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Thread: Gilberto Flores Rodriguez Sentenced to Life in 1995 ID Slaying of 14-Year-Old Regina “Gina” Krieger

  1. #1
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    Gilberto Flores Rodriguez Sentenced to Life in 1995 ID Slaying of 14-Year-Old Regina “Gina” Krieger


    Regina Krieger






    Henderson woman has ‘hope’ after arrest in daughter’s 1995 killing

    By Katelyn Newberg
    Las Vegas Review-Journal

    Rhonda Hunnel wants to see justice for her daughter’s killing, but after 24 years, the Henderson mother is even more focused on another goal: bringing people together by sharing the teen’s story.

    Hunnel said she wants to spread “Gina’s hope,” her vision of what her daughter, Regina “Gina” Krieger, would have wanted from the world.

    “To me, Gina’s hope is all of this, to bring everybody together and stop this division and lack of sympathy,” Hunnel said. “… That’s what I learned from losing my daughter.”

    Regina was days away from turning 15 when she disappeared in 1995 from her basement bedroom at her father’s house in Burley, Idaho. Her decomposed body resurfaced weeks later on a river bank. It would take 24 years for an arrest to be made, when 56-year-old Gilberto Rodriguez, of Burley, was charged with first-degree murder in February. He has pleaded not guilty, court records show.

    On April 17, prosecutors filed a notice to seek the death penalty. An Idaho judge sent the case to district court May 8, another step toward a resolution in Regina’s death.

    Hunnel has shared her daughter’s story whenever she can, through talks in prisons and writing books about her life and “Gina’s hope.”

    “Regina’s hope is just justice, first of all, that initially justice will come, and justice will prevail, and the truth will reveal itself,” Hunnel said during a February interview in her Henderson home. “Gina’s Hope is definitely love, love and forgiveness.”

    Gina’s disappearance

    Hunnel plans to follow most of Rodriguez’s court proceedings from Henderson, only traveling to Idaho for a trial and, if he’s found guilty, to see him convicted and sentenced, she said.

    “We’re definitely going to trial, and I knew that would happen,” Hunnel said after speaking with prosecutors on May 8. “Because of this type of case, and how old it is, you could probably anticipate six to 12 months before there’s actually a trial date.”

    Hunnel told the Review-Journal that during an April preliminary hearing, two witnesses testified — a man who said he was with Rodriguez the night Regina was killed, and a man associated with drug cartels who knew Rodriguez.

    The Times-News in Twin Falls, Idaho, reported that Cody Thompson testified he saw Rodriguez go into Regina’s bedroom in 1995 and come out with a body, which Thompson helped Rodriguez dump in the river. The newspaper also reported that the man involved with the cartels testified that Rodriguez told him about the killing.

    Hunnel has said her daughter admitted to using drugs during the last months of her life.

    Regina was a happy teenager who loved to doodle and sing in her church’s children’s choir. Above all, Regina loved her friends, Hunnel said.

    “Everybody was somebody special in her eyes,” she said.

    Regina had promised to stop using drugs, and Hunnel made arrangements for the 14-year-old to live with her again in Twin Falls.

    Then her daughter disappeared.

    “It was Feb. 27, 1995, that I got a phone call, 7 o’clock in the morning, from my son, who was 13 at the time, saying that Regina was missing — there was blood in the basement, that there were police officers around the house, his dad was freaking out,” Hunnel said.

    In mid-April, law enforcement rang: A body was found by the Snake River.

    Horseback riders found the body, later identified as Regina, The Associated Press reported. Her throat was slashed, and she had been stabbed in the heart. She was in the river at least 30 days.

    In 2001, Hunnel began sending letters to police departments, politicians and true crime TV shows, begging for help to find answers.

    In December 2015, an FBI agent named Chris Sheehan offered to help.

    “I’m happy that the new investigators with Cassia County that actually oversee my daughter’s case have been very helpful and supportive with Chris and his efforts with this investigation,” Hunnel said.

    The Salt Lake City FBI field office, which covers the Idaho county, declined a request for a reporter to speak with Chris until Rodriguez’s court proceedings are finished.

    Hunnel didn’t want to talk about the gruesome details of her daughter’s death, and declined to speculate about what evidence led to Rodriguez’s arrest.

    ‘Healing from grief and anger’

    While living in Las Vegas for the first time from 2006 to 2011, Hunnel started writing her first book, “A Snake in the Grass: A Memoir,” about Regina, and Hunnel’s life after her death.

    Hunnel said she wrote the book with inmates in mind.

    When Regina died, Hunnel was working as a corrections officer in a juvenile facility. She began sharing her story with teenagers at the facility, later speaking at adult prisons. During presentations, she shows inmates a slideshow with pictures of Regina.

    “My goal was to write this book with the intention that here’s a guy or gal sitting in a small cell room, lying down on a really thin mattress, reading my book and possibly relating to it from their own childhood,” she said.

    Now that she’s back in the valley, Hunnel plans to write a second book about her life.

    “It’s just going to describe a little bit more in detail my journey of loss, healing from grief and anger,” she said. “And then it will go into the actual court events, as far as when (Rodriguez was) finally arrested, and then I’m going to go into details regarding my experiences of people I’ve met.”

    When Hunnel does attend court proceedings, she plans to print the words “Gina’s hope” on shirts for her and others to wear.

    “I believe this is going to be a long trial, and I just want that message to be repeated during this whole process,” she said.

    https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/...lling-1667700/
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  2. #2
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    Murder trial in Cassia County cold case set for January

    By Laurie Welsh
    Magic Valley

    BURLEY — After being postponed due to COVID-19, a jury trial for Gilberto Flores Rodriguez, who is charged with first-degree murder in a 1995 Cassia County teen’s death, was scheduled Monday for January 2021.

    Rodriguez is charged with killing 14-year-old Regina Krieger, who disappeared from her basement bedroom and was later discovered dead on a river bank.

    Rodriguez was charged with her death in January 2019.

    During a hybrid hearing with Rodriguez’s attorneys Keith Roark and Danica Comstock appearing via Zoom and with Cassia County District Judge Michael Tribe, Cassia County Prosecutor McCord Larsen and Rodriguez along with court staff in the courtroom, Roark expressed his concern about the safety of the hearing during the pandemic.

    The Idaho Supreme Court sent out an order on Friday that seems to have different metrics for determining if it safe to hold jury trial than the metrics used to determine whether it is safe for children to attend school, said Roark, who called the order “liberal."

    "I may be the oldest person in the courtroom,” said Roark, who questioned what procedures would be in place for social distancing and for people wearing masks.

    How to hold jury trials safely during the pandemic, Tribe said, has “caused the court to lose a significant amount of sleep.”

    Tribe said people will stay 6 feet apart and wear masks and they will not use the jury room but will instead use the courtroom as the jury room, with the lawyers and court staff leaving the courtroom after the session.

    Tribe said they may also consider using plexiglass around the witness stand so the witnesses can take off their mask to speak and the court reporter and jury can more easily understand them.

    They may also use plexiglass to partition off the law clerk and between the defense and prosecutor’s tables.

    Along with seating a jury, the court will also choose two alternative jurors.

    Roark said he will request the jury be sequestered to keep everyone safer during the trial. He also asked that the trial be held in December and objected to waiting for January because by then Rodriguez will have been in jail for two years without being convicted of a crime.

    Larsen said the state has been mediating many cases lately and would not be opposed to mediation in this case.

    Roark said he needed to speak with Rodriguez outside of the hearing before answering whether mediation is an option.

    Tribe remarked prior to the hearing that the court had been working hard on getting nearly two dozen criminal cases that have been in “COVID purgatory” back on the calendar.

    In the Rodriguez case, the court will send out 1,200 jury questionnaires and plans to call about 600 potential jurors in for the pool.

    People ages 65 and over can opt out of serving on the jury.

    The jurors will be brought into two courtrooms to be sworn in and fill out the questionnaire in waves over several days.

    https://magicvalley.com/community/mi...55a1c.amp.html

  3. #3
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    Man found guilty in 1995 Burley cold case murder

    By Laurie Welsh
    Times-News

    BURLEY — A Burley man has been found guilty of first-degree murder in the 1995 slaying of a 14-year-old girl.

    Gilberto Flores Rodriguez’s first-degree murder case was placed in the hands of a 12-person jury on Tuesday afternoon after a weeklong trial. The jury returned its guilty verdict at 4 p.m. after deliberating 3˝ hours.

    Four alternates were randomly picked out of the 16-member panel and excused and the jury was left in the courtroom with instructions and the evidence.

    After returning to the courtroom later, Rodriguez was asked to stand as the verdict was read, his lower face still covered in a COVID-19 mask. He appeared stoic.

    Members of the public in the galley were warned by the bailiff before entering the courtroom to maintain decorum and when the verdict was delivered they remained silent, but tears were present in many eyes.

    Cassia County Prosecutor McCord Larsen and the victim’s mother, Rhonda Hunnel, declined to comment until after the sentencing hearing, which will be in about 14 weeks.

    Rodriguez was charged in 2019 with murdering Regina Krieger, who disappeared from her basement bedroom in 1995. She was found weeks later with a slash wound across her throat and stabbed in the heart.

    Her death notice ran April 18, 1995, in the Times-News, after horseback riders found her decomposed body near the Montgomery Bridge east of Rupert, nearly two months after she disappeared from the father’s home in Burley.

    During closing arguments, each side had an opportunity to remind the jury of key evidence and try to persuade them on the interpretation of it.

    But opening and closing arguments are not considered part of the evidence that a jury uses to make a decision.

    Rodriguez attorney Keith Roark told the jury during closing arguments that the prosecution’s case was based on the testimony of “liars,” and asked the jurors “which story should they believe after the state’s witnesses gave inconsistent statements to police over the years.”

    “Swans don’t swim in the sewer,” Cassia County Prosecutor McCord Larsen said about the character of the state’s witnesses in the case.

    Court witnesses are seldom rabbis and priests, he said.

    One of the state’s top witnesses, prison inmate Cody Thompson, said he was 16 years old and Rodriguez was 32 when Rodriguez murdered Krieger and forced him to help load her body in his car and dump it in the river, near the now torn-down Jackson Bridge.

    He admitted to telling lies to police, changing his story and committing perjury in court in another case.

    Roark said the state did not present any “real evidence” and had presented “a bunch of lies by jailhouse snitches.”

    Larsen said Thompson was a teenager when the murder occurred, did not have good experiences with law enforcement, and was intimidated and frightened of Rodriguez.

    The weight of the case is borne on Thompson’s shoulders, he said.

    Larsen said the jurors just need to use “their common sense and their judgment to figure out who is telling the truth.”

    The state, he reminded them, did not have to prove everything brought up during the trial, only the elements in the jury instructions that include finding beyond a reasonable doubt that Rodriguez committed the murder.

    The jury could have found Rodriguez guilty of the lesser charge of second-degree murder.

    Roark also highlighted the mistakes made by police over the years and that DNA evidence collected from Krieger’s body, which was tested and compared to Rodriguez’s just a few years ago, did not match.

    “The only real physical evidence they have doesn’t incriminate this man, it exonerates him,” Roark said.

    Roark also talked about what was not known about the case like who Krieger had been with that day, was anyone else in the house when the murder occurred, and if so, why they didn’t hear the brutal murder, and if she unlocked the backdoor to let the murderer into the house.

    “No one was interested in that, the police didn’t check those possibilities out,” he said.

    The police, he said, did not take the case seriously at first and counted her as a run-away until her murdered body washed up on the river bank.

    He also pointed out that the heavy object she was hit with and the knife used in the other injuries were never found.

    The judicial system, Roark said, is set up to make it difficult to convict a person who is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

    It is not the burden of the defendant to prove their innocence.

    Larsen said there were many conflicting statements made by Thompson but the jury should believe the testimony that was presented at trial.

    https://www.idahostatejournal.com/fr...c1d85e322.html
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

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    August 20, 2021

    Judge denies request for new trial in cold case murder


    By Laurie Welsh
    The Neighbour

    BURLEY — A Cassia County judge has denied a motion for a new trial for a man convicted of murdering 14-year-old Regina Krieger in 1995.

    Gilberto Flores Rodriguez was convicted by a jury in May and his attorneys filed a motion for a new trial because they said a juror was guilty of misconduct for sleeping during testimony.

    Krieger’s body was found along the Snake River weeks after she disappeared from her Burley basement bedroom. She had been stabbed in the heart and her throat slashed.

    The motion for a new trial said one juror sitting appeared to be sleeping and was woken by the bailiff. Defense attorneys had hired a private investigator who spoke with some of the jurors on the case after the trial.

    During a hearing on the motion, the bailiff told the court that the juror appeared to be asleep two to three times and she had to awaken him.

    According to District Judge Michael Tribe’s analysis of the issue, the court had opportunity to view the jury during the trial and each time the juror put his head down, which occurred three times based on the court’s observations, the bailiff made sure the juror “was stirred” in a timely manner. The juror was certainly not “sleeping during much of the testimony,” the analysis said.

    The court did not find that jury misconduct was present during the course of the trial such that “a fair and due consideration of the case has been prevented,” it said.

    The court also found that the defendant had not presented clear and convincing evidence that the juror was asleep for any significant portion of the trial or that the conduct reasonably could have prejudiced the defendant, the verdict was not decided by any means other than a fair expression of opinion on the part of all the jurors and the verdict was not contrary to law and evidence.

    The sentence hearing for Rodriguez is set for Aug. 26.

    https://www.mdjonline.com/neighbor_n...4d11aaca6.html
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  5. #5
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    Burley cold case sentence hearing postponed due to COVID-19

    By Laurie Welsh
    Times-News

    BURLEY — A Friday sentence hearing for Gilberto Rodriguez was rescheduled for October after he tested positive for COVID-19, according to Cassia County court staff.

    Rodriguez was convicted by a jury in May of killing Regina Krieger, 14, in 1995.

    The hearing was reset to 10 a.m. Oct. 15 in Cassia County district court.

    Rodriguez’s attorney, Keith Roark, did not respond to a request for a comment.

    Krieger disappeared from her basement bedroom and her body was found weeks later along the Snake River. When she was found her throat was slashed and she had been stabbed in the heart.

    https://magicvalley.com/community/mi...b13f6e806.html
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  6. #6
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    Idaho man convicted in 1995 killing gets life sentence

    AP

    BURLEY, Idaho (AP) — A south-central Idaho man convicted in the 1995 killing of a 14-year-old girl has been sentenced to life in prison.

    Gilberto Flores Rodriguez, 59, received the sentence Friday in Fifth District Court.

    A jury previously convicted Rodriguez of killing Regina “Gina” Krieger. She disappeared from her basement bedroom in 1995, and her body was found two months later on the banks of the Snake River. Authorities said her throat had been slashed and she had been stabbed in the heart.

    Rodriguez denied killing Krieger.

    “I take responsibility for what I do, but I didn’t do this,” Rodriguez said.

    Attorney Keith Roark said he will appeal the conviction because DNA evidence in the case doesn’t match Rodriguez, and the conviction was based on lies told to the jury.

    “Justice is not a concept that applies to some people and not others,” Roark said.

    Krieger’s mother, Rhonda Hunnel, testified at the sentencing hearing.

    “In February 1995, you took something I cherish — a piece of my heart,” Hunnel said. “My daughter’s spirit surrounds me daily.”

    Rodriguez was charged with the murder in 1995 after several witnesses came forward, including one who said Rodriquez forced him to help dump Krieger’s body in the Snake River.

    https://apnews.com/article/idaho-sen...1a328bd9cf6048

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