When a rival gang member killed her best friend, Alicia Cardall vowed she would become a police officer like her mother so she could steer gang members away from trouble.
Instead, Cardall was drawn to that life. She learned to smoke marijuana. She began smoking crack, said her mother, Anne Wingate. In time, the girl raised in a Mormon home in Salt Lake City sought out men Wingate described as “scum.”
Cardall moved to Denver with one of those short-lived love interests. But before she could head back home, she’d met another boyfriend who fit the mold of earlier romances: Aaron Millenson, 18, of Englewood, a man eight years her junior who would take the mother of two faster and further into trouble than she had ever been.
Within weeks of meeting, the couple were wanted for questioning in the murder of 80-year-old World War II veteran Steven Poulos in a Salt Lake City suburb. Kansas patrol officers killed them 11 days later on Jan. 25 during a gun battle following a high-speed chase and crash on Interstate 70.
“She wanted to be loved,” Wingate said. “But she was mentally and emotionally vulnerable. She couldn’t resist someone telling her she is gorgeous. She would crawl into his arms.”
By the time Cardall and Millenson met at Christmas time, more than 20 probation violations had put Millenson in jeopardy of going to prison on a theft-and-burglary conviction. Millenson tried to buy a gun at a Lone Tree sporting-goods shop on Oct. 24. Then on Dec. 30, he violated curfew. His probation officer urged a judge to revoke Millenson’s probation because he was a “serious threat.”
That’s the way it had always been for Millenson, Justin Tayler, 21, said in an interview at the Rifle Correctional Center, where he is serving a seven-year term for a string of purse snatchings. Being in trouble never stopped Millenson from getting into more trouble, Tayler said.
Millenson had a sense of invincibility that was only reinforced when authorities dismissed charges against him in the same purse-snatching case that caught Tayler and Millenson’s brother, Adam.
“He would be cornered in four different directions, and he’d think he could go up,” Tayler said.
Millenson was living at a halfway house for juvenile delinquents in the summer of 2004 when Tayler met him and his brother at a booze-and-drugs party at their father’s house. By then, Adam and Aaron’s parents were divorced.
When Millenson came home on a day pass, Tayler and the Millenson boys would sometimes go out and steal purses from women in department store parking lots, according to Tayler and court records. Within months, there were 14 such purse snatchings, but Aaron Millenson came along only a few times, Tayler said.
“We looked at it as a joke,” he said. “It was just kids being kids.”
The boys liked to go party hopping to smoke joints and drink alcohol and do “eat and runs,” where they would go to a restaurant, order a large meal complete with pie and then bolt out the door.
Millenson didn’t have any particular taste in girls, just as long as they were attractive, Tayler said.
A beautiful girl with brown eyes and red hair, it didn’t take long for Cardall to capture the attention of men, said Wingate, an author of a series of fictional crime thrillers.
Because her adoptive daughter had been given up by her birth parents, who were drug addicts, and then moved from home to home before the Wingates adopted her at 6, she had a tremendous fear of abandonment. It left her emotionally handicapped, Wingate said. The bright young girl who wrote flowery poetry and painted also craved attention from the wrong crowd, she said.
More than anyone else, a neighbor, Torrie Lambrose, seemed to understand her. He, too, had been adopted, and they often talked about their backgrounds. Cardall’s birth mother was a prostitute.
But in 1994, Lambrose, 17, and rival gang member Theodore Davis, 16, shot each other to death, according to Wingate and a Salt Lake Tribune article.
Cardall was so devastated by the shooting that she told her family she wanted to be a cop in a gang unit, where instead of arresting gang members she could rehabilitate them. But the more time she spent with gang members, the more she adopted their habits, such as using drugs, Wingate said.
Cardall was fiercely defensive when people looked down on her boyfriends, who often had tongue piercings and nose rings. She once yelled at two Utah Jazz basketball players at a Salt Lake City mall when one remarked about the “weirdo” with the pretty redhead, Wingate said.
By the time Millenson met Cardall, he knew his days of freedom were numbered. But rather than stay out of trouble, he found another gun and violated his probation yet again by traveling to Salt Lake City.
It’s unclear whether Cardall knew how much trouble her new boyfriend was in when they drove together to Salt Lake City.
On Jan. 25, Utah officials warned Kansas authorities that the couple were headed their way. Kansas patrolmen gave chase after Millenson refused to pull over. Finally he crashed into a concrete barrier near Hays, Kan., on I-70.
Millenson jumped out of a car. He fired a pistol, and then Cardall jumped out and waved a knife. Both were shot to death.
Tayler speculated that had Millenson gone to prison for his role in several purse snatchings, like he and Adam Millenson did, he would still be alive.
Cardall will be buried in western Kansas with only her initials on the stone, Wingate said. The family doesn’t want gang members to make pilgrimages to her grave because of the way she died, she said.
“I’m convinced she committed suicide by cop,” Wingate said.
Staff writer Kirk Mitchell can be reached at 303-820-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com.
