For weeks last summer, employees of the Boulder Police Department and the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office stood under the blistering Arkansas sun, combing through an entire county’s trash, searching for something.
They were searching for answers. They were searching for Ashley Mead.
Months earlier — on Feb. 15, 2017 — a gas station worker in Okmulgee, Okla., had noticed a purple suitcase inside a dumpster. Finding it odd, the woman opened the luggage and made a gruesome discovery.
It contained the disemboweled torso of Mead, a 25-year-old Boulder woman who’d gone missing three days earlier.
Shortly after that discovery, Adam Densmore — Mead’s ex-boyfriend, and the father of her 1-year-old daughter — was charged with her murder and the dismemberment of her body.
But police only had part of Mead’s body — and had no idea how she died.
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