Dolores House was a homemaker who spent the majority of her time caring for her three children, Julie, Denise and Bruce, in the home where she and her husband, Ronald, lived.
She also worked a part-time job as an elevator operator at a Denver high rise. On Wednesday, August 16, 1972, Dolores went to Westland Shopping Center on W. Colfax Ave.
She called home and told daughter Julie she was having car trouble but would be home soon. Her 1967 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser often overheated. Then she would wait til it cooled down and proceed.
Witnesses told police they saw a man, who was driving a white over maroon Ford Bronco, tow House’s Oldsmobile into the Westland Shopping Center.
The unidentified man was 5-feet-11 or 6-feet tall and weighed about 160 pounds. He had dark blonde hair, which was graying and thin on the top.
Witnesses only saw snapshots of what was going on. One minute they saw a woman near the Oldsmobile. The next, the Bronco and the woman were gone.
Dolores House’s skull was discovered by mushroom hunters in 1977 in Gilpin County. But it sat, unidentified, in a box on a shelf at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, known only as Jane Doe.
The victim’s family had submitted her dental records soon after her disappearance. But law enforcement did not compare them to the skull at CBI. The family also submitted DNA samples which were forwarded to NaMus (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System) in 2010. This moved the case along to the eventual identification of the skull at CBI.
Police now say James Green, a serial rapist and murderer, emerged as a suspect. He had been living in rural Gilpin County at the time of House’s apparent abduction.
But Green has now been dead of cancer for several years.
It was reported that investigators said they wanted to solve the case to bring “closure” to the family. But there is no closure when a loved one has been murdered. There is only resolution of a mystery.