Colorado prison inmate Roy Allan Melanson might never stand trial for the murders that his DNA says he committed in Louisiana and California decades ago.
He will die in a Bent County prison for a 1974 murder that took nearly 20 years to solve, but new evidence links him to at least two other cold cases that cast the former drifter as a serial killer.
Last week, DNA from semen on a victim’s sock connected Melanson, now 73, to the 1988 murder of a 24-year-old Louisiana woman. And last November, similar clues pointed to him in the 1974 killing of a former California beauty queen.
For more than 30 years, loved ones of the victims have lived with grief that, for some, proved too much to bear.
“He drove the nails in my momma and daddy’s coffins,” said Charlene Morris, whose 24- year-old sister, Charlotte Sauerwin, was beaten, strangled and slashed across her neck in Walker, La., in 1988. “They just shut down after that.”
Solid proof of Melanson’s ties to other cold cases was missing until recently. His DNA had been added to a national databank after a federal law in 2000 compelled him to do so, and state crime labs across the country have been methodical in resubmitting their locally stored evidence.
In California and Louisiana, that led them to Melanson.
His DNA placed him in Napa, Calif., on July 10, 1974, the night 51-year-old Anita Andrews was closing up her family’s lounge as a stranger lingered at the bar.
The next morning, the body of the one-time county fair beauty queen was found sprawled on the floor. She has been raped, and her throat was slashed.
Two months later, Melanson was in Crested Butte, and soon, Michele French was dead.
In her case, it was a strand of hair on her scalp found five years later that finally gave authorities proof that she was dead and a solid reason to arrest Melanson. That arrest is what opened the possibility of solving the other cases across the country.
“You only get one shot,” said Wyatt Angelo, the Gunnison County prosecutor, now a federal prosecutor, who built a solid but circumstantial case that put Melanson away in 1993.
“It’s very difficult to get a conviction without a body.”
Criminal by trade
When he arrived in Gunnison County, Melanson claimed to be an experienced sheepherder, according to testimony in his trial. In truth, he had been nothing more than a con artist, drifter and convict found guilty on rape and assault charges his entire adult life.
In a Texas prison, Melanson had been suspected in the beating death of another inmate, Angelo said.
“He was said to be very quick and strong, and he had these huge hands,” Angelo remembered.
A rancher in Gunnison County gave him a rifle and a horse and paid him to shoot mountain lions and coyotes who preyed on his flock.
On an August afternoon in The Timbers Bar in Crested Butte, Melanson struck up a conversation with local ranch hand Charles Matthews, saying he needed a ride.
Matthews’ car broke down, just as Michele French happened by and offered a ride.
They dropped off Matthews back at the bar, and French was never seen alive again.
Matthews testified he was surprised that Melanson told French he needed a ride to his car, after telling Matthews he didn’t have one.
“He had the gift of gab, and he was good getting into people’s good graces,” Angelo said. “His modus operandi was to gain people’s trust and wait for his chance.”
Fourteen years later in a small town east of Baton Rouge, La., witnesses said a stranger in a laundry told Charlotte Sauerwin that he was a land developer.
She had gossiped about how long it was taking for her fiance to save the money to clear land they had bought for a home, so they could move out of her family’s 30-foot-by-30-foot shed. The stranger said he could do it for not much money.
“He beat the living hell out of her,” said the fiance, Vincent LeJeune, who choked up with tears on Friday as he described the pictures he saw of the body. “He didn’t just strangle her and cut her throat, he made her suffer.”
She was found just off the couple’s property, where she had been marched and dragged with a strap around her neck, LeJeune said.
For years LeJeune harbored secret but elaborate fantasies of finding the killer and making him pay.
He’s thought about the murderer so many times, he feels like he knows him.
“He’s not sorry for anything,” LeJeune says, almost growling. “He lives off causing pain. He gets off on hurting people any way he can.”
Questions in other cases linger
Melanson has not responded to a request for an interview from The Denver Post.
Detectives who have questioned him described Melanson as smug and taunting as they pleaded with him to give other families closure.
Wyatt said at the time of the 1993 trial in Gunnison that authorities in Port Angeles, Texas, felt certain that Melanson had killed a young woman there — “He was the last one seen with her” — but there was no DNA or other evidence to connect him to the case.
“He’s a very, very smart person,” Angelo said. “He knows how to cover his tracks. I wouldn’t have been surprised at all if there were more victims.”
In April, Detectives Stan Carpenter and Ben Bourgeois of Livingston Parish, La., flew to Colorado after the DNA hit to interview Melanson about the Louisiana murder.
He “smiled at detectives telling them that if his DNA was on the victim, ‘You go ahead and charge me,’ ” recounted Perry Rushing, the sheriff’s chief of operations. “Detectives smiled back at him and said, ‘We will.’ “
But because of his age, his life sentence in Colorado and the costs of extradition, trials and appeals, Melanson won’t be tried in Louisiana, Rushing said.
His death in Colorado, however, will be hollow justice for the families of his alleged victims.
“I believe like the Bible says, an eye for an eye, you pay for what you did,” said Charlene Morris. “My daddy believed that, too, and if he could have ever gotten his hands on the person who did it, he would have given him the death penalty.”
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com
