The death of Theresa Lofton was the kind of murder that gave people pause. Not just in Denver, but everywhere. It made anybody who heard or read about it stop for at least a moment to consider the violent images it conjured in the mind, the twist it caused in the gut.
Most homicides are little murders. That’s what we call them in the newspaper business. Their effect on others is limited, their grasp on the imagination is short-lived. They get a few paragraphs on the inside pages. Buried in the paper the way the victims are buried in the ground.
But when an attractive college student is found in two pieces in a theretofore peaceful place like Washington Park, there usually isn’t enough space in the paper for all the inches of copy it will generate. Theresa Lofton’s was no little murder. It was a magnet that pulled at reporters from across the country. Theresa Lofton was the girl in two pieces. That was the catchy thing about this one. And so they descended on Denver from places like New York and Chicago and Los Angeles, television, tabloid and newspaper reporters alike. For a week, they stayed at hotels with good room service, roamed the city and the University of Denver campus, asked meaningless questions and got meaningless answers. Some staked out the day care center where Lofton had worked part-time or went up to Butte, where she had come from. Wherever they went they learned the same thing, that Theresa Lofton fit that most exclusive media image of all, the All-American Girl.
The Theresa Lofton murder was inevitably compared to the Black Dahlia case of fifty years ago in Los Angeles. In that case, a not so All-American Girl was found severed at the midriff in an empty lot. A tabloid television show dubbed Theresa Lofton the White Dahlia, playing on the fact that she had been found on a snow-covered field near Denver’s Lake Grassmere.
And so the story fed on itself. It burned as hot as a trash-can fire for almost two weeks. But nobody was arrested and there were other crimes, other fires for the national media to warm itself by. Updates on the Lofton case dropped back into the inside pages of the Colorado papers. They became briefs for the digest pages. And Theresa Lofton finally took her spot among the little murders. She was buried.
All the while, the police in general, and my brother in particular, remained virtually mute, refusing even to confirm the detail that the victim had been found in two parts. That report had come only by accident from a photographer at the Rocky named Iggy Gomez. He had been in the park looking for wild art—the feature photos that fill the pages on a slow news day—when he happened upon the crime scene ahead of any other reporters or photographers. The cops had made the callouts to the coroner’s and crime scene offices by landline since they knew the Rocky and the Post monitored their radio frequencies. Gomez took shots of two stretchers being used to remove two body bags. He called the city desk and said the cops were working a two-bagger and from the looks of the size of the bags the victims were probably children.
Later, a cop shop reporter for the Rocky named Van Jackson got a source in the coroner’s office to confirm the grim fact that a victim had come into the morgue in two parts. The next morning’s story in the Rocky served as the siren call to the media across the country.
My brother and his CAPs team worked as if they felt no obligation to talk to the public at all. Each day, the Denver Police Department media office put out a scant few lines in a press release, announcing that the investigation was continuing and that there had been no arrests. When cornered, the brass vowed that the case would not be investigated in the media, though that in itself was a laughable statement. Left with little information from authorities, the media did what it always does in such cases. It investigated the case on its own, numbing the reading and television-watching public with assorted details about the victim’s life that actually had nothing to do with anything.
Still, almost nothing leaked from the department and little was known outside headquarters on Delaware Street; and after a couple of weeks the media onslaught was over, strangled by the lack of its lifeblood, information.
I didn’t write about Theresa Lofton. But I wanted to. It wasn’t the kind of story that comes along often in this place and any reporter would have wanted a piece of it. But at first, Van Jackson worked it with Laura Fitzgibbons, the university beat reporter. I had to bide my time. I knew that as long as the cops didn’t clear it, I’d get my shot at it. So when Jackson asked me in the early days of the case if I could get anything from my brother, even off the record, I told him I would try, but I didn’t try. I wanted the story and I wasn’t going to help Jackson stay on it by feeding him from my source.
In late January, when the case was a month old and had dropped out of the news, I made my move. And my mistake.
One morning I went in to see Greg Glenn, the city editor, and told him I’d like to do a take out on the Lofton case. That was my specialty, my beat. Long takes on the notable murders of the Rocky Mountain Empire. To use a newspaper cliché, my expertise was going behind the headlines to bring you the real story. So I went to Glenn and reminded him I had an in. It was my brother’s case, I said, and he’d only talk to me about it. Glenn didn’t hesitate to consider the time and effort Jackson had already put on the story. I knew that he wouldn’t. All he cared about was getting a story the Post didn’t have. I walked out of the office with the assignment.
My mistake was that I told Glenn I had the in before I had talked to my brother. The next day I walked the two blocks from the Rocky to the cop shop and met him for lunch in the cafeteria. I told him about my assignment. Sean told me to turn around.
“Go back, Jack. I can’t help you.”
“What are you talking about? It’s your case.”
“It’s my case but I’m not cooperating with you or anybody else who wants to write about it. I’ve given the basic details, that’s all I’m required to do, that’s where it stays.”
He looked off across the cafeteria. He had an annoying habit of not looking at you when you disagreed with him. When we were little, I would jump on him when he did it and punch him on the back. I couldn’t do that anymore, though many times I wanted to.
“Sean, this is a good story. You have—”
“I don’t have to do anything and I don’t give a shit what kind of story it is. This one is bad, Jack. Okay? I can’t stop thinking about it. And I’m not going to help you sell newspapers with it.”
“C’mon, man, I’m a writer. Look at me. I don’t care if it sells papers or not. The story is the thing. I don’t give a shit about the paper. You know how I feel about that.”
He finally turned back to me.
“Now you know how I feel about this case,” he said.
I was silent a moment and took out a cigarette. I was down to maybe half a pack a day back then and could have skipped it but I knew it bothered him. So I smoked when I wanted to work on him.
“This isn’t a smoking section, Jack.”
“Then turn me in. At least you’ll be arresting somebody.”
“Why are you such an asshole when you don’t get what you want?”
“Why are you? You aren’t going to clear it, are you? That’s what this is all about. You don’t want me digging around and writing about your failure. You’re giving up.”
“Jack, don’t try the below-the-belt shit. You know it’s never worked.”