Dead Reckoning

The other issue was brain damage. Defense experts, including Dr. Jonathan Pincus, testified that Page suffered from brain damage to his frontal lobes, perhaps as a result of having been shaken as an infant. Pincus, a neurologist from Georgetown University, had testified just a few months earlier on behalf of George Woldt who, along with Lucas Salmon, had murdered Jacine Gielinski in Colorado Springs in April 1997. A calcified growth in Woldt's brain, along with physical and/or sexual abuse as a child and an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, could have been linked to Woldt's violent criminal acts, Pincus testified. Still, in September 2000, Woldt was sentenced to die.

As he had in Woldt's case, Pincus now testified that he'd interviewed 150 to 200 convicted murderers, many of them on death row, and found three factors common to most of their crimes: mental illness, physical and/or sexual abuse as a child, and neurological disorder. Like Woldt, Page qualified for all three: He had brain damage, he was abused, and he had an antisocial personality disorder.

Prosecutors called their own experts to rebut the defense's experts. Dr. David Johnson, the forensic psychiatrist at the state hospital in Pueblo who'd observed Page and deemed him competent, testified that blaming violent criminal behavior on brain damage was "a speculative interpretation." Although Page could have sustained head injuries, he thought it was unlikely, because tests indicated that the defendant's brain was functioning normally. Page knew at the time that what he was doing was wrong, Johnson said, pointing to his attempts to dispose of evidence and his escape.

In his closing argument, prosecutor Phil Brimmer began by reminding the jury that when Peyton returned from her successful interview with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, "her thoughts were filled with hope for the future.

"Little did she know that as she entered her home, her future would last only as long as it took this man to terrorize and kill her," he said, pointing to Page.

This was Brimmer's first death-penalty case since joining the DA's office in 1994 after years in private civil practice. He'd found the experience to be incredibly sad, much more so even than other murder cases. Only in a death-penalty case was there such an emphasis on getting to know someone as well as he would know a friend or family member. It was up to the prosecutors to portray the meaning of Peyton's life and her family's loss. Brimmer knew Peyton's likes and dislikes, her sense of humor, her dreams and goals. He'd heard the stories of her childhood, heard stories about her as a young woman. He'd grown to like her. But what struck him most about what had happened to Peyton was that it was every woman's worst fear come true: to be trapped and attacked in the place she was supposed to feel most safe, in her home, with no way out.

"Mr. Page did not have an ideal childhood," Brimmer said. "He did not have a father figure. He did not have a mother who gave him the attention that a mother should. He may have been sexually abused once. He may have been physically abused as a child. And if that's true, none of those things are the defendant's fault.

"But by the same token, none of those things excuses what he did to Peyton Tuthill. Does the fact that someone is abused as a child give that person the right to kill someone? Does the fact that someone may have been physically abused as a child give that person the right to sodomize a helpless woman?

"There are few people in life who are dealt a perfect hand. But despite not getting a perfect hand, people make do. They work hard. They try to improve themselves...They follow the rules of society and they follow the laws that people have passed to govern conduct...

"Ask yourself the following question: Why is his entire life story relevant to your deliberations?"

Jim Castle closed for the defense. He'd turned down the first request that he represent Page from the Alternate Defense Counsel, a group that finds attorneys for defendants who have a conflict with the public defender's office; he and his wife, also a defense lawyer, had a four-month-old baby as well as two other children, and he didn't want his family to suffer through the enormous sacrifice a death-penalty trial entailed. As a veteran of five other death-penalty cases, he knew that such a case would insinuate itself into every part of his life. He wouldn't be there for his children's events. Saturday wouldn't be a family day, but a day of work. His wife would have to do double duty at home as well as manage her own career. And the stress of having a man's life in his hands would be with him through every waking hour and would still hover as he slept.