A Dance Teacher Cons a Real Estate Developer
(‘Gone Ballistic,’ Forensic Files)
Before launching into this week’s post, I’d like to share some exciting news.
A book version of ForensicFilesNow.com is here. Each chapter consists of an existing blog post along with something extra, a new interview with someone involved in the case or an “update to the update.” Paul Dowling wrote the foreword. Prometheus Books has published it under the name Forensic Files Now: Inside 40 Unforgettable True Crime Cases on Oct. 15, 2022, and it’s available from Barnes & Noble as well as indepedent bookstores, and on Amazon.
Boilerplate. Now that the book’s MOAM (mother of all manuscripts) is finished, I’m looking forward to spending more time on new recaps for the blog.
“Gone Ballistic” seems like a good place to resume because it offers story elements that are so very Forensic Files: (1.) A spouse makes a clumsy, failed attempt before (2.) successfully killing the other spouse, but (3.) leaves incriminating evidence, and (4.) never imagines that the suspicious death of an earlier husband or wife will draw police scrutiny.
Such was the template that Miriam Helmick (and Barbara Stager and others before her) used.
Student athlete. For this week, I looked for more information about Miriam’s first marriage as well as murder victim Alan Helmick. So let’s start the recap of “Gone Ballistic” along with information from online research.
Alan Clarke Helmick came into the world August 27, 1945. He pitched for the school baseball team at Delta High in Colorado and dated fellow student Sharon Leonard. They married young and had four children, Wendy, Portia, Kristy, and Alan Jr.
After working as a bank manager, Alan Sr. became a land developer and founded Helmick Mortgage. He had ownership interests in several businesses, one of which helped to build Mesa County’s Crista Lee housing subdivision.
Sudden tragedy. In 2003, after 36 years of marriage, Sharon had a fatal heart attack, leaving Alan devastated emotionally.
“I think that he died that day — a big part of him,” Alan Jr. would later tell NBC. “You know, he lost my mother who he’d been with since he was 14, his love, his life. I’m sure that everything that he thought was real was ripped out from under him.”
Two years later, he would cross paths with Miriam Giles.
Comfortable life. So who was this cheery-faced femme fatale? Very little of her early life history surfaced in media sources except that she was born Miriam Francis Morgan on Jan. 26, 1957.
In 1976, Miriam met Jack Giles, the man who would become her first husband, while he was working at a grocery store in Brunswick, Georgia, and going to school. They married a year later and eventually moved to Jacksonville, Florida.
Jack worked as a chemical engineer. He and Miriam “weren’t rich, but pretty well off … nice house with a boat, a couple cars,” Jack’s brother Tim Giles would later tell the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.
Gone girl. Miriam and Jack had a daughter, Amy, and then a son.
In 2001, a horrible tragedy happened when Amy, 23, died under hazy circumstances, possibly from an overdose.
“To this day, I still don’t know what she died from,” Tim Giles said, as reported by the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel on December 12, 2009. “Amy was Jack’s angel, the beauty queen, workaholic. She never took drugs.”
(It’s not clear whether or not Miriam had anything to gain via Amy’s death, but Alan’s daughter Wendy told Forensic Files that Miriam changed her story a number of times about how Amy died.)
Here we go again. The following year, another untimely death shook up the Giles family.
Jack, 46, shot himself in the head while lying in bed next to Miriam in the couple’s home in North Jacksonville on April 15, 2002.
A police officer who just happened to be Miriam’s half-brother arrived at the house and declared Jack’s death a suicide, despite that the scene suggested that the profoundly left-handed Jack had shot himself with his right hand.
‘Bar’ scene. Miriam was the beneficiary of Jack’s $100,000 life insurance policy, but she must have blown through that jackpot quickly.
In 2004, the grieving widow spent three days in a Florida jail thanks to a counterfeit check-cashing scheme, according to a Florida Times-Union account.
It’s not clear exactly when, but Miriam started a career as a dance teacher in Gulfport, Mississippi, after impressing Barb Watts, owner of the Amour Danzar studio.
“I thought she was dynamite,” Watts would later tell the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. “She was the greatest thing that ever came by. We put her to work.” At some point, however, Watts came to suspect Miriam of stealing money from the business.
Happiness and grief. Nonetheless, at Miriam’s request, Watts sent her to Colorado to train the staff at her Grand Junction dance studio circa 2005.
Alan Helmick met Miriam after he signed up for ballroom lessons as a way to keep his mind off the sorrow of Sharon’s death.
Miriam enchanted Alan with her dancing, and they commiserated about the pain of losing loved ones.
Lively pair. They started dating despite that Miriam and Alan had signed agreements forbidding students and teachers from socializing outside of the studio, according to a Cox News Service story. (To be fair, it’s only natural for people to fall in love on the dance floor.)
Miriam and Jack “made everything they did fun,” recalled fellow dance student Penny Lyons in an interview with NBC.
The couple married in 2006. They lived in what a local newspaper called a high-end home, in a sprawling subdivision at 34999 Siminoe Road in Whitewater, Colorado.
High-risk investment. Alan enjoyed indulging his new bride. He bought her a dance studio and a horse-breeding farm.
In an interview on NBC, Alan’s accountant, Bob Cucchetti, said that he winced when Alan told him of his plans to go into those two types of businesses, which tend to lose money.
Unfortunately, Bob was right. Dance Junction LLC and Creek Ranch Sporthorses LLC eventually overextended Alan’s finances, according to Oxygen True Crime.
Tanked. Still, there was another, bigger problem brewing: About two years into their marriage, Miriam became determined to kill Alan.
On one occasion, while Alan was sitting in a car waiting for Miriam to return from using a restroom, he saw smoke in the rear-view mirror and quickly exited the 1994 Buick Roadmaster.
Out of the question. Police discovered that someone had dropped a lighted fuse in the gas tank. Because the tank was full, the flames didn’t have enough air to grow quickly, giving Alan time to escape.
When speaking with Alan, police floated the theory that Miriam — who had asked her husband to pop open the trunk minutes before the fire started — was responsible for the sabotage.
Alan said he couldn’t imagine Miriam doing anything “malicious” and he’d be “shocked” if she did, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reported on Dec. 23, 2008.
Electronic trail. Little did Alan know that Miriam had inquired about taking out a $250,000 life insurance policy on him and asked the agent whether they could make the transaction without her husband’s participation (the agent said no), according to the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.
Investigators would later discover that after the gas tank incident, Miriam searched online for information about overdosing on the types of prescription drugs that Alan took.
“People tend to be very intimate with their computers — they will ask it questions through Google that they would not ask another human being,” noted investigator Mike Piechota during his Forensic Files interview.
Little to gain? No one knows whether Miriam actually tried and failed to murder Alan with some type of lethal cocktail or abandoned the plan completely.
Meanwhile, Alan saw no reason to distrust Miriam, because they had a prenuptial agreement and he was leaving his money to his children, according to Oxygen True Crime. (Despite financial troubles with the horse farm and dance studio, Alan still owned Helmick Mortgage and was reportedly worth millions.)
Finally, Miriam decided to go low concept.
On June 10, 2008, she sneaked up behind Alan and fired a bullet into the back of his head.
This time, he died.
Few forensics. First responders to the house found 62-year-old Alan lying on the floor in his study, with a shell casing nearby. In another Forensic Files staple, it looked as though someone had ransacked the house but left behind too many valuables.
During Miriam’s interview with the sheriff, she provided shopping receipts as an alibi for the time of the murder, according to the Charmed to Death episode “A Ruthless Repertoire.”
Miriam voluntarily submitted to a gunshot residue test, which came up negative.
Seriously bad idea, lady. Deputies began walking around the subdivision to ask the neighbors for any clues, and a spokesperson for the sheriff’s department cautioned residents, “If you don’t know who’s at your door, don’t answer it.”
Meanwhile, Miriam’s friends described her as happily married to Alan — they were inseparable — but Miriam, 51, apparently felt the need to deflect any doubts about her innocence.
A week after Alan’s funeral, Miriam showed investigators an anonymous greeting card instructing her to “run, run, run” and saying that she was “next.” Someone had left it right outside her door, she said.
Big flap. The note on the card misspelled Alan’s name as “Allen” (cute little trick, Miriam) and someone had cut out the bar code (nice try).
Investigators found no prints or DNA on the card, but this time, they got some help from security cameras. Footage showed Miriam buying the card at Orchard Mesa City Market. She probably thought she was being clever by using cash and going to a store 13 miles from the Helmicks’ house, but now she was busted.
Miriam had no choice but to admit she wrote the card — but only to stir up authorities to investigate the case more extensively, she said.
What she accomplished, of course, was to attract more attention to herself.
Drama department. Investigators theorized that Miriam shot Alan, then showered and changed her clothes and went to the New Dragon Wall Chinese Buffet restaurant as an alibi. She left phone messages of feigned concern for Alan about why he hadn’t shown up to meet her.
Next, Miriam headed home, where she “discovered” the body. Her weepy 911 “my husband is dead” call sounded rehearsed and melodramatic.
Another red flag for police: If someone other than Miriam shot Alan, how was she so sure he was beyond help? Why didn’t she ask for an ambulance pronto? Authorities would later conclude that she made no effort to revive him despite that the operator gave her instructions.
Will be cinematic. Now, police were finding evidence that Miriam had started devising sneaky ways to tap into Alan’s money while he was still alive.
They dug up $40,000 in checks written to Miriam from Alan, and 10 of the them appeared to be forged.
Some circumstantial evidence came up regarding the car fire. Investigators discovered that four days beforehand, the Helmicks had rented the movie No Country for Old Men, which included a scene in which someone dropped a lit wick in a gas tank. (As Forensic Files viewer Rodman Papros commented on YouTube, “I have never heard of a murderer who took gaslighting so literally.”)
Son loyal. The bathroom that Miriam had used in a convenience store on the day of the car incident smelled like lighter fluid, workers told investigators.
Meanwhile, Miriam pointed to Alan’s son, Alan Jr., as a possible suspect in the fire as well as the murder. She cited rumors that the younger Helmick had a methamphetamine addiction, according to Oxygen True Crime.
But Alan Jr. had solid alibis, and he loved his dad.
“My father was probably one of the best people I’ve ever met in my life,” he later told NBC. “And I don’t just say that because I’m his son.”
Prior ‘misfortune.’ The police identified the murder weapon as a 25-caliber handgun that had long belonged to the Helmick family and was kept in Alan and Miriam’s house.
Now, investigators turned their attentions toward the 2002 demise of Miriam’s first husband, Jack Giles.
Miriam claimed Jack was depressed about the overdose death of their daughter and shot himself.
Missed opportunity. Jack’s brother, Tim Giles said that he never believed Jack took his own life. Because of Amy’s death, Jack knew all too well how a suicide could devastate a family, Tim said.
Tim would later criticize the Jacksonville police’s decision not to investigate Miriam more thoroughly after Jack’s death. They could have prevented Alan’s murder, he believed.
In December 2008, while Miriam was staying with her son in Florida and combing online dating sites for new suitors, she received some gentlemen callers who didn’t come from eharmony or OurTime: Colorado deputies accompanied by U.S. Marshalls and Florida law officers arrested Miriam in Arlington.
They found that Miriam had identification that belonged to Sharon Helmick, Alan’s first wife.
Romance killer. Under the name “Sharon,” Miriam had almost snagged another big, or at least medium-sized, fish. Charles Kirkpatrick owned two dance studios and a human resources firm.
They dated for a while, but he would later say that Miriam scared him off by asking too early and too often whether she could move into his place.
Authorities returned Miriam to Colorado, where she appeared “shackled, stooped, and dressed in a high-security red jail jumpsuit” in court, according to a Denver Post account. The court charged her with 11 counts of forgery, attempted murder, and first-degree murder. She was placed in Mesa County Jail on $2 million bond.
Found out? But she had no chance of getting her hands on more of Alan’s money and using it to bail herself out. A court granted oldest daughter Portia Vigil emergency control of her father’s assets.
Before the trial, however, Miriam did score one big win when Judge Valerie Robison ruled as inadmissible any evidence pertaining to Jack Giles’ death.
Prosecutors still had a good deal of material to work with, and they made a case that Alan discovered Miriam pilfering from his business accounts and she wanted to quiet his concerns badly enough to try killing him — first with the car assault and possibly with some drug shenanigans.
Around the same time Miriam was forging checks from Alan, he fell mysteriously ill, although he did recover.
Time-tested firearm. There was also the matter of her selling some of Alan’s properties after his death, which reportedly robbed his children of monies rightfully theirs.
Miriam had insisted that, despite the prenuptial agreement, all property acquired during the marriage belonged to her, Portia testified.
Prosecutors alleged that Miriam used the Helmick family heirloom 25-caliber gun to shoot Alan. He reportedly kept the weapon in his sock drawer.
Inadvertent slip. No one determined what Miriam did with the gun or the clothes she wore when she pulled the trigger.
An acquaintance of Miriam’s, a horse trainer named Jeri Yarbrough, said that Miriam gave herself away after the fire by blurting out, “I did not know the full tank would not blow.”
Information about Miriam’s alleged fraudulent activities also came out. She had images of 39 different driver’s licenses stored on her computer, according to the prosecution.
Glam gone. Former online friend Charles Kirkpatrick testified that Miriam told him Alan died of a brain disease.
Miriam chose to take the stand. She made sure her appearance didn’t have “scheming seductress” written all over it. She wore eyeglasses and unassuming clothes — dark pants and a striped blue sweater. Her bright lipstick and suntan were gone. She let a little gray go unretouched.
Under questioning, she denied her guilt and weepily recounted her narrative of finding Alan shot to death.
Prosecutor Richard Tuttle, who would go on to appear on Forensic Files, told the court that her tears were false.
Different kind of number. A jury agreed and convicted Miriam of first-degree murder
Hence, Miriam attained another component of the Forensic Files template: prison time. She’s currently inmate #148412 at the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility.
Her sentence — life plus 108 years — means she has virtually no chance of fox-trotting her way to freedom and preying on other men looking for love.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
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