It was an unlikely story of two young high school sweethearts reuniting after 20 years of separation.
Kathleen Logar’s high school senior picture
But it became a true crime nightmare that reads like fiction.
Six years ago after writing about this case for the first time on my cold case blog, I was so captivated by the story I wanted to speak with the chief suspect in Kathleen Logar’s murder.
A lot had changed for Bill Polhemus. He was no longer the trim, well kept middle-age man Logar met with excitement.
He was very scruffy, with sad, tired eyes.
Bill Polhemus
I met him at Sterling Correctional Facility.
Bill Polhemus had agreed to speak with me. I didn’t know why, really.
I hoped it was a sign he might be willing to divulge truths about himself, if for no other reason to ease the pain he had caused his daughter.
It wasn’t to be.
Polhemus gave a glowing version of his reunion with his daughter, Teri Jo Silbert. This was the idyllic version; the happy story-book love story.
Thirty years after her adoption, Silbert began searching for her birth parents when she was pregnant with her first daughter in 2001.
Her quest soon led to reuniting with her birth parents. But her success in finding and then meeting her parents ultimately became tainted with sadness and suspicion.
After being the catalyst for a renewed romance between her birth parents – Logar, 53, and William Polhemus, 59 – Silbert says she now fears it was her father who strangled her mother to death in the early morning hours of April 14, 2004, in her home at 4160 Perry St. in Denver.
She hopes she is wrong. The murder has never been solved.