The Case of the Jealous Lover Boy

Gary Sedlacek is awakened by someone pounding on a side door to his home in downtown Phoenix's historic Coronado District.

It's about 5:30 on a dark, drizzly morning, February 19, 2005.

At the door is Shawn Drake, Sedlacek's 29-year-old neighbor from a few doors down on North Richland Street. Drake is dripping wet from the rain, and he's obviously distressed.

"I'm in real deep," he tells Sedlacek.

Sedlacek asks where Drake's lover and roommate, Tim Contreraz, might be.

At first, Drake won't say, but Drake soon admits that he's hurt Contreraz.

"Where did this happen?" Sedlacek asks.

Drake points to his residence, a tidy brick bungalow actually owned by Contreraz, a 41-year-old manager at a local communications firm. He explains how Contreraz had attacked him while he'd been crashed out on a living-room couch after a long evening of partying.

"So what happened?" Sedlacek asks.

Drake isn't quite ready to go there yet.

He says he's been driving around for the past hour or so in Contreraz's Kia SUV (license plate HOTTIME) trying to pull himself together.

Drake finally gives it up, saying he'd stabbed his boyfriend of several months.

Trying to keep his own composure, Sedlacek asks if Contreraz needs medical attention.

"No," Drake tells him. "I think he's dead."

"You can't just leave him in there," the neighbor says, advising Drake that someone must contact the police.

Drake says he doesn't like the idea, but Sedlacek calls 911 anyway.

The pair awaits the arrival of the Phoenix Police Department.

As a steady rain falls down on him, Shawn Drake sobs like a little child.

---

Officer Fred Howard drives onto Richland Street at 6:11 a.m., and sees two men in front of a home on the west side.

Shawn Drake soon tells the cop that he's stabbed his roommate, Tim.

Howard asks him if Tim is dead.

"I think so," Drake replies, adding that he'd left Contreraz's body in the kitchen.

Howard smells alcohol on Drake's breath, and notes that he's slurring his words.

Moments later, the suspect hands over the keys to his home. Three cops soon enter through the front door.

Officer Andrew Miller later writes in a report that, "While standing at the front door, I observed four to five black dildos of various lengths lying on the floor."

Using their flashlights, the cops walk around the sex toys through the living room into a small kitchen.

As they turn a corner, they see a man seated on the floor in a large pool of blood with his back against a wall, clad only in navy-blue-and-yellow boxing shorts.

Tim Contreraz obviously is dead.

The officers observe a huge hole in the right side of his bloody chest.

A Phoenix Fire Department paramedic comes in and checks for a pulse.

There is none.

Officer Miller steps into the backyard and looks around. Three small dogs run up to him expecting their breakfasts.

Then he sees something that stops him short.

It's an upright coffin in the northeast corner of the yard.

The police leave the body where they found it in the kitchen, and lock the front door behind them.

Tim Contreraz had been darkly handsome in life, small and fit, with piercing brown eyes. And despite a history of troubles with drugs, alcohol and personal relationships, he'd kept a good job, bought his own home, and maintained friendships with people from all walks of life.

Now his home -- and his body -- officially has become a cluttered crime scene.

It should take a few hours for the soon-to-arrive homicide detectives to secure a warrant that will allow them to search the residence and property. Until then, the Richland home will remain closed.

One of the street cops speaks to Gary Sedlacek, who says he knows of Tim Contreraz's history of methamphetamine use.

He says he's also experienced Contreraz's temper firsthand, but doesn't know much about Drake, other than he's Contreraz's latest lover and recently had been in trouble with the law.

And Sedlacek isn't talking about the brawl between Drake and Contreraz the previous October that Phoenix police had to break up.

This murder certainly isn't shaping up as a whodunit, but a whydunit, or, more precisely, did-Drake-have-the-legal-justification-to-havedunit.

---

Three homicide detectives from Phoenix's C-32 squad get to North Richland Street about 8 a.m. Surprisingly few onlookers are hanging around, and no one with a television camera is in sight.

"Whose idea was it to call us out at 7 in the morning in the pouring rain?" kids veteran Detective Jerry Laird, as he and other officers move under the shelter of a carport.

Patrol Sergeant Jennifer LaRoque briefs the detectives on the basics of the case. She also informs them that Shawn Drake is the maître d' at Durant's, the restaurant on Central Avenue, a mile or so west of the crime scene.

That turns out to be a bit off, as Drake actually has another job at the storied establishment.

The sergeant asks her officers if they want to add anything.

"Yeah," one of the younger cops says. "The dildos in there are huge!"

"What, you never seen one of them before?" asks Detective Alex Femenia, who's been assigned as the lead case agent.

"Yeah, but man!"

"Okay," Femenia says, tongue in cheek for the moment. "Let's go ahead and consider the dildos dangerous weapons for purposes of this investigation."

Now it's time to get serious.

Nothing can be done at the crime scene until the cops get their search warrant, which will cover both the home and Tim Contreraz's SUV.

An examination of the mysterious backyard coffin, too, will have to wait until a judge signs the warrant.

The three dogs hover near a gate to the carport, as if they're trying to listen in. One of them, a miniature whippet, whimpers softly.

Detective Femenia wants to interview Shawn Drake at the police station as soon as possible. That sounds good to Sergeant Patrick Kotecki, who's been the C-32 squad's supervisor for just a few months.

"Go for it," Kotecki tells Femenia. "See you back here later."

---

On the short trip to the Phoenix police station, Detective Femenia previews how he plans to proceed.

"I don't treat my suspect like an adversary," he says. "You want them to like you. If I raise my voice and get coercive, I get nothing. I had the same philosophy as a young patrol officer. I talked my way into most of my arrests."

Femenia is certain that "his" suspect will plead self-defense. What Drake says and how that meshes with what the crime scene reveals is likely to have great bearing on his future.

"Even if I get an inch, a minuscule admission, I want it," the detective says, as he pulls up to the station. "It's a fine line sometimes between making a case and it going away."

That leads to another thought.

"Human things do happen on our end. Honest mistakes. Down the road at trial, things can get twisted around to make you look like the monkey, not the [suspect]. Defense lawyers always try to turn some minor nothing into something big. Don't want to go there."

Alejandro Femenia was born into a blue-collar New England family, the youngest of seven. Both of his parents worked at one of the big hat factories then operating in Danbury, Connecticut.

Femenia got by both with his wit (the guy will talk about anything to anyone) and his athletic prowess, which later won him a football scholarship to Bowling Green University.

Now 52, he's the man with a million uproarious stories, many of them about the "monkeys" with whom he has to contend. (Loosely defined, a monkey is someone who can't do anything without screwing it up.)

Femenia moved to Arizona after finishing college in 1976, not having a clue, he says, of what he wanted to do with his life. Over the next 18 months, he worked variously as a counselor at a private school and as a bouncer at a bar near Arizona State University.

A retired FBI agent teaching at the college befriended Femenia, and suggested that the young man might make a good police officer. That sounded ridiculous to Femenia, who told his older pal that the only cops he knew were jerks.

But just for the hell of it in 1978, Femenia applied for work with the Phoenix Police Department. Next thing he knew, he was accepted at the police academy. Soon after he began his training, the kid with the Fu Manchu mustache, wingtip shoes and a big head of hair thought he'd made a mistake.

He was at odds with the military atmosphere and personalities in his midst.

"I'm one of those guys who never wanted to be a Marine," he says.

But Femenia passed muster and hit the streets as a patrol officer in south Phoenix. He took to the job better than he'd expected, finding that it often reminded him of the athletic arena.