Friend said Nixon admitted killing Collins

Nathan Shumaker said he was trying to fall asleep at his Marion home the night of April 12, 2010, when he got a phone call from Jeffrey Allen Nixon, a friend so close he still refers to him as his brother.

Nixon, 20, said there was an emergency. He needed Shumaker’s truck. He needed it fast.

Shumaker said he drove to the apartment complex on Two Mile Drive where Nixon stayed with friends Robert Lake and Karrolyn Robinson.

He found Nixon sitting on the couch, staring blankly at the floor. Shumaker asked his friend what the emergency was. Nixon told him that the man who lived upstairs — 49-year-old Wesley “Bubba” Collins — was dead.

“I asked him, ‘What do you mean, Wesley is dead?’” Shumaker recalled Tuesday. “He said, ‘The upstairs neighbor Wesley is dead. I killed him.’”

Shumaker’s testimony came on the second day of what is expected to be a five-day trial in Flathead District Court for Nixon, one of two men charged with the brutal bludgeoning death of Collins.

His attorney Nick Aemisegger said during his opening statement that it was 22-year-old Lake who committed the murder and that Nixon was nothing more than an unwilling accomplice.

Lake, already convicted of the murder, had a lot to say when called to testify Tuesday.

What he didn’t say was exactly what Nixon’s involvement in the murder was.

Lake, who is appealing his conviction to the Supreme Court after signing a plea agreement he claims not to have understood, put forward his own account of Collins’ death after a testy exchange with Deputy County Attorney Lori Adams.

Adams sought to confirm statements from Lake’s change of plea hearing when he said he and Nixon had equal parts in the murder.  After saying he didn’t recall his testimony, Adams asked him to read it from a transcript.

“It’s on the paper,” Lake said. “But I don’t remember.”

He later admitted to killing Collins, but with an enormous caveat.

“Yes, in self-defense we did,” Lake said.

For the first time, Lake later claimed under questioning from Aemisegger that Collins had come at him with a knife as he and Nixon approached Collins about money they believed he had stolen from their apartment.

“He stood up and from there he had a knife on his hip on the right side of the hip, and he took a swing,” Lake claimed, adding that police never collected the knife.

Lake said he grabbed a needle off the table in one hand and a hammer in the other, then stabbed Collins in the neck and struck him in the head. Robinson testified Tuesday that she saw Lake load a syringe with lidocaine and epinephrine, and she saw Nixon put the syringe in his pocket.

Not according to Lake.

“It was done in similarity to a boxer’s one, two punch,” he said.

Nixon might have hit him with a hammer as well, Lake said, but added that he was more focused on the blade being swung at his throat.

The theory was at odds with what Shumaker said he was told hours after the killing, the investigation by the Kalispell Police Department and Lake’s own prior testimony. Shumaker said Nixon told him that he and Lake went to Collins’ apartment in search of marijuana.

“He said that when they were in there, they were in there for 10 minutes or less, and then Wesley came back,” Shumaker said.

Nixon, he said, had told him that “he had struck Wesley Collins in the head” with a hammer when Collins became angry that they were in his apartment.

Shumaker allowed them to take the truck but was later cooperative and truthful with police who were investigating the murder.

“[I said] do what you have to do,” he said. “I want nothing to do with it.”

Nixon asked him to borrow the truck again the following day, he said.

“He was going to buy some lye and take it up to pour on the body,” Shumaker said. “He couldn’t find any, so he bought some sulfuric acid.”

Another man, 28-year-old Cody Naldrett, was called to the stand next to testify about the disposal of Collins’ body following the murder. He’s currently serving an 18-month sentence in the county jail. He said he went to Lake and Robinson’s residence, which was in the same complex, after Lake sent a text message indicating he needed help.

He said he followed Nixon and Lake up to Collins’ apartment.

“On my way up there, [Lake] said, ‘Don’t freak out,’” Naldrett said.

He saw Collins’  body spread out on the floor between the kitchen and living room areas of the unit, he said. A blood-soaked towel rested over Collins’ head, he said.

He said he saw two bloodied hammers, one by Collins’ head and another closer to his feet. Nixon got ropes, cords and blankets, and the three tied the body after wrapping it with blankets.

“They were talking about Wesley, and then I heard Nixon say that he started it,” Naldrett said.

They planned to toss Collins out the window. For an unknown reason, Naldrett said he tied the rope wrapped around Nixon’s body to a weight-lifting apparatus in the room, causing a loud thud when the body was tossed from the window.

The noise angered Lake, who flew into a rage, Naldrett said. He walked back to his apartment and said goodbye to his girlfriend before returning to the truck, where Nixon and Lake had already loaded the body, he said.

“I didn’t know if I was going to come back or not,” Naldrett said, adding that he felt threatened by Lake.

He described how Nixon drove, Lake sat in the middle and he sat on the passenger’s side as they drove over snow-covered roads to Patrick Creek Road west of Kalispell, where they traveled into the mountains.

They didn’t speak, Naldrett said, but smoked marijuana intermittently throughout the trip.

“We got him up in the trees and Lake said, ‘That’s good enough,’ so we left him there,” Naldrett said.

Naldrett later testified that he was fearful of Lake. While he admitted that his initial claims to law enforcement that he was forced to help at gunpoint were false, he said under questioning that he felt threatened.

“You were scared,” Aemisegger said. “You didn’t actually have a gun to your head, but it felt like it, didn’t it?”

“Kinda, yeah,” he replied.

Aemisegger asked if it was possible that Nixon was equally threatened by Lake.

“You have no reason to believe Jeff wasn’t thinking the same thing,” he said.

Naldrett said he didn’t.

Also testifying Tuesday was Robinson, who is serving an eight-year sentence in Montana Women’s Prison for deleting text messages from Lake’s phone during the investigation. She testified Monday that both Nixon and Lake had taken part in the murder. She was downstairs in her own unit when Collins was killed.

Flathead County Deputy Attorney Alison Howard and Kalispell Police Detective Michelle O’Neil read through text messages at the trial Tuesday. Robinson wrote in one message following the murder that she was worried about Nixon.

“Why Jeff? I did it,” Lake wrote.

“Jeff helped though baby,” Robinson replied.

“They can’t prove anything,” he responded.

“I married a bad boy and I know what I’m dealing with,” she wrote later. “He doesn’t.”

At 9:20 a.m. April 13, Lake received a text from a woman in Washington. He and the woman were apparently romantically involved, though Robinson said she was unaware until a Kalispell Police detective showed her correspondence between the two.

In one message to the woman, Lake wrote “I’m bleaching all of it, even the wall I slammed his head on with a sledge hammer.”

Lake is serving a 110-year sentence in Montana State Prison.

Nixon faces up to life in prison if convicted on all charges, which include deliberate homicide, burglary, robbery and tampering with evidence.

His trial is expected to end by Friday.