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Joline Krueger Gutierrez: After all this time, that Christmas crash still echoes

By Joline Gutierrez Krueger
Friday, September 29, 2006

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For years you said the name Gordon House, and you knew, you remembered the three little girls and their mother, the crumpled metal of white car and red truck, the death and sadness and shock.

So much changed after that Christmas Eve crash in 1992 when Kandyce, 9, Erin, 8, Kacee, 5, and their mother, Melanie Cravens, 31, died in a violent fusion of metal and alcohol on I-40 west of Albuquerque. And then again, not nearly enough changed.

House, who admitted to drinking 7 beers before the crash, became the poster child for New Mexico's DWI epidemic. He became a catalyst, a controversy, a poignant example of a good man doing a very bad thing.

Lawmakers vowed to strengthen DWI laws. Nadine Milford, the grandmother and mother to those who died that night, became the voice of a state weary and angry of too many booze-stained deaths on too many highways.

For awhile it seemed we might actually get a better handle on our battle with the bottle.

But drivers kept drinking. People kept dying. And House kept fighting his conviction, which took three trials to attain.

"It's not over," Milford once told me. "This is going to go on and on and on."

That was in April 1999, four years after House was sentenced to 22 years in prison and minutes after he had lost one of many court fights.

Milford could say the same thing now. After nearly 14 years and countless appellate rulings and legal efforts that took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, attorneys for House are back in court seeking a fourth trial.

The argument, heard Thursday by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, claims that prosecutors moved House's third trial - the other two, held in Taos, resulted in hung juries on the vehicular homicide charges - to Las Cruces because of its low percentage of American Indians. House, who lived in Thoreau, is Navajo.

The thought of a fourth trial almost seems too much to imagine to those who remember the Christmas Eve crash, the Bible lying in the broken glass, the young girls' bodies so horrifically mangled that first responders needed grief counseling afterward, some unable to go back to work again.

But so many years later, fewer people know House's name, fewer remember the tortuous trail of appeals and retrials, fewer remember the little girls, their mother and her husband, Paul Cravens, who somehow survived.

But state District Judge James Blackmer has never forgotten.

He inherited the third trial, made the decision to move the trial to Las Cruces, the decision now being examined in Denver. He was the judge who put House away for 22 years.

He was the judge who allowed House a few last hours of freedom to be with daughter Leatricia when she got a new puppy.

House, he said, was the one case he would always remember.

"It still wears on me," he told me before he retired this year. "Here was a bright young man. He had kids the same age as the ones he killed, worked with troubled teens, had a master's in criminology. But I can't overlook the fact he imposed a death sentence on that family."

Nearly 14 years later, Blackmer is the only judge still alive of the three who presided over the House trials.

Nearly 14 years later, Leatricia is in her 20s. Kacee Woodard, the youngest to die that night, would be 19.

Nearly 14 years later, I still veer my car practically onto the shoulder of a two-lane highway when, in the dark of night, a car approaches from the other direction.

Nearly 14 years later, and we still haven't learned.