JEFFERSON COUNTY - At 4:21 p.m. on Nov. 13, 2001, Michael Blagg’s life changed forever.
The now-55-year-old former naval helicopter pilot would never see his wife or daughter again. The born-again Christian, upper-middle class operations manager at a manufacturing plant in Grand Junction would make the 911 call that led him to become a murder suspect.
More than 16 years later, Michael Blagg made the surprising choice to take the witness stand in his second trial for the murder of his wife, Jennifer. He is more than a decade into what was supposed to be a life sentence, and did not testify during his first trial — where he was found guilty. That conviction was overturned after a juror was caught lying on her questionnaire about being the victim of domestic violence.
Photos of Michael, Jennifer and Abby Blagg
The case has since been moved to Jefferson County due to its notoriety on the Western Slope. For the past five weeks, the five men and nine women on the jury have largely heard from the prosecution. On Tuesday, they heard from the very man whose fate they will decide.
During direct examination, Michael Blagg denied ever hurting his wife or daughter, and said he loved them with “all my heart.”
The Mesa County District Attorney’s Office worked to poke holes Tuesday afternoon in statements Michael Blagg made on the witness stand hours before as they cross-examined him about everything to his relationship with his wife, to his admitted porn habit, to what exactly he was doing during the early morning hours of Nov. 13, 2001.
“I was under a lot of stress and a huge life altering thing that happened in my life,” Blagg said as he was questioned about why he didn’t tell investigators about a fight he and his wife had gotten into on the Friday before she disappeared.
The night of Nov. 13, 2001, he told investigators a fight had occurred “a couple of weeks ago” and he couldn’t remember what it was about. He later said it was because of a phone call he got from a recruiter in Longmont. An apology note he had written to Jennifer Blagg was found in the couple’s two-story home in a quiet subdivision just outside of Grand Junction where he said he had “given the devil a foothold.”
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That note wasn’t far from the crime scene.
Michael Blagg said he drove home from work sometime after 4 p.m. on Nov. 13, 2001, and found the back door to his house ajar. A jewelry box was thrown on the floor of the master bedroom. There was a large bloodstain on his wife’s side of the bed, and it had dripped onto the couple’s clean white carpet.
Jennifer Blagg was gone, and it wasn’t until a 911 dispatcher mentioned it that he went back inside and checked on his 6-year-old daughter Abby or looked in other rooms for his wife.
“You reported your daughter missing and hadn’t even looked for her?” Deputy Mesa County District Attorney Trish Mahre asked.
“She wasn’t where I was expecting her to be,” Michael Blagg responded. “And she hadn’t been home all day, so I considered that a missing situation.”
Blagg admitted he also hadn’t checked to see if the car was still in the garage, or looked for his wife anywhere but in the bedroom.
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The 911 dispatcher would tell him to go back inside and look for them.
“When you entered the home, you had no fear of entering the home?” Mahre asked.
“I didn’t really care, to be honest with you,” Blagg said.
He said he called out to his wife and daughter “multiple times.”
“I didn’t know where the perpetrator was at the time,” Blagg said.
Prosecutors say sometime during the early morning hours of Nov. 13, 2001, Michael Blagg shot Jennifer Blagg in the face while she was sleeping, wrapped her body into a tent, loaded her into the family minivan and then threw her into the dumpster at his office, Ametek Dixson. Her body was found in the Mesa County landfill on June 4, 2002 — and her husband was arrested two days later.
The defense claims that a child predator killed Jennifer and kidnapped Abby, and that ever since, the investigation has been tainted by the false assumption that it’s “always the husband.”
There has been no trace of Abby Blagg to this day.
No one saw Michael Blagg kill his wife. And no one saw a child predator enter the Blagg home.
Much of the testimony in the trial has hinged on things that happened behind closed doors. And this even forced the judge to leave the courtroom to look at pornography in the middle of cross-examination.
It happened after Mahre grilled Michael Blagg about the porn he admitted to watching. His statements about this changed. He originally said he only watched it with his wife, and it was only so they could “research oral sex.” He initially told investigators he hadn’t looked at sexually explicit incidents in a while.
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“You were aware, even though you said you hadn’t watched anything in six to eight months, you internet history indicates you looked at internet porn sites between March and October 2001?” Mahre asked.
“Yes ma’am,” Michael Blagg responded.
He admitted he didn’t just watch porn with his wife, like he initially claimed. He also claimed that he believed all of the porn he looked at was consistent with oral sex — something Mahre said was false, given his search history. But this led to a conundrum in the courtroom: a previous judge had said the jury could not hear anything specific about what Michael Blagg looked at.
But, the prosecution needed to use some specific information to prove that he was lying.
And that’s why Judge Tamara Russell had to leave to review the names of the porn sites Michael Blagg looked at, as well as pornographic images that he had perused.
And that’s how the self-proclaimed deeply religious man found himself on the witness stand reading through pages upon pages of porn websites that had appeared in his search history.
“Does that refresh your recollection, Mr. Blagg?” Mahre asked.
“Not all of them are titled with ‘oral sex,’ but I think you can find oral sex on just about all of those,” he responded.
Public Defender Tina Fang indicated that Michael Blagg could be the final witness for the defense. But, at the end of his cross-examination, jurors heard from two other witnesses — witnesses similar to the dozens of others called over the course of the trial, which was a change from the sudden testimony of the defendant himself.
One of them, Alex Rugh, a forensic scientist for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, tested samples found in the dumpster at Ametek Dixson and on the tent that was wrapped around Jennifer Blagg’s body.
He said there was an unknown blue substance on the tent, but said it had also been in a landfill for six months.
The second witness, Al Nelson, retired from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office but was a canine handler who tracked Jennifer Blagg to a hiking trail near the family home and down to the Colorado River.
During cross-examination, he conceded that this was a popular hiking trail. No scents were tracked in the backyard of the Blagg home — where the defense alleges a child predator took the pair out of the house.
Only a few witnesses are left for the defense. Russell told the jury she is confident testimony will be complete by Friday.
This means closing statements are slated for Monday, after that, whether or not Michael Blagg walks free for the first time in 14 years will once again be in the jury’s hands.
Testimony is slated to resume at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday. 9NEWS is in the courtroom and will post updates as they become available during breaks.