Dead of Night (12 page)

Chapter 14

As Jenkins and his colleagues at the Reno Police Department and the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office continued building their already-strong case against James Biela, a clearer picture of the accused killer’s background began to emerge. In addition to confirming some of his friends’ and acquaintances’ statements that he could be a “funny guy” or the “life of the party,” the detectives had also established that he had a quick-tempered and bullying side, in part due to the information that had surfaced regarding his failed relationship with Angi Carlomagno. Much of the background or history they established for Biela was, of course, accomplished after his arrest and while he was on suicide watch at the Washoe County Jail’s infirmary section.

Biela, they knew, had been the last of Joe and Kathy Biela’s five children before their divorce—the couple divorced shortly after arriving in Reno, when James was nine. His mother later remarried and moved to Washington. Although Jenkins did not immediately determine which schools James attended as a child while still in Reno, he did learn that the murder and rape suspect had lived with his mother in the Spokane Valley area for a while and had graduated from West Valley High School there in 1999, confirming relatively strong ties their suspect had with that Pacific Northwest locale. Jenkins also learned that James Biela and Carleen Harmon, the mother of his son, had applied for a marriage license in 2007, but the license had evidently gone unused. There did not appear to be a record of an actual wedding having taken place.

With regard to Biela’s martial arts training, Jenkins learned that he sometimes trained at an establishment in Reno called Charles Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Academy, owned by Gary Grate. Jiu-jitsu is a self-defense martial arts form that trains the student in choke holds, among other things, to gain control over an attacker. The academy’s owner said that Biela sometimes trained alongside local police officers, but Biela had only attained the rank of blue belt, which is only one level above that of a beginner.

“He was just a guy in a big group of students,” Gary Grate said. “He was under the radar. Police officers trained next to him, but nobody noticed anything about him that was peculiar.”

Gary said the last time he had seen Biela was about a year earlier, at approximately the time that police began investigating the sex attacks against female students on or near the UNR campus.

 

 

As Jenkins and the other investigators continued piecing together James Biela’s life, they learned that his childhood and that of his siblings was “terrifying,” according to what his sister, Kristi Jackson, had said. Their terror centered around the abusive relationship they said that they had experienced due to the out-of-control behavior of their father and the violence he had allegedly inflicted on their mother on a continual basis.

“We pretty much spent our whole childhood afraid of the men in our lives,” Kristi said. “I think I probably thought it was normal.”

Kristi said that she and her siblings were afraid to leave their room to use the bathroom, and instead used buckets that they kept stored beneath their beds so they would not have to leave their rooms and risk going down the hallway. She said that she did not have any friends while she was growing up because she was too embarrassed to invite them to come to her house. According to Kristi, their parents were not affectionate, and a typical night at the Biela home included her dad beating her mother. On one occasion, their brother, Jeffrey, told the other kids that they needed to get out of the house and tell the police to come and do something to stop the abuse. After exiting from a bedroom window, they realized that little brother Jimmy was not with them. When they returned to the house, they found him by himself in the living room with a blank look on his face.

Kristi said that it was not until she had turned twelve or thirteen that she began to understand that the violence in their lives was unusual. She also said that James appeared to be a good father to his son, and added that he no longer had a relationship with his own father.

Another relative, Liz O’Brien, an aunt, characterized Joe and Kathy Biela’s wedding as having been “more like a funeral” than a union of holy matrimony. A short time after the marriage, she said that Joe pulled Kathy’s hair in a shocking display of violence. She said that Joe drank a lot of beer, and one of her memories of his drinking was that he liked to make pyramids out of his empty beer cans.

“We thought she was making a mistake,” Liz said of Kathy’s marriage to Joe.

On one occasion, Liz said, Joe held one of his daughters over the edge of a balcony. Witnesses believed he may have planned to drop the little girl, but family members convinced him to bring her back to safety and to let her go. After that incident, his wife left him for a while, “but she went back,” Liz said.

According to the aunt’s recollections, Joe allegedly beat Kathy severely one night when James was nine years old. After witnessing the beating, the children fled to Liz’s house in the middle of the night; Kathy showed up later as well. Liz said she saw that some of Kathy’s hair had been ripped out of her head, and she had cuts and scrapes on her legs. Because Kathy was concerned about expenses, she refused to go to a hospital for treatment of her injuries. Kathy, she said, always seemed to have an explanation for her injuries and often claimed it was not from her husband’s abuse—an all-too-common response given by victims of domestic violence. She also said that Kathy did not have any teeth because “they had all been knocked out.”

At another point during the inquiry into James Biela’s upbringing, Kathy indicated that her husband had not spanked or beaten the children, but she claimed that he had beaten her almost on a nightly basis. He once pushed or shoved their eldest son, Jeffrey, but the violence from her husband always seemed to be directed toward her and not the children. After leaving Joe, Kathy told the investigators, she never saw him again. However, she said that the court had ordered that their children have contact with their father only by telephone—no in-person visits were to be allowed.

 

 

John Latham, a coworker of James Biela’s at the construction company, told investigators that Biela was always on time for work, was a conscientious employee, and did a good job as a pipe fitter. He said there were “never any complaints” about Biela, but he indicated that Biela had appeared unhappy and frustrated during the autumn of 2007 and the early part of 2008. When John asked what was bothering him, Biela told him that he was perturbed or frustrated with his girlfriend and son. During one of their talks, John said, he witnessed Biela “put his fist through a wall.” The coworker said that Biela began slacking off at work, which caused issues with his job performance. Then, around mid-January 2008, John said that Biela told him that he wanted to leave town and was “tired of the drama in his life.” It was also around that time that he began talking about leaving his job.

When Brianna’s body was found, Carleen Harmon was working in the human resources division of Employers, a workers’ compensation firm. From her office window, Carleen could see the area near the crime scene, the field where Brianna’s body was found. She called Biela at work and told him that she could see all sorts of activity in the field, with police cars, police, and crime scene tape. She told him what she was watching and that she thought Brianna Denison must have been found. He was silent, saying nothing. A short time later, when word spread that it was likely Brianna’s body that had been found in the field, John Latham said that he asked Biela “how he felt about her being found.” Biela responded with a couple of expletives and said that Brianna “probably had it coming.”

Later that same day, James Biela approached his boss, Jeremy Coston, and requested a voluntary layoff because of “personal problems.” Jeremy said that Biela’s request came at a time when the construction company was behind schedule on many of its projects, which was creating significant overtime opportunities—nothing to sneeze at for a union pipe fitter. Nonetheless, Biela remained adamant that he needed the voluntary layoff.

According to Detective Ron Chalmers, who investigated Biela’s work schedule, among many other aspects of the case during the times of the various crimes, Biela had worked at his job on October 22, 2007, December 16, 2007, and January 19, 2008. However, he did not work on January 20, 2008, the date that Brianna disappeared. Investigators noted that Biela left in March 2008 to travel to Spokane, Washington, where he planned to work as a pipe fitter. He and Carleen drove the truck to Spokane and she flew back to Reno from there. Biela did not return until September 2008, when Carleen flew there and came back to Reno with him.

 

 

Meanwhile, Brianna’s family issued words of praise via the
Reno Gazette-Journal
to the caller of the Secret Witness telephone line, the woman without whose tip Biela’s arrest might not have come so soon—if at all. The caller had said that she wanted to remain anonymous.

“It was so incredibly brave of you knowing this could possibly be the guy,” Lauren Denison told a reporter for the newspaper. “We are so grateful you had the inkling that, wow, this behavior is weird and you had the courage to call Secret Witness. It’s remarkable.”

Lauren expressed disappointment that the call had not come from Carleen Harmon, Biela’s girlfriend and mother of his child, but she also made it clear that she and the family were nonetheless grateful and did not want it to appear that they were blaming Carleen for anything.

“Love is blind and maybe she couldn’t fathom that he could be that way,” Lauren added. “She has got to have unthinkable emotions. She is the mother of his son, lived with him, and had a relationship with him for six years. You would hope you would know someone. It’s just disappointing we couldn’t reach out to everyone after we had said ten million times for women to really look hard at the men in their lives who fit the profile. But thank goodness she confided in her friend, and that friend was the vehicle that broke this case.”

Lauren Denison also expressed disappointment that Biela had not been stopped in 2002 after threatening former girlfriend Angi Carlomagno with a knife. It seemed that he barely received a slap on the wrist after pleading guilty to battery and driving under the influence a year later, and then receiving a sentence to attend DUI school. Somehow it did not seem right that the people around him had failed early on to see his future possibility for violence. But what if they had seen it? What could they have done in the absence of catching him committing a crime? There were no easy answers. There never are to situations like this, where a violent offender wasn’t stopped until he had committed the ultimate crime of murder.

“He was already displaying this kind of violent behavior,” Lauren said. “Someone tried to stop him when he was escalating, but it didn’t happen. How do you stop something that is starting? The signs were there.”

Shortly after James Biela’s arrest, the investigators showed the Denison family members a photo of Biela. Naturally, the Denisons were upset.

“It sickened me that I was actually looking at the person who took my niece’s life,” Lauren Denison said. “We have a name and a face for the person that has completely rocked our world. This guy basically put the community on notice and . . . [held] us hostage in our own city.... I’m sure he drove by all the blue ribbons, posters, and banners of Bri and read the newspaper. He would have had his head in a hole if he didn’t. There’s no way he could have gotten away from it. He really blended in, walking amongst us and no one suspecting him. Just like the FBI profile said.”

Meanwhile, Brianna’s family decided that they wanted to take down the blue ribbons, which had been hung up around town, telling the community that they had only wanted the ribbons to remain in place until Brianna’s killer was identified and apprehended. The ribbons had been serving as a stark reminder of the tragedy that had taken the life of the young college student, they said, and of the other rape victims, who had survived the attacks against them. It was now time, the family believed, to begin moving on and start focusing on bringing about legislation that would require everyone who was arrested for a crime to submit their DNA so that it could be loaded into a national database.

At that time, Nevada required DNA samples from those who had been convicted of a felony, not from those who had been placed under arrest for a felony but not convicted. The law requiring DNA from convicted felons had been mandated in 2007. Had it included those arrested—and if that had been done when Biela was arrested in 2002—Lauren said, “We would have had him after the first attack.” At the time of the 2002 incident, she explained, on through the time of the rapes and Brianna’s murder, as well as Biela’s arrest, only convicted felons were required to submit their DNA without a court order. Because of the potential legal ramifications and protections under the U.S. Constitution, it seemed like their quest to get DNA samples from every person arrested for a felony would be an uphill battle.

 

 

The BBJF, which had served Brianna’s family and friends as a way to take positive action toward changing the laws on DNA samples, began an all-out campaign to lobby legislators to adopt “Brianna’s Law,” patterned after New Mexico’s “Katie’s Law,” the Katie Sepich Enhanced DNA Collection Act. The law, which was enacted in 2007, was named after Katie Sepich, also a student, who was raped and murdered there. A task force was formed by the foundation, the Secret Witness Program, and the Nevada Attorney General’s Office to work toward getting the law passed in Nevada. Task force members made a strong case for the law by pointing out that if DNA had been required for everyone arrested in the state on felony charges, Biela could potentially have been stopped before Brianna’s death. After his 2002 arrest on assault charges, if his DNA had been on file, it would have enabled him to be linked to the 2007 rape cases around a month before Brianna’s murder.