The Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office has formally charged a 57-year-old Nevada prisoner with first-degree murder and first-degree sexual assault in the 1984 hammer bludgeoning death of a 50-year-old Lakewood grandmother.
Alex Christopher Ewing faces four counts of murder in the first degree and two crime of violence counts in the death of Patricia Smith. Her death was later connected by DNA to the murders of three members of an Aurora family.
Ewing is serving a 40-year prison term for two counts of attempted murder and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon in the Aug. 9, 1984, attacks on a Henderson, Nev., couple. Nevada authorities took Ewing’s DNA in May and later entered that in the FBI’s national DNA database. The day after it was entered, a Colorado Bureau of Investigators crime analyst found a match between Ewing’s DNA and that found at Smith’s crime scene.
Ewing was 23 when he allegedly entered the townhome Smith shared with her daughter and two grandchildren at 12610 W. Bayaud Ave. on Jan. 10, 1984. Smith’s grandchildren discovered her partially clothed body soaked in blood near the entrance of their home. The Jefferson County Coroner’s Office concluded she had been struck 16 times in the head with a Craftsman brand auto body hammer that was found near her body, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.
Ewing also faces 18 felony sexual assault and murder charges including three counts of first degree murder in the Jan. 16, 1984, hammer bludgeoning deaths of Bruce and Debra Bennett and their 7-year-old daughter, Melissa. Only one family member, then-3-year-old Vanessa, survived, but with severe facial injuries.
In June 2002, then-Arapahoe County District Attorney Jim Peters filed the charges against John Doe in the Bennett killings based on the DNA. Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler’s office amended the complaint Friday adding Ewing’s name.
“We are moving for extradition and at this stage it is a waiting game,” said Terry Combs, a spokeswoman for Brauchler.
The same killer who killed Smith and the Bennetts is believed to have first struck Jan. 4, 1984, when he slipped inside an Aurora home and used a hammer to beat James and Kimberly Haubenschild. James Haubenschild suffered a fractured skull and his wife had a concussion. Both survived. On the same day, a man using a hammer attacked flight attendant Donna Holm in the garage of her Aurora home, leaving her in a coma. Holm survived.
