A district judge in Mesa County on Monday agreed to dismiss first-degree murder charges against the 63-year-old man accused of killing two people in a series of pipe bombings in Grand Junction more than three decades ago.
Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein conceded Friday that prosecutors could not prove James Genrich carried out the fatal 1991 bombings — a concession that came three years after Genrich’s original 1993 murder convictions were thrown out because of faulty evidence in the high-profile prosecution.
Rubinstein asked Chief Judge Brian Flynn to dismiss the murder charges rather than proceed to a new trial, but left untouched Genrich’s underlying convictions and their 72-year prison sentence, a stance that suggests prosecutors still believe Genrich committed the killings, even if they don’t believe they can prove it.
“The decision today is not an acknowledgment of innocence, in our minds, but the result of a technicality and an injustice,” Carrie Yantzer, daughter of bombing victim Henry Ruble, said during Monday’s hearing.
Imprisoned for more than three decades for the murders of 43-year-old Ruble and 12-year-old Maria Delores Gonzales, Genrich will now be immediately eligible for parole. He has always maintained his innocence in the bombings, and his attorneys believe all of his convictions should be thrown out because of the flawed evidence in the case.
“It’s very, very frustrating that the same evidence that led to the overturning of the (murder) convictions is now being used, on a technicality, to keep him in prison,” said attorney Chris Fabricant with the Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to exonerating wrongly convicted people that is representing Genrich.
The end of the murder prosecution is just the latest turn in a case that riveted the Grand Junction community and was controversial from the start.
Law enforcement tactics during the extensive investigation — including one officer encouraging Genrich to commit suicide — and prosecutorial misconduct during the trial fostered early and lingering doubts about Genrich’s guilt. Two of 11 charges were dismissed as a sanction in the middle of the 1993 trial after a key prosecution witness failed to turn over evidence to the defense; that expert witness faced contempt-of-court proceedings, and his toolmark analysis — the linchpin of the prosecution’s case — was ultimately discredited decades later.
On Monday, Yantzer labeled Genrich “nothing but evil” and said he was not an innocent person.
“This was not just done to our family, this was done to this community, our community,” she said. “Grand Junction was terrorized. Families were devastated. Lives were taken. These people were loved, they mattered and they should still be here. There is something that cannot be ignored: for the past 33 years that you, James Genrich, have been incarcerated, there has not been another pipe bomb in Grand Junction. This community has had peace, and that matters.”
The bombings
Genrich was 28, living in downtown Grand Junction and working at the Two Rivers Convention Center when a bomb went off in the center’s parking garage on Feb. 14, 1991. A man was injured, but no one was killed in that bombing.
Then, in April 1991, a family got into their van in Grand Junction to go shopping, and a bomb under a wheel well exploded, killing 12-year-old Gonzales.
Just weeks later, in June 1991, Ruble and his wife were driving home from dinner in downtown Grand Junction when they spotted a strange object in the restaurant parking lot. Ruble picked it up and died when it exploded.
Investigators at the time faced immense public pressure to identify the bomber, and Genrich became a top suspect when he went to a bookstore after the three bombings and asked for a book that included instructions on bomb-making. Prosecutors relied heavily on circumstantial evidence to build the case, including notes Genrich wrote that were found in his apartment, in which he expressed a desire to kill women and said he might harm “innocents.”
Genrich had been seen in some of the areas where the 1991 bombs detonated, and lived within walking distance of two sites. He’d studied electronics, and investigators found two fuses in his apartment that were the same type as those used in one of the bombs. Investigators did not find any gunpowder, schematics or bomb-making tools in Genrich’s apartment.
They did seize some of his tools, which the prosecution’s key expert later matched to marks on an unexploded bomb that had been discovered in Grand Junction in 1989. Prosecutors pursued a theory that the same person made all four bombs, Fabricant said.
But Genrich lived in Phoenix in 1989 and was at work in a bookstore there when the first, unexploded bomb was placed in Grand Junction.
“An unshakeable alibi,” Fabricant said.
During the trial, prosecutors suggested Genrich may have worked with an accomplice, but never named anyone.
Other evidence also casts doubt.
A white vehicle was seen at each of the 1991 bombings, and Genrich did not own or have access to a vehicle. A witness also testified that he saw a “Spanish-looking man” handling one of the bombs; Genrich is white. He told The Denver Post in 1993 that the homicidal notes he wrote were a practice he picked up in therapy — to write down what he was feeling instead of going out and “losing his temper.”
Genrich never admitted to the bombings, even when investigators followed him round-the-clock for months, and his parents secretly wore a wire and tried to get him to confess. It was during that round-the-clock surveillance that an investigator accompanied Genrich to a bar and then to his brother’s grave and suggested there that Genrich commit suicide “so we can all go home,” according to a 1993 Denver Post story.
At another point, investigators took Genrich to lunch and suggested they’d help him get a better job, then “happened to run into” a polygraph examiner, who brought Genrich into a room that had already been set up with the testing equipment and enlarged, gruesome photos of the bombing. (The polygraph test results from that day were later thrown out by a judge.)
Conviction and appeals
In 1993, Genrich was tried in Weld County due to the extensive publicity in Grand Junction. The jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder, three counts of using an explosive device to commit a felony and a single count of assault.
In 2019, the Colorado Court of Appeals found Genrich was entitled to a hearing to determine whether he should be given a new trial because of potentially flawed toolmark evidence in his case. That hearing took place in January 2022, and then-Mesa County District Judge Richard Gurley overturned Grenrich’s murder convictions in 2023.
Gurley found that the prosecution’s key toolmark evidence was flawed. The expert testified during the 1993 trial that marks on the bombs must have been made by Genrich’s tools. The expert — the same one who later faced contempt-of-court proceedings for withholding evidence — testified that his analysis ruled out the possibility that any other tools could have made the marks.
New science and forensics have since discredited the expert’s conclusion, prompting Gurley to throw out the convictions and order a new trial. That toolmark evidence was the keystone of the prosecution’s case, which was otherwise entirely circumstantial.
The murder counts were the only convictions affected by Gurley’s decision because the Court of Appeals ruled in its 2019 opinion that Genrich’s less-serious convictions of using an explosive device and assault were too old to be challenged.
Those lesser convictions, which together carried a 72-year prison sentence, still stand, though Genrich’s attorneys are challenging the convictions and expect to file a new appeal in the coming weeks.
“The courts have spoken that the crimes he was convicted of should remain,” Rubinstein said Monday. “And the sentence he is serving should remain.”
Genrich no longer faces the punishment of life in prison without the possibility of parole that comes with first-degree murder convictions, making him eligible for parole. He is scheduled for a parole hearing in May, according to the Colorado Department of Corrections.
In the prosecution’s motion to dismiss the murder charges, Rubinstein outlined a number of problems with trying the case again three decades later, including that 28 of the original witnesses have since died, and that the toolmark expert who testified in the original case is now 84 years old and lives with a cognitive impairment. Modern experts who retested the tools and wires in January found that they could not conclusively tie the tools to the bombs.
Fabricant said that the renewed investigation as prosecutors prepared to potentially bring the murder case to trial again actually strengthened Genrich’s innocence claim. Investigators found a new fingerprint on a piece of tape used on a battery on one of the bombs that did not match Genrich’s fingerprints, Fabricant said.
Rubinstein said it is unclear who left that unidentified, new fingerprint. He noted that prosecutors had concerns about the chain of custody for the evidence in the case, as it was moved several times over the three decades since Genrich’s conviction.
