A woman who witnessed Donna Wayne wrestling with a man in a car along Picadilly Road said the man looks identical to the attacker she saw - although detectives have pointed out that she did not pick him out of a photo lineup several years ago.Īnd the man was convicted of trying to hire an undercover cop to kill his wife. Her clothes were discovered on land owned by the garage owner’s family. Thirty-two years later, that garage - and the man who owns it - remain on the minds of detectives trying to solve Stephanie Bauman’s killing.
The body before him wasn’t that of his daughter, but she looked like a girl the man had seen dancing in a garage in Arapahoe County with another young girl and about four men the night before. They faced the gruesome prospect that a body there might be that of their missing daughter. The same day Stephanie’s body was discovered, a man and his wife whose daughter had run away from home went to the Adams County morgue. “You don’t want to jump to the conclusion that they’re all linked, but you have to start thinking strongly that they are related.” 1980 party could be key “There are only a few who could do something like this,” he said. They were mostly from Denver, but their bodies with little or no clothing were dumped in rural areas.īut McCrary said such behavior is extremely rare. In those 17 cases that the four case investigators are looking at, most of the victims were teenagers or young women who engaged in risky behavior, including hitchhiking. Without such evidence, it’s difficult to pinpoint the killer or to conclusively link the four “posed” cases and another 13 killings all that may be linked. In that discovery was what investigators believe was a killer’s “signature.”īrandt said he believes that whoever killed Stephanie also killed Kimberly Jean Grabin, 16, a year earlier Donna Wayne, 18, in 1986 and Karolyn Walker, 18, in 1987 and staged the bodies of the four victims within a mile of Interstate 70 east of the metro area.īrandt also said it’s possible he killed many others.īrandt, Isaacson, Aurora cold-case detective Steve Conner and Jefferson County sheriff’s investigator Cheryl Moore have submitted evidence in numerous cases to hopefully get a step further and find a physical link like DNA that binds a suspect to the victims. It wasn’t until 2008 that Marv Brandt, a veteran homicide detective who works part time for the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office’s cold-case unit, found similarities in the way Stephanie’s body was displayed with at least three others.
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When Stephanie’s murder was first linked to a series of body-dump homicides between 19 across the Denver area, a task force hadn’t identified a signature that tied the cases together. “Living out the fantasies becomes an obsession.” “The fantasy drives the behavior,” Depue said. The worst of humanity reside in a perverted fantasy world, one that can never be matched by reality despite repeated attempts, said Roger Depue, former unit chief of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit and co-author of “Between Good and Evil: A Master Profiler’s Hunt for Society’s Most Violent Predators.” Today, the traits of serial killers - their thinking, the telltale signs they leave behind, the morbid souvenirs they take with them - are well documented and extensively studied. When Stephanie was chased to her death, the art of profiling was in its infancy, practiced by a few FBI specialists in Quantico, Va., such as McCrary.
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Understanding the psychological makeup of the killers of Stephanie and the other victims could help investigators finally crack the string of unsolved murders of young women between 19. “It’s time to shock and offend somebody,” McCrary said.Ī road crew found Stephanie’s still marble-white body the next morning.Īuthorities believe Stephanie wasn’t the first - or the last - victim of a serial killer or killers who may have taken as many as 38 lives. He taunts authorities, as if saying here’s one more he got away with, McCrary said.Īnd he excitedly anticipates the reaction of bystanders. Staging serves several purposes for a remorseless, narcissistic killer.
“He’s taking the time to leave the body in a certain way,” McCrary said. He got out of his car, walked over to the body, made sure she was dead, and then spread her legs open in one last degrading move. Stephanie eventually gave up hope of escaping, dropped in exhaustion, and died of hypothermia in a ditch blanketed with tumbleweeds and thistles, according to Bruce Isaacson, Arapahoe County sheriff’s investigator. Colorado investigators suspect serial killings in unsolved cases – The Denver Post Close Menu