AURORA | A man already serving a 48-year prison term for drowning his 2-year-old son in 2005 pleaded not guilty last week to killing his wife in 1996.
Michael Jim Medina, 41, entered the plea during a 30-minute hearing last week in Arapahoe County District Court. A judge scheduled his trial for November.
Medina was indicted by an Arapahoe County grand jury this spring on charges he killed Kimmy Greene-Medina in October 1996. He is already serving a prison sentence for the 2005 killing of his 2-year-old son, Degan, in Rio Blanco County.
Investigators never found Greene’s body after she was last seen Oct. 29, 1996, and have declined to say what changed in the case and led to Medina’s indictment. A spokeswoman for the Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office said documents in the case are sealed.
Sources said an Arapahoe County grand jury took up Greene’s disappearance in 2007, but the case was slow to develop after that. Then, this year, the grand jury handed down its indictment, charging Medina in March with first-degree murder after deliberation. State records list the date of the murder as Oct. 29, 1996, the day Greene was last seen at her Aurora apartment.
Also at Thursday’s hearing, Judge Kurt Horton rejected a motion from Medina’s defense team to dismiss the case.
Prosecutors were expected to argue the motion during Thursday’s hearing, but Horton instead issued a written ruling before the hearing.
That ruling, along with other documents that could shed light on why the grand jury indicted the long-time suspect more than 15 years after Greene disappeared, remains sealed.
But investigators said as recently as 2007 they took a closer look at Medina after Degan’s death when his new wife came forward and said Medina confessed to Greene’s killing.
The woman told investigators that Medina threatened to kill Degan and as a way of proving he was capable, told her he killed Greene. The woman said Medina told her he beat Greene with a baseball bat and buried her alive because she cheated on him.
A few days later, police in Alamosa say Medina drowned the tot in a drainage pond outside Monte Vista.
Prosecutors and Medina’s defense team seemed to elude to that confession during Thursday’s hearing.
Dan King, the public defender representing Medina, said he expected to file motions asking that hearsay details from Medina’s case in the San Luis Valley be excluded from that case.
That motion will be argued during two days of hearings in August.
Medina’s defense also asked that the judge bar some evidence from a 1997 dependency and neglect case that involved Medina and Greene’s two daughters.
Judge Horton rejected that motion, but also rejected a prosecution request for access to details about the dependency case.
Medina appeared in court last week wearing a red jail jumpsuit with his hands and feet shackled. He was transferred from the Colorado State Penitentiary in Canon City to the Arapahoe County Jail a few days before the hearing.
Reach reporter Brandon Johansson at 720-449-9040 or bjohansson@aurorasentinel.com