The mother of slain University of Colorado student Susannah Chase will travel 1,800 miles from Stamford, Conn., to Boulder to be at the trial of her daughter’s suspected killer, hoping to see justice dispensed after more than 11 years.
The defendant’s mother — unemployed, in ill health and without a car — doesn’t know if she can make it the 35 miles from her home in Aurora to the Boulder courtroom where her son, Diego Olmos Alcalde, is set to defend himself this week against charges of rape, kidnapping and murder.
Jury selection in the trial gets underway Monday morning.
Like the geographical and circumstantial distance that separates the women, their feelings about who is or isn’t responsible for the savage 1997 death of the blond 23-year-old American-studies major are similarly divergent.
“I’m convinced this is who it is,” Julie Chase said of Alcalde, who police linked to the crime through DNA evidence a decade after her daughter was pronounced dead at Boulder Community Hospital. “We’re looking forward to having this over and behind us quickly.”
She said she has “complete confidence” that prosecutors will prove to a jury that the 39-year-old Chilean native beat her daughter with a baseball bat, raped her and dumped her in an alley to die.
Leticia Olmos Snyder is equally adamant that her son is innocent, fingered by an overly eager police force desperate to solve a cold case.
“I know he didn’t do it,” she said. “The police don’t know what they’re doing.”
In about four weeks, when the trial is expected to end, Boulder should finally get resolution to one of its most vexing murder cases — one that confounded police for 10 years and left a city and a family in a heart-wrenching search for answers.
“I think about her almost all the time and always what I see is her beautiful smile,” Julie Chase said last week in a phone interview from her home in Stamford. “She was a lovely person, she was very kind, and she was very compassionate.”
Friends and family described Chase as an easygoing woman who loved nature, jam bands and the eclectic, spiritually focused lifestyle embodied by many who call Boulder home.
“To us, she was the one child we called a free spirit,” Julie Chase said in an interview with the Camera three weeks after her daughter’s death. “She really liked most things about the natural world and really about most people.”
But that gentle, carefree existence came to a brutal end in the early morning hours of Dec. 21, 1997.
Sometime between when she left a pizzeria and two hours later, Chase was savagely beaten, raped and left for dead in an alley about a block from her house.
She died the next day — Dec. 22, 1997 — after being on life support for more than 24 hours.
Police interviewed hundreds of people, including Chase’s boyfriend and transients known to wander the part of the Whittier neighborhood where she was attacked, in an effort to find a suspect.
They took DNA samples from at least 50 men, hoping to match an unknown DNA profile recovered from Chase’s body. But no matches were made and leads fizzled out.
But police finally arrested Alcalde on Jan. 26, 2008, at his mother’s house in Aurora after a DNA sample collected by Wyoming prison officials matched with a DNA sample from Chase’s body that Boulder police had entered into a national criminal database.
He was charged with first-degree murder, sexual assault and kidnapping, and pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Julie Chase is left wondering how she, her husband and her four grown children are going to handle the next month in court.
“I can’t quite decide where I am,” she said. “I did not think we would ever see this day.”
She said up until just a few days ago, she was expecting a delay or postponement of the trial and another period of waiting.
She said she is committed to being at as much of the trial as she possibly can be.
“I don’t know,” she said, “what you could possibly do to get ready for this.”
