Colored Red

On October 29, 1996, Kimberly Greene Medina disappeared without a trace. Her husband didn't report her missing until two days later and claimed she went missing while walking to a local convenience store to buy cigarettes. The truly realities of what Michael Medina was capable of wouldn't be uncovered until nearly a decade later in 2005. This is a short but terrifying story. 

On January 23, 1920, shots could be heard ringing out from the Waldorf Hotel in Denver, Colorado. When police and journalists arrived they found a peculiar scene and uncovered a love triangle that involved a sick man, a woman, and an estranged husband who had been stalking his wife. Curiously, not many details remained on record about this case but a detective claimed for many years that there was more to it than the public saw. 

On December 14, 1993, a man hid inside a men's bathroom inside a Chuck E. Cheese in Aurora, CO and came out after closing duties began. He shot everyone working in the restaurant and made off with around $1500, some keychains and some game tokens. 4 employees were killed and one survived the shooting and identified Nathan Dunlap, a former employee, as the perpetrator. Nathan's case would come to be an example of how not to handle a death penalty case and details about Nathan's motives or mental state wouldn't be known until years later. The final decision as to his fate wouldn't come until March of 2020 but his victims and their families will never get their life or loved ones back.

On a cold December morning in Denver, CO, 1922, a Buick touring car pulled up behind an armored car in front of the Denver Mint. Four gunmen emerged from the Buick and demanded the money that was being loaded into the armored car. One of the Mint guards, a veteran of the police force, was killed during the ensuing shootout. The case wouldn't be "solved" until nearly 15 years later and the details of it sound closer to a gangster movie than a real life crime.

On October 19, 1995 in Greeley, CO, Tina Sandoval left work to have a reluctant meeting with her estranged husband, John Sandoval, and retrieve money for an IRS debt they incurred while together. Tina was never heard from again. It would take over two decades for detectives to finally piece together the entire twisted and disgusting lifestyle of John Sandoval and finally extract from him what really happened to Tina. 

In this special bonus episode I'll discuss a dark time in Denver's history that isn't well known. All across America in the last decades of the 19th Century, racial tensions flared due to labor disputes and immigration. Everyone wanted a piece of the booming Denver economy and this caused a clash that culminated in the Halloween Day Chinese Race Riots in Denver's Hop Alley in 1880. The riots resulted in one horrible murder of a laundry worker named Look Young and included many more rapes, beatings and possibly even unrecorded murders. 

The House of a Thousand Candles sits at 1410 High Street in Denver Colorado and has been a hotbed of strange activity, some paranormal, and some criminal. The house was the inspiration for the book, The House of a Thousand Candles, written by Meredith Nicholson, who lived in the home for a number of years and went on to share his experiences with the home. Compounding these strange occurrences is the murder of Hubert Hahn, a renter in the home in 1955 who would have his life taken senselessly while his girlfriend watched.

On November 19, 2006, Nonnie Dotson walked to run some errands near Chatfield Reservoir in Littleton, CO. She was never seen or heard from again. Nonnie was an active duty Air Force officer and due to be released from the military the following May. The ensuing investigation would question whether or not Nonnie was a military deserter, a victim of a random kidnapping, or the victim of something even stranger. In a surprising twist, her brother Tony Dotson is revealed to be anything but innocent. 

On a warm April day in 1943, an apartment manager was searching an apartment building in Denver, CO for the source of a bad odor. He eventually found the source in the form of a painted wooden hope chest. What he found in the chest would launch an investigation into a tenant in the building named Bernice Williams. This story is short but tragic and, in a way, it highlights how few options women had at the time. 

On the morning of October 15, 1995 a man at a hunting site camp on the Uncompahgre Plateau in Colorado heard a woman hysterically screaming for help. He ran to the scene to find 48 year old Bruce Dodson lying on the ground and apparently dead. He had been shot. His wife Janice was screaming and throwing around his orange hunting vest and asking her dead husband why he had taken off his orange vest. The story that would unfold was a complicated and strange romance involving greed, mental illness, and a gun that vanished into thin air. 

In 1911 a serial killer stalked the United States by train. He would sneak into a home through a window and kill entire families with the blunt end of an axe he found in or near their home. What he did in addition to murder in the homes was even more peculiar and included destroying their heads until they were unrecognizable and draping pieces of clothing over mirrors and glass to avoid the judgmental gaze of either his victims or himself. In Colorado Springs he murdered two families and has left a mystery that has lingered for over a decade, who was he and why did he hate faces?

Randy Baker had a rough start to his year in 2017. He had heart surgery, his wife left him, and he had fallen asleep at the wheel a grand total of 5 times. But the real surprise came when Randy was found dead on August 16, 2017 by his wife Kelly. She seemed upset and so did his sister, Carol, and at first it appeared he died from natural causes. However, police would soon uncover a greedy family conspiracy that would shock Greeley, Colorado. 

Russel Gulch, CO, 1904. Azel Galbraith was never a satisfied man. He and his family lived in a quiet mining town in Colorado at the turn of the 20th Century and enjoyed the small luxuries of his salary as a business manager for a local mine. But soon his attention moved to a mistress he kept in Denver and his patience and money dwindled. He needed to find a way out of the family life he now loathed, and he'd find that solution at the bottom of a bottle. 

For decades rumors persisted about a farm on the eastern plains of Colorado where transients and farm workers would head to for work and never be seen again. This farm was owned by Tom McCormick and run by him, his two sons Michael and John and the dozens of transient farm hands they recruited from Denver. The McCormicks carried a reputation of being mean and quick to anger and it wasn't until an investigation into missing trucker named Herbert Donoho in 1983 that the truth, or what small part we know of it, was uncovered about the horrors of the McCormick farm. 

On November 29, 1864, First Colorado Calvary troops of the Colorado Territory led by Colonel John Chivington, a preacher from Ohio with no war experience, attacked a camp of peace seeking indigenous tribes by Sand Creek. Nearly 200 members of the tribes were killed, mostly elderly men, women, and children. But the massacre isn't the only story to be found in this tragedy. A man named Silas Soule emerged on the right side of history before going down as Denver legend in his own tragic end. A young Cherokee woman named Mochi, blind with rage after witnessing her family and people slaughtered at Sand Creek, went on to seek revenge.

Jacine Gielinski was on her way to visit her boyfriend on April 29, 1997 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Little did she know she was being stalked by two men in another car after they saw her stopped at a stoplight. As she exited her car to enter her boyfriend's apartment complex, the two men grabbed her and shoved her into their car. Within less than two hours she would be dead. The two men who killed her would turn out to be two incredibly inept and psychologically immature guys looking to get laid. They fantasized about violence and sex and used the movie "A Clockwork Orange" as their inspiration. 

Was the Black Hand, otherwise known as the Italian mafia, a real organized crime gang or a myth in the early 1900s? Regardless of what you might think, the hysteria and murders stemming from fear and intimidation under the name of the Black Hand were real and often gruesome. In this episode I'll discuss some of the early history of Southern Colorado towns and the cultural climate that instigated crime. 

The Blagg family was described as a picture perfect family. They were born-again Christians and active in their community. But on November 13, 2001, Michael Blagg calls 911 from his home in Grand Junction, Colorado to report his wife and daughter missing. There's a massive pool of blood on his wife's side of the bed. At first, Michael appears to be a concerned husband but his bizarre actions that day reveal a man determined to appear to be someone he's not. 

In 1986, a man remodeling his home in Fountain, CO comes across a murder confession written in pencil on the back of a piece of wood built into the home. Who wrote the confession and who was murdered? I'll go over this story as well as some other strange occurrences from Fountain, CO.

On June 14, 2010 Kiowa High School teacher Randy Wilson was found dead by his car in a field at the intersection of two rural county roads. He had his hands tied behind his back, a bag over his head and his own belt around his neck. Clues would be few and far between in the case until a man confesses to the murder in 2017. But he doesn't confess in any conventional way, he does so by facebooking detectives, leaving notes around a mall, and writing on the windows of his apartment. Is he the man who killed Randy Wilson, or is something else at play here?