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Weld County officials using new tools for cold cases

Photo by ERIC BELLAMY/Greeley Tribune

Bill Hood, left, and Jim Sullivan, who make up two-thirds of the new cold case team with the Weld County Sheriffs Department, are shown at work in Greeley.

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GREELEY (AP) - Along the south wall of his office in the Weld County Sheriff's Office are the notebooks.

Cold cases, most of them homicides, line the bookshelves in investigator Josh Noonan's office.

Some of the names are probably familiar: Denise Davenport, Mary Pierce, Kay Day. All unsolved homicides, all under study by the sheriff's Cold Case Team.

The team is small - Noonan and two retired detectives, who spend their own time looking back through old case files.

Bill Hood, who is retired from the Weld sheriff's office, and Jim Sullivan, retired from Larimer County, have the experience with investigations. Now they have new tools to use as they try to unravel a set of Weld's most puzzling unsolved homicides.

As expected, the most advanced tool in solving cold cases is DNA from blood, hair, semen, saliva and even skin cells that can be broken down to pinpoint whom they once belonged to.

"In many of these cold cases, the investigators didn't have a way to use DNA," Hood said. "Right now, we have two cases with DNA samples we've sent to the CBI."

There are new advances and technology in fingerprint analysis and other crime lab areas, the men said.

The Colorado Bureau of Investigation was assigned to look into cold cases by a state House bill in 2007. Although no funding was provided, the bill requires state law agencies to provide information on every unsolved homicide investigation since 1970.

The detectives can ask for CBI assistance - DNA samples - on a case-by-case basis, Noonan said. Because there are so many requests pouring in, the results are often slow in coming.

The two detectives work about eight hours a week, and will read a case file cover-to-cover.

"These men are retired now, and they have more time to concentrate on a single case," Noonan said. "But it takes a lot of patience, because in some cases, the witnesses or the suspects are dead now."

Sullivan said the first thing they do when they reopen a case is to talk to the victim's family, to let them know what's going on.

"Every family needs closure in a case," Sullivan said. "It would be nice to help them with that."

Part of the investigation will mean centering the focus on possible suspects from the original investigation, Hood said.

"Usually one person stands out as a suspect, but the investigators back then couldn't get enough for an arrest," he said.

The Cold Case Team hopes to change that now, with new eyes looking at the cases and new tests in the crime laboratories.

At this time, the Cold Case Team is looking at nine cases of unsolved murders in Weld. Noonan said there are 27 unsolved homicides in Weld since 1970. There are many others older than 1970, but the detectives are concentrating on the more recent cases at this time.

Cases under investigation by the Cold Case Team:

• Marjorie Fithian, 23, died on June 24, 1975. Her murder made headlines not only because she was shot to death, but because her 18-month-old son was found near the body, alive and well. She was killed on Painter Road near Roggen.
• Mary Pierce, 23, was kidnapped from a downtown Greeley 7-Eleven store where she worked on Aug. 24, 1977. She was found two days later in a cornfield west of Greeley. She'd been raped and stabbed in the back 40 times.
• Evelyn Kay Day, 29, had been missing five days before her body was found Nov. 27, 1979, in her snowbound car near the Aims campus west of Greeley. Investigators believe she probably died several days earlier. Day worked for the business division at the community college.
• Yvonne Rabb was 28 when her body was found in a farmer's field near Dacono on Nov. 15, 1981. She had been shot in the back of the head with a shotgun, and the body driven to Dacono and dumped. She was identified as a prostitute in the Denver area.
• Denise Davenport, 20, was a University of Northern Colorado student when she disappeared Feb. 24, 1985. Her car was found on campus near Frasier Hall, not far from her sorority house. Two months later, her body was found by boaters in the South Platte River east of Greeley. Because of extreme decomposition of the body, the cause of death never has been determined.
• Gerald Drieling, 40, was murdered on Aug. 27, 1986, in his home southwest of Fort Lupton. He'd been shot twice in the back of the head with a handgun. Detectives said Drieling may have surprised a burglar in his home and was killed for it.
• Sheryl Parker was found in the St. Vrain River near Del Camino on July 25, 1996. The 41-year-old mother of two died from blows to the head. She lived and worked in Larimer County.
• Steven Craig Mayo, 40, was shot to death in his home northwest of Fort Lupton on Dec. 19, 2000. The autopsy showed he'd been shot several times, and police found numerous bullet holes in the walls of his home.
• Daniel Larson, 34, was found by goose hunters near Kersey on Jan. 13, 2004. He died from blunt-force trauma, which means he was beaten to death. Larson had been living out of his car in the Loveland area until he was reported missing 10 days before his body was found. Police earlier found his car, with blood inside, parked at an Interstate 25 Park-N-Ride lot near Loveland.