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Utah Couple's Murder Stymies Brazilian Police
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...¬Found=true
Utah Couple's Murder Stymies Brazilian Police U.S., Local Officials Trade Criticisms On Conduct of Difficult Investigation By Jon Jeter Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page A15 RIO DE JANEIRO -- Brazilian detectives said they knew the moment the call came in that this was no ordinary murder. The address gave it away. Barra de Tijuca is an affluent suburb of gated $700,000 condos, beachfront high-rises, palm trees and so many American expatriates that the locals call the neighborhood Miami Beach. But the full weight of how extraordinarily different this homicide was from the estimated 4,000 murders that occur each year in Rio became jarringly clear on Nov. 30 when detectives entered the second-floor bedroom of a luxurious condo. A Utah business executive, Todd Staheli, lay dead in his bed alongside his wife, Michelle, who was fatally wounded. Their bodies were mutilated by repeated blows from what appeared to be an ax or meat cleaver. Detectives said they noticed Todd Staheli's gold Rolex watch on a bureau, a few feet from the bodies. From the window they could see the couple's Land Rover in the driveway. This, the detectives quickly concluded, was no robbery, according to Brazilian authorities who provided extensive details on the case. This was rage. Seven weeks after the grotesque slayings, the investigation of the killings remains inconclusive. No arrests have been made, no charges filed, and Brazilian and American officials have traded criticism over differences in the way they deal with criminal investigations. Both sides agree that this is a singularly difficult case. There is little physical evidence, and every hypothesis that has surfaced so far contains at least a few holes. The state's top law enforcement official, Antonio Garotinho, announced this month that police had homed in on 14 possibilities, one of which focuses on one of the couple's children. Col. Romeu Ferreira, a deputy police chief, was quoted in O Globo, the leading Rio daily newspaper, on Jan. 8 as saying he was confident "that we will find out who the murderer or murderers are within a month." But for the U.S. diplomatic community here, Brazil's law enforcement system is its own worst enemy, attempting to settle too quickly on an initial suspect and viewing every discovery through that myopic lens rather than aggressively pursuing other possibilities. "This is a one-in-a-million type of case," said a U.S. diplomat familiar with the investigation. "But culture has really played a role in this case as well. It's a wall that neither the Brazilians or the Americans managed to scale, and in the end, neither of us is any closer to finding out who killed two people in their sleep in the dead of night." Todd, 39, an executive for Shell Oil, and Michelle, 38, moved to Brazil in August with their four children after assignments in London and Saudi Arabia. The couple were practicing Mormons, and Michelle taught Sunday school. Todd liked to ride his Harley-Davidson to relax. U.S. and Brazilian authorities, discussing the investigation in separate interviews, said there were no signs of a break-in. They said that a videocassette in the house surveillance system was defective, though it was unclear whether it had been tampered with. In the hours immediately after the attack, Brazilian law enforcement officials focused on the couple's 13-year-old daughter. From a three-page letter that Michelle Staheli had written to her daughter in the week before her death, detectives said they learned that things were not going well for the family as it adjusted to new lives and a new language. "I know I have not been the ideal mother but you have not been the ideal daughter," the letter began," according to a portion quoted in Brazilian media and confirmed as accurate by authorities. Police had more questions. According to authorities, forensic technicians found Michelle and Todd's blood in the 13-year-old's bed. U.S. and Brazilian officials said the girl told police that her 3-year-old sister had climbed into bed with their wounded parents on the morning of the attacks and had then crawled into her bed. But police did not find any child's pajamas with bloodstains, according to the officials. The teenager told police she did not have a boyfriend, but police discovered in her bedroom a letter from a 13-year-old boy who attended school with her, in which he wrote that he "would do anything to keep us together," U.S. and Brazilian authorities said. The authorities confirmed accounts of the letter in the Brazilian media. "It's a hideous crime with an enormous degree of brutality and most probably involved someone close to the family who was familiar with the family and the house," said Monica di Piero, the prosecutor handling the investigation. But to U.S. diplomats and the family's Brazilian lawyer, the Brazilian police investigators' approach raised more questions than it answered. An autopsy indicated that the couple was likely attacked by two assailants standing on either side of the bed and that the couple's wounds -- particularly Todd's -- were so deep that they were likely inflicted by someone of considerable strength and dexterity. No murder weapon has been found, authorities said. A U.S. diplomat who read the letter written by Michelle Staheli to her daughter disputed the idea that there was anything unusual. "That letter was more tender than anything. It certainly did not suggest that there was anything other than a normal teenage girl living in the home," the U.S. official said. One U.S. official said the crime scene might have been corrupted when police arrived at the Staheli home. Todd Staheli had already died, but Michelle Staheli was still alive, though comatose, the official said. She died two days later. "Their first priority was to save a life," said the U.S. diplomat, "and so they may have had as many as two dozen people -- paramedics, police, relatives -- traipsing around the crime scene before it was secured." At first, investigators were unable to obtain statements from the older daughter and her brother, 10, because lawyers for Shell Oil and the family said the children would not submit to such a procedure until their legal guardians -- their grandparents -- arrived from Utah. Brazilian investigators got a family court judge to order that the children remain in the country as potential witnesses. But officials said it took four days to obtain the statements, a delay the Brazilians said damaged their investigation. After providing police with statements, the Staheli children returned to Utah with their grandparents. Neither the grandparents nor the family's U.S. lawyers responded to repeated telephone calls. A U.S. official familiar with the case said the investigation all but ground to a halt in the days between the murder and the taking of the depositions. "The Brazilians didn't quite understand that for us, it's pretty much hands-off any juvenile if there is no adult guardian or representative present," the diplomat said. "But on the other hand, I think we found it odd how passive the police are here in a murder investigation. They rely a lot on physical evidence, and if they don't have that, they just kind of wait around to take witnesses and suspects to the lawyers to give a deposition." News reports described other lines of investigation by Brazilian authorities. Todd Staheli had recently been named vice president for natural gas and power in southern South America, an area that includes Bolivia. Angry about their government's plan to sell the country's natural gas deposits abroad, Bolivians in October held violent demonstrations that led to the resignation of the embattled president. But after interviews with Todd Staheli's co-workers at Shell and with intelligence officials in Bolivia, police found no evidence pointing to a political motive for the killings. The Brazilian investigators reported investigating a number of suspects, including the family maid and driver, who were not working the night of the murders. Police discovered blood in the driver's car. The driver told police that he had helped an injured bicyclist a few days earlier, and DNA tests revealed that the blood did not belong to either of the Stahelis. There were other reports about tracking workers and people who lived in the condo complex, but officials said they still had no suspects in the case. |
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