Brutal end to a tragic life

Few leads in killing of woman found with severed hands

Charlie Brennan, Rocky Mountain News

Published April 24, 2006 at midnight

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Catrina Rene Powell lived hard and died harder.

Shown little love as a child, she started scrapping with the law as a teenager and never stopped.

Her rough road dead-ended sometime after midnight Oct. 25, 2004, when someone abandoned her body a few feet from a trash container behind a strip mall at 7530 Sheridan Blvd. in Westminster.

In that grim tableau, Catrina, 26, was distinguished most by what was missing: no clothes, no weapon, no form of identification and in a macabre twist, no hands. They'd been severed at the wrists.

A year and a half later, the investigation is similarly marked by absence - the absence of a strong suspect, a solid lead or a clear motive.

The cause of death was one or more blows to the head.

"I have invested months and months and months, and this is still on my desk . . . It's always fresh on my mind," said Westminster Detective Bernard Vonfeldt.

Catrina's parents split when she was very young. They haven't been located to be told their daughter is dead.

At her grave site at Olinger Hampden Cemetery, 20 paces from traffic whizzing by on Hampden Avenue, there's no marker of any kind.

Catrina's only immediate family member that authorities found is currently an inmate at the Arapahoe County Jail, held for violating a restraining order granted to his estranged wife.

"I feel like I failed her as a brother," said Elmer Powell Jr., 29, who goes by "Junior."

"I wasn't able to make it to her funeral," he said, "because I was in here. She's never had her family there when she needed them."

Driver's blank stare

A Waste Connections driver backed in behind the Country Meadows shopping plaza around dawn.

A nude woman lay facedown by the trash container. Despite being dismembered and having suffered severe head injuries, there was very little blood.

"The thing I remember is the sanitation driver," said Westminster senior officer Don Von Lintel, the first officer to arrive. "He was sitting in the truck's cab, and his eyes were wide open. He had this blank stare on his face."

Vonfeldt, the lead investigator, came onto the case the second day.

"She was literally just a couple of feet from the trash dumpster," said Vonfeldt. "That was concerning. Why was she left in front of the dumpster, as opposed to being placed in the dumpster? She was literally in plain view."

Perhaps, police have speculated, she was meant to be found. Or maybe the killer or killers were surprised or interrupted before they could put her in the trash container.

Catrina's autopsy report is sealed. Beyond disclosing that she was not sexually assaulted, Vonfeldt would say little about the condition of her body. He hopes that keeping private some of the details of other injuries she suffered will help solve the crime.

As investigators scoured the scene that morning, they were more than a month away from knowing the name of the petite woman with reddish brown hair.

Catrina wouldn't be tentatively identified until Nov. 30, 2004, when a more detailed photo-composite portrait was broadcast, replacing an earlier composite sketch. The new portrait yielded about a hundred calls, all but one dead-ends.

But one came from 28-year-old Dachelle Powell, Catrina's sister-in-law.

"After the second picture aired," she said, "Junior called me and said, 'Do you think that's my sister?' "

She'd had a "sick feeling" for weeks. After regular phone contact with Catrina, she hadn't heard from her for more than two months.

"I told him, 'I always thought it was your sister.' "

The identification would be confirmed a week later by dental records.

'Weren't big on family'

"Our family is kinda like a big mystery to me," said Junior Powell.

"We weren't big on family celebrations, barbecues, birthday parties and stuff."

After he was born in Denver, his father, a roofer and construction worker who also shot a lot of pool, took the family to Marion, Ohio. Catrina was born there Aug. 21, 1978.

The family moved to Oklahoma City when Junior and Catrina were barely school-age. Life there was hardscrabble at best.

"When we lived in Oklahoma, we used to walk 5 miles each way to something called the Jesus House for food. They'd give us rice, meat, cheese, peanut butter . . . and we had to push the food all the way back in a shopping cart," said Junior Powell.

When the two children were still small, their father put them and their mother on a bus for Scottsbluff, Neb., to stay with their maternal grandmother.

They'd never see their father again, and Powell started considering himself his kid sister's protector.

"She was kind of like a tomboy. She used to like to swim," Powell recalled. "And in Nebraska, she'd run in the sand dunes, on the prairies and stuff."

The children, with their mother and grandmother and an uncle, moved to Cheyenne, Wyo. That's when Powell remembers "everything went kind of crazy. They didn't know how to handle me and my sister."

For some now-forgotten offense, he said, he and his sister were grounded to one room of the family's trailer - for an entire summer.

"They'd sleep in until noon or 1," Powell said of the adults. "And if we got up before that and had cereal and watched cartoons, they'd whup up on us."

He recalls "a couple nervous breakdowns" their mother suffered. In the midst of one, he remembers her throwing an ashtray at Catrina, hitting her in the face.

And yet, he said, when food was scarce, Rebecca Powell - who never had a driver's license - would make sure the two children ate first.

"Sometimes, I'd be like, 'Dang, she might love us,' and other times, I'm like, 'All right, she doesn't love us.' "

Catrina and her brother were both put into group homes in Wyoming, he said, when they entered their teens.

"When we were growing up," he said, "they would say we were either going to be killed or spend our lives in prison."

Run-ins with the law

The first time Catrina was booked into the Laramie County Jail, it was for failure to make a February 1994 court appearance.

She was 15.

Catrina had a few more scrapes, including a shoplifting arrest right before Christmas 1996.

But court records show no significant consequences until the following spring. In April 1997, Catrina and a second person were nabbed in Cheyenne for burglarizing two cars.

Catrina applied for a public defender, claiming near-total indigence.

The completed application showed no permanent address, stating that she lived "with friends."

Her occupation: "none"; she was employed by: "N/A"; the last time she had worked was: "N/A"; the last place she had worked: "N/A"; she stated that she owned clothing worth a total of about $150; the amount that she could raise to get out of jail, she wrote, was $350.

Catrina appeared in Laramie District Court four months later to plead guilty to accessory to burglary before the fact. She was sentenced to five years' probation.

But she repeatedly failed to meet the terms of her probation.

A Volunteers of America facility in Gillette wrote on Nov. 24, 1997, that she was denied a bed there because "she has had more than one 'second chance' to improve herself, but her choices reflect that she would not be likely to complete the program successfully."

Laramie District Judge Edward L. Grant signed an order on Dec. 15, 1997, revoking Catrina's probation, and sentenced her to the Wyoming Women's Correctional Facility at Lusk for from 15 to 26 months.

When Catrina Powell went to prison at the age of 19, she was following in the footsteps of her brother, who was doing about five years for strong-armed robbery.

With Junior Powell due to get out first, he vowed to give a hand to his sister, who wore "Little Powell" tattooed in green on her left hand in tribute to him.

She was released June 13, 2001. Junior and Dachelle Powell were there to meet her.

"She was carsick, but I was driving as fast as I could, messing with her, being the annoying big brother," he recalled. "I was driving like a maniac the whole way.

"But I was happy that day. We felt like we had the family back together. I said, 'If Mom and Dad could see us together, they'd trip.' "

Played the monkey

Dachelle Powell was just a few months Catrina's senior.

"She had such a connection with my daughter," Dachelle Powell said. "When my daughter was 3 1/2 months old, Trina would play like she was a monkey on my stairway, and have my daughter laughing so hard that she'd get the hiccups."

Dachelle Powell first met her sister-in-law when Catrina was in community corrections in Rock Springs, Wyo., in 1998. Dachelle Powell brought her shoes, clothes and money so that she could continue her Newport cigarettes habit.

When Catrina couldn't afford her own place, Dachelle Powell welcomed Catrina to her apartment - she and her husband in one bedroom, Catrina in the other.

"It started wearing on me, being the only person in the house working," Dachelle Powell admitted. "Junior and Trina were motivated to do what they wanted to do - go to clubs, partying with friends. Three adults on one income, it didn't work."

Catrina's brother ultimately kicked her out of his southeast Denver apartment in the spring or summer of 2004.

"In the summer of 2004, I think she started doing some meth," said Junior Powell, who also disapproved of the "knuckleheads" his sister was spending time with. "Me and her had an altercation. I got on her real bad.

"I seen her three days later. She was walking on the street at the Stone Creek Apartments. We didn't talk. I just thought, 'My sister looks like she's dead.' The next thing you know, she's gone."

Two days to live

Catrina was cited the first week of August 2004 in Denver for marijuana possession. She was scheduled to appear in Denver County Court on Sept. 17 but didn't show.

She was picked up on an arrest warrant Oct. 22. At that point she had only about two days to live.

Court records show Catrina was in court early the morning of Oct. 23. She pleaded guilty and was released shortly after 10 a.m. That pot bust overlapped another brush with police in Catrina's final days.

She was issued a summons for trespassing early on the evening of Oct. 20 in the 900 block of East 17th Avenue. Court documents indicate she was cited for being in an abandoned house that "is an ongoing problem with the transients." For that offense, she was due to appear in court Nov. 5.

By that date, her unidentified body had been in the custody of Adams County Coroner James Hibbard for 11 days.

'Very nice lady'

Westminster detectives spent many hours on East Colfax Avenue hunting for Catrina's killer or killers.

"We certainly didn't do this in an undercover method," said Vonfeldt, "and we were literally picked out the moment we parked our cars."

Investigators were nevertheless surprised at the cooperation.

"A lot of these people were very willing to talk about this, because everyone we talked to said she was a very nice lady," Vonfeldt said.

Police interviewed a Colfax habitue, a self-admitted drug user and "street person" whose identity they won't release, who spent a lot of time with Catrina prior to her Oct. 22 arrest. That man, who is not a suspect, told detectives he last saw Catrina about 3 a.m. Oct. 24, about 27 hours before her battered body would be found in Westminster.

She was hanging out near a 7-Eleven at Colfax and Ogden Street, chatting with two men standing around an black older model Chevrolet Nova.

"When he walked away, she was still talking to them," Vonfeldt said. "He didn't know if she went with them, or if she went with someone else."

Vonfeldt described those two men as being white, in their 30s, one with a "chin-strap beard."

"Those are definitely people we would want to talk to," he said.

Catrina's Colfax Avenue companion was one of numerous acquaintances who saw Catrina as markedly different from the hardened types typically seen on the city's tougher blocks.

"He described Catrina as a person who didn't really belong on the streets of Denver; friendly, beautiful smile, very outgoing - but using drugs," Vonfeldt said. "He said that it was probably inevitable how she would end up."

Only silence

Dachelle Powell last heard from Catrina by phone a little more than two months before she was killed.

"It was Aug. 10," Dachelle Powell said. "She would call me from pay phones or from a homeless shelter.

"We talked about her wanting to do something for her birthday, because that was coming up" on Aug. 21.

But after that, only silence.

Dachelle Powell said she saw bruises on her sister-in-law in the last six months before her death. Catrina brushed off her questions.

Vonfeldt said that police still don't know a motive for her killing.

"We've got an idea as to motive," he said, "and one of the motives that a lot of people have presented to us is that, by taking her hands off, this was a message that she stole from somebody, or ripped somebody off.

"The opposite side of that is that this could have been done to hide her identity" by depriving investigators of her fingerprints and tattoos, he said.

Catrina's brother and sister-in-law, though their marriage is broken, are bonded by regrets - regret over Catrina's end, regret that her killer has never been found and regret that they have no money for Catrina's headstone.

"It just breaks my heart that her grave has never been marked," Dachelle Powell said.

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