GRAND JUNCTION — Twenty-first Judicial District Attorney Pete Hautzinger scowls when he surveys the floor-to-ceiling wall of boxes taking up space in his already cramped office storage room.
“Blagg” is written on 33 boxes. They are filled with more than 20,000 pages of discovery documents. They contain the contacts for more than 100 witnesses, the inventory for more than 331 exhibits and the records of 86 pretrial motions.
This daunting pile, which represents the paper record of the six-week murder trial in 2004, only hints at the complexity of retrying one of Colorado’s most high-profile murder cases a decade after a jury found Michael Blagg guilty of shooting his sleeping wife and putting her body in a dumpster at his office.
Blagg, who was sentenced to life in prison without parole and has been in the Colorado Department of Corrections since then, is going to get a second crack at exoneration because a single juror was found to have lied during the questioning of prospective jurors in Blagg’s trial. A district judge determined this past June that juror Marilyn Charlesworth was not truthful about multiple factors in her background and that her lies could have affected her judgment and Blagg’s right to a fair trial.
So a new cast of prosecutors and public defenders is preparing to take on the case again. The burden falls heavier on a prosecution office that has been hit with county-controlled budget and staff cuts since Blagg’s original trial.
“It’s a huge 10,000-pound gorilla to drop on my staff, ” Hautzinger said. “It’s massive. This has a ripple effect across our whole office and across the whole community.”
Hautzinger said two or three of his most senior attorneys will need to spend the better part of a year preparing for a trial that will be new ground for them.
“We’ve got the same issues. The difference is that we are not going to complain about it,” said Colorado public defender Doug Wilson, whose office is funded by the state and received a budget boost from the legislature last year. “We are going to tee it up again.”
The cost of retrying such a major case — something that hasn’t happened in Wilson’s 33 years in the public defender’s office — is a factor neither Hautzinger nor Wilson can begin to compute. It is safe to say that simply based on attorney and staff hours, it could climb into seven figures.
The former DA who tried the case is now in private practice, and his assistant DA is a district judge. Hautzinger said he could personally try the case, but there is a chance it will not take place before he is term-limited from office in 2016.
The public defenders who represented Blagg in his first trial, David Eisner and Ken Singer, have retired. So that office must also begin with a new cast of attorneys.
“Everybody has to start over,” Wilson said. “Because it was so long ago, it’s almost like taking a case from the start.”
For the DA’s office, that will mean choosing new trial attorneys from 21 currently on the staff. That is two less than when the Blagg case was originally tried. The office now has no investigators.
“Staffing resources have done nothing but get worse for the good guys,” Haut-zinger said.
The public defender’s office has a pool of 420 attorneys around the state. The Grand Junction office has 19 attorneys and five investigators.
Whoever takes up the case on both sides will have to delve again into murder details that spanned the sordid to the religious. The case has been the subject of books and national crime-show segments in the past decade.
Blagg was a former lieutenant commander and helicopter pilot in the Navy and an outwardly upstanding and religious family man when his wife and 6-year-old daughter, Abby, went missing in November 2001. Abby has not been found.
A large pool of blood was found in the master bedroom of the family’s upscale home. Michael Blagg tried to convince investigators that an intruder had come into the home and killed Jennifer and taken Abby.
Jennifer’s remains were found at the Mesa County landfill in a plume of trash that included items from AMETEK, where Michael Blagg worked. She had been shot in the eye at close range.
Prosecutors relied on a large model of the landfill to show jurors where Jennifer’s body was found. That model now resides at the Museum of Western Colorado.
In another change, the new trial likely will not prominently feature testimony from former Mesa County Sheriff’s Office investigator Steve King. He was one of the chief investigators testifying for the prosecution. However, King was fired from the sheriff’s office and is facing criminal charges over financial matters.
Blagg continues to be incarcerated at the Centennial Correctional Facility while he awaits a judge’s order remanding his case back to Mesa County. Hautzinger last week decided not to appeal the motion for a new trial, so that order could come at any time.
Blagg will be moved back to the Mesa County Jail and will have the opportunity to bond out.
David Loman, Jennifer Blagg’s brother, did not respond to a request for comment on how her family is dealing with the prospect of a new trial.
Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957, nlofholm@denverpost.com or twitter.com/nlofholm
