C
HAPTER 45
“T
HERE’S A
R
OGUE
K
ILLER
L
URKING
O
UT
T
HERE
?”
Soon it was back to the greeting card, and Richard Tuttle asked, “When you told Penny Lyons, Colleen Scissors, Josh Devries, Merredith Von Burg, and Katie Turcotte about the greeting card, you were just acting at the time, weren’t you?”
Miriam responded, “Yes.”
“You were an actress?”
“Just briefly.”
“So you were acting when it comes to the greeting card, but you’re not acting when it comes to the suspicious white vehicle?”
“No. At the time, I was under the impression that nobody really cared, that nobody was going to come out and check anything. My attorney didn’t talk with me about it. Nobody called me back on it. I was out there all by myself, not knowing what to do. I’d never been in a situation like this before.”
“Okay, so you took the very dramatic step of buying a greeting card at City Market, writing out this threatening message to the grieving widow, ‘Alan was first, you’re next. Run, run, run.’ Planting it under your doormat, and pulling a big ruse on everybody, correct?”
“Yes.”
“How did you expect this to turn law enforcement in the direction of finding your husband’s killer?”
Miriam replied, “I thought that maybe they might monitor the road or come out and watch the property.”
“But the entire time you lived there, from Alan’s death until you skedaddled out of town in July, nobody actually harmed you in any way, shape, or form, did they?”
“ No.”
As far as any security measures that Miriam did while she was there, she said she left the police tape on the door. Tuttle was incredulous about this and asked, “The tape wasn’t really going to stop a suspect from entering the house, correct?”
Miriam answered, “No, but you hear it rip off.”
“So, in the middle of the night when you’re in your bedroom, you would hear the tape on the front door rip off?”
Miriam replied, “I slept on the couch in the living room. I didn’t sleep in the bedroom.”
Sarcastically Tuttle said, “Well, that’s convenient! Why were you sleeping on the couch in the living room?”
Miriam responded, “Because I didn’t want to sleep in the bedroom. I didn’t want to be in there alone. The living room was in a central part of the house where I felt comfortable.”
Tuttle asked, “Is it safe to say that during this time frame, you were afraid you could be knocked off, whether you were in the house or down by the horses or anywhere, because it’s an isolated property, correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“Regardless of the ruse you pulled with the greeting card, you were afraid of this person in the white truck. And yet you asked Katie Turcotte to come out that same night and start feeding your horses, correct?”
Miriam answered, “I did. But she wouldn’t have been at the house.”
Tuttle queried, “But she would be down at the barn by herself, and you were exposing her to danger, weren’t you?”
Miriam disagreed and said, “I felt like somebody was after Alan and me. I didn’t think they would go after Katie.”
Tuttle didn’t take that for an answer, and he added, “So she’d be safe, even though there’s a rogue killer lurking out there? Coming by your property, going into the house, playing this cat-and-mouse game, and you thought she would be safe?”
“Well, I figured that she probably wasn’t a target.”
Moving to a different area of questioning, ADA Richard Tuttle wanted to know about all the traveling that Miriam said she did on the morning of June 10, 2008. Tuttle asked if she would agree that she made it known pretty quickly to the 911 operator and first deputy on the scene that she had been gone all morning and had arrived home to find Alan Helmick dead on the kitchen floor. Miriam agreed with that assessment.
Tuttle asked if it was correct that Alan was supposed to have gone to the Clifton Water offices to pay a bill that morning, and then he was going to take a truck in for servicing at a place called Shiners, on Highway 50. After that, they were supposed to meet for lunch, but there was no set time. Miriam disagreed with the last part, and she said that they had settled on a time of 11:00
A.M.
at a Mexican restaurant named Dos Hombres. Later she had called him, because she wanted to change the restaurant to a Chinese place in Grand Junction.
Tuttle was very skeptical of Miriam’s explanation of why she had gone so many different places on the morning of June 10, with gasoline rates being so high at that time. He said she had gone to Walmart, and then clear across town to a Safeway, located on Horizon Avenue, just to buy a bag of carrots. Then she said she went back to a City Market at a different location in town to check on Alan’s prescriptions, and then backtracked eastward to a Hastings Bookstore to buy some coloring books for Alan’s granddaughters. Tuttle wanted to know why Miriam couldn’t have bought all those things at one location, at the Walmart store.
Miriam replied that she traveled to all of those locations, because the best items were at those establishments. She didn’t mind traveling around, since she wasn’t going to meet Alan for lunch until after eleven o’clock.
As far as lunch went, Tuttle wondered why Alan wasn’t calling her back, if she left so many voice messages for him. She said she thought it was because he had been upset with her the day before. So Tuttle wanted to know what he was upset about, and Miriam said, “He was keeping me at arm’s distance and didn’t really want to talk about things. When we talked about him doing errands that morning, he basically made it sound like there was no way I’d want to go with him because I didn’t want to sit in the truck all morning. It’s like he wanted to do it by himself. I was trying to understand what he wanted.”
If there had been friction between Alan and Miriam that morning, then Tuttle wanted to know why there was nothing in Miriam’s voice messages that indicated tension. Miriam answered, “I’m not the type of person to drag out anything like that. I supported him in whatever he did. So if he was having a tough time of it, I wanted to support him.”
“Well, if he didn’t want to be bugged by you, why did you keep leaving him voice messages?”
Miriam seemed to be breaking down more and more by this point. She replied, “I—I—I can’t . . . I don’t know how to explain why people do what they do.”
“So you’re really not getting along. He doesn’t want to talk with you, yet you leave him four voice mail messages spaced fairly evenly apart as you journey through town, telling him what’s going on and what you’re thinking about, and that sort of thing. You had just seen him forty-five minutes earlier when you left your first voice message?”
Before another question was asked, Miriam said, “Before he got to the shower, I gave him a hug and a kiss. And he went into the shower and I didn’t have a chance to really talk to him very much. We had discussed over coffee what we were going to do for the day. I still wanted him to know that no matter what was going on, up in his head, that I still loved him. So when I left the first message, it was very sweet.”
“Okay, so it wasn’t like you were on that bad of speaking terms, according to your testimony. He was going to meet you for lunch that day, correct?”
Miriam said that was so, but she added, “He was very agitated, and I was trying to understand that. I could only do what I could do. I just wanted him to know he had support.”
If Alan was so agitated, Tuttle asked, why was he willing to meet Miriam for lunch? Miriam answered that he wasn’t so much agitated with her, as he was about his businesses and his bad health over the previous year.
Richard Tuttle got back to the germane point, that Miriam went to a lot of places that morning, because she wanted receipts that she could later show to officers. Miriam said that wasn’t true. Tuttle then claimed that Miriam’s plans had been disrupted when Sue Boulware told her not to drive out to Loma, because gasoline was too expensive.
Miriam replied that the price of gas didn’t concern her, and said, “I could have driven out to Loma after lunch if I’d met with him.”
Tuttle asked, “Isn’t it fair to say, Ms. Helmick, that when Sue Boulware nixed your idea to go out there and pay the bill, you had to come up with a way to spend two or three hours wasting time?”
“No,” Miriam replied.
Tuttle added, “You had to find a way to have documentation of where you had been?” (So that Miriam could prove to police she was not home when Alan Helmick was supposedly murdered by an intruder.)
“No. I actually enjoyed being out a little bit. I liked putting the window down. It was a very nice day. I enjoyed doing it, even though I didn’t know some of the routes. This had nothing to do with whether I wanted to go to Loma or not.”
Tuttle asked, “Why not just mail the check to Sue Boulware?”
Miriam replied that she was just trying to be nice, because Sue was concerned about being paid. According to Miriam, she wasn’t trying to create alibis on June 10, 2008; she was just running a lot of errands on a nice day, and was enjoying driving around the area.
C
HAPTER 46
“T
HAT
G
REETING
C
ARD
L
ED
T
HEM
TO
THE
R
EAL
K
ILLER
,
D
IDN’T
I
T
?”
Richard Tuttle asked why Miriam had the receipts for all the items she bought that day so conveniently stuffed in a pocket, instead of her purse? So convenient, in fact, she could readily pull them out and show officers where she had been. Miriam said that she often just put her receipts in her pocket. She’d learned that when a woman went to a store parking lot and opened her purse to put receipts inside, she became a target for theft.
Tuttle didn’t buy it. He responded, “You have a bunch of receipts in your purse from other shopping trips, yet these receipts on this day are in your pocket, and most of your cash is in your pocket, correct?”
Miriam claimed that her purse was overflowing with receipts, and that was the reason why she had stuffed those particular receipts in her pocket.
As far as the 911 call, Tuttle wanted to know why Miriam sounded so calm during it. He said, “You were pretty patient for having just come home and found your husband violently shot and bleeding to death on the kitchen floor. Would you agree with that?”
Miriam stated, “I didn’t know he’d been shot.”
“You knew something was desperately wrong with him, right?”
“Yes.”
“It was a pretty horrific thing to walk in on. And yet you were pretty patient with this rookie dispatcher, who didn’t even know where Whitewater was. Would you agree with that?”
Miriam answered, “I may have been patient on the outside, but it really kind of upset me when he couldn’t get the address the first or second time. It was very annoying.”
“You took the time to spell out S-I-M-I-N-O-E for him, correct?”
“Yes. He couldn’t get it right. So I had to spell it for him.”
When Tuttle said, “What I’m saying is, it’s not really consistent with a wife who just came home, startled to find her husband shot dead on the floor.”
Jody McGuirk objected, saying, “This is testifying.”
Judge Robison disagreed and overruled the objection. Then Robison told the jurors, “Comments made by attorneys are not testimony. They can certainly ask questions, and they do so during the course of a trial.” It may have been a polite way of telling Tuttle to actually ask a question of Miriam.
So Tuttle did this by asking, “Do you think that for the circumstance you found yourself in, this kind of patience was normal?”
Miriam replied, “I don’t know, because I’ve not been in a circumstance like that.”
Tuttle, no doubt, would have loved to point out that Miriam Helmick actually had been in a similar circumstance in 2002, when her first husband, Jack Giles, supposedly shot himself to death. But because of the rules laid down by the court on those circumstances, Tuttle did not go there. Instead, he wanted to know why Miriam had told police right off the bat that it looked as if the house had been robbed. Her exact words had been “There’s stuff everywhere.” In fact, there hadn’t been stuff everywhere, but just a few drawers that were open.
To all of this, Miriam responded, “I was not rational during that time. I don’t know what you expect of me! I mean, I called 911 because he was gone. I don’t know how I should react.”
Tuttle came back with, “All I’m expecting from you is the truth, correct?”
Miriam responded, “You’re getting the truth!”
“Well, it’s not like the place was ransacked. Like Agent Morton from the FBI was talking about in a real burglary scene, was it?”
“I didn’t get up and look at everything. I just looked around me.”
“Where did you look?”
“I was in the kitchen. I looked around at the drawers and things.”
“Okay, do you remember telling Merredith Von Burg, Alan’s sister, in the first three days after the murder that you saw Alan’s ring, your ring, and watch, and they had been left by the bathroom sink.” Obviously, Miriam couldn’t have seen these if she had never gone past the area where Alan lay on the floor.
Miriam claimed she hadn’t said that to Von Burg. So Tuttle asked, “She’s dreamed that up?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know any reason why she would have an animus or motive against you?”
Miriam answered, “I didn’t say that! I think that with everything that went on, she probably just got it mixed up. I told her where my watch and ring were left before I left home that morning. I said by the sink. It was the bathroom sink.”
Tuttle asked if Miriam had a chance to see what items had been seized by law enforcement from the house on June 10. She said that she did. So Tuttle asked, after looking at that list, could she say with certainty what items were not on the list, and might have been stolen? Miriam answered that some jewelry was probably stolen.
Tuttle told her it was important to be exact about what items of jewelry had been stolen, because law enforcement could track those kinds of things through pawnshops. Miriam said that she had been as exact as she could have been.
Tuttle declared, “Most of the valuable items in your house were not taken. Would you agree with that?” Miriam said that she agreed. So then he listed those items: computers, four rifles, a handgun, items in a china cabinet. And then he said, “So from your perspective, it doesn’t look like a real burglary, does it?”
Miriam replied, “I don’t know. I’m not a professional.”
Tuttle continued, “You walk in. You see your husband prone on the floor, blood around him. You dropped your bags. You’re very startled. You go to him, and you kneel. And you’re just sitting there. And on the cell phone call to the 911 operator, he asks, ‘Is there anyone else there with you?’ And you answer, ‘No.’ Do you agree with that?”
Miriam said that she did.
Tuttle continued, “And yet, you hadn’t been anywhere else in the house?”
“I really wasn’t looking to see if anybody was in the house. Alan was my main concern.”
“Well, you knew some foul play had occurred, correct?”
“Yes.”
“You said that the house had been robbed, and he’s lying there in a pool of blood?”
“I wasn’t putting everything all together, as somebody still being there in the house. I was concerned with Alan. I didn’t know at first what had happened to him.”
“Well, did you think the house had been robbed and then he died of natural causes?”
“I wasn’t thinking like that.”
“In fact, they asked you more than once if there was someone else in the house with you, and your answer was no. You hadn’t gone anywhere else, and yet you knew for a certainty there was no one else in the house?”
“Well, I hadn’t seen anybody else in the house. I was mainly directing my attention to Alan.”
“There’s been a robbery. Your husband’s prone on the floor. Blood all over, and you’re not scared for your own life, as well as your husband’s life?”
“ No.”
“You weren’t scared at all?”
“No. I was very upset. He’d just died. I really didn’t care what was going on around me.”
“Okay, let’s talk what was going on around you. The dispatcher said you needed to place your hand on Alan’s forehead and your hand under his neck, and then tilt his head back. And your response was ‘He’s all bloody.’”
“I was talking about his neck.”
“Just his neck. That’s all you were talking about?”
“That’s all I saw.”
So Tuttle got into the fact that Miriam said there had been blood also coming from Alan’s nose and mouth. But when the first officer arrived, Tuttle noted, “There were no rags around or anything that you had even used as a rag to clean out his mouth, correct?”
“There wasn’t blood in his mouth.”
Tuttle shot back, “I wasn’t trying to quibble over what was in his mouth. What I’m saying is, there wasn’t any meaningful blood on your person or your clothes, correct?”
Miriam answered, “There was blood on my thumb from where I pinched his nose. That was all that was touched. I mean, he didn’t have it all over his body.”
“You testified that you had been injured.” (The prosecutor was alluding to her earlier testimony about her rib being broken.) “But in your police interview, you never mentioned the fact that you had been injured, correct?”
Miriam replied that she didn’t think that had anything to do with Alan dying.
“Well, on page sixty-four of the interview, you said, ‘I put my hands on his chin and turned his head to the side.’ You never told them you were trying to do this one-handed?”
Miriam responded that she had not told them that. She did testify, however, “I was trying to do the best I could. I wasn’t dwelling on my problem when I was interested in Alan.”
Focusing on another area, Rich Tuttle asked if Miriam had touched Alan Helmick’s body and then gone back to the car. Miriam said she had not. So Tuttle asked why there would be a particle of gunshot residue on the steering wheel of the car she had been driving on the morning of June 10. Miriam said she did not know why that would appear there.
Tuttle then got to the phone calls Miriam had to her brother in Florida, when she had declared she would sell her story to the highest bidder on television programs. Tuttle asked, “You’re looking to cash in on what’s been happening, aren’t you?”
Miriam replied, “It wasn’t that. I was just frustrated over the whole thing.”
“Well, you talked about staying in touch with
48 Hours
and with
Nightline.
And this was all over the love of your life being killed in a very violent manner. And you were willing to cash in on that?”
“No, that’s not what it was about!”
“Was there ever a time you reached out to Jim Hebenstreit through your lawyer to ask about suspects they had developed in the case?”
“No. I figured that somebody would say something if they had.”
“You weren’t curious about who had killed the love of your life, Alan Helmick?”
“I was very curious. My job was not to do their work for them.”
“Well, in fact, your job was to lead them astray. Is that correct?”
“At that point, yes, I did.”
“When you say ‘at that point,’ we’re talking about twelve days after the murder, correct?” (This was the incident of the card under the doormat.)
“I was very distraught. Very upset at the time. Very paranoid about what was going on. So yes, that’s what I did.”
“So you concocted a complete ruse to lead them on a wild-goose chase away from you and toward some phantom killer out there, correct?”
“I was hoping they would come out and keep an eye on the property and see who was coming onto the property.”
“Well, their job really isn’t supposed to be chasing phantom killers leaving hokey threatening cards on people’s doorsteps, is it?”
“No. But if they had actually contacted me or done something about the white truck or listened, then maybe I wouldn’t have been at that point.”
“They spent hours tracking down the card. And they spent hours doing forensic testing it, fingerprinting it, DNA—and it all came back to you, correct?”
“Correct.”
“It was all over this suspicious white vehicle that didn’t scare you enough even to make you leave the residence?”
“I didn’t have the money to leave the residence. When I got the money, then I did leave.”
“You did what you thought was best for Miriam Helmick, not for the investigation, correct?”
“I did.”
“And not to help them find the killer, but to lead them astray, correct?”
“It wasn’t my intention to lead them astray. It was my intention to bring them out to watch the house.”
“In fact, that greeting card led them to the
real killer,
didn’t it, Ms. Helmick?”
“No, it did not!”
Richard Tuttle uttered three more words after Miriam’s answer: “No further questions.”
Just how well had Miriam Helmick done on the stand? Her testimony and her bearing were gauged by the press. Reporter Amy Hamilton, for the
Daily Sentinel,
noted that Miriam broke into tears when she had to describe her first vision of Alan lying on the kitchen floor with blood around his head. Journalist Paul Shockley noted what at times seemed more like a duel of wills, rather than just testimony between Richard Tuttle and Miriam Helmick. His headline stated:
PROSECUTOR, HELMICK CLASH.
And for Hamilton, Shockley, and everyone else who had been watching the trial, the question remained: who had won that battle of wills in the minds of the jurors?