On July 24th, 2007 just before dying, 2-year-old Riley Ann Sawyers, aka "Baby Grace", was beaten with belts, picked up by her hair, thrown across the room and held under water by her mother Kimberly Dawn Trenor and her stepfather Royce Zeigler.  She apparently had discipline issues and they were going to learn her.
One year almost to the day Kimberly Trenor went to trial for the murder of Riley Ann Sawyers, was found guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.  Now two years almost to the day that Riley was found floating in Galveston bay step father Royce Zeiglers’ murder trial begins.  

I took the day off from work to sit in on opening statements and day one in court.

My initial impression when walking in the courtroom was ‘Am I in the right room?’  There were only 4 benches on each side of the room behind the Defense and Prosecution tables.  Each bench could hold about 10 people.  We arrived 30 minutes early and there were about 5 people in the room when we got there.  Three of them were from the media and they were bobbing and weaving cables around each other and the benches getting ready for the trial.  I really wasn’t sure how easy it would be to get into the trial considering it was national news so I was surprised to find the room so empty.  Then I realized it was after all 2 years ago.  Last week alone 2 children went missing and were found dead Elizabeth Olten and Somer Thompson.   Next week this time it will be someone else’s child.  Fact is that this tragedy just keeps happening over and over again and we’re too fickle, and too busy to pay attention.  Rest easy though justice is being served in courtrooms daily across the nation long after we’ve swept these tragedies under the rug.  Today it was being served up in Galveston, Texas.

 The table for the defense had 5 chairs around it but they only needed 4.  Royce Zeigler, and his attorneys Neal Davis III, Dee McWilliams , and a woman I didn’t recognize.  I did recognize Mr. McWilliams from Parnham and McWilliams you may remember Parnham from the Clara Harris trial or Andrea Yates

trial to name a couple high profile cases associated with the firm.  The Prosecution table had 4 chairs around it but only used 2.  Galveston County District Attorney Kurt Sistrunk, and Galveston County Prosecutor Kayla Allen.

At about 10 till 9 the attorneys started showing up with their file boxes and sliding them under the tables, while 2 sheriff’s and the bailiff took turns at the coffee pot and readied the courtroom.  I turned and met a couple that had just arrived and were volunteers with Texas Eqquasearch.  They said Tim Miller was in Oklahoma and would not be at the trial.  A lady entered the room in her biker outfit and sat next to me.  She looked out of place and I was curious so I started talking with her.  She was a member of BACA (Bikers Against Child Abuse).  I had never heard of it until she explained it to me.  Basically, as you know, during trial witnesses are not allowed in the courtroom while other witness testify in order to protect the integrity of the testimony.  This presents a problem in cases involving child abuse because many times the abuse victims (children) are asked to take the stand and testify against their perpetrator without the support of their other family members and friends in the courtroom.  BACA is a group of bikers that have chapters worldwide and they are contacted through the courts before the trials.  They meet with the victims prior to the trial to let them know they are there to support them.  Then they sit in on the trials.  For this particular trial they were there in support of Sheryl Sawyers, the grandmother of baby grace from Ohio that had identified Baby Grace from the drawings and contacted the police letting them know Baby Grace was her granddaughter Riley Ann Sawyers.  I told her how impressed I was with her organization and then the Calvary arrived.  One after another bikers pushed through the double doors and entered the courtroom filling the benches behind the prosecution table.  A room once dominated with suits and ties now filled with leather and chains.

9:00 Straight up Judge David E. Garner enters the courtroom.  He gives the room and attorneys a cursory glance “Bring in the defendant”.  Royce Ziegler enters through a side door next to the defense table.  No shackles, no cuffs, black sports coat, khakis, white shirt, no tie, overweight with acne and thick black hair cut like Paul McCartney circa 1965.  Judge Garner confirms an agreement between the attorneys to keep the opening statements to 20 minutes and then asks rhetorically

The Jurors file into the box one after the other to the right of the room next to the prosecutors table.  There were a lot of rules posted outside the courtroom regarding this trial.  Many of them pertained to media and jurors.  I don’t remember all of them so I won’t go into much detail on the jurors.  I will say there are 4 women & 8 men.  I counted wedding rings, races, and estimated ages but I’m really not sure if I’m breaking any rules by going into that so I’ll save it for another day.  I will say ages are diverse, and the rings were close to split down the middle.

The state read the indictment and the defendant pleaded “Not Guilty”, then Kayla Allen approached the jurors box to open for the prosecution.  She was straight and to the point.  No rainbows, no lollipops just the undisputed facts in the case.  March 2007 met in a chat room online, April 2007 first phone call conversation, May 2007 Royce flies to go meet her, flies back 2 days later with Kim and Riley to Houston, Married a week later.  6 weeks after Riley gets to Houston she’s dead.  Then Ms. Allen described the “Proper Burial” as she raised her fingers like quotes, plastic box, gloves, cement, plastic bags, bleach, chains, weeks in a storage room then set to drift in Galveston bay.  After that a new life begins for Royce and Kimberly she tells the jurors.  Kimberly has her IUD removed and within weeks of the murder she’s pregnant.  October 2007 fisherman finds Riley, November sketch of Baby Grace released.  As she was running into her 20 minute limit she told the jurors that they would see Royce lie over and over again to police, family and friends. Ziegler showed no emotion as she spoke to the jurors.  I glanced over to him at one time to see him jotting down a few notes, most of the time she spoke he was tapping his pen to the paper in front of him as if he were somewhere else, listening to some song.

Neal Davis III opened for the defense.  Definitely more colorful than the fact based opening from the state.  He paced more and stood closer to the jurors.  He denied little about the states version of events.  He admitted Ziegler was guilty.  Guilty for not calling police, guilty for being driven by love, but not guilty of capitol murder.  Then he began to paint a picture for the court of the kind of person Ziegler was.  Raised in a successful conservative family here in Texas, Kim was raised in Ohio.  As if to say he’s ‘one of us, she isn’t’.  Royce was socially challenged but a good kid he told the jurors.  He reasoned that was probably why he was in the world of warcraft chat room where he met Kim to begin with.  He was compensating for his lack of social skills.

[disclaimer to worldofwarcraft.com]
Don’t send your fire throwing snozebanging wizards after me or whatever the hell characters you call each other.  I mean no disrespect to your site/craft/business or whatever you consider it.  I am merely reporting on how your site was characterized by Royce’s attorneys during their opening statements.  I’ve only heard about your site after learning about this case and only know of two people that were members of your site, both of which incidentally, are baby-torturing murderers.  Just say’n.

After Davis was done glorifying Ziegler and even referring to him at one point as “A Knight in shinning armor” (yes he actually said that) he moved onto Kimberly and her family.  Her life not so rosy.  As generation after generation had children as teens they “passed them off” to others to care for them.  Kim was raised by her grandmother after being abandoned by her parents, then Riley and Kim were passed off to the Sheryl, Kim’s mother in law.  He described them as a family full of drop outs and problems.  

I’d been curious as to what story the defense would go with in this trial then Davis painted another picture.  “Ziegler had this dream of a Norman Rockwell kind of family”.  Not long after Kim and Riley had moved in with Ziegler he’d realized it wasn’t the Rockwellian dream he’d imagined.  Kim wouldn’t work, she wouldn’t cook, she wouldn’t clean, all she did was sit around playing worldofwarcraft on her laptop all day while the TV watched Riley or she entertained herself in her room.  Ziegler threatened to leave, but Kim begged him to stay.  She would make it all better she promised.  Davis wrapped up his closing arguments with claiming the state could not even prove how baby Riley died.  

9:58 the state calls its first witness.  Sheriffs Lt. Tommy Hansen of Galveston County.  District Attorney Sistrunk questioned Lt. Hansen about the day he first received the call and walked him through what transpired in the initial days of the investigation.  Lt. Hansen was the first to interrogate Ziegler on video and they were basically laying the foundation for the video tapes they were about to introduce into evidence.  Confirming that Ziegler agreed to the interviews, and waived his rights to an attorney.  The video’s on disc were introduced, then published for the court to see.  

Video 1
Prosecutor Allen moved across the room to push a button on the wall.  The lights dim as a screen drops from the ceiling.  A projector hanging above the courtroom blinks and comes alive with an Image of a younger Ziegler sitting in a chair in the corner of a tiny room nervously running his hand through his bangs.  Wearing jeans, sneakers, and a hooded “Get er Done” sweatshirt (the same shirt he’s wearing in all his booking photo’s).  He was visibly nervous in the video rocking back and fourth with his ball cap on his knee so that the camera from above could see his face. The date of this video was November 23rd 2007, and would prove to be his last day to wear jeans.  He walked into the station that day a free man, and hasn’t walked out since.

While I’m sure Ziegler felt pretty empowered landing blows on a two year old he was little more than a coward in this video.  Detectives took 4 hair samples from Ziegler in this video along with DNA swabs from inside his mouth.  He squirmed in his chair, whined, and rubbed his head after they plucked each of 4 hair samples from his head, front, left, right, and back.   Then they took the swabs by rubbing the inside of his cheeks with a q-tip.  He rubbed his jaw as they finished and moaned again as if it hurt him.  ‘What a wienie’ I thought to myself, as did the rest of the courtroom I’m sure.

I’ve watched many of these interrogations in the cases we follow here at CSO.  These detectives were the best I’ve seen.  It became evident by the end of the day that at this point in the case they knew quite a bit about Ziegler and the facts of the case. In this first video they toyed with Ziegler just to see what story he would come up with and to have it on the record.  Ziegler had no idea he was already cooked at this point.  He was nervous but how could he not be, he tried to make a joke here and there, the cops would chuckle then move him along.  At this point Ziegler’s story was that on the 29th of July he was at work, he told the detectives they could check his time sheets with his employer.  The detectives said they already had.  According to him, on the 29th while at work he received a call from Kimberly in a panic.  CPS had come by the house and taken Riley.  He hurried home to find her lying on the floor with the door still open.  Her chest bruised from a CPS worker pushing her to the ground as she snatched baby Riley from her and took off.  He hadn’t seen Riley since.  His reasoning for hiding this story from family, friends and coworkers was because the CPS worker had mentioned allegations of him sexually abusing Riley and he didn’t want that to get out because it was untrue.  Kim had even gone so far as to create a bogus letter from CPS that the detectives already had.  The police showed Ziegler the letter laughing and commenting on what a horrible job was done in creating this fake letter from CPS.  Ziegler blamed Kimberly for the letter.  He maintained that he was at work on the 29th, and that if something else had happened he knew nothing about it.  Detectives questioned Ziegler as to what else could have happened.  He wasn’t sure, but he thought it had something to do with Sheryl.  Sheryl, the mother of Riley’s birth father, was raising Riley and Kim was living with her before Ziegler moved her down to Texas without telling anyone.  It was obvious he wanted her to take the fall for anything that may have happened to Riley.  He told several stories to the police on why he felt it was her fault.

He claimed that she had left several terrorist threats on his cell phone and he had to change numbers.  He also claimed that he had several witnesses in Ohio that had seen Sheryl at a store purchasing clothes for a little girl, and pointed out that Sheryl didn’t have a little girl.  He claimed to have heard someone tell him that Sheryl was the type of person that would pay someone to come down here and kidnap Riley.  If something else happened to Riley on the 29th, then that’s what it must have been he figured.  The detectives knew better but before they dropped the hammer they wanted to know more about his relationship with Riley, they quickly changed topics.

What kind of kid was Riley, they asked?  Ziegler described her as a good kid, but “rambunctious”.  They questioned how he and Kim would discipline her when she was being rambunctious.  He mentioned a “house rule” that Kim did the disciplining because he felt that was her job.  She would make Riley stand in the corner for 5 minutes at a time when she was bad.  Is that all?, asked the detectives.  Well once she used the back of her hand on Riley’s butt, when standing in the corner didn’t work, Ziegler’s voice noticeably quieter now in the video tape as if he were telling them a secrete.  
“Have you ever spanked her?”, they asked.
“No Sir” he replied.
“Are you Sure?” asked the detective, this time in a ‘I’ll give you one more chance to answer’ tone.  
“Not that I can Remember” Ziegler now visibly uncomfortable and realizing these detectives may know something.
The detectives began pressing a little harder with their questions until finally Ziegler admitted he did indeed spank her but only once.  He told a story of Riley drawing on his work papers he had brought home.
I looked over at Ziegler in the courtroom to catch his reaction to the video.  He was slouched over the table eyes closed with his head in his hand rubbing his temples as though he had a headache.  This is one of the videos his attorneys had tried unsuccessfully to keep from the jurors.
Then out of nowhere Lt. Hansen who was leading the interview raised his voice and flat out told him.
“Read my lips, Baby Riley is Baby Grace”
It was like the whole interview just turned on a dime, and it got a whole lot worse for Ziegler.
Ziegler immediately got defensive, ‘wait hold on here guys, am I a suspect in something?’
Detectives ignored the question and immediately changed the subject.
“Where do you shop?” they asked him.
“uhhh walmart, best buy…” Ziegler told them
Detectives asked him if he was aware that every walmart purchase was video tape and time stamped no matter what form of payment was used during the purchase.  Ziegler confirmed that he knew that.
Detectives then wrapped up the interview.  Ziegler left that interview knowing that he and Kim had purchased all the materials that were found with Baby Grace from walmart.  They booked him into county and put him in solitary confinement to think about it.

Lights back on now, court dismissed for lunch.  We returned from lunch and the State introduced Video 2 into evidence then published it for the court.  

Video 2
This time when the screen dropped and the picture of Ziegler hit the wall he was in the same chair in the corner of the same room.  This time in county issue, only 24 hours after video 1 but this time scared shitless.  No more jokes, no more smirks, just flat out afraid.  He wanted to talk this time.  His story completely different, but first he wanted to know “Is this going to bury me?”.  Unfortunately not, I answered him to myself, only life in prison.
After the routine reading and signing of his rights showing he was willing to speak without an attorney, and telling the video camera above that he was the one that had called this meeting, Ziegler went into a tirade about the treatment he had received since the day before when they spoke.  “I feel like I’m getting mistreated” he said.  No phone call, they’re keeping him in solitary confinement on suicide watch, a small cell stripped of his clothes only a small blanket.  He claimed to be getting Closter phobic from the small room, and that he was laying in his own piss.  He couldn’t handle it, he wanted out now, and if they didn’t let him out when they took him back to that cell he was going to “Smash my head into that door”.  Now for anyone of you wondering if this creature could make it in prison, or for those of you like me that want these guys to suffer for their crimes against children, rest easy.  He aint liking jail at all. It’s definitely not his cup of tea so to speak.

Knowing he was ready to speak up about the crime, police decided they’d entice him to open up more by throwing a curveball at him.  As you know detectives can pretty much say anything in these interrogations.  Knowing that Ziegler and his wife were expecting a baby they mentioned they had Kim in another room.  She too was in jail for the same charges.  Then they asked about the baby.
“did you actually ever confirm that she was pregnant?” they asked him.
“What?” he asked
Well, we’re just wondering if you ever saw proof that she was really pregnant, because we’re scared you’re getting played here.  The detectives told him.
They never came out and said she wasn’t pregnant but they did a whole lot of implying.  Ziegler was visibly upset by this, then the detectives immediately changed the subject again and wanted to know what he had called the meeting for.  What was it that he felt he needed to tell them?

The new story began to unfold.  It wasn’t the 29th of July when he’d last seen Riley, it was actually the 24th of July and he had taken off work that day.  The detectives said “We know”.  He had taken the day off work because he was sick.  He claimed he spent the day in bed taking Nyquil and trying to get some rest.  “I felt horrible, I just wanted to sleep”.   He could hear Kim and Riley in the other room and Riley was being punished for something and he heard Kim telling her to get in the corner.  He was drifting in and out of sleep when all of the sudden Kim was calling for him to help her.  He went in the other room and Riley was laying on the floor.  Something had happened and Riley wasn’t breathing.  He tried CPR on her but it didn’t work.  She was dead.  He panicked. He wanted to call the police but he was afraid.  He put her in the bathroom for a couple of hours then he and Kim went to walmart.  Kim had expressed to him that she wanted a “Proper Burial” for Riley.  He just wanted her gone.  At Walmart they picked up everything they would need for a “Proper Burial”.  Container, cement, gloves, chains, bags, bleach…… Then they went home.  He held Riley up while Kim put the bags over her and they put her in the box.  Details are fuzzy for Ziegler because he has “blocked out” all the details of that day.  After a couple or three days in that box in that bathroom in their house, they moved Riley to the storage room.  It was there they kept Riley for a few weeks until they decided it was time to get rid of her.  One night they drove around and were going to dig a hole to bury the box in but Ziegler just couldn’t bring himself to do it.  So then they drove to Galveston, Texas to set her adrift.  They crossed the causeway and stopped just before they reached the island.  Parked on the side of the bridge Ziegler decided that the shoreline was not suitable and that because of all the traffic it would be better to set her adrift next to the railroad bridge just next to the causeway.  They doubled back under the bridge and made their way to the train tracks.  It was there they pushed Riley off into Galveston bay.  He never saw the box sink, but he did see it floating slowly back towards the causeway before they left.  

He felt guilty because he felt like it was kind of his fault Kim did what she did to Riley.  He felt like it was because the night before he gave Kim the ultimatum to either handle Riley’s behavior problem or he was going to leave.


I made a list of the things that Ziegler was worried about during this second interview.

·    He didn’t know if this new story would bring new charges
·    He wanted to know how long until grand jury
·    He wanted to know if the media would be in the court room
·    He wanted to know for sure if Kim was pregnant or not
·    He didn’t want to be in isolation
·    He can’t afford an attorney
·    And his “Number 1 Concern” was his treatment in jail.

That ended the second video and the courtroom was given an afternoon break.  As a side note  June 26th 2008 while in jail Kimberly Trenor gave birth to a baby boy.

I left for the day during the afternoon break.  The trial is expected to go for two weeks.  I will be going back as I am able.  I would really like to sit through the testimony of Kimberly should she take the stand.  They have yet to confirm whether or not she will testify but she was moved from prison to Galveston County jail just in case.

I honestly don’t think there’s much chance Royce Ziegler is going to walk on this.  Attorney Neal Davis III mentioned several times during his opening argument that this trial is for the “Murder” of Riley.  Holding Royce Ziegler accountable for his actions that the state can prove in this case and which he freely admits is for another trial and another jury on another day, but murder is not something that can be proven.

I know, I know, the charges are different and carry a different sentence when comparing murder to what the defense claims his involvement is in the case.  Maybe it’s not punishable by life in prison when you stuff a two year old girl in a little blue box with cement, store her in your bathroom for a couple of days, put her in storage for a few weeks, then set her adrift in the bay, but it damn sure should be.  
In a couple of weeks when they march this pathetic creature to prison, then it damn sure will be.