Attorney Who Concocted Kidnap Story Disbarred

 A remarkable disbarment from Colorado involves the criminal conviction of an attorney who twice falsely claimed to have been abducted.

The Denver Channel reported on the conviction.

The incidents took place while [attorney] Keil was handling civil matters for the victim family in a high profile Douglas County murder-for-hire case. Chris Wells is serving life in prison in that case for hiring several people to kill his estranged wife, Amara Wells, and his brother-in-law, Bob Rafferty. Keil indicated that Wells was behind her kidnapping.

Westworld (Michael Roberts)  reported on the murder for hire case as did Jim Fisher True Crime.

From the summary on the web page of the Presiding Disciplinary Judge

Keil volunteered to provide legal representation to family friends reeling from a tragic and terrifying double homicide for hire. Soon, however, her communication waned, and she only intermittently responded to her clients’ questions. When she did respond, she assured her clients—falsely—that she was actively advancing their interests in court. Her clients eventually terminated the representation, around the same time that the statute of limitations expired on their claim. During this representation, Keil violated [numerous provisions of the Rules of Professional Conduct].

Later, in an apparent effort to excuse her earlier inaction, Keil twice staged her own abduction and made up spurious stories of threats and menacing. She was convicted of one felony count of attempting to influence a public servant and one misdemeanor count of false reporting to authorities. Through this misconduct, Keil violated Colo. RPC 8.4(b) (it is professional misconduct for a lawyer to commit a criminal act that reflects adversely on the lawyer’s honesty, trustworthiness, or fitness as a lawyer in other respects).

The attorney had a close connection to the victims’ families

In the early morning of February 23, 2011, a man named Josiah Sher broke into the Raffertys’ home and brutally murdered Amara Wells and Robert Rafferty. Sher spared the life of Amara Wells’s young daughter, but only after she had witnessed scenes of gruesome violence leading to the deaths of her mother and uncle. Ms. Rafferty, who had been away in Minneapolis on a business trip, was awakened by a call from a friend who told her about news reports of the double homicide.

Immediate family members, including [the widowed] Ms. Rafferty, Amara Wells’s sister Melissa Brown, and her husband Jack (“Ed”) Brown, were taken to the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department shortly after the murders. From there, they were put into protective custody but later released to a family friend’s home, where other longtime family friends—including Respondent—soon gathered. Respondent and her husband, John, had known the Raffertys since 1996; John Keil and Robert Rafferty had been in the same line of business, the couples had children of similar ages, and the families had spent a lot of time vacationing together.

Ms. Rafferty introduced Respondent to the Browns, and Respondent offered to act as the family’s spokesperson by fielding media requests for statements. Respondent also volunteered to liaise with the coroner’s office as Ms. Brown’s advocate to secure the release of Amara Wells’s body. And Respondent mentioned that she could assist the family in handling estate issues. The Browns immediately agreed that Respondent should open an estate for Amara Wells, petition for Mr. Brown’s appointment as personal representative, and represent Mr. Brown by filing estate taxes and handling incoming creditor claims. Respondent also said she would represent Ms. Rafferty, who was personal representative of Mr. Rafferty’s estate. Because of pressing issues with the coroner and ongoing media attention, Ms. Rafferty and the Browns verbally agreed to Respondent’s representation. Mr. Brown assumed that Respondent undertook this representation as a free service to a friend in need, and no formal agreement concerning payment was ever drafted or signed.

The services were performed poorly and the representation was terminated.

But what happened next was singular

On March 24, 2014, John Keil called 9-1-1 to alert the authorities that Respondent, his wife, had been attacked. She was due to pick him up at the airport that day but had never arrived, nor had she appeared for work. Mr. Keil called Respondent’s employees and asked them to check in on her. According to Detective Mike Lynch, of the Westminster police department, her colleagues went to her house, forced their way in, and found her lying inside the trunk of her vehicle, which was parked inside her garage.

In the immediate wake of her discovery, Respondent was uncooperative with authorities, Detective Lynch said. At first she declined to speak with the police, she refused to provide details about the incident, and she rejected offers of medical treatment. Her husband prevailed upon her to cooperate with the investigators, and she eventually agreed to provide a statement at the police station, though she continued to refuse medical treatment or testing. At the station, Respondent reported that she had been awakened, dragged out of bed, tied up, knocked out and possibly drugged, and then stuffed inside the trunk of her car. She claimed to have been in the trunk for fifteen hours.

Soon after Respondent was discovered, [the client] Ms. Rafferty received a telephone call from Mr. Keil, who told Ms. Rafferty that Respondent had been attacked and questioned whether the assault was somehow related to Respondent’s efforts to recover money from Wilson. Ms. Rafferty informed Mr. Keil that Respondent had been terminated from the representation several months prior. Even so, she said, learning of the attack made her and the Browns feel “hysterical” and “very fearful for our lives.” As she explained, they had been “living on pins and needles for years, so . . . to find out that there’d been harm done to someone that was close to us and had been representing us, yes . . . I was very frightened.” Ms. Brown echoed the same sentiment: “for the years before that we’d lived in a state of panic, . . . always questioning whether or not we’re safe, and for this to have happened to her, that it could be tied back to us, like all our worst nightmares came true.” At the family’s behest, the DOC launched an internal investigation into Chris Wells’s communications to determine whether there was a link between the attack and the case.

Detective Lynch testified that several “red flags . . . jumped out” in his investigation of the alleged attack: many details Respondent provided were inconsistent and some evidence did not match up with her story. For example, when Respondent was found in the trunk, her hands were not tied, nor were there ligature marks on her wrists. Perhaps even more noteworthy, Detective Lynch said, he found a green button on the inside of the trunk that was designed to remain illuminated for thirty minutes after the trunk was closed. Pressing the button would have released the latch and opened the trunk, yet Respondent never did so, casting doubt on whether she had actually involuntarily been placed in the trunk. Ultimately, the DOC internal probe failed to turn up any communication with Chris Wells about the attack, and the authorities concluded they could neither prove nor disprove Respondent’s allegations. They closed out the case a few weeks later.

The attorney then claimed she had been kidnapped in a separate incident

Detective Lynch characterized Respondent’s story as “bizarre,” “incredible to believe,” and riddled with “numerous inconsistencies.” Nevertheless, he said, he tried to keep an open mind in order to investigate her claims more thoroughly. He and his colleagues, however, ultimately concluded that Respondent had “lied” about both the March and the May incidents.

Criminal charges were pressed against the attorney

On January 7, 2016, following a week-long trial, a jury found her guilty of attempting to influence a public servant and of one count of false reporting to authorities based on the May 2014 incident.

The harm to the client was palpable and severe

By far the greatest harm that Respondent caused in this tragedy, however, is the serious emotional trauma to which she subjected Ms. Rafferty and the Browns. Rafferty explained that after losing her husband and sister-in-law in a murder for hire, she has “never truly [felt] safe.” Respondent, once Ms. Rafferty’s good friend, senselessly revictimized the family by abandoning them in a legal matter that Ms. Rafferty believed was essential to preserving their safety. And Respondent callously preyed upon their worst fears by fabricating stories of threats and abduction, apparently to justify her own inaction in their legal case. Finally, Respondent’s two sham disappearances needlessly squandered hundreds of hours of police, paramedic, and other emergency personnel time—resources that could have been directed elsewhere. She wasted thousands of dollars in taxpayers’ money, which paid for overtime hours spent working her bogus cases. This abuse of law enforcement services damaged the reputation of the legal profession and its members.

In sum

Our disbarment decision is based on the analytical framework set out above. But we wish to add that it is also anchored by our moral outrage: that an advocate would effectively desert her frightened clients, leading to the extinguishment of their claim; that a lawyer would time and again deceive those clients about the course of their matter, despite their offers to find other counsel; that a friend and former attorney would exploit her clients’ fears by casting her neglect as a noble effort to protect them; that an officer of the court would attempt to explain away her inaction by twice faking her own kidnapping, thereby diverting emergency personnel and wasting law enforcement resources. We cannot conceive of any sanction other than disbarment that adequately answers this conduct. Accordingly, we conclude that Respondent should be disbarred.

ABA Journal had this earlier report. (Mike Frisch)