Name: Jakeob McKnight
Hometown: Lakewood
Agency: Lakewood Police Department
Date murdered: July 21, 1991
Where body found: Bear Creek greenbelt area
Cause of death: Multiple stab wounds
Suspect: John Ramsey “Felix” Chinn

Ten-year-old Jakeob McKnight had been swimming with his older brother, Joshaua, and friends at a park near his home.

The others had bikes and rode home on the evening of July 21, 1991. Jakeob was walking home, but he never made it. The next day, his body was found with more than a dozen stab wounds not far from his house.

Victim’s name: Frank Hoebich, 37
Where body found:Mojave desert
Investigative agency: Lakewood police
Date killed: Between Jan. 1, 2000 to Jan. 9, 2000
Cause of DeathMultiple gunshots
Suspects: James “Tex” Stansberry and Grant Rankin Anderson

Frank Hoebich had his own advertising business when Grant Rankin Anderson convinced him his battery-operated cigarette lighter called LectraLite would make them both rich.

Businessman Frank Hoebich, 37, courtesy Lakewood Police Department

Hoebich, 37, moved from Edison, New Jersey to Lakewood, Co. in March of 1999 to take over marketing and advertising for the new business.

“He put everything he had into this,” said Alex Jameson, a Lakewood cold case detective investigating the case.

Anderson, who stands 6-feet-4, weighs 240 pounds and exudes confidence, won business tax concessions in Nebraska to convert an old building into a LectraLite factory.

Hoebich, his family members, and numerous other people invested $1.3 million in Lectralite. The fast-talking Anderson applied for and obtained overlapping loans from different banks for the same inventory.

Victim’s name: Dolores House, 36
Investigative agency: Lakewood Police Department
Date missing: Aug. 16, 1972
Suspect: None identified

Dolores House had been having trouble keeping her 1967 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser going.

Dolores House, courtesy Lakewood Police Department

It would overheat and leave her stranded in different parts of the Denver metropolitan area.

Sometimes if she just waited, the engine would cool down enough for her to make it back home if she wasn’t too far, according to Michelle Stone-Principato, Lakewood cold case detective.

House worked as an elevator operator in a Denver high rise and would commute back and forth from Denver. But that was only a part-time job.

Thuy Bich Nguyen had run away from home to be with Lanh Van Le before she graduated from a Lakewood high school, a decision that upset her family.

Lakewood Police Department

Thuy Nguyen, 21

Thuy had defied her parents’ wish to stay away from Le in violation of Vietnamese customs and failed to graduate from high school.

But ultimately the deaths of the young couple and a friend Duong Huang Do, 32, at an apartment at 7000 W. Nevada St. on Nov. 11, 1995 may have stemmed from unrequieted love, according to Lakewood police.

Lakewood police said that they ruled out the possibility that the murders were tied to drug or gang involvement.

The bodies of Nguyen, 21, Le, 20, and Do were discovered in Do’s apartment that Saturday morning. Each of the bodies were found in different rooms. They were all shot to death. All three victims were Vietnamese immigrants.

Alex Jameson retired from the Lakewood Police Department in the early 2000s after many years of hunting down killers.

In the first few years of retirement he loved traveling with his wife to places like Bermuda, but he also missed being a detective.

He was so good at what he did that when Lakewood police officials organized a cold case unit they asked him if he’d be interested in coming back on a part-time basis to try and solve some of the cases.

That was in 2008.

Since then Jameson and fellow cold case investigator Michelle Stone-Principato, who has since been promoted to sergeant, tracked down dusty files of unsolved homicide cases and began interviewing witnesses from crimes going back decades.

They tracked down evidence and organized misplaced reports scattered in various files in storage and in old filing cabinets. They created large “murder books” that organized investigative files in chronological order. They reviewed which cases had a good chance of being solved with advances in technology.

The investigative partners sent clothing to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, hoping that they would get hits that could identify suspects. Their efforts have led to some discoveries.

In September of 2010, Jameson, Stone-Principato and several Aurora detectives announced a connection to two 1984 cold cases that authorities had long believed were connected.

The same killer who used a hammer to kill Patricia Louise Smith, 50, in Lakewood on Jan. 10, 1984, had used a different hammer to kill Bruce and Debra Bennett and their 7-year-old daughter, Melissa, six days later in Aurora.

DNA tied the two cases together. The information was fed into the FBI’s national DNA database searching for the killer. No hits have yet been made.

Shortly after graduating from Green Mountain High School in Lakewood Peter Glaser was to have started automotive college.

Peter Glaser, 18

“Cars were his life,” his mother Christa told a reporter. “He knew so much.”

But 30 years ago, Peter Glaser was shot in an apparent robbery and never had a chance to go to the school.

His case wasn’t considered a homicide though until he died in 2003, 21 years after he was shot.

The reason it was reclassified was that the shot in 1982 led directly to Glaser’s death.

He had been in a vegetative state most of his life.

On the night of Sept. 17, 1982, Glaser, 18, was working at Phillips and Andersons Lakewood Tire and Wheel, 6321 W. Alameda Ave.

That Friday morning, a 13-year-old girl ran to the window of her home.

Sandra JoAnn Rushing, 18
Courtesy Lakewood Police Department

There was an unusual disturbance in the quiet Lakewood neighborhood where she lived near West Kentucky Drive and South Simms Street.

Someone had just slammed the gearshift on a blue 1970 AMC Rebel into reverse and floored the accelerator. The young teen-ager had heard tire wheels screeching.

The car careened backward and struck the curb on the south side of Kentucky. The driver overcorrected and – still going backward – the car struck the north curb of the street.

The car had gone nearly the entire block backward, zig-zagging all the way, almost to Simms.

Then the 13-year-old girl heard a loud blast from a large caliber hand gun. A bullet had pierced the blue car’s front windshield.

When the girl looked out the window of her home on West Kentucky Drive she saw a car spinning wildly in circles.

The car did three circles before it plowed over the south curb again and smashed into a stop sign.

The girl saw a man walking down the street after the shot was fired.

Two young girls walking on Briarwood Street saw another blue car with a man and a small boy stop near the crashed car. The man then sped away.

A motorcyclist, David Williams of Lakewood, stopped by the car and opened the door to look inside. A tiny black poodle leaped out of the car and ran away.

Williams saw a young woman slumped over in the passenger seat. Williams opened the door and entered the car. He pressed his palm against the woman’s neck, trying to stop bleeding from a bullet hole.

The human remains were found under a trailer in a park at 8150 W. Colfax Ave. in Lakewood on Aug. 18, 1977 behind the Top Notch Motel.

Pamela Jean Bluemel, 15

The body was too decomposed to immediately tell who she was.

Lakewood detectives searched through stacks of missing persons reports.

The girls had run away from home, disappeared while hitchhiking or possibly had been kidnapped.

Detectives were only able to narrow the search to 20 girls whose descriptions generally matched that of the body.

Staff at the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office compared dental records of missing girls. Detectives were also able to make fingerprints from the body.

The coroner, however, was not able to determine the cause of death.

The body had deteriorated too much.

But because of the circumstances, the girl’s death was considered a homicide.

Nearly two weeks passed before the identity of the murder victim was announced: Pamela Jean Bluemel.

Her dental records had helped in making the identification. It was confirmed with fingerprints.

It had been more than 16 years since the girl was born in July of 1961, but it was unclear whether she had ever made it to that milestone.

Pamela had last been seen at a double wedding reception in which two brothers married two sisters in Lakewood in December of 1976.

When her daughter was divorced in 1983, 50-year-old Patricia Louise Smith moved with her daughter and two young grandchildren to a Green Mountain townhome. She wanted to help them adjust from their rural existence in Oshkosh, Neb. to the more fast-paced lifestyle in a big metropolitan area.

Patricia Smith, 50

It wasn’t an unusual gesture by the self-sacrificing Smith. Her daughter Chery (Sherry) Lettin, then 29, considered her mother her best friend. The cheerful, loving woman was adored by her 6-year-old granddaughter Amber Reese and her 4-year-old grandson Joe Reese. The woman, who never spoke a harsh word, brightened all of their lives at a very traumatic time.

She wasn’t just staying for a short time, either. Smith left her farm semi-permanently while her husband, Oliver Henry Smith, kept his Nebraska government job. Smith started her own home interior design business. Her husband would often visit on weekends.

Smith, her daughter, and two grandchildren rented a townhome at 12610 W. Bayaud Ave. in Lakewood. After 3 1/2 months they had established a routine. Smith and Lettin would drive Amber to school for Kindergarten and Joe to a church day-care center.

Smith would then drive her daughter to a bus station on 6th Avenue and then drive to work. In the evening the process was reversed. Smith was very punctual and dependable. She always was waiting for her daughter at the bus station.

But on the evening of Jan. 10, 1984, she wasn’t there. That was very odd. Chery waited and waited. She called her mother’s home phone repeatedly but no one answered.

It got dark and cold. Finally Chery called her cousin Valerie, who picked Chery up at the bus station. Together they rushed to the church daycare, where she picked up both of her children after a friend took Amber there when school let out.

When they drove into the driveway of the townhome, Lettin saw flickering reflections on her mother’s upstairs bedroom window. It was apparent the TV was on. Her mother’s car was in the driveway. It was very strange.

It was 6:15 p.m. If her mother was home, why hadn’t she gone to the bus stop to pick her up?

“Something had to be very wrong,” she said.

Chery, her cousin, and the two kids climbed out of the car, and the two kids ran down a narrow walkway to the front door and impatiently waited for their mother to unlock the door.

The two small kids jostled into position in front of their mother, each hoping to burst into the home and run to their grandmother first.

Amber, the older of the two kids, maneuvered her way in front of her brother.

“I pushed my way through. I was the first one to run into the room and see (my grandmother),” Amber said. “It’s definitely an image that never leaves your mind.”

The 50-year-old woman was lying on the floor near a sofa about three to four feet from the front door. Her body seemed to have been set carefully on her Winnie the Pooh comforter, which was neatly folded on the floor. Part of Patricia’s head was covered by the blanket.

Patricia’s body was in a straight line as though she was lying in a casket, Amber said. Her hands and arms were carefully crossed over her chest.

“I always thought that was a little strange,” Amber said. “She was absolutely posed.”

Patricia’s jeans were pulled down and her boots were still on. She was wearing a sweater.

Joe said he can’t forget the moment.

“I remember a loud scream,” Joe said. “It startled my sister. It was a jarring scream to the point where it burned into my memory.”

There was a lot of blood around Patricia’s head. Forensic experts would estimate that she had been murdered between the hours of 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.

There was a hammer lying on the floor beside the body.