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Ciccone murder trial begins
The first-degree murder trial of Albert Ciccone opened last Friday, with the prosecutor alleging Ciccone deliberately ran down his pregnant wife on a rural road on Oct. 16, 2003, following an argument, and the defense countering that Kathleen (Terry) Ciccone's death was a tragic accident.
If convicted Ciccone, who was an airman on base at the time of the incident, could receive up to life in prison. The death penalty was taken off the table last summer.
Ciccone is charged with two counts of murder. His wife, age 22, was pregnant at the time of her death and under Idaho law he has been charged in the death of the fetus as well.
The state's case is being directed by Elmore County Prosecutor Aaron Bazzoli, while the defense is being handled by Terry Ratliff.
Bazzoli, in his opening arguments, outlined the events he said led up to Kathleen Ciccone's death.
"Aug. 29, 2003, was a very good day for Kathleen Terry," Bazzoli said. "Surrounded by her family and friends, wearing a white wedding dress, in this very courtroom," she married Albert Ciccone, whom she had met in April at a local bar while he was working as a DJ.
Six weeks later, having discovered she was pregnant, and now separated from her husband in what Bazzoli described as a "roller coaster relationship," she was living at her mother's house in the Tipanuk area.
On Oct. 16, Ciccone picked up his wife at that residence and took her to the base hospital for a procedure related to her pregnancy. They also spent some time visiting with a marriage counselor.
They stopped at Burger King and then drove back out to Ditto Road toward her mother's house, parking at the gate leading up to the home.
An argument apparently ensued, Bazzoli said. Food, a sweater, and other items from the car were found at that scene.
Kathleen then got out of the car and began walking toward a friend's house.
"The next thing that anybody saw was her body flying through the air." Ciccone was seen to get out of his car and walk away from the scene.
At that point, Bazzoli contended, Ciccone "deliberately, willfully, with malice aforethought and with premeditation -- this was no accident -- ran down and killed his wife, who was pregnant."
Defense attorney Terry Ratliff said the state had the basic outline of the relationship and the events of that day correct, but was wrong about what happened after Kathleen left the car. Ratliff said he would show, by testimony of accident reconstruction experts, that as Ciccone approached his wife and applied the brakes to his car, which he enjoyed driving fast, that the car swerved, accidentally striking his wife.
"It was not something of intent, not premeditated. There was no intent to kill," Ratliff told the jury in his opening arguments.
"EMTs said he constantly asked about his wife," Ratliff said, and Ciccone's actions after the accident were the result of shock.
"He was completely distraught," Ratliff said. "It was an accident. For that, Albert is sorry."
Ratliff said a videotape of his interview with sheriff's deputies would show that he was open, answering all their questions, and highly distraught.
"This case is not about murder," Ratliff told the jury. "It is not about a homicide. It was purely an accident."
The state opened its case by calling as its first witness, Megan Shaw, 14, who was the first person to see the accident.
Shaw, with an adult advocate sitting by her side, and clutching a white teddy bear on the stand, described what she saw that day.
Kathleen Terry had been a friend, she said, an older teen who sat with her on the school bus they shared in the rural area of Elmore County where they lived. Kathleen lived just up the road from Shaw's house.
On Oct. 16, Megan said, she'd come home from school, chatted with her mother about her day, as usual, then went into the computer room at the Shaw home, where she was listening to music and looking out the window toward Ditto Road.
She'd earlier seen Ciccone drive by at a high rate of speed, heading toward the Russell Ranch where Kathleen was staying with her mother.
At about 5:30 that afternoon, she looked out the window and saw "first, there was dust everywhere, then I saw Kathleen flying (through the air). She went through the fence (in front of the Shaw property) and into the trees."
Because of the location of the window, she did not see Kathleen being struck by the car that would later be identified in other testimony as belonging to Ciccone.
Megan yelled at her mother that there had been an accident and was told to call 911, which she did.
Subsequent testimony, from the sheriff's department dispatcher, a replay of the 911 call, and Megan's mother, Darlene, provided a sequence of events that followed.
As the jury heard the recording of the 911 call they heard Megan, in a voice filled with anxiety and stress, nevertheless provide all the basic information the dispatcher needed to page out emergency personnel. Megan told dispatchers there had been an accident and she thought someone had been thrown from the car. She provided the address and directions to the home, then took a wireless phone out to her mother, who had already rushed from the house where she had been folding clothes to Kathleen's side.
Mrs. Shaw said she also did not see the car strike Kathleen, but heard a "whooshing" sound outside, looked out the window and "saw a car hit my mailbox and saw Kathleen somersaulting through the air."
The vehicle, she said, a yellow Dodge Neon, "was in the midst of a 180-degree turn, a slide, it was out of control," and came to a rest in the opposite direction from which it was going.
With some basic emergency training in her background, Mrs. Shaw ran to Kathleen, where she found her near a tree on the property, "profusely bleeding from her head and mouth."
"I checked her vitals. There were no vitals," she said, although in the 911 call (by that time Megan and brought her the phone) she indicated she thought, at that point, that Kathleen was still breathing. She answered several questions from the dispatcher about Kathleen's condition, but was told not to move her, and told dispatch there was room on the property for a helicopter to land.
At that point, she said, "I saw a gentleman get out of the car. He was wearing camo fatigues. He was very composed. Did not appear to be jangled, upset. He looked more determined than anything." She identified the man she saw as the defendant, Albert Ciccone.
She said that she saw he had a cell phone in his hand, and thought he was calling 911, until she heard seven numbers punched into the phone.
She testified that, while she couldn't hear most of the conversation, she did hear him say, "I got the job done," and then he walked away. "As I saw him walk away, I said 'come back, this is your wife.' He said 'no,' and swung his hand in a negative gesture. He continued to walk down the road." She said she then held Kathleen's hand and said a prayer for her and her family until the EMT's arrived.
Ratliff, during his cross-examination, sharply attacked Mrs. Shaw's testimony concerning what she had heard Ciccone say. "You didn't make that statement to the police, when they interviewed you" after the accident, nor, he pointed out, "did you make that statement at the preliminary hearing. When did you come up with that statement?"
Shaw said it took her some time to get all her thoughts together, and hadn't mentioned it earlier because "no one asked."
"You gave a lot more information today than you did in October of 2003," Ratliff said.
"I didn't think it was important," Shaw said.
Ratliff also questioned Shaw about how she could describe Ciccone's behavior, since she had never met him before and had nothing on which to make that judgement and no knowledge about how he handled stressful situations.
Dr. Glen Groben, a forensic pathologist with the Ada County Coroner's Office, who handled the autopsy, said Kathleen had died from blunt force trauma to the head, although he did not indicate if it was caused by the car that struck her or the tree she hit. She was struck from the left-hand side by the car, he said.
Alan Roberts, who heads the county rescue and extrication team, was the first of the emergency personnel to arrive on the scene.
He said that as he approached the Shaw residence at 510 Ditto Road, about a quarter mile before he got to the house he saw a man he identified as the defendant walking down the road talking on a cell phone.
He stopped and asked, several times, in an effort to elucidate a response, if Ciccone had been in an accident, and if so, told him that he needed to go back to the scene to be checked out by the ambulance EMTs that would be arriving soon. "Finally, I asked him again, and he said, 'she needs my help more than I do.' "
Looking to see if Ciccone had any obvious injuries, and seeing none, Roberts said he quickly proceeded on to the scene where he went to check on Kathleen's condition. About that time the ambulance showed up and they began working on her.
Roberts said the ambulance personnel said they hadn't seen Ciccone on the road, and at that point, concerned that he might have been injured and sat down in a ditch or passed out, he and an Idaho State trooper went back to look for him.
At the same time, later testimony from dispatcher Stacy Hieb would indicate, Hieb was involved in a three-way conversation with Ciccone's parents, who were talking to their son on one line and the dispatcher on another. Concerned about his welfare, they were able to help Hieb direct Roberts and the state trooper to Ciccone, who was found standing on a ridge in the desert about a mile from the road.
Ciccone was placed in an ambulance and taken to the hospital to be checked out. "He told us he had just gotten out of Intermountain Hospital," a local psychiatric facility, "and wanted to go home to take his meds," Roberts said. At the time, Roberts said, he thought at that time that Ciccone's behavior, which he characterized as "jittery and fidgety," was possibly due to shock. "He was a little unsteady and confused," Roberts said.
The trial, which is expected to last four weeks, resumed Monday, but results of that testimony were not available by press time.