Denver Strangler

A Killer Who Exists Mostly in a Sentence

The clearest footprint of the Denver Strangler appears in a compact true‑crime volume with an equally compact mission: to round up “mile‑high misdeeds and malfeasance” from Denver’s past. ^[1]

Published in August 2012 by The History Press, Wicked Denver: Mile‑High Misdeeds and Malfeasance gathers 160 pages of historical crime, scandal, and vice. ^[1] The book’s descriptive text does something important for this story: it explicitly promises that among its Denver tales is “the case of the Denver Strangler.” ^[1]

That simple line is the anchor point. It treats the Denver Strangler not as rumor, but as a “case”—one episode in the long catalog of wrongdoing in Denver, Colorado. ^[1]

The same description hints at the larger world this case inhabits. It notes that Denver’s past included criminals who disguised themselves—“men posed as women while committing crimes”—and “murderous madams” who left “trails of scarred girls and ruined lives.” ^[1] In that gallery of deception and exploitation, the Denver Strangler is invoked as another dark thread. ^[1]

But in public-facing material, that’s all the case gets: a name, and the assurance that somewhere in Denver’s history, someone earned it. ^[1]

The Curators of “Wicked Denver”

The people who chose to include the Denver Strangler are not casual storytellers plucking legends from thin air. Wicked Denver is co‑authored by Sheila O’Hare and Alphild Dick, whose careers sit at the intersection of scholarship, records, and research. ^[1]

O’Hare is described as an assistant professor at Emporia State University, with earlier work as a social sciences bibliographer, attorney, and archivist. ^[1] Those roles point toward a life spent inside stacks, collections, and case files: the raw material of historical true crime.

Her co‑author, Alphild Dick, is identified as a graduate research assistant at Emporia State who earned an M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Kansas and previously served as a fellow for the American Councils for International Education. ^[1] Their shared background is steeped in academic and archival research, the kind of work that turns scattered, brittle documents into coherent stories.

The table of contents for Wicked Denver reads like a map of the city’s darker corners: “Saloons and Street Life,” “Poison, Abuse and Vilification,” “The Unwritten Law,” “Unsolved,” “Disturbance of Mind,” “Bad Kids,” “Pecuniary Motives,” and “The Perils of Everyday Life.” ^[1] That structure signals the authors’ intent to organize Denver’s past crimes not just as isolated incidents, but as patterns—of vice, greed, mental unraveling, and everyday dangers. ^[1]

Somewhere inside that framework, the Denver Strangler’s story is tucked away. The description guarantees its presence; the table of contents shows the type of company it keeps. ^[1]

Denver in a Larger Western Gothic

A Case That Refuses to Come into Focus

Most notorious killers leave thick paper trails: arrests, indictments, trial transcripts, breathless newspaper coverage, anniversary features. They become fixtures in the public record.

Between Legend and History

Seen through these later works, the Denver Strangler sits in a twilight between legend and documented history. On one side are scholars and writers—O’Hare, Dick, McQueen—who specialize in excavating strange and violent stories from local archives and Western lore. ^[1][2] On the other is a public record where, at a glance, the killer exists mainly as a promise of a chapter rather than a fully told narrative. ^[1]

For true‑crime readers, that tension is both frustrating and telling. It suggests that Denver’s history holds more stories than the familiar canon of headline‑grabbers—cases that, for any number of reasons, never lodged themselves firmly in the broader cultural memory. Some were too fragmented, too poorly reported, or too overshadowed to survive as anything more than a single chilling line in a later book.