Dead of Night (10 page)

Five days later, on Wednesday, November 12, 2008, Jenkins and Wygnanski both met with and interviewed Carleen Harmon. During the interview, Carleen stated that she had been involved in a romantic relationship with Biela for about six years, and that she and Biela had a four-year-old child together, a boy. When delicately pressed for assurances that Biela was the boy’s father, Carleen told the detectives that she had no doubt whatsoever that Biela was the child’s father.

Surprisingly, Carleen did not provide Biela with an alibi. She said that she was not able to account for his whereabouts during the early-morning hours of either December 16, 2007, the morning that Virgie Chin was attacked, or on January 20, 2008, when Brianna Denison had disappeared. She explained that she and Biela, despite their six years together, had what had often been a tumultuous romantic relationship. She told the officers that the relationship had been especially difficult in October 2007, with them fighting almost every day. By December 2007, they were sleeping apart. She said that during the winter months of 2007 and into 2008, Biela would just up and leave their residence for days at a time, with no explanation. During those absences, she said, when she asked where he had been, he would tell her that he had been sleeping in his truck.

Carleen also told the detectives that Biela had left the Reno area between March 2008 and September 2008 to work as a pipe fitter somewhere in the state of Washington. While he was gone from Reno, Carleen said, Biela sold his Toyota Tacoma pickup truck and purchased another truck.

When Biela decided to move back to the Reno area, Carleen explained, she had gone to Washington in September 2008 to help him make the move. While there with him, she said, she had found some petite-sized women’s thong panties inside his vehicle. She suspected that he had been cheating on her. When she confronted him about the underwear, she said, he had gotten angry at first; then he finally told her that he had stolen them from a woman at a Laundromat in Washington.

During their interview with Carleen, Detective Jenkins and Detective Wygnanski asked her if she would voluntarily provide a DNA reference sample from her son that they could compare to the suspect’s DNA sample. Because she was confident of Biela’s innocence, she agreed. Both detectives witnessed the DNA reference sample as it was collected from the child. Afterward, they personally delivered the sample to the Washoe County Crime Laboratory.

Following the interview with Carleen, Jenkins and Wygnanski, along with several of their colleagues, began putting together additional background on James Biela. To the investigators, it began to look like he very likely might be the man they had been hoping for so long to find.

 

 

James Michael Biela had been born on June 29, 1981, in Chicago, Illinois. He was nine years old when his family moved to Reno. Later in life, he would be known as the life of the party or a barroom gathering, a funny guy who also took martial arts classes. Friends and acquaintances said that he had a quick temper, and some people described him as a bully. He joined the Marine Corps right after high school. After completing basic training in San Diego in autumn 1999, he was promoted to the rank of lance corporal and stationed at Fort Lejeune, North Carolina. He was discharged from the Marine Corps in 2001 for drug use.

On July 12, 2002, during the early-morning hours, a short time after his return to the Reno area, Biela caught the attention of authorities when he drunkenly threatened a former girlfriend’s neighbor with a knife and was arrested. At that time, he lived in the Truckee Meadows area. Angi Carlomagno, the former girlfriend, filed a restraining order against him because of his violent tendencies. He pleaded guilty in April 2003 to a misdemeanor charge involving the knife incident.

In that incident, Biela had shown up at Angi Carlomagno’s home after the two had split up a month earlier. He was drunk, and he ran over her mailbox and the mailbox of a neighbor. Angi told police that she was awakened early that morning by the sounds of her dogs barking. When she got out of bed, she found that Biela had entered her house and was standing there, confronting her with a beer in his hand. Angi ordered him to leave her house and took his beer away from him; then she followed him outside.

“He had a knife and came into my house without consent,” she said. “He kicked my dog and grabbed me. The police came and a report was made.”

While she argued with Biela as they stood along the side of the house, a neighbor, Sukhjit Singh, tried to assist her by trying to pull her into his house through a sliding glass door.

Biela pulled a knife from a sheath on his belt on his right side and made a swinging motion toward Singh with his knife,
the police complaint said.
Singh said he was going to call the police.
Afterward, Biela left the Carlomagno residence and drove away. A third person witnessed the incident from inside a neighboring house.

However, according to police, Biela’s harassment of Angi did not end at that time, despite the temporary protection order (TPO) she had filed against him. On August 22, 2002, he purportedly called her at work three times, “wanting to talk.” She told him during the first call that she did not want to talk to him and hung up. During the second call, the receptionist told Biela that Angi was out and unavailable. When he called back a third time, he pretended to be from Wells Fargo. However, when Angi recognized his voice, she promptly hung up once again.

At one point, on September 6, 2002, Biela allegedly made contact with her at the Silver Peak Brewing Company while she was in the company of her boyfriend. He tapped her on the shoulder and told her he wanted to talk to her. The encounter ended up as more than just a conversation. Biela began yelling obscenities at her and trying to fight with her boyfriend in front of the restaurant/brewery, ultimately ending with him being kicked out by the establishment’s staff. That same night, Biela called and left seven lengthy voice mail messages of approximately fifteen minutes each on Angi’s telephone, saying that he was going to “get” her. Angi stated that all of the calls had been “explicit and of a threatening nature.” She said that Biela also sent her “various explicit and threatening e-mails.” Angi’s TPO was, of course, granted, but the efforts of the police to serve the restraining order on James Biela were not successful.

Biela was originally charged with felony assault for the knife threat, and the charge was reduced to simple assault—a misdemeanor—according to court records. Biela pleaded guilty to the lesser charge, according to court documents, and was sentenced to “driving under the influence” (DUI) school and ordered to have no contact with Angi Carlomagno for a year. In short, he got off easy and did not serve any jail time. Furthermore, no DNA samples were collected at that time, because the charge had been reduced to a misdemeanor.

 

 

Detective Jenkins made a note to himself to check out Biela’s prior criminal record more thoroughly, just to determine whether anything else existed that might have slipped through the cracks.

On Tuesday, November 25, 2008, Jenkins received a call from Jeff Riolo, a DNA analyst at the Washoe County Crime Laboratory. The call reminded Jenkins of the one he had received more than eight years earlier from the commander of the crime lab—the call that a match had been hit regarding Lisa Bonham’s killer. On this occasion, Riolo told Jenkins that he needed to meet with him about the case.

When Jenkins arrived at the crime lab, Riolo told him that he personally had developed the DNA profile that Jenkins and Wygnanski had collected from James Biela and Carleen Harmon’s son nearly two weeks earlier. He had compared the boy’s DNA profile to that of the suspect’s DNA profile, which had been kept at the crime lab, he said. Riolo also told Jenkins that he had determined that the biological father of the submitted child’s DNA reference sample “could not be excluded as the source of the suspect DNA profile.” In simpler terms, Riolo had said that he had concluded that the DNA reference sample from James Biela’s son indicated that the boy was related to the suspect in the Brianna Denison murder. The boy was also related to the suspect in two of the sexual assaults from which they had developed the suspect’s DNA profile.

Riolo also told Jenkins that the probability of excluding a random individual as the source of the suspect DNA profile was 99.98 percent in the Caucasian population, 99.99 percent in the African-American population, and 99.97 percent in the Hispanic population. It looked like a near certainty that James Biela was their man. However, before they could be absolutely positive, they would have to take him into custody, charge him, and obtain a court order for a sample of his own DNA.

Being the lead detective in the case, Jenkins wrote up his affidavit for an arrest warrant, presented it to a judge for his signature and, once the warrant had been signed, he made plans with his colleagues to take Biela into custody that same day.

Knowing that an arrest was imminent, the investigators had been surreptitiously watching Biela for most of the day. They had been keeping close tabs on him since he had been identified as a person of interest from the Secret Witness telephone call. Also to be considered were the strong gut feelings that both Jenkins and Wygnanski held that he was their guy. Toward the end of the day, the officers followed Biela to the Stepping Stones Children’s Center, a day care facility in South Reno, when he showed up there to pick up his son. He was taken into custody without incident by the detectives who came to the center to arrest him, effectively putting an end to the ten-month manhunt for Brianna’s killer.

“He seemed surprised,” Wygnanski said later. “We wanted to arrest him before he got to the day care, but we arrested him when we did because we didn’t want to take a chance on anything going wrong.”

After his arrest, Biela was taken to the Reno Police Department and placed in an interview room. Detective Jenkins gave him his Miranda warning, then questioned him briefly.

When Jenkins asked him, “Had you intended to kill this girl?”

Biela said, “I don’t want to answer that.” Jenkins also asked him “about the girl who lived on North Virginia Street.”

Biela said, “What girl?”

When he was asked about the thong underwear that Carleen Harmon had found in his truck, he said, “I don’t want to talk about that. That’s bad news.”

At one point, Biela also said that he didn’t believe in DNA evidence, saying, “I told you, I don’t believe in that shit.”

The interview was interrupted by Carleen Harmon’s arrival and the videotaped meeting that then followed between her and Biela.

 

 

Following Biela’s arrest, Jenkins called Bridgette Denison to inform her that Brianna’s alleged killer had been arrested. It reminded him, he said, of the time he had called Doris Bonham in 2000 to inform her that the death of her daughter, Lisa, had been solved after DNA linked the girl’s killer to a convicted sex offender.

“As Mrs. Denison succinctly pointed out, the arrest was good, but it wasn’t going to bring Brianna back,” Jenkins said. “I hate the word ‘closure,’ but I hope her family has some comfort.... Absolutely, we believe this individual is responsible for these crimes. The greatest benefit to this arrest is that in these cases, there is a likelihood these crimes will continue. Now he’s off the streets.... But I recognize this is the beginning, not the end. This is a long way from over.”

Jenkins also pointed out that this had not been the first time during the investigation that he and his colleagues had gotten excited over a possible suspect.

“A lot of us were reluctant to get excited about this one, Biela, because a lot of other leads had not panned out,” Jenkins said of the investigation.

Jenkins recounted how he had been the lead detective over the past several years in a number of high-profile cases, including that of the murder of Nevada’s state controller Kathy Augustine, as well as the murder of Charla Mack by her husband, Darren Mack. Jenkins pointed out, however, that the Brianna Denison case was different from those other cases, and much more difficult to solve, because the suspect in her death and the other sexual assaults had chosen his victims at random.

“I hope anyone else who is privy to any information about Mr. Biela will come forward,” Jenkins said.

The cops continued to investigate their suspect and learned that Biela had been laid off from his job as a pipe fitter the previous week. This made his arrest even timelier, since because of his being out of work, he would have had more time on his hands. This, in their view, would have considerably raised the potential for him to commit additional crimes.

Biela was subsequently transported to the Washoe County Jail, where he was booked on charges of murder, kidnapping in the first degree, and sexual assault. The six-foot-tall, 190-pound prisoner seemed stunned at times; at other times, his face seemed blank or expressionless, aside from an occasional slightly worried look. At those times, it was as if he somehow knew what was coming at him next. Jenkins had also obtained the court order for a DNA sample, which was taken from Biela that evening. It normally takes approximately twelve hours to process, meaning that Jenkins and the other investigators would not know until the following day with absolute certainty that Biela was their man.

Early the next morning, there was no longer any doubt—crime lab personnel had put in overtime hours to process the sample as quickly as possible. Their work confirmed that Biela’s DNA matched the DNA left on Brianna’s body, as well as on the body of the December 2007 victim, Virgie Chin, the forensic evidence he left on the back doorknob of the MacKay Court residence, and on a condom packet found near the location where the November 2007 victim had been attacked. Biela’s DNA also matched DNA found on one of the pairs of thong panties found lying beneath Brianna’s legs at the site where her body had been discarded. The crime lab also soon matched Biela’s DNA to that of yet another rape victim, in addition to Virgie Chin.