“Nasty, brutish and short”—the Hobbesian view of life, has been replaced with “a long life of clean living” for one Caleb Silver, 28, sentenced to 33 years-eight months-to-life in prison for the murder of Dennis Boardman. This would put Mr. Silver at age 62 when he comes up for parole in the year 2052. Silver will still be five years younger than his victim, Mr. Boardman, who was 67 when Silver bludgeoned him to death in Boardman’s Fort Bragg home.
Silver was offered a term of 15 years-to-life back in September, just before his first trial started. During a lull in the proceedings, Silver, when appraised of the offer by his public defender, Eric Rennert, decided to flip a coin. As he stood there in the dock wearing jailhouse coveralls and handcuffs chained to his waist, Mr. Rennert fished in his pocket for a quarter. The coin was flipped somewhat inexpertly and pinged off the rail, rolled over under a chair and after Rennert fished it out he told Silver the result: take the plea.
By the next day, however, Silver had decided to defy Fate, and, after consulting with a different judge, withdrew his plea, and set his cap for trial.
Then there was the threat of the Midnight Needle, as suspense mounted over whether the prosecutor, Timothy Stoen, having been diagnosed with brain cancer, would seek the death penalty for Silver on the grounds that he’d lain in wait until Dennis Boardman went to sleep, then bashed in his skull with a framing hammer, before slashing, hacking and finally sawing through his victim’s throat.
It must have been a tense week for Silver, but in the end Deputy DA Stoen said the People would not be seeking a trip to the dreadful green room where the lethal needle lay in wait. Silver was white as chalk for a moment until relief at last put some color and animation back in his face. And his knees also must have been knocking, because he sat down suddenly with a thump.
Silver’s first trial began October 2nd, 2017, and was declared a mistrial because of the terrible firestorms that affected three of the jurors and kept them from attending the trial. A second trial ended in a deadlocked jury. And the third ended in conviction. But in the meantime, a preliminary hearing was held for three separate burglaries and a second stolen pickup truck, all of which preceded the murder, and Silver brusquely pled guilty to these charges – his concentration was focused on beating the murder rap, as though these burglaries were distractions not worth bothering about although they got him more time in the pen.
To watch a criminal defendant go through so many trials and hearings it would take a far more “objective” reporter than me to avoid drawing some subjective conclusions as to this defendant’s character traits. In the case of Mr. Silver what emerges is a professional schmoozer, a moocher who lived off others, demanding more and more, until he had finally worn out his welcome, and was asked to leave, then the nicey-nice guy façade would drop and the vindictive, violent little churl would emerge full of hate and spite.
When Silver was staying in Boonville, mooching off a nice lady named Silvia Carsey, when asked to leave because she was going to be gone for the holidays, he waited until she left, then stole her pickup truck, crashed it through a locked gate, sideswiped another vehicle, drove Carsey’s truck to Elk where he plowed it into a tree – snickering, no doubt to himself: There’s for you, Silvia, for kicking me out, sweet as I am!”
Silver was given to describing himself as “really sweet,” a pathetically infantile thing for a grown man to say – and the need to say it himself makes indelible the impression that the prevailing consensus among others was something decidedly to the contrary.
Dennis Boardman had kicked him out, too. And Caleb’s vengeance was extreme in this instance – also, having wrecked Carsey’s truck, Caleb was in desperate need of wheels – and he knew Boardman kept a spare set of keys under the floormat of the second truck Silver stole – but Silver also knew Boardman’s dog would start howling in grief and alert the neighborhood to the murder if he left the dog behind, so he took it with him and abandoned it in Santa Barbara County, at Santa Claus Beach, it being Christmastime.
It also came out during these trials that Silver’s own mother was frightened of him, and when a neighbor found a glove on her porch the morning after Boardman’s murder, Silver’s mother exclaimed, “That’s Caleb’s calling card,” and hurried to lock her doors. At the end of the third trial, when the jury came back with the Guilty verdict, Silver’s mom broke down crying, and the two women who rushed to comfort her were the prosecutor’s wife, Mrs. Stoen, and the victim’s daughter, Laurel Boardman.
When Silver was discussing his decision to withdraw his plea back in September, he told the judge he wanted to get out in time to “spend some time taking care of his mother.” As if. How could that be anything but another bid for sympathy, another schmooze job, for a guy who has never been able to even take care of himself? Did he imagine a complete infantile regression wherein he would curl up in Mommie’s lap and tell her how sweet he is? He certainly would never have been able to pay the rent or clean the house.
But, as Laurel Boardman said when I asked her for a comment: “It’s so sad, everybody loses.”
Everybody, that is, but Caleb Silver who will now be fed and housed, kept clean and sober, mooching and schmoozing off his cell mates and anyone else foolish enough to fall for his weasel words – but he won’t have soft-hearted women to schmooze, and if he goes off on somebody in prison he may get hurt, seriously hurt, and anyway it will go against any hope of an early out if he shows his violent, vindictive side to his wardens.
As a parting shot, Silver said the People were making a big mistake because the real killer was still out there. Scary, but is it credible? Consider the story he told to a cell mate about how hard it was to cut Boardman’s throat, how he had to go and get a better knife, one with a serrated blade. As we learned in a more recent murder trial, only someone who had cut a human being’s throat would know this – and I later came across a quote by a Lee Child’s character Jack Reacher saying, “It’s not done in one elegant swipe like in the movies.”
Defense said that Silver was saying these things to a fellow prisoner in order to scare the bully off, which is plausible; but don’t tell me Caleb knew how to make his story convincing from reading Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels – he knew it from first-hand experience and the jailhouse bully was duly impressed. He left Caleb alone after that.
Silver’s last gasp at stalling the inevitable was a motion for a new trial, based on my reporting in the AVA of his previous trials, and that my own belief in his guilt had “toxified the jury pool.” This was a very flattering gesture on Silver’s part and I thank him for it, profusely, but it’s still pretty comical when I think of how small the readership is here in the county. But it all came to naught, the motion was denied by the judge, who went to great lengths to ensure that none of the jurors had either read my reports or even heard of them (and it was less than flattering, to put it mildly, to see how easily this was done). Of course Silver will appeal, and then we’ll see if the judges higher up the chain of command will grant my ego the boon it so richly deserves!
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