Estes loses murder case appeal

MAT-SU — A woman convicted of a 2003 murder for prescription drugs had a state appeals court reject her appeal.

Cynthia Estes was convicted of first-degree murder in 2006. Prosecutors said she conspired with her husband, Richard “Bart” Deremer, to murder Estes’ cousin, David McKinney, for McKinney’s prescription medications. Estes allegedly waited in the car while Deremer blasted McKinney with a shotgun. She was convicted as an accomplice to the crime, but later appealed.

Estes argued jurors should not have been able to hear tapes of a conversation between herself and one of Deremer’s cousins. Nor, Estes argued, should the jury have been allowed to hear her conversations with Alaska State Troopers.

The problem, she argued, is that both conversations hinged on statements Deremer supposedly made to troopers and his cousin admitting his guilt and claiming his wife had helped him plan and carry out the slaying of McKinney in his Big Lake home.

The question hinges on a defendant’s constitutional right to confront witnesses who testify against her. Criminal rules prevent co-defendants from being forced to take the stand in each others’ trials. So since Deremer didn’t take the stand, Estes argued, she wasn’t given a chance to show the jury whether those statements he made to troopers and his cousin were true or even whether he’d actually made them.

Judge David Mannheimer wrote in the appeals court decision that there was no constitutional issue here, citing the ruling Superior Court Judge Eric Smith made at trial.

“As Judge Smith recognized, the probative aspect of this evidence was not that Deremer had said these things (if, in fact, Deremer did say these things). Rather, the probative aspect of this evidence lay in the fact that Estes was told that Deremer had said these things, and in how she responded to these assertions,” the ruling says.

And since it didn’t matter if Deremer said these things or if they were true, there was no requirement Estes be allowed to confront him.

Estes claimed that the jury could have assumed that since Deremer’s purported confession lined up with prosecutors’ theory of what happened to McKinney he must have made those statements and they must have been true.

Mannheimer points out that the jury could just as easily have come to the opposite conclusion — that troopers made up this confession and tailored it to fit their theory in order to prod Estes into making incriminating statements.

“We believe that the jurors could understand this concept — understand that the troopers might embellish what they knew about the crime, or even invent ‘facts’ about the crime, for the purpose of confronting Estes with these purported facts and then seeing how she would respond,” Mannheimer wrote.

During the trial, Smith anticipated this problem and instructed jurors that they were not to think about whether Deremer said what he was supposed to have said or whether if he said it, it was true. Mannheimer said that instruction was appropriate and fixed any problem with the evidence.

In telling the jury to disregard the substance of Deremer’s statements, Smith made a comment that Estes later took issue with on appeal.

“Estes contends that when Judge Smith told the jurors, ‘I can tell you a whole lot more about this stuff … once (you) complete your deliberations,’ the judge was essentially telling the jurors that Deremer had said even more things that were incriminating to Estes, and that the judge was willing to apprise the jury of this additional information,” Mannheimer wrote.

But reading Smith’s statements in context, he said, it’s pretty clear the judge only meant to tell the jury he’d be happy to explain the minutiae of evidentiary rules after the trial was over.

Mannheimer noted that Estes had said a number of incriminating things — admitting that she knew Deremer was going to kill McKinney when she drove her husband to her cousin’s house, that she helped him find the combination to her cousin’s safe and take drugs from inside. Those things alone were enough to convict her, the judge wrote.

“Any additional incriminatory implications of Deremer’s reported out-of-court statements could not have had an appreciable effect on the jury’s verdict,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.