Rocky Ford police and Colorado Bureau of Investigation agents have reopened the criminal investigation into what happened to two 15-year-old girls who vanished nearly 35 years ago while walking home from Rocky Ford High School.

Victoria Sanchez and Yvonne Mestas were last seen walking home from school together on the afternoon of Nov. 1, 1982, according to a news release from Susan Medina, CBI spokeswoman.

Police and CBI agents are combining forces in hopes of shedding new light on what happened to the girls, Media wrote.

“Although decades have passed, we are actively working with our partners at the Rocky Ford Police Department on this long-term missing persons’ case to help determine what happened to Victoria and Yvonne,” CBI Pueblo Agent Kevin Koback said.

Detectives could not comment on the information they recently received that justified reopening the case.

Authorities, however, are asking anyone who may know anything about the disappearance of the girls to call 719-647-5999.

Denver authorities released a murder suspect after linking him by DNA to the victim’s apartment and after he confessed to bashing the disabled man’s head against a wall and stomping him to death in 1978 because of a miscommunication between a judge and a prosecutor, authorities say.

Shawn Mandell Winkler, 60, a  suspect in the murder of 18-year-old Van T. Rogers, walked into Denver police headquarters on Oct. 23 and confessed to the brutal slaying that left Rogers’ body virtually unrecognizable to his own family.

“Certainly it was an unfortunate issue of miscommunication,” Denver District Attorney’s spokeswoman Maro Casparian said of Winkler’s snafu release.

The Denver County Court judge ordered formal charges to be filed against Winkler by 1 p.m. on Monday, but the prosecutor believed he only needed to file for an extension to file charges, Casparian said. The district attorney’s office filed the request for an extension by the deadline but did not file formal charges, she said.

On the judge’s order, Winkler was released on his own recognizance at 8 p.m. Monday, according to Denver jail officials.

A warrant for Winkler’s arrest wasn’t issued until Thursday, according to court records. On Thursday, Denver police released a Crime Stoppers bulletin that said they have an arrest warrant for Winkler, who is homeless.

Denver police spokesman Sonny Jackson said police took Winkler into custody, a second time, at about 7 p.m. Friday in the Capitol Hill area, near East 14th Avenue and Logan Street. “It’s a loss of life and we’re taking it very seriously.”

In January of 1978, police were called to the back of a building at 1025 E. 12th Ave. They found a man lying on the ground with obvious trauma to his face. Detectives collected a fresh cigarette butt, an empty tequila bottle, an empty cigarette pack and an empty beer can.

An acquaintance of Winkler’s contacted The Denver Post  recently and explained that Rogers’ body was so severely beaten that his father could only identify him by scars on his body.

Rogers, an alcoholic, was born with special needs and lived on his own. Someone had stolen a ring of keys that Rogers always kept tied to a string. When police went to his apartment at 930 Downing St. they found the place in disarray. Numerous items were missing including a TV, a stereo and a record player. Police also found a cigarette butt in the home.

The cold case was reopened for investigative purposes in 2005, 2011 and in 2017, according to the affidavit for Winkler’s arrest. In May, the Denver crime lab connected DNA found in Rogers’ apartment to Winkler.

A search began for Winkler, who was then wanted on a shoplifting warrant out of Lakewood. He was intoxicated when he was arrested on that warrant on Oct. 2. When Denver detectives interviewed him that day, Winkler denied ever being in Rogers’ home or having anything to do with his murder, the affidavit says.

Police released him and asked him to call back if he remembered anything.

At 4:55 p.m. on Oct. 23, Winkler walked into Denver Police Department headquarters and agreed to a videotaped interview.

Hey, #Denver! How about you help us catch this murder suspect and earn some reward mula! Just some #ThursdayThoughts… pic.twitter.com/xqMhyvk5D4

— Denver Police Dept. (@DenverPolice) November 2, 2017

Winkler said in 1978 he knew Rogers as Vance. Winkler met Rogers in the House of Draft bar on the evening of Jan. 13, 1978. He told detectives that Rogers was saying inappropriate things to his girlfriend and another woman that was with their party.

Winkler told police he and Rogers left the bar, ostensibly to find different female companionship. They went to a woman’s home but she declined “any encounter with them.” They walked to Capitol Hill to look for another woman. He said Rogers made a crude remark about women and Winkler’s girlfriend.

Angry, Winkler stiff armed Rogers’ face, causing him to strike his head on a wall and then fall. Winkler then stomped on Rogers’ head once, he said. He stole Rogers’ wallet and house keys and went to Rogers’ home with friends and burglarized the home.

He said he and two friends took a stereo, speakers and a turntable.

A 41-year-old Denver man has been charged with second-degree murder after blood-smeared coins and pants linked him to the 1995 stabbing death of a man found in the parking lot of Prairie Middle School.

Jimmie Joseph Crank was charged late last month in the Sept. 22, 1995, death of Michael Nilsson, 25, of Aurora, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

Nilsson was discovered at 6:44 a.m. lying on his back in the southeast parking lot of Prairie Middle School, 12600 E. Jewell Ave. A school resource officer found a wallet on his chest. A penny and three quarters were on the pavement near the right pocket of his faded jeans. A few cigarette butts were found on his right side.

He had been stabbed four times in the back, according to an arrest warrant affidavit filed by Aurora cold case Detective Stephen Conner.

Nilsson’s brother, Steven Nilsson, had last seen him at 8 p.m. the night before when he drove him to the Buckingham Square movie theater.

Police determined that although Nilsson had no friends, he had several enemies. Police developed a list of around 40 suspects, according to the arrest warrant affidavit. But the case went cold.

Aurora police reopened the case in 2013. DNA tests were done on the cigarettes and the coins covered with blood. The DNA on the items did not match Nilsson but they did match the same unknown person.

The DNA was entered on a computerized list of DNA samples from Colorado offenders for comparison. It cleared 18 of the previous suspects who were on the database.

During the week of Aug. 18, 2014, DNA samples were taken of the remaining 22 suspects and all of them were also eliminated as possible suspects.

CBI supervisor Melissa Grass called Conner two years later in August of 2016 and told him that they had a DNA database hit on Crank.

Crank, who has several drug convictions, had been arrested on a felony narcotics job on May 27, 2016, the affidavit says. Crank, who was homeless, was on probation at the time.

Conner interviewed Crank at Aurora police headquarters on Sept. 12, 2016. Crank denied killing Nilsson but agreed to a buccal swab to obtain his DNA. A subsequent DNA test confirmed that Crank’s blood was found on the quarters where Nilsson’s body was found.

Conner interviewed Crank’s ex-wife, Malanie Eldridge of Oklahoma on Nov. 23. She told Conner that Crank often threatened to kill her in 1995 when they were still married. She also recalled an incident in which her husband told her about a bloody knife.

Another DNA test was performed in August of 2017 on Nilsson’s sweater, jacket and the jeans he was wearing when he was stabbed to death.

Blood found on Nilsson’s pants matched Crank’s blood.

New searches for evidence in the cold-case investigation of the disappearance and presumed death of a pregnant Denver woman will unfold Wednesday in Pueblo.

The searches will focus on areas of southwest Pueblo, near where Kelsie Schelling was last known to be, according to a Pueblo Police Department news release. Schelling was 19 when she disappeared under suspicious circumstances on Feb. 4, 2013.

Donthe Isiah Lucas, Schelling’s ex-boyfriend, has long been considered a person of interest in the case. In April, investigators executed search warrants on properties and homes where Lucas lived and had lived. The searches included digging on the properties.

The new searches are prompted by recent leads generated as part of the ongoing cold case investigation.

“While we cannot offer any comment about this active investigation, we want the community to be aware that this case remains a priority for the Pueblo Police Department,” Pueblo Police Chief Troy Davenport said in the news release. “Our police department is committed to helping to bring justice to Kelsie and for her family.”

Anyone with information on the case is asked to call Pueblo Crime Stoppers at 719-542-7867 (STOP) or submit information to www.pueblocrimestoppers.com.

Mary Lynn Vialpando’s body was found on June 5, 1988, behind Roger’s Bar, 2520 W. Colorado Ave. Vialpando, who was married and had a 4-year-old child, was bludgeoned to death.

On the morning of her death, Vialpondo had returned home on the 2200 block of West Kiowa Street after attending a family wedding in Pueblo. As they got out of the car, Vialpondo had an argument with her husband and ran away in a westerly direction.

Witnesses said she entered Roger’s Bar between 2:30 and 3 a.m. and then left out a back door to the alley, where her body was later found. At the time, police collected evidence they believed was from the suspect.

In 2017, Colorado Springs detectives sent the DNA evidence to a phenotyping company that uses the genetic material to predict the person’s physical appearance. The company predicted the suspect’s ancestry; eye, hair and skin color, freckling and face shape.

By combining these attributes of appearance, a “snapshot” composite drawing was produced depicting what the suspect may have looked like at approximately 25 years old.

MOUNT PLEASANT, Iowa — A Colorado man has been charged in the cold-case killing of his estranged wife in Iowa, where they used to live and where she was last seen 17 years ago.

Michael Lee Syperda, 52, was taken into custody without incident Thursday near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, which is about 130 miles west of Denver, according to the Iowa Public Safety Department.

A grand jury in Henry County, Iowa, indicted him Wednesday on a charge of first-degree murder in the death of Elizabeth Syperda, who was 22 years old when she disappeared. Court records don’t list an attorney for Michael Syperda. Authorities intend to have him extradited to Iowa.

Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation agent Ryan Kedley declined to say what led to the arrest after so many years, including whether Elizabeth Syperda’s body had been found. But he praised the combined work of law enforcement agencies for the breakthrough in the case.

“We’re very, very happy that some sort of resolution has come in this case,” Kedley told The Des Moines Register.

Elizabeth Syperda was last seen July 16, 2000, in Mount Pleasant. Family and friends think she may have gone on a walk to meet Michael Syperda, who lived nearby. The two were estranged at the time.

Her home’s front door was locked from the outside and all of her belongings were left behind, investigators said.

Elizabeth Syperda’s mother, Donna Forshee of Roseville, California, told northeastern Missouri television station KTVO that her daughter had moved from California to Iowa with Michael Syperda and she thinks he was upset that her daughter planned to move back to California.

“This is the best news we’ve had in 17 years. … It’s been a long time waiting for it and we’re very happy that he’s in custody,” she told the station, which also serves southeastern Iowa, where the couple lived.

A month before she disappeared, Michael Syperda was arrested for assaulting his wife and her roommate. He was put on five years of probation in November 2000 after pleading guilty to burglary and domestic abuse.

The Mount Pleasant Police Department and the state Division of Criminal Investigation reopened the investigation in March.

Authorities on Friday arrested a man in the presumed death of a pregnant Denver woman who disappeared under suspicious circumstances in 2013.

Donthe Isiah Lucas, 25, was arrested in connection with the homicide investigation of Kelsie Jean Schelling, according to the Pueblo Police Department. Her body still has not been found.

ARREST MADE IN KELSIE SCHELLING HOMICIDE
For Details: https://t.co/Iy5gE1BS4J#ppdnews #pueblonews pic.twitter.com/jxSnrWoG4M

— Pueblo Police Dept (@PuebloPolice1) December 1, 2017

Schelling, 21 at the time she disappeared, was the ex-girlfriend of Lucas. She was pregnant with his child.

Lucas was taken into custody Nov. 14 in Denver as a suspect in a Pueblo robbery in September, Pueblo police said. On Friday, Pueblo detectives and Colorado Bureau of Investigation agents served him with an arrest warrant on suspicion of first-degree murder, according to a Pueblo police news release. He is now being held without bond in Pueblo.

Police did not say what led to the arrest of Lucas. Searches for evidence in November in the southwest Pueblo area, near where Schelling was last known to be, were carried out.

“It’s been a work in progress for several years,” said Pueblo police Capt. Kenny Rider, adding that police and prosecutors decided the time was right now to arrest Lucas.

Lucas has long been considered a person of interest in the case. In April, investigators executed search warrants on properties and homes where Lucas lived and had lived. The searches included digging on the properties.

The couple met in 2010 when they were students at Northeastern Junior College in Sterling. She disappeared Feb. 4, 2013, after arranging to meet with Lucas by text messages.

Schelling’s car, a black 2011 Chevrolet Cruze, was recorded by video surveillance in a Pueblo Walmart parking lot. The video shows an unknown man — wearing a hoodie, sunglasses and gloves — get into the car and drive off. On Feb. 14, her car was found abandoned in the parking lot of St. Mary-Corwin Hospital in Pueblo.

Pueblo detectives interviewed Lucas on Feb. 15, 2013. Lucas told detectives he and Schelling got together in Pueblo during her visit, they drove around to several locations and then drove to the Walmart where they got into an argument. Lucas told police she needed to go back to Denver so she could go to work the next day. Lucas denied having knowledge of how, or why, Schelling disappeared.

In 2015, Schelling’s parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court against Lucas and Pueblo police officers for failing to properly investigate her alleged murder.

Charles Moises Gonzales, 47, who killed a man who had been inducted to the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame, has been convicted and sentenced to life in prison, court records indicate.

Gonzales, 47, burglarized the home of mountain biking pioneer Michael Damian Rust, 55, and shot him in the back of the head on March 31, 2009.

Gonzales was convicted Thursday of first degree murder, abuse of a corpse, tampering or destroying evidence, burglary and theft following a plea deal with the Pueblo District Attorney’s Office.

Gonzales, who had a skull tattoo necklace and also went by the alias “Shari Jean Towner,” buried Rust’s body. Rust’s remains were discovered Jan. 8, 2016 in Saguache County between Colorado 17 and U.S. 285.

Rust’s brother, Carl, identified the remains based on a unique bicycle-sprocket belt buckle found with the body. The bones were found only 5-miles east of his brother’s home.

“You could see this place from Mike’s house,” Carl Rust said at the time.

For more than five decades, the black-and-white image of Irene Garza has haunted the town of McAllen, Texas, her story painfully recounted again and again.

She was a 25-year-old dark-haired former beauty queen, her high school’s first Latina drum majorette, the first in her family to graduate from college. She was named Miss All South Texas Sweetheart, and worked as a teacher for disadvantaged children.

But at the center of Garza’s life was her devout Catholic faith. In a letter to a friend in April 1960, she wrote about how she was no longer afraid of death. “You see, I’ve been going to communion and Mass daily and you can’t imagine the courage and faith and happiness it has given me,” she wrote in the letter, according to Texas Monthly.

And so when Holy Week came, the most sacred time of year for Catholics, Garza decided to go to confession.

On the eve of Easter, she drove to the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen.

She never came home. Two days later, her beige, high-heeled shoe was found inches from the curb near the church. The following Thursday, her body was found floating in an irrigation canal.

An autopsy would later determine she had been beaten, suffocated, and raped while unconscious.

Authorities found few clues and struggled to piece together the moments before her death. But one fact soon became clear. Among the last people to see her was a 27-year-old priest with horn-rimmed glasses – The Rev. John Feit.

The young priest admitted he had heard Irene’s confession that night, in the rectory instead of the confessional. But he denied killing the young woman. The priest avoided criminal charges, decade after decade. As the years passed, witnesses died, detectives changed, and the investigation into Garza’s murder stalled.

More than 57 years later, the murder’s lone suspect has now been found guilty. On Thursday evening, after a six day trial in the Hidalgo County Courthouse in Edinburg, a jury convicted Feit, now an 85-year-old ex-priest, of murdering Garza.

The conviction brings long-awaited closure to one of the oldest cases in the Hidalgo County judicial system, according to the San Antonio Express-News. It is a case that captivated the town and the nation, and one that reaches back to a time long before many clergy abuse cases surfaced to the forefront of public awareness.

But even after Feit’s conviction, questions persist about why it took so long to resolve the case, and whether the church and elected officials tried to cover it up.

In Feit’s trial, prosecutors presented evidence that elected law enforcement officials and church officers suspected that Feit killed Garza, the Associated Press reported. But prosecutors allege the district attorney and church leaders cut a deal to stop the investigation, to protect the reputation of the church.

Most elected officials at the time in Hidalgo County were Catholic, according to the AP, and then-Sen. John F. Kennedy, a Catholic from Massachusetts, was running for president that year.

Thomas Doyle, 73, an inactive priest and expert on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, read in court a letter recovered via subpoena of the Archdiocese of San Antonio and the Diocese of Corpus Christi, according to the McAllen newspaper the Monitor.

The letter, sent between clergy officials in October 1960, expressed concerns that if a priest was charged in Garza’s death, Kennedy’s presidential campaign and the re-election chances of the local Catholic sheriff would be at stake.

The Rev. Joseph Pawlicki, a pastor at a church outside Austin, wrote to The Rev. Lawrence Seidel, the head of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate order to which Feit belonged, insisting he hire a private investigator to find “loopholes” in Feit’s case, the Monitor reported.

The letter and trial testimony provide some clues as to why, for decades, Feit’s case went cold.

In the beginning, shortly after Garza’s death, telling evidence all pointed to Feit. A photo-slide viewer with a handwritten note saying it belonged to Feit was found in the same canal where Garza was found dead.

A priest, The Rev. Joseph O’Brien, an assistant pastor at Feit’s church, said that when a group gathered to drink coffee after midnight mass, he noticed that Feit had scratches on his hands.

Detectives also found out that Feit had been accused of attacking another young woman in a church in a nearby town just weeks before Garza’s death. While she was kneeling at the communion rail, CBS reported, a man matching Feit’s description grabbed her from behind and tried to put a rag over her mouth.

When asked to pick her assailant out of a police lineup, the young woman chose Feit. When he took a polygraph test and denied that he had harmed either Garza or the other woman, the examiner concluded that he was lying. He eventually pleaded no contest and was fined $500.

Despite all this, officials decided the evidence was not strong enough for prosecution. No charges were filed against him for Garza’s murder. Locals wondered whether the church had conspired with the DA’s office or if the elected officials were too afraid to challenge the church.

Then, in April of 2002, the San Antonio police department received a phone call from a former priest in Oklahoma City – Dale Tacheny. He explained that in 1963, he had lived at a Trappist monastery in Missouri and counseled a priest from San Antonio.

“He told me that he had attacked a young woman in a parish on Easter weekend and murdered her,” the caller said, according to Texas Monthly. In a letter, Tacheny identified Feit and recounted how he took the woman to the parish house to hear her confession. After hearing her confession he assaulted, bound and gagged her.

Tacheny said he kept these confessions to himself out of a religious obligation. But decades later, he changed his mind.

The Texas Rangers’ cold-case unit reopened the case, and also interviewed another key witness, O’Brien. But then-Hidalgo County District Attorney Rene Guerra refused to take the evidence to a grand jury, saying it was insufficient, lacking DNA or a confession, the Texas Monthly reported. He was eventually pressured into it but never called the two priests as witnesses. The grand jury declined to indict Feit in 2004 and Father O’Brien died in 2005. Garza’s family began to lose hope that justice would ever come.

Then, in February of last year, Feit – no longer a priest – was arrested in connection with Garza’s killing. He was apprehended in Phoenix, where he lived with his family.

Feit had left the priesthood in 1972, after spending some time at a treatment center for troubled priests in New Mexico, and at monasteries in multiple states. At one point he served as a supervisor charged with clearing priests for assignments to churches. One of the men Feit helped clear for a parish was James Porter, a child molester convicted of assaulting more than 100 victims, the AP reported.

Hidalgo County District Attorney Ricardo Rodriguez’s office presented the case against Feit to the grand jury, which handed down the indictment. Rodriguez campaigned for election in part on a pledge to reopen the Garza murder case, after his predecessor had been unsuccessful at solving it.

Still, the trial ahead was daunting.

“Can Rodriguez win a conviction in a case that is now 56 years old, and whose star witness – Dale Tacheny – is in his eighties?” Pamela Colloff, the Texas Monthly reporter who has reported on the case for years, wrote after the arrest. “It remains to be seen whether justice will finally be served for Irene, or whether Feit . . . can outrun the clock.”

At trial this week, Tacheny described how Feit had confessed to him that he had murdered a young woman. It wasn’t until years later that he learned that the woman was Garza.

“So I asked Father Feit, why are you here and not in prison?” Tacheny recounted, according to video of the testimony from KRGV. “He said there were three things. Number one, the church helped me, primarily through a priest. Law enforcement helped him. Finally, the seal of confession helped him.”

A childhood friend of Garza’s, Ana Maria Hollingsworth, also testified about a time during Holy Week in 1960 when Garza spoke to her about a new priest at the church, Feit.

“She said ‘it’s not the same going to confession anymore because I don’t get to stay in the confessional. He comes to pull me out and says oh this place isn’t good enough for you, let’s go to the rectory, where you’ll be more comfortable.’ And then they would walk off and go to the rectory,” Hollingsworth said.

The defense lawyers said in closing arguments that there was no actual evidence Feit had the intent to kill or was involved in Garza’s disappearance.

But the lead prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Michael Garza (no relation to the victim), described Feit during closing arguments as “a wolf in priest’s clothing waiting to attack” who came down to the Rio Grande Valley “to find his prey,” according to the Monitor.

As Feit heard the verdict, his face showed no emotion, videos showed. The now 85-year-old man left the courtroom supporting himself with a walker.

He asked that the jury decide his sentencing, which is scheduled for Friday morning. He could be sentenced to up to 99 years or life imprisonment, according to the AP.

Naomi Sigler, a relative of Garza’s, shed tears as she spoke to reporters after the verdict.

“I just feel like justice has been served,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m so tired. It’s been such a long, long, long journey.”

A former Summit County man was arrested on Tuesday, Dec. 19, in connection with the 2010 murder of an Elbert County schoolteacher, potentially closing the seven-and-a-half year cold case of Randy Wilson, found strangled to death in a remote field.

Daniel Pesch, 34, has been charged with first-degree murder and is being held without bond. He worked at CB & Potts Restaurant and Brewery in Breckenridge until March, according to his Facebook page, but social media posts indicate he may have recently moved to the Front Range. His voter registration lists a Frisco address.

The murder case is under seal, and the Elbert County Sheriff’s Office said it could not release any additional details about Pesch’s arrest. In addition to murder, he is charged with resisting arrest, obstructing a peace officer and attempted escape.

Wilson’s body was found on June 14, 2010, by two men driving on a remote Elbert County road. Wilson had a plastic bag over his head and a belt around his neck. His hands were bound behind his back, according to 911 call transcripts.

Read the full story at summitdaily.com.

Fremont County authorities say they are investigating the death of a man — whose remains were discovered more than a year ago by a hiker — as a homicide.

On Tuesday, the county coroner announced the remains had been identified as Remzi Nesfield, who was in his early 20s when he died. He was last seen alive in March 2007.

Nesfield’s remains were found Sept. 28, 2016, in the west end of the county.

On Wednesday, the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office announced that Nesfield’s death was being investigated as a homicide.

Coroner Randy Keller said a DNA match led to the identification. That was after authorities created a facial reconstruction as part of their efforts to identify the remains and previously tried finding a DNA match.

Nesfield lived in the Denver and Phoenix areas.

Those with information on Nesfield’s death are asked to call Fremont County sheriff’s Sgt. Dale King at 719-275-5553 or to email him at Dale.King@FremontSO.com. Tipsters can also call Fremont County Crime Stoppers at 719-275-STOP.

WATERBURY, Conn. – The woman in the bus depot, the perpetrator, was amiable and chatty, Eleanor Williams tearfully told the police.

This was long ago, after Williams, young and naive, had been tragically preyed upon, investigators said. Today, it’s a cold case.

The woman, whose crime in the terminal that day shattered Williams’ psyche, was African-American and appeared to be in her 20s, Williams recalled, speaking for the first time in decades about a mystery that has perplexed District of Columbia police. Williams said the stranger’s perfidy left her so mired in guilt and shame that she later contemplated killing herself.

The woman, about 5-foot-3 and slender, struck up a conversation with Williams in the passenger waiting area, cooing over Williams’ infant daughter. After a while, in the sweetest voice, she asked whether she could hold the child.

Please? Just for a minute?

She said her name was Latoya.

Which might have been a lie. Who knows?

She said she was headed “out west” – maybe also a lie.

Williams was 18 then, on Dec. 2, 1983, a date that haunts her. She had grown up on a nine-acre farm in southeast Virginia, and she still lived there. Before that morning, when she set out for Kansas by motor coach with her daughter, she had never ventured more than 30 miles from her home, she said.

Her baby, April Nicole Williams, 3 1/2 months old, was bundled in a pink-and-white snowsuit. The trip’s first leg, 200 miles, brought them to a bus station in downtown Washington.

They were scheduled for a three-hour afternoon stop. Carrying April and her diaper bag, Williams, who had been awake since before dawn, trudged into the station and sat down wearily, with 1,200 miles of highway still ahead of her.

Latoya, if that was really her name, “came over next to me at some point and just started talking to me,” Williams said recently in her Connecticut apartment, sobbing as she described the awful mistake she made 34 years ago. Latoya “was being friendly, asking me lots of questions. Like, ‘Where are you going?’ And, ‘How old is your baby?’ She was nice, you know? Then she was like, ‘Do you mind if I hold her?’ And I was sitting right next to her, right there, so I said OK, and I let her.”

Until lately, Williams, 52, hadn’t spoken publicly about her firstborn child since the week in 1983 when her world fell apart. She kept the memories mostly to herself, buried under a weight of sorrow. In her apartment, she shared the story haltingly, pausing for long stretches to gather her composure.

The woman, cradling April, said the baby needed a diaper change, Williams recalled.

“She said: ‘Oh, I’ll take her to the bathroom. You look tired.’ And I was skeptical, like, “Well . . . OK, I guess.’ Because I was tired. And I thought about it, but I had already said OK, and she had already got up and taken her to the bathroom.

“And then, I don’t know, about 10 minutes later, when she didn’t come back, I started getting nervous.”

Williams struggles every day to live with this: She entrusted her infant daughter to a stranger in a bus station, some woman. Latoya was her name, or maybe not.

“She went to change her,” Williams said, “and I never saw them again.”

– – –

“One year ago yesterday a 3-month old girl was kidnapped at the old Trailways bus terminal in downtown Washington, prompting one of the largest and longest manhunts in the city’s history. Today, while the chance of the baby’s return has decreased, the hope, it seems, has not.” – The Washington Post, Dec. 3, 1984.

There’s still hope, although very little.

She weighed 11 pounds when she vanished.

Assuming she is alive, she turned 34 last summer.

“I’m pretty sure this is the only cold-case kidnapping we have, the only stranger kidnapping, where we still have a victim out,” Washington Police Cmdr. Leslie Parsons, head of the criminal investigations division, said recently. Parsons wouldn’t discuss details of the case, but apparently there isn’t much to say. “About the only thing we can do proactively at this point is put it out in the media. Hopefully someone will see it, and they’ll call us.”

When another anniversary of the abduction rolled around in December, the department issued a news release, a standard plea for help: “The infant victim was named April Williams. She has a small birthmark on top of her left wrist in a straight line.” The statement was a terse rendition of the basic facts, repeated by police many times through the years, including details from the mother’s 1983 recollection of her chat with the kidnapper.

“The suspect could have a sister named Latisha or Natisha,” the department said. “The suspect could have the astrological sign of ‘Leo.’ The suspect is described as [having] . . . a dark brown complexion and spots on her face. Her ears were pierced with two holes in each ear.”

It said of Latoya, “she could go by Rene or Rene Latoya.”

A few weeks ago, the detective handling the case contacted Williams in Connecticut, where she has lived since 1988, and asked her to speak with the news media. Publicity is good for cold cases, he told her: You shake the tree, and something might fall out. Plus, it’s the internet age. The last time Williams talked publicly about April, in the days right after the kidnapping, stories and photos didn’t routinely circle the planet as they do now.

Williams balked at sitting for an in-person interview, telling a reporter on the phone that Connecticut was her “safe haven,” that she wanted to be left alone there, free of the painful past. She said she has tried for years to block out what happened, to rid her memory of everything about that afternoon except for April’s little face.

Then, after a few days, she changed her mind and said OK.

Then, the next morning, she canceled.

Then, later in the week, she phoned and said all right, come to Waterbury.

“Of course I blame myself,” she finally said in her apartment. Her hands were trembling. “I blame myself every minute, right up to this minute. It’s been 34 years, and it’s not something that’s over. I deal with it every day, whether I talk about it or not. . . . It’s always on my mind. It’s always: ‘How could you be so stupid? Why? Why did you do it?’ ”

She lives alone and works as a surgical technician, helping physicians with their instruments in operating rooms. She is “extremely close” to her grown son and daughter, both born after April. She has two grandchildren and hopes for more, she said.

“There were times when I was younger when I wanted to commit suicide, I just felt so bad and so guilty,” she said. “But my other kids were always my strength. Like, what would they do if anything ever happened to me? I remember coming home one night after work and thinking, ‘I could just drive off the road into a tree, and nobody would ever know that I wanted to do this.’ And then I thought about my other kids.”

Williams was 4 when her mother died in 1969, on Christmas night. She is the second-youngest of six siblings and was raised by her father on her paternal grandparents’ farm near Suffolk, Virginia. In late 1982, when she was a senior in high school, she found out she was pregnant.

“I wasn’t happy about it,” she recalled. “I mean, I was 17 years old! I didn’t want to have a baby. I thought about having an abortion, but I decided not to. . . . There’s something about when babies start moving and kicking. You know there’s something inside you, and it’s like a bonding. It’s just some kind of way special.”

April was born Aug. 17, 1983, two months after her mother’s high school graduation. Williams said the father was a local teenager who wanted no part of parenthood. She saw no future with him, either, and they lost touch after the baby arrived.

By then, Williams was interested in someone else: a soldier in Kansas, a young man she had never seen. One of her brothers was in the Army, stationed at Fort Riley, and he had mentioned his sister Eleanor to a buddy named Kevin. She and Kevin became pen pals during her pregnancy, trading letters and photos for months, and talking by phone.

In November that year, Kevin wired her money for a bus ticket to Kansas so they could meet and spend the holidays together.

Williams had never been out of southeast Virginia.

She made it as far as Washington, where she wound up spending a week, frightened, disoriented, often panicked, with news lights flashing and detectives pressing her, wanting to know this, wanting to know that – then more detectives, asking, asking, demanding.

These were stone-hard questions from stone-hard men with badges, the gist of the queries being: What did you do to her? Tell us. Where is she?

Latoya took her!

And a polygraph examiner, quietly, in a mortician’s voice:

“Did you sell your baby?”

At last, when the police seemed satisfied with her story, Williams was gently sent on her way, home to the farm. She said she hasn’t set foot in the District since.

“And I never will go back, ever.”

– – –

“Mother of Kidnapped Baby Hypnotized” – Post headline, March 10, 1984.

Latoya had short hair, dark and wavy.

She wore green pants and a white ski jacket with a purple floral lining.

Williams told the detectives that.

The Post reported at the time that the woman in the bus station had taken the baby with her to a fast-food counter to buy sodas. This detail showed up in the newspaper repeatedly, but it wasn’t accurate, Williams said. She recalled reading it that week. And she said the mistake didn’t surprise her because she had learned, in just a few hours’ time back then, to never trust anyone she doesn’t know: Police, reporters, strangers in bus depots – trust nobody.

“That’s how I am now,” she said. “I’m always going to be that way.”

These days, there would almost certainly be video footage of some Latoya walking into a bus terminal. Security cameras would capture her in the waiting area, would record her chatting up a young mother, then heading to a restroom or wherever, and sneaking out of the station with a tiny bundle in her arms. But the Latoya of 1983 stole a baby in the pre-surveillance age. “If we had images of the suspect,” Parsons said, “we’d definitely put them out to the public.”

She is a ghost.

Hours after the abduction, the driver of a Metrobus and several passengers reported seeing a woman on the bus who matched the suspect’s description. The woman, carrying an infant, got off near the Prince George’s County line, the witnesses said. Squads of police officers canvassed the area for days, knocking on doors. But the trail, if it was a trail, went cold.

Deep in Virginia, meanwhile, Williams grew tired of being stared at.

“I just couldn’t deal with everybody looking at me and talking about me and having something to say about my situation,” she recalled. “It was always, ‘She gave her baby away.’ People were always whispering that. Or, ‘She’s just not fit to have a child.’ I mean, the way people are, they’re cruel; they’re mean. Until something happens to them.”

A month after the abduction, Williams left the farm for Kansas again on a motor coach.

Emotionally she was immature, still an adolescent, she said.

Kevin, the Fort Riley soldier, was there when she got off the bus.

“All I needed him for was to have a baby to replace April,” Williams said. “He knew the only reason for me visiting him was because I wanted to get pregnant again, because I wanted another April. I thought it was going to make me feel better. I thought it would make it hurt less. But actually all it did was make it hurt more.”

She soon lost touch with Kevin.

Their daughter was born the following September.

Williams asked that the daughter’s name not be published, for privacy’s sake. She is 33 and understands the circumstances of her conception. Williams told her the story when she was teenager. She also told her son, born in 1986. The three have had many long conversations about April and the emotional impact of her disappearance, Williams said. She said they are parent, daughter, son, and the best of friends.

And the siblings know that every Aug. 17, they should leave their mother alone.

“I always spend April’s birthday by myself,” Williams said. “I don’t want to be around my other kids, because that’s me and April’s day. I sit and just think about her, hold onto her picture, cry. And I just wonder what she could be doing.”

Her voice was pleading.

“All the stuff they do in school, the awards they get. Did she get any awards? You know, the prom, homecoming, graduation – did she go to the prom? What did she grow up to be? Does she have a career? Does she have kids?”

Williams gazed at the small tabletop in front of her.

“Did she have a wedding? Did she have . . .”

It’s pointless, always pointless.

For answers never come.

A 57-year-old man has been sentenced to 48 years in prison for the cold case rape and attempted murder of a Commerce City woman that went unsolved for a quarter century, authorities say.

Dionicio Ramos-Ascencio broke into the woman’s home July 26, 1992, and attacked her with a knife he discovered there.

“He crept into her home in the middle of the night, stole a knife from her kitchen, went to her bedroom, put his hand over her mouth and stabbed her in the neck so hard that the knife was bent,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Brett Martin said at the sentencing hearing Monday in Adams County District Court. “He beat her and punched her in the face. Then he raped her on the floor of her bedroom and fled into the night.”

District Attorney Dave Young said the case was possible after the Colorado Legislature passed a law giving law enforcement the right to collect DNA from those arrested on felony charges. The case would have gone unsolved otherwise.

“The 48-year sentence that this defendant received is nothing compared to the sentence that he imposed on this defenseless victim back in 1992,” Young said. “She has had to face the trauma of what he did every day of her life.”

Martin called the case “one of the most heinous and brutal crimes I have seen. He has had 25 years of freedom that he didn’t deserve.”

Ramos-Ascencio was arrested and charged in the cold case last May after DNA collected in a 2017 Denver felony case matched DNA collected from the victim in 1992.

Martin said that in 2011 Ramos-Ascencio was caught standing on a chair looking into a window, a petty offense that Martin said “has a more sinister tone knowing what happened in this case.”

Ramos-Ascencio pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree murder after deliberation and first-degree aggravated sexual assault.

GOLDEN — A former FBI agent believes a Colorado woman wasn’t killed by her husband but by a child predator targeting her 6-year-old daughter.

John Larsen testified Thursday in the second murder trial of Michael Blagg, who is accused of killing his wife Jennifer Blagg in 2001.

Michael Blagg says he came home from work in November 2001 and found a blood-soaked mattress in the couple’s bedroom and both his wife and daughter, Abby, missing. Jennifer Blagg’s body was later found in a landfill, but Abby has never been found.

Larsen said the suspect moved Jennifer Blagg’s body to focus suspicion on Michael Blagg. Had it remained at the home, the investigation’s focus would have shifted to Abby.

Blagg’s 2004 murder conviction was overturned because a juror concealed her experience with domestic violence.

In a nationally televised program, journalist Paula Zahn will reveal new details about a chilling Aurora cold case murder in which a woman was murdered and packed into a Rubbermaid container.

“On the Case with Paula Zahn” tells the story of Carolyn Jansen’s murder from the perspective of the victim’s daughter, Victoria Baker, a young woman who was on a quest to find her birth mother when she learned her tragic fate.

It is also the story of how former Arapahoe County coroner, Dr. Michael Dobersen, prosecutor John Kellner Aurora cold case Det. Steve Conner together doggedly pursued and eventually solved the case after former District Attorney Carol Chambers repeatedly declined to prosecute the case.

The show airs on the Investigation Discovery channel Sunday at 8 p.m. The program features Denver Post reporter Kirk Mitchell, who followed the murder for years on his Cold Cases blog.

Jansen was 43 when she vanished in 2003. Her mummified remains were discovered two years later inside a container stored on the back porch of a friend’s house.

Jon David Harrington was convicted of second-degree murder 12 years later.

After 17 years and two grueling murder trials, the family of Jennifer Blagg felt justice finally was delivered Thursday morning when her husband, Michael, was found guilty of killing her and dumping her body in a trash bin.

Michael Blagg’s five-week trial came to a close with his conviction on all counts, and his wife’s family said their lives will never be complete without Jennifer and her 6-year-old daughter, Abby, who disappeared at the same time her mother was killed in 2001.

“This particular situation re-arranges a family — your attitude, your outlook, the way you live,” said Marilyn Conway, Jennifer’s mother. “It should. Nothing is ever, ever the same.”

Blagg’s trial was moved to Jefferson County because of the publicity it received after the crimes were committed in Grand Junction, where there were concerns it would be impossible to find an impartial jury.

The original 2004 guilty verdict was dismissed after it was discovered that a juror concealed a  domestic violence incident so that she would have a better chance to be seated. The second trial featured 80 witnesses, including Blagg, who took the stand in his defense.

After 17 hours of deliberation, jurors on Thursday found Blagg guilty of first-degree murder after deliberation, abuse of a corpse and two counts of theft. He was sentenced to life without parole immediately after the verdict was announced.

Ever since the first verdict, Blagg’s family and defense team have insisted he was innocent.

“We’ve been here before with a wrong verdict,” said Clare Peterson, Blagg’s sister. “Our brother, Michael Blagg, is innocent. And we will not give up until we bring him home.”

The defense argued that Jennifer Blagg was killed by a child predator targeting Abby, and the defense even named a potential suspect. But when defense attorney Tina Fang again tried to raise that possibility during the sentencing hearing, District Judge Tamara Russell shut her down. At one point, Russell even said, “Have a seat, Ms. Fang,” when the attorney kept pressing the issue.

During the trial, prosecutors argued that Blagg killed Jennifer as she slept and put her body in a dumpster at work. In closing arguments, prosecutor Trish Mahre said numerous blood smudges and stains were found in the family’s minivan.

Abby’s body has never been found.

Fang told jurors that Abby wasn’t found because Blagg is innocent. She said the blood in the van could have been tracked in by an investigator who left his DNA on a drop of blood in the home.

After Russell sentenced Blagg, Jefferson County sheriff’s deputies handcuffed him. One of Blagg’s sisters whispered, “Love you,” as he was led away.

Since Jennifer Blagg’s death, her family has suffered amid deep grief, her mother and brother said. An aunt has committed suicide and a niece suffers from anxiety. Conway said nothing compares to the loss of two children — Jennifer and Abby — at one time. And she lives to see them both again in heaven, she said.

“For my girls, I will see them again. Jennifer and Abby were as precious as any parent would recognize they are,” Conway said. “My world is never going to be complete until I do.”

Outside the courthouse, Mesa County prosecutors Mahre and Mark Hand thanked law enforcement officers, victims advocates and the Jefferson County courts for their help.

“Justice was done for Jennifer and Abby, and our hearts go out to their family,” Mahre said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Four years after Nicole Silvers was reported missing, Weld County Sheriff’s investigators reminded the public that the case still is open and asked for help tracking down the woman, was last seen sitting in a dark blue or black 80s model sedan outside Longmont High School in the early morning hours of April 9, 2014.

Silvers, who was 16 at the time, was a student at Mead High School and worked at Pizza Plus in Mead. She was reported missing on April 12, 2014, the sheriff’s office said in a news release..

COLD CASE, Missing Person, Detectives with the Weld County Sheriff's Office are reaching out to the community for assistance in locating a missing person. Click on the link below for further details. https://t.co/u2S2pwICt4 pic.twitter.com/3UuMPx1bLX

— Weld County Sheriff (@WeldSheriff) April 12, 2018

There have been no known sightings or leads on her whereabouts since she disappeared

She is described as 5-foot-8 and 135 pounds, with blue eyes. Her hair was dyed red.

Anyone with information on her whereabouts is asked to call the sheriff’s office at 970-356-4015, the sheriff’s crime tip line at 970-304-6464 or Northern Colorado Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 (TIPS).

Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty is forming a cold case unit to investigate unsolved homicides and missing persons cases, which would include the 1996 slaying of JonBenet Ramsey.

“There are over 30 other names on this list, and the impact on the families and the community is extremely significant,” Dougherty said. “And that’s what drives us.”

Boulder County has more than 30 cold cases, including four John Doe cases, which have unidentified victims who were believed to have been murdered. Some go back decades, while others are more recent, such as the 2013 missing person case of Tiannah Marie Annibal. Colorado has a total of 1,500 cold cases.

A cold case is defined as a homicide or missing person case that remains unsolved for one year after the event was initially reported to law enforcement, and for which the applicable statute of limitations hasn’t expired. There are no limitations for first-degree murder.

Chief Trial Deputy Fred Johnson and senior investigator Gary Thatcher, both of whom have experience with cold cases, will be assigned to the cold case unit in addition to their current responsibilities, Dougherty said, so additional staff won’t be hired. Both Johnson and Thatcher have also been invited to join the statewide cold case review team, which looks at cold cases from agencies across Colorado and gives advice on how to pursue them.

Read the full story at DailyCamera.com.

An Arapahoe County grand jury has indicted four people on felony murder charges in connection to the shooting of University of Colorado engineering student Andrew Graham, who was found dead on the lawn of a home in Centennial on Nov. 6, 2009.

Clarissa Lockhart, Allen Deshawn Ford, Kendall Austin and Joseph Jamal Martin, all 26-years old, have been arrested and indicted on first-degree felony murder and racketeering charges in Graham’s death, sources say.

Martin has already entered a plea and been sentenced to 10 years in prison for robbery, state court spokesman Rob McCallum said.

Each of them are also charged with a pattern of racketeering. The suspects had allegedly been involved in a series of incidents in Denver in 2009 in which groups of young black people randomly attacked white people, mostly in Lower Downtown.

The indictments were first reported Wednesday by CBS4’s Brian Maass. He said an Arapahoe County grand jury indicted the four in January 2017 and they all were arrested within days. However, their cases were suppressed, meaning information about their cases, including the conviction of Martin, were shielded from public view.

The shooting happened on Nov. 5, 2009. Graham had taken a bus to Boulder to find a house to rent with three friends while attending graduate school. A security camera at the light-rail station at County Line Road and Interstate 25 captured the robbery. It was 11:40 p.m. He was less than a mile from home.

His body was found at about 5:30 a.m. the next morning in the front yard of a home on the 8700 block of East Phillips Place in Centennial by a homeowner awakened by his barking dogs.

It didn’t take long before the investigation pointed to five suspects including a 16-year-old that sheriff’s investigators believe shot Graham.

Graham was preparing to attend graduate school after earning a civil engineering degree at the University of Colorado and working briefly in Dubai for an oil exploration company.

Cyndi Gelston-Graham, Graham’s mother, has said her son’s friends considered him a Renaissance man. Graham was a black belt in taekwondo, loved listening to jazz and blues music, and was a superb “mamabird,” or ultimate Frisbee player on a team at CU.

Andrew earned his nickname “Stitches” when he collided head to head with a teammate nicknamed “Rabbit” at practice. Both ended up in the emergency room to get sewn up. Andrew received 32 stitches and Rabbit has a scar on his forehead. Gelston-Graham says Rabbit thinks of Stitches every time he looks in the mirror.

The Park County Sheriff’s Office is partnering with several federal, state and local agencies to investigate a December homicide that left a 17-year-old girl found dead inside her family’s burned home.

Officials released a suspect sketch on Friday of a man who authorities said was seen at Maggie Long’s house the day she was found dead inside her burned-out Bailey home.

Long’s body was found in early December inside the home, which had been set on fire on Dec. 1. The teen was supposed to go to a Friday night concert at Platte Valley High School but didn’t show up there, said Park County Sheriff Fred Wegener.

Authorities said “an apparently burglary” happened  before the Long family’s home was set on fire.

Among items stolen from the home are jade figurines, a 9 mm Beretta handgun, a rifle similar to an AK-47 and a large, green safe with a combination dial and handle.

Anyone with information about the case is asked to call a tip line at 303-239-4243.