Monstrous, diabolical, evil

DER SPIEGEL, Nr. 27, 1998


A German mother is trying to prove the innocence of her daughter, on death row in Arizona.
by Clemens Höges
translation by Arch Campbell

Debbie Milke's death sentence is upheld by the Supreme Court of Arizona shortly before New Year's; her last appeal has been denied. Inmate #83533 at Perryville State Prison near Phoenix may now be executed, "by the intravenous injection of substances in quantities sufficient to cause death."

In Perryville the death process is set in motion. Debbie Milke has forms to fill out: what she wants for her last meal, who she wants to witness her execution, and what should be done with her body.

The chaplain comes; he speaks to her of guilt and atonement. After him come the psychiatrists. Then the doctor: he feels along her arms, examining the veins, and determines the best point to insert the needle.

Then matrons will bring their prisoner into the death-watch cell, behind which lies only the execution chamber with its lethal-injection gurney. When that point had almost been reached, Debbie Milke almost went insane: "I nearly went over the edge", she says. She is thirty-four years old. Her hair used to be blonde; now it is nearly gray.

This time her lawyer manages to frustrate the hangman with a swift move before higher courts. Now he is fighting together with Debbie's mother, and a private detective, to get the case reopened. So far the prosecutors have presented no unimpeachable proof of her guilt.

This much is clear: a madman, and/or a drunkard, who await their own executions, shot Milke's four-year-old son CHRISTOPHER to death. What is in dispute is whether the mother put them up to it, which is what prosecutor NOEL LEVY and the investigators believe. "She will burn for it", says LEVY; her crime was "monstrous, diabolic, evil."

Over 3000 men and about forty women are sitting in U.S. death cells. More than a few of them, warn civil-liberties activists, will die innocent. Debbie Milke could be one of them. Her case shows how carelessly American courts often handle the death penalty.

The drama of hatred, revenge, and families torn apart begins with the breakup of the marriage of Debbie's German mother, RENATE JANKA, to the American soldier RICHARD "SAM" SADEIK. SAM, an alcoholic, rages: "Nobody leaves Sam Sadeik. You'll pay for this!"

But she does leave him, moving with her two daughters to Phoenix. Debbie is her favorite, "the sunshine in my life." The younger daughter, SANDRA, however, is quarrelsome, rebellious, steals money. "Why can't you be more like Debbie", her mother asks. Soon SANDY goes back to her father. Now the split runs right through the middle of the family.

Mother RENATE soon finds herself short of money. Through old contacts she gets a good job with Standard Electric Lorenz in Stuttgart. Debbie stays in Phoenix and falls in love with the wild MARK MILKE.

Carpet-layer MILKE is no dream catch. He takes drugs, when he is not in jail. They marry anyway. CHRISTOPHER is born. But the marriage breaks up, as was predictable. "Take your lousy brat and get out of my life", yells wild MARK. Debbie Milke moves in with JIM STYERS, an acquaintance who lives alone in a large apartment. STYERS fought in Vietnam, in the Marines. He lives off a disability pension. What he did in Vietnam, Milke can only guess at. Of the ghosts that haunt him, she has no idea.

During his trial for CHRISTOPHER'S death, STYERS admits that he shot a least one child in Vietnam, who was trying to climb onto the back of his truck, and that he may have killed a few more. He hears voices; "the screams of the dead women and children" torment him. Heavy medication dampens the din of war in STYERS' skull to some degree, and also the confusion which sometimes reigns there since he fell from a jeep and lay three months brain-damaged in a coma.

Debbie Milke sees her life with JIM as a temporary living arrangement. But STYERS, some fifteen years older, becomes infatuated with her. He drives her to work, does her laundry, and minds CHRISTOPHER, though he sometimes regards the child as an exasperating nuisance: "I wish he were dead", he tells neighbors. STYERS wants to break Debbie free of her ex-husband; the last tie that binds them is CHRISTOPHER. When STYERS buys a revolver Debbie suspects nothing. He says he wants it to shoot rattlesnakes. In Arizona this is a perfectly normal pastime.

Comment: Please keep in mind that this article dates back to 1998. At that time this was indeed the theory of Debra's defense team [please also read "Claim of actual innocence"]. Today, after additional and diligent research it has become clear that the case against JIM STYERS is much weaker than told by the prosecution.

STYERS senses that Debbie is drifting away from him. On the second of December, 1989, shortly before Debbie is to move out, he borrows her Toyota. He wants to go to the shopping center downtown, where there are Santa Clauses. Christopher loves Santa Clauses. Debbie hesitates, but the youngster pesters and whines until he is allowed to go along. "See you later, alligator", CHRIS yells from the doorway. "After a while, crocodile", answers his mother.

On the way to the shopping center ROGER SCOTT gets into the car.

Comment: As could be ascertained the true happenings on that day were a little different. STYERS together with CHRISTOPHER in the car went directly to ROGER SCOTT'S apartment, which is the opposite direction of the Metro Center mall.

This man has had only two friends in his life: JOHN BARLEYCORN and JAMES STYERS. To please other people, so says a psychiatrist, SCOTT would do almost anything. And he hates it when STYERS falls in love, because then he, SCOTT, plays no more role.

Three hours later STYERS phones Debbie: while in the men's room of a department store, he suddenly lost CHRISTOPHER. A store manager calls the police. The officers sense that Styers is lying; for one thing, the toilet seat on which he claims to have been sitting when the child disappeared is so splintered that only a fakir could endure resting the skin of his buttocks on it.

Enter ARMANDO SALDATE, from Phoenix Homicide: a bear of a man, with a face like a fist and a voice like thunder. He gets confessions where other cops come up empty. He has fought his way up and now stands before the biggest step in his career: he is running for Constable, a kind of judicial sheriff. Solving a high-profile case could help him win the election, and crimes against children are always high-profile.

For fifteen hours STYERS' buddy SCOTT is grilled. He finally talks, giving contradictory versions, consistent in this claim: he and STYERS drove CHRISTOPHER into the desert; there STYERS got out with the child. He, SCOTT, stayed in the car, heard shots. STYERS came back alone, saying: "The little bastard won't be on my nerves anymore."

SCOTT leads police to the body. CHRISTOPHER lies curled up in the sand, as if asleep. He has been shot three times in the back of the head. Nearby, the investigators find shoeprints, perhaps left by STYERS. On the way back SCOTT tells SALDATE quite incidentally: Christopher's mother incited STYERS to do it.

But: "Debbie had nothing to do with it", says STYERS. He maintains that SCOTT was the killer, and the police do find STYERS' revolver in SCOTT'S possession. STYERS says that SCOTT threatened: "If I go down I take you with me, and that woman, too." Policeman SALDATE chooses to believe SCOTT, except that his muddled statement will be worthless in court; in fact, he will later-on not even testify there. So the next day, his day-off, SALDATE has Debbie Milke summoned to the Sheriff's Department in Florence, where she has just gone to stay at her father's, and helicopters the fifty miles down there. When he finds her, Debbie is waiting with an aunt at the first-aid station of the Sheriff's office. He shoos the other woman away and shuts the steel door. Now no one outside can hear. He sits himself before Milke at his usual combat distance, about twelve inches from eye to eye. They have found her son, he says. He is dead. And she is under arrest for murder. When he is through with his interrogation he tells her not to speak to anyone about their conversation.

Three days later the investigators still have found no proof implicating the mother in a conspiracy to murder. Only then does Saldate type his report. He maintains therein that Milke made a full confession to him. The case appears solved. The jubilation in the press is a breakthrough for SALDATE: he wins that election.

No one seems troubled by the unusually long interval between interrogation and report, nor by the fact that for the confession SALDATE can offer no proof: no tape-recording, no witnesses other than himself, and certainly not Debra Milke's signature. In fact, no document calling itself a confession was ever even drawn up. And the notes he allegedly took during the interrogation? He has destroyed them. Sorry about that.

At her trial Debbie Milke describes how SALDATE twisted her words. She had said: "I never wanted Chris to be like his father." In SALDATE'S text it sounds like this: "She told me she did it because she didn't want Chris to become like his father."

Shen the prosecutor ignites his bomb: he calls Debra's father and her sister before the jury -- as witnesses for the prosecution.

SAM SADEIK'S testimony is annihilating: Debbie is cold, egotistic, calculating -- just like her mother, who left him: "If she got the chance to have another kid she'd kill him, too."

Sister SANDY adds that Debbie is the typical child-murderess. She claims to have seen Debbie tape CHRISTOPHER'S pacifier to his mouth. SANDY demands the needle for her sister: "She deserves it, for what she did to Chris." Such negative character references from close family members weigh very heavily.

Debbie's mother could contradict them, but RENATE JANKA has not flown over for the trial. She gave her daughter up upon learning of the confession: "If she did it, I thought to myself, then I don't want anything to do with her." And after CHRISTOPHER'S burial policeman SALDATE assured her on the telephone Debbie Milke is "guilty as hell, and evil."

It is months after the verdict before Debbie has the nerve to write to her mother -- in care of the grandparents in Berlin. She was born there, and Totilastrasse 35c is the only German address which, because of visits as a child, she can still spell by rote. Fearing her grandparents will throw the envelope away without opening it, she writes a plea on the outside, using what fragments of German she can remember: "Grandma and Grandpa: it's not true. This is for Mom. Please, Grandma! Please!"

I've never felt so alone", she writes in the letter to her mother. Then she relates her version of the interrogation. And: "You don't have to answer me, Mom, but I'd just like to know why you've abandoned me now." Fifty-five year old RENATE JANKA does not yet know the score. She promises to do what she can. Both of them, though, put their trust for the time-being in the appeals process. "Such a confession, with nothing else? It can't hold up", she thinks. But hold up it does. In Arizona the cop's word is law.

Debbie Milke, though, does not remain alone. In prison she gets a visit from criminal defense attorney ANDERS ROSENQUIST, 55, who offers to take her case pro bono, and fight all the way. He is convinced: the woman is innocent.

ROSENQUIST hires ten students, who spend five months in the courthouse rummaging through 18,000 documents relating to cases SALDATE has been involved in. They reveal that the iron cop detests recording devices in interrogations, as well as suspects who demand an attorney. Several confessions presented by him have been thrown out of court.

A scandal two years after Milke's sentencing seems to prove ROSENQUIST right: law enforcers in SALDATE'S bailiwick have used doctored confessions to arrest at least five innocent persons for murder; the truth comes out when the true perpetrators are caught.

There's no protection here against lying policemen", says KIRK FOWLER, 61. For more than twenty years he chased drug dealers as a DEA agent. While RENATE works on a website and writes letters to senators, private detective FOWLER researches Debbie's life. He finds witnesses who confirm that Milke always cared lovingly for her son. "It's very difficult to fool a whole troop of observers for fourteen months", says the chief psychiatrist at the jail where Debra was held in pretrial detention. His colleagues, too, believe Milke to be innocent. Police experts have written to FOWLER saying that they consider the confession to be "bullshit, a flat-out fabrication". SALDATE, according to them, either did sloppy work or deliberately placed Debbie Milke on the railroad tracks.

But the courts take no notice of these declarations. Judge CHERYL HENDRIX sweeps the expert opinions of the police professionals from the bench: they are "inadmissible, since they all boil down to the contention that officer Saldate is a liar". Experts may not demolish witnesses -- that's the way it is in the Wild West.

How long the countdown to the Great Beyond may take is anybody's guess -- one year, two years. Before the fatal moment comes, so fears ROSENQUIST since the dress rehearsal of this last close call, "Debbie may go crazy on us." She lives completely isolated in maximum security, alone in a little cage, like a canary.

Once a week Debbie may talk on the phone to her mother, for five minutes. She does not want any more visitors, because the procedure is so unpleasant: steel chains on her wrists and ankles; the guards shout across the floor: "Milke comin'". The other inmates are locked down, and then she rattles along the corridors like a ghost, in a toddling gait. "They handle Debbie as if she were Adolf Hitler", says detective FOWLER, "and she's as harmless as Mother Teresa".