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Utah Couple's Murder Stymies Brazilian Police



 
 
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Old March 30th, 2004, 02:13 PM
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Default Utah Couple's Murder Stymies Brazilian Police

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...&notFound=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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