In the early morning hours of November 21, 1985, 51-year-old Roger Dean, a White male, was at his home in Lone Tree, Colorado, when an intruder wearing a ski mask entered. The armed man confronted Dean, who was having coffee in his garage, and forced him upstairs. The intruder then made Dean tie up his wife, DJ. A struggle ensued between Roger Dean and the masked man, which ended in gunfire.
As he tried to escape his own home, Dean was shot five times and died before help could arrive.
For years, the case remained a puzzling mystery for the Douglas County Sheriff's Office. Investigators at the time noted unusual details, such as twine marks on only one of Dean's wrists and his glasses being found covered in duct tape in another room, even though he was wearing contact lenses. This led to an initial theory that the kidnapping might have been staged. The case went cold, but the family's ordeal was not over. Five years after the murder, Dean's widow received a threatening letter from someone claiming to be the killer, demanding $100,000 and threatening her daughter. The case was even featured on the television show 'Unsolved Mysteries' in 1991.
Decades passed without answers until advancements in DNA technology breathed new life into the investigation. A crucial piece of evidence left at the scene was the orange ski mask the killer had worn, which Dean had managed to tear from his head during the struggle. In 2021, through the use of genetic genealogy, investigators were finally able to identify a suspect: Michael Shannel Jefferson. Jefferson, who had lived in Colorado in 1985 and had a criminal history, was located and arrested in Los Angeles.
In January 2025, Michael Jefferson, then 67, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. This plea was part of a deal that came about after a scandal emerged involving a forensic scientist at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation who had worked on the case and was found to have manipulated DNA evidence in numerous cases over many years. Jefferson was sentenced to 32 years in prison. The sentencing brought a long-awaited, albeit complex, conclusion for the family of Roger Dean, nearly four decades after his violent death.
