AURORA | The bizarre legal saga of Jesse Dimmick — which included killing a man at an Aurora motel, taking a Kansas couple hostage, suing the couple he kidnapped and faking insanity — wrapped up last week with a lengthy prison sentence.
Dimmick, 39, will likely be behind bars until he is well into his 70s after a judge sentenced him to 37 years in prison last week for killing Michael Curtis in 2009 at an East Colfax Avenue Motel. That sentence won’t even start until Dimmick has served his 11-year sentence in Kansas for kidnapping a couple there while on the run following Curtis’ slaying.
Prosecutors said Dimmick, who was initially charged with first-degree murder, lured Curtis to the Carriage Motor Inn on that day in September 2009 for a drug deal before stabbing and robbing him. The crime was brutal, prosecutors said, and warranted a lengthy sentence.
“He took Michael Levar Curtis’ life in a savage way,” Adams County Senior Deputy District Attorney Ed Bull said in a statement announcing the sentence.
After the slaying, he fled to Kansas in a stolen minivan and eluded police there during a high-speed chase. Eventually, he crashed the van in Dover, Kan., and stormed into the home of a newlywed couple, taking them hostage at knife-point.
The couple gave Dimmick pillows and blankets that night and he later fell asleep, at which point the couple bolted from the house unharmed and police later stormed in. Officers shot Dimmick during the ensuing struggle, but his injuries were not serious.
Dimmick was eventually convicted of kidnapping in Kansas and sentenced to 11 years in prison there.
After his Kansas trial, he filed a hand-written lawsuit against the couple he kidnapped, saying they had agreed to help him for an unspecified amount of money, only to break that verbal contract when they ran from the home and allowed police to arrest him. The suit was later thrown out by a judge.
After he was finally extradited to Colorado to stand trial for Curtis’ slaying, Dimmick and his lawyers said he wasn’t competent to understand the court proceedings. During one hearing in 2010, he appeared in an Adams County court room slowly shaking his head from side-to-side the entire time, appearing to have an uncontrollable nervous tick.
But a state doctor said Dimmick was sane, and that his claimed mental troubles were the result of “malingering” — the medical term for faking his symptoms.
Another defendant charged in connection with Curtis’ killing, Shayne Miller, was sentenced in May 2010 to four years in prison and has since been paroled.
In March, Dimmick reached a plea agreement with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for stabbing Curtis. He faced up to 48 years in prison under the terms of the deal.
“This is a very dangerous man who needs to be kept from society and this sentence accomplishes that,” District Attorney Dave Young said in a statement. “We are thankful that he will be off the streets for a very long time.”