Who’s Policing the Police?

Two murder cases that captured Larimer County’s attention in recent weeks—involving Tim Masters, whose murder conviction and life sentence were thrown out two months ago, and involving Shawna Nelson, who was convicted Monday of murdering a romantic rival—raise troubling questions about the justice system in Northern Colorado.

Now that the dust is settling, local law enforcement is starting to look ahead.

At first glance, the two cases show, at best, ineptitude and unchecked infidelity; at worst, they reveal deliberate misconduct, a brotherhood of silence when faced with that misconduct, and an apparent dark underbelly of half-truths and moral lapses. Law enforcement leaders said the cases highlighted what happens when people don’t abide by the high ethical and moral standards expected of them.

Shawna Nelson, 36, will spend the rest of her life in prison after being convicted Monday morning of the murder of Heather Garraus.

Weld County Sheriff John Cooke said he was glad the case, which he called “an anomaly,” was over.

“I’ve learned two things over this case. One of them is, I’m never going say to someone, ‘What were you thinking?’ because obviously they’re not. The other one is, I used to say that in my career in law enforcement that I’ve seen it all. This case has taught me that that is not true, so I will never say that again,” he said. “There are so many lessons that can be taken out of this. But it’s just a tragedy. And hopefully, in my career nothing like this will ever happen again.”

Nelson’s attorneys said she plans to appeal; for now, she and her family are preparing for her to be moved to the Colorado Department of Corrections, and the family of Heather Garraus is letting the news sink in.

“I knew Heather wasn’t going to let her get away with this,” said Sara Staley, who was Heather Garraus’ best friend and coworker, as she wept after the verdict was read Monday. “I miss her so much.”

Nelson had a three-year affair with Ignacio Garraus, a longtime Greeley police officer and husband to Heather Garraus. Shawna Nelson, a former dispatcher, was married to Ken Nelson, a Weld County Sheriff’s investigator and member of the county drug task force. Shawna Nelson and Ignacio Garraus both had children with their spouses, and also shared a son born of their affair. Prosecutors said Shawna Nelson killed Heather Garraus because she viewed her as an obstacle to a lasting relationship with Ignacio Garraus and the baby they shared.

The trial exposed what seems to be a dark side of the world of law enforcement, rife with adultery, betrayal and secrecy.

Police officers testified as witnesses to a crime, even as victims, rather than the uniformed experts they usually are in cases of this magnitude.

Defense attorney Kevin Strobel pointed out that the Greeley department was inextricably linked to the case from the beginning—the victim was a police officer’s wife; the live-in boyfriend of the prosecution’s star witness was a police officer; the police department pays the salaries of the dispatch center’s employees, many of whom testified against Nelson; and many other witnesses who testified were active-duty police officers. Strobel questioned the prudence of Chief Jerry Garner’s decision to let his detectives handle the investigation, rather than hand it over to an outside agency.

“Four minutes into this case, they reached a conclusion that Shawna Nelson was guilty. They did not investigate any other possibility,” he told the jury in closing arguments last week. “That’s advocacy, that’s not investigation.”

Garner countered that the outcome vindicated his officers and their work.

“I think the jury’s verdict has answered that question loud and clear,” he said.

He added that the department would continue to enforce its ethical standards.

“I think one of the things that comes out of it as well, that we’ll be talking about some more, is it doesn’t really matter what the morality of the public at large is. We hold our people to a higher standard,” he said. “If you’re going to enforce the law over others, it’s reasonable for others to expect you to follow the rules yourself.”

He hasn’t heard of anyone’s faith shaken in the Greeley department, “but I think the case itself brought up concerns about criminal justice itself in this part of the state,” he said.

To address that, he said the department would hold its people accountable and “do the right thing at all times.”

“The Shawna Nelson case is a great example of what happens when people don’t hold themselves to a higher standard,” he said.

Cases of adultery among law enforcement or elected officials almost always attract attention, not only because of the juicy details but because of the betrayal of public trust.

People sworn to protect citizens, like people elected to represent them, are held to a higher moral standard, so when that standard is broken or lapses, it’s important to understand what it means in the context of their jobs on the public’s behalf.

“Unfortunately, we’ve seen examples of that kind of stuff not only with this case, but with the evidence in the Tim Masters case, with several examples of where it appears that police are not holding themselves to a standard that we would like to hold them to,” said Philip Reichel, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.

“And that is a problem and it’s been a problem for decades,” he said. “You can talk in the classroom, for example, about should police be held to a higher standard, and most of our students, and I think most of the public, thinks they should. But that doesn’t make it easier to determine what that standard should be, who should be enforcing it, and so on.”

He said law enforcement officers and others on the front lines of public safety have difficult jobs because they usually see people at their worst.

“For the most part, when police officers run into members of the community that aren’t in law enforcement, they are seeing good people who have misbehaved,” he said. “You don’t get in law enforcement and get an opportunity to see a lot of good in people.”

He said it likely wears thin for officers to see frequent profligate behavior among otherwise upstanding members of society. It doesn’t excuse bad behavior among officers, but it might make it less taboo.

“You become desensitized to misbehavior,” he said. “Because you know that the banker and the real estate agents and the insurance agents in town are having affairs, and you get reports of abusive situations, you know these things are going on. And when you see it going on in your own workplace, in some cases maybe it is less surprising to you.”

He added that people in difficult, stressful jobs often share a fraternity or camaraderie that can lead to intimate friendships or relationships.

Sheriff Cooke said he didn’t think adultery among law enforcement was any more common than in other fields, however.

“When you have men and women working together side by side, these things do happen. It doesn’t matter if you are a business of 10 people or 1,000 people,” he said.

In Florida, at least, law enforcement leaders are worried enough to enact policies prohibiting that sort of behavior. The Pinellas County, Fla., sheriff’s office has taken direct action against adultery by employees.

In December, a radio operator received a written reprimand and a deputy was suspended for three days after officials learned the two had an intimate relationship although both are married to other people, according to the Tampa Tribune newspaper.

Sheriff’s office spokeswoman Cecilia Barreda sent Fort Collins Now a copy of the office’s policy, which specifies that married personnel cannot develop intimate relationships with other employees.

She said the radio operator and the deputy were the first people to be cited under the policy.

Cooke said his department had a “moral turpitude” policy many years ago that prohibited co-habitation by personnel who weren’t married, but courts struck down those rules. He said he doubted whether the Florida policy against adultery would hold water in Colorado.

“We can control some off-duty conduct when it has a direct relationship on the job,” he said. “One can say (the Nelson/Garraus affair) had a direct relationship on the job in that a woman was murdered, but you can’t predict these things.”

Sheriff’s office employees can be restricted from associating off-duty with a known felon, for instance, or from exercising their First Amendment right to join a group like the Ku Klux Klan, because it could affect their work, Cooke said.

“But somebody having an affair — I don’t think we can win that battle,” he said.

Reichel said police departments know of questionable ethical or moral issues among officers and care about the resulting reputations. When UNC’s criminal justice department branched off from the sociology department several years ago, Reichel and his colleagues talked to the Greeley, Evans and several other police departments to find out what classes they wanted recruits to take.

“Without fail, they asked for a course in ethics,” he said.

The department created a junior-level ethics course related to professionalism in criminal justice.

“We put that in in response to what the law enforcement community perceived as a problem. They said, ‘This is an area that we realize is important not only internally, but for perception in the community, and we want our officers to be ethical,’” he said.

“The police are under a microscope as far as the community is concerned. We do expect our officers to behave differently and better than the rest of us, because they’re enforcing the law, and they’d better be. But they don’t always ... and the police are aware of this. They know they need to seek out and find the best people. So it’s not like they aren’t trying; it’s just that they aren’t always able to control all the things that their employees do.”

About the Case Shawna Nelson, 36, plans to appeal her conviction of first-degree murder in the shooting death of Heather Garraus. The only sentence is life in prison without parole, and Weld District Judge Roger Klein immediately handed down that sentence Monday morning. Nelson showed no emotion as the verdict and sentence were read, but friends and relatives of Heather Garraus, whom Nelson was convicted of killing, wept openly. “Justice has been served,” said Sara Staley, Heather Garraus’ best friend and coworker at the Colorado State Employees’ Credit Union in Greeley. Nelson’s family members said they couldn’t understand how the jury was convinced beyond a reasonable doubt by that evidence. They maintain Shawna Nelson is not the person who killed Heather Garraus, and said voluminous media reports about the case helped convict her in the court of public opinion. “I will never believe in my heart that Shawna did this,” said Debbie Smith, Shawna Nelson’s sister. Two other people have been charged in connection with the case: Ken Nelson is charged with evidence tampering, related to the alleged murder weapon, and was granted immunity so he could testify against his wife. He is scheduled for a trial in April. Michelle Moore, Shawna Nelson’s best friend, accepted a plea bargain last week and agreed to testify. She was initially charged with conspiracy to commit murder but she pleaded guilty to being an accessory to crime; she is due in court March 7. Larimer County prosecutors were appointed to all three cases last year after Weld District Attorney Ken Buck said his office could not prosecute; though no reason was given, court records show that a Weld prosecutor briefly dated Ken Nelson while he and his wife were separated, and that relationship could have presented a conflict of interest. The trial was moved to Fort Collins because attorneys worried about finding an impartial jury who did not have personal connections to the myriad of witnesses.