Mitchell Gonzales, a 22-year-old man, was killed in Denver, Colorado, on May 20, 1987. He died alongside Jeffrey E. Sheffield during a violent encounter connected to Michael Tenneson, who was also known as Michael Leith. The two victims had reportedly spent part of the evening drinking and using drugs with Tenneson before Gonzales and Sheffield fell asleep inside a Denver residence.
While the two men slept, Tenneson shot each of them in the head.
The attack left both Gonzales and Sheffield dead at the scene. After the killings, Tenneson took Sheffield’s automobile and fled, turning the double homicide into both a murder investigation and a search for the stolen vehicle. The theft helped connect Tenneson to the victims and became part of the criminal case brought against him.
Authorities later arrested Tenneson while he was using the name Michael Leith. Investigators identified him as the person responsible for the deaths of Gonzales and Sheffield, and prosecutors charged him with two counts of first-degree murder. He also faced charges arising from the property taken after the killings, including aggravated robbery and aggravated automobile theft.
Tenneson was tried in March 1988 and convicted of both first-degree murder counts, as well as the robbery and automobile-theft offenses. The convictions established that the killings were deliberate and occurred as part of a broader course of conduct that included taking property from the victims after they were shot. Gonzales’s death was therefore not left as an unresolved Denver homicide; an identified suspect was arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for murdering him and Sheffield.
The correct date of Mitchell Gonzales’s death is May 20, 1987. References placing his death in 1998 conflict with the documented sequence of Tenneson’s arrest, prosecution, and 1988 convictions and appear to have resulted from an incorrect date being repeated in later records.
