Boulder – Police and University Hill residents were still flummoxed Wednesday about how a sex offender wanted for indecent exposure got keys to 21 houses.
None of the residents had reported keys missing. Also a mystery was how Patrick Gillespie was allegedly able to enter the homes without being detected.
When police arrested Gillespie on Friday for failing to register as a sex offender, they found the collection of keys to 21 houses in his car. Each key was labeled with an address on the Hill and a number corresponding to a map he had made of the area.
Gillespie reportedly also had about $2,400 in cash and the credit cards and debit cards of several women.
One of those women said she and her roommates had no idea they had been robbed until a detective Saturday told them Gillespie had one of the women’s credit cards.
The detective also tried a key in their door, and it worked.
“The thing that is really creepy,” said Elizabeth Mc Nichols, one of the women, “is that he was in our house, and we did not even know it.”
In all, there are four counts of second-degree burglary.
Gillespie is also facing indecent-exposure charges stemming from an incident where a man was seen masturbating in an alley. Police investigating that call found a cellphone at the site and linked it to Gillespie.
In another incident, a woman in the 1100 block of Lincoln Street was asleep when she heard a key go into her deadbolt, police spokeswoman Julie Brooks said. The door opened, and the woman confronted a man police believe was Gillespie before he left.
But the puzzle about how Gillespie was allegedly able to collect so many keys remains unsolved.
“None of the victims are reporting missing keys,” Brooks said Wednesday. “That would be easier, you know, if they had a purse stolen with their keys in it or something. There just isn’t an easy answer.”
Gillespie also allegedly had keys made at McGuckin Hardware, then didn’t pay for them.
But Scott Thompson, with Buffalo Lock & Key, said he wonders how someone could get so many keys to make copies of them. He was busy changing the locks on the house where the perpetrator woke the woman out of her sleep.
“These people weren’t on a master key system,” as many of the rental properties on “the Hill” are, Thompson said.
Staff writer George Merritt can be reached at 720-929-0893 or gmerritt@denverpost.com.
