A 43-year-old Cheyenne man is not guilty in the Dec. 12 death of his estranged wife’s boyfriend, a jury decided Friday.
The case isn’t as simple as it sounds. And it has nothing to do with a love triangle, Joseph Gish told Cowboy State Daily in a Monday phone interview in which he reflected on his five-day manslaughter trial and voiced relief at getting to stay involved in the lives of his adult daughters.
Had he been convicted, Gish could have spent up to 20 years in prison and lost his gun and voting rights.
“I wasn’t really worried about the gun rights or the voting rights,” Gish said. “I just didn’t want my kids to (have me) looking at them through glass and not being able to be part of their lives. That’s what was scary to me.
“I didn’t want to miss my family growing up, and my kids growing up and having kids of their own.”
Now freshly acquitted, he’s looking forward to the prospect of his two daughters, ages 24 and 21, starting families of their own soon, he said.
The Dispute
Court documents say that Laramie County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded at 7:27 p.m. Dec. 12 to a Cheyenne home for a 911 call about a domestic disturbance.
They later learned that Gregory Meyer, 55, died of a chest wound at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center.
Gish admitted on scene to having done “the stabbing” after he and Meyer got into a fight in the home.
Gish and his wife Lisa were long estranged and hadn’t been intimate for years, court documents say.
Joseph Gish, Lisa, and their adult daughter Aurora all lived at the home together in Cheyenne.
Meyer, who was Lisa’s boyfriend, would frequent the home.
Everyone usually coexisted civilly, people told deputies on scene.
But on Dec. 12, the men got into a dispute stemming in part from a dayslong plumbing project Meyer undertook in the bathroom Gish usually used, says the evidentiary affidavit.
The conflict was bigger than that, Gish reflected in his Monday interview.
He said that Meyer wanted to kick Aurora out of the house. He also said Meyer was a drug user and his meth use caused a problem. That’s a theme that also echoes in court documents.
The men had what Lisa would later describe as a “scuffle.”
Aurora told deputies Meyer pushed Gish against the wall, and that Meyer tried to punch Gish, but missed and struck her in the face instead.
That was when Gish brandished his “little silver knife,” a pocket knife.
Aurora said Meyer charged toward Gish and ran into the knife himself.
His Own Words
Gish described the incident Monday.
“I went into the bathroom and asked him to leave the bathroom,” he said. “He got upset and that started the physical altercation.”
That’s when Meyer hit Aurora.
“I looked over at Aurora to make sure she was OK after he hit her,” Gish said. “He had seen my attention was somewhere else than on him, and he wanted to use that. … But when I looked back over at him, he’d made contact with my body, and the knife was up in between us.”
Meyer died of a chest wound later at the hospital. Court documents describe the knife blade as being about 3.5 inches long.
“It was just, kind of, one thing after another — really fast — just exploded out of control,” Gish continued.
It was difficult to tell what was going on during the clash, he added. He knew when their bodies made contact, and he knew the knife was between them and had to have “impaled” Meyer.
“This whole time I’ve been wracking my brain trying to find out what the hell happened,” he said. “I know he was high — higher than I’d seen him before.”
Meyer’s toxicology report revealed a concentration of 1,400 nanograms of meth per milliliter of blood, Gish related from court testimony.
His defense team’s expert witness, Colorado-based forensic toxicologist Sarah Urfer, testified at trial that such a concentration could make a man “violent, erratic,” said Gish.
Self Defense
Gish’s public defense attorney, Senior Public Defender Baend Buus, advanced a self-defense claim at trial.
It’s uncertain whether that’s what led the jury to acquit Gish under all three theories the prosecutor had offered, since the jury marked a simple “not guilty” under each of the three. Those were voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide.
However the jurors reached by that decision, Buus will take it.
“That’s the verdict that we hoped for, and believed we would get,” he told Cowboy State Daily on Monday. “I think Joe is a great guy, and I think he’ll spend every day of the rest of his life appreciating the verdict he got from that jury.”
Gish said the jury was difficult to read throughout the week, and he had no idea how it would find. When he left his new home in Colorado on Sunday so he could stay in Cheyenne for trial all week, he said he told several family members and all five of his cats goodbye, just in case.
Looking back, however, he theorizes that the jury came to see him as empathetic.
“I think they (prosecutors) wanted to paint me out as just like a killer without feeling,” he said. “It didn’t work because I have empathy for Greg.”
He said he feels for Meyer’s daughter, and will live with the man’s death for the rest of his life.
“The last thing I wanted was for his life to be ended that night,” said Gish. “I wanted his daughter to be able to enjoy time with him, just like my daughter enjoys time with me.”
The Laramie County District Attorney’s Office declined Monday to comment.
Laramie County Sheriff Brian Kozak did not immediately return a voicemail request for comment.
Lisa Gish, who had told deputies that Joseph Gish advanced with the knife, did not immediately respond to a Monday text message request for comment sent to the phone number on file.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
