Howard Morton of the Colorado-based Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons said his group’s support of House Bill 1272 last year was part of an overall goal to solve, for the sake of victims’ families, unresolved homicides and missing persons cases.
“Our interest is to find (families), support them and empower them,” Morton said. “The Legislature is the empowering part.”
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The law requires the team to develop a database of information related to homicides that have been open in Colorado, for more than three years, since 1970 and on.
Law enforcement agencies in the state must provide the information to be included in the database, while still maintaining the physical evidence and investigation file for each case, unless other arrangements are made.
The cold case team can provide assistance to the agency upon request and if it declines to assist, it must provide a written explanation.
Family members are also permitted to ask the local agency for the cold case team’s help. If the agency decides against making the request, the agency must inform the family in writing.
“If you had been murdered in Colorado, the chances are three in 10 your killer would never be prosecuted. How would your family deal with that?” Morton said, quoting from a flyer FHOVAMP created to educate legislators and the public.
He said FOHVAMP previously tried to get former Gov. Bill Owens on board with directing more resources toward unsolved cases, but did not get a response.
The group then began sending out the flyers, and, after 2006’s primaries, sent letters to the winners.
“We started to get calls from legislators who were interested in helping us,” he said.
Prior to HB 1272 was a bill that would have moved millions of dollars spent on death penalty cases to cold cases. Morton, FOHVAMP and the bill’s sponsor argued the resources were basically being wasted in a state where only one person is on death row.
“We wound up saying we’re willing to trade vengeance for justice,” Morton said. “There’s a lot of us who’d like to see the killers of our loved ones get death. But the problem is, we can’t find out who it is, get them convicted or even arrested. The question for us was, which is more important: Keep a death penalty hardly ever used, or take these resources and try to effectively address our unsolved murders?”
Though the bill failed, it paved the way for HB 1272, which Morton said then passed handily.
Morton’s stake in all of this is personal — and tragic.
In 1975, Morton’s son was stabbed and left under a pile of rocks in the Arizona desert. For 12 years, Morton and his wife thought the young man was missing, because his remains were misidentified and cremated by Maricopa County.
The Mortons searched for him for years, using the media and other means. He said a newspaper story eventually jogged the memory of a retired deputy. But though they know what happened to their son, the Mortons do not yet know who is responsible.
“Just sitting around telling our story over and over again didn’t get us what we wanted,” he said.
In 2001, Morton and about 10 other families formed FOHVAMP. He cited the help of a University of Colorado professor, whose students volunteered to help canvas law enforcement agencies throughout the state to see which ones had unsolved murders.
“We now have the names, dates of birth and death and other data on 1,250 victims of unsolved murders in Colorado, except for 28 who are John Does, Jane Does and Baby Does,” Morton said.
The number includes persons missing under suspicious circumstances, including Ben Gray, Dale Williams and Kenneth Chacon, three of several people missing from Montrose County. (See related stories).
Morton said a new database containing that information would be released Wednesday in Denver.
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