Justice for David Strickland
Justice for David Strickland
The Issue
In June of 2012, Mollie Olgin and Kristene Chapa were on a date in Portland, Texas when they were approached by a gunman in Violet Andrews Park. The attacker, wearing gloves and a mask, forced Kristene to duct-tape Mollie and herself. He referred to the girls by numbers as he sexually assaulted them and then shot each of them in the back of the head. Mollie, who was shot first, did not survive.
David Strickland was charged with the fatal attack on Mollie Olgin and Kristene Chapa after a former friend of his, Detective Aaron Veuleman, became the new lead detective on the case. Allegedly, a personal conflict arose between Strickland and Veuleman before the attack on Mollie and Kristene.
Based on shell casings found underneath Mollie’s body and an inconclusive ballistics report misunderstood by the jury, Strickland was convicted and sentenced to life in prison by San Patricio County in September 2016. Aside from the questionably-handled shell casings, the state claims no evidence or eyewitnesses placing David Strickland at the scene of the crime.
[THE ORIGINAL SUSPECT]
However, overwhelming evidence indicates that the original suspect, Dylan Spellman, is the real perpetrator. Spellman had just been convicted of an armed robbery in Nevada where he and his cohorts entered a home, tying and binding the residents, including a child, as they referred to each other by numbers. Spellman was staying with a family friend in Portland while he awaited sentencing and reportedly spent a lot of time in Violet Andrews Park. The overlook that Mollie and Kristene stood on is visible from Market Street, where Spellman was staying.
Three eyewitnesses that could positively identify Spellman (Alisha Dickey, Kiki Koumbis, and Monique Ybarra) placed him at the scene in the hours before and after the murder. Additionally, Spellman’s DNA had been found on a cigarette butt and an energy drink can at the scene. Weeks after the murder, Spellman was also found by police having sex with an intoxicated woman beneath an overlook in the park. Years later, after David Strickland's conviction, a pubic hair found on Chapa's clothing would be matched to Dylan Spellman as well.
- [Testimony by Monique Ybarra]
- [Testimony by Alisha Dickey]
- [Search Warrant Affidavit for Alisha Dickey's Home]
According to Kristene, the attacker used a silver gun. Police found a silver gun during a search of Spellman's girlfriend's home, while Strickland’s gun, which the state claims to be the murder weapon, is black. Furthermore, Strickland did not own any silver pistols at all.
When law enforcement visited Spellman in 2014 during his incarceration in Nevada to confront him about the DNA, he failed a polygraph test and also asked the prosecutor, Sam Smith, “How much time am I looking at?” After being told that capital murder carried a death penalty sentence, Spellman declined to speak further and was not charged. Following this visit, in May of 2014, at the behest of Police Chief Gary Giles, lead detective Roland Chavez was replaced with Aaron Veuleman. Giles would testify that he wanted to "change the situation" and "look at the case from a whole new perspective."
[ENTER DAVID STRICKLAND]
In June of 2014, a letter addressed to Chapa's father was found in the mailbox of an unrelated person in Sinton, Chapa's town of residence. The letter sought to implicate one Chris Melchor in the attack on Mollie and Kristene. Melchor was Strickland's former roommate in Utah with whom he had a troubled falling-out. Earlier in the year, Strickland had confided in friends that he had been threatened by Melchor and sought help from law enforcement to no avail. Amid this turmoil, Strickland moved back to Texas, settling in Helotes. After arrangements were made for Strickland to pick up personal belongings from Melchor's home in Utah, including a firearm allegedly stolen from Strickland, Strickland was reported to police as an intruder and arrested, later bonding out of jail.
Detective Veuleman asserted that the letter implicated Strickland by containing "details that only the killer could know" about the crime. However, as Veuleman would later testify in court, this assertion of incriminating details in the letter is based on the logic that the details in question were never publicized by law enforcement, which ignores the possibility of persons involved with the case leaking information, the exact kind of violation that Veuleman himself had been fired for months before trial. Furthermore, the majority of the details contained in the letter are inaccurate. In trial two years later, the state would present evidence showing that portions of the letter appeared in spell-check data taken from Strickland's laptop.
Early in the investigation, police had made contact with Strickland after a KMart employee reported seeing his concealed pistol in his waistband. Strickland consented to having his weapon test-fired. According to testimony, Detective Chavez test-fired four rounds, but only two spent casings would be logged into evidence. The remaining two casings have never been officially accounted for.
On June 20th, 2014, Strickland was arrested by US Marshals in his Helotes apartment. Shortly afterward, Chief Giles left the police department and moved back to his home state of Utah.
[BEFORE TRIAL]
09/01/16, weeks before Strickland's trial, defense witness Kiki Koumbis's husband, George Koumbis, was executed in his own store in Corpus Christi during an apparent robbery-gone-wrong that Corpus Christi Police Chief Mike Markle called "targeted." Kiki had apparently seen Mollie and Kristene as well as Spellman in Violet Andrews Park hours before the murder, but never volunteered her information to police.
09/18/16, the day before Strickland's trial, a long-time friend of his that had become convinced of his innocence and spoke out repeatedly online, Mikhail Chavez, was visited by Portland PD Lieutenant Jon Quade and Officer Aaron Veuleman, who had been fired from Portland PD seven months prior. Chavez had previously been interviewed by investigators in 2014, had kept in regular contact with Strickland, and had some minor contact with the defense team. Chavez was also one of the first few people to see Strickland in the hours after the murder, working a three-hour shift alongside him the Saturday morning that the crime scene was processed, and noticing no unusual behavior from Strickland at all. Furthermore, Chavez also knew some details about Strickland's personal conflict with Veuleman.
Despite the fact that Chavez was on the witness list for the state, Quade and Veuleman lied as they pressed him for information, saying that Strickland and his attorneys planned to claim that Chavez was the real killer. In a phone call with Chavez, Portland PD Chief Mark Cory vouched for this lie about the defense team's strategy. Chavez interpreted the visit as an implied threat and an attempt to scare him into silence. Prosecutor Sam Smith took responsibility for the visit the following day, saying that he had sent the officers to Chavez's apartment.
[THE TRIAL]
Dylan Spellman's subpoena to testify in Strickland's trial was denied by a Nevada judge due to a spelling error. Due to the timing of the subpoena's issuance, the error wasn't able to be corrected with a new subpoena.
Detective Chavez testified that the brand of ammunition test-fired from Strickland's Glock pistol was Remington, Strickland's ammunition of choice. However, the spent shell casings sent to the DPS lab for testing and analysis were one Federal brand and one WCC brand, Federal being the same brand as the casings found at the scene. This glaring inconsistency went unexplained by law enforcement.
Additionally, Detective Veuleman sent Strickland's pistol to the DPS lab along with an after-market firing pin. The state's toolmark examiner, Richard Hitchcox, removed Strickland's firing pin and installed the after-market firing pin provided by police before conducting his own test-fire, using the resulting spent casings for his comparison to the casings found at the scene and the casings that allegedly came from Detective Chavez's test-fire of Strickland's weapon. None of Hitchcox's work yielded any definitive match to Strickland's pistol and only found consistency within general class characteristics, I.e., consistency with stock firing pin impressions made by .45-caliber pistols manufactured by a range of firearm brands that includes Glock. Despite this lack of an actual "match" to Strickland's pistol, Hitchcox testified that in his professional opinion, Strickland's pistol was the murder weapon.
In his closing argument, lead defense attorney John Gilmore said, "David's DNA was nowhere to be found in this crime scene. There is no forensic evidence at all that links David to this crime. There is no eye witness-- no eye witnesses that saw David and could identify David as being at the park that night. Not even Kristene Chapa. She cannot identify David as the perpetrator. ...They had a lock solid case on Dylan Spellman... He is the guy. If he had been eliminated, why did they go to Las Vegas in the Spring of 2014, right before David Strickland was arrested? ...They have a great case against him. And if he were on trial -- if he is sitting where David Strickland is right now, he would be found guilty of this crime... They had more than enough evidence. They have got more evidence on him than they do on David Strickland."
Defense attorney Chris Dorsey argued, "They can't match the projectiles, the business end to David's gun, because it wasn't his gun. There is no match here. ...[R]emember the last test, the first one I asked Hitchcox about? The December 4, 2012, test... The one he forgot about. ...Why do they have to do that test? If everything is a complete match like the State wants you to believe, why are they doing the last test? Simple. ...They can't match the firing pin. That's why he is flipping the firing pins in and out. They can't match the firing pins to the cases. But, to listen to Hitchcox, he wouldn't tell us that. But, you remember, no matching patterns in firing pin impression... Guess what? He had significant differences in the... firing pin shearing in his previous tests, the July 9, 2014, test. So the firing pins just didn't match. That's why he had the guy redo the test."
"...Look at these envelopes. Police officers put their initials on them every time they are supposed to take it out and open it up. The initials you see here: Aaron Veuleman. ...You will see another one down here: Aaron Veuleman, November 16, 2012. Why is Detective Veuleman -- former Detective Veuleman -- fired --...Why is former Detective Veuleman messing with these cartridges right before he sends them to the lab? Why is he doing that? He put his initials here. But why is he messing with it a week before it is sent to the lab?"
Defense attorney Jimmy Granberry remarked, "[T]here were four casings fired by Chavez out in the brush somewhere at some shooting range when he is ten minutes away from the Corpus Christi Firearms Lab where they had firearms examiners... and it would have been a one-day turnaround... Professionally done... Then there is two extra casings... Why did they sit on it for [five months]? Chavez, pretty decent guy, I think he suspected what Aaron Veuleman had done and he sat on it because they had Spellman. They had the real guy. The one he was convinced had done it."
"...Who walks around a park in a small town where two people have been murdered and killed and the killer has not been caught? Who frequents those areas at night in the dark either alone or with a woman? ...Dylan Spellman knows that he is safe from the person who did that, because Dylan Spellman did that."
In his closing argument, prosecutor Sam Smith told the jury that Strickland's pistol was a "100% match" to the casings found at the scene. During jury deliberation, the jury asked the judge to read back a portion of Hitchcox's testimony. A short time later, the jury reached a verdict.
September 28th, 2016, Strickland was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In an interview outside the courthouse with The Coastal Bend Chronicle immediately after trial, prosecutor Sam Smith said that the jury's guilty verdict came down to "the gun, without a doubt." According to Strickland, his attorneys had not wanted him to testify out of concern that he would mention his pre-existing relationship with Detective Veuleman.
In 2017, personal-injury attorney Tony Buzbee filed a $500-million lawsuit on behalf of Kristene Chapa against Strickland, his father, and his father's pharmacy. The complaints against Strickland's father and the family business would later be dropped from the suit.
[DNA IGNORED: THE LIE CONTINUES]
In 2018, After Strickland’s conviction, the pubic hair found on Chapa’s clothing was also matched to Dylan Spellman via mitochondrial DNA testing. Sam Smith, who had since become the district attorney, dismissed the DNA match on the pubic hair as irrelevant, contending that the hair could have been left behind before the crime and incidentally made its way onto Chapa's clothing.
This same pubic hair had already been analyzed by the FBI via microscopy in 2015, excluding Strickland as its source. The defense had been misled to believe that the hair could not be tested for DNA.
To date, no arrest warrant has been issued for Dylan Spellman while the shoddy case against David Strickland has been repeatedly broadcast on national television, including MSNBC, Vanity Fair Confidential, Investigation Discovery, and Dateline NBC. In early 2020, David Strickland’s appeal was denied by the 13th circuit court of appeals. In October of 2022, Strickland made his first public statement.
David Strickland deserves exoneration or a new trial. Kristene and Mollie’s family deserve the truth and justice. The public deserves integrity in the criminal justice system. Sign the petition today.
Messages from Strickland are published to a Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/justicefordavidstrickland
[UPDATES]
- In January 2024, the court of appeals denied Strickland's writ of habeas corpus without a written order.
- Sam Smith has retired and as of January 1, 2025, San Patricio County's new district attorney is Margie Flores. Strickland's opportunities for appeal in Texas courts have been exhausted and the case has moved on to the federal level.
- 01/01/25 : The text of the petition has been updated.
---
San Patricio County District Attorney [Margie Flores]
PO Box 1393
Sinton, TX 78387
(Phone) 361-364-9390
(Fax) 361-364-9490
1,692
The Issue
In June of 2012, Mollie Olgin and Kristene Chapa were on a date in Portland, Texas when they were approached by a gunman in Violet Andrews Park. The attacker, wearing gloves and a mask, forced Kristene to duct-tape Mollie and herself. He referred to the girls by numbers as he sexually assaulted them and then shot each of them in the back of the head. Mollie, who was shot first, did not survive.
David Strickland was charged with the fatal attack on Mollie Olgin and Kristene Chapa after a former friend of his, Detective Aaron Veuleman, became the new lead detective on the case. Allegedly, a personal conflict arose between Strickland and Veuleman before the attack on Mollie and Kristene.
Based on shell casings found underneath Mollie’s body and an inconclusive ballistics report misunderstood by the jury, Strickland was convicted and sentenced to life in prison by San Patricio County in September 2016. Aside from the questionably-handled shell casings, the state claims no evidence or eyewitnesses placing David Strickland at the scene of the crime.
[THE ORIGINAL SUSPECT]
However, overwhelming evidence indicates that the original suspect, Dylan Spellman, is the real perpetrator. Spellman had just been convicted of an armed robbery in Nevada where he and his cohorts entered a home, tying and binding the residents, including a child, as they referred to each other by numbers. Spellman was staying with a family friend in Portland while he awaited sentencing and reportedly spent a lot of time in Violet Andrews Park. The overlook that Mollie and Kristene stood on is visible from Market Street, where Spellman was staying.
Three eyewitnesses that could positively identify Spellman (Alisha Dickey, Kiki Koumbis, and Monique Ybarra) placed him at the scene in the hours before and after the murder. Additionally, Spellman’s DNA had been found on a cigarette butt and an energy drink can at the scene. Weeks after the murder, Spellman was also found by police having sex with an intoxicated woman beneath an overlook in the park. Years later, after David Strickland's conviction, a pubic hair found on Chapa's clothing would be matched to Dylan Spellman as well.
- [Testimony by Monique Ybarra]
- [Testimony by Alisha Dickey]
- [Search Warrant Affidavit for Alisha Dickey's Home]
According to Kristene, the attacker used a silver gun. Police found a silver gun during a search of Spellman's girlfriend's home, while Strickland’s gun, which the state claims to be the murder weapon, is black. Furthermore, Strickland did not own any silver pistols at all.
When law enforcement visited Spellman in 2014 during his incarceration in Nevada to confront him about the DNA, he failed a polygraph test and also asked the prosecutor, Sam Smith, “How much time am I looking at?” After being told that capital murder carried a death penalty sentence, Spellman declined to speak further and was not charged. Following this visit, in May of 2014, at the behest of Police Chief Gary Giles, lead detective Roland Chavez was replaced with Aaron Veuleman. Giles would testify that he wanted to "change the situation" and "look at the case from a whole new perspective."
[ENTER DAVID STRICKLAND]
In June of 2014, a letter addressed to Chapa's father was found in the mailbox of an unrelated person in Sinton, Chapa's town of residence. The letter sought to implicate one Chris Melchor in the attack on Mollie and Kristene. Melchor was Strickland's former roommate in Utah with whom he had a troubled falling-out. Earlier in the year, Strickland had confided in friends that he had been threatened by Melchor and sought help from law enforcement to no avail. Amid this turmoil, Strickland moved back to Texas, settling in Helotes. After arrangements were made for Strickland to pick up personal belongings from Melchor's home in Utah, including a firearm allegedly stolen from Strickland, Strickland was reported to police as an intruder and arrested, later bonding out of jail.
Detective Veuleman asserted that the letter implicated Strickland by containing "details that only the killer could know" about the crime. However, as Veuleman would later testify in court, this assertion of incriminating details in the letter is based on the logic that the details in question were never publicized by law enforcement, which ignores the possibility of persons involved with the case leaking information, the exact kind of violation that Veuleman himself had been fired for months before trial. Furthermore, the majority of the details contained in the letter are inaccurate. In trial two years later, the state would present evidence showing that portions of the letter appeared in spell-check data taken from Strickland's laptop.
Early in the investigation, police had made contact with Strickland after a KMart employee reported seeing his concealed pistol in his waistband. Strickland consented to having his weapon test-fired. According to testimony, Detective Chavez test-fired four rounds, but only two spent casings would be logged into evidence. The remaining two casings have never been officially accounted for.
On June 20th, 2014, Strickland was arrested by US Marshals in his Helotes apartment. Shortly afterward, Chief Giles left the police department and moved back to his home state of Utah.
[BEFORE TRIAL]
09/01/16, weeks before Strickland's trial, defense witness Kiki Koumbis's husband, George Koumbis, was executed in his own store in Corpus Christi during an apparent robbery-gone-wrong that Corpus Christi Police Chief Mike Markle called "targeted." Kiki had apparently seen Mollie and Kristene as well as Spellman in Violet Andrews Park hours before the murder, but never volunteered her information to police.
09/18/16, the day before Strickland's trial, a long-time friend of his that had become convinced of his innocence and spoke out repeatedly online, Mikhail Chavez, was visited by Portland PD Lieutenant Jon Quade and Officer Aaron Veuleman, who had been fired from Portland PD seven months prior. Chavez had previously been interviewed by investigators in 2014, had kept in regular contact with Strickland, and had some minor contact with the defense team. Chavez was also one of the first few people to see Strickland in the hours after the murder, working a three-hour shift alongside him the Saturday morning that the crime scene was processed, and noticing no unusual behavior from Strickland at all. Furthermore, Chavez also knew some details about Strickland's personal conflict with Veuleman.
Despite the fact that Chavez was on the witness list for the state, Quade and Veuleman lied as they pressed him for information, saying that Strickland and his attorneys planned to claim that Chavez was the real killer. In a phone call with Chavez, Portland PD Chief Mark Cory vouched for this lie about the defense team's strategy. Chavez interpreted the visit as an implied threat and an attempt to scare him into silence. Prosecutor Sam Smith took responsibility for the visit the following day, saying that he had sent the officers to Chavez's apartment.
[THE TRIAL]
Dylan Spellman's subpoena to testify in Strickland's trial was denied by a Nevada judge due to a spelling error. Due to the timing of the subpoena's issuance, the error wasn't able to be corrected with a new subpoena.
Detective Chavez testified that the brand of ammunition test-fired from Strickland's Glock pistol was Remington, Strickland's ammunition of choice. However, the spent shell casings sent to the DPS lab for testing and analysis were one Federal brand and one WCC brand, Federal being the same brand as the casings found at the scene. This glaring inconsistency went unexplained by law enforcement.
Additionally, Detective Veuleman sent Strickland's pistol to the DPS lab along with an after-market firing pin. The state's toolmark examiner, Richard Hitchcox, removed Strickland's firing pin and installed the after-market firing pin provided by police before conducting his own test-fire, using the resulting spent casings for his comparison to the casings found at the scene and the casings that allegedly came from Detective Chavez's test-fire of Strickland's weapon. None of Hitchcox's work yielded any definitive match to Strickland's pistol and only found consistency within general class characteristics, I.e., consistency with stock firing pin impressions made by .45-caliber pistols manufactured by a range of firearm brands that includes Glock. Despite this lack of an actual "match" to Strickland's pistol, Hitchcox testified that in his professional opinion, Strickland's pistol was the murder weapon.
In his closing argument, lead defense attorney John Gilmore said, "David's DNA was nowhere to be found in this crime scene. There is no forensic evidence at all that links David to this crime. There is no eye witness-- no eye witnesses that saw David and could identify David as being at the park that night. Not even Kristene Chapa. She cannot identify David as the perpetrator. ...They had a lock solid case on Dylan Spellman... He is the guy. If he had been eliminated, why did they go to Las Vegas in the Spring of 2014, right before David Strickland was arrested? ...They have a great case against him. And if he were on trial -- if he is sitting where David Strickland is right now, he would be found guilty of this crime... They had more than enough evidence. They have got more evidence on him than they do on David Strickland."
Defense attorney Chris Dorsey argued, "They can't match the projectiles, the business end to David's gun, because it wasn't his gun. There is no match here. ...[R]emember the last test, the first one I asked Hitchcox about? The December 4, 2012, test... The one he forgot about. ...Why do they have to do that test? If everything is a complete match like the State wants you to believe, why are they doing the last test? Simple. ...They can't match the firing pin. That's why he is flipping the firing pins in and out. They can't match the firing pins to the cases. But, to listen to Hitchcox, he wouldn't tell us that. But, you remember, no matching patterns in firing pin impression... Guess what? He had significant differences in the... firing pin shearing in his previous tests, the July 9, 2014, test. So the firing pins just didn't match. That's why he had the guy redo the test."
"...Look at these envelopes. Police officers put their initials on them every time they are supposed to take it out and open it up. The initials you see here: Aaron Veuleman. ...You will see another one down here: Aaron Veuleman, November 16, 2012. Why is Detective Veuleman -- former Detective Veuleman -- fired --...Why is former Detective Veuleman messing with these cartridges right before he sends them to the lab? Why is he doing that? He put his initials here. But why is he messing with it a week before it is sent to the lab?"
Defense attorney Jimmy Granberry remarked, "[T]here were four casings fired by Chavez out in the brush somewhere at some shooting range when he is ten minutes away from the Corpus Christi Firearms Lab where they had firearms examiners... and it would have been a one-day turnaround... Professionally done... Then there is two extra casings... Why did they sit on it for [five months]? Chavez, pretty decent guy, I think he suspected what Aaron Veuleman had done and he sat on it because they had Spellman. They had the real guy. The one he was convinced had done it."
"...Who walks around a park in a small town where two people have been murdered and killed and the killer has not been caught? Who frequents those areas at night in the dark either alone or with a woman? ...Dylan Spellman knows that he is safe from the person who did that, because Dylan Spellman did that."
In his closing argument, prosecutor Sam Smith told the jury that Strickland's pistol was a "100% match" to the casings found at the scene. During jury deliberation, the jury asked the judge to read back a portion of Hitchcox's testimony. A short time later, the jury reached a verdict.
September 28th, 2016, Strickland was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In an interview outside the courthouse with The Coastal Bend Chronicle immediately after trial, prosecutor Sam Smith said that the jury's guilty verdict came down to "the gun, without a doubt." According to Strickland, his attorneys had not wanted him to testify out of concern that he would mention his pre-existing relationship with Detective Veuleman.
In 2017, personal-injury attorney Tony Buzbee filed a $500-million lawsuit on behalf of Kristene Chapa against Strickland, his father, and his father's pharmacy. The complaints against Strickland's father and the family business would later be dropped from the suit.
[DNA IGNORED: THE LIE CONTINUES]
In 2018, After Strickland’s conviction, the pubic hair found on Chapa’s clothing was also matched to Dylan Spellman via mitochondrial DNA testing. Sam Smith, who had since become the district attorney, dismissed the DNA match on the pubic hair as irrelevant, contending that the hair could have been left behind before the crime and incidentally made its way onto Chapa's clothing.
This same pubic hair had already been analyzed by the FBI via microscopy in 2015, excluding Strickland as its source. The defense had been misled to believe that the hair could not be tested for DNA.
To date, no arrest warrant has been issued for Dylan Spellman while the shoddy case against David Strickland has been repeatedly broadcast on national television, including MSNBC, Vanity Fair Confidential, Investigation Discovery, and Dateline NBC. In early 2020, David Strickland’s appeal was denied by the 13th circuit court of appeals. In October of 2022, Strickland made his first public statement.
David Strickland deserves exoneration or a new trial. Kristene and Mollie’s family deserve the truth and justice. The public deserves integrity in the criminal justice system. Sign the petition today.
Messages from Strickland are published to a Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/justicefordavidstrickland
[UPDATES]
- In January 2024, the court of appeals denied Strickland's writ of habeas corpus without a written order.
- Sam Smith has retired and as of January 1, 2025, San Patricio County's new district attorney is Margie Flores. Strickland's opportunities for appeal in Texas courts have been exhausted and the case has moved on to the federal level.
- 01/01/25 : The text of the petition has been updated.
---
San Patricio County District Attorney [Margie Flores]
PO Box 1393
Sinton, TX 78387
(Phone) 361-364-9390
(Fax) 361-364-9490
1,692
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Petition created on January 31, 2020