In the summer of 1982, the community of Longmont, Colorado, was shaken by the violent death of one of its elderly residents. Orma B. Smith, a 94-year-old White female and retired librarian, was brutally murdered in her own apartment. The grim discovery of her body was made the following day in the scenic area of Big Elk Creek Meadows, leaving investigators with a homicide on their hands.
For years, the question of who could have committed such a heinous act against a vulnerable member of the community lingered, casting a long shadow over the town.
The initial investigation into Orma Smith's death did not immediately yield an arrest, and the case grew cold. However, the name of her neighbor, John Agrue, had surfaced as a person of interest. At the time of the murder, there was not enough concrete evidence to charge him with the crime. Shortly after Smith's death, Agrue was apprehended during the commission of another violent crime: the attempted abduction of a woman at knifepoint on the University of Colorado Boulder campus. This led to his conviction and imprisonment for kidnapping, but his connection to the murder of his neighbor remained unproven in a court of law.
Decades would pass before the truth of Orma Smith's final moments would be definitively uncovered. Advances in forensic technology allowed for a re-examination of evidence from the cold case. In 2010, a breakthrough was made when DNA evidence from the investigation into Smith's death was conclusively linked to John Agrue. This posthumous identification brought a resolution to the long-unsolved murder. By the time he was officially named as the killer, Agrue was already deceased, having died in 2009. The belated revelation confirmed that the man who had lived next door to Orma Smith was indeed her murderer, bringing a somber end to a case that had puzzled investigators for nearly three decades.
