On Oct. 15, 1992, three young children discovered their mother murdered in their Denver home.
Now, 16 years after the crime, Denver police say they have solved the stabbing death of Roslin Yvette Gray with the arrest of 56-year-old Carlton Smith.
Gray’s children — a teenage boy and girl and their 8-year-old brother — walked into their home and found that their mother had been repeatedly stabbed. They ran next door to the home of their grandfather, screaming for help.
Originally, police arrested Ricky Thompson, Gray’s boyfriend, but he was released within days for lack of evidence.
At Gray’s red brick home, police said there were signs of a struggle. They recovered a “sharp object” that police said may have been used to stab Gray.
Relatives said that in the months before her murder, Gray had become addicted to cocaine.
“Cocaine killed my sister,” said Gray’s brother, Michael Davis, at the time of the murder.
Davis and his wife, Kelly Jones, said they noticed a change in Gray’s behavior about eight months earlier and the family was worried that she was using drugs and associating with a bad crowd.
In August 2005, the Cold Case Unit of the Denver Police Department began work on the Gray case. Earlier this month, detectives developed sufficient information to obtain an arrest warrant for Smith, said Detective Sharon Avendano, a spokeswoman for the Denver Police Department.
On Saturday, detectives from the department’s fugitive unit arrested Smith for investigation of first-degree murder. Avendano said detectives will present the case to the Denver district attorney’s office for filing of charges.
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com
