Court upholds Blagg murder conviction
The Daily Sentinel
By CHARLES ASHBY Charles.Ashby@gjsentinel.com
The second first-degree murder conviction and life sentence of Michael F. Blagg will stand, the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled Thursday.
Blagg, 60, was first convicted in 2004 in the death of his wife, Jennifer, but in 2014 that conviction was tossed after defense attorneys discovered that one of his jurors, Grand Junction resident Marilyn Charlesworth, admitted she was a victim of domestic violence, something she didn’t disclose when she was selected to serve on that jury.
As a result, Mesa County prosecutors had to try the case over, and did so in a Jefferson County courtroom because of a change in venue.
That retrial was a difficult one for prosecutors, in part, because it occurred 17 years after Jennifer Blagg was killed, and the couple’s daughter, Abby, went missing. The wife’s body was eventually found at the Mesa County landfill, but the daughter’s body was never found.
“Because his prior conviction was overturned, due to juror misconduct and it was highly publicized, we anticipated the primary issue on appeal would be a venue change,” Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein said.
“In an effort to do everything we could to protect the conviction, I made the very difficult and unpopular decision to concede to the defense request for a venue change,” he added. “That meant that our trial team had to live out of suitcases for two months, while trying one of the most complex and high-profile cases this jurisdiction has ever seen.”
Blagg’s court-appointed public defender tried to argue that the second conviction should be reversed because the trial court erred when it allowed evidence from an unlawful search of his home, admitted expert testimony that improperly opined on his guilt, excluded evidence of an alternative suspect, and restricted his testimony and permitted improper cross-examination.
A three-judge panel of the court rejected all of those claims, saying there was extensive evidence of his guilt, even though Blagg and his attorneys say it all was circumstantial.
“Evidence showed that Blagg had experienced personal, marital and work problems before the murder,” Anthony Navarro wrote in the opinion, which was joined by Judges Jaclyn Brown and David Yun.
“Expert testimony indicated that it was unlikely that an intruder unknown to Blagg’s wife had broken into the home and killed her,” Navarro added. “The crime scene in the home appeared to be staged to look like a robbery gone wrong. The family van was likely used to transport his wife’s body and then returned to the home.”
The court wrote that Blagg loaded up a dumpster at his work place, “which was out of the ordinary,” and owned a gun similar to one used to kill his wife. After an extensive search around the region, her body was discovered in the landfill wrapped in a tent similar to one owned by Blagg, and was surrounded by rubbish from Blagg’s office.
During the first trial, Blagg was convicted on one count of first-degree murder, one count of abuse of a corpse, one count of theft over $15,000, one count of theft over $100 and one count of a crime of violence. In 2014, all of those convictions were reversed, but a Jefferson County jury re-convicted him of the same charges.
He was again sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, and concurrent sentences on the other counts, which ranged from 3 months to 3 years.
Blagg is serving his sentence at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Canon City.
Charlesworth was convicted in 2018 of criminal contempt. She was ordered to serve 10 days in the Mesa County jail, and fined $10,000.
