Dennis Gene Cox had a troubled past, but the Kilgore family saw none of it until Julie Ann Kilgore went missing Tuesday afternoon.
A man authorities believe to be Cox, 50, was shot and reportedly killed by Fort Collins police Friday afternoon, six hours after Kilgore escaped from him at a Laramie Ramada Inn.
At a bus stop at 243 N. College Ave. at about 4 p.m., three officers approached a man fitting Cox’s description. The man raised a pistol and was gunned down by the officers, Fort Collins police said.
He was taken to Poudre Valley Hospital in critical condition. The Associated Press quoted the FBI as saying that the man died, and police referred The Denver Post to the Larimer County Coroner.
Authorities in Colorado and Wyoming were on high alert, knowing Cox was armed, had a violent past and faced a return to prison. Records show he had once lived in Fort Collins, about 3 miles from where he was shot.
Ray Kilgore, 75, said his 48-year-old daughter broke off her relationship with her fiance on Sunday, two days before she disappeared.
She called briefly on Friday after she regained her freedom, before undergoing hours of questioning from Brighton and Laramie police, as well as the FBI.
She told her family that Cox had held her at gunpoint, but she’d managed to get free.
“She was pretty hysterical,” Ray Kilgore said.
The family had seen nothing sinister in Cox, he said. They had known Cox for a year and a half.
“He was always the nicest guy, always respectful,” Ray Kilgore said. “He just snapped.”
The Kilgore family’s three-day ordeal ended Friday at about 10 a.m., when Julie Ann Kilgore raced into the Ramada Inn lobby, asked a clerk for help and hid under a desk, authorities said.
The clerk called Laramie police and said “the Colorado kidnapping victim was with her,” said Brighton police spokesman John Bradley.
Laramie police Cmdr. Mitchell Cushman said Kilgore made a break for it when Cox left the hotel room. He was never seen back at the hotel, but his 1993 Ford Taurus was found abandoned in an alley in downtown Laramie, about a mile from the hotel along Interstate 80.
How he got to Fort Collins from Laramie, about 60 miles away, was a mystery Friday evening.
“We didn’t have buses leaving Laramie today, so there’s a question as to how he got out,” Cushman said.
Authorities had been looking for the pair since Kilgore, a nurse, disappeared Tuesday afternoon, when she left home and told her family she would be back in a few minutes.
Her car was found abandoned in a shopping center parking lot a little more than a block from her home.
Cox has been divorced three times, records show. He has an extensive arrest history of 41 charges, including several for domestic violence and crimes upon women.
He was arrested on kidnapping charges in Thornton, Denver and Arapahoe County in the 1980s, two of which also included additional charges of sexual assault.
His record also includes arrests for drug possession, contempt of court, resisting arrest, threats on a police officer, drunken driving and harassment, classified in court records as “strikes, shoves or touches.”
Records show Cox was released from prison on parole in 2008 after serving two years on conviction for menacing with a deadly weapon in La Plata County in 2005.
When not in jail, he has split his time living in the metro region and Durango, according to a records search.
The three Fort Collins officers involved in the shooting were not injured but were placed on administrative leave while the shooting is being investigated, a standard procedure, according to the department.
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com
