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2018-02-03

#event/trial/verdict/guilty

Posted February 3, 2018 09:47 pm
By

ROBERT STEIN

robert.stein@amarillo.com

Inside the Spielbauer verdict: Jurors describe deliberations that led to conviction, life sentence

A little more than a week ago, seven women and five men gathered around a table. They’d been chosen to determine the guilt or innocence of 35-year-old Jeremy “J.D.” Spielbauer, who was accused of capital murder in the 2014 death of his ex-wife, Robin.

It didn’t take long.

After a total of about four hours of deliberation in Canyon, jurors unanimously agreed to find him guilty of the lesser included offense of murder and to sentence him to life in prison.

The jurors had heard six days of emotional testimony in 251st District Court, reviewed complicated cellphone tracking evidence and saw photos of Robin’s body crumpled beside her SUV on the side of Helium Road, west of Amarillo, and of the autopsy that showed skull fractures and a gunshot wound to the back of the head.

“It’s just an emotional roller coaster,” said juror Damen Ratliff, a 41-year-old City of Amarillo drainage utility superintendent.

“I’ll never pull up to a car on the side of the road and see it the same way again. I’ll always remember Robin laying next to that vehicle.”

Ratliff is one of four jurors who described deliberations to the Globe-News in the week following the verdict and sentence handed down Jan. 25.

The case — which attracted a Dateline NBC camera crew from Los Angeles — centered on a love triangle between Jeremy, his 32-year-old ex-wife and current wife at the time, Katie Phipps.

Phipps, 32, was originally charged with the crime and spent 466 days in jail for the murder before prosecutors cleared her based on cellphone tracking evidence. Much of the trial was spent ruling out Phipps as the murderer.

In opening statements, Randall County Criminal District Attorney James Farren admitted his office had made a mistake in filing the case against Phipps and said county sheriff’s office investigators who built the case had made a rush to judgment.

Juror Alexa Deal, 24, said the idea investigators could be making a mistake again was in the back of her mind during the whole trial.

Deal said she went back and forth on Spielbauer’s guilt and felt for Jeremy and Robin’s two daughters, ages 10 and 14.

“I just wanted to see the good and I was just hoping maybe they got it wrong, maybe something else happened … I didn’t want these children without both parents,” Deal said.

“But the evidence was there. All the evidence changed my mind.”

Undecided

After filing out of the courtroom and into the adjacent deliberation room, the jury selected Stephen Cross, a 39-year-old accountant, as foreman.

Cross passed out slips of paper torn from a notepad and asked jurors to write “G” for guilty, “U” for undecided and “NG” for not guilty.

The pieces of paper were shuffled and read aloud: 10 guilty, one undecided and one not guilty.

“When I saw that, I was like, ‘Well, we have a little work to do,’” said Cross, who cast a “G” vote.

Jurors started going through the evidence that was gathered in the deliberation room, including a few hundred photographs and about two dozen pieces of physical evidence.

“We were able to stay focused, and I felt that we were all really pretty reasonable in our decisions and listening to where people were coming from,” Cross said.

Jurors asked for the alleged murder weapon — a pink-and-black .22 caliber Sig Sauer pistol — to be brought into the room. Investigators recovered the gun, which was owned by Phipps, at the home where Spielbauer and Phipps lived shortly after the murder.

Jurors also examined metal and polymer pieces that investigators said matched the gun and were found at the crime scene.

Deal said she voted undecided initially and had concerns that Phipps could’ve been at the scene. She said she was persuaded after reviewing the evidence.

“Once they brought it all in, and I got to check phone records, and I got to lay out all the evidence in front of me, it was hard to believe she had any part in it,” Deal said.

Deal and others said they were eager to see surveillance footage from an Amarillo National Bank branch at the intersection Southwest 34th Avenue and Soncy Road, about a mile from where Robin’s body was found April 8, 2014.

The footage, which wasn’t played in the courtroom, showed her driving past the bank at 9:21 p.m. on the night of the murder with Spielbauer following at 9:27 p.m. Just before 9:51 p.m., Spielbauer’s truck is captured going back the other way.

Investigators placed the time of the murder between 9:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. on April 7, 2014.

“The key piece of evidence that got me was the ATM surveillance footage, just seeing Robin’s car go by and his car go by,” Deal said. “Obviously it was him if he was the only one out there.”

Eyewitnesses had testified during the trial that Phipps and her young son were at a friend’s home on Karen Street that evening before leaving together, and prosecutors also presented wireless internet tracking data that showed Phipps’ son’s cellphone was connected to a Wi-Fi site at the home until 10:13 p.m. before connecting to a site at Phipps’ home on South Manhattan Street at 10:21 p.m.

Willing to fix ‘the error’

Juror Karla Stoffle said she voted guilty on the first vote and was convinced by the array of evidence, including three videotaped interviews Jeremy gave to investigators that show a shifting story of where he was when his ex-wife died.

In the last video, Spielbauer admits he was at the secluded Helium Road location with Robin when an angry Phipps confronted them there. Spielbauer says he leaves before any violence happened.

“Nobody in their right mind is going to do that,” said Stoffle, a 52-year-old insurance account executive. “You don’t leave your ex-wife and current wife out in the middle of nowhere, going down each other’s throat.”

Testimony indicated Robin was about to end an ongoing affair with Jeremy, whom she had divorced in 2012, and was considering taking him to court for child support. Phipps also testified that her marriage with Spielbauer had become “rocky” and that by April 2014 she had grown angry, suspecting the affair.

Prosecutors argued that Jeremy, under pressure and hoping to remove both women from his life, arranged a meeting on Helium Road with Robin that night, killed her and brought the gun home so it would be linked to Phipps.

Stoffle said she was pleased that the district attorney’s office “kept digging” and brought justice for both Robin and Phipps.

“I think they kept it up until they got to the bottom of it,” she said. “That makes me proud for Amarillo, that they actually saw that they had made a mistake and were willing to correct the error.”

The jury ultimately opted for the lesser crime of murder, which meant jurors didn’t feel Jeremy intended to steal items from Robin — a felony that would have elevated the crime to capital murder.

Cross said he probably read written jury instructions, which included the definitions of murder and capital murder, 10 times or more aloud to jurors as they deliberated.

Jurors said they felt the theft happened, but that Spielbauer didn’t have an intent to commit robbery when he killed Robin and just took the items to cover his tracks. “Basically, it was a crime of opportunity,” Cross said.

The allegedly stolen items were not recovered, but Social Security cards for Spielbauer’s daughters, which Robin’s mother testified were always kept in Robin’s wallet, were found in Spielbauer’s truck after the murder.

‘It should be eternity’

The group spent 2 hours and 49 minutes deliberating before returning the guilty verdict.

Had jurors found Spielbauer guilty of capital murder, the sentence would’ve automatically been life in prison without the possibility of parole because prosecutors had declined to seek the death penalty.

During the punishment phase of the murder conviction, jurors spent 44 minutes deciding on a prison term with a possible range of five years to life. Instead of an anonymous poll, jurors went around the room saying what they thought the sentence should be.

Ratliff said he made a plea to others to consider a 60-year sentence, which still would’ve made Spielbauer first eligible for parole at the same time as a life sentence — after 30 years.

Spielbauer would be free at 94 years old if he served the full 60 years, Ratliff said, and a life sentence would only slap an “exclamation point” on the case.

He said he conceded after other jurors argued that the crime was heinous and that they wanted to send a strong message that they believed the state’s case.

“The statement was made, and I’m not sure who said it, that for Robin it was for eternity, which means for J.D., it should be eternity,” Ratliff said.

“OK. I’m OK with that. I sleep just fine with that decision.”

Cross said the violence of the crime, shown in crime scene and autopsy photos, factored into the final decision.

“After seeing these photos and just the overall violence and the force and the hate that had to have gone on there, or the anger, I felt that he deserved a life sentence,” Cross said.

“I feel that we made the right decision,” Cross said. “I hope Robin’s parents and kids can find some peace in it all.”

Timeline: Spielbauer murder and trial