Alex Jameson retired from the Lakewood Police Department in the early 2000s after many years of hunting down killers.
In the first few years of retirement he loved traveling with his wife to places like Bermuda, but he also missed being a detective.
He was so good at what he did that when Lakewood police officials organized a cold case unit they asked him if he’d be interested in coming back on a part-time basis to try and solve some of the cases.
That was in 2008.
Since then Jameson and fellow cold case investigator Michelle Stone-Principato, who has since been promoted to sergeant, tracked down dusty files of unsolved homicide cases and began interviewing witnesses from crimes going back decades.
They tracked down evidence and organized misplaced reports scattered in various files in storage and in old filing cabinets. They created large “murder books” that organized investigative files in chronological order. They reviewed which cases had a good chance of being solved with advances in technology.
The investigative partners sent clothing to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, hoping that they would get hits that could identify suspects. Their efforts have led to some discoveries.
In September of 2010, Jameson, Stone-Principato and several Aurora detectives announced a connection to two 1984 cold cases that authorities had long believed were connected.
The same killer who used a hammer to kill Patricia Louise Smith, 50, in Lakewood on Jan. 10, 1984, had used a different hammer to kill Bruce and Debra Bennett and their 7-year-old daughter, Melissa, six days later in Aurora.
DNA tied the two cases together. The information was fed into the FBI’s national DNA database searching for the killer. No hits have yet been made.