AURORA — A man serving a 48-year prison sentence for the death of his 2-year-old son now faces a murder charge stemming from the disappearance of his wife.
The Aurora Sentinel reports 41-year-old Michael Jim Medina is expected to appear in court this week for the presumed death of Kimberly Greene Medina. The Aurora woman disappeared in 1996, and her family has long suspected her husband was involved.
Medina is in prison for the 2005 killing of his son Degan in Rio Blanco County.
Police declined to say what changed in the case and led to Medina’s indictment, and a spokeswoman for the Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office says documents in the case are sealed.
In 1996, Medina told police that his 19-year-old wife had left their apartment at 10:40 p.m. saying she need to buy a pack of cigarettes. He reported her missing two days later. He said he thought the cigarettes were an excuse, and that she really wanted to make a private phone call.
He told The Denver Post at the time that he thought she has a “secret life, extracurricular activities” at work, and was worried that something had happened to her.
Eight days after Greene disappeared, a police department bloodhound traced her trail and determined that she had not made it to a store eight blocks from the couple’s apartment. The dog’s handler determined that she had gone to a nearby pay phone and then gotten into a car.
The dog followed the scent down Buckley Road but lost it near the intersection of Colfax Avenue and Interstate 225.
Greene took no personal possessions with her and never contacted any of the roughly 100 family members in the metro area. Her father, John Greene, said his daughter was a devoted mother who never would have left her two children behind.
Friends and relatives distributed 50,000 fliers in an effort to locate the missing woman.
Meanwhile, Medina moved with the two children to Alamosa and married another woman, Becky Garel, with whom he had Degan. According to a report in the Valley Courier, Garel was trying to leave him because of domestic violence issues when Medina told her he’d killed his first wife and would kill both Degan and himself if she went to authorities about the domestic violence.
Soon after, the boy was found drowned in a sewage lagoon. Medina claimed the death was an accident and, though initially charged with first-degree murder, pled guilty to felony child abuse causing death.
