Dead of Night (14 page)

Chapter 16

When court proceedings began in preparation for James Biela’s arraignment, the accused killer didn’t seem to take things seriously at times, smiling into cameras and often sitting with a cocky look on his face. He became more somber as things progressed, and he was totally serious by the time new evidence was presented that indicated that a pair of thongs might have been used as the murder weapon that strangled Brianna Denison. When questioned about the results of the autopsy that she had conducted on Brianna, Dr. Ellen Clark told the court that in her opinion, the cause of death was strangulation by ligature. The mark on Brianna’s neck was an exact match for the strap on a pair of K.T. Hunter’s panties that had gone missing the night Brianna was abducted.

Also testifying was Alberto Jimenez, who reported finding Brianna’s nude body, wearing only socks, in a field near his workplace on February 15, 2008. Alberto gave a graphic description of the animal bites he saw on the body, and told the court how a discarded Christmas tree had been thrown on the remains in an attempt to conceal them from view. After discovering Brianna’s body, he hurried back to work and immediately notified the authorities, he said, thinking all the while about his own children and the family of the young girl he had just found.

“If I didn’t do something about what I had seen,” he told the court, “it would haunt me for a long, long time.”

Hearing the sickening details of how Brianna’s body was found, and the condition it was in when Alberto Jimenez first noticed it, proved to be too much for the deceased’s mother and brother. They were unable to stay in the courtroom and listen to some of the more disturbing details that were being brought out during the testimony.

The court also heard from Detective Adam Wygnanski, who questioned Biela following the Secret Witness tip that had finally broken the case. Wygnanski said that he began to believe that Biela could be the man that law enforcement had been searching for when, during the interview, Biela appeared “just very, very nervous” and began to sweat.

Dr. Lisa Smyth-Roam, an expert with the Washoe County Crime Lab, told the court that the DNA of seven hundred men was tested following Brianna’s murder, and most of them came forward to be tested voluntarily in order to exclude themselves. There had been only one of the tests that proved to be a match for the DNA taken from the crime scenes. Neither James Biela nor any of his other paternal male relatives could be excluded from the Y chromosome DNA profile, Dr. Smyth-Roam testified.

Biela’s mother and two sisters were present in the courtroom during the hearing. They sat there, stunned, as though they were in shock throughout the proceedings. It was clear to observers that they still could not believe that the man they thought they had known so well, their son and brother, could have done the things they were hearing about during the testimony. To Brianna’s family members, though, the possibility was all too real.

Carol Pierce, Brianna’s grandmother, called Biela a “pathetic, sick man.” Her aunt Lauren was pleased when the judge bound Biela over for arraignment in Washoe County District Court to enter a plea in the charges against him: kidnapping, murder, the rape of Brianna, and the additional rapes of at least two other victims. At the time of his arraignment, he would have the choice of pleading guilty, not guilty, or not guilty by reason of insanity.

The trial would be scheduled following Biela’s plea entry, but there was a likelihood of the prosecution requesting additional time to prepare for the trial. This, according to District Attorney Richard Gammick, was because there was an extremely large amount of evidence in the case. Gammick also said his office had still not decided whether or not to seek the death penalty. Until the case was ready for trial, Biela would be held in custody without bail.

 

 

Biela’s defense team made several requests of the court while they waited for the legal process to continue—one of which was for the trial to be moved to another county in order to choose from an unbiased jury pool. Defense attorney Davies also wanted Biela’s three trials to be held separately, claiming that each of the cases involved inconsistent weapons, unrelated victims, and differing methods of attack. He feared, he said, that jurors would convict Biela in the two rape cases, only because of the strong feelings about the Brianna Denison case. This might happen whether the evidence in the rape cases proved Biela’s sufficient guilt or not. The community involvement in the case, he said, was so extensive that “the community is almost a witness at this point.”

The prosecution, led by Elliott Sattler, called those claims “absurd,” and said that each separate charge was a strong case in itself, saying that the evidence proved that the crimes were all related.

“The most recent case in the news is always the ‘most covered’ any community has ever seen,” Sattler said, comparing the O.J. Simpson and the Craigslist Killer cases to James Biela’s similar publicity situation.

Incredibly, Biela had been seen to have a smirk on his face occasionally during the hearing, and observers in the room said that he looked toward the back of the courtroom at one point at Brianna’s mother. Bridgette Denison immediately averted her eyes, refusing to meet the stare of the man who, she believed, had brutally murdered her daughter.

Chapter 17

As expected, James Biela entered a plea of not guilty at his arraignment, and the court later set a February 22 trial date. It was not long, however, until his defense attorneys filed a motion claiming that they had none of the DNA evidence that they had planned to use in his defense. It had been destroyed by the county’s crime lab, they said. When the defense had asked for access to the DNA samples for independent testing, the crime lab reportedly told them the samples had been “consumed during testing,” although an earlier report from the Washoe County Crime Lab had claimed that some material was still available.

The lab furnished the defense with a copy of their directives for testing, which instructed them to use the “smallest amount possible” of the available samples.

According to the defense’s motion, the amount of evidence collected from the crime scene was
70 to 100 times the amount necessary for a lab to develop a genetic profile of a suspect, so what happened to all of this unused evidence?

The motion said:
Without the ability to conduct its own testing, the defense is unable to challenge the state’s test results. Allowing the state’s DNA tests into evidence would force the defendant into the position of proving a negative.

The chief deputy public defender Maizie Pusich said in the defense motion that the laboratory had violated its own policies when it had destroyed Biela’s semen samples after they used what they had for DNA testing. Pusich claimed that
[destruction of the samples] raised the inference that arresting and prosecuting someone, anyone, in this high profile murder case may have been more important to state agents than following the procedures designed to prevent false tests.

The motion asked that an order be issued that any DNA test evidence, when the entire sample had been used and could not be retested, be suppressed as evidence and not presented to the jury at the trial. The DNA evidence in question had been collected in the Brianna Denison murder case and in the December 2007 rape case.

The defense also said they planned to ask that the date of the trial be moved to a later time. There were two primary reasons for the request, they said: both the ruling that was to be made on their motion concerning the DNA evidence, and the fact that Biela’s previous lead attorney had left the public defender’s office and had since gone to work for a private law firm. Pusich said she needed more time to prepare for the case and had not yet received all of the evidence that had been requested by the defense.

Biela’s defense team also asked that other key evidence in the case be suppressed, including the testimony of Carleen Harmon about his fetish for thong underwear, and also the DNA sample that had been taken from his son. The child’s DNA, they alleged, had been taken from the minor with only the consent of his mother. For that reason, the defense hoped to have it suppressed as evidence.

Because of the defense’s requests, a hearing was subsequently held to determine what evidence could be presented to the jury when the trial, rescheduled to start on May 10, was held. DDA Elliott Sattler told Judge Robert H. Perry that the prosecution felt that the evidence about Biela’s alleged interest in thong panties and pornography should be included in the trial for the reason that it connected the evidence in the murder and sexual-assault cases. Biela’s defense, however, sought to limit much of what evidence was to be presented to the jury, claiming that Biela’s alleged interest in thongs and pornography was, in itself, nothing illegal. By allowing the evidence to be presented, the jurors’ opinions of Biela would be affected.

Biela’s onetime girlfriend Carleen Harmon told the judge that Biela spent a lot of time on pornography websites on their home computer. She said that she often searched the computer after he had used it to see what sites he had visited. She told the judge that she tried to keep him from going to the websites, to no avail, by changing the passwords on the computer.

Carleen also said that she had good reason to believe that Biela had a fetish for women’s thong panties. She said that she had found two pairs of thongs in Biela’s truck when she went to visit him in September 2008 when he was working in Washington. Suspecting that he might be cheating on her, she said she had searched his truck and was upset when she found the two pairs of small cotton thongs in a pastel-flowered design. She confronted Biela with the thongs, and he became very angry and defensive and threw them out the truck window, finally claiming that he had picked them up at a Laundromat, she said.

In ruling on the request regarding the thong underwear, Washoe District judge Robert Perry decided that the ex-girlfriend’s testimony concerning Biela’s interest in websites featuring thong underwear would, indeed, be allowed during his trial. He ruled, however, that the sites could not be referred to by the defense as pornography. In addition, Perry denied the defense’s motion asking that Biela’s son’s DNA sample be suppressed.

The prosecution considered the rulings to be highly in their favor, even with the judge’s stipulation that all their evidence would have to be officially introduced at the trial and must at that time meet all the necessary legal standards.

Chapter 18

Before the start of his trial, James Biela’s mother and siblings had spoken to the media on several occasions, telling about the person they knew, the person who was not the monster that was being put on trial, accused as a rapist, kidnapper, and killer. It was almost impossible for his family to perceive Biela that way, and they tried to describe his childhood and early life in a way that would show him as they remembered.

“It’s not the Jimmy we know,” his mother, Kathy Lovell, said. “He’s not the monster they are describing.” She had come to Reno to be in court during the jury selection, and to bring her son the new black suit he would wear during the trial. However, she and the other family members could not be present in the courtroom during the trial itself because of the possibility that they might be called as witnesses during the penalty phase if Biela was to be found guilty.

Biela’s other family members were upset that they could not be present during the trial because they wanted to be able to show their support for him. His sister Kristi had saved vacation days from her job since his arrest so that she could attend the trial. She worried that the public would perceive the family’s absence from the courtroom in the wrong way.

“What will a jury think when they see there is no one there for him? We want people to know why we aren’t there, and it’s not because we don’t want to be,” she said. “I want people to know there are people who love Jimmy. To me, he was a good brother and a good father [to his son]. He is my best friend.”

Biela’s mother had been experiencing a great deal of hurt since her son’s arrest, with the newspapers in the Spokane area, where she lived, carrying frequent headlines about the case. The atmosphere at the auto shop where she worked as a bookkeeper and receptionist was supportive, she said, and the men she worked with would do their best to try to reassure her when yet another story about her son would be published. “But I just end up crying,” she said. “It’s all guys I work with, and they try to talk to me about it, but they don’t know what to say.”

There had even been death threats toward her family, Kathy Lovell said, adding that she knew it would be difficult to be in Reno—what with the extreme level of public animosity toward her son. However, she said that she just tried to think of the day she would be able to hug Biela once more. She firmly believed in his innocence, she said, and thought that the police had been under pressure to find someone to blame. She added, however, that her heart went out to the Denison family. Biela, too, had told her that he felt bad for the Denisons, his mother said.

“Someone who did something like that wouldn’t feel remorse,” she said. During a phone call, he had also told her, “Mom, I’m so sorry for putting you through this.”

News reports had criticized Biela for having what they referred to as a smirk on his face at times during his preliminary hearings, but his mother said, “That’s just Jimmy’s expression, something he does when he’s nervous. I can tell in his eyes how scared he is.”

When Carleen Harmon had first called Kathy Lovell and told her that James had been arrested, his mom initially thought there had been some sort of terrible mistake.

“She told me Jimmy had been arrested, but I just didn’t believe it,” his mother said. “I thought that they got this wrong.”

Biela’s sister Kristi said that the time since Biela’s arrest had been especially tough for the family.

“There’s no one who can relate to what I’m going through. No one cares about the defendant’s family. They just hate us,” she said.

Kristi said that she had picked out a tie for her brother to wear with the JCPenney suit his mother was bringing to Reno for him to wear during the trial.

“What tie do you pick out that may be the tie your brother may be wearing when a jury decides whether he lives or not?” she asked.

Kristi also said she worried about her mother being alone in Reno during the trial. She expected that the streets around the courthouse would be cleared before Biela was brought there, wearing a stun belt and a bulletproof vest, but wondered what might happen to any of his family, who would have no protection from hostile crowds.

Biela’s family stayed in touch with him during the time between his arrest and the start of the trial by writing to him often. Kristi said they talked to him by phone a few times a week. Kathy Lovell said she lived from paycheck to paycheck, but the family had still managed to put money into an account for Biela so he could make phone calls and buy items from the jail store. She had added Reno numbers to her cell phone plan, she said, to save long-distance charges, and said the family kept their phones with them at all times because they never knew when Biela might get a chance to make a phone call.

At the jail, they were not able to visit Biela; they could only view him on a monitor through the jail’s television visitation system. When he had first been arrested, his family could view him through a glass window.

“We all put our hands up against the window,” Kristi said. “It was the closest contact we have had with him.”

 

 

Kathy Lovell remembered her son, growing up, doing all the normal things in spite of his abnormal home situation with a horrifically abusive father. Jimmy had tinkered with cars, joked, helped others without being asked, his mother said, and was afraid to put worms on his fishing-pole hook. Money was very scarce; and when they were young, the children would look on the ground for change people had dropped and check every phone booth for coins people might have forgotten. When they collected enough change, the children would go to McDonald’s for two hamburgers, which they divided among the four of them.

Kathy Lovell said that on one occasion, when Jimmy was about five years old, he had insisted that the children should have a birthday party for a Japanese cartoon character that he liked. She had made corn muffins for the party, and they all had sung “Happy Birthday” to Spectreman, the cartoon superhero.

The Biela children and their mother tried to make the best of things during the years when the children were young, doing the best they could to have a happy life during the times when Joseph Biela was not on the rampage against his wife. His abuse had begun almost immediately after their marriage, and had been a constant in their lives from then on. The family was on welfare, and they had a car, but there had been little money for gas. When they moved to Reno when James Biela was nine years old, Joseph Biela drove ahead to find work and then, when he did, the rest of the family came by train.

Despite their financial situation, Joseph refused to allow his wife to work, or even to make any friends. The brutal beatings he subjected her to took place almost every night, with the children listening, terrified, afraid to come out of their bedrooms. Their father didn’t hit them, but he verbally abused them. He didn’t want his wife to tell the children she loved them.

“He thought it would make them sissies,” she said, “especially the boys.”

 

 

The family’s situation finally changed in September 1990, when Kathy and the children moved in with Kathy’s sister. This happened after Kathy and Joseph Biela had a particularly horrible fight. Kathy divorced Joseph, got a job, went to night school, and met Ron Lovell, the man she married in 1993. They moved back to Spokane, and Kathy was surprised at how good Ron said all the Biela children were, considering what they had gone through in their early lives.

“You would think with all that abuse and situation,” he said, “you’d be dealing with kids who were really messed up.”

Ron became a father figure to all the children, and took young Jimmy fishing and bowling, competing together in a father-and-son tournament.

The family said that James Biela had been an average student in high school. He didn’t date, they said; he was shy but had a great sense of humor. He worked at a pizza parlor, at Target, and at the auto shop with his mother while he was in high school. He enjoyed Spanish class, jazz and heavy metal music, and playing video games.

“He really was a normal kid,” Ron Lovell said. “He didn’t kill the family pets or do anything that would indicate he is a person who could do something like this.”

After graduation, James Biela joined the Marine Corps and did well, until his discharge for drug use. Then he returned to Reno, where he eventually had problems with the police due to his dust-up with former girlfriend Angi Carlomagno, her neighbor, and her boyfriend. Then he met Carleen Harmon; and when they had a son, Ron Lovell said, Biela’s life changed.

“He really grew up and loved being a father,” Ron said. “He wanted to provide for his family and went to school to be a plumber’s apprentice.”

While Reno waited for Biela’s trial to begin, all his family could do was wait for the time when, if he was to be convicted, they would get the opportunity during the penalty phase to tell about the Jimmy they knew and loved. They would have only one chance to convince the jury that he was still their gentle, beloved little brother, who deserved mercy, not the monster that could very well be sentenced to death for kidnapping, raping, and murdering Brianna Denison without a second thought.