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By Roger Burr \ Z Daily Times StaffTears of relief wetted an attorney’s shoulder Tuesday when a magistrate lifted the weight of the law from the shoulders of a woman who had been accused of firing seven bullets into the head and neck of her sleeping husband.A weeping Marva Griesemer hugged attorney Val Jolley, then turned to fall into the arms of her teen-age daughter, sister and friends after Magistrate Ellen Holloway dismissed an open charge of murder filed in the July 1 death of Robert Griesemer.Mrs. Holloway said that Districtlemodeling?f Room of Your HomelADE BOOKCASE SPECIAL!15% off- CALL 325-2688Woodworkingmfield Hwy.Attorney Bill Birdsall had proved that the 49-year-old Griesemer had been the victim of a homicide, but had not presented sufficient evidence that Mrs. Griesemer had committed the crime to warrant binding her over to District Court for trial.The ruling came at an end of an all-day preliminary hearing that saw about a dozen persons, including Mrs. Griesemer’s 15-year-old daughter, take the witness stand.Police and prosecutors quietly cleared the courtroom of televison sets on which they’d played video tapes of interviews, tape recorders, transcripts, and the other paraphernalia of an exhaustive investigation.They had acknowledged in advance that the case would be hard to prove because there are no known living witnesses other than the person who shot Griesemer as he slept on his bed in his home at 102 W. 25th, July 1,1986.Outside the courtroom, the 49-year-old Mrs. Griesemer said she’d had complete faith in Jolley, and that her innocence had been proven.Jolley pointed out that the woman had undergone nine hours of themost sophisticated questioning that several of Farmington's most experienced police detectives had to offer. And throughout it, she’d told the same story of a murderous intruder that she’d told an officer who found her hysterical on the kitchen floor of the house in which her husband lay dead.Jolley asked, as he had in court, why after 30 years of marriage, during which the Griesemers twice divorced and twice remarried each other, the woman would suddenly decide to kill her husband.Asked, by a reporter, who might have shot her husband, Mrs. Griesemer said that is one of a number of things “we’ll never know.”Mrs. Holloway heard Mrs. Griesemer’s hysteria for herself when a tape of the apparently distraught woman, calling the Police Department the night of the murder, was played.Mrs. Griesemer had left her telephone off the hook. Her tearful call for help was recorded by a police dispatcher’s tape, even as her words dissolved into weeping and muted cries, and the police dispatcher tried to calm her.That evening was relived, in part, by the taped sound of the first police officers’ arrival, her cry when she looked up to see Lt. Norman McConnell standing in her house before her, and McConnell’s “Ma’am, we’re police officers ... police officers ... It’s okay.”McConnell, a 14 year police veteran who said he’d never seen a witness appear to be so hysterical, told the court that Mrs. Griesemer said she’d been dozing in her front room after coming home and finding her husband asleep in the back bedroom. J **Suddenly, she awakened about 10:40 p.m. to find a man standing before her. The man slapped her in the face, and she didn’t know if she blacked out or was just stunned, but she heard a single sound like a firecracker from the back of the house.It was a story that Officers Gary Duncan and Homer Robinett said she told again and again at the police department, even when they tried to fool her into believing that tests had shown that she’d recently fired a gun, and that blood had been found on her clothing.The officers admitted, in court, that in fact they had no evidence that Mrs. Griesemer had recently fired a gun, and that laboratory tests on her clothing failed to find any traces of burned gunpowder or blood.An autopsy report showed that Griesemer had been shot seven times toward the right side of his head and neck. Police who photographed the death scene said Griesemer was lying on his side, with his arms folded across his chest. His blood had spattered the pillow, bed, floor, furniture and curtains, police said.The death weapon has never been found, inspite of an extensive search of the house, its roof and yard, and the roof and yard of the house next door, officers testified. Mrs. Griesemer has admitted that her husband owned such a .25-caliber semi-automatic pistol, but claimed not to have seen it since she and daughter Heather Griesemer left Lawrenceville, 111., to join Griesemer in Farmington in mid 1985.Police found a box of .25-caliber ammunition, minus eight rounds, in Heather’s bedroom. Two FBI special agents said laboratory tests onthe live cartridges, bullets recovered from Griesemer’s body and spent shells found in the the death room, showed that the bullets that killed the man could have come from the box in the girl’s room.Mrs. Griesemer said she couldn’t remember seeing the box, even as she unpacked after the family moved into the rental house the day before the shooting, according topolice.McConnell told of entering the unlocked front door of the Griesemer home to find the woman lying curled on the kitchen floor by the telephone. He said she didn’t respond when he first spoke to her, but when he touched her, she looked up and cried out.Mrs. Griesemer professed not to know that her husband was killed, and the police dispatcher’s tape recorded her saying, “I want to see my husband.”‘No, you don’t want to see,” McConnell responded.As Mrs. Griesemer became more adamant in demanding to be allowed to enter the blood spattered bedroom, McConnell said, he began to fear that she would have to be phyically restrained, so he told her her husband was dead.Police said the suspect was very cooperative when police asked to search her home and cars.Birdsall pointed out to the court, in closing arguments, that Mrs. Griesemer would have welcomed a police search for physical evidence if she knew that it wasn’t there because she’d disposed of it.Police and prosecutors had conducted their investigation on the premise that Griesemer was killed because he battered his wife.ream Great
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Farmington Daily Times
Farmington, New Mexico, US
Wed, Jan 28, 1987
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