GUNNISON—A fluttering bird. A skittish border collie. Did they cause a freak accident? Or are they bizarre excuses to cover up a cold-hearted murder?
That’s what a Gunnison jury is sorting out over the next month as it considers the case against a wealthy Texas steel importer. Fred Mueller, 51, is on trial for allegedly murdering his retired physician wife, Leslie Mueller, in May 2008 while hiking near their Lake City vacation home in one of the most rugged, remote and unoccupied counties in Colorado.
A last photograph of Leslie, taken during that hike, shows a petite 48-year-old mother of three crouching on a rocky outcrop in front of a small waterfall with her border collie, Gracie. Fred Mueller snapped the photo 28 minutes before Hinsdale County authorities were notified of a drowning on Cottonwood Creek.
Fred Mueller gave rescuers and investigators an account of what happened seconds after he took that picture.
His wife possibly looked up at a bird that flew by, he said. Maybe the bird startled Gracie. And maybe Gracie, who he called “the worst dog we’ve ever had,” caused Leslie to fall off the edge.
“It looked to me like she just did a swan dive,” he said in a recorded version of events played this week for a jury that runs the gamut from a young woman with blue and green hair to a bespectacled grandfather.
The jurors scribbled notes as Mueller described his late wife crumpling on the rocks head and shoulders first and sliding “like mush” into the creek before she “oozed” lifelessly downstream and out of sight.
Mueller said he ran up to higher ground and to a point where he thought the creek might carry his wife. When he didn’t see her, he drove to a neighboring house for help.
The neighbor, Justin Sparks, found Leslie about 130 yards downstream from where her husband reported she had fallen. Her head was wedged under a log. An autopsy would show that she died by drowning.
Doubts build
From the beginning, those who came into contact with Mueller doubted his story — for both scientific and gut-reaction reasons.
Sparks told the first Hinsdale County Sheriff’s Office deputies to arrive that Mueller’s behavior was cold and unemotional. He said Mueller stood by with his hands in his pockets “like a bystander at an accident scene” and watched as the rescuers put Leslie’s body on a gurney.
When Hinsdale County called in the Colorado Bureau of Investigation the evening of the drowning, concerns about the truthfulness of Mueller’s story grew. Doubts finally coalesced into an arrest warrant for alleged first-degree murder with deliberation, nearly four years later. Investigators and prosecutors believe Mueller drowned his wife.
The findings behind the murder charge include the fact that there was no blood, hair or other material on the rock where Leslie Mueller allegedly landed after a 14-foot fall. The stream wasn’t deep or fast-moving enough to carry her body, much less wedge it under a log.
She had no injuries consistent with falling. There were no broken bones or marks on her hands and arms where a person would normally try to break a fall.
Experts in water flow, the science of human motion and human traits, water rescue and a software mathematical analyzing system called MADYMO were brought in on the case to reinforce investigators’ findings. They did stream-flow studies and human-falling analysis. They floated mannequins and a live volunteer down the creek to prove it wouldn’t carry a person where Mueller said it did.
Mueller’s three attorneys will attempt to poke holes in the research of what they have called “dubious expert testimony” with their own long list of expert witnesses.
Hints of unhappiness
Other facts investigators seized on: Mueller had scratches on each side of his face and on one hand. His broken glasses and scuff marks in the dirt were found near the rock where he said Leslie fell. His shirt, with tears on the front collar, was found nearby. He was wet up to his mid-thighs even though he said that he didn’t go into the water looking for his wife.
A few days after Leslie’s death, Mueller flew back to their home in San Angelo, Texas, where he owns a steel import business and where he and Leslie were well-known. She was San Angelo’s first female obstetrician/gynecologist and was very active in the Catholic church.
Friends have told investigators they thought the Muellers were a happy couple, but one former employee of Fred Mueller’s testified that he had told her not long before Leslie’s death — which was weeks before they their 27th wedding anniversary — that the marriage had grown stale and he had contemplated divorce.
Leslie Mueller had grown up on a ranch and loved spending time in Lake City. He did not. She was an outdoors person who liked horseback riding, cross-country skiing and hiking. He was more of a city person.
After Leslie’s death, Mueller sold the Lake City home, one of three vacation homes the couple owned in Colorado, Texas and Mexico. A little more than two years after Leslie died, he married Wendee Walker.
She sits in the front row of the courtroom every day, flanked by Fred and Leslie Mueller’s two grown daughters. Fred Mueller’s elderly parents sit directly behind him. Other relatives and friends fill that side of the courtroom. They have all continued to express belief in the innocence of the lanky, patrician man who appears in court every day in country club-appropriate clothes even though he has been held in the Gunnison County jail since February.
The murder trial, which is being held in neighboring Gunnison County rather than in harder-to-reach Lake City where the infamous cannibal Alferd Packer was once convicted, has brought national media attention. Videographers for the true crime shows “48 Hours” and “Dateline NBC” have staked out a position on one side of the courtroom to film the trial.
Grant Houston, publisher of the Silver World newspaper in Lake City, is also covering every minute of the long trial for the 400 or so year-round residents of Lake City.
“It’s a big deal in Lake City,” he said
The trial, which began last week, isn’t expected to wrap up until early February.
Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957, nlofholm@denverpost.com or twitter.com/nlofholm
