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Slaying victims not simply 'transients' to their loved ones
By Lynn Bartels
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer
Handyman George ``Billy'' Worth wasn't homeless. He wasn't homeless at all.
For 10 years he had lived in a friend's basement in northwest Denver, coming and going as he pleased.
It's true that when the urge to drink became too powerful to ignore, Worth returned to what the gentrified call lower downtown and what the less fortunate still refer to as Skid Row.
It was there in LoDo on Sept. 7 that police found the battered bodies of Worth and his buddy, Donald Dyer.
Within the next two months, three more men were beaten to death in the area, creating panic among the down and out in LoDo. The cases remain unsolved. ``Transients slain,'' news reports blared.
The victims were always described as homeless, never as somebody's friend or cousin or neighbor. That hurts the people who cared for them, got them jobs and places to live and invited them home for the holidays.
``George was a part of this household. He was a person,'' said his friend and landlord, Earl Klingensmith. ``I'm still crying.''
Ten years ago, when Earl Klingensmith needed someone to do odd jobs at his rental property, he knew where to look. A recovering alcoholic, Klingensmith had once hung around LoDo.
``There were tons of bars on Skid Row then,'' he said. ``You never had to worry about anything, though. There were people who would beat you up and take your money but they didn't kill you, not in the days when I drank.''
Klingensmith approached ``a bunch of winos around a fire'' underneath the Broadway viaduct. There he found George Worth, 6 feet 1 and 165 pounds, who looked as if he could work.
The two men hit it off and Klingensmith invited Worth to live in his basement. Klingensmith used to tease Worth that he had the bigger bedroom of the two.
``Almost from the beginning I trusted him. In all the years that Billy lived here, he never took a thing,'' Klingensmith said.
``Billy was a wonderful person. Everybody loved him. He was always clean and neat and orderly, and he had a heart of gold.''
Worth had been born in Montana and his father died when he was 8. He had a sister, but didn't want her to know where he was.
``I'm sure he was ashamed he was a bum. I'm sure he wished he could quit drinking,'' Klingensmith said.
Worth had killed a woman in 1972 while driving drunk in Jefferson County. He was sentenced to up to five years in prison in the death of Eva Bressman, 68, of Commerce City.
Worth never stopped drinking, although he could go for weeks without taking a sip, Klingensmith said. Then he would disappear for a few days, a few weeks, even a few months, especially in the summer.
``He would go for a pack of cigarettes and not come back. He'd go to Skid Row,'' Klingensmith said. ``Him and his buddies liked to take a (grocery) cart and go alley hopping. They would go from dumpster to dumpster and pick up cans. In a day's scavenge, they could make enough to buy a jug of wine for the night.''
Klingensmith began to wonder whether Worth might finally be tiring of life on the streets. Worth this year began talking to his sister in Strasburg and he got a job with a roofing company.
Worth's sister, Agnes Joles of Greeley, said, ``I never walked in my brother's shoes, so I don't know what really happened, but I love him very much. He had one fault and that was alcohol, and that's why he ended up on Skid Row.''
But the errant lifestyle beckoned. Worth took off about three months ago with the bike he had just bought for $99. He pawned it within days.
``I kept telling Billy that times are not the same, don't go down there,'' Klingensmith said. ``He had a temper when he drank hard liquors, but ordinarily Billy could solve his problems because he was big enough and he knew how to fight.''
Klingensmith had a strange feeling when he saw a TV report on Sept. 7 about police finding the bodies of two men under a dock in the 2400 block of Blake Street.
The next day a Denver detective called. Worth and Donald Dyer were dead.
``According to the detective, Billy came to the defense of Dyer and Dyer had been beaten the most. His body had been brutalized,'' Klingensmith said.
Worth was buried Sept. 13 on what would have been his 63rd birthday.
Barbara ``Bobbie'' Miller, a hog farmer from Keenes-burg, visits the Denver Rescue Mission three times a week to pick up inedible bread she feeds to her hogs. In exchange, she donates pigs to the mission for food.
She met Donald Dyer there in January 1998.
``He asked for a job,'' she said.
Dyer went to work at Nifty Fifty Ranch, Miller's hog operation, 11 miles east of the town in southern Weld County. He fed the pigs. He fixed the fences. He helped the neighbors with their chores.
``Don was one hell of a good guy,'' Miller said.
He lived with Miller, took meals with her and her workers and went with them to Christmas parties. He played cribbage with her ailing mother in Fort Lupton after he mowed her lawn.
About every six weeks or so, Dyer would get irritable and folks at Nifty Fifty knew what was coming.
``He'd want to go to (Denver). I'd drop him off and he would go on a drunk,'' Miller said. ``When he was broke and sick he'd go into the mission. They'd bed him down and give him a shower and I'd pick him up.''
Dyer never talked much about himself, except to say he considered Maine and Nova Scotia home.
The last time Miller saw him was three days before his body was found. She had dropped him off at the mission, where he ran into Worth. Dyer told his boss to pick him up in two days, but he didn't show. Miller asked around at places where she thought he might hang out.
She never expected murder.
``Don was not the type of person to have enemies or anything,'' Miller said. ``He was easygoing and liked everybody.''
The Denver coroner could not locate any family and was unaware of Dyer's ties to Miller. The county paid $700 for his burial in Evergreen Cemetery in Broomfield.
Miller is heartbroken over the death of a man she considers a family member.
``Even if they're homeless, they still bleed red blood,'' she said. ``They're still people.''
Melvin Washington lived on Denver's streets but his family didn't consider him homeless.
He regularly showered at his mother's house near City Park. He spent holidays with the family.
``Over the years he just became less and less interested in having a place to live,'' said his cousin, Sharon Brown of Northglenn. ``He'd say, `It's too much trouble for me to act the way society wants me to act.' ''
Washington was born in Bartlesville, Okla., and moved to Denver when he was a boy. He graduated from East High School in 1970 and attended junior college on a baseball scholarship.
Brown said her cousin's problems began about 25 years ago when he was playing and singing in a band.
``One night somebody slipped a mickey in his drink. It really had a psychological affect on him. Gradually Melvin just started to lose his focus,'' she said. ``We would talk to him about getting on medication, a job, an apartment. He said he had already done that and didn't want to try anymore.''
Washington's police record dates to 1980, and shows countless arrests for vagrancy, begging and loitering. Brown said about once a year he would spend time in jail.
Washington received a monthly disability check from Social Security for about $500. If he had a place to live, his family made sure he paid the rent first. The rest went for booze, food and maybe some pot.
After Washington's mother died, Brown took over the job of keeping track of ``Fuzzy,'' as the family called him. She often went looking for him underneath the Blake Street bridge.
The man who could remember every Halloween costume he and his cousins wore when they were little would forget that his sister had made him a doctor's appointment.
``Every time I would see him I would just be in tears when I would drive away,'' Brown said. ``But people make choices and we don't know why they make those choices.''
Several years ago, the family met at Brown's house for Christmas. As with all holidays, Washington was there.
``He hung out all day and then he said (to his grandfather), `Pops, I'm ready to go back to the bridge.' He just turned and waved at us all and said, `Had a ball, can't take it all.'
``After that, when we would get together at the end we'd wave and say `Had a ball.' ''
The last time Washington lived in a house was two years ago when he rented a room in a boarding house near Gaylord Street. But his landlord kicked him out because of his rowdy friends. He stayed on the streets after that.
Brown had just bought him new clothes for the winter when she heard police found two bodies on Blake Street. Her first thought was, ``Oh God, don't let that be Melvin.''
It wasn't.
But he would be found the next day, badly beaten about the head, in the 1100 block of Lawrence Street. He died a week later at the Denver Health Medical Center.
His family couldn't believe it.
News stories that the police investigation was stymied because the victims didn't have many friends or family stung Washington's relatives.
``I had just talked to Mel. My brother had just talked to Melvin. Some friend had just seen him,'' Brown said, crying. ``It was so hurtful.''
Friends and family packed Washington's funeral. They told stories about the man who would stop them on the street and ask for a couple of dollars - except for around the first of the month when he would stop them and ask if they needed money.
Brown knows what she is going to put on her cousin's headstone, the same message inscribed on his funeral program:
``Had a ball, can't take it all.''
Sharon Najera knew something was wrong with her neighbors' son. Milo Harris couldn't hold a job. He stared at people and talked to himself for hours.
``He was just out in space,'' she said.
But she didn't know how troubled he was until last year, when his parents decided to move from their home in unincorporated Adams County into a retirement community.
They talked to Najera about struggles with their son, who had lived on and off with them.
They said he had been asked to leave after he accused his nephews of being devil worshipers and made other bizarre statements.
``They didn't divulge any of the embarrassing things until it was time to go,'' Najera said.
She learned that Harris was brilliant but unable to concentrate and lead a normal life. He didn't like it when his parents told him they were moving and he had to find a place to live.
``They said, `He might be back and he might try to break things and we just want you to know,' '' Najera said.
Harris' mother declined to comment and asked that her name not be used.
The day Harris' parents moved into their new home in the metro area, his father suffered a heart attack and died. His mother tried to reach Harris but the address and phone number he had given her were false.
``His mother did get ahold of him finally, but he didn't come to the funeral,'' Najera said.
Mother and son talked only one time in the last year. He needed money. She met with him, gave him some cash and told him she couldn't give him any more.
Police on Sept. 26 found Harris' body floating in the river near Cuernavaca Park in the Central Platte Valley.
Najera found out from Harris' brother, a college professor in Arizona.
``He and his mother always figured that he would die on the streets one day,'' Najera said. ``But they thought he would freeze to death.''
A city crew cleaning weeds at Lipan and 19th streets found Kenneth Rapp's body Oct. 22. Police believe he was killed three or four weeks earlier.
Little is known about him. He has a family, which claimed his body from the coroner's office, but the family didn't want to talk. Their names were not made public.
``I'm sure I've seen him in here for meals and a shelter bed, but I don't know much about him,'' said Jay Earl, the outreach chaplain at the Denver Rescue Mission.
``That happens.''
October 31, 1999
