A deal’s a deal, claims an Aurora murder suspect who wants his former hostages to pay up in court for breaking a pledge made at knife-point to hide him out.
Instead, newlyweds Jared and Lindsay Rowley bolted as soon as then-23-year-old Jesse Dennis Dimmick dozed off after snacks, pillows and a movie in their rural Dover, Kan., home in September 2009.
Dimmick had eluded police for two days, after the body of 25-year-old Michael Curtis was discovered inside an East Colfax Avenue motel in Aurora.
The Rowleys were watching TV when Dimmick burst in.
“I, the defendant, asked the Rowleys to hide me because I feared for my life,” Dimmick stated in his hand-written countersuit.
“I offered the Rowleys an unspecified amount of money which they agreed upon, therefore forging a legally binding oral contract.”
The lawsuit was Dimmick’s response to one filed by the Rowleys in September, in which they sought $75,000 for the emotion distress his intrusion created.
Dimmick wants $235,000, saying he wants to pay the hospital bills that resulted when he was shot by a SWAT officer as he wielded a knife inside the Rowley home.
The Rowley’s lawyer, Robert E. Keeshan, called such Dimmick’s agreement hardly binding.
“In order for parties to form a binding contract, there must be a meeting of the minds on all essential terms, including and most specifically, an agreement on the price,” he wrote in a motion to dismiss Dimmick’s claim.
Dimmick was captured in the farm community southwest of Topeka after he allegedly crashed a minivan, stolen in Greeley, following a 10-mile chase by a sheriff’s deputy along a country road.
An alleged accomplice, Shayne Michael Miller, then 35, was arrested about 100 miles east in a hotel in Salina, Kan., the night before.
In May 2010, Miller pleaded guilty to being an accessory to a class 1 felony and was sentenced to four years in prison. He admiited renting the room where Curtis was killed.
In Kansas, Dimmick already has been sentenced to nearly 11 years in prison on kidnapping and other charges.
He is being held in the Adams County Jail yet to enter a plea on first-degree murder, autho theft and other Colorado charges.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com
