Killer Triggers Page 9

  Teens and younger kids who haven’t been hardened by abuse or deep poverty or racism are more likely to tell you the truth if you go at them after building a certain comfort level by asking about their daily life and activities.

  Another method is to make statements that you know are false, or that you at least don’t know are true. If you’ve prepared them properly, kids will sometimes blurt out the truth to correct you or set you straight, even if it incriminates them.

  In this case, I kept asking Chris indirect, nonthreatening questions that gave him wiggle room, or so he thought. In truth, I was leading him through a maze that ended in a prison cell.

  “What do you think ought to happen to the person who murdered Mrs. Limbrick?”

  “He should go to prison and be punished forever.”

  “What should happen to somebody who maybe just knows about it but didn’t do it?”

  Chris fell silent at that one.

  I was in the right church and getting close to the right pew. He didn’t want to talk about that person, because he was that person.

  It was time to bring down the soft hammer.

  “You were there, weren’t you?”

  Now the kid was getting scared. He had never been in such a serious, life-changing moment. He may have taken a car for a joyride and done some other petty crimes, but this was murder. He’d been involved in a horrible and traumatic crime.

  I could see the “tells,” body movements that betray anxiety and fear. Professional poker players are skilled at reading them in the other players. I’m better at reading them in interrogation subjects.

  Christopher’s eyes were dancing, his facial muscles were twitching, and he couldn’t keep his knees and feet still. He was hanging over the edge of the cliff. I offered him a rope. He thought it was for his safety. Silly kid.

  “Okay, son. Here’s what you are going to do. You are going to tell me the truth from here on out. Tell me what happened that day in the Limbrick home? And don’t lie to me this time.”

  A true criminal would have told me to do something unnatural to myself and clammed up. Chris was not one of those guys—yet. He was all bluster and bullshit, but at heart, he was a scared kid. With his parents watching, it was even harder for him to lie to me.

  The story poured out. It wasn’t quite what I’d mapped out in my head, but close. His buddy Chuck had told him a month earlier that he wanted to run away because his parents, especially his mom, were too controlling.

  Chuckie had decided he wanted to escape parental control and move to Canada. Christopher volunteered to go with him because he’d been in trouble for his involvement in the car theft ring. Chuck said Jasmine, a girlfriend, wanted to go with them, too.

  What sort of plan was this? Get away to Canada? Maybe they thought they could tap trees and live off maple syrup. Or take up curling and get endorsements from . . . hell, I don’t know. Who the hell watches curling, let alone endorses it?

  These three idiots didn’t really have a plan. They were spoiled adolescents whose brains were a thousand synapses short of rewiring. They didn’t have passports or a clue.

  Their lamebrain plan was to drive across the northern border in Limbrick’s father’s car, which was parked in the driveway since his dad was on the road in his truck.

  It got worse. Dangerously worse.

  On the morning of their planned getaway, Chuck called and asked his pliable buddy to bring “some protection.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Bring your father’s gun.”

  Being a follower and a dolt, Chris swiped his father’s gun from the closet and put it in his backpack before heading to Chuck’s. They took the father’s car, picked up Jasmine, and headed out, but they’d driven only a few blocks when Chuck saw his mom headed their way in her Buick.

  Betty Jean was coming home between shifts on the school bus.

  “We need to beat her home,” said Chuckie.

  Chris could not figure out why Chuck wanted to return to the house with his mother there, but he went along with the plan because he’s a moron. They sped back and got there before Betty Jean pulled up in her car.

  Chuckie told Jasmine to walk down the street and hang out until he came for her. He and Chris went around back so his mother wouldn’t see them, and climbed in a window.

  Then they waited for her downstairs. Before his mother walked in, Chuckie said to Chris, “Did you bring the gun?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Give it to me! I have to kill her or she’ll come after us and bring us home!”

  Chris said he didn’t believe that Chuck would really shoot his own mother. But the stunned idiot handed his father’s gun over to his friend and then hid in a bedroom.

  Mrs. Limbrick walked in and said, “Chuckie, are you home?”

  Chuckie did not answer. He stayed hidden downstairs.

  Betty Jean came down the steps.

  Chris heard the horrifying click of Chuckie pulling back the hammer of the pistol. Then he heard the explosive gunshot.

  Betty Jean screamed and said, “Chuckie, I love you, but you just shot me!”

  Then Chris heard a second shot, and the sound of Mrs. Limbrick falling to the floor.

  As soon as he told me this, Chris Marrow’s parents looked at him in horror.

  “I came out of the bedroom and saw Mrs. Limbrick dead on the floor,” he said. “Then Chuck told me to get some trash bags so we could dump her somewhere. But I said we needed to get out of there in case someone heard the shots.”

  At that point, Chuck decided to make it look like a burglary gone wrong. He did a half-assed job of that, toppling over a few pieces of furniture and taking the cash from his mother’s purse, as well as her car keys.

  They picked up Jasmine down the street but, after a brief discussion, took her home because Chuckie had decided not to go to Canada, for some reason. Chris couldn’t explain either that or why Chuck decided to drive his mother’s car to the mall and park it outside a Target store.

  Apparently, Chuckie thought that was what a killer burglar would do. Maybe he liked the symbolism. Park the car at Target. Bull’s-eye!

  As Chris laid out the sprawling insanity of this murder, a rare matricide, I asked him why Chuckie would have killed his mother.

  “She had grounded him a couple times because he refused to help out at home, and he hated her for it,” Chris said. “About four months ago, Chuck took a wine cooler out of the refrigerator, and his mother caught him drinking it. She told him to stop. He called her a name. She slapped him in the face. He hated her for that. He told me he wanted to kill her.”

  Not to gloat, which is beneath my dignity, but my first impression of Chuckie the choirboy had been correct. He was a cold-blooded SOB. He’d probably skated through life on his charms and musical gifts and had grown to resent any of his mother’s attempts to control him or get him to do work around the house.

  Everything was fine with him, as long as you didn’t say no.

  There was one other question lingering at that point.

  “Chris, what did Chuck do with the gun?”

  “We took it to our school and hid it in a dumpster,” he said.

  Our guys found the gun registered to Chris Marrow’s father there, at Emerson Junior High School, still in the brown holster. There were two expended casings.

  Chuckie’s fingerprints were all over it—a big oversight by the criminal mastermind.

  We had all we needed.

  Chuck’s father was still on his way back from Louisiana when we took the son into custody. We found him at an aunt’s house. We told him he was under arrest, then cuffed and searched him.

  We found 114 dollars in cash in his shoe—the money he’d taken from his mom’s purse after shooting her twice.

  Now we had more than we needed.

 
When you put someone in jail, at the booking desk they are asked to fill out a simple information card listing the names and addresses of family members. This serves as an informal test to make sure the person isn’t jacked up on some drug or otherwise screwed up. It can also tell us a bit about the person’s state of mind.

  Chuckie’s cold heart came through. He listed his father’s name and then, under his mother’s name, he wrote, “Deceased.”

  This confirmed my suspicion that he was an adolescent sociopath. The kid was all charm, no heart. And no conscience.

  His father seemed to feel the same way.

  When Charles senior finally made it back to Colorado Springs, we already had his son locked up. The dad asked to see him, but from the tone of his voice, we decided that might not be a good idea.

  “Just give me five minutes alone with that little fuck,” he said.

  Or words to that effect.

  Chuckie was charged with first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Chris Marrow was charged with second-degree murder and armed robbery. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eight years.

  blown chances

  In Colorado, we had a children’s criminal code, a separate body of law. Anyone under eighteen is legally a child even though he might be a hulking middle linebacker on the high school football team. The rules said you had to be over twelve and have schemed, designed, shown malice, used a weapon, and caused death before you could be tried as an adult.

  Chuckie qualified, so he was charged as an adult. He was a nice-looking kid, friendly, musically talented. You looked at him and he just seemed like a good guy you’d trust to date your daughter or dog-sit your beloved pooch.

  He was a master at hiding his dark heart.

  Even the notoriously hard-nosed prosecutor who put him in prison later told reporters, “I felt like Chuck had potential. This was a sad case, as heinous as the crime is.”

  At the age of fifteen, Chuckie became the youngest person ever locked up in the Colorado State Corrections System. That fact elicited no little wailing and gnashing of teeth from kindhearted but naive people who hadn’t been shot twice and murdered by the killer choirboy.

  They thought the police and the prosecuting attorney were evil for putting this youngster behind bars with predatory adult criminals. Believe me, Chuckie was nobody’s prey. The kid had very strong survival instincts.

  Normally, I don’t care what happens to a killer once we get him convicted and locked up, but Chuckie’s name kept popping up over the years. He used his musical talents to charm his fellow inmates and corrections officials, working with troubled kids in a prison program, teaching piano and guitar, and performing in prison shows.

  One report said that Limbrick’s Praise Team prison choir had become so popular that the number of inmates attending Sunday services doubled.

  In fawning interviews, he made statements intended to impress the parole board. “I loved my mother and I think of her all the time,” he said in a 2009 newspaper article with the headline “inmate maestro earns respect in prison.”

  “I don’t even know how to relate to the person that I was, what, twenty-one years ago. Wow,” he said in that puff piece.

  Chuck Limbrick worked the system. It took him twenty-three years, but he finally charmed his way to freedom. Colorado Governor Bill Ritter commuted his sentence in 2011, just before leaving public office.

  The public was grateful, until it wasn’t.

  Upon his release, Limbrick launched a Kickstarter fund-raising campaign to raise ten thousand dollars to pay for the recording of his gospel album entitled I Made It, by Chuck Limbrick “Mystro.”

  I found his plea for funding more than a little disturbing. Chuckie wrote that he’d always had a passion for music, but then, “My life changed forever when I was fifteen, and I made a mistake that would give me a life sentence in prison, and I became Colorado’s youngest person at an adult correctional facility.”

  A mistake? You shot your mother twice with a .357 Magnum, and it was a simple mistake?

  I could tell where this was headed, and true to form, Chuckie turned on the charm.

  “After a couple years of being locked up, I decided that I wanted the Lord to use my life, my story, and my passion to bring glory to him. God was able to use all three during my twenty-three years in prison. I was able to lead worship music for the prison ministry, sing in the prison choir, and record two Christian CDs. I was able to use my story to serve as a warning to young people, as well as a testimony to God’s incredible grace and redemption.

  “I now have the freedom to use the gifts and story that God has given me to bring Him glory, so I am doing what I know how to do best: going to the studio . . . God is up to something big, and I would love for you to partner with me in this. Thanks for all your support and prayers. God bless you.”

  He raised more than ten thousand dollars, recorded the album, and sold it on iTunes and other places. He formed a band that played in local churches, and he gave more interviews.

  I found it interesting that in those interviews, Chuckie always dodged the question about why he murdered his mother. Reporters tried to get it out of him, but he was a slippery devil.

  “You ask a kid, ‘Why did you take the cookie out of the cookie jar when I told you not to?’ and the first thing he says is ‘I don’t know,’ and the truth is, he really don’t know,” Chuckie said in one interview. “So you know, in scenarios that I’ve faced in my life sometimes, you know, the reality is, I don’t know.

  “I think that when you’re a young person, you don’t do things purposefully. You just, you act on impulse. You just do what you do.

  “And that’s what’s happening to a majority of the kids out here today.”

  In another interview after his release, the choirboy said he’d been saved by the Lord and forgiven by his mother in heaven.

  “I know my mama loves me, and I believe in my heart that she’s proud of me for the person that I’ve become . . . I love her and I miss her, and I would tell her that I’m working to make her proud and make my family proud. I know I made some mistakes. I know there’s probably a lot of people hurt by a lot of the choices and decisions that I’ve made, but I’m making it right, and I think that she already knows that.”

  Well, not quite, Chuckie boy.

  He wasn’t done making mistakes and bad decisions that hurt other people.

  Just after eleven a.m. on March 4, 2015, while still on parole, he went for a drive after drinking coffee mixed with heavy doses of vodka. His blood alcohol content was nearly three times the legal level of intoxication. That was a bad decision, and Jamie Northam paid the price.

  Limbrick’s car slammed into the back of her vehicle. Northam suffered permanent facial scarring, traumatic brain and soft-tissue injuries, long-term joint disorders, back damage, memory loss, and other health problems.

  Despite all that, Northam and her husband told reporters that they didn’t want Chuckie to return to prison for the rest of his life. Jamie said she felt sorry for him and had forgiven him.

  That was her prerogative, of course. And the judge took it into account. Chuckie did not go back to prison for the rest of his days. Instead, after nearly killing another woman, he was ordered to complete a hundred hours of community service, undergo alcohol education, and get a mental health evaluation.

  I’m sure Chuckie thought that his heavenly supporters were pleased with that outcome. He probably felt that he’d been saved once again despite all the pain, suffering, and death he’d caused.

  But what happened next indicated to me that everyone in this world and the next one, too, had had enough of Chuckie’s bullshit.

  About ninety days after his trial ended, Chuckie went for another drive after drinking alcohol. This time, he didn’t get to hurt anyone else.

  The forty-four-year-old church musician and
convicted murderer rolled the vehicle and was thrown from the car because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. State police said speed and alcohol contributed to the wreck and to his death.

  So long, Chuckie. You finally bit the big one. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy. Some people die too soon. You didn’t die soon enough—in my book, at least.

  Chapter Five:

  A Killer Rental

  the trigger: greed

  After six years as the sergeant in charge of the homicide division, I’d been on call seven days a week for too long, according to Mrs. Kenda. She was more than a little annoyed with me. To avoid a messy divorce (Is there any other kind?) and return to some semblance of a normal family life, I asked for weekends off, and the chief agreed.

  The problem was, I had to train my replacement, and it took forever to get the new guy to where he needed to be. His training took more than a year before I felt comfortable leaving him in charge of the Saturday-Sunday carnival of carnage.

  Finally, at the end of the second week of January 1990, I turned him loose.

  “Honey, I’m home!”

  I’d really been looking forward to having a weekend when I could just relax, watch football, and have a couple of beers without death knocking on my door. That first Sunday was set up to be all the sweeter because the Denver Broncos were at home and taking on the Cleveland Browns in the NFL playoffs.

  I actually get to watch a whole football game!

  Or so I thought.

  At eleven a.m., I settled into my favorite chair. The Browns kicked off to the Broncos. I was at peace with the world.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  As John Elway set up the offense for the first series of plays, the damned telephone rang.

  This isn’t going to be good news, I thought.

  “Sarge, I’m at a house in the East Lakes neighborhood, and the chief is here and it looks like some sort of a religious ritual killing with bodies everywhere. Oh, my gawd, you gotta get over here!”