Logan has difficulty getting an erection. Boyden once had breast implants. Logan drinks in the morning. Boyden keeps condoms in her bedroom. Logan's front teeth are false. Boyden isn't a virgin.
Ten jurors, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter D'Angelo and assorted court watchers learned during The State of Arizona v. Michael Richard Logan how Logan, a 41-year-old electrician, and Boyden, a 35-year-old finance analyst, met at a bar and spent the afternoon and early evening of August 12, 1996, together. By the end of that day, Boyden was hospitalized with a broken nose; cut forehead, eyebrow and lip; bruised and swollen neck, throat and larynx; loose teeth; and severely bruised breasts. A doctor testified that Boyden's breasts were covered with bite marks.
Logan was arrested three days after the incident and interviewed by police. A grand jury later failed to indict him on charges of sexual assault and aggravated assault; there had been no medical proof of rape, and incomplete medical evidence. County prosecutors had refused to reopen the case after Boyden gave them additional testimony and medical records.
Since then, Boyden had become accustomed to telling her story to strangers. She told it again and again to various law enforcement agencies--and finally to New Times ("Not Victim Enough," March 27, 1997)--before county prosecutors decided to take action against Logan.
The day before New Times' initial story about Boyden was published, City of Scottsdale prosecutors charged Logan with simple assault, an offense that carries a maximum jail sentence of six months. After the story appeared, county prosecutors charged Logan with counts of aggravated assault and simple assault.
County officials assigned the case to Lou Stalzer, a veteran prosecutor who now runs the county attorney's criminal division in its southeast office in Mesa. The trial began on February 11. Kim Boyden had been pressing for her day in court for 19 months.
He calls it rough sex; she calls it a beating. The jury's task is to determine who is telling the truth. Logan is charged with one felony count of aggravated assault for the broken nose, and one misdemeanor count of simple assault for the bruised, bitten breasts.
On each of the five days of the trial, Logan sits at the defense table, looking edgy, as though he doesn't feel he belongs there. Boyden sits in the first row behind the prosecution table, avoiding Logan's eyes and watching the jury. She's perfectly still as prosecutor Lou Stalzer and defense attorney Howard Snader show enlarged color photographs of her injuries--her bruised breasts, gashed forehead and broken nose. She left the courtroom once, visibly shaken, in the middle of Logan's testimony, but returned later that afternoon.
Stalzer begins his opening arguments by explaining that this is not a case of identity--Logan readily admits he was at Boyden's home--but rather a case of "causation." He places a snapshot on a machine at the prosecution's table, and there is Kim Boyden's swollen left breast, discolored by bruising, on a large television monitor. He shows other photos of her swollen face and bruised neck.
"You're going to have to decide," Stalzer tells the jury. ". . . Is that consensual sex?"
As will be the case throughout the trial, the jurors stare back. The seven men and three women watch stony-faced, as though it were a tennis match.
Defense attorney Howard Snader--who practices with the Phoenix firm Phillips & Associates--explains to the jury that it's not enough to prove that Boyden's nose was broken in his client's presence. It has to be proven that the injury was caused intentionally, knowingly or recklessly. "It is an unfortunate set of circumstances that led to the set of photographs you've seen," Snader admits, but, he says, it's not intentional.
Kim Boyden takes the stand in a navy blue suit, her brown hair up. When she smiles, she's cheerleader pretty, but today she's grim; her features barely move as she speaks. Boyden's eyes get red and damp as she tells her story, but she doesn't cry. She's told the tale so many times, she says, that she's numb.
Prosecutor Stalzer leads Boyden through the events of August 12. She awoke and drove half an hour to work, in downtown Phoenix. Once at work, she received a call that her home alarm had gone off. She drove home immediately.
At home, Boyden walked to the master bedroom and took her loaded gun from a drawer. She was on the cordless phone with the alarm company, checking behind doors and curtains.
Boyden walked outside, and the gun discharged. "My heart fell in my stomach and I scared the alarm guy," she recalls.
"I was shook up, I wanted to calm down," Boyden says, so she drove to Eli's, a bar/restaurant on Scottsdale Road. About an hour later, Logan walked in. He sat at the bar, too; eventually, they started talking and sat next to each other.
Boyden told Logan about her new house. He said he was an electrical contractor. She asked him for advice about ceiling fans.
He told her he had been a Green Beret in the Army, so she felt safe. When he asked her to drive with him to drop off some legal papers, then to dinner at another Scottsdale bar/restaurant, Marco Polo, she said okay, but insisted on driving them in her car.
Logan and Boyden dropped off the paperwork, and headed for Marco Polo. They ordered more drinks, then Boyden's pager went off. She left the bar, called her friend Robin, and returned to tell Logan that Robin would join them for dinner. He said no, he wanted to return to his car. So they left.
On the way back to Eli's, Boyden says, Logan asked if they could stop by her house so he could check it out for ceiling fans. They pulled into her garage, got out of the car. She told him to wait while she shut off the alarm.
Boyden punched in the alarm code. And that, she tells the jury, is the last thing she remembers before "being face down on my bed. Nude. . . . I had a hand around my neck and I had a man . . . on top of me," penetrating her sexually. She screamed repeatedly, "No, stop," and Logan put his hand over her nose and mouth, trying to suffocate her. She blacked out.
He left the room, and she awoke, stood up. He walked in and "I saw him swing his fist back and he punched me in the face." She heard ringing, and was back on her stomach on the bed. She passed out again, and awoke, vomiting in the middle of the bed.
She woke again, and heard water running. She got up and fled naked out the Arcadia door to her backyard, and down the street.
"I thought he was trying to kill me," Boyden says.
Defense attorney Howard Snader repeatedly grills Boyden on the number of drinks she had that day, how she handles stress, how she knew she'd been raped. Stalzer's objection to the last question is overruled. Boyden answers, in monotone: "At the time, I was 34 years old. No, I was not a virgin."
She says she assumes Logan was running water in the tub to drown her.
The prosecution's other witnesses are a police officer who cared for Boyden at the scene, the neighbors she ran to for help, and the two doctors who treated her injuries.
Scottsdale police officer Ruth Naholm says she found Kim Boyden wrapped in a sheet in the hallway of the home of Boyden's neighbor Karol Rogers. Boyden was confused, disoriented, upset. She told Naholm she had kissed Logan good night at the door, but he then attacked her in the hallway, continuing in the bedroom.
The next witness, Rogers, recalls that she was unloading bags from a car when she heard a voice. "I heard real low words," Rogers recalls: "Get a gun, get a gun, he's gonna kill me, get a gun."
She turned and saw Boyden, stark naked. Rogers handed her a pillow to cover herself and walked her into the house.
Tija Supre was staying with Rogers.
"She came basically into my arms," blood dripping into her eyelashes from the cut on her forehead, almost matting her eyes shut, says Supre. She asked Boyden if she'd been raped. She said, "maybe, sort of," then "some."
Stalzer then presents two physicians who treated Boyden's injuries. Her gynecologist, Brian Finkel, tells the jury he examines thousands of women a year, and "I have never seen one of my patients' breasts as severely traumatized as hers. . . . I've never seen a woman who looked like someone tried to chew her breasts off." The bruising to her breasts was still apparent October 4, when he saw her again, Finkel says.
The second doctor to testify, plastic surgeon James Bertz, says he saw Boyden a week after the alleged beating. He noted "raccoon eyes," swelling in the vocal cords and windpipe and a broken nose, which he repaired.
And the state rests its case.
Defense lawyer Howard Snader's witnesses include the emergency-room doctor who treated Boyden, the Scottsdale police detectives who investigated the case, a bartender from Marco Polo who saw Boyden and Logan making out, and another doctor whom Snader pays $550 an hour to review medical records and provide testimony.
Kurt Solem, the emergency-room physician at Scottsdale Memorial Hospital-Osborn who treated Kim Boyden August 12, says there was "no visible evidence of trauma to the vagina."
Tammy Abney, a bartender at Marco Polo, recalls seeing Boyden and Logan at the bar the afternoon of August 12. They were kissing, Boyden was sitting on Logan's lap, she says. "It seemed passionate. It was making out."
The professional witness, plastic surgeon Steven Gitt, testifies that after reviewing Boyden's medical records, it's more likely she sustained her cut forehead and broken nose from falling off the bed than from being punched in the face.
Mike Logan sports wire-rimmed glasses, a mustache and short auburn hair with a bald spot. Though stoop-shouldered, he's a big man: 6'4", 225 pounds. On August 12, 1996, he tells the jury, he awoke at 5 a.m. and went to work. He couldn't concentrate, though, because he was in a custody battle over his 3-year-old daughter and was acting as his own lawyer.
He left work, went to court to deliver some papers, and wound up at The Vine, a bar/restaurant in Scottsdale. He drank Black Russians (vodka and Kahlua) and ate some potato skins, then headed to another bar, Eli's, around 12:30. Kim Boyden was seated at the bar, talking to the bartender.
He says Boyden had at least five double vodkas on the rocks. (She disputes that, saying it was far less.) Eventually, Logan realized he needed to drop some papers off at his ex-girlfriend's attorney's office before 5. He can't recall who suggested Boyden join him on the drive to the lawyer's office. She drove them in her car.
After the lawyer's office, Boyden wanted to go somewhere other than Eli's. Logan suggested Marco Polo.
"We sat down," Logan recalls, ordered a drink, and "she indicated to me she really liked me. I indicated I really liked her." She kissed him. He responded. "She sat on my lap at one time and she used her hand, stroking my inner legs."
Logan says he was getting embarrassed, and he needed to go home. Boyden wanted him to come home with her. He says he turned her down. But, he says, she insisted and drove them to her house. She turned off her alarm, they went inside, she fed her cat.
And then, Logan says, "She embraced me, we started kissing. She started fondling me, I started fondling her. . . . She then said, 'Come with me,'" and led him to the bedroom.
They had foreplay on the bed for 10 or 15 minutes. He fondled and sucked her breasts. Did he bite her? "If I did, it wasn't severe enough to cause puncture marks."
He says she gave him a condom and asked him to make love to her, but he couldn't achieve an erection. Logan explains that he is on medication for headaches that, when combined with alcohol, inhibits sexual performance.
During this encounter, did Boyden say, "no, stop"? Snader asks.
No, Logan says, never.
Logan tells of repeated episodes of Boyden vomiting and passing out. He watched to be sure she didn't choke. (At this point in the testimony, Boyden gets up and leaves the courtroom.)
Logan says Boyden got up, saw the vomit, ripped the sheets from the bed and threw them to the floor, cussing. He says she whipped a standing fan toward him; he ducked and it grazed his head.
"She had a real wild look at me, and came at me. She was attacking me. Attacking me is what she was doing."
He grabbed her, placing her on the bed and putting his arm over her chest, holding her down. She passed out again.
Then Boyden sat up and lunged off the bed, smacking her head on the floor--Logan smacks his hand on the witness stand, for effect.
In his haste to help her, Logan "tripped over some clothing that was on the floor and landed on her." That, he says, caused the cuts on her forehead and lip, and her broken nose.
Logan started running water in the bathtub, to clean her up. He went to the kitchen to get ice for her face.
"Next thing I know, I saw her running naked outside."
Logan testifies that he got scared, turned on the lights in the house, got dressed and left.
Prosecutor Stalzer grills Logan about his recollection of events at the trial, compared with those in the transcript of his taped interview with Scottsdale police days after the incident.
Logan tells Stalzer he believes the interview was not transcribed correctly--indeed, the tape no longer exists, police say--and denies many of the statements he allegedly made in the 70-plus-page transcript.
For example, Logan says, he did not tell police the combination of his headache drugs and alcohol make him "unstable," elevate his anger and can send him into an uncontrollable rage.
Defense attorney Howard Snader closes by reminding the jury that it doesn't matter whether they like his client.
"You can love him. You can hate him. . . . But this case is based on the rantings of someone hours after the fact, with a blood alcohol level of 2.04," he says.
Prosecutor Lou Stalzer concludes by slapping the now-familiar photos of Boyden up on the monitor again, one by one, asking, "[Is this] 'kind of, sort of' an injury?" Again and again he asks the question, points at a new snapshot.
"And you can go on and on," he says, turning to face the jury. "Hardly a 'kind of, a sort of' injury. . . . And surely one that was not consensual."
Stalzer concludes, "As much as Mike Logan wants justice, so do the people of Maricopa County and Kim Boyden."
Whatever you decide, he tells them, will be right.
The following day, after just one hour of deliberation, the jury returns its verdict. Aggravated assault, not guilty. Simple assault, guilty.
Boyden is pleased, although she's frustrated that the jury didn't believe Logan broke her nose.
"I think what he did was barbaric. Animals have more respect for each other. He's just a pig," she says.
She says she'll continue to work with the Center Against Sexual Assault, warning other women to be careful. The trial was grueling and stressful, Boyden admits, but she's glad she pushed for justice.
"[Logan] will remember this for the rest of his life, and he'll think twice about it before he does this to another girl," she says.
After repeated requests to tell his story, Logan declines an interview request at the conclusion of the trial, saying he wants to wait until after the verdict--and then doesn't return calls.
Michael Logan's sentencing is scheduled for March 27.
Contact Amy Silverman at her online address: [email protected]
