El Paso County Sheriff Bill Elder will meet Wednesday with Gov. John Hickenlooper and state law enforcement officials to explain why he is discontinuing the active investigation into the 2013 assassination of former state prisons chief Tom Clements.
Elder will specifically discuss a recent Denver Post article citing Texas Rangers documents that , a white supremacist prison gang, ordered parolee Evan Ebel to kill Clements, Jacqueline Kirby, Elder’s spokeswoman, said Monday.
“The sheriff will discuss what we found and what we did not find,” Kirby said.
In an interview with The Denver Post on Thursday, Hickenlooper declined to comment on whether he would consider appointing a special prosecutor to shepherd the Clements murder investigation because the case was actively under investigation. He could not be reached for comment Monday after Elder’s decision to close El Paso County’s investigation.
Kirby said the Texas Rangers report is three years old. Since then, hundreds of interviews have been conducted by investigators, she pointed out. She declined to say more about Wednesday’s meeting.
by The Gazette of Colorado Springs that he has “no information to dispute that Ebel acted alone.”
The cited documents including a 77-page report revealing a spiderweb of hundreds of phone calls between gunman Ebel and fellow members of the 211 Crew in the days before and after Clements’ killing on March 19, 2013. Some of those calls came two days later while Ebel was leading Texas lawmen on a 100 mph chase that led to his death in a shootout.
After investigators retrieved phone numbers from the phones Ebel had been using, authorities in Texas and Colorado made six arrests, half of them never previously reported. The arrests stemmed from the gang members’ dealings with Ebel, but none was directly linked to Clements’ killing, which remains officially unsolved more than three years later. Texas Ranger James Holland’s report identifies a dozen suspects or persons of interest who allegedly did everything from ordering Clements’ assassination to helping Ebel flee to Texas.
At the time Elder came into office in 2015, he told The Denver Post that “there is no person of interest” or suspects in the Clements case. He vowed to do a top-to-bottom review.
There are critics of Elder’s analysis. Most of the hundreds of interviews conducted by law enforcement since the Texas report was completed were done by or under the direction of , who said the investigation overwhelmingly verified that members of the white supremacist prison gang conspired with Ebel.
In addition, several key witnesses cited in the Texas Rangers report told The Post that they had not been interviewed since Elder became sheriff, including 211 Crew Capt. Christopher Middleton, who said he had brunch with Ebel hours before Ebel shot Clements at his Monument home. Middleton was released in February after serving nearly three years in prison on a parole violation because of his association with Ebel. He said he arranged for Ebel to stay with a friend in Fountain the night before the murder. Middleton denies knowing about Ebel’s murder plans.
The Clements case was mired in conflict between prosecutors and an El Paso County Sheriff’s Office distracted by office politics, sexual scandals and possible criminal wrongdoing. The sheriff at the time, Terry Maketa — along with San Agustin and another top official — was indicted by a grand jury on various criminal charges including kidnapping. The charges are unrelated to the Clements case.
It is possible prosecutors have already missed their opportunity to hold some of the conspirators accountable for lesser roles in the Clements murder and Ebel’s escape because the Colorado statute of limitations for “accessory after the fact, murder” is three years.
The Rangers’ report also revealed another mystery that Elder has yet to explain: how DNA linked to a Colorado Springs murder ended up on pipe bombs found in Ebel’s car.
