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WOMAN IN OFFICER'S DEATH A VICTIM OF TWISTED LAW

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By BILL JOHNSON
Rocky Mountain News
January 16, 2004

They were all there, save for one.

The line of cops stood, grim-faced along a back wall of the packed courtroom.

Her folks and a clutch of supporters squirmed in their chairs, softly whispering on the right.

The policeman's widow, a sad, lone figure, sat silently on the left.

The five Colorado Supreme Court justices, their faces betraying nothing, glanced down from their high, leather-cushioned perches.

For the next hour, they would debate the fate of a tragically naive - if not, stupid - young woman whose falling in with the wrong, doped-up and violent man solely to retrieve her clothes from an ex-boyfriend's room led to a cop getting murdered.

What would happen in this room over the next hour was very likely her last chance at freedom, to avoid spending the rest of her life where she is now, in a Cañon City prison.

And Lisl Auman, who was in custody and was nowhere near the spot where the officer was killed, would not be there Wednesday morning to hear any of it.

Ironic, if you think about it. And it is probably just as well.

They are arcane exercises, state Supreme Court arguments are, with their rapid-fire, over-the-heads-of-you-and-I legalisms and incessant parsing of state statutes by the lawyers and justices.

The issue was whether the state's highest court should uphold Lisl Auman's conviction on felony murder charges in the death of Denver police officer Bruce VanderJagt six years ago. The decision, still to be rendered, likely rests now on one of those inside-baseball, parsed-out points.

What is certain is the time for common sense and truth in this matter passed long ago - back during the initial investigation of the officer's killing, the trial and initial appeal.

So if a technicality now will save Lisl Auman - and the rest of us from overreaching prosecutors willing to use the felony murder statute in the future when it suits them and their police co-workers - root for the technicality.

Lisl Auman, the clear-thinking among us know, was a scapegoat in all of this, the target of this town's collective rage over a good officer being murdered, after the gunman, Matthaeus Jaehnig, took the fallen officer's handgun and killed himself.

If Matthaeus Jaehnig doesn't kill himself, Lisl Auman today is maybe sitting somewhere at home, perhaps checking in with her probation officer - if she had been charged at all.

What was her complicity in the murder of Officer VanderJagt? This was the question her lawyer, Cathleen Lord, assistant attorney general Paul Kidder and the justices hammered away at.

Lisl Auman, everyone agrees, was arrested and being driven away in a police cruiser when the fatal shots were fired. Was she then acting in concert with Jaehnig? The AG's office to this day insists she was.

She simply was a young woman wanting nothing but her clothes from her scumbag ex-boyfriend's room in a padlocked Buffalo Creek home, a heartbroken woman who took a couple of her girlfriend's criminal skinhead pals with her to retrieve them.

Jaehnig is driving both heavily armed and loaded on methamphetamines in a stolen Trans-Am when the cops pull up behind him and Auman on their way back to Denver. He races away at speeds up to 120 mph before getting cornered at an apartment complex and taking VanderJagt's life.

Could Lisl Auman have forseen this? It is a question the justices wanted answered. Is hers a case the legislature had in mind when it passed the felony murder law?

Her arrest prior to the murder does not relieve her of responsibility in the officer's death, assistant AG Paul Kidder stressed over and over.

"Once you're in (committing a felony - in this case, burglary) you're in," he repeated. "You have to hope nothing bad happens."

He skips over the Denver DA's refusal to similarly charge Auman friend Demetria Soriano, her boyfriend, Dion Gerze, and their friend, Steven Duprey, three others who participated in the burglary. All except one are now walking about freely.

Lisl Auman did not force her way into a stranger's home, loot it, steal the family car, get busted and kill a cop - miscreants of the type the felony murder law is intended to punish.

It is a fact Denver police Chief Gerry Whitman and Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar still choose to ignore.

"Criminals," both men said in remarks after the hearing, "need to know if they participate in such felonies, they will be held responsible."

Maybe they simply forgot Soriano, Gerze and Duprey.

If their position is understandable at all, it is because they still have to face Anna VanderJagt, the officer's widow, the way reporters did when she emerged all alone from the hearing.

"It makes it feel like (her husband's murder) was just yesterday," she said softly.

This is, she said, a sad day for everyone involved, including Lisl Auman by name. She is simply trying to put out positive energy for her young daughter, Hayley, she said, who is still coping with her father's loss.

"I hope this is it," she said over and over.

Does Lisl Auman deserve a life sentence for what she did? someone in the crowd asked her.

Anna VanderJagt took a deep breath.

"I have a tough time with that," she finally said. "I've asked myself that so many times. And I truly don't know."

Bill Johnson's column appears Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
Call him at 303-892-2763 or e-mail him at johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com

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