The defense team for Mark Redwine, who is accused of killing his son, made several motions in court Friday about the handling of evidence in his case, and the team also asked a judge to ban media interviews with Redwine while he is incarcerated pending a trial.
Redwine, 55, is suspected of killing his 13-year-old son, Dylan Redwine, in November 2012. A grand jury issued an indictment in July accusing him of second-degree murder and child abuse resulting in death. He faces 16 to 48 years in prison if convicted on either count.
District Court Judge Jeffrey Wilson said he expected to issue written rulings on the defense team’s motions early next week.
Redwine, who appeared for the hearing wearing an orange jail-issued jumpsuit, did not speak.
In addition, Wilson set a hearing for 11 a.m. Dec. 15 to review the defense team’s analysis of what amounts to about 13,000 pages of evidence.
“Law enforcement and the prosecution have had 4½ years to conduct an investigation. We’re roughly 1½ months into ours,” said Justin Bogan, one of the public defenders representing Redwine.
District Attorney Christian Champagne said he had no objections to Wilson’s scheduling of the Dec. 15 review of the defense team’s progress analyzing the evidence.
Most of the defense team’s motions centered on how evidence will be tested, including a request that the defense be allowed to have its own experts present during tests.
The defense also requested that the La Plata County Sheriff’s Office deny media requests for interviews with Redwine in the lead-up to an eventual trial.
If the defense is prepared to move forward with the case at the Dec. 15 hearing, Wilson would likely schedule an arraignment, a hearing in which Redwine’s attorneys would enter his plea in the case.
Redwine was arrested July 21 in Bellingham, Washington. He eventually waived his right to an extradition hearing, which allowed the Sheriff’s Office to retrieve him and bring him back to Colorado.
Redwine’s arrest came as a major development in the 4½-year investigation into the disappearance and death of Dylan Redwine.
On Nov. 18, 2012, Dylan arrived by airplane from Colorado Springs for a court-ordered visit with his father. The boy was reported missing the next day, setting off several searches by law enforcement and the community for any signs of him.
Some of his remains were found in June 2013 in a remote location about eight miles by road from Redwine’s home, north of Vallecito Reservoir.
The Sheriff’s Office named Redwine a “person of interest” in August 2015, and hikers found Dylan’s skull on Nov. 1, 2015, about 1½ miles from where some of his remains were previously found.
Champagne called it a “turning point” in the investigation. Prosecutors presented their case to a La Plata County grand jury July 17-19, and the grand jury handed down its indictment July 20.
According to the indictment, Dylan’s blood was found in Redwine’s living room and a cadaver-sniffing dog detected the sent of a deceased body in Redwine’s living room, washing machine, the bed of his pickup and on the clothes Redwine reportedly wore the night Dylan went missing. Dylan’s skull had injuries consistent with blunt force trauma in two locations. It also had two small markings consistent with knife markings, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors have declined to discuss a motive in the case. According to the indictment, Dylan didn’t want to visit his father and had argued with him during a previous visit. Dylan also had seen “compromising pictures” of his father and reportedly planned to confront his father about those pictures during their visit, according to the indictment. Prosecutors have declined to describe the contents of the photographs.
