Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler says that the family of a former prosecutor who was murdered 18 years ago was denied justice when the 71-year-old suspect died before his case went to trial.
Robert Williams died Saturday. In 2017, he was charged with murder in the 1999 death of 41-year-old prosecutor Rebecca Bartee, who worked in the office Brauchler now oversees.
“A murdered prosecutor. An untimely but ultimately brave witness. A DNA match. The only thing missing is justice,” Brauchler said in a news release. “From the moment we identified Williams’ DNA in the tub of our murdered colleague, our office and (Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office) investigators set about to hold him accountable for his inexplicable, cold-blooded murder and attempt to cover it up. We sought justice for Rebecca Bartee. The Bartee family and our community were denied that justice.”
Bartee’s coworkers called the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office when she didn’t show up for work on June 7, 1999, according to a news release by Vikki Migoya, Brauchler’s spokeswoman. Bartee’s body was later found in the bathtub of her Copper Terrace Apartments on South Dayton Street. There were no rugs or towels on the racks in the bathroom because they were found wet in the washing machine.
In February 2017 a local news reporter contacted the sheriff’s office to say he had been approached by a man who said he had information about an old murder. Investigators contacted the man, who said he believed his acquaintance, Williams, had strangled a young woman at Copper Terrace years early, the news release says.
The man related that he had seen Williams accosting the woman in the hall of the apartments one day. The man intervened, and the woman left. Williams also had problems with other women in the complex, the man said. Williams made unwelcome advances and looked in people’s windows. The man knew that Williams had served time in prison in California, Migoya’s news release says.
The day the woman’s body was found, the man told investigators, Williams acted strangely. Investigators reported that the man told them, “I am not going to die not letting that girl’s family know what happened.”
Investigators were able to corroborate much of what the man had told them, including that Williams was convicted in Los Angeles of the 1983 strangulation murder of his estranged girlfriend, the news release says.
The Colorado Bureau of Investigation had been able to extract a DNA profile from one of the hairs found in Bartee’s bathtub, and that evidence was reexamined in light of new information pointing to Williams. Ultimately, CBI analysts determined that the DNA on the hair found in Bartee’s bathtub matched Williams.
Williams was arrested Aug. 29, 2017. He appeared in Arapahoe District Court on Aug. 31, 2017, and was charged with first-degree murder in Bartee’s death. His court hearings were repeatedly postponed and he died before a trial date was set.
“It is tragic that after 18 years of waiting for an arrest in this case, the family and friends of Ms. Bartee will not have the opportunity to see the man charged with her murder stand trial and be held accountable for this brutal crime,” Senior Deputy District Attorney Chris Wilcox said.
Wilcox and Chief Deputy District Attorney John Kellner, who has won several cold case murder convictions, prosecuted the case.