A Denver man who brutally attacked his mother-in-law and then lay in wait to kill his wife was sentenced Thursday to life without parole plus 80 years.
Ray Allen, 33, was convicted by the Denver District Court jury after eight hours of deliberation and immediately sentenced by Judge Morris Hoffman.
Hoffman told Allen that the longer he is on the bench, the less he understands people. He added that if neighbors hadn’t intervened, two people would have died instead of one.
Allen had vowed to kill his wife, Dorothy, because she wanted a divorce. But on the night of Aug. 23, 2004, neither Dorothy nor her mother, Sharon Fordyce, expected that Allen would sneak into their secured apartment building and carry out his promise. He barged into Fordyce’s apartment by posing as someone else.
Fordyce, suffering from numerous stab wounds and incapacitated by the attack, couldn’t warn her daughter, who had been out with friends, not to come into the apartment.
She couldn’t help her daughter after Dorothy cried out to her mother that Allen was killing her.
Allen never showed compassion, said prosecutors David Karpel and Carlos Samour.
But minutes after Allen was convicted Thursday, Fordyce, 56, said during the sentencing hearing: “I still love you, you will always be my baby boy.”
She added that maybe some day, given that love, she will be able to forgive him for what he did.
During the first day of trial, Fordyce gave horrifying testimony about the attack. Some jurors wept as they listened.
After the sentencing, Fordyce said it had been very difficult to testify.
“I relived it from start to finish,” she said. “It was like going back a year and a half and living the whole nightmare over.
“It won’t bring my daughter back, but I know justice was done,” she said.
During closing arguments, Karpel told the jury that there was no doubt that Allen carefully planned the attack.
“You are looking at a coldblooded killer, make no mistake about it,” Karpel said as he pointed at Allen.
Samour showed the jury two badly bent knives.
“How many knives did he use?” Samour asked the jury. “How many did he need?
“That was how violent and how forceful it was,” the prosecutor said, pointing at the knives.
But defense attorney Dru Nielsen said that although Dorothy was killed and Fordyce was badly hurt, Allen wasn’t guilty of any crime because he was so impaired by cocaine and alcohol he didn’t know what he was doing.
Staff writer Howard Pankratz can be reached at 303-820-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com.
