Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (27 page)

The first uniformed officers to reach the scene on Colorado Boulevard expected the worst; they saw a motionless man and woman and an officer on the ground.

Randy Yoder had been incredibly lucky as he stood in the middle of what was a virtual shooting gallery trying to save the life of the old man, who scuttled for safety in vain. Yoder was bleeding profusely from what proved to be two grazing rather than penetrating wounds.

Paramedics from the Denver Fire Department inserted breathing tubes into the unconscious man and woman and attempted to force oxygen into their lungs, knowing as they did so that it was probably no use.

Then the female shooter, the elderly man, and Randy Yoder were rushed to the Denver Health Medical Center’s emergency room. Yoder was admitted in fair condition. Dr. Katie Bates wiped away the blood on his belly and found that his wounds were painful but not critical, though a few centimeters either way and it would have been a different story. He was treated and observed for several hours then was released.

Dr. Andy Knaut checked the shooter and her victim. At eighteen minutes after six he pronounced the elderly man dead. A minute later, he pronounced the woman dead.

The case was assigned to homicide detectives Dave Neil and Dale Wallis. Along with many officers and crime scene experts from the Denver Police Department, they arrived at the Gang Unit.

People were leaving the nearby IMAX theater, kids were playing football in the park, and nearby residents were standing in their yards, wondering what had happened as they listened to sirens, watched whirling blue lights atop cruisers, and saw a score of police vehicles pulled up close to the parking lot where the shooting had taken place.

Detectives swarmed over the lot, whose surface was sprinkled with dull brown oak leaves and fresh blood, some of it in pools, some of it a path of dots, as if someone actively bleeding had run between the SUV and Randy Yoder’s truck. Its doors open, the SUV was parked headed north. Yoder’s truck, also with its doors open, was headed in the opposite direction. They were four to five feet apart.

The investigators marked the myriad spots where evidence lay: bullet casings, fragments and expended rounds, a cell phone, a man’s Burberry wool cap, and sunglasses. Every bullet or casing was noted with a yellow billboard-shaped marker with a number. There were almost two dozen on the ground near Yoder’s truck, and five under the tree between Justyn Rosen’s SUV and a green metal picnic table.

One of the most interesting items lying on the asphalt driveway was a small tape recorder with the tape inside intact.

The detectives took scores of photographs and diagrammed and measured the area. Practically in City Park, it was also close to homes. The crowd on the other side of the yellow crime-scene tape grew, their voices hushed and curious.

Identification of the two deceased people came as a shock to many Denverites. Justyn Rosen, 79, long familiar because of his automobile dealerships and as a benefactor of numerous charities, seemed to be the last person who would die in a shoot-out.

The woman, whose lovely face later appeared in
The Denver Post
and
The Rocky Mountain News
and on the eleven o’clock television news was familiar to only a few. She was Teresa Perez.

The members of the Gang Unit had no idea what led up to the bloodbath in their parking lot, but they soon learned about the end of the affair between Rosen and Perez and then what detectives found when they traced their lives back to their childhoods.

The tape in the recorder unveiled much of the story of the relationship between the old man and the beautiful younger woman. It was a soundtrack for the last reel of a true-life
Fatal Attraction.
Of course Justyn Rosen in no way resembled Michael Douglas, but Teresa was as attractive and obsessed as Glenn Close was in that memorable—and frightening—movie.

Teresa apparently felt the need to let the world know why she was choosing what she believed was her only way out of a tangled and tragic life. That tape, combined with interviews detectives and reporters had with people in Rosen’s and Perez’s lives, explained many of the whys of the carnage outside the Gang Unit.

After brooding and sobbing all day on October 2—her daughter Lori’s twentieth birthday—Teresa grew more upset. She hid from process servers who knocked on her door to deliver the restraining order to keep her away from Justyn. She called Bob Costello and asked him if God would forgive her if she committed suicide. She had threatened to kill herself before, so alarm bells didn’t sound as loudly as they would have for the average woman. Costello assured her that God would forgive her, and he asked Teresa to call him back later so they could discuss the matter. That approach usually worked to calm her down, and it would give her time to think.

But she had thought about her life for a long time, and she had apparently found only hopeless dead ends. One warning sign that indicated her desperation was that she gave her precious dog, a little Yorkie named Shelby, to her daughter, Lori, for her twentieth birthday.

Teresa Perez had made up her mind. She was not going to be ignored. The next day, she also called her foster mother in a hysterical rage. “He scammed me all along, didn’t he?” Teresa demanded to know. “I could’ve gone on with my life and done other things. But I sat here and waited for six years!”

She seemed to be out of control, heartbroken and angry that the man she truly appeared to love—despite his age and infirmity—was using legal means to get rid of her.

Perhaps both Teresa Perez and Justyn Rosen were thinking about their religious beliefs during the final few days. She wanted to be sure she would go to heaven if she killed herself, and Justyn, a devout Jew, might have been adhering to his religion. Yom Kippur, the highest Holy Day of the Jewish religion, would be on Sunday, October 5. It is the Day of Atonement, on which Jews make amends for their sins of the year just past with fasting and prayer. By Sunday, Justyn would need to demonstrate his repentance and try to make up for his sins. If he wanted to change the judgment written in the book in which God inscribes all names, he needed to accomplish it the next twenty-four hours. The fasting would begin before sunset on Saturday night and continue for twenty-five hours until after dark on Yom Kippur with many of Denver’s devout Jews praying for hours in their synagogues.

Now it was approaching sunset on October 3. Justyn Rosen and his family would, in all likelihood, pray on Yom Kippur at Temple Emanuel. Arguably, the old man had much to atone for.

Hours earlier on that Friday evening, Teresa had decided to be in charge of her last act. She rented a dark-colored SUV so that Justyn wouldn’t recognize her own white car. Once she was in the posh Hilltop neighborhood, she parked near the bottom of his driveway, partially blocking an exit. She left the engine running as she knocked on the Rosens’door, forcing her way in at gunpoint when it opened.

Justyn’s wife and daughter later found Teresa’s rented car. Curious, they looked inside and saw a backpack, an empty gun case, and some envelopes with notes in them. They felt they knew who they belonged to, and they told a friend that the messages were from a woman who “wanted money from their family.” He glanced at one of the notes and sensed that it was really a suicide note. He called police and waited for them to arrive. The date on the suicide note was January 24, 2002, almost two years earlier. Nevertheless, it was ominous. Several paragraphs began, “In the event of my death…” and ended with instructions for Teresa Perez’s funeral arrangements and what bequests she wanted her children to have. But she hadn’t killed herself then; hopefully, Bob Costello was right. Teresa was just off on another of her wild tears. His family didn’t know it yet, but Teresa had, quite literally, kidnapped Justyn. He was gone from home. She had already mailed new suicide letters to those who were on her mind, people she loved and those she resented.

And then Teresa had forced Justyn into his new white Expedition and told him to begin driving. It was rush hour on a Friday afternoon and traffic was heavy.

The voices on tape indicated that they drove aimlessly around Denver as she railed at him, telling him that neither of them was going to live.

Histrionic as always, Teresa wanted the world to know her story. She memorialized their conversation on the small tape recorder, perhaps thinking—as some dramatic would-be suicides do—that she would be able to listen to it one day, not comprehending that she would not be around to relive what she was doing. She thought she would feel the shock waves that would wash across Denver. She believed that she would be able to watch television news and see her name—and Justyn’s—on the front page of area newspapers.

For the moment, the knowledge that she was terrifying the man she considered a faithless lover seemed to be enough.
She
was in charge of their lives at last.

Her voice on the tape rambled on, out of touch with reality. She was clearly distraught and emotional. Her vocabulary was profane as she repeatedly threatened Justyn Rosen.

Teresa addressed her taped remarks alternately to Justyn and his lawyer, a man she intensely resented. “Craig Silverman,” she said scornfully. “I already got all the letters out in the mail, to newspapers, everything. It’s all out. All the money’s going to one of my relatives that I have. You have pushed me [over the edge].”

Her voice broke as she talked to Rosen. “You’re a dead man tonight, and I’m a dead woman ’cause of you. You went too far. You do one wrong thing, and I’m gonna shoot you.

“I saw [
sic
] your lawyer calling me, and here’s your lawyer with an [unintelligible]. You’re setting me up.”

“Bullshit,” Rosen muttered.

“You’re setting me up,” she warned, as she criticized Rosen’s driving, apparently wary that he might deliberately cause an accident to thwart her. “If you hit that car, you’re—as soon as you fuck up on the road, I’m shooting you and then me. So be ready. And I don’t want to kill you, but I’m gonna embarrass the fuck out of you.
I’m
gonna die ’cause I want to go to heaven. If I kill me, I can go to heaven, but if I kill you, I won’t. But I’m gonna shoot you. You’re gonna be shot tonight. Give me your cell phone now.
Give me your cell phone!”

“I’m not gonna do it,” he said firmly.

It was clear what she intended to do if he tried to call for help. “Okay. When you pick it up,” she said, “then you’re shot. Why have you lied to me for six years?”

In crude terms, she recalled her view of their sex life together, reminding him of all she had done for him, sexual favors that only she could provide. She repeated her recollection of what she claimed had been their most intimate moments.

It sounded, too, as though she were giving him driving directions. “Turn here…turn there…Pull over…”

Sometimes Teresa insisted that he stop the car, always with a threatening tone in her voice, which sounds implausible as she was clearly on the fine edge of total hysteria.

They were apparently on Colorado Avenue, close to the Gang Bureau offices, at this point on the tape. It dovetailed precisely with Randy Yoder’s recall of the first glimpse he had of Rosen’s SUV.

“If you get out of the car, you’re shot,” she warned him. “Drive the fucking car up there now. If you…Drive the fucking car! Geez, what are you trying to do?”

She sounded surprised and frightened. “Go straight! What are you trying to do to me?”

“Nothing,” Rosen’s voice said, trying to placate Teresa as he turned into the parking lot. “I just want to…”

It was obvious that she realized Justyn was headed toward the police substation. “Keep driving,” she ordered, “or…[unintelligible]. Go up there.”

She capitulated by allowing him to drive toward Randy Yoder’s truck. “Go up there,” she said. “Oh, you want to be with the police when you die? Okay. If you tell this guy anything, you’re shot now. [unintelligible]
I mean it.”

Teresa’s voice suddenly sounded weary, accepting that it was all over. “Okay,” she said flatly. “You’re done, and I’m done.”

There was an unidentifiable sound on the tape, then Rosen’s voice could be heard asking someone, “Are you the police?”

“Yeah, I’m the police.” It was Randy Yoder’s voice, getting louder as he approached the driver’s window.

There were more sounds, hard to pinpoint, staticky noises, and voices in the background.