Woman saw accused killer hours before murder

MINDEN -- In the last conversation Alane Dockstader had with her estranged boyfriend, hours before he allegedly killed her stepfather and shot her mother, the accused killer said he was going to shoot himself.

"He told me he was going to shoot his brains out, and I just told him to shut up, and hung up," Dockstader, 19, testified Thursday during the murder trial of Christopher Fiegehen in Douglas County District Court.

Fiegehen, 24, of Carson City, is charged with the Feb. 10, 2002, early-morning killing of Al Chorkey and the attempted murder of his wife, Lorelle Chorkey, in their Minden home. Al Chorkey suffered fatal wounds to his throat, and Lorelle Chorkey was shot once in the chest below her right collarbone and once in the head behind her right ear.

Dockstader told the jury she saw him several times in the days before the attack and had sexual relations with him at least once, despite a restraining order she obtained against Fiegehen because she said he threw a boulder through her car window

On the eve of the attack on her parents, she said, she spent two hours alone with him in his home when he showed her a knife police contend he used to kill Chorkey.

She said she left Fiegehen, whom she'd dated for about 18 months, around midnight and told him she was staying with a girlfriend in Gardnerville when in fact she was going to stay the night with her new boyfriend, Matt, in Carson City.

"I was scared he would like, go beat up Matt or something crazy," she said.

When Fiegehen called her on her cell phone five minutes after she left him, she said, he was expecting her to be heading to Gardnerville, so she lied about where she was on the road.

"I said I was at the light across from the old Wal-Mart and he said, 'No you're not because I'm right there,'" she said. "I was caught in a lie. I hung up."

Once she met up with her new boyfriend, Dockstader said, Fiegehen called again and the two screamed at one another before he threatened to shoot himself. She said she hung up again and put her phone on silent.

"I was kinda freaking out in my own head and I'm sure he was too, having me lie to him," she said.

Dockstader also testified that a bloodied baseball cap found under Chorkey's body was the same one she'd bought for Fiegehen as a gift.

"That's the hat that I purchased for him," she said after Deputy District Attorney Mark Jackson pulled it from a evidence box.

When Jackson opened an evidence box containing the knife found stuck into the deck near Chorkey's body, Dockstader said she recognized that too.

"He showed me a knife he had just bought. He was kinda bragging about it," she said.

"Is this the knife the defendant showed you on Feb. 9, 2002?" Jackson asked.

"Yes," Dockstader said.

Other prosecution witnesses Thursday included a sales clerk who said she'd sold Fiegehen the knife at the Carson City Harley-Davidson; a paramedic who treated Lorelle Chorkey at the scene of the attack and said Chorkey could tell him her name, but kept asking what happened; and the trauma surgeon who cared for her at Washoe Medical Center and said she was talking to him.

"One of the paramedics said she had brain matter in her hair, and I said she can't have brain matter in her hair, she is alert and talking," Dr. Edward Plecha said.

He said when he examined Lorelle Chorkey, he discovered she did have brain matter in her hair.

"I still remember saying that to the EMT. I didn't believe them based on her level of consciousness."

That evidence is expected to bolster the prosecutor's contention that she identified Fiegehen as her assailant.

Lorelle Chorkey is expected to testify today.