State of Washington v. Ian Simmers

Seattle, Washington Defendant Ian Simmers, age 16, was accused murder for allegedly killing Rodney Cochanour, age 35, whose body was found along the Burke-Gilman Trail along the Sammamish River near Bothell Washington on March 11, 1993.



The Bothell Police Department the first investigated the murder, and multiple officers responded to the scene, including officers Schlaegel, Hopkins, Miner, and Ericks.



Gochanaur had suffered multiple wounds, including a number of stab wounds to his back and a large cut to his face.



Gochanaur had obviously struggled with his attacker before succumbing to the wounds. The victim had defensive wounds on his hands and had been fatally stabbed in the back of his torso. The scene was messy, including blood left on trees and other places in the area.



Police located physical evidence nearby, including the victim's glasses and the murder weapon, a kitchen knife.



Despite the obvious importance of information from the scene where the victim was found, the Bothell PD Officers refused to document the actual scene or take pictures of the victim or immediate area surrounding him.





The initial investigating officers (including officers Hopkins and Miner) also learned information about Gochanaur's activities, including that he lived in Bothell with a family member, that he had been drinking with a woman, Hope Fleischacker, in Woodinville the evening before his body was found, and that he owed money to several individuals.



These Defendants' initial investigation into the Gochanaur murder turned up multiple suspects who warranted further investigation, including individuals with motives to attack Gochanaur such as Hope's ex-boyfriend and the people to whom Gochanaur owed money.



A few days after the murder, King County Sheriff 's Officers arrested Ian Simmers and another juvenile, Jon Wyatt, for alleged—and clearly juvenile—crimes like shooting flare guns by Lake Washington.



According to Simmers' attorneys:



[T]he Bothell PD Officers, the County Officers, and ultimately the investigating officers, decided that Plaintiff was going to take the fall for the Gochanaur homicide. They agreed among themselves to seek Simmerr's conviction for the crime, and to violate his constitutional rights along the way.



To begin, the Police Officers decided to interrogate Siommer and Wyatt without providing them with access to attorneys or their parents, despite the fact that they were both juveniles—Plaintiff was 16 years old and Wyatt was just 14.



Before the Police Officer Defendants interrogated Wyatt and Simmers there was no probable cause to suspect Simmers of the Gochanaur murder.



The Police Officer Defendants began with Wyatt and told him about the Gochanaur homicide, even though they had absolutely no reason to believe that he or Plaintiff had anything to do with the crime.



Wyatt did not know anything about the Gochanaur homicide.



Nonetheless, the Police Officer Defendants began to threaten, pressure, and cajole Wyatt in an effort to get him to falsely state that Plaintiff had something to do with the crime.



Among other things, the Police Officers used tactics that would be unfit for an adult against Wyatt, including depriving him of access to an attorney after his father had specifically requested one, continuing to badger and harass Wyatt about invocating his right to counsel, and using guilt-presumptive questioning designed to convince Wyatt to say

what they wanted him to say, rather than be silent or tell them the truth that he and Simmers had nothing to do with the murder.



The officers attempted to coerce and fabricate a false statement they would attribute to Wyatt, the Police Officer Defendants revealed information about the crime to Wyatt and suggested that he could avoid punishment if he went along with their story that Simmers stabbed the victim.



the Police OfficerS also wrote false notes and other reports indicating things that Wyatt never said and that were untrue, including as it relates to his invocation of his right to counsel and silence, and about Plaintiff 's innocence.



Before Ian was arrested, he knew nothing of the Gochanaur murder. He did not know any of the facts about when the crime occurred, how it occurred, or who was actually involved.



Ian truthfully told the officers that he had nothing to do with the Gochanaur murder.



The Police Officers later falsely claimed that Ian had knowledge of the crime, including details only the true perpetrator would know and that had not been publicly released. These claims were false. In reality, the Police Officer Defendants had supplied these details to Ian during the course of a lengthy interrogation and as part of their

agreement to pin the crime on Ian before Ian said anything related to the murder, and despite his innocence.



When the Police Officer Defendants began questioning him about the murder, Ian expressly invoked his right to silence.



The Defendant Officers unlawfully disregarded this invocation of Ian's right to silence and continued to question him.



After Ian was placed in a holding cell where he tried to sleep, and despite the fact that Ian had invoked his rights, the officers repeatedly woke Ian to question him about the Gochanaur murder. They would briefly relent when he refused, only to return later throughout the night evening and begin questioning him again.



The Police Officer Defendants also falsely claimed that Wyatt had implicated Simmers in the murder—a coercive false evidence ploy designed to overcome Ian's will and convince him to confess.



Ian's mother was also not permitted to intervene or see her son, even though Ian had asked to speak with his mother.



Mentally exhausted and left with little other choice, Officers Rusk and Hopkins led the interrogation of Ian throughout the night in an effort to secure a confession.



Although Officers Rusk and Hopkins had no evidence tying Ian to the crime, and the interrogation revealed that he knew nothing about the murder, they persisted in their efforts to coerce a false confession from an innocent suspect.



The Officers fabricated inculpatory information within the inculpatory statement they taped Ian making.



First, the Police Officer Defendants fabricated the confession by feeding Ian details about the crime that he could not have known.



The officers told Ian that the murder weapon was a knife and that it had been thrown away at the scene. The officers also encouraged Ian to say that the killing had been in self-defense based on evidence that the victim had been accosting people before his death.



Ian incorporated these and many other fed facts into the videotaped false confession.



When Ian was unable to correctly guess the answers to the Defendant Officers' questions, they steered him toward answers that fit the evidence.



This process of rehearsing the confession during a lengthy, unrecorded interrogation eventually produced an inculpatory statement that the officers knew was false.



The Police Officer Defendants purposefully chose not to record the portions of the interrogation in which they coached and coerced Ian to make an inculpatory statement, and where they supplied him with non-public facts about the murder.



Apart from the so-called "confession” itself, and other false reports about the interrogation, the Police Officer Defendants also fabricated evidence in an effort to keep Ian in custody despite being just 16-years old and obviously innocent of the murder.



The Officers also fabricated evidence that Ian made an accurate drawing of the murder weapon. In reality, they collected doodles that Ian drew during the interrogation, identified one that most closely resembled the actual weapon, and falsely claimed that he had drawn it at the officers' request.



The officers also allegedly made an agreement with Kevin Olsen to give false testimony.



The Defendants did not have probable cause to detain or prosecute Ian for the

murder of Rodney Gochanaur. All of the "evidence” that ostensibly supported probable cause

was the result of coercion and fabrication.



* * *



However, the Washington Court of Appeals described the case against Simmers as follows:



The victim was found dead on a jogging trail in Bothell, in March, 1995. He had been stabbed several times. Suspicion focused on Simmers, then 16 years old. After questioning by police, Simmers confessed. The State charged Simmers with one count of first degree premeditated murder with a deadly weapon or, alternatively, one count of second degree felony murder predicated on second degree assault with a deadly weapon.



(No evidence linked Ian to the murder, officers of the Bothell Police

Department and King County Sheriff 's Department zeroed in on Ian as a suspect. They held

him in custody for nearly ten hours and deprived him of sleep while interrogating him

repeatedly throughout the night. The officers used manipulative and coercive interrogation

tactics and fed Ian details about the crime in an effort to force and fabricate a confession that

they knew was false.)



Simmers was tried as an adult in March 1996. The State played the tape of Simmers' confession for the jury. The State also presented the testimony of Kevin Olsen, who had become acquainted with Simmers in jail. According to Olsen, Simmers told him "he was laying and waiting for anybody to come by to rob and kill", then spotted the victim and stabbed him to death. Simmers countered with an alibi defense, that he was at home on the night of the crime.



(The prosecution relied exclusively on fabricated evidence to secure Ian's

wrongful conviction and succeeded in prosecuting.)



Simmers came under suspicion when a friend who had been arrested with him for vandalism told police detectives that Simmers was involved in the death of Cochanour.



Detectives claimed that Simmers confessed to killing Cochanour after waiting from someone to come along that he could rob. Simmers was questioned for 10 hours before being driven to the scene of the crime.



Simmers was charged as an adult.



There was no physical evidence tying Simmers to the crime.



Simmers blood was not on the knife and a pair of boots found nearby were not his.



The State's case was based on Simmers' alleged confession and the testimony of Kevin Olsen, a jail inmate, to claimed that Simmers told him that after he attacked Cochanour, the removed his shoes and threw them in the river.

He also said that Simmers intentionally lied in his confession.



Olsen was a convicted criminal and has testified against other inmates.

The jury convicted Simmers of premeditated murder. The court entered Judgement and a sentence of 46 1\2 years and later denied a motion for a new trial. He was 1`7-years old.



Simmers was wrongfully convicted as were all of the other individuals desrcibed in the other 49 chapters.



Simmers conviction was affirmed on May 24, 1999 by the Washington Court of Appeals.



After DNA testing on the murder weapon exonerated Ian, the conviction was

overturned and the charges were dismissed in 2019. All told, Ian spent ages 16 to nearly 40 imprisoned due to Defendants’ misconduct.



On January 21, 2021, Simmers filed suit against King County and others claiming that his constitutional rights were violated.



Although he can never recover the enormous swath of his life lost to this

conviction or fully repair the incalculable harm he suffered, Ian brings this lawsuit to vindicate the violations of his rights under the United States Constitution and Washington state law thatcaused him to be wrongfully imprisoned for over two decades.