On a spring day in 1975, Melanie Suzanne Cooley, an 18-year-old White female known to her friends as "Suzi," left Nederland High School for the last time. It was April 15th, and the high school senior was last seen hitchhiking in the mountain town of Nederland, Colorado. An artistic and spirited individual, Melanie enjoyed photography, writing poetry, and playing the guitar.
She had even embroidered a large, distinctive eagle on the back of the blue jean jacket she was wearing that day, along with blue jeans and tan boots. When she failed to return to her family's home on Magnolia Road, between Nederland and Boulder, concern mounted.
Weeks passed with no word of the missing teenager. Then, on May 2, 1975, a road maintenance worker made a grim discovery in the rugged terrain of Coal Creek Canyon. Melanie Cooley's body was found, bringing a tragic end to the search. The investigation revealed a brutal and violent end to her young life. She had been bludgeoned over the head repeatedly with a large rock and strangled. Her hands were found bound in front of her with many feet of yellow nylon cord wrapped around them. A report card in her pocket helped to identify her.
The investigation into Melanie's murder has stretched on for decades, becoming a haunting cold case for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office. No arrests have ever been made, and no one has been officially charged with her death. Over the years, suspicion has heavily focused on one of the most infamous serial killers in American history, Ted Bundy. Circumstantial evidence placed Bundy in Golden, Colorado, not far from Nederland, around the time of Melanie's disappearance. Her age, appearance, and the manner of her death—blunt force trauma to the head and strangulation—fit the pattern of Bundy's known victims.
Despite the compelling similarities and his presence in the area during his "Colorado period" of killings, Bundy never confessed to the murder of Melanie Cooley before his execution in 1989. While he admitted to numerous other slayings, he was never formally questioned by Colorado detectives about her case. Another serial killer, Vincent Groves, was briefly investigated and cleared. The lack of a confession or definitive evidence has left Melanie's case officially unsolved. The question of who picked her up on that April afternoon and so violently ended her life remains unanswered, a lingering mystery in the Colorado foothills.
