Frustrated with the murder investigation of a family member, a Colorado man began his own probe, including talking to the suspect himself.
” ‘Sometimes I have a real problem with my temper, and I just sort of pop off and lose it,’ ” the father later quoted the suspect as telling him. ” ‘And then sometimes I can get a little violent.’ “
Police advise against such measures, warning that contacting suspects is potentially dangerous and could ruin investigations, but families of murder victims reach a point where they overlook any risk.
“It tells me the depth of feeling that a death stirs in the family of a murder victim,” said Howard Morton, executive director of Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons.
The desperate measure taken by the man is symptomatic of a growing percentage of unsolved homicides in which family members think police have abandoned the case, Morton said.
The group recently posted a study on its website that it had commissioned this year from the Center for the Study of Crime and Justice at Colorado State University entitled, “What Cold Case Families Want from Law Enforcement.”
The man who contacted the suspect himself was quoted anonymously in the study conducted by a team of researchers supervised by Paul Stretesky, who now works for the University of Colorado Denver.
As part of the study, 37 family members of victims, mostly parents, were interviewed an average of 15 years after their loved ones had been killed.
The families of victims begin to feel they are victimized a second time when a primary detective stops investigating a homicide without notifying them and police stop returning their calls, Morton said.
The study recommended that police and prosecutors do a better job of communicating candidly to family members about cases.
The arrest and prosecution of the killer helps family members of the victim in the grieving process, the study found.
Sixteen people who participated in the CSU study said they found it necessary to work the homicide cases themselves in order to get something done. Police would not interview certain witnesses until one participant asked them to, according to the study.
One woman offered to go with serial killer Scott Kimball before his arrest to the spot where her daughter was buried.
Morton said he warned her that if she went with him, she could be his next victim and she said: “I believe he already killed my daughter. What could he do to me that is worse than that?”
Denver police spokesman John White said police will follow all leads in a homicide case. If families of victims learn the whereabouts of suspects, he said, they should contact police because it could be dangerous if they do it themselves and their actions could jeopardize the investigation.
“The advantage of talking to authorities is we have investigative tools to flesh out leads,” White said.
Online.
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
