In the winter of 1973, on December 27th, Colorado State Trooper Thomas Carpenter, a 31-year-old white male, was on duty in Denver. A husband and father to three young children, Carpenter was a former U.S. Marine who had joined the Colorado State Patrol in 1968. He was known as a kind and calm man, always ready to lend a hand. On that fateful morning, his path crossed with two men, one white and one Black, who were with a stolen vehicle on the westbound on-ramp from Broadway to the Boulder Turnpike.
What began as a routine stop escalated into a kidnapping. The two men overpowered Trooper Carpenter, took his service weapon, and forced him to drive them in his own patrol car. For a period of time, Carpenter was seen driving with the two men as passengers around the areas of I-25 and I-70. The journey ended in the Montbello neighborhood of Denver, in a parking lot on Albrook Drive. There, in the driver's seat of his patrol car, Trooper Carpenter was shot and killed, with evidence suggesting the shots were fired from the back seat.
Witnesses reported seeing two men, matching the description of the initial suspects, fleeing from the patrol car around 10:50 a.m. Despite an immediate and extensive investigation by the Denver Police Department and the FBI, no arrests were ever made in connection with the murder of Trooper Carpenter. Two years after his death, a significant piece of evidence surfaced when his service weapon was discovered in a ditch in New Mexico, but this lead did not result in any arrests. The case grew cold over the years but has not been forgotten. It was reopened in 2018 and remains an active investigation by the Denver Police Department's cold case unit, with a substantial reward offered for any information that could finally bring his killers to justice and provide closure for his family.
