Foreign Faction: Who Really Kidnapped JonBenet? (21 page)

I
had been in Telluride for nearly eleven years and the last two had been a little frustrating. I had been struggling to put a cocaine trafficking investigation to bed since an attempted homicide of a street peddler had taken place in 1998. In the year prior, street level dealers were leaving town after allegedly being assaulted / threatened with baseball bats, and in at least one instance, a rivalry occurred between warring factions that involved a felony menacing with a knife.

The 1998 incident that set me into high gear involved a “hit” that had been ordered on a street-level dealer who had sold cocaine to a cooperating undercover informant just two days before he was shot in the front passenger seat of a car. The hit was ordered because he had fallen behind in his payments. It was a meager $350.00, but it was the principal of the matter and he was to be made an example for those who transgressed.

The shooter, another foot soldier in the cocaine trade from Montrose, had fired three shots into the target of his contract before his gun malfunctioned. A struggle ensued and the victim was able to flee on foot from the scene of the shooting, a lone county road surrounded by nothing but rugged terrain, pine trees and pitch black night. Bleeding profusely, he eventually found his way to the porch light at the front door of an unsuspecting county resident who immediately dialed 911.

In the months that followed that attempted homicide, agents of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation worked in conjunction with my office to get a handle on what was happening in my jurisdiction. It seemed that the “cocaine cowboy days” of my previous Boulder narcotic unit experiences were returning.

At one juncture, a couple of the local street dealers attempted to turn one of my patrol officers to their side of the fence. He played along for a short period of time, but it wasn’t long before I pulled the pin on that particular course of action.

The investigation was broad, ranging from Hispanics who were making a move to control the cocaine trade in southwestern Colorado to a highly placed group of local individuals, some of whom appeared to have been involved in the distribution of cocaine in Telluride for upwards of twenty years.

The lyrics of Glenn Fry’s “Smugglers Blues” that described how they “hid it up in Telluride” was no joke.

My wife, an E.R. nurse at the local medical center, had become embroiled in a series of personality conflicts at work. As one of the more senior and respected nurses at the clinic, a number of people came to her to express their dissatisfaction with the way things were being handled, and she became a spokesperson for those unwilling to say it out loud to management.

Events eventually came to a head, and a house cleaning was initiated by management at the clinic. My wife, apparently viewed as a troublemaker for her willingness to help carry the voice of the disenfranchised, was one of the casualties and found herself unemployed for the first time in nearly 30 years. No good deed goes unpunished. Isn’t that how it usually goes?

If memory serves, she only collected one unemployment check. A dozen or more people wrote letters to the editor expressing their dismay at her dismissal. Many in the community had been treated in the emergency room over her decade of service, and she was held in high esteem, due to the manner in which she dealt with her patients and her display of life-saving medical expertise.

It was perhaps six weeks later that her position was reinstated. Management admitted that perhaps some of their decisions were ill-conceived, but it was too late. The damage had been done. Having given her heart and soul to the medical center for ten years, she was hard pressed to muster the enthusiasm she had previously felt for her place of employment.

Some events in our lives have a way of changing things, and during the days she spent at home as one of the unemployed, my spouse began exploring the possibility of going back to school. I was supportive of that idea, but didn’t expect that ultimately she would be moving back to Boulder to pursue a Master’s degree in Transpersonal Psychotherapy.

The time frame for completing this project, that involved finishing up a Bachelor’s degree before post graduate studies even began, left me with the responsibility of raising the last of our children (a 9
^th
grader at the time) and living without a partner for five years.

I waved goodbye to my spouse in August 2003 and pondered the realities of a long- distance relationship. On a good day, a one-way trip to Denver’s Front Range involved approximately seven hours of driving. Needless to say, I found myself in a rather discouraging mood and turned my attention to surviving the on-going battle taking place in my front yard.

In 2001 - 2002, certain members of Town Council seemed to have become motivated to de-motivate everyone within their employ. My department, in particular, seemed to bear the brunt of their hostility, and I found myself repeatedly in front of their number, fighting for the very existence of an agency whose sole purpose and function was to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the community.

I was begging for a full-time investigator who could handle the myriad of cases that were overwhelming my department during the fall budget hearings. I had personally spent a full six weeks of my time that summer investigating a case that involved an embezzlement of public funds from a housing complex that totaled thousands of dollars in lost revenue to the city.

Yet my arguments fell on deaf ears. Some felt that my budget was out of control, in spite of the fact that I pointed out that public safety agencies frequently comprised the larger percentage of any city’s budget. Unlike other departments, public safety was open for business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. There was a logical reason why our staffing and budget was larger than some of the other departments operating in town, and why the utility bills for our building were greater than others. Our lights and computers stayed on after 5:00 p.m. when everyone else went home.

The truth of the matter, however, is that some people just don’t like cops and are not hesitant to say it during a public meeting. Overtones of that sentiment played itself out over the course of 2002 and 2003. In one particular instance, a council member suggested that the employees of my department forego a pay raise, so that other town employees could benefit from that savings and receive a higher cost of living increase.

I was fast approaching 28 years of service in the law enforcement profession and nearing 11 years as a chief of police in a mountain resort community. A sense of isolation seemed to envelope me, and I was feeling increasingly alone in more ways than one.

Depression and frustration had become my bedmates, and over the course of that long, cold winter I struggled to see what the future held for me.

A lifeline appeared out of nowhere when I noted an employment advertisement placed in the
Daily Camera
during a visit to Boulder in the early spring of 2004. The Boulder County District Attorney’s office was looking for a criminal investigator to join its ranks.

The winds of change had shifted direction once again, and I soon found myself announcing my retirement.

It may become apparent that I am averse to leaving loose ends to their own design. Before departing for the environs of the Twentieth Judicial District Attorney’s Office, I was determined to bring closure to the cocaine trafficking investigation initiated in 1998. It had been a long, arduous, and complicated set of affairs that involved many disappointments but a series of search and arrest warrants were finally issued in the spring of 2004.

Regrettably, not nearly as many people were arrested as I had hoped, and while a few had escaped our efforts to take down an on-going criminal enterprise, I was finally satisfied to see at least some type of conclusion to what had become a five-year narcotic trafficking investigation. I would like to think that it sent the message that it was no longer safe for those who desired to hide and peddle poison in Telluride.

It was not long thereafter that I stepped through the doors of the Criminal Justice Center located at 1777 6
^th
Street, Boulder, Colorado. It was the building that had once housed the Police Department where I had begun my professional career.

Like the circumstances surrounding the death of JonBenét, the first case assigned to me on that first day of June, 2004, coincidentally involved a death by strangulation. Jeffery Scott Gutiérrez had murdered his fiancée, Belinda King over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, and I was to serve as a liaison between the district attorney’s office and the law enforcement agency handling the investigation.

Jeffery was a little vague on the details of what had happened, but he told investigators that some type of argument had taken place over the holiday weekend between himself and his betrothed. It was a verbal argument that got out of hand.

Surveying the scene later that day, it appeared that the physical altercation had begun in the living room. I took note that a television appeared to be missing from a small entertainment center, and although there were several VHS rental tapes and boxes scattered about, there was no VHS player present.

There were a few things knocked over or looked to have been thrown around in the living room, and clumps of blonde colored hair were observed to trail down the floor of the hallway.

More hair and pieces of a shattered 70’s-style blue and white Corning Ware coffee pot were on the floor of the bedroom and on the bed. The coroner would discover blunt force trauma to Belinda’s head, and it was presumed that she had been struck with the heavy coffee pot during the altercation. This blow did not render her unconscious, however, and Belinda fought back during the assault.

Jeffery was able to eventually force Belinda to her back on the floor of the bedroom and, straddling her body, manually strangled her to death. It is my recollection that she had broken fingernails and had bit her tongue during her struggle to survive.

Jeffery told investigators that the argument had taken place Sunday evening but it had taken him some time to work up the nerve to call his relatives and tell them about the death of his live-in fiancé. He had covered her head and the upper part of her torso with a blanket and left her body on the floor of the bedroom overnight before calling anyone.

Verbal arguments don’t typically end with someone being strangled to death, and though police had obtained a remorseful confession from Jeffery, I was tasked with trying to better understand the motive behind the argument and murder. It certainly looked like “heat of passion,” but I was interested in the underlying dynamics of the situation.

While walking through the crime scene that afternoon, I would locate a piece of documentary evidence that would help put it all together. It was a small paper receipt from Walmart that was crumpled up on the rear floorboards of Jeffery’s car. It was dated on the Saturday afternoon of the holiday weekend.