February 24, 2023
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3:21Now PlayingMore than 50 years after the unsolved murder of a young mother in Denver, her family’s hope for answers is up against a bitter reality – the original police file has been missing for at least a decade, lengthening the odds the killer will ever be identified.
Stanley Anita Moore – Stanita to her brothers and sisters – was 23, a young mother, and a nurse aide working at Presbyterian Hospital when someone strangled her on Dec. 13, 1971, as her 18-month-old daughter slept in her crib in another room.
“I didn’t get to know her, and I wish I could have,” Shan Dale Hornbuckle, that daughter, said.
The murder got a brief mention in the newspapers, and a larger story in The Denver Post a few months later touting a $2,000 reward. But then it faded from view.
“It just seems like it lasted a week or two, a month or two, and then nothing,” said Sandra Fisher of Denver, one of Stanita’s sisters. “And then every year after that, we just kind of wondered, when are they going to find something?”
Solving it now will be a monumental task.
Denver police spokesman Doug Schepman confirmed to 9Wants to Know this week that the case file is missing. All that exists, he said, are some handwritten notes from the crime lab, a brief entry of the incident in a daily ledger, and the autopsy report.
After a half-century of hoping that someone would be held accountable, Stanita’s family wonders if the fact she was Black meant her case didn’t get the investigative effort it deserved.
“She was a Black lady down in the ‘70s,” Hornbuckle said. “Did they not care?
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