On Feb. 17, 2003, Jennifer Lynn Marcum parked her car at Denver International Airport and disappeared.
FBI agents suspect she was murdered, possibly by drug dealers, said Jennifer’s father, Bob Marcum.
“Her body hasn’t been found,” Marcum said Saturday. “I really need to see something happen.”
Marcum and other family members traveled from Illinois and Missouri to Denver on Saturday to be with hundreds of other families of murdered or missing family members.
They are members of an organization called Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons, a Colorado-based group that stirs up interest among law enforcement agencies to solve their cold cases. There are more than 1,200 unsolved homicides or missing-person cases with Colorado connections, group officers say.
Members of several regional police departments, sheriff’s offices and district attorneys’ offices attended the meeting to speak with family members of homicide victims about what can be done and is being done to find killers.
“We’re not going to forget your cases,” said David Fisher, chief of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Denver Police Department. “We’re going to keep chipping away at it.”
But some family members took Denver’s detectives to task, claiming they hadn’t pursued their cases as aggressively as they did high-profile murders such as the May 8 shooting of Detective Donald “Donnie” Young. Young was slain and another detective was wounded while working off-duty security at a baptism party. A suspect has been arrested.
“The Denver police pulled out all the stops on that case, flooding the media for several weeks,” said Phyllis Tigges, whose son, Thad, was killed Jan. 25, 2001.
Her son’s murder got “a drop in the bucket” of police attention, Tigges said. She said her other children interviewed more witnesses than police homicide detectives did in the days after her son’s murder.
Other family members of murder victims read poems written by their lost family members or recounted the constant horror of having loved ones slain.
“When somebody murders a person, they don’t just murder that person, they murder a whole family,” said Leana Bowman, whose sister, Sharon Bowman, was raped, tortured and dismembered in Pueblo in 1976.
Sharon left three young daughters behind, Leana Bowman said.
Staff writer Kirk Mitchell can be reached at 303-820-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com.
