Arrest made in 1985 killing of Douglas County man
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Colorado Bureau of Investigation
and last updated 2021-04-09 16:49:03-04
HIGHLANDS RANCH, Colo. â A 64-year-old man has been arrested in the killing of a Lone Tree man in 1985, authorities announced Friday.
Michael Jefferson faces charges of first-degree murder, felony murder and kidnapping in the death of Roger Dean, who was 51 when he died on Nov. 21, 1985.
Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock said Dean was apparently being robbed at his home when he was killed during a scuffle inside the home. Dean was shot five times and died en route to a hospital.
Before the sun was high;
So brief her time, she scarcely knew
The meaning of a sigh.
As round the rose its soft perfume,
Sweet love around her floated;
Admired she grew–while mortal doom
Crept on, unfear’d, unnoted.
Love was her guardian Angel here,
But Love to Death resign’d her;
Tho’ Love was kind, why should we fear
But holy Death is kinder?
– Hartley Coleridge
On August 16 2006 MSNBC broke the story that an arrest had been made in the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, a pretty 6 year old girl, winner of several beauty pageants, who had been garroted and bludgeoned to death on Christmas night 1996 in Boulder, Colorado. Through 1997 the case became the biggest story of any kind in the United States, until another princess died on August 31 in a Paris tunnel. The story was fueled by the wealth of her parents, the brutality of the assault, its savage cruelty, even if in the annals of mayhem and murder in the Republic, in the long list of slaughtered innocents, JonBenet
Oberholtzer
Schnee
Within a year of the Jan. 6, 1982 murders of Barbara Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer (nee: Burns), a 29-year-old Racine native who had moved to Colorado with her husband, and Annette Schnee, a popular 21-year-old working at a local hotel, seemingly every suspect had been exonerated and the new evidence wasnât coming forward.
The first-ever DNA-based conviction wouldnât come along for another eight years, and the suspected killerâs DNA (identified within the past week as Alan Lee Phillips) wouldnât even be put into CODIS â the FBI s Combined DNA Index System containing forensic profiles of nearly 20 million people â until the late 1990s or early 2000s.
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Tonight
Cloudy early with some clearing expected late. Low around 30F. Winds NNW at 5 to 10 mph. Updated: March 25, 2021 @ 9:32 pm
Arrest made in murder of a Racine woman in the Rocky Mountains in 1982
elisfkc2 / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0
On the night of Jan. 6, 1982, her life was taken.
Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer, a Racine native born Barbara Burns, was trying to hitchhike home from a bar to her home in Alma, Colo. She never made it home. She was 29.
After 39 years, Colorado law enforcement spurred on by an obsessed, retired detective who refused to give up and thought he would die before the case was solved say they have found the man who killed Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer in what had been known as the “Rocky Mountain Cold Case.”