A private investigator in the Roaring Fork Valley has been subpoenaed to testify at next month’s trial of a former Aspen socialite accused of hiring a hit man to kill her ex-husband.
http://liarcatchers.com/wrongful_death.html
Jim Crowley, a former Aspen police detective, has been involved in the investigation into Pamela Phillips and her former lover, Ronald Young, for 15 years.
During that span, Crowley has testified in preliminary hearings in Arizona for both Phillips and Young, and in Young’s 2010 trial that sent him to prison for life for detonating a car bomb that killed Gary Triano, Phillips’ former spouse.
A subpoena to have Crowley testify at Phillips’ six-week trial, which is scheduled to begin Jan. 11, was filed in Pitkin County District Court on Thursday. The subpoena is filed locally should Crowley decide to appeal it, a court official said.
Phillips, who allegedly paid Young $400,000 to kill Triano, is charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy. After Triano’s death in a car bomb outside a Tucson golf course country club, police say Phillips collected more than $2 million from a life insurance policy.
Young first came to the attention of Aspen police in 1996, by way of Phillips. She told Crowley that she had hired Young, then her neighbor, to manage her astrology website, starbabies.com, but that he had skimmed money from the enterprise.
Young left town ahead of a warrant for his arrest for fraud in August 1996, and the next month police in Yorba Linda, Calif., found a van he had rented in Aspen.
Crowley headed west. In the van, according to police: divorce papers for Phillips and Triano, a map of Tucson, a shotgun and a stun gun.
In November of that year, Triano, a father of two and a prominent businessman, got into his Lincoln after a round of golf at Tucson’s La Palmoa Country Club. The bomb was detonated remotely.
Since then, Crowley’s testimony has involved his investigation into what he found in Yorba Linda and the relationship between Phillips and Young, he said.
A report on “America’s Most Wanted” in 2005 resulted in Young’s arrest the next day in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Crowley arrived in Florida after his arrest but Young refused to speak with him, the investigator said Thursday.
Roughly 10 months later, authorities from Arizona and Aspen descended on Phillips’ former residence here.
Crowley said Phillips left while authorities searched her Meadowood home. Police removed computers, files and other evidence.
Phillips may have returned briefly “for clothes” but then headed for Europe, Crowley said.
In 2008, Crowley filed an arrest warrant for Phillips with the U.S. State Department, which contacted authorities in Switzerland. Swiss authorities said they could not find Phillips, though a “Dateline NBC” producer located her almost immediately, Crowley noted dryly.
She was eventually detained in Austria and brought to Arizona to face the murder charges. She remains in custody in Arizona.
Crowley said he expects to take the witness stand for two hours, though he questioned whether the trial will actually start Jan. 11. The prosecution and defense still have some 30 motions that need to be resolved before the trial.
Young was represented by the public defender’s office in Pima County, Ariz. Potential conflicts of interest prevent that office from representing Phillips as well, and the one-time millionaire is being represented by an alternative public defender.
