Diego Olmos Alcalde told an interviewer that he is a ladies’ man whose run-ins with prostitutes landed him in jail, but he denied that he killed CU student Susannah Chase a decade ago.
“He said he isn’t afraid of the death penalty or going to jail for life because he is an innocent man. He said his past with women has been unfortunate,” said Miguel Morales, a Los Angeles-based correspondent for El Mercurio de Valparaiso in Chile.
Alcalde, 38, was born in Chile and moved to Colorado as a boy after his mother married an American.
Morales talked to Alcalde, who is locked up in the Boulder County jail, by telephone. The interview was broadcast Monday on Chile’s Radio Portales.
Boulder police arrested him in January for the 1997 murder after DNA collected when he was imprisoned in Wyoming matched a genetic sample found on Chase’s body.
Denver police arrested him twice after two other women accused him of assault shortly after Chase’s death. He spent six months in jail for one of the attacks, and authorities dropped charges in the other.
He told Morales that the women who accused him of sexual assault, including one in Wyoming, were prostitutes who were angry that he didn’t pay them. He wasn’t aware they expected money for their favors, he said.
“He said he got involved with prostitutes throughout his life.”
Many other women offered themselves to him without charge, and Alcalde didn’t turn them down, he told Morales. “My good looks brought me some good luck with the women,” he said.
“He calls himself a lucky man with the ladies and blessed in his masculinity so women are going to fall for that,” Morales said.
He doesn’t remember ever meeting Chase, 23, a University of Colorado senior who was beaten with a baseball bat and raped near her Boulder apartment.
“He said he doesn’t remember meeting her at all. He has met so many women in his life, as a sexually active man,” Morales said.
Alcalde, whose case has generated widespread public attention both here and in Chile, has been kept separate from other prisoners for his own protection since his arrest.
His jailers considered moving him into the general population but decided against it when he received a threatening letter last week, said Boulder Sheriff’s Cmdr. Phil West
West couldn’t describe the letter.
But Alcalde told Morales that it included a picture of him bathed in red, symbolizing his blood.
“It said wherever he goes within the jail system or the penitentiary system, he is marked for death.”
Morales said Alcalde worries that family members who visit him at the jail could be in danger.
Over the phone Alcalde sounds like a man who is very sure of himself, Morales said. But “he spends his time crying, singing, mentally going back to his hometown in Valparaiso to his friends that he used to be with as a kid.”
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
