Tesla drawn to Colorado's thin, dry air, and other electrifying challenges

Lab in Colorado Springs preceeded by AC success in Telluride

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Right at the very turn of the 20th Century (1899-1900), futurist and the odd, Serbian-American electrical engineer Nikola Tesla, made quite a stir here in Colorado when he located his Colorado laboratory in Colorado Springs. But his work and projects influenced other parts of the state, long before that.

According to recent writings Kaushik Patowary of Amusing Planet, "Tesla was drawn to Colorado Springs by the same qualities that brought thousands of tuberculosis patients to the mountain city—the city’s thin and dry air. But unlike the city’s many residents, Tesla was not looking for a cure."

In the spring of 1899, he set up a laboratory on a small grassy hill in what is now known in some circles, as Knob Hill. 

To further study the conductive nature of "low-pressure air," Tesla set up an experimental station at high altitude in Colorado Springs during 1899. There he could safely operate much larger coils than in the cramped confines of his New York lab, and an associate had made an arrangement for the El Paso Power Company to supply alternating current free of charge (though, by some reports he was sued by the city later for power a bill for power, and eventually land and building materials of the lab were sold to satisfy a long-held debt to the City of Colorado Springs. 

To fund his experiments, he convinced John Jacob Astor IV to invest $100,000 (equal to more than $3 million in today's dollars) to become a majority shareholder in the Nikola Tesla Company. According later reports, Astor thought he was primarily investing in the new wireless lighting system. Instead, Tesla used the money to fund his Colorado Springs experiments. Upon his arrival, he told reporters that he planned to conduct wireless telegraphy experiments, transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. 

There, he conducted experiments with a large coil operating in the megavolts range, producing artificial lightning (and thunder) consisting of millions of volts and discharges of up to 135 feet in length, and, at one point, inadvertently burned out the generator in El Paso, causing a power outage. The observations he made of the electronic noise of lightning strikes led him to (incorrectly) conclude that he could use the entire globe of the Earth to conduct electrical energy."

"Tesla believed that electricity could be transmitted across vast distances through the atmosphere without using wires. To test his theories of wireless transfer of electrical energy, Tesla needed a place that was situated in the mountains where the air was thin and easy to ionize, and therefore more conductive to electricity. Tesla found Colorado Springs’s location at six thousand feet favorable for his research. The land was free and sparsely populated which gave him privacy. Also, the dryness of the air minimized leakage of currents, and as Tesla discovered to his delight," writes Patowary. 

Leonard E. Curtis, a lawyer and friend of Nikola Tesla, found him the necessary land and power needed for his research from the El Paso Power Company. With the help of several large donations from Tesla’s numerous wealthy friends, the inventor erected a small but powerful laboratory in the middle of the prairie, just east of Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind, which still operates to this day.

"The laboratory was a peculiar structure, that looked like a barn but with an eighty-foot tall wooden lattice tower attached to its roof. This tower was surmounted by a 142-foot metal mast. At the top of the metal pole balanced a large copper ball. Hand-written signs hung at the entrance warning any curious onlookers— “Keep Out. Great Danger” it said, along with a quote from Dante's Inferno: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.,” says Patowary. 

"The ominous signs were not a ruse to deter unwanted visitors, although it did keep nosey people away. The laboratory posed genuine risk to anyone who ventured too close. Inside, the wooden building, Tesla built a monstrous coil, 52 feet across, that threw millions of volts of electricity through the air producing intense arcs of energy that threatened the very existence of the building in which it was housed. To prevent fire from consuming the building, Tesla devised a rolling roof that could be thrown back when experiments were on. " 

The experiments in the Colorado Springs lab were not without other problems, including knocking out the entire electrical system city-wide. "Tesla had inadvertently destroyed the power company’s dynamo. He pulled so many amperes from the electric generator that it went up in flames. The power company demanded that Tesla pay for the damage, which he did, and the generator was up in a few days."

But years prior to his Colorado Springs work, Tesla may have experienced one of his earliest and greatest victories in Telluride.

"Lucien L. Nunn, who was trained as lawyer at Harvard and schooled in Germany at Goettingen University, moved to Telluride in the late 1880s. As the manager of the Gold King Mine, located high above Telluride near today’s ghost town of Alta, Nunn was faced with dwindling profits and possible closure if he could not figure out how to power the mine and milling operations at a lower cost. The mine, which had already cut all the trees for fuel over the years, was now being powered by coal, which had to be brought in by mule trains. The cost was prohibitive," according to Alan Drew, who has articles about Nunn and the Ames power plant for years.

Nunn had read about the successes of Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse with alternating current power and was impressed with their claims that it could be transmitted much longer distances than Direct Current. He was able to strike a deal with Tesla and Westinghouse to build the world’s first commercial grade alternating current power plant in Telluride. The Ames Power Plant in Telluride began operation in 1891.

Later the dustup between Thomas Edison and Tesla became known as the “War of the Currents.”  Edison, backed direct current or DC, and Nikola Tesla, who was promoting something different in the form alternating current or AC.

AC power worked in Telluride and it could be transmitted miles and power large equipment. As a direct result of the success of the power plant in Telluride, Tesla and Westinghouse were invited to demonstrate alternating current power right next to the Edison Electric Company’s demonstration of direct current at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. More than 30 million people in total attended the extravaganza and everyone witnessed for themselves the "'Battle of the Currents.'"

Another victory, the Niagara Falls Power Plant had been planned to be a direct current power plant, but was changed after the Chicago World’s Fair. The plant, which is still working today and has a statue of Nikola Tesla overlooking the falls, worked and supplied cheap, abundant power to the Northeast of America at a critical time in the Industrial Revolution.

The Telluride mine also had a river nearby—a fork of the San Miguel.  Lucien L. Nunn approached Westinghouse to try out Tesla’s idea for alternating current.

Tesla himself did not come to Telluride. Westinghouse sent a team of engineers to Colorado to build the Ames Hydroelectric Plant based on his designs for the generator and induction motor. On the 19th of June 1891, they flipped the switch and sent electricity along newly constructed transmission lines up to the Gold King, which was at 12,000 feet in elevation. Ames plant made history as the first hydroelectric facility to generate and transmit alternating current for industrial purposes in the U.S. The success at Ames proved that AC was a viable option, and, shortly after, the same design of the plant was built on a much larger scale at Niagara Falls.

Lucien Nunn went on to install similar systems at other mines and eventually provided electricity to Telluride—making it the first town in the country to be powered by alternating current. The Ames hydro plant runs to this day and is owned and operated by Xcel Energy. Mychal Raynes, a plant specialist, says it’s only needed a few improvements and otherwise is still using the original equipment.

In Lightning In His Hand: The Nikola Tesla Story, author Inez Hunt and Wanetta Draper describes one of his experiments:

"The crackling and snap repeated and then came a tremendous upsurge of sound as the power built up. There was a crescendo of vicious snaps above. The noises became machine-gun staccato, then roared to artillery intensity. Ghostly sparks danced a macabre routine all over the laboratory. There was a smell of sulfur that might be coming from hell itself. A weird blue light spread all over the room. Flames began to jump from the ball at the top of the mast- first a few feet long- then longer and brighter- thicker, bluer. More emanations until they reached rod like proportions thick as an arm and with a length of over 130 feet. The heavens reverberated with a terrific thunder that could be heard 15 miles over the ridge to Cripple Creek."

During his time at his Colorado Springs laboratory, Tesla observed unusual signals from his receiver which he speculated to be communications from another planet. He mentioned them in a letter to a reporter in December 1899 and to the Red Cross Society in December 1900. Reporters treated it as a sensational story and jumped to the conclusion Tesla was hearing signals from Mars.  He expanded on the signals he heard in a February 9, 1901 Collier's Weekly article entitled "Talking With Planets,"where he said it had not been immediately apparent to him that he was hearing "intelligently controlled signals" and that the signals could have come from Mars, Venus, or other planets. It has been hypothesized that he may have intercepted Guglielmo Marconi's European experiments in July 1899—Marconi may have transmitted the letter S (dot/dot/dot) in a naval demonstration, the same three impulses that Tesla hinted at hearing in Colorado—or signals from another experimenter in wireless transmission.

Tesla had an agreement with the editor of The Century Magazine to produce an article on his findings. The magazine sent a photographer to Colorado to photograph the work being done there. The article, titled "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy," appeared in the June, 1900,  edition of the magazine. He explained the superiority of the wireless system he envisioned but the article was more of a lengthy philosophical treatise than an understandable scientific description of his work, illustrated with what were to become iconic images of Tesla and his Colorado Springs experiments.

Working for about nine months in his Colorado Springs lab,  his popularity waned, as his findings were difficult to grasp for investors and others that followed his exploits. Increasingly, he was considered eccentric and perhaps a bit of a ‘nut job.’

Popular reports in the papers didn’t help at all to defuse that idea, as noted in the following account in the Rocky Mountain News in January of 1901 headlined “Tesla will talk with Mars from Pikes Peak.”
“… I have observed electrical actions which have appeared inexplicable, faint and uncertain though they were, and they have given me a deep conviction and foreknowledge that before long all human beings on this globe, as one will turn their eyes on the firmament above, with feelings of love and reverence, thrilled by the glad news:
“Brethren, we have a message from another world, unknown and remote. 

It reads:
One. One, two, three.” (signed) Nikola Tesla.

Story of brutal Guffey crime twists in bizarre tangle

Carl and Joanna Dutcher

Three teens convicted of triple murder in tiny, remote locale

Tony Dutcher

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

It has been more than two decades now since the violent murders, and the deaths of three members of the Dutcher family on New Years Eve, near Guffey, in Park County. The bizarre twists and turns of the case are still hard for local folks to get their heads around, and not surprisingly, the three teenagers convicted of the crime disagree on the the details of what transpired that night long ago.

I was working as publisher of the Ute Pass Courier at the time, one of nearest news sources to Guffey, and remember a great deal of the specifics of the case as Courier veteran news reporter Charles Jones  dogged the story's details over the next year, or so. 

In January 2001, the bodies of three members of the Dutcher family were found near Guffey; all had been murdered. Three teenagers were later convicted of the crime. The boys had formed a group, according to reports and authorities investigating, that took on aspects of a paramilitary organization, and one of them claimed that the murders were part of a plan to fight insurrection in the country of Guyana. The brutal nature of the crime and its bizarre motive attracted national attention.

Early on the afternoon of Jan. 3, 2001, authorities in the tiny Park County community of Guffey, Colo., found Carl and JoAnna Dutcher dead from multiple gunshot wounds inside their home.

Immediately, investigators sensed that this was no ordinary crime, yet it would take months for them to unravel the bizarre circumstances that culminated in an unspeakable triple homicide: Was it all a twisted version of the children's game Simon Says? ABC News reports and accounts in statewide newspaper coverage followed the twisting turn of events for months.

After discovering the Dutchers' bodies, investigators quickly zeroed in on their 15-year-old grandson, Tony. He had been visiting at the time of the murders, but was nowhere to be found.
Police called the boy's mother, Jennifer VanDresar.

Jennifer VanDresar

"I just kept saying, 'You have to find my son, he's hurt, you have to find him,'" she remembered telling the police. "Then it came to me ... and I said, 'He's in the fort.'"

The "fort" was a makeshift campground about 100 yards up a hill overlooking the Dutchers' home.
Here, in this place meant for innocent play, investigators would discover another horrific crime scene: Tony's body was found in a sleeping bag, his throat slashed almost to the spine.

Alongside the body lay an unfinished Scrabble game, a clear indication that Tony had not been camping out alone that night. Tony's mother told police that Isaac Grimes, Tony's one-time best friend, was supposed to be joining her son for a camp-out.

Issac Grimes, between two officers

Initially, Grimes denied being anywhere near Tony Dutcher on the night of the murder, saying he hadn't seen him since school let out for Christmas. Eventually, under pressure from his mother to tell the whole truth, Grimes made a shocking confession: He had killed Tony.

Not only did he confess to the murder, but he also told investigators the entire twisted story leading up to Tony's brutal death: The murder was a test of his loyalty to Simon Sue, leader of a bizarre paramilitary cult called the Operations and Reconnaissance Agents, or O.A.R.A., and made up of seemingly harmless high school boys.

Initially four Colorado teenagers facing charges in the killings of another boy and his grandparents carried out the alleged triple murder because they believed the young victim's grandfather was a racist, prosecutors said, according some newspaper reports.

Isaac Grimes, 16, told police he agreed to kill 15-year-old Tony Dutcher and his grandparents because he was on "probation" in a group organized by 19-year-old Simon Sue, and that was the only way he could get back in good standing with the others.

He was scheduled to be arraigned on Tuesday, but was granted a postponement because his new lawyer asked for more time to review the case.

According to the account Grimes allegedly gave police, he was a member of something called OARA, which Sue told him was a paramilitary group with ties to the government of Guyana, where Sue's family was from.

The members of the group were supposed to be good citizens, shunning alcohol, drugs and racism.

According to prosecutors, Grimes said that on New Year's Eve he went to the Dutchers' home in Guffey, Colo., to camp out with Tony, who was a classmate of his at Palmer High School in Colorado Springs. Another member of the group, Jonathan Matheny, 17, drove Grimes to the Dutchers' home and dropped him off, promising to come back late that night to help kill the grandparents, according to Grimes, prosecutors said.Shortly after the two teenagers went off to a homemade lean-to about 200 yards from the Dutcher home, Grimes got behind the other boy and slashed his throat, according to the account."His throat had been slashed clear to the spinal column and he bled to death," Park County District Attorney's investigator Leonard Post said.

Grimes said Tony Dutcher's grandparents, Carl and Joanna, didn't think anything was wrong when he came back to the house at around midnight, because the boys would often come back after spending just a few hours camping in the cold. 

At around 4 a.m., after Carl and Joanna Dutcher had gone to bed, Matheny returned and Grimes let him in. Carl Dutcher apparently heard the noise and got up, and when he came out into the hallway Matheny shot him twice, according to Grimes' account.

Jon Matheny

Joanna fled to the bathroom, but Matheny fired through the door six times, hitting her in the chest and head, Grimes said, according to prosecutors.

The two then returned to Colorado Springs with two weapons they had stolen from the Dutchers, and burned their clothing, a backpack and other things that had been covered with blood in the incident, according to the teenager's account.

According to prosecutors, Matheny and Sue took the weapons used in the killings to the home of the fourth member of the group, Glen Urban, 18, and he cut them up. Sue later showed investigators where he and Matheny hid the weapons.

On Monday, Matheny was bound over for trial scheduled for Dec. 3. He is accused of supplying the alleged murder weapons and shooting two of the victims.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News "Primetime," Grimes shared the details of his horrible crime -- revealed to police back in 2001 -- for the first time in public.

On New Year's Eve 2000, Grimes's friend -- and fellow O.A.R.A. member Jon Matheny -- dropped off the boys at the Dutchers' remote mountain home. After dinner, Grimes and Tony climbed to the fort
"Up at the top of the hill we talked for a while, we played some Scrabble, and then I murdered him," Grimes told ABC News. "He was wrapped in his sleeping bag. I pointed out what I said was a light in the distance that I wanted him to look at and I kept saying, 'Well, no, you're not seeing it.' So I got behind him and I murdered from there."

But what about Tony's grandparents, Carl and JoAnna Dutcher?
Grimes insists that he is not responsible for their deaths. Instead, he says that Matheny returned to the Dutchers' home and shot them. Then the two boys gathered weapons from the house, loaded them in the car and left.

On the drive back from the mountains, Grimes also says Matheny made a phone call to alleged O.A.R.A. ringleader, Simon Sue -- in Canada with his family at the time -- to tell him that the grizzly mission had been accomplished.

"[Matheny said] something like 'He did it' or something like that, referring to me," Grimes said.
Only after a lengthy interrogation did Sue finally tell investigators about the phone call, in which Matheny had implicated himself and Grimes in the killings.

Simon Sue

Sue described the substance of the phone call in stark terms: "Isaac killed Tony and Jon killed the other two."

Ultimately, all three boys would plead guilty before their cases could go to trial. Grimes admitted to Tony's murder, while both Matheny and Sue pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder, as well as violating Colorado's organized crime laws.
All three received harsh sentences: Grimes is currently serving 60 years in prison; Matheny, 66 years; and Sue, 53 years.

Yet despite these guilty pleas, the full story behind the murders -- now more than two decades ago -- remains elusive. And of course, the questions remain: Why did they do it? Had this high school senior brainwashed two younger boys into committing an unspeakable crime?

Matheny's account of New Year's Eve 2000 differs from both Sue's and Grimes's. Although he has confessed to being the driver on that fateful night, Matheny said that not only did he not murder the Dutchers, but that he was never even inside their house.

He also claimed the whole thing was a burglary gone wrong, but he provided little in the way of details.
"There was no motive other than we wanted the guns. It went from being a burglary to a triple homicide like it is, with no point to it," Matheny told ABC News.

Matheny said he does not know who actually pulled the trigger.
"I can't say, I wasn't there," he said.

Meanwhile, Sue scoffed at the portrayal of him as some kind of evil genius. In fact, he said he is not even that smart.

"You know, if you look at my high school records, I did poor in school, you know," he said. "My IQ, I'm not a genius by any sorts, in fact I have an average IQ."

Sue also rejected the characterization of him as a charismatic cult leader in training, a budding Jim Jones.
"Charisma is in the eye of the beholder," he told "Primetime."

Sue said his O.A.R.A. was little more than a boy's club; everything else is a figment of Grimes' imagination, especially claims of brainwashing and indoctrination.

"Isaac Grimes says a lot of things and it's an easy defense," Sue said.
However reluctantly, Sue did admit to ABC News that the O.A.R.A. was a highly organized group, that he was its undisputed leader and that they committed other crimes like stealing guns.

Grimes and Dutcher

What about Grimes's belief that the O.A.R.A. was a worldwide operation whose secret mission was to fend off armed insurrections in the tiny South American country of Guyana? Even authorities initially found the stories about the group convincing enough that they provided Grimes and Matheny with armed guards and bulletproof vests.

Sue refused to take the credit for these grandiose ideas.
"Anything that Mr. Grimes has said about O.A.R.A., I never led him to believe any of those things," he said.

Sue said he only pleaded guilty because his mother begged him to, fearing that in the aftermath of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, someone with a "foreign appearance" like his would get a life sentence.
Sue's mother, Nadia, has written to Grimes in an effort to vindicate her son. Grimes has responded to her in letters and has also written to the district attorney, sometimes claiming he acted alone.
"This is what Isaac writes, 'During my testimony, under oath ... I knowingly and willingly lied,'" Nadia read from one of Grimes's letters.

But these letters are also filled with outrageous rants, and Grimes's parents said they only show the full effect of his illness and the corrosive guilt he feels over killing his best friend.

Perhaps an equally tragic ending is what has happened to Tony's mother, Jennifer Van Dresar. Her despair led to drinking and taking pills and two suicide attempts. Then one awful night, VanDresar, under the influence, drove the wrong way down the interstate and killed a 27-year-old father. She was sentenced to five years in prison.

Van Dresar now writes letters to Grimes, her son's killer. Despite her pain, she has compassion for him, a boy who at 15 was convinced that he had to kill in order to protect his family and save himself.

"I think in Isaac's little teenage mind, he did what he thought he had to do, he didn't know there were other choices," VanDresar said.

Grimes,  told ABC News several years ago that for him, one thing is certain.

"I am a murderer for life now," he said. "I can't take that back. I did a horrible thing, and I can't take that back." 

Reports of  Simon Ewing Sue  sentencing to 53 years in prison initially, appeared many papers, on charges of masterminding the slayings of a Guffey couple and their 15-year-old grandson on New Year's Eve 2000.

Sue was out of the country when Carl and JoAnna Dutcher and their grandson Tony Dutcher were slain at the grandparents' home in rural Park County near Guffey. Prosecutors said Sue ordered the killings to test the loyalty of members of a small, secretive group of students at Palmer High School in Colorado Springs.
Authorities said Isaac Robin-McCain Grimes, then 15, slit Tony Dutcher's throat and Jonathan Matheny, then 17, shot and killed the grandparents.

Grimes pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 60 years in prison. Sue and Grimes are expected to testify against Matheny, who is scheduled to go on trial Nov. 10 on first-degree murder charges.

Judge Kenneth Plotz sentenced Sue to 45 years for each count of conspiracy to commit murder, which will run concurrently. Sue received another eight years on the organized crime charge and five years of mandatory probation.

Prosecutors were seeking 60 years.

Later,  a district judge reimposed Isaac Grimes’ 60-year sentence for nearly beheading his best friend during a triple slaying on New Year’s Eve 2000, on Feb. 9, 2006.

District Judge Kenneth Plotz of Park County cut 10 years off Grimes’ sentence in 2004 for the murder of Palmer High School student Tony Dutcher and his grandparents, Carl and JoAnna Dutcher, near Guffey. Grimes admitted slashing Tony Dutcher’s throat and was an accomplice in the shooting deaths of Dutcher’s grandparents.

Prosecutors appealed the reduction and the Colorado Court of Appeals sent the case back to Plotz, saying the window for reconsidering the sentence had passed.

Plotz, who came out of retirement for the 2004 ruling, said too much time had passed between the filing of a motion to reconsider the sentence and the hearing at which the sentence was reduced.
That delay of 32 months amounted to abandoning the request, Plotz said.

Grimes, 20, at the time, appeared without an attorney, refusing Plotz’s urgings that he should have legal representation. “I have nothing to argue, your honor,” said Grimes, chained at the waist and wearing a dark green prison jumpsuit. “I consider (this hearing) completely irrelevant. I am indifferent to a change in sentence. So my plan of action is to not contest this and let happen what may.”
Jennifer Vandresar, Dutcher’s mother, wrote Plotz from prison urging him to keep the reduced sentence. She said she forgave Grimes.

“Isaac, unlike the other defendants, shows such remorse he is determined to suffer each day as much as he can,” the letter, which was read in open court at Vandresar’s request, stated. “I ask for people to not distort my intentions. I still love and long for Tony. This is an act of forgiveness and compassion.”

Vandresar was serving 10 years for vehicular homicide for causing a fatal crash while driving drunk the wrong way on Interstate 25 seven months after her son was murdered.

Plotz appeared to agonize over the decision, urging Grimes to try and talk him out of the decision he had to make.

“I can only say that it’s an understatement to say this is a horrible tragedy,” Plotz said before delivering his decision. “It’s horrible because of what Mr. Grimes did . . . a horrible, horrible murder of a totally innocent victim. That these boys were friends makes it even more horrible.”
Plotz said Grimes was a boy when it happened.

“In all likelihood, years from now, you will not be the Isaac Grimes who murdered Tony Dutcher,” Plotz said. “That compounds this tragedy.”

Sean Paris, deputy 11th Judicial District attorney, said after the 2004 hearing he tried to ensure Grimes’ rights were protected despite representing himself. He sent a jailer, Park County sheriff’s Lt. Daniel Muldoon, to interview him Tuesday to find out what caused the 32-month delay.

Grimes told him his attorney at the time wanted to wait until co-defendants Simon Sue and Jonathan Edward Matheny were sentenced so he could testify for the prosecution. And the attorney thought it would be good to wait until right before Plotz retired, so he might reduce the sentence without fear of public outcry, Muldoon testified Wednesday.

Those reasons were not valid, Paris said, calling it “a manipulative, orchestrated delay.”
Grimes sat emotionless as Plotz rendered his decision. He will return to the San Carlos Correctional Facility in Pueblo.

Grimes’ father, Robin Grimes, said he was unable to attend the hearing but was disappointed after hearing about Plotz’s ruling.

“I’m not saying Isaac didn’t deserve any punishment — he did,” Robin Grimes said. “But he cooperated with authorities and led them to their case. Unfortunately, they used that against him.”

Grimes told reporters his son has withdrawn in the past couple of months and they haven’t been able to contact him.

“I call his caseworker to check on him periodically,” he said. “He’s our son. We definitely care for his well- being.

Sue, whom prosecutors consider the mastermind behind the Guffey slayings, is serving 53 years in prison. Matheny, whom prosecutors believe shot Dutcher’s grandparents, is serving a 68-year sentence, but that sentence is being reconsidered Friday in Park County.

In May, of 2004, the appeals court ordered the trial court to recalculate Matheny’s sentence, saying Plotz did not have authority to impose so long a prison term. A judge on Friday chipped two years off the 68-year prison sentence of a Colorado Springs man involved in a triple slaying near Guffey in 2000.Jonathan Edward Matheny, pleaded guilty to violating Colorado’s organized-crime laws and conspiring to murder Palmer High School student Tony Dutcher and his grandparents, Carl and JoAnna Dutcher. 

The killings occurred on New Year’s Eve 2000 at the couple’s home 55 miles southwest of Colorado Springs. Judge Kenneth Plotz of the 11th Judicial District sentenced Matheny in December 2003 to serve three 48-year terms simultaneously for conspiracy to commit murder, plus 20 years for violating Colorado’s organized-crime laws.

The appeals court in May found the 48-year terms unconstitutional because Plotz exceeded the standard range of eight to 24 years for conspiracy to commit murder. The court ordered Matheny resentenced on those counts but upheld the 20-year sentence.Plotz on Friday restructured Matheny’s sentence to achieve nearly the same effect. Plotz gave Matheny 24 years for conspiring to murder Carl Dutcher, 24 years for conspiring to murder Joanna Dutcher, and 18 years for conspiring to murder Tony Dutcher. 

He ordered those sentences served back-to-back, totaling 66 years. Plotz sentenced Matheny to 20 years on the organized crime count, but ordered it served simultaneously.Matheny, his shaved head covered with tattoos, had no visible reaction to his new sentence.Matheny’s attorney, Patrick Murphy, argued Matheny’s sentence should be reduced to 48 years, in part because he was 17 years old when the crimes occurred.

“The problem with that is, what does a judge tell the victims?” Plotz said. “What do I tell Charles Dutcher, who lost his son and both of his parents on the same night?”Isaac Grimes, who was 16 at the time, admitted slashing Tony Dutcher’s throat. Grimes told investigators that Matheny shot the grandparents.

Matheny never admitted killing anyone but said he helped plan the killings and drove Grimes to the Dutchers’ home.Grimes said he and Matheny were following orders from Simon Sue. He told police they were part of a secret paramilitary group called Operation and Reconnaissance Agents that Sue led.

Part of the group’s purpose, Grimes said at the time, was to fight racism. He said one reason the Dutchers were killed was because of racist comments by Carl Dutcher.Grimes since has written a letter from prison saying he lied about Carl Dutcher using racial slurs.In a letter to the Park County District Attorney’s Office released to area newspapers, Grimes said he made up the allegation against Dutcher to 
make it appear the killings were somehow justified.

“I knowingly and willingly lied,” Grimes wrote. “This was not under coercion but was an effort on my own behalf to look ‘less guilty’ — that is to try to make myself sound like a less horrible criminal in front of the judge.”Grimes, Matheny, Sue and Tony Dutcher were Palmer High School students. Plotz later reimposed Grimes’ 60-year sentence.

Plotz previously had cut 10 years off Grimes’ term but tacked the time back on after prosecutors successfully appealed the sentence reduction.Sue, whom prosecutors consider the mastermind, is serving 53 years in prison.

Jennifer VanDresar, 35 at the time, faced vehicular homicide and other charges in the July 28, 2001, head-on collision that killed Stuart Edwards, 42, of Colorado Springs. Edwards was returning home from a shift at printing facility in Colorado Springs.