Golden – It’s been more than 18 months, and investigators are no closer to finding out what happened to files found missing in May 2005 from the Jefferson County attorney’s office.
The extensive investigation – including 47 interviews, a surveillance camera, recording-device sweeps and fingerprint analyses – was conducted by the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office after a box of files and 8,000 pages of documents disappeared.
All of the material was related to county critic Mike Zinna’s legal wrangling with the county about an airport development deal, according to the report obtained by The Denver Post under an open-records request.
Although the investigation didn’t recover the files or finger a culprit, it did find lax county government security, a curious surge in copy-paper use and a history of bickering among elected officials.
Some people interviewed by sheriff’s investigators – including Commissioner Jim Congrove and County Attorney Frank Hutfless – suggested Zinna could be involved. Others said it was “an inside job.”
“Congrove and Hutfless were very quick to point the finger at me,” Zinna said. “I think the investigators dismissed me as a suspect from the very beginning. They interviewed 47 people, and I wasn’t one of them.”
Zinna said “many people” could have stolen the documents, which he said were important to a lawsuit he was about to file against the county.
On May 18, 2005, the commissioners asked that documents related to Zinna’s previous cases be collected. Two clerks left a box of files on the desk of assistant county attorney Lilly Oeffler.
Between 5:20 p.m. May 19, 2005, and 8:15 a.m. May 20, 2005, the box disappeared.
Oeffler reported the theft to deputy assistant county attorney Ellen Wakeman, who walked into a meeting and told Hutfless, “Frank, we got a problem. Files are missing.”
During a search, another estimated 8,000 pages related to Zinna’s cases were found missing.
The county board called the sheriff, and Denver agreed to act as special prosecutor in the case.
The file system was so “inefficient,” Hutfless and Wakeman said, that they could not identify exactly which files might be missing. Two weeks after the disappearance was discovered, Zinna filed suit against 19 Jefferson County officials and employees in U.S. District Court, saying they had interfered with his constitutional rights in the airport case.
The Denver District Attorney’s Office found “no identifiable suspect” last February.
However, while interviewing witnesses, investigators learned that more than 11,000 sheets of paper had disappeared from a county attorney’s copy machine over two weekends about the same time.
It’s not known who did the copying or whether the copying was linked to the missing files.
The report paints the Jefferson County attorney’s office as being ripe for a security breach, naming 18 flaws. The offices could be reached from public hallways, attorneys didn’t lock doors and the same key could open any fifth-floor office door.
A county government campus security audit “was done prior to these documents coming up missing,” said sheriff’s spokeswoman Jacki Kelley. It was unclear why written and verbal findings were not instituted.
Today, a receptionist signs in visitors and key cards are used.
The case remains open, Kelley said.
