Colorado trial of immigrant stirs outcry in Chile
Comments Jun 10, 2009 4:28 PMBy P. SOLOMON BANDA
BOULDER, Colo.


Chilean immigrant Diego Olmos Alcalde said he wasn't even in Boulder when University of Colorado student Susannah Chase was raped and beaten to death with a baseball bat in 1997. But if he had, he would have fled back to Chile, he told investigators.

Authorities linked Olmos Alcalde to the crime last year through semen found on Chase's body and a DNA sample he gave after a kidnapping conviction in Wyoming.

His arrest led to an outcry from the Chilean media. They say Boulder authorities, stung by the unsolved 1996 killing of JonBenet Ramsey, were looking to solve Chase's slaying by pinning it on a hapless immigrant 10 years after the fact.

Olmos Alcalde faces murder, sexual assault and kidnapping charges. Prosecutors and defense attorneys will begin presenting evidence after opening statements that are expected Thursday.

Alonso Lopez of Chile's consulate office in Los Angeles said Wednesday that Chilean officials are monitoring the case. He also said Olmos Alcalde could be considered an American since he's lived in the U.S. since he was 16.

"It's no small detail. He's been living in the United States for more than 20 years," Lopez said.

Even though he says he wasn't in Boulder that day, Olmos Alcalde told a Chilean reporter in a tape-recorded conversation that he couldn't remember whether he had sex with Chase, according to a Boulder Daily Camera account of an evidence hearing in March.

"The truth is, I have been very lucky with women in the past," Olmos Alcalde said in that taped interview, prosecutor Amy Okubo told a judge during the hearing. "You can be with a woman one night and then, after that, it is `See ya.'"

In that same court hearing, prosecutors argued Olmos Alcalde may change his story and claim he had consensual sex with Chase before somebody else killed her.

Prosecutors and Olmos Alcalde's lead defense attorney, Mary Claire Mulligan, declined to comment on the details of the case when reached by The Associated Press.

Chase, a 23-year-old student from Stamford, Conn., was found severely beaten in an alley a block from her Boulder home Dec. 21, 1997.

Chase was walking home alone from a pizza parlor after an argument with her boyfriend when she was attacked. Police say she was savagely beaten with a baseball bat found nearby.

She died the next day - the day she was supposed to fly home to Connecticut for Christmas - after 24 hours on life support in a hospital.

Police interviewed hundreds of people, including Chase's boyfriend. They took DNA samples from at least 50 men, hoping to match DNA recovered from Chase's body. But no matches were made and leads in the case eventually fizzled out.

Olmos Alcalde was not among the suspects in 1997.

DNA was first collected from Olmos Alcalde in 2001 after the Wyoming kidnapping conviction. After years of appeals, a new trial and a long wait caused by a backlog of thousands of samples in Wyoming's state lab, Olmos Alcalde's DNA profile was uploaded into a national DNA database in January 2008. He was arrested within days.

Jurors will hear about five other attacks that prosecutors blame on Olmos Alcalde, including two in Denver in the weeks after Chase's slaying, and his Wyoming conviction, which involved an attack on a young woman in a parking lot in 2000.

Other evidence in the case includes the baseball bat, which prosecutors say contains DNA from Olmos Alcalde's ex-girlfriend. While Olmos Alcalde's DNA and fingerprints aren't on the bat, prosecutors said in a hearing in April the evidence shows Olmos Alcalde had access to it.



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