Attorneys say Las Vegas detectives used ‘made up’ evidence to pin murder on woman: ‘It wasn’t an accident’

LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — Two Metro police detectives used ‘evidence that they made up’ in order to pin a murder on a woman who, ultimately, was exonerated and declared innocent by the Clark County District Court, attorneys told a federal jury in Downtown Las Vegas Monday.

In opening statements of a federal trial alleging fabrication of evidence and intentional infliction of emotional distress, lawyers for Kirstin Blaise Lobato, 42, claim those two police detectives – Thomas Thowsen, now retired, and James Larochelle, now a deputy chief – “stole 23 years of her life” when they “generated the idea” that Lobato brutally murdered a homeless man in 2001.

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Lobato was convicted twice of killing that man, Duran Bailey, and brutalizing him when she was 18, first in 2002 and again in 2006 after the Nevada Supreme Court overturned the first conviction. In December 2017, a judge vacated Blaise’s conviction, relying on forensic evidence and an “uncontested alibi,” court documents say, leading to the eventual dismissal of all charges against her. Lobato was released from prison in January 2018 after over 16 years in the Nevada Department of Correction.

The Eighth Judicial District Court issued a certificate of innocence in October. Lobato filed this lawsuit against the police department and the two detectives in 2019.

“You will be the ones who decide what justice is in this case,” Elizabeth Wang, one of Lobato’s three attorneys, told the jury Monday.

Wang, whose opening statement to the jury lasted about a half hour, detailed how Lobato had been sexually assaulted at a Budget Suites on the east side of town on Memorial Day Weekend 2001, several weeks before Bailey’s murder. She had told various people various details about the assault. One of those witnesses revealed to police that Lobato had told people she stabbed her attacker’s genitals.

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Bailey, whose body was found on the west side of town behind a dumpster, was stabbed, his skull was cracked, his eyes were swollen shut and teeth had been knocked out of his mouth. His penis had been severed from his body after he was killed and was found several feet away.

“It was a brutal murder,” Wang said.

Police used Lobato’s admission that she had stabbed her attacker’s genitals, Wang said, possibly cutting it off, as a reason to interview her for Bailey’s murder.

“What are the chances?” Wang asked, that another purported attacker would also have his genitals stabbed. “It’s close enough for them.”

As such, the detectives asked leading questions and fed her information not known to the public, Wang said and distorted Lobato’s story and distorted or excluded certain evidence in order to make their case against Lobato. Some of that information, or lack thereof, ended up in arrest and officer reports, Wang said.

“This wasn’t negligence,” Wang said. “It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t an innocent mistake.”

Craig Anderson, the detectives’ attorney, told the jury many of Lobato’s statements seemed to implicate her in Bailey’s murder, saying she had admitted to cutting off her attacker’s penis. And when she got arrested, Anderson said, the detectives found a bat in her car.

When police were taking her from her family’s home in the small town of Panaca – where Lobato was later determined to be staying during the time of Bailey’s murder – Anderson said Lobato told her father, “I’m sorry, daddy. I told you I did something bad,” and her mother, “Mom, I did it, now I have to do what I have to do.”

Anderson also said that neither Lobato nor any of the several witnesses the police interviewed, mentioned that the attack sustained by Lobato was weeks before Bailey was found dead.

“No one had said there was a Memorial Day attack,” Anderson said.

The Federal District Court Judge Richard F. Boulware, II, said the trial should last five to six days.

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