SEATTLE – The firefighters who tried to save 3-year-old Ashley McLellan, unconscious after being pulled from a pool on a cold winter night in 2003, noticed something strange about her stepfather.
He was calm, mostly dry, and never once asked them if she would live.
She didn’t live, and nearly four years later, that man, Joel Zellmer, has been arrested on charges he killed her in an attempt to collect on a $200,000 insurance policy. Ashley’s death was the last in a string of bizarre injuries to befall the young children of women Zellmer dated, investigators say.
“As a single mother with a small child, many of us hope for a partner to go through life with and for a father figure that will help set a good example for our children. Mr. Zellmer understood that only too well and he took advantage of my trust and hope,” Ashley’s mother, Stacey Ferguson, said in a statement released by her lawyer on Thursday.
“While nothing anyone can do can ever bring Ashley back and nothing can lessen the pain of her passing, it is some consolation that Joel Zellmer will now have to face the justice system.”
Zellmer’s arrest Wednesday night at his rural home near Auburn was his second in Ashley’s death, which initially was ruled an accident. In 2005, he was arrested while wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a loaded .357 handgun, but he was released pending further investigation.
This time, he has been charged in King County Superior Court with first-degree murder and first-degree theft. In the theft charge, he is accused of collecting $193,000 from the state Department of Labor and Industries after filing a bogus disability claim saying he had suffered brain damage and could not work. He is being held on $5 million bail pending his arraignment June 13.
In a declaration filed in the wrongful death claim, Zellmer said he was lying down inside at the time of the drowning.
“I cared for Ashley as if she was my own daughter financially and emotionally, providing her with her own room, feeding her meals, making regular payments for her daycare services, arranging potential doctor’s appointments and attending to her eyewear needs,” he wrote. Ferguson disputed that he provided such support.
Ashley was found unconscious in the pool at Zellmer’s home Dec. 3, 2003, while her mother was at work. Zellmer told the emergency workers an unlikely story, charging papers say: that the girl must have opened a sliding glass door, gone out onto the deck to eat some cake that Zellmer had left there, and then wandered down a flight of stairs to wash the cake off her hands in the unlit, uncovered pool. This on a 39-degree night, and Ashley was known to be afraid of the dark.
Three months earlier, just after Zellmer and Ferguson married, Zellmer took out a $200,000 life insurance policy on the girl, county sheriff’s Detective Sue Peters wrote in an affidavit for probable cause.
Investigators say Zellmer has a history of dating single mothers, urging them to take out insurance policies and harming their young children, including burning the hands of one and giving another an overheated sippy cup that left blisters on her lips.
Zellmer never collected any insurance money in Ashley’s death or for injuries suffered by his then-4-month-old stepson, Mitchel Komendant, in September 1990, said Dan Donohoe, a spokesman for the county prosecutor’s office.
According to charging papers, Zellmer took out insurance in late August 1990 that would pay up to $25,000 for anyone injured in his car should it be hit by an uninsured motorist. Just weeks later, he brought Mitchel to a hospital, saying the boy had been injured after the family’s car was rear-ended by a hit-and-run driver. The X-rays came back negative, but three days later, Zellmer asked doctors to order new X-rays.
The new X-rays showed that Mitchell had at least one, and possibly two, broken legs. Within a week, Zellmer tried to collect on the insurance policy – an effort he dropped after his wife signed a declaration saying there had been no car accident, Peters wrote.
Other incidents alleged in charging papers:
* In April 2000, Zellmer began dating Kelly Clauson, the mother of an infant son. Less than a month later, as she was preparing dinner, Zellmer’s 4-year-old son came into the kitchen and told her, “My dad needs you. Your baby was in our pool.”
She ran to the master bedroom, off of which was a hot tub, and saw her baby on the floor, soaking wet with a bluish pallor. Zellmer, who had been in the bedroom, claimed that the baby must have crawled into the hot tub, but Clauson knew her son could not have moved the thick, insulated cover over the hot tub.
That summer, in July, Clauson left Kyle with Zellmer briefly. When she returned, the boy’s hands were blistered with second-degree burns. Zellmer claimed the boy must have leaned against the hot glass of the fireplace, even though children usually pull away when they feel the warmth of hot objects.
* In the spring of 2003, Zellmer began dating Mia Teran, the mother of a 3-year-old daughter, Mia. He suggested taking out insurance policies for her and her daughter. The second time she left Zellmer alone with the girl, she burned her lips on a sippy cup. Teran broke off the relationship after finding a collection of pictures of other women with young daughters in Zellmer’s home office.
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