It was one of Colorado’s biggest unsolved murder mysteries of the 1950s.
Jane Doe, funeral pyre victim
Who placed a log on top of a woman and torched her body in Gilpin County? It came to be known as the pyre case.
Its a mystery that torments Cathy Jo Damoth even 61 years later. She said she hopes the pyre case can still be solved today, if for no other reason to determine whether her father is guilty of the grotesque murder that stunned Coloradans.
Her father, Charles Damoth, then 31, is the one who discovered the pyre and bones deep in the woods of Jefferson County while on a hunting trip.
“I don’t have any reason to believe my father was involved,” Cathy Jo Damoth wrote me in a recent email.
But authorities at the time did. They repeatedly asked him whether he was involved in any way either with the murder of the Jane Doe or the burning of her body.
Many years after the case was front page news in The Denver Post, Cathy Jo Damoth found newspaper clippings among her family’s belongings.
She wondered if the woman’s identity was ever discovered and if so had anyone ever been arrested for the crime.
“I don’t know why this bothers me today except I watch ‘Cold Case Files’ on television and wonder if her murderer was ever caught,” Cathy Jo Damoth wrote. “I am the last living person in my family and would like to know whether or not my father was involved or not.”
The mystery began on Sept. 30, 1952.
Charles Damoth, an Arvada carpenter, was shooting magpies 6½ miles south of Black Hawk in a small gulch off of Highway 119.