Authors: Steve Jackson
Love Me To Death (19 page)
The people would be proving six “aggravating factors,” the prosecutor told the judges. Whatever mitigation the defense offered to counter the weight of the prosecution’s case, he added, would “pale in comparison.”
Looking first at Neal, Tingle then turned back to the judges and said that it was his hope that the court would “look at the horror of this murder, the brutal contempt for human life” and render the only appropriate punishment.
“Death.”
After Charles Tingle took his seat, Judge Woodford called upon the defendant to make his opening statement. With a sigh, Neal stood and walked over to the lectern. The freedom to move across the courtroom without leg shackles was part of the deal that he’d worked out so that he would be free to play the role of a lawyer. The deputies took a couple of steps closer just in case.
As with most defendants who appear in today’s courtrooms, Neal had been offered the opportunity to dress in civilian clothes. Defense lawyers contend that jail garb can influence judges and jurors against their clients. Neal had turned down the offer, saying he only deserved to wear his inmate jumpsuit.
Before he could begin, Woodford warned him: while opening statements are not considered evidence at any trial—just an outline of what each side intends to present—the judge noted that whatever Neal said about the crimes could still be used against him and that he retained his right to remain silent. Neal said that he understood but wanted to go on. He adjusted the microphone at the lectern and begged the judges’ pardon if he spoke too loud. Then he began.
“It’s September 20, 1999, Monday morning, a day that’s much more to some, much less to others.” As those in the courtroom probably were aware, he said, it was Yom Kippur, “a special day . . . the day of atonement, a day for reconciliation, forgiveness, and peace.”
The faces of the families behind him were unmoved. “This is one of the most horrendous things I ever heard of,” Neal continued, as if talking about an act committed by another man. Then he acknowledged: “How could someone do what I have done? I wish I could say I was innocent. There is no excuse for this crime. I can’t wash my hands enough for this.”
Neal said he was guilty as charged. “Mr. Tingle is an honorable man and he speaks the truth. He has been honest with me, and did not exaggerate anything. I would not change what he said, except maybe to fill in some blanks.” And by doing so, he said, he would be “the voice for three wonderful, trusting, beautiful women.”
Neal launched into his oft-repeated spiel about the truth setting him free. He had been molested as a boy, he noted, “an excuse” that led him to spend his life “pointing the blame at someone else while refusing to look at myself.”
The weight of his deeds would be too much to carry, he said, except for his recently reaffirmed “belief in the Lord, my God.” Until then, he had “served only Satan. . . . I’m not bragging; I’m so ashamed.”
On his behalf, he reminded the judges that he had fired his public defenders so that in their “zeal” to defend him, they would not further injure the victims or their families. He now promised he wouldn’t cross-examine his rape victim or other prosecution witnesses. But he reserved the right to “leave open” whether he would take the stand to testify on his own behalf.
There was an old Turkish proverb, he told the judges: “No matter how long you’ve gone down the wrong road, turn back, turn back.” He’d turned back, he said. “Even a wretched life means something. Even a wretched life can change. I do not want to die, for I know I’ve turned around.” He wanted to live so that he could “zealously” serve Jesus in prison. And, though he did not explain how it would be accomplished, he promised “full restitution.” However, if the judges decided on death, he added, “I will submit fully” to that fate, “remembering special moments” with his victims.
Neal rambled on for the better part of the morning. At one point, he acknowledged “the evil” of killing Angela Fite, “knowing how close she was as a mother to her children.” Saying the word “mother” caused his voice to crack and he wiped at his cheek.
“I know better than to expect something good to come out of this,” he said. But he hoped that the hearing would bring “reconciliation and forgiveness.”
Because he was facing the judges, Neal did not see the families when they shook their heads back and forth. No. There would be no forgiveness from them for William Lee “Cody” Neal.
Neal moved on, saying he must always “be on guard against the evil coming back.” He reminded the judges that he had never killed before, never raped a woman.
In his opening, Tingle didn’t specify the aggravators—those particular, legally mandated circumstances that set apart a death penalty case from another murder—that the state would seek to prove, but Neal did it for him. The crime was “especially heinous, cruel, and depraved,” he said, adding, “That’s an accurate assessment.” He killed two or more people by lying in wait. “True.” He intentionally killed two or more people with “universal malice and extreme indifference to the value of human life. . . . True.” He killed a kidnapped person. “True.” He killed to prevent prosecution. “That’s what precipitated the whole thing.” And he killed for monetary gain. “Yes,” he concluded, “all of the aggravating factors are present.”
As for mitigators that might sway the judges toward life in prison, Neal said, there were only three. He surprised those in the courtroom by claiming one mitigator was “the age of the defendant,” a mitigator usually reserved for very young offenders. Although he was forty-two at the time of the crime, Neal explained, being the victim of sexual abuse at an early age had left him “a child . . . hiding and stalking . . . scared of being punished for what he had been doing and what he had become.”
Another mitigator, he said, was that he might not have been in the frame of mind to “appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct.” Then again, he admitted, “I knew that what I was going to do was wrong and chose to do it anyway.” He only halfheartedly offered that he might have been under “unusual and substantial duress. . . . I been through a lot of tough times in my life.” What he had become, Neal said, did not “happen overnight. . . . It took time to build a box to live in and hide. There’s no light in that box, just the presence of evil and evil cannot stand the light.”
No mitigation could morally justify his crimes, he said. “How can you justify the murder of three women and the rape of a twenty-one-year-old, who’ll be forever haunted by what she saw?” he asked.
Neal said he wanted to “take responsibility for the whole thing. I will not accept less.” On the other hand, he added, “I want to live and my only chance is to tell the truth.”
There was one last mitigator that he said he’d forgotten to mention and that was that he no longer posed a threat to society. He paused, then shrugged. “I never expected to do what I did, but I did it.”
By the time Neal finished with his opening remarks, it was late afternoon. Judge Woodford declared the court in recess.
September 21, 1999
The next day, the prosecution began its case by calling Deputy Michael Burgess to the stand. The balding, mustachioed deputy seemed reluctant to speak about his part in the events of July 8, 1998. Little wonder, nine years on the force and he’d never seen or even imagined a greater horror, and it had stayed with him.
Under prosecutor Tingle’s questioning, Burgess explained how Holberton’s coworkers had called the sheriff’s office, worried because she hadn’t come to work for several days, and he’d been dispatched to conduct a welfare check. He talked to a neighbor and failed to get an answer at the front door when he went around back and slid open a glass door.
Calling out, he began to enter and then stopped in his tracks, “overwhelmed by a sense of evil. I saw what appeared to be a body, mummy-shaped, wrapped in plastic,” he testified. “I could also see a woman’s leg, duct-taped to a chair.”
As the deputy spoke, Tingle placed several photographs one at a time on a projector so that they could be seen in the monitors around the courtroom. A photograph of a plastic-encased, mummylike object. A shot through an open back door in which a woman’s leg can be seen duct-taped to a chair leg.
“What were you thinking and feeling?” prosecutor Tingle asked. That sort of question would normally have elicited an objection from a defense attorney arguing about its relevance. But Neal was representing himself and would raise no objections throughout the proceedings. He just sat waiting for Burgess’s answer while his “advisory counsel,” Randy Canney, slumped in his seat.
“It was one of those scenes where you know you just don’t want to be there,” Burgess said. “A wave of evil hit me. It looked like a torture chamber where somebody had suffered. I knew I needed to get help.”
Jose Aceves, the sheriff’s lead investigator on the case, was called to the stand next, this time by Bachmeyer. Aceves didn’t wear his emotions on his sleeve like Burgess, and it was hard to gauge his expression beneath his thick Fu Manchu mustache as he spoke deliberately and without emotion, recalling his role on July 8, 1998. He’d arrived on the scene and had been told that there appeared to be three bodies inside the West Chenango address.
“Did you check for vital signs?” Bachmeyer asked.
Aceves shook his head. The first officers on the scene had checked for vital signs “and there were none.” They’d then retreated from the scene to wait for Aceves and a search warrant.
Once allowed inside, they had recorded the scene with both still photographs and video, which were now shown to the panel of judges as Aceves narrated. There was the filthy, cluttered room, the empty food-and-drink containers. There was the blood splattered on the walls and floor near the chair; on the ceiling above the chair was a trail of blood where Neal had swung his weapon back up to strike again and again.
It only got worse. There was Angela Fite, slumped over in the chair to which her arms and legs had been bound. The position of the chair and the way that the cigarette butts spilled from an ashtray indicated that the suspect had been seated there for some time with a view of his victim in the chair, Aceves said. Fite had been identified by her driver’s license, which had been left on her lap and now appeared on the video.
The judges sat grim-faced as the image of a black plastic mummy appeared on the screens. “Rebecca Holberton was found inside,” Aceves noted. The audience gasped when a close-up revealed what the investigator said was a piece of skull, bloody strands of hair still attached. “It belonged to Rebecca Holberton.”
The video camera zoomed in on a maul that was found in a hall closet. Just a few steps from where the women were murdered, Aceves said. Long strands of human hair belonging to Candace Walters and Angie Fite had been found on the maul, as was the blood of all three victims.
Behind the chair was another body beneath a blanket, the head encased by a white plastic bag. “Candace Walters,” according to Aceves.
At last, Aceves stepped down. The photograph of Angela Fite in the chair remained on the screen during a fifteen-minute break. When the court reconvened, Tingle asked that the television cameras be turned off and that no photographs of the next witness be taken or her name published. The media had agreed that such requests would be honored in exchange for the right to have cameras in the courtroom for most of the hearing.
Tingle turned toward the gallery. “Your Honor, the state calls Suzanne Scott.”
Seventeen
A petite young woman rose from the first pew behind the prosecution table. A little over five feet tall with blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses over her light blue eyes, she looked timid and helpless as she approached the gate separating the gallery from the rest of the courtroom.
If the case had gone to trial, Suzanne Scott would not have been allowed into the courtroom until after she had testified because she would have been needed to officially identify Neal in court as the man who had raped her and murdered Angela Fite. However, as he had already admitted to the crimes, she was free to attend.
The prosecutors had told her that she didn’t need to be present except when it was her turn to testify. She had avoided the preliminary hearings, but felt that she needed to be present for the opening statements. Throughout the first day she had generally stayed within the protective shadow of her mother or boyfriend; occasionally, she sought quiet conversation with a family member of the other victims, all of whom watched over her as though she were a child of their own.
Now she kept her eyes locked on Tingle, who escorted her to the dais in front of the judges. Passing within a few feet of Neal, she kept her eyes averted. She was met by the bailiff, who asked her to raise her right hand and swear to tell the truth before she climbed up into the witness stand. Once seated, she stated her full name for the record as Neal stared up at her profile from the defense table.
“How long have you been in Denver?” Tingle asked.
“My entire life,” she answered. Her voice was so soft that she was asked by Judge Woodford to move closer to the microphone, which she did self-consciously by sliding her chair forward.
Tingle was worried. He wasn’t going to be able to testify for her. If she resorted to mumbling one-word replies, it was going to be difficult to get across to the judges the horror that she had witnessed. He’d feared that would be the case after he and Bachmeyer had interviewed Scott a month before the hearing. They wanted to brief her about what to expect, but also get a feel for her as a witness. If she had been adamant about not wanting to testify, they would have understood and gone on without her.
Just reading her account of what had happened and hearing Neal’s own version, they had been impressed with her strength and courage, as well as her quick thinking. She’d been terrorized with dead bodies, seen a woman brutally murdered, been sexually assaulted with a gun to her head, and yet had the presence of mind to ask Neal to sit next to her on the mattress so she could keep an eye on him. She had done whatever it took to stay alive. No one could have blamed her if she just wanted to forget about it and try to go on with her life. But she understood how vital her testimony would be and never expressed the slightest hestitation about going forward.
They knew that she was scared to death, and Tingle had expressed his doubts to his cocounsel that she would be able to handle testifying in the presence of Neal, but Bachmeyer had disagreed. Maybe it was because she was a woman, but Bachmeyer thought that the same bravery Scott had shown in that house of horrors, she would exhibit in the courtroom.
Tingle started off with easy questions—where she was from, her job—to get Scott focused and comfortable before he gently moved her toward that horrible night. He asked her about late 1997 when she and Beth Weeks were roommates and they were frequenting Shipwreck’s, where she first saw and heard about a guy named Cody Neal.
“Do you have any specific recollection about how Mr. Neal was dressed when you would see him?” Tingle asked.
“Yeah, he always had a black cowboy hat on,” she replied. “When it was colder, he would wear a longer black, like a duster, coat and always wore boots . . . always in blue jeans. . . . Mostly what I remember is black T-shirts.”
“What was your understanding, if you had any, about his financial situation by May and June of 1998?” Tingle asked. He leaned against the side of the lectern facing her, relaxed as if talking to someone at a cocktail party. His voice was soft, guiding, as he kept his eyes on Scott’s.
“At certain times, it would seem like he had quite a bit of money, and he was not discreet about having the large amounts of money,” she answered.
Good,
he thought,
she doesn’t need prompting to give complete answers.
“Can you elaborate for us?”
he thought,
she doesn’t need prompting to give complete answers.
“Can you elaborate for us?”
“There was an occasion before my birthday and he comes and gave me a hundred dollars for my birthday,” she recalled. “At that time, we weren’t that close of friends, I don’t believe.” She recounted the night that she had been sleeping and her roommate asked if it would be OK for Neal to wish her a happy birthday. “Then Cody came in, and he had a hundred dollars in one-dollar bills. . . . He just threw them all over my bed, and he just, you know, said that we could use that when we went out to celebrate for my birthday.”
Scott recalled how she’d met Angela Fite at the bar with Neal. She believed that they were a couple, but Beth Weeks started seeing more of him. “She was really starting to care about Cody more. . . . Their friendship had just really gotten a lot closer.”
In mid-June he was talking to her about coming to work for him in what he said was the mortgage-lending business.” When he told you about his business and made this job offer, did you believe him?” Tingle asked.
“Not wholeheartedly,” she replied, shaking her head. “With the amount of money that he was talking about . . . and the split of time in the offices between Las Vegas and Colorado . . . it really just seemed mostly too good to be true. And I didn’t see why he would be offering me something like this.”
Neal told her not to mention his offer to anybody. But when he said he wanted her to go with him to Las Vegas to meet with his lawyers about the job, she broke down and asked Beth if she thought he could be trusted.
“We talked about it for quite a while, and she said that she didn’t think that he would ever do anything to hurt us.” For the first time in her testimony, Scott faltered. Her voice cracked, and she wiped briefly at her eyes before regaining her composure and pressing on. In the gallery, Beth Weeks began to cry.
Both women remained tearful as Scott recounted how the three of them had gone out on the town after his proposal to marry Beth.
“When that was happening,” Tingle asked, “what was the attitude of Mr. Neal? What was his demeanor?”
“He was very happy, calm,” she replied. “He was in a really good mood, you know, like he was happy that Friday night was there, and we were going to have such a good time that night.”
Tingle nodded. The remarks about Neal’s demeanor at this point would be important later, in closing arguments when he would ask the judges to remember the chronology of events. By 7:00 P.M. Friday, July 3, Rebecca Holberton had been dead and wrapped in black plastic for more than three days. He had split Candace Walters’s head open only eight hours earlier and left her lying under a blanket. He was in a grand mood indeed.
After dinner at the strip club, Scott said, “he was still in a good mood. Laughing and joking and enjoying himself.” Then it was off to the country-western bar, where Wild Bill Cody held court, lecturing the younger bucks how to behave like a proper gentleman.
“That they should stand up when a lady comes back to sit down,” Scott recalled, “and a lady shouldn’t light her own cigarettes.”
Beth Weeks and one of the young men got into a drunk disagreement until Neal stepped in. “Cody just spoke up and told that guy . . . that he needed to be polite and nice to her.”
Tingle paused and looked at the floor for a moment. All the groundwork was now laid. . . . Within days and hours of brutally murdering two women, the polite, respectful man in the orange jail jumpsuit the judges saw in front of them was playing jokes, spending his victims’ money on strippers and booze, and lecturing other men on how to treat a lady.
Now came the tough part. Scott had held together remarkably well with Neal looking back and forth from Tingle to her when questions were asked and then answered—like a spectator at a tennis match. Her testimony had taken the morning and started again after the lunch break. It was now time to open the wound. A horrible but necessary step to make sure that Neal never hurt anyone else again.
Softly, without changing his position at the lectern, in a tone that warned her what was coming, he said, “I would like to talk about July the fifth, Sunday.” Scott nodded, her eyes closed for a moment, and then she looked up and let out her breath. She was as ready as she would ever be. Under Tingle’s guidance, she recounted how Neal had picked her up for their “flight to Las Vegas” and how he’d coaxed her into the garage of the town house on West Chenango Drive by saying he had a surprise for Beth that he wanted to show her. “He explained that it would be more or less like a dress rehearsal . . . that he wanted me to be blindfolded and he wanted to put duct tape on my mouth because that was how Beth was going to do it when she walked into her surprise.”
“What was his attitude and demeanor like at that time?”
“He seemed excited and, you know, like this was a great thing that we were going to be working on together.”
The atmosphere in the courtroom was tense. Everyone knew what was to come. Tingle looked at the clock and suggested to Judge Woodford that it was a good time to break for the afternoon recess. To himself, he thought it would allow Scott a chance to catch her breath and collect her thoughts.
Fifteen minutes later, Scott was back on the witness stand. “He had me take off my glasses. Then he tied a piece of bath towel around my eyes . . . and then asked me if I could see out of the blindfold.”
Neal had her take his arm as he led her through the garage and up the steps into the town house. Inside, he picked up his cat. “He wanted me to meet his cat and he had me pet his cat.” He then led her down a hallway; she knew then that something was wrong. For one thing, there was no carpeting in the hallway, just bare plywood, but more than that: “It just didn’t feel right,” she said.
Still blindfolded and gagged, she was brought into a room where Neal turned her around and told her to sit down. The seat was farther down than she had figured and she quickly realized that she was sitting on a mattress.
In court Scott couldn’t remember if he told her that he was going to tie her up or if he just did it. He quickly bound her wrists and ankles with nylon rope to eyebolts screwed into the floor at each corner of the mattress. She was spread-eagled and on her back. Helpless.
Scott hesitated and then began to cry quietly. Tingle waited and soon she pulled herself together enough to press on. “I didn’t want to be . . . I didn’t want to be tied up,” she said, “so I started to cry, and I asked him to just let me go. And I promised that I wouldn’t say anything to anybody about what had happened so far. He just told me to shut up, and he said that I hadn’t seen him be cold and mean and that I didn’t want to.
“Once he tied me up, he opened my blouse and cut off my bra, and he cut off my pants, and he cut off my underwear.” She couldn’t see the knife that he was using. But she could hear her clothes being cut from her body, and she could feel the cold steel against her skin.
Neal told her to “just be calm and to do what he said and to not cry anymore.”
“Do you remember what you were thinking?” Tingle asked.
“Mostly I was thinking about not crying.”
“Did you know what was going to happen to you?”
“I had a feeling about what was going to happen.”
Tingle picked up a large plastic bag with a pair of pants that had been split along the seams. “Do you recognize this?”
“Those are my pants,” Scott acknowledged.
“What do you remember happening . . . after Mr. Neal cut your clothing?”
“He asked me if I had ever seen a human skull. I said no, and he left the bed and came back with an ice-cream wrapper,” Scott said quietly, wiping at the stray tears that rolled down her cheeks. “He pulled out a piece of bone. . . . He held it in front of me, and he was touching it. . . . There was hair on it and he said, ‘Can you see that?’ And then he laid it on my stomach.”
“What was his attitude and demeanor like when he did that?” Tingle asked.
“Just like he was showing off, like ‘Look at what I have.’ ”
Spectators in the gallery began to sniffle as Scott plunged further into her nightmare. Detective Aceves sat hunched over at the end of the prosecution table, looking down at the floor.
One of Chris Bachmeyer’s hands came up to cover her mouth and chin. She was still troubled by the nightmare of women being called from a room to their deaths and was having difficulty not crying in court as she imagined the young woman before her in fear, tied up and helpless.
At the defense table, Neal’s head swiveled back and forth from prosecutor to witness. Canney slumped in his seat, staring at the table, the law books in front of him closed.
“Were you able to move?”
“No.”
“What did he do when he put that piece of human skull on your stomach?”
“I think that he just watched me to see what my reaction would be.”
Neal removed the piece of skull and tossed it over onto the black plastic object that Scott could see to her left. He’d been crouching at her side but now stood and walked past a chair at the end of the mattress and over next to the fireplace.
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