Murderers among us

Back in May 1979, a 42-year-old former visual arts professor from the University of Utah in Salt Lake spent an extended period of time visiting Colorado to participate in the second annual Denver International Film Festival. The festival ran from 4 May through 17 May, and for the first week of the event he likely crashed in Boulder with his in-laws. Then, according to newspaper reports, he met a gentleman fron Estes Park named ****** * **** at a party held on 10 May. Without access to the police reports, I don't know where the party was held, so I don't know where they met. The gentleman from Estes Park, named ****** * ****, was renting or housesitting a house out at ********* *******, near the YMCA, so either the party took place in Estes Park (which makes you wonder where the 42-year-old former visual arts professor heard about it - supposedly he had a vehicle of his own), or it took place in Boulder (which makes you wonder how the Estes Park renter heard about it), or it took place in Denver (which makes you wonder where the Estes Park renter, who supposedly worked in the construction/building truss field, developed his interest in film festivals).

In any event, at this party, supposedly, the asterisk guy told the film guy he had a place in Estes Park, or he rented a place in Estes Park, or something connected to Estes Park, and supposedly invited the film guy to stay there at his place while he was away on business with construction trusses in Montana. The film guy was married with two kids, but potentially separated from his wife at the time (although not legally divorced). These film guys are always reputed to swing both ways, but it strikes me as unlikely this was a sexual encounter that ended up back in the Estes Park renter's bed. I tend to think, from watching the films the film guy wrote and directed, he was more likely to swing towards available younger women, and maybe this dangling Estes Park participle got him out of his in-laws' hair and into some private digs where he could enjoy freedom to write and refresh and ****. So the Estes Park guy supposedly leaves the state from sometime after 10 May to 19 May, and the film guy's last known contact with family is calling his mother on 14 May (in speaking with the family, he may have also spoken with his daughter by telephone on this same day, as it was her birthday), although one newspaper account hints at him being seen alive on 16 May. When the Estes Park guy returns from Montana the afternoon of 19 May (a Saturday in 1979), the film guy is sprawled out on his (rented) floor dead (potentially his body had been moved from where the lethal blows were administered), supposedly a bloodless crime scene. The owners of the house were ****** ***** ***** ** and his second wife *********, married in 1970, friends of the ********* ******* developers ***** **** and his wife ****** from ********* Iowa, who purchased the property in 1971 and built the house that still stands out at ********* ******* in 1975. Here is where (lacking acesss to a death certificate, or autopsy, or photographs, or the murder book) you have to suspend disbelief, or indulge the whims of the various disinterested reporters, or spin cogs to try to provide explanations how all this together might be true: 1. Emphasis intended: Supposedly the scene is bloodless 2. Supposedly no signs of forced entry 3. The place doesn't look "ransacked", and the film guy's Rolex watch wasn't stolen (don't know if it was still on his wrist or on a bedside table, in the bathroom, etc.) 4. The film guy had been hit over the head with a blunt object (likely the coup de grace), and hit repeatedly in other places on his body 5. The corpse may have shown defense wounds, i.e., the victim tried to fight back (this from surviving family members) 6. The object used to inflict this punishment may have been a log from the fireplace, a piece of lumber, or a baseball bat - again, suspend disbelief that the murder weapon hasn't been narrowed down somewhat based on the width of the impact crater, composition of surviving wood fragments, or perhaps our local sheriff and his detectives and Larimer County crime scene investigators were just plain lousy 7. One of the initial persons of interest failed a polygraph, miserably, and wasn't ever charged or apparently questioned beyond this. He even said before the test was administered he would likely fail it, and piled lies on top of lies during the pre-interview about the simplest things (one silly example - he said he would have had good reason to be at the house where the murder occurred because he delivered mail there, despite the fact that the renter kept a post office box at the YMCA, and wouldn't have had any mail to deliver) You don't have to spend any time believing this smelly piece of garbage: 8. In 1983, supposedly due to a "paperwork error", all of the evidence from the crime scene was "accidentally destroyed" in Fort Collins. From a murder. From a cold case. From a case where, allegedly, 4500 man-hours of your taxpayer money was spent trying to find other suspects when it seemed the most likely suspect just needed to be lined up in front of a grand jury for indictment. The victim's family has questions. The likely suspects are all still alive. Some of them with bad alibis or no alibis live right here in Estes Park, ensconced behind gated compounds with working phone numbers that elicit no responses. Simple DNA testing would rule-out their surviving children as products of their own loins, rather than springing from a murdered guy's unsprung coil. A guy is dead who hadn't been in Estes Park long enough to create enemies or sleep enough times with somebody's wife to "deserve" something (the family trees of all of the likely suspects don't include a child conceived in May 1979, although it would be worth testing, because birth certificates can be fudged and all human gestations don't last exactly 40 weeks). Larimer County is still too scared of its own shadow to re-open the case. Private citizens have to beg on behalf of a distraught family to stop making Estes Park look like it is straight out of some "Town that Dreaded Sundown" drive-in movie sequel. (to be continued)