Paul Mann

Mad River Union

EUREKA – Jason Anthony Warren, 31, the convicted felon and transient charged with the successive murders of two women in 2013 in separate attacks in Hoopa and Eureka, is scheduled to be prosecuted in August at a single trial in Humboldt County Superior Court.

Public Defender Kevin S. Robinson lost his recent motion for separate proceedings in connection with Warren’s alleged beating death of Dorothy Evelyn Ulrich, 47, of Hoopa in the early morning of Sept. 27, 2013; and the alleged vehicular murder shortly thereafter of Humboldt State University geography instructor Suzanne Seemann, mother of two, on Old Arcata Road/Myrtle Avenue, Eureka.

Warren is accused of deliberately running down Seeman and her two jogging companions, Jessica Hunt and Terri Vroman-Little. He allegedly plowed into them in a silver 2005 Kia Spectra he is alleged to have stolen from Ulrich. Both Hunt and Vroman-Little were gravely injured but survived.

Warren is to be prosecuted on four counts, one for Ulrich and counts two, three and four for the other three victims.

Robinson argued orally in an interim hearing that separate trials were warranted because the only overlap in the two cases was the use of the same motor vehicle, the Kia sedan. He noted that the two assaults were investigated separately, the Hoopa killing by the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department assisted by Hoopa Tribal officers, and the Eureka hit-and-run by Arcata Police and the California Highway Patrol. Separate investigations merited independent trials, Robinson said.

The public defender noted that state’s evidence in Ulrich’s death would be used by District Attorney Maggie Fleming to establish motive and intent in the other three counts. That, Robinson asserted, would “preemptively overwhelm the dispassionate review of the second set of facts” arising from the Eureka case.

He recalled that former District Attorney Paul Gallegos had suggested at Warren’s preliminary hearing that the People would use the charges in the first case to build the second which, Robinson declared, would be highly prejudicial to his client. In his written argument, he warned that jurors “might confuse evidence admitted on” count one’s events and conflate them with the events that led to counts two through four.

Fleming cited the legislative preference for a single trial when the accused acts alone. She argued that the evidence in both cases was comprehensively “interlocked:” a single suspect committed his crimes within some two hours of each other and they were linked by the stolen vehicle. This constituted a single course of conduct, warranting a single trial, she said.

A video some five minutes long recorded at Ulrich’s home placed Warren at the residence at 4:21 a.m., Fleming elaborated, where he stood in a pool of blood. The hit-and-run collision on Old Arcata Road occurred about an hour later. Eureka Police recovered the car — and Ulrich’s wallet — where it had been abandoned in Eureka behind the Adult Day Care Center at 1901 California Street. The vehicle’s missing mirror was recovered by officers at the Myrtle Avenue crime scene.

“The entire course of conduct took less than two hours,” Fleming said, adding that blood found on Warren’s shoes and on the brake pedal of Ulrich’s car put the suspect incontrovertibly at both scenes. Robinson countered that with respect to the vital issue of motive, “Nothing established a connection between the conduct in Hoopa and the conduct in Eureka.” He asked the court to reject Fleming’s claim that the two alleged murders constituted a single course of conduct.

Unpersuaded, Superior Court Judge Timothy P. Cissna sided with Fleming. “I have reviewed the materials and authorities and I think the cases are properly joined,” he ruled. “To a significant degree they are the same class of crimes, they are related in commission. I don’t think one case is more inflammatory than the other.”

Cissna agreed that the content of the two cases was not identical, but said they have more than enough in common to afford “substantial cross-admissibility of the evidence.”

According to investigators, Ulrich died in her Hoopa trailer home of multiple sharp and blunt force injuries inflicted with wanton ferocity. The coroner’s crime scene report documented “significant blood” on Ulrich’s head and arms, four sharp-force injuries to her back, two patterned bruises on either side of her rib cage and trauma to the back of her head from a sharp-edged object that opened her skull and exposed the brain.

“Her hair appeared to have been sliced off,” the on-scene coroner reported.

The subsequent autopsy by a second pathologist documented chopping injuries to the head, a skull fracture, stabbing wounds to the torso and patterned abrasions and contusions to one wrist which were “suggestive of restraints.” The state argued at the preliminary hearing that the suspect engaged in torturing Ulrich “with no provocation, no reason whatsoever on the part of Mr. Warren to attack, [and to] torture her in the process of killing her and then murder her.”

In support of Cissna’s finding of cross-admissibility, the state contends that Warren took the three joggers unawares, as he is alleged to have done in murdering Ulrich. “The only difference when he struck and ran over Ms. Hunt, Ms. Vroman-Little and Ms. Seemann was that there was no torture ahead of time. It was the same unprovoked, unwarranted attack from behind. The physical evidence supports that conclusion.”

Ulrich had equipped her trailer on Little Moon Lane with a video and audio security system comprising many surveillance cameras and audio feeds, which provided detectives with a wealth of evidence. On the afternoon and evening of Sept. 26, 2013, Ulrich and Warren were seen at her residence and also sighted at various, unspecified locations in and around Hoopa.

Except for some coughing recorded at 3:07 a.m., the surveillance system picked up no video or audio until 4:21 a.m., when Ulrich’s voice was heard to complain of pain and assault, accompanied her exclamation of “Stop, Jason, stop.” Then both the video and audio feeds showed Warren departing the trailer and leaving the residence in Ulrich’s Kia. Crime scene photographs documented “a copiously blood-spattered, gruesome depiction of the trailer home,” since destroyed by fire.

About an hour after Warren was video recorded leaving Hoopa, Arcata Police Sgt. Ron Sligh, driving from Cutten to headquarters in Arcata, came upon the scene of the hit-and-run on Myrtle Avenue near Flying L Ranch Road. He found Terri Vroman-Little in a ditch, even as an unidentified witness had observed something or someone lying on the asphalt who would turn out to be Jessica Hunt. The witness had observed Ulrich’s car stop off the road and then proceed toward Eureka.

Sligh later discovered Suzanne Seemann, who was dead at the scene of multiple skull fractures, brain injury and intracranial hemorrhages. One eye was bruised, her right leg bore two closely-spaced, horizontal lacerations and her right elbow was tinged with blood.

DNA testing by the California Department of Justice linked Ulrich’s blood with samples from Warren’s left tennis shoe, socks and cap and with blood recovered from the floor well of the driver’s side of the Kia, which was extensively mangled. Damage included a shattered windshield and damaged front end, slide or drag marks on the hood, broken side mirrors and broken glass in the interior and smeared fluid on the parking brake. Blood was found both inside and outside the car.