Audio By Carbonatix
part 2 of 2
Robert Gardner III was adopted in Pennsylvania shortly after his birth in March 1974 and given the name of his adoptive father, Robert Gardner Jr. His parents dubbed him “Robby” to distinguish him from his dad and from the host of “Bobs” they knew. “It was hard to know who had the worse temper, me or him,” Robert Gardner says of his boy as a toddler. “My wife used to tease me and say, `Are you sure he’s not your real son?'”
The family’s time together was tragically short. Just two years after adopting the boy, Gardner’s wife died of a massive coronary. Two weeks after the funeral, Gardner turned his back on Philadelphia and took his only child to Colorado, thinking it a “nice, open place to raise my son.”
Robert Gardner Jr. never considered marrying again. He says he didn’t want to have to bury someone else and bear that kind of grief. But being a single father was hard, and he often couldn’t cope with his boy. “We had discipline problems,” he says as he sits at the dining-room table of his mother’s Commerce City home. “Sometimes I couldn’t handle him. I thought maybe there was something buried deep in his mind that he wanted to get out.”
Gardner says he called the Denver Department of Social Services, looking for help in dealing with his son. “It was the biggest mistake of my life,” he says. “They said they couldn’t help me. And I said, `What do you want me to do? Do you want me to wait until it’s so bad I half beat him to death?'”
Social Services took an interest in the case then. The agency took Robby away from his father. “So, basically,” Gardner says, “he spent the rest of his life in and out of institutions. The state had him on Thorazine since he was eight years old.”
Robby Gardner lived at the Fort Logan Mental Health Center in southwest Denver for “three or four years,” his father says, but he walked away several times in order to get home to his dad. “He’d come home and we’d sit and talk,” Gardner says, “but he knew that I’d have to turn him in. That was one of my biggest mistakes. I should have sent him back to Philadelphia.”
While his son was being warehoused in one place after another, Gardner was experiencing problems of his own. He lost his home in northwest Denver and moved into a room at a downtown hotel. His health began to seriously decline (he is now on dialysis for a kidney disorder) and he lost his job tending bar. He also found it increasingly difficult to see his son, particularly if a visit meant walking even short distances. When Robby was sent to prison, it became even harder to visit.
Robby Gardner was only seventeen when he was arrested on two counts of attempted second-degree murder. He’d shot at two gang members, hitting one. He was tried as an adult, allowed to plead down to menacing and sentenced to four years in the Department of Corrections.
Gardner says that in prison, his son was “finally learning how to work for a living.” Robby was taking up carpentry and learning the plumbing trade when, in November 1992, corrections officials transferred him to Limon. “In September [1993] he was due out to a halfway house,” Gardner says. “Then home.
“We already were making plans about what we were going to do when he got out,” he continues. “We were going to buy a hot-dog cart and take it to the mall. He was going to work it in the afternoon, and I was going to work it in the morning. I even found a nice little cheap cart for $3,500.”
The dream died on the morning of April 5, 1993, when Gardner picked up the ringing telephone at his mother’s house. Limon’s assistant warden was on the line. He told Gardner that Robby had been found dead in his cell. “I just let out one big yell and dropped the phone,” Gardner says. “I couldn’t pick it up again.”
It would be the last official word Gardner would receive about his son’s case for almost a year. Investigators and other prison officials, he says, refused to return his calls. The officials became particularly reticent about providing information last fall, when Gardner filed a wrongful-death suit against the state. That suit is still pending.
What Gardner did hear about his son came from Limon inmate Steve Autrey, with whom Robby had shared a Limon cell for about two months. Autrey wrote to Gardner expressing his condolences. “According to him, Robby helped straighten him out,” Gardner says. “Autrey had been in there a lot longer than Robby, but he gave [Autrey] a different perspective on life.”
Just three weeks after Robby was murdered, prison officials found Autrey unconscious in his cell. He’d been choked, but he survived. Autrey claims to have no memory of the attack, and no arrests have been made in the case. Robert Gardner says the attack on Autrey may have been connected to his son’s death; prison investigator Hougnon, who probes all major crimes committed within the Limon prison, says he doesn’t think the two incidents are related.
Boccardi says he was returning from a drug and alcohol education class the morning of Gardner’s murder when Hougnon stopped him and asked his name. “He said, `Come with me,'” Boccardi remembers. “I asked, `What for?’ And he said, `You tell me.'”
Three days later guards armed with a court order allowing them to take forensic samples removed Boccardi from his cell in solitary confinement. “They took hair from my arms, legs, my pubic area,” Boccardi says. “They took blood from my fingers, and they took my palm prints. My rights were never read to me. They never questioned me again.”
Boccardi says Starkey has since told him that the forensic tests all came up negative; prison officials refuse to comment on the test results.
In his affidavit requesting the court order, investigator Hougnon told a judge that Boccardi and Gardner had exchanged angry words approximately two days before the murder and that Gardner had struck Boccardi. Hougnon claimed, too, that a confidential informant told him that on April 4, Boccardi told Gardner he “wouldn’t be hitting anyone” when Boccardi was through with him.
Hougnon wrote in the affidavit that he needed blood samples because Gardner had apparently tried to fend off his attacker. The victim suffered numerous cuts and bruises in what appeared to have been a struggle, and it was believed that his assailant might be similarly injured, accounting for some of the blood found in the cell. In fact, said the affidavit, Starkey did have cuts and scrapes on his body. The only apparent injury visible on Boccardi was, in Hougnon’s words, “some slight discoloration” on his right hand.
Hougnon also needed hair samples from Boccardi, he wrote in the affidavit, because prison staffers had discovered a shoestring in a trash can that had been removed from Unit 2. The string, Hougnon wrote, “had two loops in it, one at either end, and also had what appeared to be human hair attached to it.” Theoretically, it was a murder weapon.
In addition, Hougnon wrote, the doors on Gardner’s cell and on Boccardi’s cell “didn’t work properly” and “could have been opened from either inside the cell or outside the cell while the cells were locked down.” That issue was important, because the cell doors are locked every night between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.–and at the time of Hougnon’s affidavit, investigators believed Gardner might have been killed as much as twelve hours before his body was found. Hougnon says officials now believe the murder took place closer to the time Gardner’s body was found at 9:30–in other words, that Gardner probably died when the cell doors were unlocked.
Hougnon also says now that he personally checked the locks on only two cells in the pod: Gardner’s and Boccardi’s. “I believe the locksmith checked all the others,” he says. “I don’t know off the top of my head who those were.” Boccardi, however, insists his cell door was not tampered with. In fact, he says, guards had to unlock and relock his cell door the morning of the murder so that he could attend his drug and alcohol class.
Hougnon concluded his affidavit by stating he had “probable cause to believe that a crime–Murder in the First Degree, Accessory to First Degree Murder (and) Tampering with Physical Evidence–has been committed (and) reasonable grounds to believe that Timothy Starkey and Richard Boccardi committed the crime…”
Starkey, however, claims no one from the prison has bothered to question him since he was interrogated the day Gardner’s body was found. Hougnon will not respond to questions about what, if anything, Starkey has told him about the murder.
Sixty-two days after Boccardi was sent to the hole, he was charged with a Class 1 violation of the penal code: first-degree murder. It is an administrative charge, not a criminal one, and hearings on such charges are governed by guidelines laid out in the Code of Penal Discipline, the formal rules for inmate conduct at DOC facilities.
According to the code, an inmate is supposed to receive written notice of the charges against him within ten days after the incident is discovered. If thought to be a danger to other inmates, the suspect may be placed in segregation prior to a hearing, but during that time he is to be allowed to keep his personal belongings with him. Boccardi, however, says guards stripped him of all his belongings, including a diary he’d begun keeping to outline his defense.
Under the penal code, the accused is entitled to a hearing in which he or she may question witnesses. Boccardi asked that approximately a dozen witnesses, including the pathologist who performed the autopsy on Gardner, be called to testify in his defense. He expected that many of them, guards included, would bolster his alibi: that he left his cell that morning only to speak to a prison teacher and attend the drug and alcohol class. But prison officials denied each request, leaving no one to testify on his behalf.
In a hearing held June 14 at the prison and conducted by Limon authorities, Boccardi was found guilty of the administrative murder charge.
Corrections officials have denied repeated requests from Boccardi’s family and Westword to review the evidence the state presented at the hearing. According to Richard Boccardi, the only new information to surface in the hearing was Hougnon’s claim that a confidential in-formant says he saw Boccardi enter Gardner’s cell on the morning of April 5 carrying an extension cord. Boccardi, the informant reportedly said, then left to have breakfast with the other inmates. Boccardi says he did not eat breakfast that day.
Hougnon says that Boccardi isn’t telling the whole story. Hougnon won’t, either. “We have a scenario as to what happened, [but] I can’t get into that,” he says. Higher-ranking prison officials, including DOC inspector general Wallis Parmenter and DOC chief of staff Bob Cantwell, also refuse to disclose why Boccardi was convicted on the administrative charge.
After the conviction, Boccardi was shipped off to Centennial prison in Canon City. When the new, state-of-the-art Colorado State Penitentiary opened across the street last year, he became one of the first tenants. At CSP, he and other inmates are locked up 23 hours a day. When they leave their cells, even to take showers, many of them must remain shackled. There are no contact visits; family members may speak to their relatives only through the glass walls of the visiting room.
Starkey, too, was found guilty of violating the penal code on the murder charge. But instead of being shipped directly to Centennial, he was diverted to the infirmary at Territorial Prison in Canon City. Starkey says it was because he was “getting out of hand” and that “they didn’t want to deal with me anymore.” Prison records reveal another explanation: In early July, Starkey, using a coil from a ballpoint pen as a needle and some string for thread, sewed one of his eyelids shut.
Since Gardner’s murder, Starkey has continued to “get out of hand.” He says he got angry one day and smashed up his television set, and he claims to have been involved in two assaults on prison guards. “I’ve been caught with a shank,” he admits. “Not that I’m bragging, but the cops said it was the best one they’ve seen. I made it myself. It was steel.”
Lincoln County Deputy District Attorney William Sylvester waited until mid-February to charge Starkey with first-degree murder. Six weeks later Sylvester and Starkey’s attorney reached a plea agreement. If a judge approves the deal at a June 3 sentencing hearing, Starkey will be allowed to plead to a lesser charge of second-degree murder and receive a sentence of at least six years, but no more than twenty. Starkey hopes it will run concurrently with his escape charge. If that happens, he could theoretically be eligible for parole in a few more years. Starkey denies speculation that a condition of the lenient deal was that he roll over on his friend Boccardi.
Robert Gardner Jr. says the plea agreement is unjust. “He killed somebody,” Gardner says of Starkey, “and I think they should lock him up and throw away the key, or give him the gas.”
Sylvester has yet to make a decision on whether or not to charge Richard Boccardi, and the DA refuses to tip his hand. Limon warden Bob Furlong, however, says he “has strong reason to think” charges will be filed. Other prison officials, including Cantwell and Parmenter, say the same.
But the situation puzzles Bob Boccardi. If investigators are truly convinced that Starkey and Boccardi are both guilty, he asks, why wasn’t Starkey charged with conspiracy? And why the delay in charging Richard?
The elder Boccardi has been asking those same questions for more than a year now. He has met with DOC boss Zavaras at least twice and gone the rounds with Zavaras’s underlings countless times.
Bob and Elisabeth Boccardi last met with Zavaras two weeks ago. They were attempting–again, unsuccessfuly–to get their son moved out of maximum security.
Zavaras was civil but revealed little. “I think I explained to you before,” the DOC chief said patiently, “that your son is still under investigation and that, potentially, he could be charged.” He was unswayed by Bob Boccardi’s argument that the state now has a confession in the case.
The bottom line, Zavaras told the couple, is that their son must remain where he is. “This,” he added, “is the same conversation that we had last year.”
And in the meantime, Boccardi says, “Every day that goes by, Richard sits down there in his four- by six-foot cell, scared, isolated and with no real physical contact with his family.”
Later, over lunch, the Boccardis acknowledge that they’ve been feeling guilty about having put their son in prison in the first place. “It must be nearly impossible for him to sit in that cell,” Bob Boccardi says. “Some of his letters have been very down. His salutation is always the same: `Get me out of here.'”
end of part 2
