STATE OF IOWA, Plaintiff-Appellee, vs. ROBERT MONROE JORDAN JR., Defendant-Appellant.
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IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF IOWA
No. 6-892 / 05-0481
Filed November 15, 2007
STATE OF IOWA,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
vs.
ROBERT MONROE JORDAN JR.,
Defendant-Appellant.
________________________________________________________________
Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Polk County, Robert Hanson,
Judge.
Robert Jordan Jr. appeals from his convictions following a jury trial for two
counts of first-degree murder. AFFIRMED.
Mark C. Smith, State Appellate Defender, and David Adams, Assistant
Appellate Defender, for appellant.
Thomas J. Miller, Attorney General, Thomas Tauber, Assistant Attorney
General, John P. Sarcone, County Attorney, and Daniel Voogt, Assistant County
Attorney, for appellee.
Heard by Sackett, C.J., and Zimmer and Eisenhauer, JJ.
2
ZIMMER, J.
Robert Jordan Jr. appeals from his convictions following a jury trial for two
counts of first-degree murder in violation of Iowa Code sections 707.1 and 707.2
(2003). He contends there was insufficient evidence to support his convictions.
He also maintains his trial counsel was ineffective in several respects. Upon our
review, we affirm Jordan’s convictions and preserve his ineffective assistance of
counsel claims for possible postconviction relief proceedings.
I. Background Facts & Proceedings.
On February 26, 2001, Glenda Chiles entered Jeff Johnson’s house in
Des Moines and discovered the bodies of Johnson and her boyfriend, Steven
Jenkins. Both men had been shot twice with a shotgun. Johnson had been shot
in the lower back and then in the head. Jenkins had been shot in the shoulder
and the back of the head. Both bodies showed signs of decomposition. Four red
shotgun shell casings were discovered near the bodies. All four shells had been
fired from a twelve-gauge Mossberg shotgun.
Jenkins had last spoken with
Chiles on February 23 when he borrowed her car with the understanding he
would return it later that evening.
Following a lengthy investigation, the State jointly charged Robert Jordan
Jr. and Richard Christiansen with two counts of first-murder on October 7, 2004.
Jordan pled not guilty to each charge and moved to sever his trial from
Christiansen’s trial. Jordan and Christiansen were tried separately. A jury found
Jordan guilty of two counts of first-degree murder. 1 Jordan filed a motion for new
1
A jury convicted Christiansen of two courts of first-degree murder in a separate trial.
This court affirmed his convictions on appeal.
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trial, which the district court denied. Later, the court sentenced Jordan to two
concurrent terms of life imprisonment. Jordan now appeals.
Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the State, the jury
could have found the following facts from the evidence presented at Jordan’s
trial. Emily and Mark Tongue were residing in Rockford, Illinois, in 2001. At
some point in the year 2000, Emily purchased a shotgun for Mark. Her husband
removed the standard stock and installed a pistol grip to make the shotgun
shorter. The Tongues stored the shotgun and red shotgun shells in a closet in a
bedroom in their home in Rockford.
They last saw the shotgun around
Christmastime in 2000.
The Tongues were friends with Robert Jordan Jr. and Richard
Christiansen. In early February 2001, Mark Tongue left Illinois and traveled to
Las Vegas to serve a jail sentence for driving under the influence. Christiansen
arrived at the Tongues’ residence for a visit on approximately February 14. He
was driving a stolen white Chevy Lumina.
Jordan arrived at the Tongues’
residence on or about February 16. Jordan and Christiansen were together in
the Tongues’ residence at times when Emily was not present.
Jordan and
Christiansen left the Tongues’ home on February 18. Emily assumed the men
returned to Des Moines.
In February 2001 Glenda Chiles lived with Steven Jenkins. Jenkins and
Jeff Johnson were friends and fellow drug users.
Johnson lived on Summit
Street in Des Moines. At about 8:00 p.m. on Friday, February 23, Jenkins went
out in a car belonging to Chiles. When Jenkins did not return home or call his
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girlfriend that evening, Chiles left a message on his answering machine. Jenkins
never responded to the message.
On an undetermined night in January or February 2001, Richard
Christiansen went to the Des Moines residence of his friend Mark Hardin, a drug
dealer.
Because Hardin was not home, Hardin’s girlfriend, Connie Wilcox,
directed Christiansen to the basement to see James Marts, who was living in
Hardin’s home. According to Marts, Christiansen was “really high, high-strung,”
and “buggy-eyed” during his visit. 2 Christiansen kept pacing back and forth and
told Marts “something had gone bad.”
At some point, Christiansen made
statements implicating himself in a multiple murder. Although Marts could not
recall whether he heard these statements from Christiansen or from Hardin the
next morning, Marts said Christiansen told him something went wrong, and “I had
to kill them,” or “we had to kill them.” Christiansen also said he was “going to
have to kill Connie [Wilcox] because Connie knows.”
Later, Hardin returned to his residence and joined Marts and Christiansen.
At some point, Marts left and drove Connie to her home. When Marts returned to
Hardin’s home the next morning, Hardin looked scared. Marts later made a
statement to a Des Moines police officer that Christiansen had said something to
the effect that it or something had gone bad, and either “I” or “we” had to kill
them.
After Mark Tongue finished serving his jail sentence in Las Vegas, he
returned to Des Moines on a bus.
He arrived in Des Moines shortly after
midnight on February 26, 2001. Erika Christiansen, Richard Christiansen’s wife,
2
Marts could not recall the date or the day of the week that Christiansen came to visit.
5
picked Tongue up at the bus station and dropped him off at a Motel 6 in Des
Moines where Jordan and Christiansen were staying. Later that day, Jordan was
treated for a toothache by a Des Moines dentist.
Several days later, Jordan, Christiansen, and Mark Tongue drove from
Des Moines to the Tongues’ Rockford residence in the stolen Chevy Lumina.
The trio arrived on March 1. By this time, Christiansen was in possession of a
nine millimeter Taurus semi-automatic pistol.
On March 2, 2001, Jordan and Christiansen robbed a bank in Machesney
Park, a city located near Rockford. Jordan used a pistol gripped shotgun during
the armed robbery. Mark Tongue saw a televised news report about the bank
robbery and realized Jordan and Christiansen fit the description of the armed
robbers. On March 3 Tongue asked the men to leave his home, and he rented a
room for them at the Clocktower Inn in Rockford.
Early in the morning on
March 4, the police arrested Jordan and Christiansen at the Clocktower Inn. In
their motel room, the police discovered a Mossberg shotgun, a Taurus pistol, and
shotgun ammunition.
During an interview with the police the morning of his arrest, Jordan told
officers the shotgun used in the bank robbery belonged to him, and he stated he
had possessed it “for quite a while.”
Jordan also admitted he had fired the
shotgun before, and he said he thought the shotgun shells in the shotgun were
loaded with number four buckshot. The police asked Jordan if he was “mentally
. . . prepared to use that shotgun if need be,” and Jordan answered, “it would
depend upon the circumstances.”
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Jordan told the police he had known Christiansen for six or seven years,
and he referred to Christiansen several times as his “partner.” Jordan admitted
he and Christiansen had stolen the white Chevy Lumina. Jordan also admitted
he had appeared in the surveillance videotape of the bank robbery. He stated he
was the “cover man” during the bank robbery and carried the shotgun. He said
Christiansen was the “money man.”
Eventually, the Des Moines murder investigation led police to the evidence
recovered from Jordan’s motel room in Rockford. 3
The shotgun used in the
Illinois bank robbery and discovered in the motel room at the time of Jordan’s
arrest was tested by the Iowa DCI Laboratory.
A criminalist was able to
determine the four shells recovered from the scene of the double homicide in
Des Moines in February 2001 had been fired from the twelve gauge shotgun
originally owned by the Tongues and seized by police at the time Christiansen
and Jordan were arrested for bank robbery. Some of the live shotgun shells
found in the motel room in Rockford were identical to the shotgun shells that had
been used in the murders in Des Moines eight days earlier. 4 Based on this and
other information, Jordan and Christiansen were arrested for the murders of
Jenkins and Johnson. We now turn to Jordan’s appellate claims.
3
In early 2002 a Des Moines police officer went to Illinois to interview Mark and Emily
Tongue. Based on information gleaned from these interviews, he contacted Illinois
authorities to retrieve the shotgun used in the Machesney Park robbery.
4
The shotgun shells found in Jordan and Christiansen’s motel room and at the murder
scene were made by the same manufacturer, were the same gauge and length, bore the
same markings, and contained the same number four steel shot.
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II. Sufficiency of Evidence.
Jordan admits the evidence we have already described is sufficient to
generate a suspicion that he may have played a role in the deaths of the victims;
however, he argues the jury’s verdicts are not supported by substantial evidence.
For the reasons that follow, we disagree.
The State jointly charged Jordan and Christiansen with two counts of firstdegree murder. The jury instructions in Jordan’s case allowed the jury to convict
Jordan as a principal or an aider and abettor, and included an instruction on joint
criminal conduct. 5 The jury returned general verdicts that do not show which
theory or theories the jury adopted. Jordan contends he could not be convicted
under any theory because the evidence fails to establish that he participated in
the murders in any way.
We review sufficiency of evidence claims for the correction of errors at
law. State v Bower, 725 N.W.2d 435, 440-41 (Iowa 2007). A jury’s finding of
guilt is binding on appeal if substantial evidence supports it. State v. Nitcher, 720
N.W.2d 547, 556 (Iowa 2007). Substantial evidence is defined as evidence that
“could convince a rational trier of fact that the defendant is guilty beyond a
reasonable doubt.” State v. Robinson, 288 N.W.2d 337, 339 (Iowa 1980). We
consider all the evidence in the record, not just evidence supporting the
defendant’s guilt. State v. Randle, 555 N.W.2d 666, 671 (Iowa 1996). We also
5
Jordan has not challenged any of the trial court’s instructions or verdict forms on
appeal. We note that our supreme court recently analyzed the concept of joint criminal
conduct in State v. Smith, 739 N.W.2d 289 (Iowa 2007). The Smith opinion, filed
September 7, 2007, includes the following language, “In the future if a court is going to
instruct on the theory of joint criminal conduct, it should incorporate the elements of joint
criminal conduct as set forth in this opinion, rather than instructing the jury with the
general language of section 703.2.”
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consider legitimate inferences and presumptions that may reasonably be
deduced from the evidence in the record, and we view the evidence in the light
most favorable to the State. State v. Casady, 597 N.W.2d 801, 804 (Iowa 1999).
Circumstantial and direct evidence are equally probative.
Iowa R. App. P.
6.14(6)(p); State v. Hopkins, 576 N.W.2d 374, 378 (Iowa 1998).
As we have already mentioned, the Mossberg shotgun used to murder
Jeff Johnson and Steven Jenkins was the same shotgun discovered in Jordan
and Christiansen’s motel room after the Illinois bank robbery, and shotgun shells
discovered in the motel room were identical to the shells used to kill Jenkins and
Johnson. Furthermore, Jordan admitted the shotgun was his, and he claimed he
had it “for quite a while.”
In his brief on appeal, Jordan concedes that he possessed the shotgun
used to kill Jenkins and Johnson when he and Christiansen robbed a bank in
Illinois on March 2, 2001.
However, he contends he lied about owning the
shotgun and lied about how long the weapon had been in his possession when
he was interviewed by an FBI agent and a local police officer following his arrest
after the bank robbery. 6 In support of this argument, Jordan points out that when
he was first interviewed after the bank robbery he told the law officers that he
knew what they wanted and would not give it to them. He suggests that his
statements to law officers that the shotgun was his and he had it for “quite a
while” were made in an effort to hide information from authorities and to protect
Mark Tongue, Richard Christiansen, or both.
6
Jordan did not testify at his trial.
9
The jury was free to reject the defendant’s argument that he lied about the
shotgun when he was interviewed following the bank robbery.
State v.
Smitherman, 733 N.W.2d 341, 349-350 (2007). It was up to the jury to assess
the meaning of Jordan’s statements. A reasonable jury could conclude Jordan
would not have made the incriminating statement that the shotgun used in the
murders belonged to him unless he was at least a possessor of the weapon if not
its actual owner. Reasonable jurors could also interpret Jordan’s claim that he
had the shotgun “for quite a while” to mean he possessed the weapon at the time
of the murders. Only about eight days had passed between the murders in Des
Moines and Jordan’s statements after the bank robbery.
In addition, other evidence provides support for the connection between
Jordan, Christiansen, the shotgun, and the murders in Des Moines. Jordan had
an opportunity to acquire the shotgun before the murders were committed
because he and Christiansen were in the Tongues’ residence in mid February at
times when Mark and Emily were not at home. Furthermore, Emily testified she
had not seen the shotgun during the month prior to the murders in Des Moines.
The State presented evidence that placed Jordan and Christiansen in Des
Moines the weekend of the murders, and Jordan was seen in the company of
Christiansen. It is undisputed that Jordan was in possession of the shotgun used
to kill Johnson and Jenkins when Jordan and Christiansen committed a bank
robbery soon after the murders in Des Moines.
The videotape of the bank
robbery shows that Jordan used the shotgun in the commission of that robbery.
In response to a question after the robbery, Jordan stated he was prepared to
use the shotgun depending upon the circumstances. The State also proved that
10
Jordan was in possession of ammunition identical to that used in the murders
when he was arrested in Illinois.
The record also reveals Jordan had known Christiansen for six or seven
years and repeatedly called Christiansen his partner. He admitted he committed
at least two crimes in conjunction with Christiansen, the theft of the white Chevy
Lumina and the bank robbery after the murders.
Finally, Christiansen made
statements implicating himself and possibly another person in multiple murders
when he said something had gone wrong and “I” or “we had to kill them.”
Multiple murders are not common, and Christiansen’s statement about killing
“them” linked him to the murders committed in Des Moines at the same time he
was in the city. A reasonable jury could conclude if Christiansen said “we had to
kill them,” this statement combined with evidence linking Jordan and Christiansen
to other joint criminal activity constituted evidence connecting Jordan to the
murders.
Upon our review of all the evidence, we find substantial evidence supports
the jury’s verdicts.
III. Ineffective Assistance of Counsel.
Jordan next claims his trial counsel was ineffective for (1) failing to
investigate and present exculpatory evidence and (2) introducing prejudicial
hearsay evidence. Generally, we preserve claims of ineffective assistance to
allow full development of the facts surrounding counsel’s conduct.
This is
because postconviction proceedings are often necessary to discern the
difference between improvident trial strategy and ineffective assistance. State v.
Ondayog, 722 N.W.2d 778, 786 (Iowa 2006). In this case, we conclude the
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record is inadequate to address the defendant’s claims of ineffective assistance
of counsel. Accordingly, we preserve these claims for possible postconviction
relief proceedings.
IV. Conclusion.
We find substantial evidence supports the jury’s verdicts. Therefore, we
affirm Jordan’s convictions of first-degree murder and preserve his ineffective
assistance of counsel claims for possible postconviction relief proceedings.
AFFIRMED.
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