Posted on 08/29/2003 10:34:05 PM PDT by woofie
Mark Horner starts with what happened on the morning after Girly Chew Hossencofft disappeared. It's Sept. 10, 1999, and state highway worker Raymond Gabaldon is driving westbound on Highway 60 about seven miles outside of Magdalena when he notices a tarp alongside the road. He stops, of course, because it could be a hazard if windswept onto the highway.
"The tarp was blood-stained and he's thinking, well it is hunting season,' but then he looks downhill and sees what looks like girl's underwear, a blouse--she was a very petite woman--and he found duct tape with strands of long, black hair."
Horner pauses here, reassembles his thoughts for the next turn in a mind-bending story that he knows perhaps better than any prosecutor or detective in Albuquerque. But what is the next turn? The story of Girly's murder is so full of strange permutations, so many odd layers in fact, that it has secured a place in local lore alongside New Mexico's most bizarre criminal episodes.
But he's on a roll, so we fast forward nine months. It's now June 24, 2000, and a search for the body begins in earnest. Operations are set up along a dirt road some 10 miles southwest of Magdalena. Horner is inside the search area, among the canine corps and helicopter crew. He drove down in the darkness the night before, waited for the sunrise before discovering investigators camped on the barren outback. "I was going to be there no matter what," says Horner. "You can't keep me away from it." He headed back to Albuquerque the following day and did what he has been doing most days for the past four years, since he first started covering the case. He chronicled the details on his website.
If you're bad with faces but good with names, you might know Horner from his days at KRQE News 13, where he worked as a TV reporter from 1995 to 2000. Gone, however, are the well-pressed suits, the piece (Horner calls it "TV hair") and cheesy mustache--replaced by a shaved head, salt and pepper beard and baggy T-shirt that fit noticeably better with his new vocation as a true-crime writer. The new image is part of what Horner calls getting real. "I had to be honest with myself and write this book," he says, "or I couldn't go to my grave with peace of mind."
From the outset, Horner was among the pack of local media that lined up to share yet another tragic story with the public. But as bizarre details surrounding Girly's former husband Diazien Hossencofft and his associates Linda Henning and Bill Miller began to surface, Horner felt the story wasn't getting the coverage it deserved in the local newsrooms. As a result, he devoted a website to the case and plugged in details in his spare time.
"I just needed an outlet," he says. "In black and white, it's all there if you know where to look. It's compelling as hell and it makes people's jaws drop when they hear this story."
Aliens, Elixirs and Smuggled Babies
At the story's center is Diazien Hossencofft, who plea-bargained a murder charge for his role in Girly's disappearance (her body has never been found) in January 2002 and is serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Wyoming. His acumen as a con man adds one layer to the story. His creepiness adds another.
"He could decipher in 30 seconds what your interests were and whether he could exploit you using those interests," says Horner. He exploited Linda Henning's belief in aliens to win her trust and friendship, to sell her on the idea that Girly was a reptilian alien queen involved in a plot to take over the earth. As a result, Henning is serving a life sentence for her perceived role in Girly's murder, although she steadfastly maintains her innocence.
Horner's focus is simple enough. He wants to uncover the truth and facts--to ultimately determine if justice has been served. But it's what he calls the "layers of minutia" that makes the challenge of writing his book at times seem overwhelming.
For example, in Diazien's police supplemental file (all seven volumes) there is the wealthy, aged Santa Fe woman that he scammed for $25,000 a month for nearly two years while pretending to be a geneticist. He was injecting her with a panacea of his own invention that he claimed would cure the woman's breast cancer and reverse the aging process all at once.
Then there is the story of Diazien's son, Demitri, whom he conceived with a Japanese woman while pretending to be a cardiothoracic surgeon on business in Canada. According to Horner, buried in his case file is the story of how Diazien threatened the child's mother if she didn't give him custody, met her in a hotel room in Juráez where she tearfully gave up the child. Diazien then smuggled his son across the border and brought him home to Girly saying he had adopted the infant in Albuquerque earlier that day.
On the day of Girly's disappearance, Diazien had arranged for a woman from the East Coast to meet him at an Albuquerque hotel. Later that day, the two left town and headed for South Carolina to be married. He had met the woman over the Internet and had never seen her face before that day. In the end, the FBI finally tracked him down in South Carolina by tracing his phone calls.
And these details are only a glimpse into the trail of lies the police tracked in the case. "He sold himself to so many people," says Horner. "More than you could believe."
A True-Crime Writer in Waiting
From the beginning Horner says he knew the case was going to draw national exposure and be an extraordinary discovery for an investigative reporter. So, without the newsroom support he wanted, in October 1999 he began chasing his own leads through his website.
It was that fateful decision that has propelled him into his new career and garnered more exclusive information that he had ever dreamed possible. First he received an e-mail from Andrew Chew, Girly's brother in Malaysia, thanking him for being his family's conduit to information about the case.
"I didn't know they existed on the other side of the world, but this website had deep meaning to them," says Horner.
Other people connected to Diazien and Girly began e-mailing him as well. One man claimed to be Diazien's bodyguard and former roommate, another woman said she had dated Diazien and said he had threatened to kill her and told her the body would never be found. "They contacted me through my website!" says Horner. "I'm thinking reporters need to know this can be an awesome tool."
"At the early hearings he always had a digital camera, taking pictures and telling people about his website," recalls Joline Gutierrez Krueger, who covered the case for the Albuquerque Tribune. "I remember thinking this guy's obsessed'."
Obsession though, to Horner, is too strong a word. He prefers to describe himself as driven, and considering what has transpired since the early days of the case, his enthusiasm for telling the story has been vindicated.
By the time Linda Henning's trial began in September 2002, Gutierrez Krueger says she and Horner "almost had like a fan base" of people who followed the case on Horner's website, which included Gutierrez Krueger's articles.
"These people said they had never been to court before," recalls Gutierrez Krueger, "but said it was so interesting they just came down to watch."
The small local following turned out to be a benchmark for the national exposure that would soon follow. Early on, before many of the twisted details of Diazien's life and Henning's alien theories had been reported, Horner wrote on his website that "the day will come when the "Dateline NBC," Court TV and "48 Hours" of the world will stand up and take notice." He was right. National programs including "Dateline NBC," A&E's "American Justice" and the History Channel's "Dead Reckoning" are all currently producing stories about Girly's case.
For two weeks last December, Court TV devoted all-day coverage to the Linda Henning trial for two weeks and the show's producers were so impressed by Horner's insights they interviewed him as an expert commentator during their broadcast. They also linked Horner's website to CourtTV.com. Internet traffic increased immediately from a few hundred people a day to as many as 19,000 a day during the broadcast.
Among his newfound devotees was Gregg Olson, a best-selling true-crime writer based in Washington state, who e-mailed Horner and encouraged him to write a book on the case. Olson even helped Horner procure a literary agent in New York who quickly landed him a contract with Kensington Publishing Corporation. With that, Horner took a leave from his most recent job as a news producer at Eyewitness News 4 in May to write his book.
He is so committed to the task that he sold his house in Albuquerque this summer, sent his wife and kids to live with relatives out of state and has secluded himself in a quiet rental home in Hillsborough, a tiny town at the foot of the Black Range in southern New Mexico. He works a minimum of 10 hours a day seven days a week, taking occasional breaks to talk to his wife and kids on the phone or walk his dog, He lives solely among stacks of photos, court records, news clips, interview transcripts--every bit of paperwork, he says, associated with the case--scattered in every room of his rented house.
A Requiem for Girly
When the discussion moves away from aliens, elixirs and smuggled babies, shifting to the life of Girly Chew, Horner seems more relaxed, focused on telling what he says is a tragedy tied to age-old themes.
"When the subject of domestic violence arises, you often hear that the most dangerous time is when they separate from their abuser," says Horner. "Girly ultimately got to that point."
Girly Chew met Diazien briefly while visiting the United States with a friend. After several months of exchanging letters, she agreed to marry him and moved to the United States in December 1992. Once the relationship became abusive and she feared for her life, Girly showed a will to survive. She hired a divorce attorney, found an apartment, took out restraining orders, enrolled in self-defense classes and warned her co-workers at Bank of America to call the police immediately if she was ever 10 minutes late to work.
According to case files, she even went to the FBI the day before she disappeared and said Diazien was going to kill her and nobody will find her body. Despite the fact that Diazien had already been charged with violating the restraining order and had a sentence pending, the FBI wasn't able to help her.
"She had been in the country for only six years and had the wherewithal to make the break," says Horner. "I felt we needed to look at this. I mean, I hate the words tragic, especially in television: brutal, tragic, shocking and deadly, you hear them gratuitously. They're words that sell all too often on the 6 o'clock news. But when I say tragic, this was truly tragic."
Girly's personal terror was another angle Horner said was difficult to sell in the newsroom, yet an issue he felt compelled to write about. He even posted the domestic violence hotline on his homepage.
He says her co-workers swell with tears when talking about her. She was someone they admired for her courage and pleasant demeanor and he finds it bothersome that news reports created a perception of her as a mail-order bride. After interviewing friends, co-workers and relatives, he admits it's difficult not to feel like he once knew her.
"She was not a mail-order bride," says Horner. "She was a helluva person. I've looked at her life for four years now and it is hard to find a character flaw."
In the end, Horner believes that beneath the layers of Diazien's bizarre deceptions, predictable themes are at the root of Girly's death: greed, revenge, reputation, power and most importantly control. Unfortunately, he says, these are themes often applied to domestic violence cases.
"It's interesting to me that women all too often are the subject of the story, when they are victimized by their husband," says Horner. "This was a woman who suffered domestic violence."
National Exposure
Last month Horner returned to the courtroom where Linda Henning was convicted of murder and listened to seven of the jurors rehash details in front of a "Dateline NBC" production crew before sitting down with the show's reporter for a 90 minute one-on-one interview.
Like Court TV, it appears "Dateline's" focus will be on Linda Henning and Horner will be a featured analyst during the broadcast. For the first time, two jurors in the case will express concerns that perhaps Henning was not mentally fit to be on trial. You might recall, her talk of aliens and emotional outbursts during the trial absorbed local news coverage at the time. Channel 7 especially seemed focused on what one local reporter called the "weird Linda angle," which incensed Henning and to this day has made her leery of local media. Because of this distrust, both Gutierrez Krueger and Horner say they have exchanged written correspondence with her from jail, but neither has been able to get an interview. "Dateline," however, will be broadcasting their exclusive interview with Henning sometime in fall.
Nonetheless, Keris Salmon, "Dateline's" producer admits Horner played an invaluable role in helping her staff sift through the details of Henning's trial.
"Mark was the backbone to the story, just a super resource," said Salmon. "He was our only neutral presence."
Was Justice Served?
Salmon said NBC's coverage probably will not dig deeply into Bill Miller's role in the case, instead focusing on whether Henning received a fair trial. But she acknowledged that the show's staff was mystified by Miller's ability to skirt a jury trial.
While Hossencofft and Henning pass the time behind bars, both contend that Bill Miller is the only person who knows where Girly's body was disposed of. Henning furiously maintains she is innocent and that Miller got away with murder. During his plea, Diazien fingered Miller as Girly's killer--saying he hatched the plan for Girly's death but Miller carried it out. Miller wanted to hunt a human being and "gut her like a fish. ... I gave him that ability to do so," Diazien told prosecutors. Miller of course disagrees with them wholeheartedly.
After a grand jury failed to indict him on felony charges, including murder and kidnapping, Miller was convicted of several misdemeanor counts of tampering with evidence for things such as eating and burning business cards. He remains free while awaiting sentencing in November.
"My biggest question in the case is how is it possible the Grand Jury didn't indict him on anything stronger than five counts of tampering with evidence," says Gutierrez Krueger. "Diazien Hossencofft creeped (the Grand Jury) out so badly, that the prosecutors basically got squat."
Both Horner and Gutierrez Krueger naturally admit they would love to see the transcript of Diazien's testimony, although because it was not submitted as evidence during Henning's trial, it is not public record.
Meanwhile, Horner says he has been working to get an in-depth interview with Miller since 1999, has knocked on his door in the Northeast Heights several times, but to no avail. So, at least to the media investigators, Miller's role remains somewhat of a mystery. Physical evidence placed him at the crime scene and witnesses said he had stalked Girly outside of her karate class building, according to case files. There's also disbelief among his friends and neighbors that he would be associated with such a case--that Miller could be anything other than the helpful soccer coach, family man and gentle giant figure that wouldn't hurt a soul. Then there are those that say he had an interest in aliens, the occult and anti-government militia groups.
According to police reports, witnesses said Diazien asked Miller to kidnap Girly when they were both attending a UFO seminar at Page One Bookstore in the days preceding Girly's disappearance. At the time, according to police reports, Diazien and Henning were talking to each other on walkie-talkies in the store, acting strange and generally distracting customers and alien enthusiasts alike. Later members of the UFO group told police that they advised Miller to report Diazien's plan to the police, which he failed to do until after brought in for questioning.
Horner has tried to weigh these details carefully in his book and believes in the end people who read it will have a complete understanding of the case and be able to draw their own conclusions. "I think when a lot of people read this they will be a bit dismayed that Bill Miller never got a jury trial," he says.
September Sacrifice
When Jim Cypher, Horner's literary agent, circulated his book proposal, tentatively titled September Sacrifice, publishers showed an interest right away, making it an easy sell. Cypher has represented a number of successful writers in the true crime genre and says he's confident Horner's book will achieve relative commercial success. Not surprisingly, Horner's webpage played an integral role in shaping Cypher's outlook.
"I think it gave (the publisher) confidence in Mark as a guy that could deliver the goods," says Cypher. "He was automatically an expert." Cypher also noted that Horner's investigative reporting skills and writing style were clearly on display through the Internet, and compounded with the national buzz from network and cable television coverage, Horner, he says, was instantly marketable.
"At the end, there were lots of people going to his website and it became a big resource," says Gutierrez Krueger, "He sacrificed everything; job and family."
"Look, here is a guy who's writing his first book and the story is rich in many ways," adds NBC's Keris Salmon. "In order to do the best job possible you have to live it, and I think that's what he is doing."
He exploited Linda Henning's belief in aliens to win her trust and friendship, to sell her on the idea that Girly was a reptilian alien queen involved in a plot to take over the earth.
This guy was the ultimate con man
Name file alert.
The reptilian symbolism you see around you with gargoyles, in coats of arms, in advertising, and so on, is all part of this.
These "gods" could not take over the planet openly because there are not enough of them, so they are doing it covertly by appearing human. Movies like They Live, The Arrival (the first, not the sequel), and the US television series, V, tell the story of what is REALLY going on. I urge you to think about watching these movies to get up to speed if you are new to all of this.
Woa!!!!
Testimony in Henning's trial indicates that Henning met Diazien Hossencofft during a nine-hour Icke seminar at the University of New Mexico Continuing Education Center seven weeks before Girly Hossencofft's death.
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