Mueller jury talks trial, tribulations

State was unable to totally convince

SAN ANGELO, Texas - Uncertainty plagued jurors far beyond the room where they cast vote after vote in the murder trial of San Angelo businessman Frederick Mueller.

Questions brewed in the back of their minds, and left some lying awake at night.

Every day for more than five weeks, jurors listened intently, took detailed notes and posed insightful questions to nearly every witness who testified.

Geoff Heller said serving on The State of Colorado v. Frederick Harold Mueller trial affected his life in a way he hadn't expected — it wasn't a job that could be left at the day's end.

"I really found myself pondering a lot of the evidence and a lot of the witnesses and things of that nature at night," Heller said.

Juror Betty Haggart said she kept waiting for a picture to emerge from details prosecutors laid out.

"I'd come home every night and say, ‘Please tomorrow connect the dots for me,'" Haggart said after the trial. "They had a lot of dots."

The five-week trial ended Feb. 9 in a mistrial, with 11 jurors voting not guilty and one holdout for a guilty verdict. Frederick Mueller, accused of killing his wife Leslie in May 2008, was released that afternoon on a $150,000 bond and was ordered to surrender his passport.

Deemed an accident at the time, Leslie Mueller's death near the couple's vacation home in Lake City, Colo., was subsequently investigated by law enforcement authorities who did not believe the account of events given by Frederick Mueller.


Juror Rob Burnett, who like Heller joked that he lost skiing time over the past month, said the trial affected all the jurors physically and emotionally.

They cited lack of sleep, taking sleep aids and how Haggart would come into court with notes she made at 2 a.m.

Jurors, who dissected testimony, read body language, inspected photos and video, weren't convinced the prosecution met its burden of proof. All of them hope to visit the fall site, which they said would have been helpful in their decision-making.

The district administrator with the Colorado judicial branch, after reviewing Colorado statutes, decided not to release the jurors' names.

It was unclear which juror voted guilty.

The 11 jurors "finding him not guilty in no way implies that we believe he's innocent," Burnett said, backed by the other jurors present.

"That was a strong emotion all the way through," Haggart added.

Burnett, Lindsey Grasmick, Jeannine McElveen, Haggart, Lacey Keane and Heller agreed to meet the day after the mistrial was declared. They wanted to make it clear that they don't believe Mueller is innocent — just that there wasn't enough evidence to convince them one way or the other.

A lack of significant injuries baffled jurors — if Leslie fell, they wanted to know, where were the fractures, bruising and blood? If Mueller held her head under water, where were the marks from her struggle?

Votes changed constantly inside the jury room, where an erasable board kept track of slight variances in the vote — guilty, not guilty, undecided, undecided not guilty or undecided guilty.

"It changed constantly," Keane said.

At the beginning of each day, and as pieces of evidence were discussed, jurors would cast their votes. They began deliberations the afternoon of Feb. 6 and declared they were deadlocked Feb. 9. It wasn't until the last hour of the last day of their deliberation that they arrived at the 11-to-1 decision.

"I think it was difficult for all of us because I believe we all left the courtroom and went into deliberation feeling pretty much the same about the plausibility of (Mueller's) account of the accident," Burnett said. "I think all of us were going, ‘Wow. This doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? This is a real stretch to buy it.'"

Jurors said the original vote was more evenly divided. Eventually all but one came to the same conclusion: The prosecution had not given enough evidence to find Mueller guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

McElveen, speaking for most of the jurors in the room, said it was "a very reluctant not guilty vote."

"If all the stars had aligned and there was cosmic energy and harmony throughout the universe, perhaps everything could have happened the way he said it did," McElveen said.

McElveen said the green plaid shirt found near the extraction point could have been a piece of circumstantial evidence — or it could have been a coincidence.

"For me it came down to ‘the story wasn't true, therefore the element that caused her death (was murder),'" she said. "‘Therefore' wasn't evidence. I didn't have the evidence I felt I needed to move to a guilty vote."

Parts of Mueller's "implausible" story were suspicious from Day One, Burnett said. One unsettling point was that Mueller "didn't look long enough" for his wife and that the couple's neighbor, Justin Sparks, traveled farther in his attempt to save Leslie.

McElveen said jurors agreed Leslie didn't land on her face — whether coming down from a 10-foot or 20-foot drop. Some details, such as how the Muellers' camera ended up on rocks with no scratches or dents, had to be thrown out completely.

Nine of the jurors who deliberated were college graduates, according to an informal poll among themselves. Their ages ranged from retirement years to a recent high school graduate.

Some were surprised by how uniformly both families supported Mueller. McElveen was less taken aback. Although it wasn't brought up in the trial, she said she could believe that Leslie's parents stood behind Mueller so they wouldn't lose access to their grandchildren.

During the trial's five weeks, friends and family from Texas and Colorado filled the benches behind Mueller's defense team.

Jurors had varying opinions on the attorneys but generally preferred the straightforward approach of the prosecution.

Experts such as dog handler Jonni Joyce, drowning expert Andrea Zaferes and hydrologist Scott Fifer were generally liked and respected. Dr. Werner Spitz, the defense's forensic pathologist who at times showed his irritation with prosecutors' questions, was less impressive, they said. At the beginning of Spitz's testimony, his small jabs drew a few laughs from the gallery, but toward the end of his questioning, those died off.

After jurors left the room for a break, Judge Steven Patrick turned to Spitz and reminded him he was used to testifying and needed to answer prosecutor Matt Durkin's questions without expanding.

Burnett said some jurors felt that confirmation bias, a tendency to look for information that supports a preconceived idea, could be seen in the initial investigation.

Craig Sallee, a juror originally from San Angelo who went to school in Wall, said in an interview the day of the mistrial that he agreed with the others that time played a large factor in their decision. They went through different scenarios to work out if Mueller would have logically had time to drown his wife, then run for help.

"They just didn't prove the case to me," he said. "I can put holes in everything. In my heart I felt like he's guilty, but you've got to go with the evidence that's shown."

Although Mueller didn't make a positive impression on Sallee, he couldn't send a man to prison without more to support the accusation.

With the case behind them — other than a quick trip Feb. 9 to a hearing about a retrial — all jurors were looking forward to returning to their lives.

During the final days of deliberation, they looked forward to "smoke breaks" when they could throw snowballs and build snowmen. As the court cleared Feb. 9, at least half of the jurors visited with attorneys outside the courthouse — going so far as to invite them out for a drink.

The seven interviewed talked about how wearying it was to hear the "same question posed three times," to hear data about water flow and defense attorney Mike DeGeurin's phrase "by the way" — used to introduce another thought.

Likewise, the litany of Mueller's story will be forever imprinted on their minds.

"If I heard about that blue bird one more time, I'd have to throw up," Sallee said.

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