Diego Olmos Alcalde, convicted last week of the 1997 murder of Susannah Chase, will spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance of parole.
Boulder District Judge James Klein on Monday also sentenced Alcalde to 48 years for sexually assaulting Chase and 24 years for kidnapping her — the maximum for each charge.
Alcalde will serve the sentences consecutively in state prison. He turns 40 today.
Alcalde’s attorney, Mary Claire Mulligan, asked the judge to consider her client’s tumultuous history and allow her to gather information about him for the court before imposing a final sentence.
“Mr. Alcalde has had a background that would make most people blanch,” she said.
Klein denied her request.
A jury last week convicted Alcalde, a Chilean native who has lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years, of beating the University of Colorado senior with a baseball bat, raping her and then dumping her nearly lifeless body in an alley near her Boulder home.
For more than a decade, police were unable to link a suspect to the Dec. 21, 1997, killing until sperm recovered from Chase’s body and preserved in evidence was matched to DNA taken from Alcalde and submitted to a nationwide criminal DNA database.
Members of Chase’s family took the podium Monday and spoke to a packed courtroom about the woman who would have turned 35 in October.
Chase’s brother Stephen, who like most of the family flew out from the East Coast to attend the hearing, said his sister “paid the biggest price for her random encounter with evil” but that if anything good comes from the tragedy, it’s that Alcalde will no longer be on the streets to terrorize others.
Turning to Alcalde, Chase’s other brother, Doug, said his sister would have hoped that he put his energies into redeeming himself.
“She would hope that in some way you redeem your existence on this earth so you are not just a rapist, a kidnapper and a murderer,” he said.
Alcalde, who declined to speak at the sentencing, mostly conferred with his attorneys and wrote on a piece of paper as the Chases spoke. Occasionally, he looked up to glance at a childhood photograph of his victim that was being displayed on a screen.
Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett said justice was done in one of Boulder’s most confounding cold cases.
“A guilty sentence in a murder case is never a happy thing, but it’s satisfying,” he said Monday.
