Killer Triggers Read online

  “That’s bullshit,” he said. “We never went to that house. The landlord called and asked for an estimate. When I told him it would be a hundred dollars for the repair, he hung up on me. I never heard another word from him.”

  He showed us his service records for the date in question. We believed him. We then described to him the hammered vent put in upside down. He was appalled.

  “That’s some jackass amateur who didn’t know what the hell he was doing,” he said. “Our guys would know better.”

  It appeared that Atkinson had tried to do the repair himself, then filled out the forms claiming that a licensed contractor had done the work. (Because of this case, the city’s regulations were tightened up to prevent that sort of deception in the red-tag program.)

  Atkinson had faked the signature on the document and lied about the repair, and on top of that, he put the replacement part into the heater backward and then hammered the hell out of it because it wouldn’t fit.

  Then Atkinson made the house even deadlier. The landlord figured that only one working heater wouldn’t keep the entire place warm unless there were no air leaks, so he went around and made sure the house was airtight. That was the one job he actually did right, and it proved fatal for his next renters.

  In the process, he turned the heater vent into a lethal weapon, a carbon monoxide death-ray machine. Atkinson had figured they wouldn’t complain about it being cold. Of course, they couldn’t complain if they were dead, either.

  Atkinson claimed that the ancient wall heater had been repaired, but he lied. He was much better at lying than at fixing things.

  Keep in mind, it wasn’t that he couldn’t afford to maintain his properties. He was just cheap. We eventually found out that he had more than a million dollars in the bank, plus all the equity in the many properties he owned.

  Greed was the trigger in this homicide case. And believe me, it did become a homicide case. A hardworking woman and four kids were dead because this asshole landlord was too miserly to have the wall heater properly fixed.

  The media and police brass lost interest because it happened to a blue-collar family in a poor neighborhood, but I wanted this son of a bitch to pay for what he’d done.

  the landlord from hell

  Once we’d built up a good case against him, I paid a visit to the landlord from hell. He lived alone. Not surprising. We sat down in his kitchen for a little chat.

  “We have a problem, Mr. Atkinson,” I said. “We’ve found that you lied about having a licensed contractor repair that wall heater after your previous tenants were nearly killed. You did a hack-job repair and then filled out those forms yourself. Then you rented the place to a family of five and they died because of your shitty repair job on your shitty wall heater in your shitty house.

  “That sets you up nicely for five counts of criminally negligent homicide, and you are under arrest.”

  I had expected a denial, an explosion of anger, or at least a plea for mercy. I had no hope for a confession or any sign of remorse. This miser was a cold fish.

  His only response was, “What will my bond be?”

  I told him probably two hundred thousand, which meant he could post twenty thousand and get out until it was time for his trial.

  Hearing that, he stood up from the table, went to a coffee can over his stove, took the lid off, and pulled out a huge wad of hundred-dollar bills. Then he counted out twenty thousand and stuffed the rest back in the coffee can.

  “I don’t think I did anything wrong,” Atkinson said, “but if the court says I did, I’ll take my medicine.”

  “Oh, there will be medicine to take, Mr. Atkinson,” I said as I cuffed him, tight as they would go.

  Then we drove to the county jail, where he was booked. I didn’t stay to watch him walk out. I might have run him over with my squad car, accidentally.

  Before he bailed out, I went back to his home to search it after leaving him at the jail. He had elderly friends who kept an eye on him. Atkinson was only seventy-three, but he seemed older than that. Something was off. He just seemed emotionally stunted and lethargic.

  There was an older woman there, his friend. Maybe his only friend.

  “I arrested him, but he’ll probably be back home before long,” I told her. “I can’t really read him, but he seems depressed, so you might want to keep an eye on him.”

  “Okay,” was all she said. She and Atkinson seemed to have surliness in common.

  I really don’t know why I cared about his state of mind. Maybe I just wanted to make sure I saw him convicted and locked up for his greed and negligence.

  Later, I received word that he had posted bond and gone home. I tried to put the whole case out of my mind and get some R&R with the family that night.

  My phone rang at 5:13 a.m.

  “Mr. Atkinson was found dead in his car with the engine running in his closed garage,” a patrolman said.

  He’d killed himself with carbon monoxide. Maybe he figured it was some sort of poetic justice. I found it pathetic, but then, I was glad no one else would die in one of his houses because of his greed.

  I went to his house that morning before they cleared it for release of his body. He was slumped behind the wheel; his skin was clearly marked by the “carnation pink and apple-blossom white” striations characteristic of CO poisoning.

  Despite my contempt for Atkinson, I was starting to feel a little sad for him when his neighbor-lady friend walked up to me, looking as if she wanted to strangle me with her old-lady shawl.

  “You pulled the trigger on him!” she shrieked.

  Then she kicked me so hard in the shin, I damn near went down. If the Broncos ever needed a punter, I’d recommend that old biddy to them. She had a leg on her.

  She was still cussing at me as two patrolmen dragged her away. They were going to arrest her for assaulting a police officer, but I told them to let her go.

  I left her bawling in the driveway. Then I went to the nearest 7-Eleven store and bought a box of Band-Aids because the blood was seeping through my pants and down my leg. I did my own first aid on a curb outside the store.

  Then I went back inside the 7-Eleven and did something I hadn’t done for three years. I bought a pack of Marlboros, went back to my unmarked car, and smoked every one of them—with the windows down, just in case.

  Smoking can kill a guy, you know.

  Then my radio went off with another homicide report, and I got right back into the game.

  and then this happened . . .

  Fast-forward twenty years. By then I’m long retired from the police department and working with a camera crew in Denver, on a commercial for Homicide Hunter.

  The idea of the commercial was built around me doing a murder investigation. We were shooting in an alley in a really shitty part of downtown because they wanted it to look gritty and realistic. We were doing the shoot at two a.m. to avoid a lot of traffic and gawkers.

  The commercial producers had hired six off-duty Denver cops as security on the set. There was one older guy and a few younger cops. Before we started shooting, they all came up to say they liked the show. We stood there just shooting the breeze while waiting for the cameras and lighting to be set up.

  The older cop was a guy named Mendez. I teased him saying that I was surprised to see a veteran out pulling security for extra cash, which was usually something younger guys with families did.

  “Oh, Joe, when I heard you were going to be here, I had to come down,” he said. “I had a family reunion a while back, and when I told my cousin you were coming to Denver, he asked me to get a photograph with you.”

  I said I’d be glad to do that.

  “Is your cousin a fan of the show?” I asked, just making small talk.

  “Well, yeah,” said Officer Mendez, “but that’s not the reason you’re his hero.”

 
“Why would I be his hero?” I asked.

  “Well, do you remember the Gerardo case, where the woman and four kids died of carbon monoxide poisoning in a rental house?”

  “Sure I do. That case was a heartbreaker,” I said.

  “My cousin’s son was best friends with the ten-year-old Gerardo boy. My cousin’s boy was invited to stay all night with him on the night they all died, but his mother wouldn’t let him go, because he was sick.

  “He’s never gotten over the fact that his friend died that night,” Mendez said. “He and his family consider you a hero for figuring out what happened and charging that landlord.”

  I told him I was glad to help bring him some peace over the loss of his friend.

  Hearing his story gave me a little peace, too. Just a little, but I’ll take what I can get.

  Chapter Six:

  Murder in a Mom ’n’ Pop Shop

  the trigger: money

  This case still gets to me, so as I tell it, you may have to excuse me if I need to go outside and sledgehammer a dirt mound or just scream into my palms until drool drips from my fingers.

  I was just a year into my job as a homicide detective in November 1978 when the call came in. One dead, another close to it, at a neighborhood grocery on the poor side of town.

  I’d been doing search warrant–paperwork training with my brand-spanking-new partner, Manny, a smart kid who would later become a respected police chief in a nearby town.

  At that point, he had just moved over from patrol and had never worked a homicide.

  “Here is your golden opportunity,” I said. “Mount up.”

  Upon arrival at the chaotic crime scene, Manny went from the new guy to an old guy in about thirty minutes.

  This job will do that to you.

  The eighty-three-year-old guy who owned the mom-and-pop grocery was facedown on the floor in a halo of blood. He had multiple stab wounds, and it looked as if someone had stomped all over his lower body. He was breathing when the EMTs arrived, but died while they were treating him.

  Paramedics were preparing to evacuate his wife to the ER. They had found her under a coffee table. She probably crawled there to escape whoever had stabbed and kicked her. Rosa Melena was still breathing, but it didn’t look as though she’d make it. Her face appeared to be crushed on one side. Blood was dripping from her ear.

  They were found in their tiny apartment carved out of the back of the store, which was just through the living-room door. The grocery’s cash register drawer was open, and a coin tray was on the floor. There was a penny on the floor; other than that, the register was empty.

  It was sad, pathetic, and disturbing. There probably wasn’t two hundred dollars in inventory in the whole place. Maybe ten one-gallon containers of milk and fifteen loaves of bread.

  They had scraped by for forty-one years and never had any trouble. They were heroes to many in the neighborhood, providing food to families in need. For this to happen to them was just tragic.

  The couple’s adult son, Rudy, was there when we arrived. He also worked in the store but had gone to his house next door for lunch with his wife. He had rushed over after seeing a man and a woman running from his parents’ place and down the alley behind their houses.

  Rudy, who was in his sixties, said he had tried to give his father CPR after calling 911. He was badly shaken, his shoulders heaving with sobs.

  I felt bad, but I had to keep asking questions.

  “I’m sorry, can you tell me how much money was in the cash drawer?”

  “Thirty-two dollars and change,” he said.

  Then he looked at me, tears flowing down his face, walked up to me, and put an arm around me.

  “Please find the guy who killed my dad,” he said.

  “I will, and I will lock him up,” I said.

  And I did.

  good samaritans brought down

  Severino “Sam” Melena and his wife, Rosa, seventy-three, were good people in a bad part of town. Sam had originally migrated illegally from Mexico to Colorado to take a job in the silver mines in Georgetown. He had also mined coal, I believe. Sam was just a hardworking man who had also worked on the railroad, in a steel mill, and as a rancher.

  I identified with him in part because I grew up in a coal-mining family in Pennsylvania and I knew just what he’d had to go through to support his family. His son shared some stories with me, and my mind took me back to childhood memories of family members talking about cave-ins and poisonous gases. My grandfather was killed in a coal-mining accident. My great uncle, father, and uncle all worked in the mines.

  My path to the police department was partly the result of my determination not to live like a mole underground, waiting to be crushed or gassed. It tore at my heart that Sam Melena had survived that difficult life and then been killed for a few dollars.

  Once he and his family moved to Colorado Springs, they rented their building from a woman who owned a bunch of seedy properties built during the war. The landlady was sort of a benevolent matriarch for the down-and-out residents of the area.

  She gave the Melenas a rent discount for operating the little grocery to provide milk and bread and other basics to neighborhood folks who couldn’t afford cars or bus fare.

  The Melenas were the salt of the earth, just the nicest people. In his later years, Sam taught music and English lessons to other Latinos at the local YMCA. Their son, Rudy, was a great guy, too. He served on the local housing board and was an advocate for the working-class and poor Latinos who lived in the area.

  Many of them, like Sam and Rosa, were not legal residents of the United States, but they were assets to their community. The family was known for their kindness and concern for others. If you had no cash for groceries, no problem. Take care of it when you get paid.

  Back in the 1950s and ’60s, most cities and towns had small corner groceries in neighborhoods. Parents could send their kids over to pick up a couple of cans of soup or some hamburger meat. They’d just say, “Charge it to our ticket.”

  The grocer would send a weekly or monthly bill, and families paid up. There was more trust back then. The grocery owner usually lived in the back of the store, so you were neighbors, too.

  Those stores began to fade in the 1970s as the big national chains like IGA and Piggly Wiggly moved into towns, offering lower prices and a bigger selection. They didn’t take credit. They weren’t your neighbor. They didn’t trust you to pay later.

  “Dad never lost money doing that,” Rudy told me. “People might have taken a while, but they always came back and paid him because he was so good to them.”

  Good people—a rarity in my world. Maybe in yours, too.

  Unfortunately, we have way too many dirtbags like Lawrence Eugene Todd, nineteen, who was quickly identified as a suspect in this case. Rudy had spotted him and his very easy-to-spot girlfriend running down the alley while Rudy was eating lunch next door.

  He knew them because he’d helped the ragged couple find a place to stay down the street. They had shown up at the store a few weeks earlier, saying they were homeless and without money, begging for help.

  When we talked to Rudy that day at the store, he said the couple might have fled to that apartment, but we sent our guys over and they had cleared out. They were in the wind.

  I knew they wouldn’t be that hard to find. They weren’t Bonnie and Clyde—more like the doofus pair from Dumb and Dumber.

  killer couple

  Lawrence Eugene Todd was a blood-sucking leech on the neighborhood, if not a running sore on the face of the planet. He was officially a soldier in the US Army, but he’d given himself leave after deciding he wasn’t cut out for the rigors of military life.

  Besides, he had a girlfriend, Vicki, who was a major distraction from his military duties. She was distracting, period. Vicki was nearly six feet tall, with natural bri
ght-red hair, a frizzy white-girl Afro, and a million freckles.

  We learned that she never completed grade school and spent most of her teen years as a runaway labeled “out of control.” At least, she was never hard to find. With her flaming, flopping hair adding to her considerable height, Vicki stood out in any crowd.

  She was not unattractive, but she had an IQ lower than sea level, and she was a magnet for lowlifes and losers. Lawrence and Vicki were an interracial couple, and they had claimed they were outcasts in our fair state. So they decided to move to central California, where they’d first met. We later found out that Lawrence came from a long line of criminals.

  The California cops told reporters his family was “notorious.” Lawrence Todd had a criminal record dating back at least five years, with multiple juvenile convictions, and charges ranging from assault with a deadly to burglary and resisting arrest. According to media reports, just a couple of years before his savage attack on the Melenas, two of Todd’s brothers were convicted for a home burglary that turned into a murder when the homeowner they had tied up and gagged died of suffocation.

  Maybe Lawrence had joined the army to get away from bad influences at home, but he seemed to bring all that baggage with him. The military life certainly didn’t help him get straight.

  “Fuck the army” was Lawrence’s go-to response when reminded of his commitment to our nation’s defense. He was not a patriot, nor much of a human.

  As you might imagine, his rebellious attitude did not go over well with his commanding officers or with his comrades in arms, so Lawrence had fled Fort Carson for civilian accommodations in Colorado Springs.

  He and Vicki needed a pad as a home base before launching Lawrence’s AWOL plan. They had no money, but when they first showed up at Melena’s grocery, Rudy had helped them out, much to his later regret.

  Finding shelter solved one problem for the sketchy couple. They had a roof over their heads for a few nights, but they still had no money. And they needed cash to get out of Dodge and make their way to La-La Land, where Lawrence figured he could reconnect with his criminal past and never again have to wear camouflage or pull KP duty.