Audio By Carbonatix
It was twilight when Jack Ducey’s family arrived at his dark hulk of a house in north Denver. They’d come when their phone calls went unanswered and they spotted the newspapers collecting on his stoop. There was no sign of life. To the contrary, one of Jack’s dogs was lying dead in the yard. And an overpowering odor was coming at them from an open window. When they discovered the front door was unlocked, they shouted into the house and called his name, still hoping Jack would answer. But the only sound they heard that November night in 1987 was the rustling of dry leaves blowing across the sidewalk and the unkempt yard.
The family members didn’t go in. They were afraid to. Jack had had a run-in with the cops a few months earlier and, says a cousin, “You’d never know if he’d be sitting in there, half-crocked, with a gun in his hand.” They phoned police from a neighbor’s house.
Denver officers found Jack on the living room floor next to the sofa and the telephone, which was off the hook. He’d been there a few days–ever since Halloween, police would later surmise. Detectives weren’t sure at first how he died. It was the coroner who found the bullet holes in his body.
Some of Jack’s family had expected him to come to an end like this. The 35-year-old had dangerous friends and odd ways. He’d turned the upper part of his house into a makeshift barn for his dozens of animals, including geese and chickens. He lived like a recluse in the squalor of a labyrinthine home that had once been an apartment house, shutting himself away from the prying eyes he thought were always watching. He had bars placed over every one of the home’s 32 windows. Before he died, he’d become convinced that the CIA was tailing him and that people were listening in on his conversations.
Jack Ducey didn’t have to live that way. The son of a Denver police detective who’d made a killing in the stock market, he was worth more than half a million dollars, almost all of it in cash and CDs. But he didn’t seem to know what to do with his money or how to enjoy it. He drove old cars. He didn’t travel. What money he did spend went toward such things as fireworks, pigeons, beer for his friends and bizarre adornments for his already cluttered rooms: a giant totem pole and an eight-foot-tall stuffed brown bear were squeezed in among piles of junk and rambling letters to radio talk-show hosts.
The only pleasure Jack seemed to get from his wealth was bragging about it, a cousin says. “And that was probably his demise.” Jack told his family that he kept a lot of cash in the house. Neighbors told police they’d heard Jack kept as much as $40,000 just lying around. If that was true, it was gone by the time the police and Jack’s family combed the place.
In the seven years since Jack’s death, Denver police detectives have tracked down dozens of leads. Even so, the investigation remains open, the case unsolved. But there is one thing investigators seem sure of: For all Jack’s paranoia about strangers, it probably was one of his friends who killed him.
Calvin Hemphill has been a Denver cop for almost twenty years, a homicide detective for the past eight. He is beginning to tire of the toll. The job is different than it used to be, he says. “When I first came in here, in almost every murder, the killer knew his victim,” says Hemphill. “That’s not necessarily true anymore. Gangs. Drive-bys.” Stranger-to-stranger killings are on the rise, and the job is getting more difficult all the time.
Jack Ducey’s murder, though, was probably not random. And Hemphill still thinks he can crack the case if he can only get the right break.
Hemphill balances a thick notebook on his knees. It is Ducey’s case file, filled with crime-scene photographs, mug shots and interview notes. The detective pages through it to refresh his memory, but in truth, he’s forgotten little about the case. There is a certain kinship that develops between homicide detectives and the victims whose murders they are investigating–the result of poring over the intimate details of someone’s life and death. When Hemphill refers to this victim, he calls him Jack.
Taped to one page of the notebook is a photograph of a dour-faced man in an old Denver Police Department uniform. It is an official department photo of Jack’s father, Elmer Ducey, who was a detective until his retirement in 1962. Personnel records are difficult to trace that far back, but employees believe that Elmer Ducey signed on with the department in 1928.
Elmer Ducey’s relatives recall that he worked in plainclothes at the end of his career–something to do with administration. But Denver attorney Fred Vondy (who served as the Duceys’ probate attorney) thinks Ducey once worked in Five Points, where he was known on the streets as Acey Ducey. “Named for the gambling game,” Vondy says.
Elmer Ducey was something of a gambler–but in the world of stocks and bonds. “He may have been rather brilliant in his investments,” Vondy says. For instance, the policeman bought up early stock in Walgreen’s and the old A&P supermarkets. Hemphill believes the elder Ducey might even have hit the jackpot with shares in a Canadian gold mine. And Elmer dabbled in real estate as well, primarily in the northwest Denver neighborhood where he lived–frugally–with his wife, Helen.
“They were very, very conservative people,” Vondy says. “They saved their money.” And when Elmer Ducey left the police department, he chose to keep working, serving for years as a Pinkerton guard.
The Duceys were childless through most of their marriage. At one point, they believed they couldn’t have children. “Jackie was a late child,” remembers a cousin. “I remember when he was born. It was Christmas. I think he was a spoiled child,” the cousin continues. “He always got everything he wanted.”
Another relative agrees with that assessment. “As kids,” he says, “we loved going over there [to the Duceys’] to play because he had so many toys.” But even as a kid, he notes, Jack was high-strung. “When he was young, he had a nervous disorder.” When Jack got upset, “he would stiffen his legs and wave his hands.”
(Both relatives asked that their names not be used. The fact that Jack’s killer has not been caught, they say, makes them leery of publicity.)
The Duceys moved around from one northwest Denver home to another, but by the time Jack was in high school they’d settled into an old apartment building at 2811 West 37th Avenue, just a couple of blocks east of Federal Boulevard. The Duceys continued to rent out the upstairs units but converted the bottom floor for their own living quarters.
The house was an odd assortment of small rooms, a friend remembers, and though the Duceys had torn down the walls separating the bottom-floor units, they chose to leave the three kitchens intact. At the time of Jack’s death, there were still three kitchens on the first floor, a relative says.
Cops’ kids are sometimes known to rebel against their straitlaced parents, and Jack was no different. He ran with a wild crowd at North High School in the late Sixties, and he later told a friend that he and his buddies did a lot of drugs back then–mescaline, LSD, you name it. One of his friends later turned to God. Several others turned to heroin. One of his closest friends was Ronnie Walker, who went to Canon City on a drug charge and was stabbed to death in prison.
Jack told neighbor Sharon Fowler, however, that he’d never shot up heroin and never would. “I’m not that stupid,” he’d say. But even in his later years, says Fowler, Jack would sometimes smoke a little pot or hash. His favorite escape, though, was beer. He always had some around. After his murder, police found several cases of beer and a near-empty keg in the house.
Jack went to work for the Union Pacific Railroad in the early Seventies. A brakeman, he would be on the road for days. He was on call sometimes 24 hours a day. It was a lifestyle that didn’t suit a lot of people, but Jack seemed to like it well enough. And though he was now an adult, he continued to live in his parents’ house, moving upstairs to one of the apartments.
The Duceys became reclusive in their later years, says one of Jack’s cousins: “And as they got older, they got stranger.” Elmer Ducey “kept everything he ever got his hands on,” says another cousin. “He did not throw anything away. He’d pick something off the street and take it to the house and throw it in the corner or put it in a can.” Elmer also became “real quiet,” a loner. “At family gatherings,” says the cousin, “we’d all eat around the table, and [Elmer] would take his plate and go in another room.”
When Elmer Ducey died in 1980, he left all his money to his widow. Helen continued to live much as she always had, pinching pennies and keeping pretty much to herself. Helen Ducey was close to her sisters–there were five girls in the family–and having dinner with them and visiting with them were among her few remaining social activities.
When Helen Ducey died, six years after her husband, she bequeathed everything to her only son, Jack. It was a small fortune, but it seemed to do little to ease the pain Jack felt at his mother’s passing. What seemed to matter most to him was that he was alone. He took to visiting Sharon Fowler, a neighbor who’d moved with her family into the house behind Jack’s in 1986, not long after Helen Ducey died. Jack would sometimes talk about his parents.
“He said he missed his mom,” Fowler recalls. “And he showed me pictures of his dad.”
Things seemed to turn sour for Jack after his mother died. Fowler believes that may be because Helen kept a tight rein on her son and kept him out of trouble. One of Jack’s aunts promised Helen before she died that she’d watch over Jack. She kept her promise, phoning Jack regularly and inviting him over for supper. Where he once confided in his mother, he began confiding in his aunt. “He would talk to her about being scared,” a cousin says.
Jack didn’t get along with many of his neighbors. He used to scream at them, says a friend. “They’d argue and threaten each other.” But he accepted Fowler because of her family ties: Her big brother was Ronnie Walker, Jack’s high school friend who was killed in prison. If it wasn’t for that connection, Fowler says, neither of them probably would have put up with the other.
“He always came over and talked about my brother,” Fowler says of Jack. “He’d tell me memories of him. I liked that. I didn’t want to lose that. He always treated me better than anyone else in the neighborhood, even though we had our own scuffles.”
In fact, the Fowlers managed to anger Jack almost from the time they moved in. “Jack got really mad when we put up a privacy fence,” Fowler says, “because the fence made it so he couldn’t drive his car back behind the house anymore. The first thing he did was offer us $100,000 for our house. We should have taken it,” she adds, laughing.
The second thing Jack did was put up a backyard fence of his own. Till then he’d had a little picket fence with personality–brown and blue with silver dots on it, if Fowler’s memory serves. But for spite, “and to make a point,” Fowler says, Jack went out and bought four-foot-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood and nailed them to his little fence, with the tall side up. The Fowlers thought the whole thing was pretty funny, but other neighbors–and the city zoning department–were not amused. “He was getting summonses and cease-and-desist orders,” Fowler says. “He finally had it taken down.”
But Ducey replaced the wooden barriers with something even more odd. He had the yard encircled with a tall, cast-iron fence without a gate. The only way to get into the backyard was by going through the house.
Jack could also be very thoughtful, as when the Fowlers’ Doberman pinscher was stolen. Jack came over the next day with a beautiful red Chow Chow puppy as a gift for Fowler’s son.
That same dog later caused another rift in the relationship between Jack and the Fowlers. Jack had decided to keep some chickens and roosters, Fowler says, and he erected a chicken-wire cage right up against the Fowlers’ fence–much to the frustration of the Chow. One day a rooster made the mistake of sticking his head through a hole in the fence; the dog quickly bit it off.
Jack was furious and threw the headless chicken into the Fowlers’ yard, says Sharon. But the Fowlers didn’t particularly want it, either, and threw it back. Soon tossing the rooster’s body became a ritual. “He kept throwing it in my yard, and I’d throw it back. I told him, `Get this bird out of here!’ Finally, I called animal control. He promised, he swore to them that he’d bury it. So they didn’t take it.”
But Jack had no intention of burying the headless rooster. After the animal control officers left, he hung the bird upside down on the clothesline and left it there. “It hung there for months and months,” Fowler says.
Jack had always been fond of animals. He’d raised pigeons when he was in high school, and he decided to do so again after the Fowlers moved in. He also collected cats and dogs and geese and rabbits and goats. He’d had to get rid of the goats when the zoning department went after him, but he managed to keep the rest of the creatures, perhaps because he kept them in the house, away from the view of city inspectors. He turned one of his upstairs apartments into a kind of petting zoo, where the animals could roam free. He put hay in the rooms on the north side, Fowler says, so the chickens would have a place to nest.
By then Jack was no longer working regularly, and the Union Pacific was laying people off. A fellow employee says that some workers, Jack among them, were out of work for as long as six years. So when the railroad offered employees a buyout, some were more than willing to take it. According to his co-worker, Jack chose to take advantage of the offer and retired sometime in 1987.
Despite Jack’s loud arguments with his neighbors and his reputation for throwing back plenty of beer, he had managed to stay out of trouble and out of jail. That changed the March before he died.
On the night of March 12, 1987, a woman phoned Denver police to report that Jack was pounding on her door with a big stick. Officers Arla Buckley and Avis Filby were dispatched to check out the disturbance. A few minutes later someone called to report that the man had retreated to his house and was now shooting out streetlights from his window. According to the officers’ reports, Jack met them at the door with a gun. He fired a round. “I could hear the hammer drop,” Filby wrote in her report. But the gun misfired. Jack was handcuffed and taken to jail.
On the way downtown, Jack told the officers that his neighbors had a radio station and that they’d been using it to bombard his house and send threatening messages through his radio “for the past seven days, 24 hours a day.” He said, too, that his house was bugged. He had been banging on the door, he said, to get the neighbors to shut off the power. In a written statement, Jack later claimed that some of his neighbors were involved in cults and that they stole his mail and mutilated his pigeons.
That July, Jack got into trouble again over a neighborhood beef. He’d apparently had a long-running feud with a man across the street. The man owned a satellite dish, and Jack believed his neighbor was using it to spy on him. The two men clashed in an incident no longer on file with the court, but police records show that Jack received several court summonses following the argument. His neighbor was arrested for flourishing a weapon.
Jack’s temper and reclusiveness kept most people at bay, but in the months before his death, neighbors noticed two men frequenting Jack’s house. The men, described to police as “dark Spanish guys” by a neighbor, would stop by often to play pool and help Jack put away beer.
Pat Seder was one of the last people to speak with Jack Ducey. Seder owned a restaurant and bar called Senor Peabody’s, and Jack had begun investing in it in the months before his death. Vondy believes Jack may have poured tens of thousands into the restaurant; relatives remember him complaining about the financial drain. So they knew something of Seder. But when she described herself to police in an interview after the murder as Jack’s girlfriend, it came as something of a shock to people who knew him well.
Seder told police she had phoned Jack on the morning of Halloween. He told her that he was going to have a party–which, to everyone’s best recollection, would have been his first ever. Seder told police she could hear voices in the background during the phone call and that she thought Jack had company. But she said the voices could have been the sound of the television or radio.
Halloween fell on a Saturday that year. Jack was expected for Sunday dinner the following day at his aunt’s house. He didn’t come and he didn’t phone. Nor did he answer when his aunt called his house.
“She was always concerned about Jackie, because she told her sister that she would take care of him,” a cousin says. “So she and a neighbor drove by there. She noticed the newspapers. She called me up and asked me if I would go over there with her.” It was November 4, and Jack hadn’t been seen or heard from since Halloween.
When the police arrived, says Jack’s cousin, they weren’t eager to go inside. They knew that Jack had fired his gun at an officer months before, and they didn’t want a repeat incident. “The police went in with me, and they wanted me to call his name in case he was sitting there with a gun,” his cousin says. “They were leery about going in, and I understand it.” The officers split into two groups. The cousin was in another room when Jack’s body was discovered. “I never did see him,” he says. “I didn’t want to remember him like that.”
It was not a sight someone would be likely to forget. The body was decomposing; maggots and rodents had been at it. Jack’s blood and body fluids had soaked into the carpet, leaving behind a ghoulish outline when the body was taken away to the morgue.
“At first viewing,” says Calvin Hemphill, “it could very easily have been that he had a heart attack and had fallen on the floor. He was laying in a very natural position.” Hemphill did note some bullet casings by the front door, but he figured they could have been left over from the time Jack fired his gun at officers. When the body was removed, Hemphill sealed the house, anyway. Just in case. His caution was warranted. The coroner found the bullet holes in Jack’s body the next day, and Hemphill and other detectives went back to Jack’s house to comb it for clues.
Detectives are trained to look for anything unusual–furniture out of place, signs of a struggle, a dust-free imprint denoting the absence of a television or stereo. In this case, their task was more difficult. Jack’s housekeeping methods were such that police couldn’t tell if the house had been ransacked. Their search turned up shell casings and a toy gun in a holster in a back room. And it seemed clear that robbery was the motive for the murder. Jack’s wallet was missing. Police found some empty coin cases lying around.
And though Jack had talked about keeping large sums of cash around the house, none was found.
A few weeks before his death, Jack had told relatives that he feared for his life. “He always talked way out,” a cousin says. “He said somebody was after him. I could never piece it together. He wanted to show me where his important papers were.” Jack had said he kept money in an old wardrobe on the first floor. After his death, his relatives went looking for it.
The cabinet was still locked when his family searched the house. They couldn’t find the keys, so they removed the door from its hinges. They found only clothes. One cousin now believes that Jack removed money from the cabinet for his killer. “He may have went to the cabinet, opened it up and got the cash out, locked it back up and boom!” he says. “That’s something I always thought about.” The family’s belief that a great deal of money was missing from the house was bolstered by the fact that shortly before his death, Jack had withdrawn more than $40,000 from one of his bank accounts. That money was never accounted for.
After searching the house, Hemphill and another detective began scouring the neighborhood for potential witnesses, someone–anyone–who might have seen or heard something. They learned plenty about Jack’s eccentricities–one neighbor said Jack would kill pigeons and impale their heads on the fence rail. And they found even more reason to believe that Jack was killed by someone he knew. The detectives were told that Jack never opened his doors to strangers and that he always locked his doors, even when he stepped onto the front lawn for a few minutes.
Hemphill got an unexpected break in the case one day while he was placing some additional evidence in the Ducey case into a locker at the police building. He’d forgotten to bring along the property bureau number and told the clerk to just put the stuff in the locker with Jack Ducey’s name on it. The clerk pulled up the name on the computer and informed Hemphill that there were two lockers with Ducey’s name on them. Hemphill was taken aback and asked to see the other evidence. He discovered that a motorcycle officer had turned in Jack’s wallet. Hemphill questioned the officer, who told him that when he was working the streets one day in December, a man came up to him, handed him the wallet and said he’d found it. Jack’s credit cards and driver’s license were still inside the wallet, but there was no cash.
It seemed a long shot, but Hemphill put out a Crime Stoppers ad appealing to whoever found the wallet to come forward. It worked. A man called and told Hemphill that he collected aluminum cans and that he’d found the wallet in a trash can behind a house in southwest Denver, miles from the scene of Ducey’s murder. He steered officers to that address. That’s where they found Matias Garcia.
When Hemphill told Garcia they wanted to speak with him about Jack Ducey, he was forthcoming. “Oh, I know Jack,” he told them. “He’s a good friend of mine.” That revelation was enough to earn Garcia a trip downtown for questioning.
Garcia was one of Jack’s old buddies from North High School. And like old classmate Ronnie Walker, Garcia had become involved with heroin. Garcia’s arrest record goes back to at least 1976, when he was popped for “use of dangerous drugs.” Nine other arrests–all but one of which involved the sale, use or possession of narcotics (heroin was specified in one arrest)–round out his record. When examining his arrest file, detectives discovered that during a 1986 arrest in Lakewood, a gun had been found under a seat in Garcia’s car. That piqued their interest.
Lakewood police also told Hemphill that Garcia had a running mate by the name of Kendall Gomez, a fellow heroin user with a record of pulling armed robberies. By this time, however, Gomez was in jail. He’d violated his probation in November 1987 by refusing to submit to a urinalysis.
Hemphill traveled to Canon City to visit Gomez and to toss out some accusations. Gomez told Hemphill that he’d known Jack since the fifth grade and that the victim was “a good guy.” The detectives were not impressed. “I think you went to his house and wanted money and things went wrong,” they told him. Gomez denied any involvement. He still does.
Gomez, who is now out of prison and living “a Christian life” in northern Colorado, says he “really didn’t go around much with” Matias Garcia and that it “didn’t bother him” when police questioned him about the murder. “They said they talked to a lot of people,” he says.
Since detectives didn’t get far with Gomez, they concentrated again on Garcia. They asked him to submit samples of his hair, which he did. They checked his fingerprints against those found on the wallet and at the crime scene. Nothing matched. Garcia says he took and passed a polygraph test, a statement confirmed by his attorney, Art Nieto.
But even though it appeared that Garcia might not have committed the murder, detectives seemed convinced that he knew more than he was letting on. Garcia did little to dissuade them of that notion. “We had considered a deal,” Nieto confirms. “In exchange for Matias coming forward with whatever information he had, [prosecutors] would charge him with a lesser crime than murder. I think it might have been a robbery charge we were considering.”
Prosecutors agreed to immunity for Garcia on the murder charge if he didn’t lie to them and if he had nothing to do with the homicide. But the deal broke down, Nieto says, because prosecutors wouldn’t promise to keep Garcia out of prison on the robbery charge.
“You don’t want to be in prison with a snitch jacket,” Nieto says. “That’s real harmful to your health. It could get you killed.”
Garcia today maintains that he has no inside knowledge of Jack Ducey’s murder. “I really don’t know anything about it,” he says. “I don’t know why anybody would do that to him. He was a real good guy, a good friend.” And though he says that police detectives accused him during interrogations of committing the crime, “they accused everybody. I would never do anything like that.”
Garcia says he remains mystified about how Jack’s wallet came to be found behind his house.
The case of Jack Ducey’s murder has remained open but relatively dormant since a year or so after his death. His considerable estate was split between dozens of relatives: aunts, uncles, cousins and second cousins. A distant relative bought his old house and converted it back into apartments. His animals were taken to the shelter. Someone took down part of his fence to make a gate.
There is little left to show that he lived and died in the house on 37th Avenue. But Sharon Fowler wonders sometimes if Jack’s spirit still dwells in the old place. “His aura was so strong,” she muses. “I would know when he would be sitting there, watching us. I knew, most of the time, if he was around or not. I knew he was watching.
