After confessing to killing his date, UMBC student John Gaumer wondered aloud to city homicide detectives if the crime would ruin his future job prospects.
“I hope this situation won’t make a huge mark in my future career,” Gaumer told investigators, according to a tape-recorded confession played in Baltimore County Circuit Court on Tuesday. “I have no priors, no history of violence or anything like that.”
Prosecutors played two confessions Tuesday ? one recorded on audio and another on video ? that Gaumer, 23, gave detectives in the Dec. 29, 2005 beating death of Josie Brown, 27, the mother of a young girl.
In the confessions, Gaumer described what considered a promising date with Brown in Baltimore after the two met on MySpace.com.
“I asked her ‘What was on her mind?’ and she said, ‘Sex,'” Gaumer told detectives. “I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll get lucky.'”
Gaumer said he spent more than $100 on Brown, including drinks at Tapas Teatro, Red Maple and Dionysus.
But after kissing, touching and agreeing to go to back to Gaumer?s dorm room with him, Brown changed her mind while riding back along Interstate 95 in Gaumer?s car, he told police.
“I was getting confused,” Gaumer said. “It seemed like the evening was going well.”
Brown took a call from an ex-boyfriend and began cursing at the former Kutztown University football player and biochemistry major.
He threw her phone out the window, and she scratched his face, Gaumer said.
The 6-foot-6, 225-pound Gaumer then threw her out of his vehicle and over a guardrail and beat her to death with his fist and a stick, he admitted.
After killing Brown, Gaumer removed her jaw, teeth, nose and fingers in an attempt to dismember her body so severely she could not be identified, he said. He carried her body parts back to his dorm in the woman’s purse.
“I tried to clean up the stuff I had in there like the nose, the jaw, stuff like that,” Gaumer told police.
Gaumer?s attorneys acknowledge he beat and killed Brown, but said he didn’t rape her and should not be convicted of first-degree murder because he did not plan the killing and was in a “blind rage” at the time. Under Maryland law, unless he is convicted of first-degree murder and either felony rape or armed robbery, he cannot face the death penalty, which prosecutors are seeking.
