Title: Colorado Unsolved Mutilation Murders.

Dates: 1911 - 1912

Overview: Someone, in a very brutal manner, killed several, stopped, and got away

Status: Cold Case.

Colorado Unsolved Mutilation Murders

A puzzling case from the Centennial State made headlined during August 1911, when music teacher Signe Carlszen was reported slain in Denver. On the night of August 9 she left a students home at nine oclock, hiking across a lonely, open field to reach the streetcar that would take her home. When she had not arrived by 2:00 a.m., her father launched a search, but seven hours passed before a farmer found her body in a field.

According to published reports, Carlszen was found with a scarf wound tightly around her neck, skull fractured by at least six heavy blows. Some of the head wounds measured three inches across, and local newspapers reported that the blows caused her eyes to bulge from their sockets. One article also claimed that Carlszens body had been mutilated with a knife.

Confusion still surrounds the other victims in the case, with Signe Carlszen seemingly the last to die. On August 11, 1912, the New York Times reports that authorities were studying a half-dozen similar crimes in Denver and its suburbs, spanning the past six months. Local reports, meanwhile, linked Carlszens death to a triple murder reported from Colorado Springs on September 17, 1911. The victims in that caser were named as Mr. and Mrs. H.F. Wayne and a female houseguest, Mrs. A. J. Burnham. Homicide investigators labored long and hard to solve the case, but all in vain. Their search was fruitless, and no suspects were ever charged or publicly identified.

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