Solved cold cases in Colorado
7 documented cases.
Helene Pruszynski
Helene Pruszynski, a 21-year-old college intern from Massachusetts working at a Denver radio station, was abducted, sexually assaulted, and stabbed to death in January 1980; her body was found in a field off Daniels Park Road in Douglas County, Colorado. The case went cold for nearly 40 years until investigative genetic genealogy identified James Curtis Clanton, who had been living in Florida under a former identity. He was arrested in December 2019 and pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in 2020.
John Curtis Patterson
John Curtis Patterson, a 20-year-old gas station clerk, was found fatally stabbed in the chest in the restroom of the Cascade Service Station on North Broadway in Boulder, Colorado, on September 29, 1975. The cash register had been emptied, pointing to a robbery. A 32-year-old career criminal named Louis Jess Locicero, who was staying at a nearby motel, was arrested days later after detectives found a .30 caliber M1 carbine, a knife matching the victim's wound, fibers from Patterson's shirt and hairs matching Patterson's head in his room, yet he was released before charges were filed and the case went cold for nearly 50 years. In 2025 the Boulder County Sheriff's Office announced the case solved after modern ballistics technology and re-examined physical evidence tied Locicero to the killing; the district attorney concluded the proof established guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but Locicero had died in 2024.
Jonelle Matthews
Jonelle Matthews, 12, sang with her Greeley middle school's honor choir at a Christmas concert on December 20, 1984, and was dropped at her home about 8 p.m. by a friend and the friend's father. When her father got home about an hour and a half later the front door was open, her shoes were by a chair and her stockings on the couch, and there was no sign of a struggle. President Reagan spoke of her the following spring and her face went onto milk cartons; nobody was ever arrested. On July 23, 2019, a crew digging an oil pipeline in rural Weld County turned up human remains that dental records identified as Jonelle. She had been shot in the head. Within weeks Greeley police travelled to Idaho to see Steve Pankey, a former neighbor from her family's church who had talked about the case to courts and police for years, had once asked for immunity, and knew that a rake had been used to wipe out footprints in the snow, a detail police had never released. His former wife told a grand jury he had taken her on an unexpected trip to California two days after Jonelle vanished and dug in the yard when they got home. He was indicted in October 2020. A first trial ended in a hung jury in November 2021, with a conviction only for false reporting. On October 31, 2022, a second Weld County jury convicted him of felony murder and second-degree kidnapping, and he was sentenced the same day to life with parole possible after 20 years.
Kelsie Schelling
Kelsie Schelling was 21 and living in Denver when, on February 4, 2013, an ultrasound confirmed she was eight weeks pregnant. That night she drove two hours south to Pueblo because her boyfriend, Donthe Lucas, had texted that he had a surprise for her. She waited for him in a Walmart parking lot, then on a street near his grandmother's house, and was never seen again. The next morning Lucas withdrew $400 from her account at a bank; texts from her phone claimed a miscarriage; her car was left in a hospital lot, where police found it on February 14, cleaned out. Lucas gave Denver police an account of a hospital visit that records showed never happened, and told two detectives different times he last saw her. For years it stayed a missing-person case. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation joined in 2016, investigators dug up the backyard of the house where Lucas had lived in April 2017, and in November 2017, after he was arrested at Denver International Airport on an unrelated robbery charge, Lucas admitted in a recorded interview that the hospital story was false and that he had moved her car. He was charged with first-degree murder on December 1, 2017. After years of delay, a Pueblo County jury convicted him on March 8, 2021, in under three hours, and he was sentenced that day to life without parole. Her body has never been found.
Paige Birgfeld
Paige Birgfeld, a 34-year-old mother of three, left her Grand Junction, Colorado, home on the morning of Thursday, June 28, 2007, telling her children she was working in Glenwood Springs, and did not come back. Her red Ford Focus was found burning in an empty parking lot on July 1. Investigators learned that she ran an escort business called Models Inc. By October 2007 they had named a suspect, Lester Ralph Jones, a client who worked as a mechanic. Prosecutors said store video showed him buying a TracFone two days before she vanished, and that the phone's only calls were to her. Without a body there was no arrest, and the case went cold. In March 2012 a hiker found her remains in a dry creek bed in Wells Gulch, Delta County, and dental records identified her. A cold case team at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation took over in 2013, and the Mesa County Sheriff's Office arrested Jones on November 21, 2014. A first trial in 2016 ended in a mistrial on September 9 with the jury split nine to three. A second jury convicted him of murder and kidnapping on December 27, 2016, and Judge Brian Flynn sentenced him to life without parole. No DNA linked him to her, and the case rested on circumstantial evidence.
Rhonda Marie Fisher
Rhonda Marie Fisher, a 30-year-old woman from the Denver area, was last seen on the night of March 31, 1987, walking north on Monaco toward Leetsdale in Denver. The next morning, April 1, 1987, a passing motorist found her body down an embankment in the 3500 block of South Perry Park Road, south of Sedalia in rural Douglas County, Colorado. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled, and one of her hands appeared to have been restrained. The case went cold for nearly four decades. In late October 2025, a CODIS match tied DNA preserved from paper bags placed over Fisher's hands at the scene to Vincent Darrell Groves, regarded as one of Colorado's most prolific serial killers. Groves had died in custody in 1996. On December 2, 2025, the Douglas County Sheriff's Office announced the case solved.
Sylvia Quayle
Sylvia Quayle, 34, was sexually assaulted, stabbed, strangled, and shot to death inside her Cherry Hills Village, Colorado home, where her father found her on August 4, 1981. The case stayed cold for roughly four decades until investigative genetic genealogy traced crime-scene DNA to David Dwayne Anderson, a former local who had moved to Cozad, Nebraska. He was convicted of first-degree murder in 2022 and sentenced to life in prison.