The Karen Grammer Story

Body Count

When Smit left the apartment that afternoon, he knew that he was onto something. He knew he had at least two murders that seemed, at least on the surface, to be linked. Slowly, word was starting to bubble up from the streets that there might have been more. A few weeks before Karen Grammer's murder, on June 19, a 29-year-old cook at the old Four Seasons Hotel had been shot almost execution-style. That case had stalled. So had the strange murder of another young soldier from Fort Carson, whose body was found in a secluded spot near Prospect Lake. The soldier had been killed with a bayonet.

Bayonet similar to murder weapon

Smit, along with a young prosecutor named Chuck Heim, started pounding the streets, and they learned more about Corbett and Glenn, the two men at the center of the gang.

Corbett was by far the harder of the two, Smit would later say. "He was in the military, he was gung ho," and he prided himself on his talents in the martial arts, karate in particular. At his core, "Corbett was a man completely without a conscience...he had no conscience whatsoever." What's more, he was prone to sudden, murderous impulses, Smit said, capable of "going off or on like a switch."

Michael Corbett

As an example, Smit cited an incident that happened before Corbett's and Glenn's killing spree began in earnest. "He ran over some guy with a tank," Smit said. "That's a true story. He didn't like the guy and he ran him over with a tank." The victim was not killed, though he was seriously injured, and Corbett, an enlisted man, was never charged or disciplined for the incident, Smit said because the Army "believed him that it was an accident."

Perhaps that incident planted in Corbett the sense that he was invincible, that he could, in Smit's words, "do anything and kill anyone." It was a sense of murderous entitlement that, as authorities would later learn, he demonstrated publicly in the summer of 1975 when he went after a rival for the affections of a young woman in Colorado Springs. His rival had made the mistake of taking a potshot at Corbett a few days earlier. In retaliation, Corbett and his crew hunted the man down and, when they found him partying at a local nightclub, Corbett sprayed the crowded place with gunfire, killing his rival with no concern for the innocent clubbers in his path.

Most of Corbett's followers were just that, young men who were drawn to the charismatic killer, but who lacked his murderous instincts. As he became more deadly, they became more frightened of him, Heim would later say. Their fear that they might face the same fate as Watson, as much as any single factor, cemented them to their murderous mentor, Heim has recalled.

Glenn was the exception. Though he lacked Corbett's force of personality, and didn't share his almost psychopathic detachment, he was Corbett's devoted disciple. "Glenn was a follower, just a follower, but he was there, he was present when Corbett killed and so he thought he could kill," Smit said.

Robert Russel

Within a short time, Smit and Heim, who would later be joined by Robert Russel, the prosecutor who later worked on the case of serial killer Ted Bundy, began to suspect that Corbett and Glenn and the others in their crew had launched an all-out killing spree. There were, by now, at least five murders that they were nearly certain all or some of the men had committed while working as a unit. They have also been considered suspects, but never charged, in two others, a cab driver who was killed on the base at Fort Carson about the same time as the others, and another young soldier who had been gunned down in the middle of the night at a rest stop about 10 miles from the fort, also around the same time.

But they needed more to close in on the crew. Soon, they caught the break they needed.