Denver police twice arrested Diego Olmos Alcalde on sexual-assault charges and had him in custody only weeks after he allegedly raped and beat Susannah Chase to death in Boulder in 1997.
But legal and judicial decisions combined with laboratory backlogs to keep the identity of Chase’s possible killer a secret from police for more than a decade.
Alcalde’s arrest Saturday has brought a measure of relief to Chase’s family and the Boulder police who hunted him. But it has raised questions about whether he could have been stopped sooner and kept from tormenting other women.
“It is definitely frustrating to hear that a week or two after what happened to my sister, there were violent sex crimes that could have raised a red flag,” said Doug Chase, 38. “You would like to think that when someone gets caught for rape in a city 25 miles away a week or two later, there would be some attention paid to whether this could be the same guy. Who knows how many crimes he could have committed later.”
A search-warrant affidavit released Monday shows just how close Alcalde came to being taken off the streets on several occasions.
Chase, a 23-year-old University of Colorado senior, was found close to death in an alley near her home in Boulder on Dec. 21, 1997, her skull fractured by blows from a baseball bat. She died the next day.
On Jan. 1, 1998, Denver police arrested Alcalde on first-degree sexual assault charges after a prostitute reported she was raped in his car.
Fifteen days later, Denver police spotted the same car, a blue Datsun 280Z, pulling to the curb on Downing Street near East Colfax Avenue.
“As the vehicle pulled over, a female passenger jumped out and ran back to Sgt. MacDonald’s patrol vehicle,” the affidavit said.
The woman told the officer that she met the driver, Alcalde, where she worked at the Roslynn Grill and had drinks with him.
At closing time, he offered her a ride home and drove to a street near the Cherry Creek Mall where he pulled a knife from under his seat.
He told the woman he would do what he wanted to her and reached under her shirt to touch her breasts. When the unidentified woman kicked the door, Alcalde told the woman he was sorry, the affidavit said. He then drove her back near Colfax, where the woman jumped out of the car.
No “likelihood of conviction”
Lynn Kimbrough, spokeswoman for Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey, said the office, then led by DA Bill Ritter, declined to file a criminal case on the first arrest. Despite the prostitute’s description of the rapist and his car, prosectors determined there was no “likelihood of conviction in the case.”
The second arrest was resolved when Alcalde pleaded guilty to one count of carrying a concealed weapon, a misdemeanor.
Authorities didn’t submit Alcalde’s DNA to a national database then. Under Colorado law, DNA is checked against the FBI database only if a defendant is sent to serve out a sentence with the state’s Department of Corrections.
On Aug. 10, 2000, Alcalde was in Cheyenne. He followed a young woman to the parking lot at her apartment and blocked her vehicle with his.
He choked her and then dragged her from the car, but not before she honked the horn, drawing attention and forcing him to run.
This time he was tried and found guilty, but the Wyoming Supreme Court overturned the decision on a technicality.
Wyoming’s Department of Corrections takes DNA samples from all those incarcerated, said Steve Holloway, director of the state’s crime lab.
The lab received a DNA sample from Alcalde at Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins on May 11, 2001. But the prison system sends the lab about 1,500 DNA samples each year, so the sample waited to be analyzed.
When the state Supreme Court remanded the case for a new trial in 2004, the crime lab had to “expunge” the record, Holloway said.
Later that year, Alcalde was again found guilty by a Wyoming jury.
He went to prison in September 2004, and another DNA sample went to the crime lab.
But the backlogs persisted in Wyoming, and more than three years passed before his sample was analyzed and uploaded in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, where it was a match for DNA found on Chase’s body. The delay “was strictly because of our backlog,” Holloway said.
Alcalde had been paroled on July 19, 2007, and released to the custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation consideration.
But because Alcalde — who came to the U.S. after his mother, Leticia, married Denver resident William Bayers — was a naturalized citizen, ICE had no reason to hold him.
“We took him into custody and then discovered that he had derived U.S. citizenship from a parent,” said ICE spokesman Carl Rusnok. “ICE released him the next day.”
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
Staff writer Christopher N. Osher contributed to this report.
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to an editing error the headline incorrectly stated the year that Denver police twice arrested Diego Olmos Alcalde,. He was in police custody in January 1998.
