In 1977, the state of Colorado officially recorded 166 murders.
Until last summer.
In June 2010, when Leroy Oliver Sr. finally succumbed to the bullets fired into his back 33 years ago, he technically became that year’s 167th victim of murder or manslaughter.
His death probably won’t mean much for the person who shot him. No one was ever prosecuted, much less convicted for the crime.
That’s because while Oliver was a lot of things — rogue, raconteur, lothario and lover of whiskey — he was most definitely not a snitch, at least not one who would help authorities.
Shot while face down on his bed and drunk, Oliver refused to tell police who did it.
At the same time, it was not a secret he carried to his grave last year at age 73. He told lots of people, including his kids, that his wife or his brother had shot him. The two of them, by Oliver’s telling, were having an affair, and wanted him out of the way.
But, paralyzed from the waist down, Oliver worried who would care for his kids and for him if his wife went to prison. So he stayed quiet, and, since at the time it was an aggravated assault case, not murder, police eventually stopped investigating. Their reports were destroyed.
Today, Leroy Oliver Jr. is hoping to restart that probe. He started by telling his father’s story to a Denver coroner’s office investigator after an autopsy last June officially declared Leroy Oliver Sr.’s death on June 13 to be the result of homicide.
“I would like someone to pay for what happened to my father,” said Leroy Oliver Jr. “One of the reasons my dad told me the story is once he died, he wanted me to pursue it.”
Johnny Oliver, Leroy’s brother, is dead now, but Leroy Oliver’s ex-wife, now 63, is alive. She repeatedly declined to comment and is not being named because she has never faced charges in the case.
Filing criminal charges now would present daunting obstacles for prosecutors, and appears, at best, unlikely. For starters, the only remaining witness is dead. Oliver’s ashes are sealed in a jar that sits on his son’s living room cabinet.
“It makes a wonderful newspaper story; it doesn’t make a case that we could file charges on,” said Lynn Kimbrough, spokeswoman for District Attorney Mitch Morrissey, referring to Oliver Sr.’s death being called a homicide.
Because of Oliver Sr.’s unwillingness to implicate his shooters and the statute of limitations for aggravated assault having long since lapsed, police didn’t save evidence, said Sonny Jackson, Denver police spokesman. Whatever he told numerous witnesses is only hearsay, Jackson said.
Oliver Sr.’s story is not only remarkable for how justice was denied but how willing he was to forgive. Despite injuries that left him in a wheelchair and severe pain for 33 years until his death, he never sought retribution.
Carmen Lawson, 73, first met Leroy Oliver Sr. in the early 1960s when he was a security guard at the Continental Bus Station at Sixth Avenue and Tremont Street, where she worked in a restaurant.
“The girls called him ‘muscles,’ ” Lawson said. “He was a handsome man.”
A colorful past
Oliver, who grew up in Louisiana and had been a military police officer in the Army, was always a lady’s man, his son said. He had five children by five different women. He also drank a lot of whiskey.
He began living with the woman he later said shot him in the 1960s, leaving Oliver Jr.’s mother. They had a daughter together, Christina Marie Oliver, who was born in 1969. According to Oliver Jr., the woman gave birth to another daughter fathered by his younger brother Johnny the following year.
Oliver Sr. raised his wife’s second child as his own, Oliver Jr. said. Then, despite the affair with his brother, he married the woman in 1975, according to court records.
Two years after their marriage on Sept. 17, Oliver Sr. came home after a night of heavy drinking and dropped face down on his bed.
He heard a door open and, as he recalled it for his son, saw two people in the shadows, one he recognized as his wife and a figure he believed was his brother Johnny, he later told Oliver Jr. Shots were fired. Oliver Sr. was struck in his lower back. He was paralyzed.
That’s the second-hand account Leroy Oliver Jr. gave the coroner’s office after his father’s death.
“He advised the decedent was shot by his brother and his wife was also involved,” a coroner’s office investigator recorded in notes. “He advised the decedent’s wife was having an affair with the brother.”
Others gave different versions of what happened, saying that Oliver Sr. accused his wife of shooting him.
Helen Lucero, 67, a nurse who cared for him years later, said he told her that he was asleep and that after he was shot he turned around and said, “Why?”
Lucero said Oliver Sr. described for her how his wife just stood there weeping, holding a gun in her hand.
It’s unclear how intensive the police investigation was at the time. Jackson said officers could not find a report of his shooting from 1977. The department purges case files after the statute of limitations runs out, he said. Nothing is left today.
“A big mountain to climb”
Last summer, the coroner’s office determined based on its investigation that the shooting was not self-inflicted and therefore a homicide, coroner’s spokesman Michelle Weiss-Samaras said. Oliver Sr. actually died from sepsis and a possible toxic megacolon from ulcers and long term bladder catheter placement as a result of the shooting, she said.
On June 17, four days after Oliver Sr. died, coroner’s office investigator Tracey Balbin sent a letter to Detective Randall Stegman of the Denver Police Department’s homicide unit describing Johnny Oliver as the suspect and not mentioning his wife. The letter said Johnny Oliver was dead.
According to Mary Dulacki, records coordinator for the Denver police, homicide detectives did not conduct an investigation following the coroner’s office determination that Oliver Sr.’s death was a homicide.
“He knows who shot him. But he didn’t seek justice while he was alive,” Jackson said. “Now trying to locate (witnesses) after all these years. It’s a big mountain to climb.”
Oliver Sr. told his son that he refused to tell police who shot him.
“He didn’t want his daughters to hate him because he put their mama in jail,” Oliver Jr. said.
Lucero said Oliver Sr. realized that he would not be able to care for the girls and that if their mother went to prison, they would go to foster care.
“Someone had to take care of the little girls,” she said. “He didn’t know what else to do.”
A few years after the shooting, Oliver Sr. moved into The Tower at Speer, a subsidized housing complex at 1255 Galapago St., where he mostly lived until his death. His ex-wife, whom he had divorced after the shooting, worked at the King Soopers across the street, but while he pointed her out to folks from his apartments, he tried to avoid her.
“Even after all this time I think he still loved her. You could feel it when he was talking. He said he would never find another woman like her. He said if he had been more attentive to his wife it would have never happened,” Lawson said. “His heart was bigger than this building.”
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
