"I think I began to realize that there was value in me when people started coming out of the woodwork to help me, to be in my life," she says now. "It sounds strange, but prison has been like a sanctuary for me. I've learned how to express myself, to make choices that matter — and even to be happy. To be able to believe that life is still beautiful, beyond this experience, is a blessing."
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Randy Miller
Robert "Pops" McCalmant, Miller's tormentor, was convicted of a hundred counts of sexual assaults on children and sentenced to 1,338 years.
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Despite the name, it's unlikely that any royalty has ever stayed at the Kings Inn, one of a dwindling procession of inexpensive motels along East Colfax. Half a century ago, the motels were often the first stop of new arrivals in town. But in recent years they've adapted to a different clientele, including people in desperate need of temporary housing — people battling a downward spiral of poverty, addiction, family crises...or all three.
Diana Lombardi brought her three children — Tara Perry, her older sister Teresa and a younger brother — to the Kings Inn in the mid-1990s. In some ways, it was a step up for the family, which had spent months at a time in homeless shelters and many nights sleeping in a car.
Tara and Teresa have almost no memories of their father, a man Lombardi met at a party when she was twenty. Lombardi had a good job when they started dating, but not for long. They were both heavy drinkers, and her new partner was a mean drunk and frequently in trouble with the law. "He was beating me up so bad I couldn't go to work," she recalls.
After their father left, the girls enjoyed brief periods of stability. At one point they lived in a trailer in Palmer Lake with the man who fathered Lombardi's son. But Lombardi was often broke, unemployed, and barely scraping by. The Kings Inn was supposed to be a fresh start. They ended up staying for years, after Lombardi got a job managing the motel, which included free rent.
Tara loved going to school; it felt safe there and offered a degree of structure and routine she never found at home. Her friendships were distant, though. She was ashamed to bring classmates to the motel, afraid they might tell others about her poverty and her alcoholic mother. "It felt like I was living a double life," she says. "I had one life at school and another at the motel."
Life at home was frequently chaotic, with running drunken arguments between Lombardi and her boyfriends. As they grew older, Tara and her sister increasingly spent time away from the place, even if that meant wandering parks late at night. "We tried not to get home as much as possible," says Teresa Perry. "We found our own outlets."
One of Tara's outlets was visiting Robert Lee McCalmant, better known as Pops. A quiet man in his sixties, McCalmant lived on the fourth floor of the Kings Inn, in a two-bedroom suite that was furnished like a regular apartment. He ran a coffee shop at the Dunes Motel and always seemed to have a buck or two to slip to the needy kids who hung around his front door. He collected guns and antiques and seemed to know everybody in the neighborhood. Tara couldn't figure out why he stayed in a place like the Kings Inn and rode the bus when he clearly could afford better, but it wasn't a mystery she could solve. She was just glad to have a place to hang, where nobody asked questions.
It was through hanging around McCalmant's place that she first met Randy Miller. She was thirteen. He was twenty and a denizen of Colfax. He already had a long history of drug and assault arrests and had done time in the juvenile system, but to Perry he seemed charming and gentle, almost feminine. "Girls followed him everywhere," she says. "He paid me compliments and made me feel special."
With Miller, she didn't have to pretend to be someone else. He knew about the turmoil in her home and seemed to genuinely care. But a romantic relationship between the two didn't develop until after Miller went into the Colorado Department of Corrections in 1997 on a two-year jolt for drug charges. He wrote her a lonely letter. She wrote back. By the fall of 1998 she was writing him every day — and counting the weeks until he'd be back in town.
She celebrated her sixteenth birthday that December. No one at school suspected that she was "super-involved" with a convict pen pal. Retired Aurora Central teacher Michaud remembers Perry as "almost a shadow" in her English class — a quiet, eager-to-please waif.
"There were kids at Central who specialized in trouble, who liked the idea of the danger and the drugs," she says. "That was never her thing. It was clear that Tara was a lost soul. You could see she wasn't being taken care of, but she came to class all the time. Then all of a sudden she wasn't coming, and nobody seemed to know why."
