For 34 years, two pieces of carpet and a little girl’s bed comforter held the evidence needed to solve four violent killings that haunted Aurora and Lakewood for decades.
But it took time for DNA technology to advance far enough for the semen on those things to be used to create a genetic profile. Then, a Nevada attorney general had to order retroactive testing of all inmates housed in its state prisons for that genetic profile to be pinned to a person.
Finally, on July 10, during a nightly national database check run by computers at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the DNA on those carpet pieces and the comforter were matched to Alexander Christopher Ewing, a 57-year-old man serving 70 years in the Nevada Department of Corrections, said John Camper, the CBI’s director.
“Make no mistake, DNA is what brings us here today,” said George Brauchler, 18th Judicial District Attorney.
The July 10 match identified Ewing as the person who matched the genetic profile left by the suspect who raped and killed Patricia Smith, then 50, on Jan. 10, 1984, in her Lakewood apartment and to the suspect wanted in connection with the Jan. 16, 1984, deaths of Bruce and Patricia Bennett and their 7-year-old daughter Melissa.
“We frequently get hits on cases, but not often on cases as monumental as this,” Camper said.
On Friday, Camper joined law enforcement officials from Aurora and Lakewood to announce that an arrest warrant had been issued for Ewing.
The attacks on Smith and the Bennett family terrified the Denver area in 1984 and for years had remained a mystery to law enforcement and to Smith’s and the Bennetts’ survivors.
At the time, DNA analysis for law enforcement did not exist. But detectives conducting thorough investigations in their search for killers collected mounds of evidence and saved it all.
A Lakewood police detective cut a carpet sample from underneath Smith’s body and collected hair and fiber from her body because it appeared she had been raped. During her autopsy, a coroner took swabs from Smith’s body to collect semen left by her attacker, according to an arrest warrant affidavit filed in Jefferson County District Court.
That carpet sample sat in evidence storage until 2009 when the police department sent it to the CBI because of new DNA technology. A scientist was then able to create a genetic profile of the suspect, the Jefferson County affidavit said.
Meanwhile, detectives investigating the attacks on the Bennett family kept a white bed comforter found in the bedroom where Melissa and her 3-year-old sister, Vanessa, slept. Both girls had been beaten with a hammer and sexually assaulted. Vanessa survived.
Detectives also cut a swatch of carpet from beneath Melissa’s body and collected semen left on her. A CBI serologist identified a blood type of the attacker but DNA technology was not available, according to arrest warrant affidavits filed in Arapahoe County District Court.
In 1989, a detective realized that no one had sent the comforter to the CBI so it was tested, and the serologist, Ted DeValis, recommended that he send it to a specialist in California who was using DNA analysis. That specialist, however, created only partial markers, the Arapahoe County affidavits said.
In 2001, DNA technology caught up, and Kevin Humphreys, a CBI laboratory agent in charge, had extracted DNA from the comforter and carpet sample taken from the Bennett home. Still, no known person matched it.
But that didn’t stop an Arapahoe County district attorney in 2002 from seeking arrest warrants for a person with that genetic profile under the name John Doe.
Detectives in Aurora and Lakewood had long believed the attacks on Smith and the Bennett family were linked, but in 2010 the CBI determined that DNA found in both homes belonged to the same person, Camper said.
That person, now identified as Ewing, had been housed for more than 30 years in the Nevada Department of Corrections after being convicted of escaping from custody and attacking a couple with an ax handle. His DNA had never been collected.
Nevada enacted a state law in 2013 that required mandatory DNA collection for people convicted of certain crimes. But the state prison system resisted testing inmates.
Three years later, the Nevada Attorney General issued an opinion that said the statute applied retroactively. A DNA sample obtained by swabbing the inside of Ewing’s cheek was loaded into the national database in July, and almost immediately it was a hit on the two Colorado cold cases.
“That is how we discovered this individual right here,” Brauchler said.
Detectives in Aurora and Lakewood moved quickly once they were notified of the match by the CBI.
On July 12, two Aurora detectives traveled to Carson City, Nev., to interview Ewing. Lakewood detectives interviewed him the next day. Both received search warrants to collect second DNA samples, which again matched the evidence from the Smith and Bennett cases.
“Law enforcement should never quit in the pursuit of justice for victims, and our office is proud to be the collaborative efforts to bring justice for these cold case victims and their families,” the Nevada Attorney General’s Office tweeted Friday morning.
An amended arrest warrant for Ewing was obtained Thursday in Arapahoe County, and a new arrest warrant was obtained Friday in Jefferson County. Prosecutors have asked that Ewing be extradited to Colorado.
At a Friday morning news conference, Brauchler urged other states to join Colorado and Nevada in creating laws for mandatory DNA testing. By sharing that information, other unsolved crimes can be brough to justice, he said.
“Do this for the victims of those cases that are still hanging out there wondering if they’ll ever get justice,” Brauchler said. “I promise if you do this, you have the opportunity to help bring some closure to people who have these gaping holes in their lives from crimes that have not yet been solved.”
Watch: A joint press conference about the 1984 cold case homicides in Aurora and Lakewood