Woman charged after cold-case unit investigates 2004 death of her boyfriend in Jefferson County

Aug. 12—UPDATED at 10:45 a.m. with detail from detective who arrested Weiss.

ST. LOUIS — Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt announced here Thursday morning that his office's cold-case unit helped solve a Jefferson County murder case from 2004.

Alice Patricia Weiss, 65, of Columbia, Missouri, was arrested and charged Wednesday with second-degree murder in the shooting death of her boyfriend 17 years ago.

Authorities allege Weiss used a .22-caliber handgun to shoot James Summers in the head and back on April 27, 2004. Summers, 47, died on the driveway of his home on Shenandoah Drive in Dittmer, Missouri.

Authorities haven't disclosed a possible motive.

At a news conference at the Old Post Office in downtown St. Louis, Schmitt said this is second case investigated by the Cold Case Unit that has resulted in charges since it was established in December.

Schmitt said adding investigators to old cases, "a new set of eyes," resulted in the murder charge.

Schmitt's office wouldn't say specifically how many other unsolved homicides the unit is investigating or if any of them are in St. Louis.

The St. Louis Police Department has its own unit to handle cold cases in the city, said department spokeswoman Evita Caldwell. The city's investigators haven't asked for additional outside assistance from Schmitt's office.

Schmitt said his office worked with the Highway Patrol and other agencies to get an inventory of unsolved cases in the state. He said there are dozens.

"We're focused on murders," Schmitt said.

"I think it's important to make sure we're delivering justice even as these cases are sometimes decades old," Schmitt said.

The Cold Case Unit, with veteran prosecutors at the helm, worked with Jefferson County sheriff's deputies on the Summers case. Jefferson County Sheriff Dave Marshak was commander of the sheriff's detective bureau in 2011 when he read up on the Summers' file and decided it deserved another look. He brought the case to Schmitt's office in December, shortly after the unit was formed.

"After hearing about the Cold Case Unit and the aggressive prosecutors who were assigned to it, I knew it was a match for us," Marshak said in an interview. The case was "reworked from the beginning" and new evidence was discovered, although Marshak didn't elaborate.

Summers' death was covered in just five sentences in the Post-Dispatch two days after he died, with news that police were questioning a woman but awaiting autopsy results before deciding to file charges.

The charges never came, and authorities didn't explain Thursday what evidence they collected recently to warrant charges now. Weiss was always the prime suspect and police said their investigation over the years had produced no other credible suspects.

Jefferson County sheriff's Detective Kevin Sullivan was among a half-dozen officers who arrested Weiss as she left her home in Columbia, Missouri, on Wednesday.

"She was somewhat surprised, matter-of-fact about the whole thing," Sullivan said in an interview.

Summers worked in information technology at the time of his death. Weiss also worked in the IT field but also in the insurance business, Sullivan said. She is now retired.

One newer bit of evidence, albeit from 13 years ago, comes from a cousin of Weiss. Schmitt said the cousin told investigators that Weiss confided to him during a Walmart shopping trip in 2008 that Weiss planned to blame the killing on her now-deceased father, who had dementia.

In a probable cause statement filed with the murder charges this week, police said Weiss told them she heard gunshots while she was showering and went to investigate. She also tried to wash her hands before letting police swab for gunshot residue, police said.

Detectives recreated her account of hearing gunshots from the shower. They put an audio recording device in the shower and fired the handgun. The detectives decided the shots "were barely audible and that it would be incredibly hard to recognize the sounds of gunfire unless you knew exactly" what to listen for, court records said.

Weiss told police she stored the gun, unloaded, in a bedroom closet and hadn't fired it in years, then later changed her story to say she fired it earlier that morning, authorities say. Marshak said the shower reenactment and gunshot residue test were all done as part of the original investigation.

Court records do not list an attorney for Weiss. She was being held Thursday in the Jefferson County Jail without bail. The prosecutor on the case is Dean Hoag, who was as a state prosecutor before working as an assistant U.S. attorney for years.

Shortly after the Cold Case Unit began its work in December, Schmitt announced charges in the 1986 strangulation of Kristen Edwards in Franklin County. Kenneth T. Avery Jr. of Villa Ridge, Missouri, is awaiting trial for second-degree murder.

"We are still committed to working with others to get the current violent crime issue under control," Schmitt told reporters Thursday. "But we absolutely must not forsake the victims of violent crime whose cases have not gone solved and whose remain cold."

Kim Bell covers breaking news for STLtoday.com and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Follow her on Twitter here.

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