Court seals Heimann murder photos

Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, April 7, 2004

Two Snohomish County judges have signed orders closing autopsy and crime scene photos of a 2001 murder victim to public view.

The orders were signed at the request of county prosecutors after a journalist made copies of evidence gathered by police in the April 2001 beating and stabbing death of Jerry Heimann, 64, of Everett, deputy prosecutor George Appel said Tuesday.

The journalist, from For Him magazine, viewed and made copies of the photos, which were gathered by police and the medical examiner to document what happened at Heimann’s Everett home and the damage done to his body with baseball bats and knives.

It’s unclear if any of those photos will be published.

From now on, it will be impossible for the public to view the 26 photos that were used as exhibits in the trial of Barbara Opel and hearings involving five teenagers she recruited to kill Heimann.

She was convicted last year of first-degree aggravated murder and will spend the rest of her life in prison.

Five teens also pleaded guilty to murder charges, four of them in adult court.

Appel said Heimann’s son doesn’t want the photos exposed to public view. Had the photos never been used as evidence, Appel said the graphic pictures never would have been available for public inspection in the first place because of privacy laws.

Superior Court judges Gerald Knight, who handled the Opel trial, and Charles French, the judge who decided which teens would be treated as adults, both signed orders to keep the photos out of public view, Appel said.