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Zero to Life

Lisl Auman had met Matthaeus Jaehnig only that morning. By day's end, he and a cop were dead--and her life was over.

On the way to the police station, Gargaro said, Lisl asked him if he knew the fallen officer. He said that he did and that VanderJagt was a good man and had a little daughter. Gargaro said that Lisl had responded, "I don't know anything. I can't help you. I just met him [Jaehnig] today. I'm really sorry for your friend. I didn't mean for anything bad like this to happen."

But here's how Gargaro described the arrest six months later, during a preliminary hearing: "I ordered her at least four times to go to the ground...She just wouldn't do it...She was loud to me. She was almost as though she was shouting to me...And she was aggressive...She began to move as though she wanted to get up...The defendant did not cooperate in any way or answer any of my questions...She had an occasion to look towards the area where the other police officers were...And she really showed no emotion of any kind."

1997 was a restless year for Lisl Auman. By that summer, she was living with several friends in a house in Englewood, drifting from job to job.

Her parents had divorced ten years earlier, and her mother remarried. Although all three parents--her father, Don Auman; Rob Auerbach, her stepfather, and her mother, Colleen--cooperated to provide warm, stable and loving homes for Lisl and her brother, Mason, the divorce hit hard. Through high school, Lisl lived alternately with Don and then with Rob and Colleen.

Lisl was intelligent and artistically inclined, but she had trouble deciding on a career or a direction in life. And after one disastrous teenage experience with a boy who hit her, Lisl had no serious relationships with men. A reborn hippie, a fan of the Grateful Dead, she lived in the moment. She liked to read, hang with her friends, party, walk in the mountains, take photographs and work on stained-glass projects with her mother.

Yet something about this young woman inspired profound affection in those who knew her. Most of her friends are now settling down, working or in college, some with small children. When they talk about Lisl, they tend to say similar things. They say that she's gentle, warm and giving. Fun to be around. That she'd let you bum her last cigarette, do anything to make you laugh, sing at the top of her voice in the shower.

"We'd sit on the porch and watch storms," says Robin Bartholomew, a former roommate. "We chased a rainbow once in Lisl's car. We ended up just driving to a high spot and looking down at it."

"The prosecution said this was a vindictive angry woman and she wanted revenge and would go to any length to get it," says longtime friend Alicia Frederick. "It was not Lisl. I almost wanted to laugh. I thought, they're describing themselves."

But things went wrong between the roommates in the Englewood house. There were squabbles about bills, dishes, housekeeping, who'd last bought toilet paper. Lisl, along with a couple of friends, decided to spend some time in the mountains. She had been offered a job working on forest rehabilitation.

Lisl's mother was pleased at the idea. A slender woman with a narrow face, blond hair and a trusting manner, Colleen has spent the past year trying to puzzle out what has happened to her daughter--the steady stream of misinformation in the press, the vilification. Can they do that? she keeps asking. Can they just print whatever they want? Colleen has been a second mom to many of Lisl's friends, who remember summer afternoons in the Auerbachs' backyard, meals at their table.

Colleen explains that when she herself was eighteen and unsure about what she wanted to do in life, she moved to Alaska with a friend. There she worked on fishing boats and lived in a cabin without electricity or running water. It was a defining experience, and she hoped that Lisl's sojourn in the mountains would prove equally beneficial for her.

At first Lisl stayed in a house in Buffalo Creek with Robin and another friend, Steffany Froemel. Steffany introduced her to Shawn Cheever, who was living in an old stone-and-wood lodge that had once been beautiful. Now the building was run-down, the outside littered with broken glass and bits of colored plastic. Lisl got a room there but spent most of her time in Cheever's room with him. There was neither running water nor electricity, and Lisl bought Cheever a heater.

In the beginning, Cheever was affectionate and attentive, but his interest soon cooled. Lisl remained smitten. She made him breakfast. She bought him presents. She had never dated anyone like Cheever before, and she found his tough logger persona romantic. But she was also becoming aware that he was a thief and a liar with an extensive arrest record.

"Shawn Cheever showed me a shoebox full of other people's checkbooks once," Froemel says. "He did petty crime, tons of it. Impersonation. He was always in jail under a different name."

During Lisl Auman's trial, Cheever would admit that he had deliberately exploited her for sex and money.

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1 comments
aerien27
aerien27

hahaha....Denver skins... what shit, they laughed at the skins and the skins only wished to be like Matthaeus

 
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