[chris]

Joel Hollendorfer was sentenced to 24 years in prison after a jury convicted him of manslaughter in the death of Kara Nichols, whose remains were found buried on his parents' property in the Black Forest area of El Paso County, Colorado, more than nine years after she disappeared.

Nichols was 19 and living in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She had done some modeling and was working as an escort, advertising online. Hollendorfer lived at his parents' property on Burgess Road, north of Colorado Springs. He was 47 at his 2023 sentencing, placing him in his mid-thirties in 2012. He and Nichols were not connected socially, but he had responded to one of her advertisements.

Nichols was last heard from on October 9, 2012, when she told her brother she was leaving Colorado Springs for Denver. Her final eight calls, placed between 9:58 p.m. and 11:08 p.m., were to Hollendorfer. She never arrived or contacted her family again. Her father reported her missing on October 14, 2012. Her laptop and phone charger remained in her apartment.

Detectives contacted Hollendorfer in May 2013. He acknowledged answering Nichols' advertisement but said they had never met. In a later account, he said they had arranged to meet but did not. A 2014 search of the family property found nothing, and the case went cold.

In February 2022, Hollendorfer's former wife told FBI agents that he had confessed to accidentally killing an escort in 2012 and burying her at his parents' place. After investigators obtained a search warrant, Hollendorfer walked them through the property. He identified one dry patch with a high spot and said nothing was buried there. His mother separately identified the same ground as the grave of her horse, Milo. On February 3, 2022, investigators excavated the site and found human remains in the old horse grave, beneath the horse's bones. The remains were identified as Nichols. Hollendorfer was arrested that month.

It has not been established which of Hollendorfer's interviews appears in the recording. He was interviewed in 2013, when he said he had contacted Nichols but never met her, and again in 2022 after his former wife came forward, when he was walked over the property and denied anything was buried where Nichols was found.

Hollendorfer was charged with first-degree murder and tampering with a deceased human body and tried in El Paso County District Court. On June 22, 2023, after about five hours of deliberation, a jury of eight women and four men rejected the murder count and convicted him of the lesser offense of manslaughter. The class 4 felony ordinarily carried two to six years.

Chief Judge William Bain found that four late-1990s felony convictions, including theft and attempted burglary, qualified Hollendorfer as a habitual criminal, making a 24-year term mandatory, four times the ordinary maximum. Two convictions from 2012 and 2013 for harassment and violating a protection order were misdemeanors and could not be counted. Bain heard arguments on proportionality on August 23, 2023, and sentenced Hollendorfer on August 31, 2023, to 24 years in prison with credit for 571 days served. Nichols' parents called the outcome a miscarriage of justice. No appellate ruling has been publicly reported.

The video is a police interview-room recording running about 79 minutes. It presents the interview itself and begins with a short narrated introduction naming the people involved.

[chris]

Part 2 of 2 of the recording described above.