Andrew Scoles originally wanted a presidential pardon before sharing what he knew about the murder. Recently unsealed documents show his demands had shrunk.
Andrew Scoles insisted he knew something about who murdered Brittany Zimmermann.
He claimed that one morning, his roommate, David Kahl, broke down and tearfully confessed to killing Zimmermann, a 21-year-old UW-Madison student. She was found strangled and stabbed to death on April 2, 2008, in her West Doty Street apartment.
Many tried to get Scoles to come forward with what he knew about the high-profile murder and alleged confession by Kahl, a convicted rapist, repeat drunk driver and admitted heavy drug user.
In 2014, just days after Kahl’s DNA was identified on a piece of Zimmermann’s clothing, Madison Police Department detectives traveled to a federal prison in West Virginia to interview Scoles, who was serving time for illegal gun possession. He told detectives Kahl confessed the murder to him but wouldn’t go into detail.
In early 2016, Zimmermann’s mother sent Scoles a video through his parole officer. In it, she pleaded with him to speak to police. Scoles said he would talk but he wanted something in return.
“After watching [your] video and [with] great consideration, I told the [police] I would be willing to cooperate in any and all ways that I could,” he wrote to Zimmermann’s mom in an email, adding, “if the government would give me my life back.”
Local news outlets later reported that Scoles was seeking a presidential pardon for a 2010 marijuana conviction and expungement of the 2014 federal gun conviction in exchange for details about Kahl’s alleged confession.
Scoles wanted his felony record cleared so he could get back 19 guns that were seized from him in the 2014 case. “My gun collection … was a large part of my life,” he said in the email to Zimmermann’s mom.
Digging his heels in on the demand for a pardon, Scoles stayed silent. Soon, his promises of information about Kahl’s alleged involvement in Zimmermann’s murder faded away. After getting paroled in 2015, Scoles went on with his life, working as a self-employed carpenter and riding his motorcycle on the country roads between Madison and his home in Cross Plains while police continued investigating clues about the Zimmermann murder.
Then, in early 2017, something began to shake loose.
A court document recently unsealed at the request of Isthmus shows that Scoles was proposing a new deal — one that didn’t demand a pardon — in exchange for his information.
The unsealed document is an April 26, 2017, letter from Scoles’ attorney, Joseph Bugni, to a federal judge detailing Bugni’s many efforts to arrange an interview between Scoles and police. It states that Scoles was willing to testify if Kahl was prosecuted for Zimmermann’s murder. But the letter adds that prosecutors seemed indifferent to meeting with Scoles or facilitating a deal.
A month after Bugni first suggested a deal with the Dane County District Attorney’s office, he received word back, communicated through the federal prosecutor: “[They said] I could go pound sand — if Scoles had some information to share about [Zimmermann’s murder], he could come in off the street like anyone else and give it,” Bugni explains in the letter. “I wrote back immediately, hoping that something could be worked out. This was a high-profile case and a tragic one at that.”
Bugni kept pressing to set up a meeting with the DA’s office. But that door slammed shut when Scoles, 39, died on Aug. 5, 2017, from injuries he sustained in a motorcycle accident in mid-July.
Exactly where, why and how this proposed deal fell apart is unknown. No one wants to talk about it: Scoles’ attorney Bugni declined repeated requests for an interview. Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne also refused to discuss it, stating “We are ethically bound not to speak about open investigations.”
U.S. District Judge James Peterson is the one who initiated talk of a new deal in early 2017 when, during a parole hearing, he encouraged Scoles to come forward with what he knew.
“I brought it up,” confirms Judge Peterson in an interview. “I thought if [Scoles] had information, it would be appropriate to facilitate the evaluation of that evidence.”
After that hearing, Bugni met with his client and, as he wrote in the now-unsealed letter to Peterson, Scoles “expressed a willingness to sit down with the police and talk about what he knew about the murder.”
Bugni asked three things for his client according to the unsealed letter: credit for sharing information in his federal case, a copy of police reports from Scoles’ initial interview with police in West Virginia, and a letter from prosecutors that would protect him from an obstruction charge.
At Bugni’s request in February 2017, a federal prosecutor passed this proposal on to the Dane County District Attorney’s office. Since the DA’s office had charging authority over the case, it would have to decide whether to accept Scoles’ offer.
Although Bugni says the district attorney’s office showed no interest in a deal, he persisted. According to the unsealed letter, Bugni “reached out to the DA’s office about the case and the opportunity to talk through the issues that divided us. I received nothing for over a week. I then started calling the DA’s office and leaving messages. A week later, one of the district attorneys called me back and we spoke about the case.”
An assistant DA told Bugni his office wouldn’t provide a letter protecting Scoles from obstruction charges. Bugni offered to “send him an email with everything that Scoles would say and then see if he’d want to hear it from Scoles but with the protections I demanded. He said I could send it and he’d see.”
Bugni sent the email in April 2017, but notes in the unsealed letter: “I have not heard back. So that’s where things stand with Scoles and Brittany Zimmermann.”
Dane County Deputy District Attorney Matthew Moeser says he may have been the prosecutor who spoke to Bugni about a deal offered by Scoles early last year. “It’s certainly possible I spoke to Mr. Bugni but I honestly don’t remember the scope of the conversation,” says Moeser, adding that he “can’t discuss anything regarding the Zimmermann case.”
Attempts to obtain a copy of the attorney proffer by Bugni — the letter detailing exactly what Scoles knew — were unsuccessful. Bugni would not share the proffer, citing attorney-client privilege.
To determine where the proposed deal broke down, Isthmus filed an open records request in early January 2018 to Ozanne’s office for correspondence between the DA’s office and Bugni and Scoles’ proffer letter. The request went unanswered for almost a month until a reporter showed up at the DA’s office in mid-February. Once there, Ozanne gave the reporter a written reply asking for more clarification on the request. As of press time, Ozanne has not responded to further follow-up emails or a fax about the records request.
Isthmus sent a similar request to the Madison Police Department. The department’s records custodian, Lt. John Radovan, replied that he received results from the city’s email system but that Deputy District Attorney Moeser “advised me that this was a continuing investigation and requested that we not release any records whatsoever related to this case.”
Madison defense attorney Stephen Hurley says Bugni was not making any outlandish requests for his client. “That’s just basic, competent client representation,” he says, calling them “really benign requests.”
“If he got those three things, [Scoles] would have gone in and talked, [then prosecutors and police would] make a determination about if the information is useful,” says Hurley, who has been a criminal defense attorney in Madison for more than 40 years. “I’d say that about 80 percent of the time, [law enforcement] doesn’t find the information useful.”
Of deals like the one Scoles’ attorney proposed, however, Hurley says “they’re not an everyday thing but they do happen … usually at the police level.”
Hurley wouldn’t speculate on why the DA’s office didn’t take the deal. But, he adds: “One always has to be skeptical of information for sale.”
And, if all of this did eventually lead to a murder trial, Kahl’s defense would have brought up Scoles’ criminal history — which includes numerous misdemeanor convictions for various drugs, weapons, disorderly conduct and operating while intoxicated charges — to discredit him.
Hurley says the proffer letter Scoles’ attorney sent the DA’s office is useless without Scoles being alive to testify. Now, he says, “it’s all hearsay.”
Furthermore, Scoles’ motivation for testifying would have been questioned in a trial. Known as “Mud” or “Mud Man” to his friends, Scoles blamed Kahl for his original conviction for the 2010 marijuana case, telling Zimmermann’s mom in an email: “I was made a felon for a ounce and a half of pot ... which David [Kahl] had a great part in getting me busted for.”
Kahl, 51, is currently serving a prison sentence at the Oshkosh Correctional Institution for his seventh drunk driving conviction, a felony. He may be released as early as November 2021. He did not reply to a certified letter sent to the prison by a reporter seeking comment.
According to a WKOW-TV report, two months after Zimmermann’s murder in 2008, police questioned Kahl, who told them he was in the area around Zimmermann’s apartment the day she was killed, trying to scam UW students out of money for crack cocaine but denied knowing anything about the Zimmermann murder.
In 2016, he admitted to WKOW-TV that he was at Zimmermann’s home on the day she was found dead but said he did not kill her. The DNA evidence that police have linking Kahl to the crime apparently isn’t strong enough to charge him with it. In February 2016, Police Chief Mike Koval told the Wisconsin State Journal that “The case is not ripe for arrest and referral.”
Assistant Madison Police Chief Vic Wahl says police wanted to speak to Scoles again.
“[MPD] investigators spoke to [Scoles] on more than one occasion,” Wahl says in a statement to Isthmus. “Detectives were open to speaking further with Scoles and MPD had contact with the Dane County District Attorney’s Office and United States Attorney’s Office … regarding the matter. [But] before an additional interview could take place, Scoles died.”
Becky Turk, a friend of Scoles for more than 20 years, says he never told any of his friends what he knew about Zimmermann’s murder. “Whatever he knew went to his grave with him.”
Brittany’s mom, Jean Zimmermann, was devastated when she learned that Scoles died last August. “[Scoles] swore he had all the information police would need,” she says.
Zimmermann says she occasionally gets updates from police but they’ve become less and less frequent over the decade since her daughter was killed. She was unaware of Scoles’ most recent attempt to make a deal.
“We were never told that that was happening. Maybe they were waiting to see what would come out of it before they mentioned it,” she says. “What it sounds like he was asking for seems so insignificant — it’s really nothing.”
Almost 10 years after her daughter’s murder, Zimmermann says she’s distraught over how the investigation has gone. “Every time they would tell us that this thing might happen or that might happen, everything would just fall apart. For the last 10 years, everything has fallen apart.”
But Zimmermann and her family are still seeking justice for Brittany, who was a junior at UW-Madison, hoping to someday become a doctor.
“I try to remain hopeful that the case will still be solved,” she says. “But my hope is dwindling — it’s been dwindling for a long time.”