When they arrived at the Paladium at 6 p.m., prosecutors say, Walters headed into the strip club while Brashers met four other Foxxy Football players in a private room for the shoot. The other women told police that throughout the night, Brashers kept ducking into the strip club for drinks. Walters later told detectives that Brashers was nervous and drank three Jägerbombs. At 10:30 p.m., Brashers called Feliciano. She said Walters wasn't allowed into the shoot and she was afraid he was going to kill himself.
Sometime later, the other players told police that Brashers asked if her "ex-boyfriend" could sit in a corner of the room while they finished the shoot. One woman reported that "he had been kicked out of the strip club for being obviously drunk."
Brittney Brashers and Robert Walters met in the Air Force and had a tumultuous relationship.
Brittney Brashers and Robert Walters met in the Air Force and had a tumultuous relationship.
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Drunk or not, something weird was going on, the women told police. One woman, who didn't know Walters, later described him as a "creepy white male." Others said he appeared to be alternately laughing and crying. When Brashers took her shirt off for some topless shots, the women said Walters began fiddling with his cell phone.
At 11 p.m., Walters texted Brashers. "Take me back to Colo Spgs please," he wrote. "Im not strong enough ... Pityh me ... Pity."
At 11:02 p.m., he left a voice-mail message for Figeroa. "Hey, Sarge, it's your best bud," Walters said. "This is Robbie Walters, and Brittney has broken her no-contact order. I'm at a strip club in Denver right now with Brittney. Yes, Brittney is that stupid where she would come to a strip club with me."
He continued. "Come on, Sarge, let's destroy her," he said. "She is fucked up again. This is the second, third or fourth time she fucked up. I'm at a strip club now, and she's flashing her naked body to anonymous strangers."
He ended the message with this: "Yes, I'm a dick. I know you don't like me, but I don't care. But I've got the proof, and you need to kick her out. Peace."
Walters left another voice-mail message twenty minutes later. "She is the most evil woman I've ever known," he said. "That bitch needs to be kicked out!"
When the photo shoot ended, at about 12:30 a.m., one of the women asked Brashers why her ex-boyfriend was crying. Prosecutors say Brashers told her "it was because another man had seen her breast and that he was extremely jealous."
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He says he grabbed her head and she was completely limp. She could not move her arms. He states he thought she was brain dead from the punches to her face. [Walters] thought she had brain damage. He says she was already dying. If he would have left her there, she would have died. So [Walters] grabbed her head and just rolled it into his arms. He says she was like, "No." [Walters] states he choked her.
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Denver firefighter Derek Walrum was one of the first people to respond to the scene on the 100 block of South Yuma Street, a clearly marked dead-end street within a neat subsidized housing development three blocks from busy, gritty West Alameda Avenue. The street is lined by a park on one side and identical brick apartments on the other, and is located ten miles from the Paladium and a full mile from the highway.
It was foggy that night, Walrum testified at a pre-trial hearing, and as firefighters drove toward the dead end, the accident slowly came into view. An agitated man sat in the passenger seat of a smashed-up car. "Brittney! You've got to be okay!" he shouted. Next to him was an unconscious woman. He was shaking her, as if to wake her up.
Something struck Walrum as odd. In court, he described it as "a very untypical accident." Walters, he said, was combative. Though firefighters told him they needed to keep the woman's head still to prevent further injuries, he wouldn't let go. Once firefighters extricated her, they realized she wasn't breathing and began CPR. Walters seemed less hurt, but they strapped him to a backboard to be safe.
"The amount of injury to the one party and not to the other was very atypical," Walrum testified. "It was just a strange feeling. I can't explain it a lot more, more than just a lot of things just didn't seem to fit together."
For instance, Walrum said, "I got the feeling from the time that I approached the male party that he knew the state of the person, the female party.... Just got the feeling that he knew that she was deceased at the time."
That afternoon, Denver homicide detective Troy Bisgard was approached by a detective from the traffic investigations bureau. The traffic detective had just returned from the autopsy of a young woman who was killed early that morning in a car accident, and he was troubled. "He did not see any injuries on the victim consistent with that that he's seen in a car accident," Bisgard testified at a different pre-trial hearing.
Instead, the injuries were "consistent with an assault to the right side of her face," Bisgard said. There were red marks on her neck as well as petechial hemorrhaging, tiny red pinpoint marks that are a sign of asphyxiation, on her body.
