GRAND JUNCTION — Jim Fromm was a rookie police officer in 1975 when he was dispatched to a small apartment where the bodies of a 24-year-old mother and her 5-year-old daughter lay in a scene of bloody carnage.
Fromm, then 23, and his fellow officers would spend the next 46 hours in that apartment, without sleep. They hadn’t seen much of this kind of depraved crime before so they were intent on photographing and bagging every shred of evidence.
“If there was anything that we thought might even possibly be evidence we took it,” said the retired officer who now works as an accountant and whose eyes still redden at the thought of what happened in that apartment.
The detailed work that Fromm, Doug Rushing and Ron Smith did back then — before the advent of DNA tests and digitized databases — is now credited with leading to an arrest in the murders of Linda Benson and her daughter, Kelley Benson, 34 years later.
Truck driver Jerry Nemnich, 64, was arrested Wednesday because a cold-case team brought old evidence and new science together.
When authorities announced the Longmont man’s arrest last week, Fromm, Smith and Rushing, all now retired from police work, were standing shoulder to shoulder in the back of the room.
Another retired officer, Larry Bullard, was nearby. Bullard donated a year of his time to the cold case and the mind-numbing task of going through boxes and boxes of hard-to-read microfiche and crumbling paper records.
The officers who worked the case 34 years ago had been criticized in the shaken community of Grand Junction when they didn’t solve the murders. But Bullard said it wasn’t because they weren’t thorough.
There was the marathon of evidence gathering, hundreds of interviews, a handful of polygraph examinations and even a trip to FBI headquarters in Quantico, Va., for help.
With all that, Nemnich never came up on their radar. He was long gone and he was unknown in the area. He had faced one charge of check fraud 11 years before in Mesa County. There was no sex-offender registry or way to match the stranger’s blood to a convicted sex felon.
The investigators had never gotten over their failure to solve the case.
Now, it was their turn for praise.
“This was not a case of a botched investigation. It was excellent police work,” said Grand Junction Police Chief Bill Gardner.
On top of not having scientific investigative tools available now, that work occurred at a difficult time.
“It was a summer of homicides that Grand Junction has not seen, in my knowledge, ever,” Smith said.
Grand Junction was half the size it is now. But it was growing and losing that small-town feel. Everyone didn’t know everyone else anymore. The oil-shale boom was just heating up. The town was busy with migrant farm workers and transient workers building the Hayden power plant.
In the late 1970s, a new attempt was made to solve the Benson case. That stalled, and the case did not come under scrutiny again until just over a year ago when Police Cmdr. Greg Assenmacher started looking into cold cases.
Because of the wealth of evidence, the Benson case looked like one that could be solved. So for the past two months investigators focused on that one.
They also had help from the Longmont Police Department when they discovered Nemnich had been living there.
The investigators learned when the long-haul trucker would be driving back into Colorado last week and nabbed him.
Fromm said that news thrilled him — and gave him chills.
“God only knows how many times he’s driven through this valley in the past 34 years,” he said.
