Nine
July 8, 1998
Even as Neal was giving his final orders to his captives, the bodies of the three murdered women were discovered.
When Rebecca Holberton didn’t return to work on Monday, July 6, to start her new job, her supervisor thought she’d taken an extra day. When she didn’t show up on Tuesday, her coworkers grew more concerned; it wasn’t like her, except that they were aware she’d battled depression in the past. A friend from work decided to stop by the town house to check after work. She saw a vehicle in the driveway, but no one answered when she rang the bell.
When Holberton failed to show up for work on Wednesday, her supervisor at US West called her sister, Deb Lacomb, in Oregon. She had no idea where her sister might be. Holberton’s coworkers called the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office and asked for an officer to check her town house.
Deputy Michael Burgess arrived at the West Chenango address about 1:30 in the afternoon for what he expected to be a routine “welfare check.” Pulling up in his patrol car, he saw a man coming out of the town house next door to the address that he’d been sent to. “You know who lives here?” he asked.
The man shook his head. No, he said, the neighbors weren’t particularly friendly.
He thought the apartment belonged to a blond woman. “A man lives there, too, sometimes.”
Burgess went to the front door and rang the doorbell and knocked. Failing to get an answer, he went around to the side of the town house and climbed the locked fence into the backyard. A nine-year veteran of the sheriff’s office, Burgess noted that all the windows on both levels, as well as the glass door, were covered with paper as though the owner was in the process of painting. The door was unlocked, so he opened it a crack and called out.
When there was no answer, he opened it a little farther and began to enter the half-dark room. He stopped short. He didn’t know what had happened, but he knew that he didn’t want to be there. Immediately in front of him was a table littered with the remains of all meals and cigarette butts, but it was the rest of the room that repelled him. It looked like a torture chamber. He backed away from the door and called in for help.
It had already been a busy day for Jefferson County chief deputy district attorney Mark Pautler. The office always had a chief deputy on call for major cases, and it was his turn. His first call of the day asked him to report to the scene of what was later determined to be a murder-suicide. As he was leaving his house, he called the sheriff’s dispatch to check on the status of the search warrant so that he could enter the premises. The dispatcher asked, “Which one?” That’s when he was told that there had been another apparent murder at a town house on West Chenango Drive.
Pautler first went to the murder-suicide with the search warrant. He then drove to West Chenango, where he talked over the situation with the investigators on the scene while they waited for another search warrant. He decided to see what he could by climbing the back fence and looking in through the sliding glass doors.
In more than twenty-five years as a prosecutor, Pautler had seen some grisly and disturbing crime scenes, but this one immediately jumped ahead of the others. A young woman sat in a chair facing the door, staring with sightless eyes. A blanket covered part of her, but he could see that she had been duct-taped to the chair. Her body was tilted at nearly a right angle, and there was a terrible-looking wound—or wounds, it was hard to tell—to her head. Blood was pooled on a blanket and on the floor. Strangely, there appeared to be a driver’s license on her lap.
A mattress was on the floor with eyebolts at the corners, pieces of rope revealing the purpose of the setup. He could just see in the gloom what looked like another body by the fireplace; a white plastic bag had been put over the head, but he could tell it was filled with a dark liquid that he took to be blood. What looked like a third body was wrapped in plastic garbage bags by a wall.
So far, all that the police had was the name of one of the possible victims, Rebecca Holberton, who owned the property. Until the warrant arrived, they couldn’t get close enough to read the driver’s license. No one knew who the killer might be. Canvassing the neighborhood, the police had learned that a man lived at the apartment, but no one knew his name, his whereabouts, or much of anything about him.
Pautler and the others learned who the male occupant of the town house was when Grund contacted the sheriff’s office. A few minutes later, they heard from Denver police who called in, saying they had three kidnap victims, one of whom claimed to have been raped and forced to watch a murder on West Chenango Drive by a man named Cody Neal.
The chief deputy district attorney left the walkthrough of the scene to other deputy district attorneys, including Charles Tingle, who would be assigned lead prosecutor for the government, and the lead investigator for the sheriff’s office, Jose Aceves. He drove to the Denver apartment where two of the hostages, a man and a woman, were talking to police. Suzanne Scott, the alleged sexual assault victim, was in a police car speaking with a detective.
Pautler spoke with the investigators and the two hostages, where he heard his first account of what Scott and the others had witnessed; he was told there was a tape-recorded confession. He also learned that Neal was armed with a handgun and, because shells had been found, was presumed to have a shotgun as well. The investigators were concerned enough about Neal returning to shoot the witnesses that they moved the interviews out of any potential line of fire.
It was early evening before the investigators were ready to page Neal and try to get him to give himself up. They didn’t know much about him other than he was a cold-blooded and brutal killer who said he would kill again, and that he was capable of making “feeding the cat” jokes before murdering his third victim while a woman he planned to rape was forced to watch. They also knew by the manner in which he cooly planned and carried out his executions that he had thought through his actions for some time.
Neal returned the page from a cellular telephone and spoke first to his former girlfriend, Weeks, and then to Jefferson County sheriff investigator Cheryl Zimmerman. Neal talked to Zimmerman for about an hour while Pautler and other detectives listened to her side of the conversation and then looked over her shoulder at the notes she was taking of what Neal said in return.
The suspect was up and down: One minute he was the great killer, “scion” of a Mafia family; next he was calmly asking if he could have cigarettes and a private cell if he surrendered. Then he would be back claiming that he’d already murdered five hundred people and would kill again if provoked.
After about an hour, Neal asked to speak to a lawyer he knew. It so happened that Pautler knew that lawyer and was aware that the lawyer was no longer practicing law but was working instead as a sous-chef at a Denver restaurant.
When that information was relayed to Neal, he then asked for a public defender, but the investigators had several concerns about that request. First of all, they worried that they’d lose contact with Neal; he was on a cell phone, but nobody knew where he was, or if he had other hostages, or whether he was planning on more killing. There was also a possibility that the cell phone would cut out or lose power, and that if it did, Neal might not call back. The investigators were also worried that an attorney might tell him to quit talking, or might try to cut deals with them to get him to surrender.
The police were under no constitutional obligation to provide an attorney for Neal at that time. Contrary to television dramas, until placed in custody a suspect doesn’t have the right to ask to have an attorney appointed for him, or for one to be present during an interview. Nor would Neal have the ability to later claim that he had not been warned of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, also because he was not in custody. On the contrary, Neal had spent a considerable amount of time and effort incriminating himself—first in front of Scott, then through subsequent confessions to his hostages and on a tape recording, and, finally, to Zimmerman.
In fact, until Neal was in custody, it would remain a police case, not under the direction of the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office. Pautler was there in an advisory role, but the police priority was to capture a confessed, and witnessed, mass murderer. There was every reason to believe him when he said that he had killed more than the three women who’d been found, and that he was capable of killing others. They knew that he was armed and dangerous. Decisions needed to be made and they needed to be made fast; nobody wanted him on the streets for a moment longer than was necessary.
A police officer could have posed as a public defender and there would have been no repercussions because the high courts have ruled that the police may use lies and deceit in order to apprehend someone who is a danger to the public. However, the concern in this case was that Neal was obviously intelligent, at least in a “street smart” sense, and they worried that he might trip up a police officer with a legal question.
To buy time, Pautler wrote Zimmerman a note saying to tell Neal that a public defender would be available in twenty minutes. He then called and talked to his boss, District Attorney Dave Thomas, about posing as a public defender. Both knew that his subterfuge would have repercussions. A defense attorney would be sure to raise the issue in some fashion—whether to appeal Neal’s case if he was convicted, or by bringing it up to the Colorado Supreme Court’s attorney review commission as an ethics violation that could jeopardize Pautler’s standing as a lawyer.
Pautler believed that he could make legal arguments for the deception. One, as a deputy district attorney, he was a sworn peace officer with the authority of a police officer, including the ability to make arrests and conduct investigations. Two, he knew that the code of professional conduct contained language that stated that the rules governing attorney conduct—including those prohibiting deception—were not hard and fast, and that they seemed to indicate that lawyers should use their common sense in unusual circumstances. There was no guarantee that the courts would agree with either of his contentions.
Thomas believed that it was the best course of action, but he left the decision to his chief deputy. With visions of the crime scene fresh in his mind, Pautler decided that the public’s safety outweighed the personal risk. He wrote Zimmerman another note, this one telling Neal that public defender “Mark Palmer” had arrived. He had decided to use a pseudonym in case he had ever had any dealings in the past with Neal or anyone he might have known.
Zimmerman handed Pautler the telephone. Avoiding any discussion of constitutional issues, such as Neal’s rights, he told Neal that he was “looking at some pretty heavy stuff.”
Neal’s reply was all bravado. “I’m one of the most dangerous people you will ever have the chance to represent,” he said. “This is not a game.”
As the discussion with Neal went on, the Jefferson County SWAT team was gearing up to nab Neal when the moment came. That moment arrived late that night when, as he’d arranged with Pautler, Neal drove Holberton’s truck into a parking lot of a department store.
Before he could move, the SWAT team swarmed over him and forced him to the pavement at gunpoint. A .25-caliber loaded handgun was found on the seat; a twelve-gauge shotgun was behind the seat with one shell in the chamber and two more in reserve. Boxes of ammunition for both weapons were also found on the seat, as were credit cards and other items belonging to Rebecca Holberton and Candace Walters.
Pautler was present at the arrest but did not attempt to talk to Neal. Nor did Neal ask to speak to Mark Palmer or any other lawyer when advised of his Miranda rights: that he could ask for an attorney to be present and that he had the right to remain silent.
“I understand,” he said. But Wild Bill Cody Neal had no intention of keeping his mouth shut.
Ten
Holly Walters began to worry on Monday, July 6, when she didn’t hear from her mother. She and her partner had left on Friday morning, July 3, for the twelve-hour drive to Missouri. She expected to be gone three weeks and took their time on the drive, arriving Saturday.
Sunday had been busy. Her partner’s parents lived in Missouri and had an outing to the lake planned. Holly forgot her concerns about her mother and Cody in the fun, which turned to a disaster when the canoe that she was in with her dog and partner overturned in a lake. The dog received a cut and had to be taken to a veterinarian for stitches. By the time all the excitement died down that evening, Holly figured that her mother might have been too tired to call . . . or maybe delayed. But when the next morning passed into the evening, and she couldn’t reach her mother, she knew something was very wrong. Even if she’d run into car trouble, or stayed another day or two, she would have made contact, she thought as she went to bed that night.
Holly Walters woke before dawn in a panic. She called her mother’s apartment, tried her cell phone and pager. Nothing. “I’m going home,” she told her partner, who insisted on coming. They drove straight through, getting to Denver in the early evening.
Holly went straight to her mother’s apartment, hoping to find that her mother was just so caught up in her new life as a millionaire that she hadn’t gotten around to calling. But it was obvious that her mother hadn’t been home since she left with Cody. Then she saw her mother’s cell phone and pager on the table and realized that they must have been left behind. She searched the house and found cell and pager numbers for Cody. She tried both, but there was no answer. . . . She wondered if they’d been in an accident . . . but no, something told her that this was Cody’s doing. The bounty hunter. The hit man. The con man.
She thought she had an idea where he lived, in some town house complex over on West Chenango Drive, so she armed herself with a hammer and a knife and went there to find her mother. She got there and looked in the windows, not knowing that she wasn’t at the right address, though her mother’s body and those of Rebecca Holberton and Angela Fite were nearby . . . beyond any rescue.
Holly Walters was out until after midnight before going home. There was no rest there, however. Only tears and fears. Finally, at 3:00 A.M. on Wednesday, July 8, she called the cellular number that she had for Cody and was surprised when a male voice answered. “Cody?” she asked.
“No,” Neal started to respond, then recognizing her voice, said, “Oh, hi, Holly,” and proceeded to feed her a story. They were in a little town about three hours from the Colorado border, but there’d been a little accident. Her mother, he said, had hit a deer, which had forced her off the road. She’d suffered minor injuries—a few scrapes and bruises—but otherwise she was fine. Five days after slaughtering Holly’s mother, he even made a joke about her notoriously poor eyesight at night. She was back at the hotel, he said. “I was just out trying to get something to eat.”
When he asked how her trip had gone, Holly told him about the boating accident. He responded by saying that he was just glad that everybody was OK.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “When you get back to the hotel, have my mom call.” Somewhat relieved by Neal’s assurances, Holly lay down and soon fell asleep. She woke up after just a few hours, and knew that Cody was lying.
She would have called,
she thought as she got up. She was sure that Cody was somewhere in the Denver area.
Still, Holly Walters was hesitant to call the police. It would be admitting what she didn’t want to even contemplate. She spent the day driving around, hoping to spot Neal.
Maybe she’s a hostage or injured, but still alive.
At 10:00 P.M. she knew she had to file a missing persons report with the police. She called and gave the officer a description of her mother and of Cody Neal; she also gave the officer Neal’s license plate number and Social Security number, which he’d supplied when applying for work at her company. The officer told her it might be twenty-four hours before her mother would actually be listed as a missing person.
Ten minutes later, the police called back. A detective told her that they might have some information about her mother, “but we need to send someone to talk to you.”
“That does not sound good,” Holly responded.
“Not good or bad, we just need to talk to you in person,” the detective said.
Actually, it was nearly three hours before a detective arrived. When he did, he told Holly that they’d apprehended William “Cody” Neal that night and that there were three bodies in a town house.
“Is one of them my mother?” she asked, fearing the answer but needing to know.
“Yes,” he said.
After the detective left, Holly Walters fought back her tears and called her father. The newspapers would be out in a few hours, and she didn’t want him to learn the news that way. Then her grandmother called to see if she’d heard anything from Candace. Holly lied and said there’d been no word. She wanted the old woman to get her sleep, as she was going to have a tough day to deal with come morning. After she hung up, Holly let the tears come freely.
The family of Angela Fite had also been worrying for days. On Monday her mother, Betty Von Tersch, had tried to page and call her eldest daughter from work but got no answer. It worried her a little, but she thought Angie and Cody might have gone somewhere to celebrate her “surprise.” Possibly even eloped without telling anyone.
Then she got an alarming telephone call. Angie hadn’t picked up her children, Kyle and Kayla, from the baby-sitter. Von Tersch couldn’t believe that the baby-sitter had taken so long to contact anyone, but her mind quickly jumped to more important concerns. Where was Angie? She told the baby-sitter that she would be by directly to pick up the children. Then she called Angie’s employer, who said she hadn’t been in to work, nor had they heard from her.
Von Tersch left and decided to swing by Angie’s apartment before getting the children. If something was wrong at the apartment, she didn’t want the kids seeing it. The landlord didn’t want to let her in the apartment. “You have to,” she pleaded. “I have to know if she’s dead or alive.”
The landlord gave in. The windows were open, and Angie appeared to have been doing the laundry when she left, but she was not there, nor was there any sign of foul play.
Von Tersch left to pick up her grandchildren. After that, she wasn’t sure what to do.
Maybe they went to Las Vegas and got married,
she thought.
Maybe her pager doesn’t work there.
But Angie wouldn’t have left her children with a baby-sitter without telling someone. She began to imagine all the horrible things that could have befallen the couple in Las Vegas; maybe something had gone wrong with Neal’s mob connections. Without any other plan, she sat on her front doorstep, looking down the street, waiting for Angie to show up.
“Why is Mommy not home?” Kyle asked.
“I don’t know, honey,” she answered. “I don’t know.”
The sun came up on the next day, Wednesday, July 8, with still no word from Angie. About 1:00 P.M., Von Tersch decided to take the children to get haircuts. On the way, she passed West Chenango Drive, a block from her house, not knowing that her daughter’s body was about to be discovered there by Deputy Burgess.
The more time passed, the more Von Tersch sensed the coming news. She called Matt Rankin and asked him to pick up the children. She felt that she was soon going to have to do something that would be easier if the children were not present.
Von Tersch was sitting out in front of her home when she saw a police car drive by at about 8:00 P.M. She told Rankin, who was in the basement with the kids, but he shrugged. It was not unusual for a police car to drive through a neighborhood. But Von Tersch knew that it was somehow connected to her daughter’s disappearance. She went to bed but tossed and turned until about 5:00 A.M., when she got up and called the police to file a missing persons report. She tried to page Angie again, but there was no return call. She was getting ready to go to work when Tara called.
As usual, Tara had been awakened by the news on her clock radio. She was still sleepy and wasn’t sure she heard right when the broadcaster said something about murders—two were dead in an apparent murder-suicide, and another two women were also dead . . . and something about a bounty hunter. A minute later, Rankin had called.
“You hear the news?” he asked. A couple of people were dead, including a bounty hunter.
The coincidence of her sister being missing, last seen in the company of an alleged bounty hunter, was too much. She called her mother and suggested that she call the police and try to learn more.
“Mom,” Tara said, “he could be a serial killer, for all we know.” Angie could have eloped with Cody, but she would have left the kids with Tara or their mother.
Betty Von Tersch turned on the television. The newscasters said that there’d been a multiple homicide on West Chenango Drive. She knew the town houses that they were talking about. . . . Heck, if she stood on her front porch, she could look right at the backyard of the town house in question. She couldn’t seem to get through to anyone with the police who seemed to know anything, so she decided to go look for herself. She drove down to West Chenango, but the street was sealed off with yellow crime-scene tape. She could see a number of police and other official-looking cars parked down in front of the town house.
With dread seeping into her every thought, she flagged down a sheriff’s patrol car that was leaving the scene. “I have to talk to you,” she said. Her daughter, Angela Fite, was missing, last seen in the presence of a man named Cody. A bounty hunter.
“Where do you live?” the deputy asked.
Von Tersch told him and he said to go home and wait, an investigator would be sent to talk to her. The investigator arrived at the same time as Tara. The women asked if the news report was true—two women and a bounty hunter were dead. The investigator shook his head. No, three women were dead and a man had been arrested the night before for their murders. The coroner was trying to identify all the women, but he was not finished “unwrapping the bodies.”
The investigators asked if they knew the alleged bounty hunter’s real name. The women had been talking about him as Cody. Von Tersch remembered her conversation with her daughter. “Bill Neal,” she said.
After the investigators left, saying they would get back to her shortly, Von Tersch was suddenly overwhelmed by the horror. Unwrapping the bodies? Had they been hacked to pieces and the remains placed in bags? This couldn’t be happening. Tara had to calm her down. . . . It didn’t mean that necessarily, she said.
With no more information, Von Tersch and Tara drove to Angie’s apartment to fetch clothes for the children. When they arrived, they noticed a man sitting in a van, looking up at Angie’s apartment. Tara figured that he had to be a cop and walked up to him. “That’s my sister they’re talking about on the news,” she said. “What are you waiting for?” The detective replied that he was waiting for a search warrant; this was a murder investigation and he had to go by the book.
Von Tersch spent the rest of the day in a fog, and friends and family called with questions she didn’t have answers to. Rumors and partial truths flew like birds. There was a news report saying that one of the women got away. They were talking about Suzanne Scott, but Von Tersch dared to hope that the survivor was her daughter. She kept waiting for Angie to call and say something like, “You’ll never believe what happened, but I’m OK.” There would be sadness for the other victims, but at least her daughter would still be alive.
Maybe they’ve got it all wrong,
she thought. Maybe some other women had been murdered by some other bounty hunter. Angie and Cody would return from an elopment, puzzled by all the attention.
Then the coroner called and asked for a member of the family to come and identify Angela’s body. Betty left that to her ex-husband, Wayne Fite, who’d come to town to marry a daughter off, not bury one, and to her current husband, Rod Von Tersch. The coroner had done his best to clean up the damage inflicted by Neal, but there was no denying that the woman lying on that cold steel table was Angie. She would not be coming home to her children and family ever again.
Even as the families of the murdered women were learning the horrible truth, so was the rest of the world. A media feeding frenzy ensued, some of it sparked by Neal’s willingness to talk to reporters.
The day after his arrest, he told a television reporter, “I will state as fact there are two other bodies they haven’t found yet that I know of.” He wouldn’t elaborate any further.
Neal denied being on drugs at the time of the murders. Also, there was a “common thread” between the three murder victims, he hinted. Then he apologized to the friends and families of the women and to his own family and friends. “I am truly sorry,” he said, adding that he was worried about the effect his crimes would have on his young daughter.
He finished by publicly firing his attorney, public defender Jim Aber, a longtime opponent of the death penalty. Neal said that he wanted to plead guilty immediately, but Aber was trying to talk him out of it. “As of this moment, you are fired,” Neal said into the television camera; he wanted another attorney.