Dead of Night (17 page)

On that day, her child’s day care center had called and told Carleen that she would need to come and pick her son up. When she told the center’s employees that Biela was already on his way to get their son, she was told that she would have to come for the boy because the police were at the center. The center’s staff would not give her any further information over the phone. Carleen’s first thought, she said, was that there had been a car accident. To her complete shock, she soon found out otherwise.

Biela called her into the police station after he was arrested. She tried once again to calm him down and assure him that he would not be charged. She met him in an interrogation room.

“As you walked into that room [to talk to Biela], did you think he had done something then?” asked Deputy District Attorney Sattler.

“No,” Carleen answered.

“You were going out of your way [to support him] because you still believed in him?”

“Yes.”

Sattler asked her if her opinion had changed since that time, and the defense immediately objected to his question. But before Judge Robert Perry could rule on their objection, however, Carleen quickly answered. She told Sattler that yes, her opinion had, indeed, changed.

Chapter 22

Carleen Harmon had gone to meet with Biela at the police station in an interview room following his arrest. One of the items of evidence shown to the jury during the trial was the video that had been made of the meeting. Biela’s face was shown, but Carleen’s face had been blurred on that copy of the video by the judge’s order. The effort at concealment made little difference in protecting Carleen’s identity, however. The video was released to the press after it was shown in court and entered into evidence at the trial. The meeting in the interrogation room had been highly emotional. The tape showed Carleen walking into the room where Biela waited. She was holding her head in her hands, crying. She became nearly hysterical when she saw him, saying again and again, “Did you do this? Oh, my God, did you? Did you?”

She walked over to Biela and they hugged, but she continued to ask him if he was guilty, crying the entire time. There were stretches of the conversation that were unintelligible; but at one point, Biela asked her why she had lied.

“About what?” she asked, and Biela answered that she’d lied to him about their son’s DNA. Carleen asked him if the boy’s DNA had matched that of the killer, and Biela said he didn’t know. Then he asked her not to let the boy forget him.

He told Carleen he didn’t want to live anymore. He had wanted to buy a gun the previous week, he said, but he couldn’t. When she asked him why he wanted one, Biela told her he was going to shoot himself.

“I’m not a piece of shit,” he told her. “I don’t know what to do.”

Carleen pleaded with him, crying, to tell her the truth. “Tell me, please.”

Biela began apologizing to her for ruining “Thanksgiving and your birthday,” evidently trying to sidetrack the conversation. Carleen, however, still wanted some straight answers.

“Your DNA matches,” she told him.

Biela then claimed, “They threatened to kill me tonight. They’re listening right now.”

“I don’t care,” Carleen told him, “let them listen.”

“I don’t want to be alive anymore,” Biela said, beginning to sob.

Carleen still begged for the truth. “Please! I need to know. Please!”

Biela was full of self-pity. “You’re going to leave,” he told her. “You’re going to leave me.”

Carleen again begged for an answer. “Please,” she said again.

“I can’t right now,” Biela answered, telling her, “They’re going to kill me, anyways.”

“Tell me,” she told him, “tell me. I can help you.”

“You can’t help me,” Biela said. “At this point, it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry I fucked it up. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter to me,” Carleen sobbed.

Then Biela asked a telling question: “If I told you, ‘I did it,’ would you still love me and be with me?”

Carleen’s answer to that question was inaudible.

After more unintelligible conversation and mutual crying, Biela asked Carleen again not to let their son forget him, and he said once more that he was sorry.

“I’m sorry for everything,” he said. “I’m sorry for being a fuckup.”

Later, following their meeting, Biela was taken to the Washoe County Jail by Detective David Jenkins, who had heard Biela saying to Carleen that he didn’t want to live anymore. Jenkins told him that he shouldn’t hurt himself, but Biela told Jenkins and the other officers present that he was evil and he hoped his son “wouldn’t be fucked up like him.”

 

 

As witness after witness took the stand and testified, the evidence against James Biela continued to mount up in all three cases.

When the prosecution called the police expert on tracking cell phone records, the officer testified about calls made from Biela’s phone on the dates of the December 16, 2007, rape of Virgie Chin and the January 20, 2008, abduction and murder of Brianna Denison.

Officer Joe Robinson had reviewed Biela’s cell phone activity and found that Biela had called his friend, Carl Jaeger, two times on December 16, 2007, around two hours before the rape. Jaeger had previously testified that he had received a call from Biela that night, but he had not answered his phone. The cell phone tower that was used for the calls to Jaeger was in Northwest Reno, Robinson told the jury.

Another call that Robinson testified about had been made from Biela’s phone to his voice mail on January 20, 2008, the morning when Brianna was taken, Robinson said. The call had been made using a tower located northwest of Virginia and North McCarran, about a mile and a half from the apartment where Brianna was spending the night.

Verizon network operations technician Mike Metcalf testified that if someone had been calling voice mail from the vicinity around the Brianna Denison abduction site, it was highly likely that the cell phone they were using would have connected with the tower northwest of Virginia and North McCarran.

 

 

DNA expert Brittany Baguley offered her findings on the tests she had run on the human hair that had been found in Biela’s truck and the DNA results of those tests. FBI trace evidence examiner Stephen Shaw testified about finding fibers from Biela’s truck carpet on Brianna’s socks.

Detective Zachary Thew told the court that when he searched Biela’s truck, he found two boxes of nine-millimeter ammunition and a receipt from Scheels sporting-goods store for a nine-millimeter Glock pistol. The receipt indicated that before Biela could take possession of the gun, he had to pass a background check.

Detective Troy Callahan testified that he had searched Biela’s travel trailer, which had been stored at EZ Storage near Lemmon Valley. Inside the trailer, hidden inside a storage compartment, Callahan told the jury that he had found two pairs of thongs: one was brown, with pink polka dots, and the other was a multicolored fruit design. Both thongs were size small. Biela had purchased the 1972 Road Ranger trailer for $600 on June 18, 2008, and the woman who sold him the trailer told the investigators that the thongs weren’t hers. She had never seen them before.

When Detective Roya Mason, of the Reno Police Department, took the witness stand, she testified about the forensic searches she had done on the three computers belonging to Biela. Thousands of hits had been found for “thong,” she said, along with hundreds of photos of women wearing thongs. There had been 1,408 hits on one computer and 1,164 on another, Mason said, with one typical site called “Buy used dirty thongs.” Many of the website pages that were involved had been viewed between May and November 2008; some of the pages had even been viewed on the morning of Biela’s arrest.

Deputy District Attorney Chris Hicks asked, “Based on your review, did you find any appetites or themes?”

“I thought an interest in the thongs and women in thongs was a theme,” Mason answered.

 

 

Detective David Jenkins testified at length about several aspects of both the assault cases, as well as Brianna Denison’s murder. He told the jury that several things linked all three of the cases. The DNA evidence from the December assault case was a match for the DNA that had been taken from the doorknob at the house where Brianna disappeared, Jenkins said. After Brianna’s body was found, the sperm taken from her body was found to be a positive link to both the doorknob sample and the DNA from the December assault.

Jenkins also told the court that if a circle had been drawn around the location of all three of the crimes, it would have been a little smaller than four hundred yards in diameter.

“There was something about that neighborhood,” Jenkins said. “The offender either worked or lived in the neighborhood or had some connection with that neighborhood. If he struck again, he would likely strike in that same neighborhood.”

Jenkins said that following the crimes, additional police patrols had been added in that area because of the likelihood that it was the assailant’s chosen “hunting grounds.”

Through the prosecutors, jurors had been allowed to ask Jenkins questions about the December 2007 sexual-assault case. In one of those questions, Jenkins was asked if the investigators had considered any vehicles other than Biela’s Toyota Tacoma truck. Jenkins responded that a wide range of similar vehicles had been looked at, but it had been determined that a 2008 Toyota Tacoma had been the best fit for the very detailed description given by one of the assault case victims.

Another question for Jenkins was why the attacker in the case had apologized to his victim, and Jenkins said that many sex offenders often did the same.

“Even in the midst of unspeakable violence, offenders will often apologize, or say, ‘This isn’t really what I want to do.’”

When a juror asked Jenkins about Biela’s stated attempt to buy a gun, as he had said in his meeting with Carleen Harmon, that particular question resulted in the defense calling for a mistrial when court resumed the following morning, before the jury was seated.

The juror had wanted to know Jenkins’s opinion as to why Biela would have wanted to buy a gun if he already owned one, which he had allegedly used in the assault/rape case in October 2007. Biela’s victim in that assault had testified earlier in the week that he had raped her at gunpoint in a parking garage.

The juror’s question prompted James Leslie, the deputy public defender, to claim that Biela should be granted a mistrial. The question, he said, suggested that the juror who had asked that question had already determined Biela’s guilt in that sexual-assault case.

Deputy District Attorney Elliott Sattler, however, was not of the same opinion. He told the judge that the question only showed that the juror was paying attention to all the details of the three cases. The juror had heard testimony about Biela using a gun in the sexual-assault case; then she had heard other testimony saying that he had tried to buy a gun prior to his arrest.

Sattler told the judge, “The question itself doesn’t suggest that, at this moment, she believes Mr. Biela is guilty.”

The judge called the juror into the courtroom alone to ask her about her question and to find out whether or not she had already formed an opinion about Biela’s guilt or innocence.

“Is there anything about this note [containing the question for Detective Jenkins] that we should be concerned about indicating you have made your mind up about the attack?” Judge Perry asked the juror.

“No, sir,” she promptly answered, “not at all.”

Perry thanked the juror and sent her back into the jury room, ruling that the trial would continue and a mistrial would not be granted.

Maizie Pusich, the other public defender for Biela, later told the press that it was too soon to decide whether the judge’s decision would be a point for appeal if Biela was convicted. If it got to that point, Pusich said, the defense team would be looking at every possibility for appeal.

 

 

When Eric Marconato, an instructor in martial arts and a Sparks police officer with whom Biela had studied, heard about Biela’s arrest, he contacted the investigators. He harbored serious suspicions that the jiu-jitsu move that was used on one of the sexual-assault victims sounded to him like something that he had taught Biela during their classes.

As a witness, he told the court that the move he had shown Biela, grabbing a person from behind and holding him around the neck and shoulders in a certain position, could render the victim unconscious in seconds. The “rear naked hold,” as it was called, was very similar to what one of the victims had described in her testimony during the trial when she told the court that she was grabbed from behind and quickly taken down to the ground by her attacker.

Biela had a blue belt, the instructor said, and had been training in martial arts for around three years. When he found out that Biela had been arrested, he said, he had become concerned that some of the moves and maneuvers he had taught during the training might have been used by Biela in the assaults.

Anthony Napierski, a friend of Biela’s who had taken the jiu-jitsu classes with him, also testified about Biela’s martial arts experience and training. Anthony testified that Biela was skilled with the hold in question, the one that had been used in the assaults. When asked what the effects of that move by a man of Biela’s size would be against a small woman, Anthony said that the woman would be defenseless; she wouldn’t be able to do anything. “She wouldn’t be able to get away,” he said.

 

 

When the prosecution finished calling all its witnesses, the state rested its case. The defense then began with its first witness, DNA and paternity expert Roger Vincent Miller. Miller started by criticizing the Washoe County Crime Laboratory for their decision to use all of the swabs they collected in the case to establish DNA profiles. This, Miller said, made it impossible for anyone else to check the crime lab’s results.

“A better way of doing this would have been to split [the samples] in half,” said Miller, of Chromosomal Labs, based in Phoenix, Arizona. Miller said that the lab could have started with half; then if that was not enough, it could have added the rest.

“The question is, was there a justification for [using up all the samples], and I’m not sure there was,” Miller said. He said that national standards required using only a portion of the samples so that the other side could retest.

Miller told the court that he had seen what might have been additional DNA in one of the samples found on Brianna’s body, but he could not retest to determine what he had seen.

“We did find one peak that did not correspond with either the victim or the defendant in this case,” he said. It raised the question, Miller said, that if they had been able to do an additional test, they might have found someone else’s DNA on the swab.

To the surprise of the court, Miller was not only the first defense witness to testify—he was also the last. Following his testimony, to the amazement of the spectators in the courtroom, the defense rested its case.