Rebecca “Becky” Kellison was eager to get home so she could study for a final test at Lane Beauty Academy in Aurora she was attending. She was only two days away from graduating.
The pretty 21-year-old woman with strawberry blond hair was about 5-feet-4 and weighed about 110 pounds. She had gone dancing at nightclubs with her sister Carol and her husband the night before on a Friday.
Aurora Police - Rebecca Kellison, 21
Early the next morning, before her sister awoke, she wrote a note, “I’m going home,” love Becky.
It was the last communication any family member or friend ever had with Becky. She left the note between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Saturday, June 19, 1976.
“I still have that note,” said her mother Margaret Kellison, 80, of Shasta Lake, Ca.
Becky’s car was then parked in front of her parent’s home in Aurora so she likely walked a few blocks and either hitchhiked or took a bus a few blocks from her sister’s Denver apartment near City Park.
“She never saw any danger in that,” Margaret Kellison said.
Then next day, one of Becky’s classmates from the beauty academy called Becky’s mother, who was then 45, to see if she could catch a ride to the beauty school that Monday for the test.
“I had a lump in my throat because Becky had never come home,” Margaret Kellison said.
She immediately made a missing persons report with Denver and Aurora police, but was told that because Becky was 21 there was no alarm.
“She was just considered a runaway. There was nothing they could do,” her mother said.
But Margaret Kellison knew her daughter wouldn’t just leave. She had a test to take and would have never left her family like that.
For one thing, she had a close relationship with her father, who was debilitated after suffering a heart attack. She wouldn’t do something like running away – that would cause him so much stress.
After her father had his heart attack and couldn’t work, Becky had agreed to baby-sit her two younger siblings at night while her mother worked. She was 16 and 17, but she never complained. She was very responsible.
“She really became the second mother to my two younger children. She was just a real sweetheart,” Margaret Kellison said. “I knew something happened to her.”
Her daughter did have a temper and if riled in the right circumstances she could get very angry. Margaret Kellison worried about a scenario in which her daughter flashed her temper.
She called police every week or so but they acted like they didn’t want to hear about it.
“I assumed they would check with her friends to see if they had seen her that morning,” Margaret Kellison said. “I thought they would at least do something. They did not believe anything happened to her. It was a different time.”
But they never did. If she had known they weren’t going to check, she would have knocked on doors and done it herself, she said.
In December of 1977, a farmer was plowing a field in Adams County on property where the Denver International Airport runway is located.
At the time the ground was rolling fields. The plow uncovered clothing. The farmer called the Adams County Sheriff’s Office.
Investigators dug up the ground and found Kellison’s blue purse with her identification inside. They found her jeans, underwear, black boots, her shoes, brown suede jacket and her short-sleeved print shirt.
What they didn’t find, said Steve Conner, major crime/homicide unit detective, was Kellison’s body.
Margaret Kellison repeatedly went to the site to see what police were doing to search for her daughter’s remains. Although police said they had dug up the whole field looking for her daughter’s remains she never saw any sign of it.
She strongly believed that she was buried somewhere out there.
Years later, when the area was paved over for a runway, her remains were not found.
“When DIA was built out there I think they covered up her body. I don’t think we’ll ever find her body,” she said.
Conner said that it’s possible after so much time had passed that, scavengers had carried her bones away, leaving no trace of her at the location where she was murdered.
Over the years detectives suspected Ted Bundy and another serial killer may have been involved. The case was never solved.
“I have long given up hope. I think it’s a dangerous, dangerous world.”
Contact information: The Aurora Police Department can be reached at 303-739-6151. Denver Post reporter Kirk Mitchell at 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com. For updates follow Kirk Mitchell @kmitchellDP