swab for DNA testing, they should have videotaped the process, he said.

“It’s not a crime to have women’s underwear in a travel trailer,” he told the jury in an attempt to lessen the impact of Biela’s thong fetish and the fact that he had allegedly used a pair of thongs to strangle Brianna Denison.

Slocum claimed that Biela didn’t try to avoid the police when they contacted him about the case. The defense attorney said that Biela initially thought that they wanted to speak to him because his father might have gotten in trouble.

There was little that Slocum could do in his closing remarks other than attempt to insert even a fragment of doubt in the jury’s mind about something—anything—that had been presented as evidence against Biela.

“That defense attorney could only do so much [with what he had to work with],” one courtroom observer would say later.

 

 

During rebuttal DDA Sattler said that Biela had tried to buy a gun because he was planning to kill himself. Sattler also said that the analyst at the crime lab knew that he was only going to have one shot at testing the samples, so he did the right thing and used them all.

If the jurors believed the October 2007 rape victim when she pointed out Biela in the courtroom and identified him as the man who had assaulted her, Sattler said, that was all they needed to convict him of those crimes.

In closing his rebuttal, Sattler said, “We’ve heard testimony that the defendant fancied himself as a kind of comedian. He was a funny guy. ‘The bitch probably had it coming’ might be a very poor attempt at humor from anyone other than the person who strangled the life out of Brianna Denison. It might, in fact, apply to all three of the victims in this case, ‘They probably had it coming.’”

 

 

Finally, after several hours, with all the closing arguments finished, the three cases against James Biela were turned over to the jury. It was now solely up to them to decide his fate. They would have to reach a decision on five different counts:

 

If Biela was found guilty, the trial would immediately move into its penalty phase and the prosecution would begin to present the evidence that would support their call for the death penalty. There would be more testimony from the defense during this phase than there had been during the trial itself. The attorneys would tell the jury the whole, terrible story of Biela’s traumatic childhood. The defense team would hope to convince the jurors that there were mitigating circumstances caused by the abuse he had suffered as a child that would justify a sentence of life in prison instead of death. That testimony would be the only card the defense would have left to play in its attempt to save Biela from the death penalty.

Only six hours after beginning their deliberations, the jury returned with their verdict: guilty on all counts.

“‘We the jury in the above entitled matter find the defendant, James Michael Biela, guilty of sexual assault,’” the court clerk began to read aloud from Biela’s verdict sheet. All of the other counts against him were named, one by one, and the clerk read the guilty verdict for each of them. Biela and his attorneys stood, motionless, receiving the verdicts without reaction. It was likely that the jury’s decisions didn’t come as any surprise to them.

Biela would now be eligible for the death penalty, and the sentencing phase of his trial would begin immediately.

 

 

While those in the courtroom took a short break as they readied themselves for the trial process to continue, a few people remaining in the room noticed a remarkable meeting taking place between Brianna’s grandmother Barbara Zunino and Kathy Lovell, the mother of James Biela. Only moments after the guilty verdict was announced, Mrs. Zunino stood and walked across the courtroom toward Mrs. Lovell, reaching out to her. Mrs. Lovell took her hands and the two women stood for a moment, speaking softly to each other with tears in their eyes.

When asked what she had said to Biela’s mother, Barbara Zunino would only say, “She’s a mother. I’m a mother.” She would not comment further except to say that she would share their remarks, “maybe, someday.” It was an emotional, private moment between the two women—each of them grieving for a loved one—and those who witnessed it were touched by the kindness and empathy that Barbara Zunino displayed.

Chapter 24

Unlike in some other states, it is a requirement in Nevada that the jury, not the judge, is responsible for deciding all sentences in murder cases. Both the defense and the prosecution were ready to begin their presentations, and the jurors were ready to do their duty to the best of their ability. The seriousness of the decision they would have to make weighed heavily on each of them, and they all clearly realized the importance with which they were tasked.

The prosecution, calling Biela a “serial rapist” and a threat to society, was preparing to ask the jury for the death penalty. Biela’s attorneys, however, would attempt to convince the jury that Biela’s traumatic childhood had been largely responsible for his actions. There was no question that he and his siblings had endured terrible things during their early lives, and the defense would take the fullest advantage of that fact.

 

 

Public Defender James Leslie began his presentation by telling the court about his client’s early years, saying, “He witnessed things no child should have to witness. No child should have to be down the hall with his brother listening to what is happening to his mother night after night.”

Leslie described James’s childhood household as “frankly, bizarre” and said that it kept all the children continually frightened and dreading the coming of night, listening from their rooms while their father, Joseph Biela, beat their mother with chilling regularity. Leslie recalled the earlier testimony about James Biela and his siblings being so afraid to come out of their bedrooms at night that they kept buckets in the rooms to use as toilets.

 

 

Dr. Melissa Piasecki, a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry and forensic psychiatry, began her testimony for the defense by calling Joseph Biela’s daily behavior “unusual and abusive.” She described the atmosphere in the family’s apartment in Chicago as one where psychological and verbal abuse were continual and harsh. Dr. Piasecki told the jury that Biela’s mother was tied to the bedpost and viciously whipped and beaten almost every night while her husband loudly ranted about his sexual fantasies. This took place in the room next to the one where James Biela slept with his brother, Jeff, who told the court that he could still hear the beatings in his mind, with his father mercilessly whipping his mother with a belt while she begged him to stop. He said that he could still hear, he said, the whistling sound the belt made as his father brought it down, over and over.

Kathy Biela’s abuse included having her hair and earrings pulled out, numerous broken ribs and teeth, and being tied so tightly on so many occasions that she eventually had to have wrist surgery because of her injuries. Sometimes Kathy went to try and hide in the children’s rooms, crawling under their beds in unsuccessful efforts to keep her husband from finding her. The terrified children would watch while their father came into their rooms, found their mother hiding, and dragged her out from under the bed and back to his bedroom to start his vicious attacks against her once more. The beating and the abuse would continue and they would hear the screaming begin again.

Citing an example of Joseph Biela’s “bizarre” behavior, Dr. Piasecki said that one of the things he did that fell squarely into that category was an unbelievable incident that took place on one occasion when he put a pet cat into the freezer and then proceeded to relieve himself in the cat’s litter box.

After the court recessed for the day, with the psychiatrist scheduled to return to the stand the following morning, a large number of people and an equally large number of media representatives gathered outside the courthouse and talked about the outcome of the trial and what they thought the sentencing might bring. Reporters took the opportunity to interview many of the spectators who had been in the courtroom during the trial, asking their opinions on what had taken place, what they thought of the verdict, and what they thought the outcome of the penalty phase of the trial might be.

Most of the people said that they thought that the defense “didn’t have much of a chance.”

“He should get the death penalty,” one young lady told reporters.

“I’m kind of mixed on the death penalty,” another bystander said. “Honestly, if they’re going to pursue the death penalty, then, yeah, eye for an eye.”

 

 

Adam Wygnanski, the retired detective who was the first to finger Biela as the likely suspect in the rape cases and Brianna’s murder, due to the Secret Witness tip he investigated, was one of those interviewed outside the courthouse. He had been in the courtroom, along with a large number of other law enforcement personnel who had worked the case, when the guilty verdict had been read. He said the verdict came as a relief for all of them.

“The victims, the people who worked so hard on the case, we all spent a lot of time,” he said, recalling what he called “ten months of agony” for law enforcement, as well as for the victims and their families.

Detective David Jenkins told the reporters that he was very satisfied that the jury had done what he called “the right thing.”

District Attorney Richard Gammick and his team had successfully brought the case to trial, and Gammick told the press that he was “tickled to death” that James Biela had been convicted. “No matter what happens, he’s going away for a long, long, long time.”

Upon learning that his family members had testified in court about the vicious beatings he handed out to his wife on a daily basis, and that his household had been deemed “frankly, bizarre,” Joe Biela grew very indignant and hostile when he was contacted by the media for a statement.

The whole thing was “a bunch of lies,” he said, justifying his statement by adding that “everything was fine. I beat my wife, but not my kids.” When asked if the beatings were severe, he told his interviewer, “That you will have to ask her.” Apparently, he believed that it was perfectly fine to hand out horrible abuse and vicious beatings to his wife, as long as he didn’t beat his children.

The elder Biela’s behavior toward the press, along with his opinion about his son’s situation, always seemed to change drastically from one interview to the next, likely due to his mental-health situation. He told one reporter, who spoke with him while the trial was in the penalty phase, that he hoped his son’s life would be spared. He said, “Let him spend the rest of his life in jail. If they let him out, he might do that again.”

But on another occasion, on video with another interviewer, Joe Biela looked and acted differently. He appeared very disoriented and angry toward his son, and he appeared to be quite emaciated and ill, even more so than in his previous interviews. Looking at a photo of his son in a family album, he snarled, “There’s that little ass wipe that killed that girl.”

When the reporter pointed out another photo in the album, a snapshot of James Biela with a little boy, the reporter asked, “Is that his kid?”

Joseph Biela snorted and flung his arms out dismissively.

“Hell if I know,” he said.

 

 

When court resumed the next morning for the continuation of the defense’s penalty phase testimony, Dr. Melissa Piasecki returned to the stand to complete her testimony about James Biela’s dreadful childhood. When time came for cross-examination, Deputy District Attorney Elliott Sattler pointed out that he agreed that the experiences Dr. Piasecki had described on the witness stand must have been terrible for the Biela children. He said that none of the other children, however, had grown up to be a convicted murder and rapist.

Sattler said that despite the fact that James Biela had been court-martialed out of the U.S. Marines for being AWOL and using marijuana, he was still a good student, a hard worker, and a good provider for Carleen Harmon and their son. Things changed in the fall of 2007, Sattler said, when Biela embarked on the series of sexual assaults that led to Brianna Denison’s murder.

Sattler asked Dr. Piasecki how she could explain Biela’s suddenly starting to rape women, stealing their underwear, breaking into their homes, and “violating women in the most despicable ways possible and choking women to death. How do you explain that?”

“I can’t explain that,” the psychiatric doctor answered.

“How is it that, sixteen years removed from this horrible father, he snaps and starts raping and killing people?” Sattler asked.

Dr. Piasecki told him that there was not yet a good understanding of the way that early experiences can affect people later in their lives. There was usually more of an “association” between such things, instead of a “cause and effect.”

 

 

Also testifying for the defense was a former director of the Nevada Department of Corrections (NDOC), who described for the jury the conditions of prison life for prisoners who were sentenced to terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Richard Nelson, a deputy Washoe County sheriff who worked in detention, and Tom Green, a sergeant in the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office, both took the witness stand and testified on Biela’s behavior while in custody. They said that he had been a model prisoner during that time. Several members of Biela’s family testified, including his brother, sisters, mother, aunt, and uncle. His friends, David Bouch, Shawn Hardiman and Zach Flores, and former girlfriend Carleen Harmon also spoke to the jury.

 

 

James Biela finally changed his mind about speaking on his own behalf and decided that he would address the jury himself at this point. He stood at the defense table to speak. He had been told by his attorneys that he could address the jury at sentencing without having to be sworn in or facing cross-examination by the prosecution. The process, called an allocution, had some very clear limitations, however, in what he could say. He could express remorse, or he could plead for leniency, but he could not deny the crimes he had been convicted of or discuss the evidence in the case. If he did so, his attorneys told him, the prosecution would then get a chance to cross-examine him, and that would definitely not be in his favor.

Biela looked at the jury, but instead of speaking to them or to his victims and their families, he seemed to be addressing his young son and his own family. He said, “I just wanted to say I’m sorry that this incident has destroyed several families,” and he began to shake and choke back sobs as he said that no matter what the jury decided, he would never be able to see his son grow up and be a father to him.

Biela said he was sorry if he’d failed his son and that he just wanted the boy to know that he loved him.

“This might not be the time or place, but I love you,” he said about his son.

The news media reported that all in all, Biela said he was sorry four times, with tears rolling all the while. Never once, however, did he say he was sorry for what he had done to his victims, nor did he apologize in any sense to their families for his crimes. Obviously, this didn’t escape the attention of the media, whose video reports of his statement were posted on the Internet, nor the attention of those who were listening in the courtroom. He seemed to be sorrier for himself than for anyone he had committed such violent, vicious crimes against, they reported, and most of those who heard his statement felt only disgust.

 

 

One of the most dramatic times of the trial came later that day, when Brianna Denison’s family and friends took the witness stand to address the jury to make their victim impact testimony and plead for justice for the young girl whose loss they felt so keenly. One by one, they spoke, and Brianna’s mother directed her remarks straight to James Biela.

“I am here before you today,” Bridgette Denison said, “suffering more than any mother should. The horrific acts you perpetrated on my daughter have impacted me, my son, my family, and people who have been there for me . . . words cannot describe. It sickens me to think that my poor baby girl spent her last moments of life alone with you. I will never live to see her complete her life’s journey. I feel like the life has been sucked out of me.”

Then Brianna’s grandfather Bob Zunino addressed the jury.

“I know Mr. Biela wants mercy, but I don’t think he deserves mercy,” he told them. “I hope that no one in this room ever has to go through the experiences, the horror, the pain, and the sorrow my family is going through and has gone through for the last two and a half years. I am also hoping that the decision you make today or tomorrow will bring justice and peace to my little Brianna.”

 

 

In closing remarks, public defender James Leslie spoke of the mitigating factors the defense had presented in the hope of convincing the jury to spare Biela’s life.

“Nothing we say is meant to lessen the tragic loss of life or take away the pain so many people have suffered on a very human level,” Leslie told the jurors, “but there are reasons not to vote for the death penalty in this case.” Leslie said that Biela’s childhood, filled with mistreatment and neglect, witnessing and hearing violence down the hall night after night, was reason to vote for life in prison without parole.

“That is an appropriate and sufficient punishment,” Leslie said.

Deputy District Attorney Chris Hicks countered the defense’s contention that Biela deserved mercy because of his childhood trauma or any other mitigating factor.

“All the emotions, all the travesties of this case, all of the impacts on friends and families, it’s all because of him and nobody else,” Hicks said to the jury. “We will be asking you to give him the death penalty.”

Defense attorney Maizie Pusich told the jury that sentencing Biela to life in prison without the possibility of parole would be sufficient punishment for him and would serve to protect the public by keeping him permanently unable to harm anyone else. She told them that killing Biela was not the way to prevent such tragedies from happening in the future.