After her daughter was raped, beaten and strangled, Linda Donelson assured homicide detectives she would shadow their work, no matter how long it took to find her daughter’s killer.
“I would call and tell them, ‘Why aren’t you doing this?”‘ she said. “I was a real nuisance.”
But in the years since Sherri Major’s March 18, 1996, slaying, Donelson learned that Denver homicide detectives had been flying all over the country in pursuit of her daughter’s suspected killer, Chester Todd. They, too, were passionate about solving the case.
“You have to be active, but then you have to stand back and let them do their jobs,” Donelson said. “I had to focus on raising my daughter’s three teenage boys, and I left the police work to police.”
Donelson was one of about 175 family members of homicide victims who attended a conference Saturday by Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons, or FOHVAMP.
In recent years, members of the group have learned how to draw police into their family member’s cases and coax legislators to seek funding to pursue cold cases.
At the conference, homicide investigators and law enforcement administrators explained which cases they are more likely to pursue, including those in which DNA could point directly to the killer.
The Denver Police Department and the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office created cold- case units.
“The message is to never give up hope,” said Denver’s chief of police investigations, David Fisher, who is also on FOHVAMP’s board.
In the past, Denver homicide detectives would work the cold cases when they weren’t solving the latest homicide case, Fisher said. Since the cold-case unit opened three years ago, Denver has six full- time detectives and a sergeant who work only cold cases.
“That’s something that is very important,” Fisher said. “They’re dispersed all over the country. We’re going to great lengths to connect the dots.”
Some old cases are getting solved, often when witnesses – whose relationships with suspects have changed over the years – finally agree to talk, said Cheryl Moore, a Jefferson County cold-case investigator.
Greggory LaBerge, director of Denver’s crime lab, said Colorado’s dry climate – which helps preserve evidence – and advances in DNA testing make it possible to solve homicide cases that are decades old.
LaBerge said it helps to know where on the body or at a murder scene to look for evidence. He said his office has used saliva to helped solve several cases.
A killer may not be able to see the evidence he left behind, but investigators who know where to look – often on a victim’s breast or neck – can find it.
Last month, Denver police said they used saliva found on a victim’s hair to solve a 17-year- old murder investigation even though earlier DNA tests weren’t able to find a match.
On Aug. 6, 1990, police found the body of 36-year-old Paula Joscsak on a loading dock behind a Denver business. Police questioned Corey Bailey, now 35, about the murder but didn’t have the evidence to hold him.
In 2005, Denver’s crime scene investigators analyzed the saliva and found a match to Bailey, Denver police spokesman Sonny Jackson said.
Solving a cold case is fraught with challenges, including witnesses moving around the country or even dying, and evidence getting lost, Moore said.
But one of the toughest barriers to solving a case is not knowing the identity of murder victims, said Moore, who was named Colorado homicide investigator of the year in 2006 after developing cases against Billy Edwin Reid in the 1989 murders of Lanell Williams and Lisa Kay Kelly. Murder charges against Reid are pending in court.
The key to solving Kelly’s case was figuring out who she was to begin with. For 16 years, Kelly was known as Jane Doe. Moore said she believed that Williams’ and Jane Doe’s murders the same year were committed by the same person under similar situations. And, because Williams had been a prostitute, Moore believed Jane Doe may also have had a criminal record.
She ran Jane Doe’s fingerprints, which were collected in 1989, and found a match to Kelly, who also had been arrested for prostitution. Other pieces of evidence, which she could not discuss, linked Reid to the murder, she said.
Cases sometimes are so old – some date to the 1950s – that she’s unacquainted with issues of the day.
“That whole world, I wasn’t even born,” Moore said. “You’ve got to kind of be a historian when it comes to researching some of this.”
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
Post unveils cold-case blog
A new blog by The Denver Post will highlight cold cases from throughout Colorado. The site includes the case of a Girl Scout counselor who was sexually assaulted and strangled in her tent in the Pike National Forest in 1963; a government worker with clearance to review top-secret files who was poisoned to death in 1972; a Denver girl who never returned from a road trip with teenage friends in 1990; and many others.
The profiles will be updated when investigators identify suspects or make arrests, or when prosecutors obtain convictions.
