Strohmeyer expected to take stand

Bill Gang

Thursday, Feb. 5, 1998 | 10:18 a.m.

Jeremy Strohmeyer was scheduled to take the witness stand today in a hearing over the legal challenge to three confessions he made to the sexual assault and slaying of a 7-year-old girl at a Primm casino on May 25.

The 18-year-old Strohmeyer was not expected to talk about the incident itself but about the events after his arrest near his Long Beach home three days later.

His attorneys have contended that Strohmeyer was coerced into giving three confessions to police after being denied his right to an lawyer and, perhaps, not told of his constitutional right to remain silent. They want the confessions ruled inadmissible for the teenager's April 20 trial.

Long Beach police detectives already have testified in the six-day hearing that Strohmeyer was informed of his rights and agreed to give them up to "get things out in the open."

But as he was pouring out his story, police didn't tell him that an attorney hired by his family was trying to reach him -- providing a secondary issue for District Judge Don Chairez to consider.

Long Beach attorney Douglas Otto testified Wednesday how he first contacted police to inform them he was the teenager's attorney and instruct investigators not to interview his client.

He said he then tried to visit Strohmeyer at Long Beach Community Hospital, where the teenager had been taken for treatment of an intentional overdose of Dexedrine as police closed in.

Otto said he was refused access to Strohmeyer and then his attention was diverted by one detective while another whisked the defendant out of the hospital and to the Long Beach Police Department, where he confessed a second time.

Otto, who no longer represents Strohmeyer, testified that he didn't see the teenager until about 7 a.m. the next day inside the Long Beach jail.

By then, he had given a third confession to Las Vegas homicide detectives, providing gruesome details of the events in a women's restroom at the Primm Valley hotel-casino and the last minutes of Sherrice Iverson's life.

Otto said Strohmeyer looked as though he hadn't slept during the few hours he had spent in a cell and "appeared to me to be ill."

Iverson was strangled and her body was propped on a toilet near the video arcade, where she and her 14-year-old brother had been playing games while their father gambled.

Strohmeyer was arrested after surveillance video of a body-pierced young man leaving the restroom area was broadcast on television stations in Southern California. Schoolmates had called police and identified Strohmeyer as the one on the video.

Long Beach detective William Collette testified Wednesday that Strohmeyer admitted he had decided to flee the Long Beach area but friends wouldn't help him.

It was then, according to Collette, that Strohmeyer decided to commit suicide by taking a vial of pills.

His mother, Winifred Stroh-meyer, told how she returned to their home after dinner on May 28 and found a suicide note from her son and an empty pill bottle.

The note read in part, "Forgive me for I have sinned. I'm sorry."

She said she rushed through the house calling for her son and looking for his body but he was gone, although her anxiety escalated moments later when police arrived to say Strohmeyer had been arrested on murder charges.

As has been the case through much of the hearing, defense attorneys challenged the media cameras in the courtroom and asked Chairez if Strohmeyer could come to court dressed in civilian clothes for his testimony rather than his dark blue Clark County Detention Center uniform.

After District Attorney Stewart Bell argued against the special treatment -- stating that if the exception is made for one inmate, it must be made for all -- Chairez refused the defense request.

But the judge did agree to have the defendant's shackles and belly chains removed for his testimony.

The scales balanced later Wednesday when the judge refused to let a television station broadcast Strohmeyer's testimony live.

Bell embraced the position of defense attorneys against such a live broadcast.

"I think it's a bad precedent, sort of like dressing him up," Bell said.