Kind, creative, intelligent, thoughtful and compassionate. Those were a few of the words friends and family used to describe Kara Nichols on Thursday at the sentencing hearing for her convicted killer.
Earlier this year, Joel Hollendorfer was found guilty of manslaughter for killing Nichols, 19, and burying her body in the backyard of his family’s property, where it wouldn’t be discovered for nearly a decade.
Hollendorfer was sentenced to 24 years in prison on Thursday as Nichols’ family and friends packed an El Paso County courtroom not only to speak about their loss, but to honor her memory.
“Kara was destined for greatness,” Nichols’ friend Autumn Hopfe told the court. “She made everyone feel included, and she was beautiful both inside and out.”
“Knowing Kara was an honor and a privilege. She was the most vibrant person I have ever known,” said Erin Wyrick, another friend of Nichols. “Beauty and kindness radiated off her. … She saw the good in people.”
Nearly 10 people gave impact statements to the court on Thursday, and nearly all talked about the lively and ambitious person Nichols was before she was killed by Hollendorfer, using words like empathetic, kind and compassionate to describe Nichols.
Kara Nichols’ mother, Julia Nichols, did not attend the sentencing hearing but spoke with The Gazette afterward about her daughter, and the memories she has of her 11 years after her death.
“She was a creative, funny, feisty young woman,” Julia Nichols said. “She was really social, the kind of person who always rooted for the underdog even at the expense of sometimes being a little too rebellious.”
Julia Nichols said her daughter had big dreams, and that she one day hoped to work in a creative field, because she was someone who loved art, music and fashion.
“My husband would sit with her in the kitchen on the kitchen table and the whole table would be covered with paints, crayons, scissors, collage materials — you name it,” Julia Nichols recalled of her daughter’s love for the arts. “She was always doing little projects as a child.”
While Thursday’s hearing brought with it celebrations of who Kara Nichols was, it also brought condemnation of the perceived lack of justice she received through the investigation and Hollendorfer’s trial.
Hollendorfer was originally charged with first-degree murder and tampering with a deceased human body, but the 12-person jury opted to convict Hollendorfer of manslaughter, a significant downgrade from first-degree murder.
Hollendorfer’s defense attorneys argued at trial that Kara Nichols’ death was an accident, caused in large part by Kara Nichols’ heroin use, with the defense claiming that Kara Nichols died either of a heroin overdose or due to her being choked during sex, and becoming unable to resume breathing because of being high on heroin.
Nichols’ family was very vocal on Thursday in their disagreement with those claims.
Paul Nichols, Kara Nichols’ father, described the trial and verdict as a “miscarriage of justice.”
“My 19-year-old daughter was murdered. … I believe Joel Hollendorfer is guilty of murder in the first degree,” Paul Nichols said. “I do not believe our daughter was accidently strangled to death. That is an affront to common sense.”
Paul Nichols wasn’t the only person to express displeasure with Hollendorfer’s manslaughter conviction. Kara Nichols’ brother, Terry Nichols, raised many of the same frustrations as others in court had previously.
“This trial was a miscarriage of justice characterized by victim blaming,” Terry Nichols said. “This was a relentless campaign of slander and defamation of my sister. If the jury was working with all the facts, I have no doubt they would have returned a guilty verdict of murder in the first degree.”
Many who spoke in court on Thursday expressed their displeasure with the 24-year prison sentence Hollendorfer was set to receive, saying they would fight to ensure that he served every day of his sentence.
Even a current and a former detective for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, both of whom worked on the Nichols’ case, gave statements to the court, a highly unusual occurrence.
“I’ve never seen anyone with such a lack of remorse,” former El Paso County Detective Tammy Gouiat said of Hollendorfer. “Shame on you, and shame on your family for hiding all your secrets.”
Before Judge William Bain handed down Hollendorfer’s sentence, he spoke about the case and the impact Hollendorfer’s actions had on Kara Nichols’ friends and family.
“In 25 years in doing this kind of work I have not seen as much pain in a family as I have seen in this case,” Bain said. “You have seen the pain you have caused. … You, one person, because of your conduct on one night have caused more than a decade of pain, agony and sorrow. Pain, agony and sorrow that will never cease.”
Bain thanked members of the jury for their work on the case, and addressed some of the complaints made by Kara Nichols’ family and friends that the court didn’t allow evidence to be entered regarding Hollendorfer’s previous criminal convictions and past allegations of domestic violence.
“The court is very confident that the Court of Appeals would have sent this (case) back if they had allowed past evidence to be introduced,” Bain said.
Bain then sentenced Hollendorfer to 24 years in the Department of Corrections, a sentence that was not up for dispute because of Hollendorfer’s status as a habitual criminal.
Any defendant in Colorado convicted of a crime with at least three previous felony convictions could be considered a habitual criminal and have their maximum sentence quadrupled. At a hearing last week, Bain ruled that Hollendorfer’s four previous convictions in the 1990s were satisfactory to qualify him as a habitual criminal, turning his manslaughter conviction into a 24-year prison sentence, four times the maximum of six years usually allocated for a class-4 felony conviction.
Bain dismissed the charge of tampering with a deceased human body before the trial concluded because he ruled that the statute of limitations had passed.
Hollendorfer declined to make a statement to the court on Thursday on the advice of his attorney.
Speaking with reporters after Thursday’s hearing, Wyrick said one of her last memories of Kara Nichols occurred in September 2012, when they sat on a swing set at a local park for hours, just talking.
“We just acted like teenage girls,” Wyrick recalled. “It was a great memory, and I’ll never forget it.”
The memory that came to mind for Kara Nichols’ mother was the time the two spent volunteering at the local humane society, and how Kara Nichols used to beg the supervisors to let her pet the puppies before heading home.
Of course, Julia Nichols said, that eventually ended with Kara Nichols picking out the family’s first dog, which she would name Goldie for the dog’s gold fur.
Hopfe recalled how when the two were kids Kara Nichols helped her “break out of her shell,” and how they could talk for hours about anything and everything.
“No matter who you were she would make you feel like a superstar,” Hopfe said. “I want everyone to remember her for the person she was.”
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