$439,000 Settlement for Widow of Serial Killer Victim After Albuquerque Police Missed Chances to Stop the Killer

In June 2008, Scott Pierce was killed in Albuquerque by Clifton Bloomfield, a man who would ultimately confess to five murders over roughly three years. Bloomfield had committed two earlier killings, of a Korean couple known as Tak and Pung Yi, roughly six months before he killed Pierce. Investigators recovered DNA linking Bloomfield to the Yi murders before Pierce died, but that evidence sat unprocessed. Instead of looking at Bloomfield, police extracted confessions from two other men, Travis Rowley and Michael Lee, for the Yi killings. Bloomfield remained free.

The gaps did not stop with the Yi investigation. Bloomfield was on supervised probation at the time and had been involved in domestic violence incidents that, under New Mexico law, required arrest. Neither the probation violations nor the domestic calls led to his detention. Katherine Pierce, Scott's widow, and her attorneys at Davis Kelin Law Firm argued that her husband would be alive if officers had acted on any of several points where the law gave them clear authority to take Bloomfield into custody.

The firm filed suit in January 2010 on behalf of Katherine Pierce, with Ben Davis among the attorneys of record. The lawsuit named the City of Albuquerque and focused on the pattern of missed opportunities: the delayed DNA processing, the wrongful arrest of two innocent men, the failure to pursue Bloomfield on probation and domestic violence grounds, and the absence of any procedure connecting the dots between his crimes.

Albuquerque's deputy city attorney maintained that officers had done nothing wrong and denied any misconduct. The city nonetheless chose to resolve the case rather than face a jury. In September 2012, the city agreed to pay $439,000 to settle all claims brought by Katherine Pierce. The city did not admit liability as part of the agreement.

Bloomfield was convicted and sentenced to 195 years in prison for his five murders. The city had previously paid nearly $1 million to Michael Lee, one of the men wrongly held for 15 months in connection with the Yi killings, in a separate settlement reached in 2011.