Her body was dumped on a mountainside in 1989, and she was buried with the name Jane Doe. Now, a cold-case investigator with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office has identified her and hopes to catch her killer.
Lisa Kay Kelly, a Denver native and graduate of East High School, was 33 at the time of her death.
Kelly’s mother died without knowing what had happened to her daughter, who had vanished. Kelly had no children of her own, but a brother and sister still live in the Denver area.
“I can’t imagine having someone in your life who has disappeared and not know what happened to them,” said Cheryl Moore, Jefferson County’s cold-case investigator.
Moore, who currently has 43 unsolved cases to work on, unraveled Kelly’s identity in September with the help of colleague Vicki Spelman.
Spelman doggedly submitted multiple queries of the victim’s fingerprints to an investigative database. The task was complicated and had remained unsolved for so long because Kelly’s body was partially decomposed and the fingerprints imperfect.
After finally getting a hit, Moore compared a description of Kelly to the body that had been found. They matched. Also, records on Kelly and her known whereabouts came to an abrupt end in 1989.
Moore and Triena Harper of the coroner’s office notified Kelly’s family. Moore declined to give details on Kelly’s death because it’s an ongoing case.
The detective hopes someone will come forward with information on how Kelly’s body came to be found on Lookout Mountain about 25 feet down a steep embankment off the Lariet Loop.
Kelly had a difficult life that may have contributed to how she died. She was a crack-cocaine user, Moore said.
In the mid-1980s, Kelly moved to California for a few years but returned to Colorado in 1987.
In 1988, she was arrested in Aurora for shoplifting and prostitution, according to Colorado Bureau of Investigation records.
She spent some time in the Arapahoe County Jail and was released in September 1988. She used aliases, including Lianne Garfield, Lisa Barnes, Lisa Garfield, Kelly Garfield and Kelly Barnes.
Since the identification, investigators have backtracked to friends and associates trying to rekindle a long- dormant homicide investigation.
“Anyone responsible for taking someone’s life has to be caught and punished for that,” Moore said. “There is no statute of limitations on a homicide.”
Anyone with information is asked to contact investigator Cheryl Moore at 303-271-5625 or cmoore@jeffco.us.
Staff writer Kieran Nicholson can be reached at 303-820-1822 or knicholson@denverpost.com.
