Victim’s name: Marjorie “Margie” Fithian, 23
Where body found: county road near Roggen
Investigative agency: Weld County Sheriff’s Office
Date killed: June 24, 1975
Cause of Death: Shot
Suspects: Robert Davis, Jerry Eugene Walker, Vern Hudson and Larry Hernandez
The scene a ranchhand near Roggen found that summer day was sad.
An 18-month-old, golden-haired toddler clenched his mother’s hand as she was bleeding to death with two gunshot wounds to the head.
Marjorie “Margie” Fithian died on the way to a hospital in Brighton.
Weld County sheriff’s investigators concluded that Fithian had been shot shortly before she was found next to her son, who was not harmed. Witnesses saw a light yellow or tan midsized two-door car leave the area shortly after the shooting.
Clues indicated that she had been shot somewhere else and driven to the rural dirt road.
Investigators learned that the day before, Majorie’s uncle had left her at a bus depot in down town Denver on June 23, 1975, the day before she was shot.
She was going to catch a bus to Greeley the following day.
Several men allegedly picked up the victim and her son from the parking lot of the Picadilly Restaurant in Denver.
Two months later, someone called Weld County sheriff’s investigators and said Jerry Eugene Walker had shown them three pictures of Fithian that had been taken after she was mortally shot.
Deputies arrested Walker on Aug. 27, 1975. But the next month he was released.
Walker died three weeks later while sitting in a living room chair. An Autopsy did not determine the cause of death.
During the course of the investigation, investigators identified three other suspects, Robert Davis, Vern Hudson and Larry Hernandez.
There are several other persons of interest in the case.
Hudson died in 2006.
Contact information: The Weld County Sheriff’s Office can be reached at (970) 356-4000. Denver Post reporter Kirk Mitchell at 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
