Menu
Jury finds Gonzalez guilty of Attkisson's murder, other charges
In the end, a mountain of evidence and more than 20 witnesses convinced a jury of a Greencastle man’s guilt in a 2020 murder.
John H. Gonzalez, 30, was found guilty Wednesday evening of killing 44-year-old Melissa “Lisa” Attkisson of Greencastle at her home on Berry Street on Jan. 25, 2020.
The jury was out for deliberation for nearly three hours, though some of that time was spent eating dinner, before returning with unanimous guilty verdicts.
Putnam Superior Court Judge Denny Bridges read the verdicts and then the defense had the jurors polled. Each offered a guilty verdict.
The additional charges were Level 6 felony auto theft and Level 6 felony theft of a firearm, both of which he stole from the dead woman’s home after her brutal killing.
After two full days in court, Wednesday proved to be the longest of all, with one last witness for the prosecution, followed by the defense’s case, which featured Gonzalez taking the stand, and then final arguments from each side.
Prosecutor Tim Bookwalter recounted for the jury exactly what the State of Indiana was required to do to prove the three charges, noting that there had been an admission of guilt on the two theft charges, leaving the prosecution to focus on murder.
One of the refrains running through Bookwalter’s closing statement was that of the “mystery second murderer,” considering that Gonzalez admitted to being involved in the initial shooting of Attkisson, claiming he struggled with the woman over her 9mm pistol.
However, Tuesday testimony from Dr. Rohland Kohr noted that Attkisson died from blunt force trauma to the head, not the gunshot, and that evidence suggested this almost certainly happened between 10 and 30 minutes after the shooting took place.
“I think it’s a trillion-to-one odds to think that in our community, you’re going to have two different people show up within 15 minutes and try to murder the same person, one to shoot and one to beat,” Bookwalter said.
He returned to this motif later, noting that the likely murder weapon was a 2x4 board that was torn from a table Gonzalez built in the basement of the home, the basement it was established he had spent several hours in the night before.
“I don’t think some mystery second murderer is going to know that there’s boards in the basement,” Bookwalter said. “If you’re going to come kill her, wouldn’t you bring your own weapon?”
Bookwalter also focused on how nonchalantly Gonzalez moved on with life after killing Attkisson, or at least leaving her gravely injured as he admitted, quickly starting a relationship with another woman, taking Attkisson’s possessions, repeatedly buying alcohol and drugs and using Attkisson’s credit and debit cards along the way.
“He has no conscience,” Bookwalter said. “And he’ll lie and he’ll twist every fact around to try and get around this.”
The prosecutor outlined this with what he called a series of “big lies,” such as saying the gun box was empty when he found it and Attkisson actually pulled it on him, that he intentionally left the photos and video of Attkisson after she was mortally wounded on his phone as proof that she was alive when he left, that Attkisson’s wallet happened to be in the console of the Ford Escape when he stole it and that he left the back door of the house unlocked.
One particular “big lie” on which Bookwalter focused was on a 2:55 p.m. text to Attkisson’s phone after she had already died that said, “U feeling any better. I figured u were sleeping.”
The prosecution classified this, along with a text from Attkisson’s phone to her friend John Mullens, as Gonzalez covering his tracks.
Bookwalter said the story changed once Gonzalez learned that both phones were tracked as being together in the Terre Haute area at the time, saying it was meant for Dabryn Tanner, a woman with whom he soon became intimate and spent much of the next week.
“He’s caught sending a text from his phone to her phone and he’s got both phones together,” Bookwalter said. “Oh, I made a mistake. I thought that was going to Dabryn.”
The irony is that elsewhere in his testimony, Gonzalez said he contacted Tanner via Facebook Messenger, not text.
“You notice that with him, every time there’s a good piece of evidence, he has a story,” Bookwalter said.
And when there wasn’t a good story, Bookwalter said, Gonzalez talked about how he was impaired by drugs.
“His memory went from very good about things to, ‘I can’t remember things,’” Bookwalter said.
Finally, Bookwalter spoke of how much technology and science went into the case, from Kohr’s examination of Attkisson to the various Indiana State Police investigators and specialists who helped build the case.
“The defense said in opening arguments that they had science and common sense on their side,” Bookwalter said. “Dr. Kohr is science. Brandon Mullen is science. Chris Carter is science. Nick Alspach is science. Robert Dilley is science.
“I am extremely proud of our law enforcement community on this case,” the veteran prosecutor added. “It is extraordinary the efforts of the Greencastle Police Department, the Putnam County Sheriff’s Department, the Indiana State Police — they have great resources. Police from 4-1/2 hours away (Rock Island County, Ill.) drove here to testify in this.”
Defense attorney Jim Bruner also made some of his most compelling arguments of the three-day trial during his closing argument.
Bruner pointed out, as he had in opening arguments, that there were no eyewitnesses on the days leading up to Attkisson’s death or the day of, as well as problems with the time of death cited by the prosecution.
First he cited rigor mortis, which normally sets in at 12-24 hours, before the body returns to a less rigid state.
However, when Coroner Dave Brown was on the scene on Wednesday, Jan. 29, nearly four full days after the estimated time of death, rigor mortis was still in effect.
Even allowing for the cold temperatures in the house, Bruner estimated it still would have set in and relaxed earlier.
Additionally, Bruner cited the lack of artifacts of putrefaction, or the decay of the body that would normally be caused by microorganisms and insects.
“I don’t believe we can have zero putrefaction at a time that is 96 hours, almost, since the time when the State of Indiana is telling you she passed,” Bruner said.
Besides this, Bruner also challenged how cold the house actually was. While some of the police on the scene noted the cold in the house and a neighbor even said the air conditioner had been running for several days, Bruner offered an astute observation in this matter — an air conditioner only runs when it needs to lower the temperature in an area.
With temperatures in the 30s in late January, the air conditioner would not have needed to run to cool the house, as home thermostats can’t generally be set much below 60 degrees.
“The only way that air conditioner was running all weekend was if it was trying to lower the temperature below 60 degrees,” Bruner said.
Bruner also cast doubt on some of the DNA evidence, noting that Gonzalez’s DNA was found on the 2x4 that he had handled in building the table, but not on the particle board, which he wouldn’t have had reason to touch aside from using it as a weapon.
He similarly questioned Kohr’s assertion that the kidney injury would have caused Attkisson to bleed to death in an hour or two, thus shrinking the window in which she could have died of the beating to her head.
“I don’t believe that the injury to the kidney affected the ability of her to remain alive to well past when John left for when someone else came in and beat her to death,” Bruner said.
He reminded the jury no blood was found in the car though there was no evidence of Gonzalez cleaning up or changing clothes after beating Attkisson.
Bruner noted that ex-boyfriend Colton Croan, not Gonzalez, had a history of violence with Attkisson.
“I think you’ll find Mr. Gonzalez did what he did and didn’t do what he did not do,” Bruner said. “Go back, deliberate, review all the evidence. Take into account this evidence about when she passed away. But take into account everything Dr. Kohr said.”
With one final chance at rebuttal, Bookwalter offered his most powerful piece of evidence, the video of Attkisson, already seriously injured, begging for mercy.
“You’ve heard from me, you’ve heard from Mr. Bruner, you’ve heard from John Gonzalez. It’s time you heard from Lisa Attkisson,” Bookwalter said.
With that, the video was back on the screen in front of the jurors.
“John…” an agonized Attkisson says.
“What?” a voice interjects tersely.
“...just make it stop. It hurts so bad. Please. John, please make it stop.”
With at least one juror on the verge of tears, Bookwalter offered his final words to the panel:
“Ladies and gentlemen, there was no mystery murderer. That was the murderer,” he said, pointing to Gonzalez.
Even before closing arguments, though, the final day had a number of big moments.
ISP Sgt. Sam Stearley, taking the stand for a fourth time in the trial, offered part of the internet history from Gonzalez’s phone in the early morning before the murder. This included a series of Google searches, articles and videos related to how to operate the gun in question and how loud it would be when shot.
A search on Jan. 27, a day before the body was found, was for “Putnam County, Ind., Jan. 2020 death news,” while later searches related to how to disable a GPS tracker on a Ford Escape.
Once the prosecution rested its case, the defense only called two witnesses, ex-boyfriend Colton Croan and Gonzalez.
While Croan’s testimony highlighted his stormy history with Attkisson, it did little to put him near her home on the days in question.
Gonzalez, on the other hand, spent a lengthy time on the witness stand, though he often seemed to be at odds not only with Bookwalter during cross examination, but occasionally with his own attorney Bruner, who made all verbal arguments in place of original defense attorney Jim Hanner, whose voice is lost due to a medical condition.
The defendant spoke of a disagreement between himself and Attkisson that he said escalated with her pulling the gun, though his testimony did not paint a clear picture of exactly what happened in those moments.
On cross examination from Bookwalter, Gonzalez said he was sitting next to Attkisson at the head of her bed when she pulled a pistol from her purse and he began to defend himself, trying to take the gun away and hitting Attkisson to try and get her to drop it.
In the struggle that Gonzalez said ensued, he wound up somersaulting over Attkisson as he pulled the gun away from her, and as he did so, it went off and struck her in the abdomen.
After the shot, Gonzalez said Attkisson got to the floor under her own power, while he sat on the bed, in shock.
“Did you ever use the phone that was there to call for any kind of medical assistance?” Bruner asked.
“I was kind of in shock that something that was so small of an issue was taken to that kind of extreme,” Gonzalez said. “I was high on meth. I kind of panicked. I didn’t know what to do.”
He then offered an explanation for the photos and video.
“I took two pictures and a video of her laying on the floor,” Gonzalez said. “I thought in my head that if I took them pictures — because I thought I was going to leave after — I’ve been convicted before of a robbery charge. I know how the system works. I know how bad that looked.”
The robbery conviction came up again much later in the day, once the jury had offered its guilty verdict, in the form of a habitual offender enhancement.
Gonzalez was previously convicted of Level 5 felony robbery in Fountain County in 2015 and Class D felony sexual battery in Vigo County in 2012.
The Indiana sentencing range for murder is 45-65 years, while for Level 6 felonies it is six months to 2.5 years.
The habitual offender enhancement could add between six and 20 years to Gonzalez’s murder sentence.
The parties will be back in Putnam Superior Court at 9 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 7 for sentencing.