Earlier this month, on Monday, May 12, 2008, the brutal and bizarre Lafayette, Colorado murder case of 52-year-old Linda Damm came to a close with the sentencing of Linda's 16-year-old daughter, Tess. Here's how the sad, but twisted, tale of butchery played out some 15 months earlier.
According to the prosecution's case, Tess had a turbulent relationship with her mother, who had been battling a drinking problem for some time. Tess complained on an Internet blog site that her mother was a "raging functional alcoholic" and that her own life was "falling apart and deteriorating." According to the postings, Linda had lost her job and sometimes became violent. Other family members admitted that Linda's drinking problem had hindered her ability to "properly care for herself and her daughter."
In what appeared to be an act of desperation to get her mother out of her life, Tess turned to her live-in boyfriend, Bryan Grove, 17 at the time, for help. At a meeting at a restaurant on February 3, 2007, Tess and another friend told Grove "how much they hated Linda," according to a police affidavit. Grove in turn asked Tess if she wanted him to "take care of Linda for her," and Tess allegedly replied yes. The following day, while Tess went on a drive with a friend, Grove went to Linda's ordinary two-story house where he allegedly became embroiled in an angry confrontation with her during which she purportedly told him that she blamed him for causing many of the problems in her house and with her daughter. At one point he purportedly grabbed her by the throat and pushed her onto a bed where he choked her into unconsciousness.
Afterward he stabbed her in the neck with a small knife so inhumanly that it became stuck and he was unable to pull it out. With Linda still alive and a knife protruding from her throat, Grove went to the kitchen where he obtained a larger knife to finish the job that he had begun. When he was certain that she was dead, Grove called a friend and asked for help with wrapping Linda's body in sheets and then moving it to the trunk of a car inside the garage. Grove, according to the affidavit for his arrest, had considered cutting up Linda's body "to make it easier to get rid of," but had changed his mind. An autopsy showed that Linda died from 18 stab wounds in her mouth and to her throat.
If the aforementioned isn't enough, what really made this case all the more creepy was the fact that over the next few weeks Tess and Grove partied heartily inside the house while Linda's rotting body remained lying in the trunk of the car parked inside the garage. When they weren't partying, they were sending love notes to each other and to their friends via Internet blogs, and spending the dead woman's money.
"Feeling our lips kiss makes me crazy inside," Grove wrote in one entry. "Your wifey cleaned the house and did all the laundry," Tess wrote in reply.
