Imagine sitting at home, quiet, watching television and maybe eating popcorn, enjoying a nice night with your partner. But suddenly, someone begins to frantically knock on the door of his house, breaking the serenity that he enjoyed.
This could be a very annoying situation, but for the Rowley couple it was a situation full of anguish, fear and confusion, because when they opened, they found that a murderer wanted by the police was standing at the door of their home.
Thus began the odyssey Jared and Lindsay Rowley, a newly married couple that in 2009 he had to hide a man on the run from justice in his home and that two years later she was sued by the perpetrator.
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According to the criminal, the couple had agreed to shelter him in exchange for a sum of money – which was never agreed – and that therefore they should have ensured his safety, in addition to preventing the police from capturing him.
“The police wanted to kill me,” wrote Jesse Dimmicka man who was sentenced to more than 40 years in prison for second degree murder.
But what happened? Who was Jesse? What happened to the couple?
The murder of Michael Levar Curtis
According to official communiqués from the authorities, on September 10, 2009, the Police of the city of Aurora, in the state of Colorado, United Statesreceived a call from a motel, located on East Colfax Avenue, warning that a man was presumed dead on the premises.
When they arrived, they realized that, indeed, a black man was lying on the ground, without a pulse, and with multiple traumas -apparently caused by a short sharp object- on the upper part of his body.
After this, the search for the culprits began immediately. The Aurora Major Crimes department took over the investigation, which would come to fruition two days later.
(Keep reading: The terrible murder that tweeter solved from his home: this is how he deciphered the crime).
The suspects were clear: Shayne Michael Miller, a 35-year-old man who had rented the room that night, and Jesse Dennis Dimmick, her escort 23 years old. Together they had seduced Michael Levar Curtis and taken him to the Carriage Motor Inn.
Even so, Dimmick was the perpetrator of the crime. According to prosecutors, after using drugs with him, she stabbed him to death.
“He savagely took the life of Michael Levar Curtis,” prosecutor Ed Bull, who was handling the case, said in an official statement announcing the sentence.
Miller was held by authorities without bail for murder and theft, because later it would be verified that he was the one who stole Curtis’s documents and belongings. However, the other defendant still had to be captured: Jesse Dimmick.
The Police declared at the time that, when they found him, he got into a white van with which he drove several kilometers towards Kansas, thus starring in a chase that ended in the Dover regionwhen the vehicle crashed into a tree.
It was then that he arrived at the Rowleys’ door.
The night of September 12, 2009
With a knife in his hand and breathing hard, the 23-year-old man arrived asking for a place to hide. According to what the local Colorado media ‘Sentinel’ reported, the couple had no choice but to offer him a lodging and spend the night with him.
At first, Jesse felt comfortable with the situation, for while Jared helped him make a bed and offered him extra pillows, Lindsay made him dinner and some sandwiches to snack on.
This is how the hours passed until the subject, who had stopped in front of his door, fell completely asleep. Seizing the opportunity, the newlyweds escaped from their home and alerted the authorities.
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When the Police arrived at the house, Dimmick did not think twice and tried to escape again. But nevertheless, he was finally captured after receiving a gunshot wound to his back.
The sentence: 48 years in prison
After he was brought back to Colorado to stand trial, Dimmick’s defense said he was not competent to understand the court proceedings.
During a hearing in 2010, he appeared in an Adams County courtroom, shaking his head from side to side all the time, appearing to have a nervous tic, and was often seen with his head down and shoulders hunched, acquiring a closed stance.
I was drugged. That’s not the person I know
Additionally, according to the local American media ‘The Denver Post’, the defendant’s grandmother declared that he was out of his mind, since he had always been a good man.
“I was drugged. That is not the person I know as Jesse,” he declared, supporting the theory that the defendant was drugged or out of himself at the time of committing the murder.
However, one of the experts said that Dimmick was sane and that his alleged mental problems were the result of “faking” or faking his symptoms.
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After this, the trial decided to dismiss that he could have any mental health problem and initially convicted him of having kidnapped Jared and Lindsay, a penalty that would result in eleven years in prison.
In March 2013, at which time Curtis’s death was still on trial, the young man reached a plea agreement with prosecutors and he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Due to this – and according to the terms of the agreement – he will have to serve a sentence of 48 years behind bars.
The lawsuit against the hostages
“I, the defendant, I asked the Rowleys to hide me because I feared for my life. I offered the Rowleys an unspecified amount of money which they agreed to, thereby forging a legally binding verbal contract,” Dimmick wrote in a handwritten document in late 2011.
In the document, he claimed from the couple a sum of 235 thousand dollars, which is equivalent to almost one billion Colombian pesosas reparation for having handed him over to the police, the shot in the back, and for having subjected him to “emotional stress.”
However, Robert E. Keeshan, the Rowleys’ attorney, made a written statement arguing that they never made any kind of verbal contract related to money and that they would never have let him into their house for that.
On the contrary, they forced them to open the doors of their recent home because they were afraid, because theyHe had threatened you with a knife.
Fortunately this did not prosper. The local Kansas newspaper ‘Topeka Capital-Journal’ announced that a judge dismissed the lawsuit on January 9, 2012, thanks to Keeshan’s allegations, who also stressed that, for it to have been a verbal contract, the two parties would have had to discuss the terms and wishes of the deal. But that didn’t happen.
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LAURA NATALIA BOHORQUEZ RONCANCIO
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