A NEW CLUE IN 1968 MURDER
It’s been 45 years since the 18-year-old was found tortured and killed. Now Englewood police want to know who was driving amysterious 1957 Ford.
For 45 years, potentially crucial evidence in the abduction, torture and slaying of an Englewood High School student was with held by police. The license plate number and description of a car reportedly seen near the bus stop where Connie Paris was kidnapped was never publicized— until this week, when newly assigned Englewood cold case Detective Mike Fast gave The Denver Post a description of the car, hoping that it could help solve the case even today. While the plate number is still secret, the car, he said, was a turquoise 1957 Ford sedan.
Police often juggle what facts to publicize — or not— to avoid damaging a case, but not releasing evidence about what may have been the killer’s car was a bad decision that may have prevented it from ever being solved, according to friends, family and some lawenforcement.
“They mishandled the investigation,” said Diane Riechert, a friend of Paris’ who has made bringing the killer to justice a personal quest.
Not only had Englewood police not released the plate number and car description, but they failed to check handwritten license plate ledgers that would have told them who received the license plate and owned the Ford, Riechert said. The owner of the car remains a mystery because the ledgers were discarded during computerization of records.
One explanation for not releasing facts about the now mysterious car was that the source of the information about the car was a suspect, according to agent Paul Goodman of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, who has been assisting in the Paris murder investigation for two years.
But Fast said DNA evidence believed linked to Paris’ killer does not match that former suspect. Even in 1968, police had reason to think the suspect, who was a security guard, was not the killer. The man, then 25, had taken and passed three lie detector tests in the weeks after Paris’ disappearance, according to Denver Post file stories.
The decision not to release details about the car only compounds the pain of James and Mary Lou Paris, both 85, who already believed Englewood police had possibly missed opportunities to solve the case by delaying their investigation into her disappearance.
“They should have followed that tip,” said Jeff Paris, 56, Connie’s younger brother. “They didn’t take it seriously.”
Paris, 18, anAstudent and member of her school’s pep club, was strangled to death March 26, 1968.
On the Tuesday evening that Paris vanished, her mother gave her money for a hamburger, a bus ticket and a pay phone. The high school senior rode a bus to the main Denver library on Broadway and 13th Avenue to do research for a literature class. She was a senior.
The library closed at 9 p.m., and she boarded another bus home, down Broadway to the last stop on the line at East Girard Avenue. Her family’s homewas more than six blocks south on Lincoln Street. Police believe she walked across the street and behind a bank to a pay phone to call her parents.
At about the same time, the security guardwhowas making checks saw the ’57 Ford behind a bank. He hadn’t seen the car before, so he jotted down some details, Goodman said.
Five days after her disappearance, Paris’ nude body was found 3½ miles west of the bus stop. She had car cigarette lighter burns on her body and had been beaten and strangled.
Even today, identifying who drove that ’57 Ford is possible, and it could be enough evidence to lead to Paris’ killer, Goodman said. The ’57 Ford sedans with distinctive tail finswere not that popular by 1968. High school students were far more apt to drive ’55, ’56 and ’57 Chevrolets, he said.
Fast said police would like to know about anyone who owned a ’57 Ford back in 1968, possibly someone from the high school.
“It is an active case,” Goodman said Thursday.