BOULDER, Colo.—A man tied by DNA to a decade-old rape and beating death had been arrested twice shortly after the slaying on charges of threatening or raping other women, court documents show.
Diego Olmos-Alcalde was being held at the Boulder County jail under $5 million bail on Monday in the death of 23-year-old Susannah Chase, a University of Colorado student who was beaten to death with a baseball bat and left for dead in December 1997.
Olmos-Alcalde faces charges of murder, kidnapping, sexual assault and violating parole. He was formally advised of the charges at a hearing Monday.
He watched the proceedings through a window from an adjacent room and cried during the brief session as Judge John F. Stavely read him the charges. He was handcuffed and wore a light blue jumpsuit.
His attorney, from the public defender’s office, declined to give her name or comment after the proceedings.
While Boulder police pursued leads after Chase’s slaying, Olmos-Alcalde was in Denver, where he was twice arrested after two women said they were threatened with a knife and one said she was sexually assaulted, according to an arrest warrant affidavit released Monday.
The first arrest came Jan. 1, 1998, after a woman said she was raped and held at knifepoint. The second was on Jan. 16, after a woman said a man held a knife to her throat after he offered her a ride. The woman jumped out of the car and alerted a nearby police officer, who arrested Olmos-Alcalde, the affidavit said.
The outcome of the first case wasn’t immediately known. In the second, Olmos-Alcalde, pleaded guilty to carrying a concealed weapon and prosecutors dropped a charge of attempted sexual assault, said Lynn Kimbrough, a spokeswoman for the Denver district attorney. It wasn’t known whether he served time in jail.
Olmos-Alcalde was also arrested in 1995 on a charge of criminal sexual contact in Union City, N.J., the affidavit said. No details of that case were immediately available.
Olmos-Alcalde, now 38, was arrested again Saturday in Aurora after DNA tests linked him to Chase’s death. When Boulder detectives confronted him about Chase’s homicide and showed him a photo of her, taken three days before she died, Olmos-Alcalde denied knowing who she was, and said he hadn’t been to Boulder since he was 16, according to the affidavit.
He repeatedly denied hurting Chase, even as detectives told him they found his DNA on her.
Chase, of Stamford, Conn., was walking home alone early on Dec. 21, 1997, after an argument with her boyfriend when she was attacked. Police believe it was random. She was found in an alley a block from her home.
Authorities in Wyoming, where Olmos-Alcalde had served time in prison for a 2000 kidnapping conviction, had recently submitted a sample of his DNA to a national database, which matched it with Chase’s case, authorities said.
Olmos-Alcalde’s DNA was submitted to the database in 2001, said Melinda Brazzale of the Wyoming Department of Corrections. However, she said his information was removed after he appealed his conviction to the Wyoming Supreme Court and a judge reversed his conviction because an alternate juror joined deliberations after they started when another juror fell ill.
After he was retried and convicted, Olmos-Alcalde’s initial 12-to-20 year sentence was reduced to 7 to 10 years. His DNA sample was eligible to be put in the national database in 2004, Brazzale said, but it was unclear when his information was reentered.
In the Wyoming case, police in Cheyenne said Olmos-Alcalde followed a woman in her car to her apartment complex and blocked her car with his vehicle after she parked.
The woman had managed to honk her car horn several times before Olmos-Alcalde dragged her from her car, alerting her brother and sister who went to help her, police said. Olmos-Alcalde fled in his car but the victim and her siblings identified him as her attacker.
Olmos-Alcalde, who is from Chile and in this country legally, was released from prison in Wyoming last year and was turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. They said “he did not meet the requirements for deportation,” the affidavit said, and ordered him to report to Wyoming officials to continue his parole requirements.
A warrant for his arrest was issued in October when he did not report as ordered, the affidavit said.
Also on Monday, investigators asked the public’s help Monday in finding a blue 1979 Datsun they said Olmos-Alcalde was driving at the time of Chase’s slaying. Authorities would not elaborate how the vehicle was used in the crime.
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Associated Press Writer Conning Chu in Cheyenne, Wyo., contributed to this report.
