Since a Navy intelligence specialist was fatally shot in the back of the head in early 1981 near Kremmling, the Navy’s role in the investigation has puzzled his family and former intelligence shipmates and commanders.
Now, DNA analysis 27 years later could help settle whether Laszlo “Boz” Boszormen yi was randomly killed by a local robber, as crime investigators believe, or targeted by a Cold War spy, as his sister and some former intelligence colleagues believe is possible.
Beer bottles apparently discarded by the killer along U.S. 40 about 11 miles west of Kremmling were sent to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation last month for DNA analysis, said Matt Harmon, investigator for the 14th Judicial District.
“This could be one of our last chances to develop evidence in this case,” Harmon said.
Agents from the Naval Investigative Service — now called the Naval Criminal Investigative Service — and Grand County sheriff’s investigators concluded Boszormenyi’s Jan. 29, 1981, slaying was a random robbery in which the killer got away with Boszormenyi’s wallet and more than $1,000 he had after cashing his paycheck.
Boszormenyi was driving alone between San Diego, where his ship the USS Constellation docked, to Omaha, where he was enrolled in an intelligence course, said his sister Margaret Hill, a supervisor at an insurance company in Pennsylvania. He was stopping to ski along the way.
Witnesses told authorities they saw a green pickup truck parked behind Boszormenyi’s yellow-and-white Volkswagen van at a gravel pull-out between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. before he was found bleeding to death behind his van, according to a Grand County Sheriff’s Office report. He was shot once in the back of the head with a .22-caliber bullet fired from a rifle, then dragged behind the bus.
The beer bottles were found at two spots where witnesses reported seeing the green truck.
Boszormenyi’s intelligence background did not appear to be thoroughly investigated, as is customary when unusual events happen to someone with his “top secret” security clearance, according to his associates.
Because intelligence operatives are vulnerable to blackmail and extortion, they are investigated for debt and drinking problems or when they have affairs, said former Lt. Cmdr. Fred David McDougall, who supervised all intelligence officials, including Boszormen yi, on the Constellation.
“It’s unfathomable there were no arrests, no persons of interest and no follow-through (by the Navy) after a murder,” said Howard Morris, who served with Boszormenyi and retired after 20 years in the Navy. “I’m flabbergasted.”
Boszormenyi was killed shortly after completing a sensitive intelligence mission in the Persian Gulf for much of the Iran hostage crisis.
But McDougall said he does not believe Boszormenyi’s killing had anything to do with his intelligence work, in part because Boszormenyi was between assignments and didn’t have immediate access to current information.
Morris said because Boszormenyi was one generation removed from living in Hungary, then an Eastern Bloc nation, relatives could have told a Hungarian friend about their son with a promising future in U.S. intelligence. It could be that a spy later tried to contact and compromise him, he said.
“It’s not beyond the pale of belief,” he said. “It’s plausible.”
Given several spy scandals since this murder, including the Navy father-and-son spy team of John and Michael Walker that operated in the 1970s and ’80s, it would be prudent for NCIS investigators to give the unsolved murder of an intelligence specialist with top-secret clearance another look, he said.
“There should have been an in-depth review of everything Boz touched the last six months he was on the Constellation,” Morris said. “They should have gone in the ship, locked it down and scoured it for anything hinky related to him. He had daily access to sensitive defense information.”
Had some trained killer been involved, Harmon said, he doesn’t think they would have waited until he got to Colorado, then shot him on the side of a U.S. highway in daylight while school buses were passing by.
Hill said the alternative, that a stranger spent two hours getting to know her brother before shooting him to death in a random robbery, doesn’t sound plausible to her, either.
A few things that were unusual for him were that he wrote several checks the morning he died that later bounced and he had a roll of film from a 35 mm camera even though he didn’t own a camera, Hill said.
“I’m wondering if the Navy took that roll of film,” she said. “Did NIS ever go back to reinvestigate after the Walkers were arrested? This is just not making sense.”
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
