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Not Boulder but close
Resolving 1993 murder of Englewood 5-year-old took an advances in forensic science
By Kevin Vaughan | The Denver Post
PUBLISHED: October 8, 2011 at 2:47 pm
[url=http://www.denverpost.com/newstips/][/url]
Detective Bobbie Garrett pulled down a three-ring binder, opened its vinyl cover and began reading the 275-page summary of one of Colorado’s most notorious cold cases.
It was January — nearly 18 years after a brown-eyed 5-year-old girl named Aleszandra “Alie” Berrelez vanished from the courtyard outside her Englewood apartment, sparking a four-day hunt that ended in the heartbreaking discovery of her body. Her killer had stuffed her into a canvas bag and tossed her down a hillside in Deer Creek Canyon.
As Garrett began the latest look at case No. 93-9789 — the kidnap and murder of little Alie Berrelez — the paper trail alone filled 37 three-inch binders and two file boxes at the Englewood Police Department. Garrett, an investigator in the crimes against persons unit for more than a decade who had worked the case off and on over the years, settled in to take a fresh look.
Alie’s disappearance and the subsequent discovery of her body had captivated people across the Denver area, in part because of the bloodhound, Yogi, who led officers from her apartment to Deer Creek Canyon, where her body was found.
What the public never knew was that later Yogi led investigators from Deer Creek Canyon back to the Golden Nugget Apartments, and that a second bloodhound, Becky, took them right to apartment 106A — and that both dogs identified both the prime suspect and two cars he had driven.
As Garrett sat down in January to look again at Alie’s disappearance and murder, she saw the extensive circumstantial case against the man who lived in that apartment — a drug user and drifter who died in 2001 after years of hard living.
The first step was to examine the case summary, which detailed the work of the original detectives in 1993 and 1994.
The story started, at the top of Page 1, at the beginning.
“On May 18, 1993, at approximately 7:02 p.m., the Englewood Department of Safety Services Police Division Dispatcher Vern Elder received a phone call from Marivel Berrelez . . . Marivel Berrelez stated that her 5 year old daughter was missing.”
Garrett read on.
Alie was in the courtyard of the Golden Nugget Apartments with her two brothers. . . . A neighbor watching the children slipped into her unit for a few minutes, and when she returned, Alie was gone. . . . Soon, other officers swarmed the horseshoe-shaped complex but found no signs of Alie. . . . Alie’s 3-year-old brother, Sam, told the officers she was with a man “and they went in a car.” . . . Three days after Alie vanished, a police bloodhound named Yogi sniffed a pair of the little girl’s underpants and began working around the apartment courtyard before heading to Broadway, then south to C-470, and ultimately to the mouth of Deer Creek Canyon. . . . Four days after Alie disappeared, searchers that picked up where Yogi left off saw a green canvas bag in a ravine. . . . An officer opened the bag and saw Alie’s lifeless body.
On Page 18, Garrett saw the first mention of a man who had come into investigators’ sights the same day Alie’s body was found. A man who lived in unit 106A but had boarded a train to California.
As Garrett read, she experienced what she would later describe as “red flag upon red flag.” She continued, jotting down occasional questions, thinking about what else she might do that hadn’t already been done. When she was finished, she’d reached the same conclusion as her predecessors: The man who lived in unit 106A was Alie’s killer.
Detectives had tried in 1994 to press charges against him after building a case that was strong but circumstantial. Prosecutors, however, decided there wasn’t enough, and no arrest was made — despite repeated efforts, in the ensuing years, to find the clue that would tip the balance irrevocably toward a suspect.
Now Garrett considered her options. What she decided would crack the case.
Unraveling the truth
Solving a cold case — any cold case — can be a matter of luck or advanced technology or shoe leather.
Luck, as in a furnace repairman’s 1995 discovery of a wad of women’s underwear secreted in a duct that led to an arrest in the 6-year-old unsolved murder of Susan Doll.
Advanced technology, as in the 2008 arrest in the rape and murder more than 30 years before of Holly Andrews — a case solved with a DNA match.
Shoe leather, as in the 1983 Boulder murder of Sid Wells that yielded, earlier this year, an arrest warrant for the longtime suspect in the case, Thayne Smika, obtained after detectives and prosecutors went through everything again, conducted new interviews, and determined they had enough to go to court.
When Becky, the second bloodhound, walked right into the open door of that unit four days after Alie vanished, maintenance workers were cleaning up — the previous tenant had abruptly moved out.
The previous tenant was 32-year- old Nicholas Randolph Stofer.
An examination of Englewood’s case files paints a portrait of Stofer as a young man with a lot of problems.
Born Nicholas Randolph Schultz, he’d gotten a new name after his mother remarried and his stepfather adopted him. He grew up in the Littleton area, and by age 15, he was drinking and using drugs and engaging in sex with a male classmate. He later served in the U.S. Navy but was bounced out on an “other than honorable” discharge and drifted, married and divorced twice, found jobs and lost them, and used massive amounts of drugs and alcohol.
On June 2, 1993, 15 days after Alie vanished, investigators had their first contact with Stofer. In a telephone interview, Stofer claimed that around the time of Alie’s disappearance, he’d been talking with two other tenants in the complex. He said that while they were chatting, he saw Alie’s mother looking for her in the courtyard. And he said he then headed out to a pay phone in front of the complex to make calls.
But those other tenants told a different story — that when they’d left for a bingo game, Alie was still in the courtyard. Phone records showed Stofer hadn’t made any calls.
As Garrett went over everything, she saw one curiosity after another linking Stofer to Alie’s disappearance and death.
Alie was barefoot when she was found, and seven people described Stofer as having a “foot fetish” — two of them said he’d talked of being sexually attracted to small, female feet. . . . Stofer bought an Amtrak ticket to California the day Alie disappeared, then moved up his departure and was on the train when her body was found. . . . Stofer was inside his apartment as officers searched for Alie but never answered his door. . . . Stofer borrowed a Buick two days after Alie vanished, claiming he needed to go to Hudson to get his last paycheck from a railroad job but had, in fact, been fired and paid two months earlier. . . . A friend who’d helped him move into the Golden Nugget Apartments saw a green canvas bag exactly like the one used to conceal Alie’s body. . . . Alie’s brother, Sam, in multiple conversations with a psychologist, said he’d seen “the old man” take her. . . . On two separate occasions, Sam took investigators to apartment 106A after being asked where the “old man” lived.
And Garrett saw more compelling evidence, courtesy of the two dogs.
In August 1993, Yogi and Becky, in separate exercises at different locations, were given a gauze pad to sniff that had been wiped around inside the green canvas bag. And each dog then picked out Stofer’s Subaru, and later the borrowed Buick, from among a series of vehicles parked together.
And then, in April 1994, there was more. Investigators obtained a court order requiring Stofer to appear in a lineup. He and four others — three police officers and a firefighter — stood next to designated cones in a lot at a training center used by law enforcement officers from Arapahoe and Douglas counties. More than a half-mile away, a handler let Becky sniff the gauze pad.
The dog then zig-zagged her way more than 1,000 yards until the five men were in sight. Becky sniffed her way right up to Stofer, stopped in front of him and nudged his right hand.
A little later, Yogi was given the same gauze pad. He, too, worked his way to the men, jumping on Stofer when he reached him.
Later that year, investigators took the case to prosecutors in the office of then-Arapahoe County District Attorney Bob Gallagher. The prosecutors decided the case wasn’t strong enough.
Garrett saw some of the things that may have given them pause, things that could have been exploited by a defense attorney. That Sam had initially said the man who took Alie was black. That both Yogi and Becky had shown keen interest in the same apartment a block from the Berrelez home — an apartment with no ties to Alie or Stofer. That while the carpet fibers found on Alie’s clothing matched the green shag in Stofer’s apartment, they also matched the floor covering in seven other units in the building. That doctors never determined with certainty how Alie died — perhaps, they theorized, it was a result of a severe asthma attack. And, of course, that dogs can’t talk.
Still, Garrett believed the evidence pointing to Stofer far outweighed that which threw his guilt into question, and so as she thought about her next step, she believed DNA testing — much more advanced than what existed at the time Alie was killed — was her best bet.
On Feb. 8, she filled out the paperwork to send several items to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation: The green canvas bag in which Alie’s body had been found, and her shoes, underwear, jumper, shirt, headband and hair tie.
It was Garrett’s best hope, and yet she knew it might yield nothing.
“You always submit things hoping they’re going to come back with something,” she said. “But they often don’t.”
Months passed. Garrett worked other cases.
Closing the case
Tuesday, Aug. 31. The phone on Garrett’s desk rang.
“Investigations, Garrett,” she answered.
On the other end of the line was Gentry Roth, a CBI forensic scientist.
The call started with small talk. Roth told her about his memories of the case — especially Yogi, the bloodhound. He asked her a few questions about Stofer — how it was he came to be a suspect, whether he was a family friend, whether he would have been around her.
“So,” Roth finally asked, “wanna know what I did?”
“What?” Garrett asked excitedly.
Garrett’s mind raced. Submitting the evidence again had been a risk — testing can, in effect, destroy the chance to test again in the future when technology may be even more advanced.
But Roth told her how he’d run moistened cotton swabs over Alie’s clothing, then tested them. And how that testing had yielded two DNA hits — both from Alie’s underpants.
One was a partial genetic profile, and Stofer could not be eliminated as the source of it. Because the profile was not complete, Roth could not say with a “reasonable degree of scientific certainty” that it came from Stofer. But what Roth could say was that the odds of it coming from someone else were, at a minimum, greater than one in 100 million. At the same time, he found a second partial profile, this one known as a Y-STR. It is a DNA profile that is male-specific and is passed from fathers to sons. And it, too, matched Stofer.
Because the samples were so small, Roth could not tell her what had left the DNA. It could have been anything — drops of sweat, or saliva, or a few skin cells.
No matter. Garrett had DNA consistent with Stofer’s on the underpants Alie was wearing when her body was found. And with that, she had the final clue she needed to close the books on a case that frustrated her and many other investigators and left Alie’s family in limbo for more than 18 years.
About 20 feet and an open area separate Garrett’s desk from the office of Englewood Police Chief John Collins, who as a young detective had worked some on the Berrelez case in the early years. Collins could tell Garrett was on the phone with someone, and then he heard her yelling.
“Stop what you’re doing,” she yelled to Collins. “You better sit down. . . . This is kind of big.”
A moment later, Garrett burst into his office.
“We have a DNA hit,” she said excitedly.
“On who?” Collins asked.
“Alie’s case,” Garrett said.
“Stofer?”
“Yep.”
Kevin Vaughan: 303-954-5019 or kvaughan@denverpost.com
Resolving 1993 murder of Englewood 5-year-old took an advances in forensic science
By Kevin Vaughan | The Denver Post
PUBLISHED: October 8, 2011 at 2:47 pm
[url=http://www.denverpost.com/newstips/][/url]
Detective Bobbie Garrett pulled down a three-ring binder, opened its vinyl cover and began reading the 275-page summary of one of Colorado’s most notorious cold cases.
It was January — nearly 18 years after a brown-eyed 5-year-old girl named Aleszandra “Alie” Berrelez vanished from the courtyard outside her Englewood apartment, sparking a four-day hunt that ended in the heartbreaking discovery of her body. Her killer had stuffed her into a canvas bag and tossed her down a hillside in Deer Creek Canyon.
As Garrett began the latest look at case No. 93-9789 — the kidnap and murder of little Alie Berrelez — the paper trail alone filled 37 three-inch binders and two file boxes at the Englewood Police Department. Garrett, an investigator in the crimes against persons unit for more than a decade who had worked the case off and on over the years, settled in to take a fresh look.
Alie’s disappearance and the subsequent discovery of her body had captivated people across the Denver area, in part because of the bloodhound, Yogi, who led officers from her apartment to Deer Creek Canyon, where her body was found.
What the public never knew was that later Yogi led investigators from Deer Creek Canyon back to the Golden Nugget Apartments, and that a second bloodhound, Becky, took them right to apartment 106A — and that both dogs identified both the prime suspect and two cars he had driven.
As Garrett sat down in January to look again at Alie’s disappearance and murder, she saw the extensive circumstantial case against the man who lived in that apartment — a drug user and drifter who died in 2001 after years of hard living.
The first step was to examine the case summary, which detailed the work of the original detectives in 1993 and 1994.
The story started, at the top of Page 1, at the beginning.
“On May 18, 1993, at approximately 7:02 p.m., the Englewood Department of Safety Services Police Division Dispatcher Vern Elder received a phone call from Marivel Berrelez . . . Marivel Berrelez stated that her 5 year old daughter was missing.”
Garrett read on.
Alie was in the courtyard of the Golden Nugget Apartments with her two brothers. . . . A neighbor watching the children slipped into her unit for a few minutes, and when she returned, Alie was gone. . . . Soon, other officers swarmed the horseshoe-shaped complex but found no signs of Alie. . . . Alie’s 3-year-old brother, Sam, told the officers she was with a man “and they went in a car.” . . . Three days after Alie vanished, a police bloodhound named Yogi sniffed a pair of the little girl’s underpants and began working around the apartment courtyard before heading to Broadway, then south to C-470, and ultimately to the mouth of Deer Creek Canyon. . . . Four days after Alie disappeared, searchers that picked up where Yogi left off saw a green canvas bag in a ravine. . . . An officer opened the bag and saw Alie’s lifeless body.
On Page 18, Garrett saw the first mention of a man who had come into investigators’ sights the same day Alie’s body was found. A man who lived in unit 106A but had boarded a train to California.
As Garrett read, she experienced what she would later describe as “red flag upon red flag.” She continued, jotting down occasional questions, thinking about what else she might do that hadn’t already been done. When she was finished, she’d reached the same conclusion as her predecessors: The man who lived in unit 106A was Alie’s killer.
Detectives had tried in 1994 to press charges against him after building a case that was strong but circumstantial. Prosecutors, however, decided there wasn’t enough, and no arrest was made — despite repeated efforts, in the ensuing years, to find the clue that would tip the balance irrevocably toward a suspect.
Now Garrett considered her options. What she decided would crack the case.
Unraveling the truth
Solving a cold case — any cold case — can be a matter of luck or advanced technology or shoe leather.
Luck, as in a furnace repairman’s 1995 discovery of a wad of women’s underwear secreted in a duct that led to an arrest in the 6-year-old unsolved murder of Susan Doll.
Advanced technology, as in the 2008 arrest in the rape and murder more than 30 years before of Holly Andrews — a case solved with a DNA match.
Shoe leather, as in the 1983 Boulder murder of Sid Wells that yielded, earlier this year, an arrest warrant for the longtime suspect in the case, Thayne Smika, obtained after detectives and prosecutors went through everything again, conducted new interviews, and determined they had enough to go to court.
When Becky, the second bloodhound, walked right into the open door of that unit four days after Alie vanished, maintenance workers were cleaning up — the previous tenant had abruptly moved out.
The previous tenant was 32-year- old Nicholas Randolph Stofer.
An examination of Englewood’s case files paints a portrait of Stofer as a young man with a lot of problems.
Born Nicholas Randolph Schultz, he’d gotten a new name after his mother remarried and his stepfather adopted him. He grew up in the Littleton area, and by age 15, he was drinking and using drugs and engaging in sex with a male classmate. He later served in the U.S. Navy but was bounced out on an “other than honorable” discharge and drifted, married and divorced twice, found jobs and lost them, and used massive amounts of drugs and alcohol.
On June 2, 1993, 15 days after Alie vanished, investigators had their first contact with Stofer. In a telephone interview, Stofer claimed that around the time of Alie’s disappearance, he’d been talking with two other tenants in the complex. He said that while they were chatting, he saw Alie’s mother looking for her in the courtyard. And he said he then headed out to a pay phone in front of the complex to make calls.
But those other tenants told a different story — that when they’d left for a bingo game, Alie was still in the courtyard. Phone records showed Stofer hadn’t made any calls.
As Garrett went over everything, she saw one curiosity after another linking Stofer to Alie’s disappearance and death.
Alie was barefoot when she was found, and seven people described Stofer as having a “foot fetish” — two of them said he’d talked of being sexually attracted to small, female feet. . . . Stofer bought an Amtrak ticket to California the day Alie disappeared, then moved up his departure and was on the train when her body was found. . . . Stofer was inside his apartment as officers searched for Alie but never answered his door. . . . Stofer borrowed a Buick two days after Alie vanished, claiming he needed to go to Hudson to get his last paycheck from a railroad job but had, in fact, been fired and paid two months earlier. . . . A friend who’d helped him move into the Golden Nugget Apartments saw a green canvas bag exactly like the one used to conceal Alie’s body. . . . Alie’s brother, Sam, in multiple conversations with a psychologist, said he’d seen “the old man” take her. . . . On two separate occasions, Sam took investigators to apartment 106A after being asked where the “old man” lived.
And Garrett saw more compelling evidence, courtesy of the two dogs.
In August 1993, Yogi and Becky, in separate exercises at different locations, were given a gauze pad to sniff that had been wiped around inside the green canvas bag. And each dog then picked out Stofer’s Subaru, and later the borrowed Buick, from among a series of vehicles parked together.
And then, in April 1994, there was more. Investigators obtained a court order requiring Stofer to appear in a lineup. He and four others — three police officers and a firefighter — stood next to designated cones in a lot at a training center used by law enforcement officers from Arapahoe and Douglas counties. More than a half-mile away, a handler let Becky sniff the gauze pad.
The dog then zig-zagged her way more than 1,000 yards until the five men were in sight. Becky sniffed her way right up to Stofer, stopped in front of him and nudged his right hand.
A little later, Yogi was given the same gauze pad. He, too, worked his way to the men, jumping on Stofer when he reached him.
Later that year, investigators took the case to prosecutors in the office of then-Arapahoe County District Attorney Bob Gallagher. The prosecutors decided the case wasn’t strong enough.
Garrett saw some of the things that may have given them pause, things that could have been exploited by a defense attorney. That Sam had initially said the man who took Alie was black. That both Yogi and Becky had shown keen interest in the same apartment a block from the Berrelez home — an apartment with no ties to Alie or Stofer. That while the carpet fibers found on Alie’s clothing matched the green shag in Stofer’s apartment, they also matched the floor covering in seven other units in the building. That doctors never determined with certainty how Alie died — perhaps, they theorized, it was a result of a severe asthma attack. And, of course, that dogs can’t talk.
Still, Garrett believed the evidence pointing to Stofer far outweighed that which threw his guilt into question, and so as she thought about her next step, she believed DNA testing — much more advanced than what existed at the time Alie was killed — was her best bet.
On Feb. 8, she filled out the paperwork to send several items to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation: The green canvas bag in which Alie’s body had been found, and her shoes, underwear, jumper, shirt, headband and hair tie.
It was Garrett’s best hope, and yet she knew it might yield nothing.
“You always submit things hoping they’re going to come back with something,” she said. “But they often don’t.”
Months passed. Garrett worked other cases.
Closing the case
Tuesday, Aug. 31. The phone on Garrett’s desk rang.
“Investigations, Garrett,” she answered.
On the other end of the line was Gentry Roth, a CBI forensic scientist.
The call started with small talk. Roth told her about his memories of the case — especially Yogi, the bloodhound. He asked her a few questions about Stofer — how it was he came to be a suspect, whether he was a family friend, whether he would have been around her.
“So,” Roth finally asked, “wanna know what I did?”
“What?” Garrett asked excitedly.
Garrett’s mind raced. Submitting the evidence again had been a risk — testing can, in effect, destroy the chance to test again in the future when technology may be even more advanced.
But Roth told her how he’d run moistened cotton swabs over Alie’s clothing, then tested them. And how that testing had yielded two DNA hits — both from Alie’s underpants.
One was a partial genetic profile, and Stofer could not be eliminated as the source of it. Because the profile was not complete, Roth could not say with a “reasonable degree of scientific certainty” that it came from Stofer. But what Roth could say was that the odds of it coming from someone else were, at a minimum, greater than one in 100 million. At the same time, he found a second partial profile, this one known as a Y-STR. It is a DNA profile that is male-specific and is passed from fathers to sons. And it, too, matched Stofer.
Because the samples were so small, Roth could not tell her what had left the DNA. It could have been anything — drops of sweat, or saliva, or a few skin cells.
No matter. Garrett had DNA consistent with Stofer’s on the underpants Alie was wearing when her body was found. And with that, she had the final clue she needed to close the books on a case that frustrated her and many other investigators and left Alie’s family in limbo for more than 18 years.
About 20 feet and an open area separate Garrett’s desk from the office of Englewood Police Chief John Collins, who as a young detective had worked some on the Berrelez case in the early years. Collins could tell Garrett was on the phone with someone, and then he heard her yelling.
“Stop what you’re doing,” she yelled to Collins. “You better sit down. . . . This is kind of big.”
A moment later, Garrett burst into his office.
“We have a DNA hit,” she said excitedly.
“On who?” Collins asked.
“Alie’s case,” Garrett said.
“Stofer?”
“Yep.”
Kevin Vaughan: 303-954-5019 or kvaughan@denverpost.com