Authors: Steve Jackson
Love Me To Death (16 page)
When he left Scott, Weeks, and David Cain on the day that he surrendered, Neal said that he’d considered going back to the town house “and blowing my brains out.” But when he spotted the crime scene tape, he turned away.
Aceves asked if he’d sexually assaulted or urinated on Fite.
“No, sir,” he replied. “I loved Angie. I just didn’t like somebody betraying me. . . . I’ve been betrayed since I was a little kid.”
Zimmerman asked if he was bitter toward the women he’d killed. “I felt bitter in a way, but . . . I didn’t use bitterness with that ax in my hand splitting her brain, OK, to execute her, right?”
Neal said that he purposely wanted the murders to be as brutal as possible. “I wanted no way out. I wanted this picture to be so horrendous that society would not let me get off—OK?—because I don’t deserve to get off. Not for one murder, not for two, not for three, not for raping Suzanne.”
He said that he’d been troubled by nightmares since the murders. “My conscience has always bothered me . . . and that touched me, because then I knew that I still had one. That gave me hope rather than being so cold and cruel and saying, ‘Hey, fuck it, man, it’s just a bunch of dead bitches.’ I’ve cried many times in my cell after these murders.
“Hell, last night I cried for over an hour on what little I’ve been able to see in my mind again. . . . Rebecca’s little head sitting under that blanket looking so precious . . . Candace looking so studious and trusting, as much as she could . . . The lady I really love, Angie . . . Poor little Suzanne.
“I’m able to deal with it, not because I’m insensitive or cruel or a demon or evil, I’m hanging on for the ones that died. I’m hanging on for Suzanne. I’ll be all right.”
Neal said that there was one thing he’d noticed about his kitten’s reaction to the murders. “I loved that little kitty,” he said. “But after Rebecca died, her little tummy would not come off that floor. She knew I was a killer. It was like she definitely knew that I had it in me, because cats are—what do you call them?—predators. She recognized a bigger predator.
“And that’s what I was: a predator is something that stalks, calculates, is committed to a kill . . . knows when to spring or jump. That would describe me as well.”
The investigators at last returned to the question of how he intended to get rid of the bodies. Did he intend to dismember his victims, place them in the footlockers, and then try to hide the evidence? Had he simply run out of steam after all the killing?
Carnivores, Neal said. He’d planned to get rid of the bodies by leaving them for wild carnivores after he had disposed of the victims’ heads, hands, and feet so that they couldn’t be identified. He said that he had a secret place where he’d been baiting the carnivores for years for just that purpose.
Such careful planning suggested to them that the killer was someone who knew what he was doing and possibly had done it before. “Cody, for never having killed somebody before this time, you sure had this really well planned out,” Zimmerman noted.
“In a short amount of time,” Neal reminded her.
“And you covered yourself every step of the way,” the investigator continued.
“Yeah,” he agreed, “except for leaving everything where you could get it.”
“OK, so have you ever killed somebody before?” Zimmerman asked.
“No,” he said. “And I’ll lay that on my mother’s life, OK, never.”
Although he claimed that Bundy was not his idol, Neal conceded that he “related to Bundy in a lot of ways. Not because he was a mentor with me. I don’t believe I really ever read a Bundy book before I was in jail, but I’ve heard things.
“I was better than Bundy would have ever been, OK? . . . I’m not meaning that bragging. I’m saying that I had this killer in me all my life, and I’ve depressed it.”
He had contemplated killing “at least thirty more people I was going to get within a three-day period. I had them lined up, ready to go, and there was no doubt I could have got them all. And every one of those people I knew.”
A lot of them were supposed friends at the bars that he frequented, Shipwreck’s and Fugglies. “It was going to be a wipeout thing. Make sure they’re all there, and go in and kill every last one of the sons of bitches who was there.” He said that he’d planned an especially tortuous death for Matt Rankin and Rankin’s brother and father.
Most of the later victims were just garbage anyway, he said, like Gerloff. “I was going to make a judgment call,” he said, on who would live and who would die.
There was a passage in the Bible, Revelation 6:8, that he thought the investigators might want to look up. “It’s about this pale horse, and on it was a rider, and his name was Death, and Hades followed him.” Neal looked at his interrogators. “That’s me, OK? That’s me.”
Fourteen
February 25, 1999, Jefferson County Courthouse
District Court Judge Thomas Woodford looked down from his bench at the defendant in the jail jumpsuit. “How do you plead?” he asked.
“Guilty,” Cody Neal responded. “Without a doubt, Your Honor.”
At least this time he’d told the truth and followed through on a promise. Following his arrest and through the rest of 1998, Neal had continued trying to tell his story to just about anybody who would listen, though the story often changed.
In one interview, he would be telling a newspaper reporter, “I’ll plead guilty to any stinking charge they got, without a plea bargain. I want the death penalty. I believe I deserve it.” And in the next, he would express his desire to remain alive in prison so that he could devote his life to teaching others about Jesus.
With members of the media, his approach was almost always the same—flattery, a promise to reveal previously unknown aspects of his crime and background, and “an exclusive.” Rarely was anything new revealed as a result of these interviews, but he could usually find a taker to listen to him. Then he would break off the interview and a week later make the same promises to another reporter.
Neal was always trying to paint himself as now dedicated to “the truth” and doing the right thing, though always with a hint that he was not alone to blame. He said he wanted to avoid a trial so that details of the victims’ lives wouldn’t be made public. “They didn’t do nothin’ wrong,” he told a newspaper. “Why should it be put in the public eye? I want to get on with it. Not that I want to die. But I know it’s a death penalty case. I always believed in the death penalty, myself. And I still believe in the death penalty. I do have a heart and I do have a conscience.”
Talking to investigators, the press, family, and friends, he’d confessed to a variety of motives for committing the crimes. A few days after his interviews with Jose Aceves and Cheryl Zimmerman in September 1998, Neal repeated parts of the story for a newspaper columnist. He boasted about having been involved in all sorts of illegal activities: “Theft, extortion, fraud, embezzlement, forgery. I could keep listing them.”
As for the women, “I knew they’d be potential snitches. I was right—none of them were trustable.” Candace Walters had told Holberton about his criminal activities, he said, but he was able to “smooth things over.” Walters then hinted that she’d talked to Angela Fite. “They pushed me to my limit,” he said. “I don’t want to say I ‘snapped.’ All three had fair warning.”
Neal also boasted that he was a Mafia hit man doing a job. He said that he’d killed the women because he’d been worried that they were going to turn him in for bilking them of their money. Suzanne Scott told investigators, “He wanted people to start listening to him and believing what he said.” David Cain said that Neal told him that “he would get a rush out of killing people.”
In jail Neal’s reading revolved around the life and death of serial killer Ted Bundy, who’d been executed in Florida’s electric chair. Neal said that he would prefer a firing squad to Colorado’s method of execution, a lethal injection. “I want justice to be served,” he said. “It won’t be served if I just fall asleep.
“I’m ready. I want to do it now. While it’s hot, let’s eat.”
Whenever he got the chance, Neal apologized to the victims’ families. “I am truly sorry to have you all go through this nightmare. I will say you have a right to know why,” he told a reporter, then added mysteriously, “I will do my best to answer that at a later time and place.”
The families cared little about what he had to say; their loved ones had done nothing worse than care for a man who had robbed them and then murdered them. There could be no excuse. Nor was Holly Walters, for one, moved by his supposed acceptance of the death penalty. “It’s not even going to be up to him,” she told the press. “At this point, I don’t care what Cody wants, regardless of whether it’s in our favor or not. I have no feelings for Cody whatsoever, other than hate.”
In November 1998, investigator Cheryl Zimmerman had testified at Neal’s preliminary hearing to show cause why he was charged. She’d recounted how he’d told her that he killed his roommate, Rebecca Holberton, and then lured Candace Walters and Angela Fite to their deaths with a promise of “a big surprise” that awaited them. As objectively as possible, the police officer had detailed how each victim was seated in the chair and then struck with the long-handled maul. After he taped Fite to the chair, she had testified, he pointed out the bodies and the presence of Suzanne Scott, then said, “Welcome to my mortuary.”
A date was set at the preliminary for the arraignment, with Neal contending that he would plead guilty at that time. But his public defender, Jim Aber, sounded like he was mounting a defense when he asked Zimmerman on cross-examination, “Why would he commit murder to avoid being charged with theft?”
By the time the arraignment rolled around in February 1999, Aber was gone. Neal had fired him after an argument over his decision to plead guilty. Reluctantly, he’d accepted Randy Canney, a former public defender who was now in private practice, as an advisory counsel. Neal now conceded that he was going against Canney’s advice. However, he noted to the court, he’d recently met with a psychiatrist “who didn’t see any reason why I was not competent.”
As Neal spoke, Canney sat quietly at the defense table. He believed that his client was mentally ill and delusional; he had hoped that the psychiatric examination would have found him incompetent to proceed with a trial. But the hurdle for competence was low; Neal had to be so sick as to not understand the nature of the charges or the penalties that he would face if convicted. He understood both. There was little the lawyer could do now to prevent the defendant from essentially committing suicide.
Several times, Judge Woodford asked Neal if he wanted to reconsider his plea and have a lawyer appointed to represent him. Each time Neal refused.
“This is the point of no return,” Woodford finally warned him.
“I understand that, sir,” he replied.
Woodford shrugged and accepted Neal’s plea. There was only one last thing to do: set a date for Neal’s death penalty hearing. Only then did the defendant imply that he was going to put up a fight.
Normally, a hearing would have been held within sixty days, but Neal asked Woodford to extend the time so he could do research in the jail’s law library. He also asked for permission to spend at least twelve hours a week doing the research. The judge granted both requests and set the hearing date for July.
As Neal was being led from the courtroom, a young man sitting with the victims’ families yelled, “Hey, punk! Hey, punk!” Neal didn’t turn or acknowledge that he’d heard as family members and victims’ advocate counselors settled the young man down.
After that hearing, Neal’s former attorney, Jim Aber, criticized Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas for continuing to seek the death penalty. “This is a total farce,” he told the press after Neal’s guilty plea. “Seeking the death penalty against a person not represented by counsel is like trying to kill an unarmed man. There is no morality or justice in this.”
Thomas shrugged off Aber’s accusation, at least in the press. “The death penalty motion in this case is appropriate,” he said. “Our job as prosecutor is to pursue justice as we see fit.”
However, the prosecutors who would be trying the case—Chief Deputy District Attorney Charles Tingle, who’d been in on the crime scene investigation, and Deputy District Attorney Chris Bachmeyer—considered Aber’s comments a cheap shot.
By Aber’s logic, all a murder defendant would have to do to avoid the possibility of a death sentence would be to demand to represent himself,
pro se
in the latin legalese. Then the prosecution would be morally obligated not to seek the death penalty.
pro se
in the latin legalese. Then the prosecution would be morally obligated not to seek the death penalty.
They saw the comment as political grandstanding; in actuality, the prosecution would have preferred that Neal be represented by counsel. They had what they believed to be an overwhelming case. The only real question was Neal’s competency, but the defendant had repeatedly said that he knew that murdering the women and raping Scott was wrong—the hurdle for legal insanity—and had been deemed competent to proceed at trial by the psychiatrist.
Thomas even said that he would have preferred for Neal to have a lawyer. By representing himself, Neal guaranteed that if sentenced to die, appellate lawyers would argue during the appeals stage that he had not been competent to represent himself. It would be one more issue that the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, which handled such appeals for district attorneys, would have to deal with. If an appellate court agreed with those assertions, then Jefferson County would have to go through the death penalty hearing, possibly an entire trial, again.
At the district attorney’s office, they talked about whether that was all part of Neal’s plan. Nothing seemed beyond his cunning.
For the next seven months, Charles Tingle and Chris Bachmeyer proceeded with extra care. Cody Neal would have to be afforded rights and privileges that the usual defendant did not receive. It had already been an exhausting case, and even more drawn out when Neal asked for another extension and was given until September.
Tingle had the most contact with Neal, including Canney, except, perhaps, investigator Aceves. As a
pro se
defendant, Neal had the right to contact Tingle to discuss legal matters, as would any attorney appointed to represent him. Neal took full advantage of phone privileges granted by the judge, calling the prosecutor four or five times a week, leaving messages when no one was in.
pro se
defendant, Neal had the right to contact Tingle to discuss legal matters, as would any attorney appointed to represent him. Neal took full advantage of phone privileges granted by the judge, calling the prosecutor four or five times a week, leaving messages when no one was in.
Although he was not allowed to tape their other conversations, Tingle could and did keep the voice-mail messages; since the arraignment, he’d accumulated two hours of Neal’s ramblings, at an average of a minute a message. It wasn’t unusual to come to the office on Monday morning and find ten messages or more from the defendant, who would talk until cut off by the machine, then call back, often only to repeat the same information.
Forty years old, dark-haired, and brown-eyed, Charles Tingle looked like a district attorney—conservative, straitlaced, white shirts and plain ties, clean-cut. In fifteen years as a prosecutor, he’d never run into anybody like Cody Neal. The defendant was extremely intelligent, at least in his niche as a pathological liar and sociopath. He was also very meticulous, putting together an eighteen-inch-thick stack of case law regarding the death penalty in the United States. It was clear from their conversations that he’d read every page of it, as well as the thousands and thousands of pages of discovery. If there was a page that he couldn’t read or a clarification that he needed, he’d stay after Tingle until he got what he wanted, rather than let it slip like most
pro se
defendants that the prosecutor had dealt with in the past would do.
pro se
defendants that the prosecutor had dealt with in the past would do.
Given the methodical way that Neal had gone about the business of murdering three women and raping a fourth, it wasn’t really a surprise. If there was one thing that stood out about the murders, beyond their brutality, it was the incredible, multilayered web of lies and details that he’d spun to snare his victims. Even when the tales had grown past the point of credulity to anyone looking at this case from the outside, it was a reflection of his ability as a “master manipulator” that he was able to lead the women so easily into his lair.
It was one of Tingle’s fears that Neal would be underestimated. By the courts. By his jailers. By even himself and Bachmeyer. He adopted the attitude that anything, no matter how innocent, that came out of the defendant’s mouth was an attempt to manipulate them.
In their pretrial dealings, Neal was always courteous and respectful . . . ingratiatingly so. Although he would become irritated if some issue had not been taken care of fast enough to suit him, he was never threatening on the telephone or in the dozen face-to-face meetings that they had. Only on one occasion did he ask if Tingle, who always took an investigator as both a witness and for safety’s sake, was too nervous to meet with him alone.
Otherwise, Neal was always handing out compliments about how honorable and smart he was. He couldn’t thank the prosecutors, both Tingle and Bachmeyer, enough for respecting him and helping him pursue the
pro se
course that he was on.
pro se
course that he was on.
It made Tingle’s skin crawl to hear him talk like they were on the same team. He knew from firsthand experience what Neal had done; he’d been called to the scene while the bodies were still there, had seen the blood pooled on the floor and splattered on the wall with brain matter. The vision of what he’d seen had haunted him ever since. He’d prosecuted more than a dozen murder cases, all with their own crime scene and autopsy photographs, but none had come close to what he’d had to study to prepare for this case.
To even be able to look at Neal without revulsion, he had to separate in his mind the ax-murderer from the jailhouse lawyer. But even after all that he had done, and facing the death penalty, Neal had not changed his ways. Haircuts in the jail cost $6, and Tingle had seen records that showed Neal paying with $20, leaving a $14 tip. He was apparently receiving money from friends, including a new girlfriend.
Even inside the jail, Neal was still the dream-weaver. Whatever a woman wanted most— whether it was a home, financial security, adventure . . . or love—he was the one who promised to make it come true. He knew what buttons to push, which strings to pull.
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