CENTENNIAL | Seventeen years ago this week, Kimmy Greene disappeared from her Aurora home without a trace, leaving behind a troubled marriage and two
young daughters.
Thursday morning, Greene’s former husband, Michael Medina, 42, — the man her family has always suspected killed her and who is already serving 48 years for killing his 16-month-old son — went on trial in Arapahoe County District Court, accused of bludgeoning Greene and burying her body in a field.
A grand jury indicted Medina last year for Greene’s murder.
The trial, which is scheduled to last three weeks, appears to hinge on a confession police say Medina made to his new girlfriend in 2005, just days before he drowned the couple’s son in a drainage pond near Monte Vista.
That 2005 confession, prosecutors say, is the strongest piece of evidence showing Medina, who has a long history of domestic violence, killed Greene when she tried to end the marriage. In it, police say Medina detailed driving Greene to a field, beating her with a bat and burying her alive.
Medina’s lawyers said in their opening argument Thursday that the confession was “fiction,” one Medina made up to scare his new girlfriend into staying with him and a tale that doesn’t match some of the few verifiable facts in the case.
And, they argued, prosecutors don’t have any other evidence showing Medina killed his wife.
“What you are not going to hear is any evidence that Mrs. Medina died at the hand of Mr. Medina,” said Rebekka Adams-Higgs, one of the public defenders representing Medina.
Police never found Greene’s body, and they never found a murder weapon. There were also no witnesses to the crime, or physical evidence like blood in the couple’s Aurora apartment.
Adams-Higgs said the couple had a volatile relationship, one marked by violence and a series of break-ups. Several times before that day in October 1996, Greene left Medina only to later reconcile, she said.
The night she disappeared was another one of those moments where Greene walked away from the relationship, Adams-Higgs said.
“That night, she left alive,” Adams-Higgs said.
She added that Greene was jealous of her friends who had time to party and “wasn’t into the mommy thing.”
But prosecutors said Greene didn’t have the financial means or the know how to abandon her family and friends and start life anew.
Deputy District Attorney John Kellner said Greene dropped out of school at 15 when she got pregnant with her and Medina’s first daughter. When she disappeared at 19, the family was barely scraping by financially.
Investigators have worked with the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol searching for a scrap of evidence that Greene is still alive, Kellner said. Each search has turned up nothing.
“There is no record of Kim since 1996,” he said.
In the days before her disappearance, Greene had started a new relationship with a coworker and was looking for an apartment for her and her girls, Kellner said. She had also told Medina she wanted a divorce.
“The defendant had other plans for Kim,” he said.
Medina also lied after his wife disappeared, Kellner said, telling people he went to a nearby gas station to search for her. Surveillance video from the gas station showed Medina was never there.
But that discrepancy, and Medina’s history of violence, weren’t enough for police and prosecutors to pursue murder charges against Medina until 2005, when he made that confession and killed his infant son.
Medina pleaded guilty in 2006 to killing his son, Degan Medina, and is serving 48 years in prison for the crime.
Adams-Higgs said she didn’t want to downplay the seriousness of that crime, but said Medina’s confession was clearly false. He said it was snowing the night he killed Greene, when weather records show it wasn’t. And, he said he killed Greene when she got home from work, even though she didn’t work that day.
She said that because of the brutality of that crime, witnesses who knew Greene and Medina in 1996 now remember Medina differently.
“That tragedy altered people’s views and perceptions and to a certain extent, people’s memories of what happened back in 1996,” she said.
Medina sat quietly in court Thursday wearing black slacks and a matching silver shirt and tie. If convicted, he faces life in prison without the possibility of parole. If he is acquitted, he could be paroled from prison as early as 2028 for his son’s killing.