Jailed Engineer Says He’s Innocent of Murder Plot

It was October, 1985, and Nick Schulz was flying high.

The 32-year-old engineer was on the fast track at General Dynamics’ Electronics Division in San Diego. After less than two years with the defense contractor, he’d been promoted, vaulting past more senior co-workers into a $55,000-a-year job marketing GD products to the Air Force.

At the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles on Oct. 25, he hobnobbed with generals and Hollywood celebrities at the annual Air Force Ball. It was heady stuff for the Chicago-bred Schulz, the balding, brown-eyed electronics whiz son of a middle-level manager and a department store saleslady.

And Schulz was in the love of his life. He was madly in love with Janice Vuich, the manager of a Point Loma savings and loan. Divorced once, she was separated from her second husband when Schulz met her at a dinner party in April. The intervening months had been a wild fling--impulsive getaways to Mexico and the Caribbean, a snap decision to buy a house and live together in Del Cerro.

But on Oct. 29, a Tuesday night, Nick Schulz crashed.

He drove a rented Avis car to Ramona, to the ranch house occupied by Vuich’s soon-to-be ex-husband, PSA pilot John Kiracofe. A shot was fired. Kiracofe took a bullet in the abdomen. Schulz was arrested a half-hour later in Poway with a loaded semi-automatic pistol in his car.

Schulz has not spent a day as a free man since. He pleaded no contest to an attempted murder charge last March--coerced, he says now, by a lawyer he then fired--and lost an effort to have the plea set aside. In December, he pleaded guilty to a charge that he’d made a threatening phone call to Vuich from his cell at the County Jail.

Today, Schulz is imprisoned, at the beginning of an 11-year, 8-month term for the two offenses.

To the prosecution, it is a simple enough case to understand: An emotional misfit, fearing he was losing the woman he loved, plotted to murder the man he thought was stealing her from him.

But for those closest to Schulz--his friends and relatives and co-workers--the shooting remains a mystery. The Nick Schulz they know could not have plotted anyone’s murder. The Schulz they know is the All-American boy: the straight arrow, the hard worker, the dutiful son.

They wonder, too, if the case is more than a mystery. They wonder if it is a terrible wrong. Because Nick Schulz insists he is innocent.

Nicholas Kenneth Schulz was born in Chicago in April, 1953, the eldest of the three sons of Nicholas and Elfriede Schulz. He went to Lutheran school, and then to a public high school. His first job was as a pin-setter in a bowling alley. He liked music and he liked to take apart machines; he built stereo systems for himself and his friends.

Schulz turned his aptitude into a career, earning degrees in electrical engineering and business administration and taking a series of increasingly responsible jobs in the defense industry.

In 1984, he left the Midwest for San Diego and a job at General Dynamics. He worked 14-hour days and many weekends in Kearny Mesa, co-workers say. And in his free time, he fell in love with Janice Vuich.

In the past, friends say, Schulz had avoided headlong love affairs. He wanted his professional life in order and his earning power secure before getting too serious with a woman. But with Vuich, a 42-year-old blonde, it was different. Circumspection gave way to a tempestuous intimacy.

They spoke of being wed, according to Schulz’s former secretary, Carol Porcher. They spent hours in deep, philosophical talk, Schulz says, weighing the meaning of their affection, sorting out Vuich’s feelings about her two failed marriages.

In October, 1985, though, Vuich insisted on coming up for air. Her divorce from John Kiracofe would be finalized early the next month, barely two years after they had been married. She told Schulz she wanted to ponder her future.

“I told him that I needed time and space to think about what I needed to do for my life, what it was that I wanted in my life, without any emotional input from anybody,” Vuich later explained at a court hearing. (She declined to be interviewed by The Times.)

Schulz told his friends and family that he understood her need for reflection. His mother says she made plans to introduce Schulz to a couple of young women when he visited the family in Chicago early the next month, after a business trip to Europe.

Was Schulz losing something he would kill to get back? He insists not.

“Yes, I loved her,” Schulz said in the court statement, “but is love in itself an obsession? There were no ties, no demands, she was free, she was my friend, and I was concerned for her as a friend, and as such wanted her to find her own path and to be happy in life.”

Yet Schulz meddled. He called Vuich’s friends and her psychologist, asking them to help her resolve her confused feelings. And on Tuesday evening, Oct. 29, 1985--a few days after Vuich had declined to accompany him to the Air Force Ball--Schulz drove to Ramona to confront Kiracofe, a man he had never met, about the woman who bound their lives together.

According to the prosecution, it was a meticulously plotted attempt at murder, baroquely embroidered by an inflamed, illogical mind.

As laid out in a preliminary hearing and later summarized by Deputy Dist. Atty. James Pippin in court filings, the scheme began Oct. 25.

Schulz wanted to “case” Kiracofe’s Ramona house, Pippin contends, to know its layout before meeting Kiracofe face-to-face. So he rented a big white car, assumed the name “Joe Amilio” and, pretending to be a well-heeled investor, scheduled an appointment with Sharon Quisenberry, the Ramona real estate agent who was trying to sell the house and its surrounding acreage for Kiracofe. In court, Quisenberry identified Schulz as “Amilio.”

On Tuesday, Oct. 29, Schulz rented another car, a silver Chrysler, and outfitted it for the killing. With blue cardboard, he covered portions of the front and rear license plates. Inside, he placed two wine bottles filled with gasoline and two pieces of cloth--wicks for the firebombs with which he intended to blow up Kiracofe’s house, Pippin surmised. There was a disposable lighter to ignite the gas. There was a pair of gloves. There was a 9-millimeter automatic pistol. And there was a shoe box padded with a pillow--a homemade silencer for the murder weapon.

About 7 p.m., according to the prosecution account, Kiracofe heard a knock on his front door. A voice outside said there was a package for the pilot. When Kiracofe opened the door, he saw a man holding a box. In a split-second, Kiracofe was shot in the abdomen.

At 7:30 p.m., a sheriff’s deputy observed the silver Chrysler driving a little too quickly through Poway, westbound on the road from Ramona. Noting that the car’s license plate appeared to be altered, the deputy tried to pull the driver over.

The driver made an illegal turn, slowed down and leaned forward, appearing to hide something under the car seat. When the officer approached, he saw what the driver apparently was trying to conceal--a loaded semi-automatic pistol. The driver was Schulz. The deputy arrested him on a weapons charge.

Laboratory analysis linked a bullet shell found in Kiracofe’s kitchen to the gun found in Schulz’s rented car. The box with the pillow-silencer had a bullet-hole in one side. Sheriffs’ experts found gunpowder particles mixed with the pillow fibers.

Prosecutors charged Schulz with attempted murder, unlawful entry to commit murder and unlawful possession of explosives.

Suddenly, there were no more Air Force Balls. The trip to Europe and the visit to Chicago were off. Schulz was in the County Jail, with bond set at $500,000--a sum he couldn’t raise.

Vuich wanted nothing to do with him. She later testified that as soon as she heard Schulz had shot Kiracofe, she threw away everything Schulz had ever given her. She has not spoken to him since.

Kiracofe, meantime, recovered from his wounds and was discharged from hospital care after several days. Within a month of the shooting, he filed a $1-million civil suit against Schulz.

Schulz was bound over for trial after a preliminary hearing in December. Three months later, on the advice of his lawyer, Charles Bumer, Schulz pleaded no contest to the attempted murder charge.

It was the first step, Schulz says now, down a nightmarish path from which he has yet to turn back.

Schulz insists he was coerced to enter the plea--that Bumer threatened to have him declared incompetent unless he accepted a plea bargain. He says, too, that Bumer miscalculated the benefits of the bargain--that he said it would shave six to nine years off Schulz’s sentence at the trial, while in fact it saved Schulz only a year.

Schulz fired Bumer last July, as he awaited sentencing. “I am convinced beyond doubt that you have not been true to my cause,” Schulz wrote Bumer in a letter that became part of the court record.

A new lawyer, Allen Bloom, argued in September that Schulz should be allowed to withdraw the plea and go to trial. The soft-spoken engineer had been poorly represented, he contended, and investigation had unearthed evidence that could clear Schulz of the charges.

In a court hearing, Bumer acknowledged misstating the benefits of Schulz’s plea bargain, but vigorously denied threatening to try to declare Schulz incompetent to secure his plea. The district attorney’s office fought the defense move: plea bargaining would be threatened if a plea could be overturned because of a defense attorney’s mathematical errors.

And Schulz’s assertions of innocence were irrelevant, Deputy Dist. Atty. Paul Morley said in a brief.

“Obviously,” Morley wrote, “the plea was made in view of the overwhelming proof of his guilt.

Superior Court Judge David Gill rejected the defense motion--a decision that is under appeal. A week later, on Oct. 3, Judge Richard Haden handed Schulz the maximum penalty under his plea bargain: 11 years in state prison.

To Schulz, his life had become a tale from Kafka. He had a defense, a defense that had cost him $120,000 in fees for lawyers and investigators--his life savings, and his mother’s as well. Yet no court would listen to it. He was stripped of his lover, his career, his dignity, his freedom. And no one would listen.

“I am dealing with a justice system gone mad, where contrary to what we are taught, one is presumed guilty till proven innocent, with the burden on himself not his accuser,” he had said in court before his sentencing. “The system is a trap. Once in there is no escape. Even the truly innocent are not exempt from the steel jaws.”

What is his defense? It is an improbable story, laid out in angry statements Schulz has read aloud in court and in hundreds of pages of investigative reports. Some of it can be verified; much cannot. In some respects it raises unsettling questions.

Schulz begins where Pippin began, on Oct. 25. Schulz says he rented a car that day for one reason--for his business trip to the ball in Los Angeles. At 11:30 a.m., when Quisenberry testified he was leaving Ramona, Schulz’s ex-secretary, Porcher, says he was talking to her at General Dynamics. He has a dated, time receipt for lunch at a Kearny Mesa deli a few minutes later.

There was a “Joe Amilio,” Schulz says--but it was not him. In a written report, private investigators hired by one of Schulz’s attorneys say a co-worker in Quisenberry’s office, Lee Carrubba, told them Amilio had wavy black hair and a mustache, smelled of cologne and spoke with an accent.

(In an interview with The Times, Carrubba confirmed the accuracy of other parts of the investigators’ report. But she declined to answer questions about her reported description of Amilio.)

Schulz does not dispute going to Kiracofe’s home the following Tuesday--but he says he was invited by Kiracofe when he called the pilot to talk about Vuich on Monday evening, Oct. 28.

“I mentioned that I could see she still had feelings for him,” Schulz said, recounting the supposed conversation in a statement submitted to the court. “I told him he should show her how he really feels, to show her who he really is, to be honest with himself and his feelings, and honest with her . . . . “

According to Schulz, Kiracofe dismissed his sentimental musings as “quixotic and naive.” But Kiracofe said he would be willing to talk; they agreed Schulz would see him in Ramona the following evening.

Schulz had a busy day Tuesday. He rented the silver Chrysler--in preparation, he says, for a drive early the next morning to General Dynamics’ offices in Los Angeles to pick up his passport for the trip to Europe the following week.

Around 5 p.m., he went to an El Cajon bar to meet a friend, William Busk, with whom he sometimes shot at an East County pistol range. Busk had been by to visit over the weekend and had borrowed Schulz’s gun, thinking he might purchase it. As they had chatted over a game of pool, Schulz mentioned he was looking for a motor scooter to buy as a Christmas present for Vuich’s son Travis.

At the bar, Busk told Schulz he knew someone who was selling one and he introduced Schulz to his friend Ronnie. (Schulz isn’t sure of the man’s last name or his whereabouts today.) Schulz agreed to buy the scooter from Ronnie and they made plans for Ronnie to drop it off later in the evening. Schulz has a copy of a receipt he says Ronnie gave him for his deposit.

Afterward, as they were getting in their cars to leave, Busk returned the items he had borrowed from Schulz over the weekend: his semi-automatic pistol, a gray box with some gun accessories and the box with the pillow, which Schulz used for testing hand-packed rounds indoors.

Ronnie told Schulz to get some gasoline for the scooter, but Schulz didn’t have a gas can. So Busk emptied a couple of wine bottles he had in his car trunk, filled them with gas from a can in his car and gave them to Schulz.

(Busk gave Schulz’s investigators a statement confirming the account. Subsequently Busk was jailed in Riverside on a sexual battery charge. After initially agreeing to be interviewed by The Times, he later declined to meet with a reporter.)

According to Schulz, then, it was only by happenstance that he headed from El Cajon to Ramona equipped for the confrontation that followed.

He arrived at Kiracofe’s rural home at about 7 p.m. and saw a man in the front room, pointing a gun at the ceiling.

“I should have let my fears get the better of me and have turned back and rescheduled the meeting in a public place, such as a coffee shop,” Schulz said in one of his written statements to the court.

Instead, he grabbed his gun and placed it in the gray box--not the one with the pillow in it. His idea, he said, was to have it beside him while he talked with Kiracofe, in case there was trouble.

But there was no conversation. Kiracofe opened the door, reached for Schulz and socked him in the jaw. They tussled. Schulz reached into the box. He stumbled. The gun discharged.

Kiracofe retreated, and Schulz says he called to see if he was all right. But Kiracofe came toward him with a gun in his hand, and Schulz fled.

“My only thought at that time was to get back home,” he said in the written statement. “I could barely hold onto the wheel, I was shaking so badly. I wanted to get back and call Janice and tell her what happened. On the way home, I was stopped by the Poway police.”

Pippin pumps holes into Schulz’s account.

Did Schulz case Kiracofe’s house? Pippin says eyewitnesses--Quisenberry and a Mexican farmhand who worked for Kiracofe--identified him as “Joe Amilio.”

Did Kiracofe invite Schulz to Ramona the night of the shooting? Pippin says there are no telephone toll records of a call by Schulz to Kiracofe’s home.

Did Schulz go to El Cajon to buy a scooter before driving to the meeting with Kiracofe? “There ain’t no scooter,” Pippin says. “Where is it?”

Then there is the ballistics evidence. In a trial, experts would testify about their varied interpretations of gunpowder traces and pin markings. In the absence of a trial, however, there are two versions of the evidence--and lingering doubts about which is correct.

Schulz and his lawyers note police experts found that the chemical composition of the gunpowder in the pillow-box did not match the gunpowder from the unfired bullets in Schulz’s gun. Schulz says the hole in the box resulted from a test firing years before. The defense conclusion: Schulz did not shoot Kiracofe with a pistol hidden in the box.

Perhaps, the defense says, Schulz did not shoot the pilot at all. Two bits of information point to that possibility. First, a witness told defense investigators he heard three shots that night, not just the one fired by Schulz’s gun. Second, while Schulz’s clothing revealed no traces of gunpowder matching the powder in Kiracofe’s wound, a defense expert found matching gunpowder residue on the sleeve of the sweater Kiracofe was wearing when he was shot.

Taken together, the defense contends, the evidence suggests Kiracofe, in pursuing Schulz through his house, may accidentally have shot himself.

Pippin says he was unaware of tests on a sweater. But he argues that the ballistics analysis doesn’t turn on such subtleties.

Investigators, he noted, found a bullet shell in Kiracofe’s house--the shell from the hardball round that appeared to have caused the pilot’s injuries. Pin markings on the shell matched markings produced by test firings of Schulz’s pistol.

And if the gunpowder in Schulz’s unspent shells didn’t match the powder in Kiracofe’s wound? Well, Pippin says, that’s because the other rounds were hollow-point bullets, packed with a different powder. He figures Schulz planned to use the hardball round to shoot the lock off Kiracofe’s door, if necessary, and the hollow-points to kill him.

“His story is bull,” Pippin said. “It’s not true. He’s lying. The facts don’t fit it. It doesn’t make sense. And nobody believes it, hopefully.”

Nobody but Schulz? “He may believe it,” Pippin allowed.

“Only John and I truly know what happened that night,” Schulz wrote last April in a tortured letter to Vuich--a letter she never answered. “I ask, why does John not tell the truth?”

Prosecutors believe the career pilot has told the truth about the shooting. Pippin describes him as an innocent, stalked prey--a man who was divorcing Schulz’s girlfriend, not trying to win her back.

“John Kiracofe’s involvement in this was only in Schulz’s mind,” Pippin said. “He and Janice were through.”

Central to Schulz’s defense, though, is the assumption that Kiracofe is lying. To make the assumption plausible, Schulz and Bloom have painted him in court as a sometime drug dealer who mistreated his first wife, his daughters and Vuich’s son and terrorized his neighbors with guns and threats.

On his lawyer’s advice, Kiracofe declined to be interviewed for this story. But Pippin said Schulz’s allegations were “all bull----.”

If Kiracofe is telling the truth, then Schulz is lying. And every day he fights for exoneration, he denies himself and his family whatever peace might come from admitting his guilt.

Pippin says that denial is part of what makes Schulz so dangerous.

Schulz “has blamed everyone else for the situation he presently finds himself in,” Pippin wrote in a statement filed with the state Department of Corrections. “He has refused to accept responsibility and remains obsessed with the thought that the victim and his ex-wife are responsible for his imprisonment.”

What happened to Nick Schulz, mild-mannered engineer and good son? The people who know Schulz best cannot accept Pippin’s depiction of him as a maddened, would-be killer.

Alan Osterman has known Schulz since they were high school seniors in suburban Chicago. “He is probably the most consistently normal-behaving person I know,” Osterman said in a statement filed with the court on Schulz’s behalf. “He is always on an even keel, with no sign of irrationality at all.”

Elfriede Schulz says her son was a stabilizing force in the family. “He’d have excuses for people, rather than getting upset,” she said in an interview.

Co-workers could not believe Schulz had been arrested. “There were no clues to him being mentally unbalanced or no clues as to him having a violent nature,” said Michael Vaughan, a business development manager for General Dynamics. “The general feeling was that people were dismayed, and they were going, ‘What? Are we sure it was Nick that did this?’ ”

Last spring, a Department of Corrections assessment team concluded that Schulz posed a danger to the public. But team member Terrill Holland, a psychologist, recommended that Schulz be released on probation--that he had no “propensity” for criminal behavior.

Psychologist Amy Lamson of San Diego evaluated Schulz at the request of the defense. She reported her conclusion: “The results of this evaluation strongly support the possibility that Mr. Schulz is telling the truth about the shooting, as ridiculous as his story sounds. He is the type of person who would foolishly get himself in a dangerous situation that he has no business being in with the mistaken notion that he is going to be doing good.”

Those who are certain of Schulz’s guilt, however, say the psycho-babble needlessly complicates a simple story. For them, Schulz really isn’t that difficult to understand.

To Janice Vuich, he is a chameleon--a man she thought she knew, but who turned out to be more malevolent than she ever imagined.

“Mr. Schulz told me that he had the ability to change his personality at will,” she said during her testimony at Schulz’s preliminary hearing. “Mr. Schulz told me that when he decided that he wanted something that he got it, no matter what it took.”

To Jim Pippin, Schulz is a man who cracked. “I think it’s very clear that Schulz has a mental problem--a problem in his thinking, in his reasoning,” Pippin said. “Isn’t that why most crimes are committed?” he asked. “Because people don’t think logically?”

Mike Vaughan has tried to think logically about his friend’s downfall. He attended many of the early court hearings, and he acknowledges that the case against Schulz is formidable--”almost to the point where it’s hard to ignore,” he says.

But Vaughan cannot find a perspective on the affair that makes any sense.

“I’ve tried to sort it out,” he said. “The more one thinks about the whole incident, the harder it becomes to sort out. Because there’s not a lot of things that make sense in this case.”