Weeks later, John Gaumer would tell detectives that his date seemed to go quite well.
It was just before New Year?s Eve last year when Gaumer and the woman he met through MySpace.com hit the bars in Mount Vernon, bouncing between Red Maple and a pool hall. As he told police in a statement played Wednesday in court, Gaumer bought Josie Brown cigarettes and she kissed him. They drank red sangria and white wine.
Then, he said, they turned on each other.
“It was almost like a blind rage,” Gaumer, 23, told police in the video.
He is set to go on trial in January on murder and rape charges in the slaying of Brown, the mother of a young girl. A former UMBC student, Gaumer sat quietly next to his attorneys through a motions hearing and heard his words to police ? words the defense wants to keep from the jury.
“I was pretty much, like, shredding her clothes off,” Gaumer, who is 6 feet, 6 inches, told the detectives.
He said he had pulled his car over to the side of Interstate 95 and kicked Brown out after she announced she didn?t want to go home with him. He drove off, then turned around and came back.
“You were trying to degrade her?” a detective asked.
“Yes.”
Defense attorney Donald Zaremba told Baltimore County Circuit Judge Mickey Norman those statements were taken against Gaumer?s rights to an attorney and against self-incrimination.
Furthermore, Zaremba said, Gaumer was arrested though police only showed up at his apartment with search and seizure warrants.
Investigators discovered a 44-second voicemail message on Brown?s cell phone that helped lead them to Gaumer, prosecutor Susan Hazlett said. His phone had apparently by accident dialed hers during the attack, she said, recording the sounds of Brown “pleading for her life” in a ravine by the side of the highway.
Poised and polite throughout the lengthy recorded interview, Gaumer described to the detectives how he groped Brown?s naked body and rammed a stick into her genitals.
Late one night two weeks later, Gaumer said in the recording, he returned to the ravine and found her body how he?d left it, with her nose and teeth cut out, resting in a stream.
In the video, he slammed his fist into a table with a thud to show how at one point he hit her. But, he said, “I had my head turned. … I don?t have a good stomach for blood.”
A detective noted in the video that dating was a big part of Gaumer?s life.
MySpace, Gaumer replied, is for people you wouldn?t meet under normal circumstances.
