Richard Paul White was arrested in September 2003 in the shooting death of Jason Reichardt, a 27-year-old Aurora man who had been his friend. While Aurora detectives questioned him about that case, he told them he had killed women. Within days two women were found dead in Denver. A year later he pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, one for Reichardt and two for the women, Victoria Lyn Turpin and Annaletia Maria Gonzales. Under the plea agreement, which kept him from facing the death penalty, he agreed to help investigators with other cases. Torrey Marie Foster, a mother of two who had disappeared three years earlier and whose death he had also described, was identified in August 2005.
White was born on October 29, 1972, and grew up in Mesita, a small town in Costilla County, south of Alamosa near the New Mexico border. His family ran the town's grocery store and post office, 9News reported in 2003. For about a year, between 2001 and 2002, he lived in Denver, and former neighbors later told 9News they had known him as an ordinary, polite man and had suspected nothing.
In 2003 he took a job at a printing company. The owner, who had hired him the month before the shooting, told 9News that White had been a good employee but had stopped coming to work about a week before Reichardt died. The Associated Press gave his age as 31 in September 2004.
A few months before his arrest, White appeared in a Denver courtroom as a prosecution witness. In June 2003 Hal Hebert was tried in Denver for the 2001 killing of his wife, Carol Hebert. According to the federal appeals court that later heard Hebert's habeas appeal, a woman testified that her husband had bought a semi-automatic handgun from White and then sold it to Hebert. White testified that he had sold her husband one of two guns, which he described, and his account of the weapon differed from hers. The murder weapon was not found. The jury found Hebert guilty on June 27, 2003.
At the time of that trial, nothing showed that police or prosecutors knew anything about White's own crimes. The Tenth Circuit noted in 2012 that it appeared undisputed that the prosecution learned of them only after Hebert's trial had ended.
Jason Reichardt was 27 and lived in Aurora. An Aurora police spokesman said he and White had been friends for a little over a year. The Associated Press later called Reichardt White's former roommate, and a Rocky Mountain News photo caption described him as White's co-worker. When Reichardt did not show up for work, the owner of the printing company became worried and went to look for him, he later testified.
Reichardt was found shot to death in Aurora on a Monday evening in September 2003, 9News reported. On the Tuesday, according to court records cited by 9News, White's sister told police that White had called her to say something bad had happened, and that he had shot Reichardt as Reichardt tried to stop him from taking his truck. She said she had driven him to buy camping supplies and food. On the Wednesday morning, Aurora police and the Douglas County Sheriff's Office arrested him at a makeshift campsite in Pike National Forest.
White's account of the shooting changed. Detectives later testified at his preliminary hearing that he had confessed to killing Reichardt but called it an accident. A female Aurora detective testified that White told her he had removed evidence and his fingerprints afterward. The charging document, as described by the Tenth Circuit, called the killing a robbery and murder.
Questioned about Reichardt, White began to talk about other deaths. He told Aurora investigators that he had strangled two women in Denver, and he spoke of other killings in southern Colorado. He later told police he had killed five women, 9News reported.
On the Thursday after his arrest, two women were found dead in Denver. Police believed both had died in October 2002 or earlier.
Denver Police Chief Gerry Whitman told nearby residents that they need not fear further crimes, because the suspect was in custody. He declined to discuss details, saying that the suspect was probably the only person who knew them, and said officers would stay until all the evidence was collected and every victim accounted for. Investigators said White had given them more information but would not say where it might lead.
The two women found dead in Denver were identified as Victoria Lyn Turpin, 32, and Annaletia Maria Gonzales, 27. Annaletia Gonzales left a daughter, who was 10 years old in 2005. Her father, who lived in Vermont, told 9News that his granddaughter would have to grow up without her mother. Little has been made public about Victoria Turpin's life.
While White was held in the Arapahoe County jail, a Denver grand jury returned a 53-count indictment against him. It charged murder, kidnapping, sexual assault and other violent crimes. The indictment alleged that between August 2002 and February 2003 White kidnapped, falsely imprisoned and sexually assaulted five women, that he murdered two of them, and that he attempted to murder a third. The women who survived were not publicly identified.
In Arapahoe County, the Reichardt case went to a preliminary hearing in Aurora, where the owner of the printing company and an Aurora detective testified. The hearing ran over more than one day. By then White was being described in the press as a confessed serial killer, though he had yet to be convicted of any of the killings.
On September 7, 2004, White pleaded guilty in Arapahoe County Court in Centennial to the first-degree murder of Jason Reichardt. His father was photographed by the Rocky Mountain News leaving the courthouse that day.
The following week, in Denver, he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the deaths of Victoria Lyn Turpin and Annaletia Maria Gonzales. Each plea carried a sentence of life without parole. According to the Denver District Attorney's office, he also agreed to help investigators with the cases of three other women he said he had killed in Colorado since 1998.
The agreement spared him a possible death sentence. He had been eligible for the death penalty, the Aurora Sentinel later recalled, and prosecutors did not seek it in exchange for his help to investigators.
A Denver judge sentenced White in the two Denver killings to a term 9News reported as 144 years to life. In Arapahoe County, District Judge Gerald Rafferty sentenced him in 2004 to life in prison for Reichardt's death; 9News reported that the sentence ran concurrently with the Denver term. At sentencing Rafferty told him that a great deal of mercy had been shown to him and that he would be behind bars for the rest of his natural life, the Sentinel reported when the judge retired in 2015. By April 2005 the Associated Press described White as serving life without parole after pleading guilty to three killings.
Torrey Marie Foster was found dead in Costilla County, on the Colorado and New Mexico border, and was identified in August 2005, when Denver police released her name and the Rocky Mountain News reported the coroner's identification.
Foster had disappeared three years earlier, at 25. She left a son, who was 12 in 2005, and a daughter, who was 9. White told police he had killed her, but he was not charged with her death; the Associated Press reported in April 2005 that he had not been charged in the cases of the other women he described.
In the spring of 2005 White's father, who lived in Mesita, began selling DVD copies of his son's videotaped statement to police, in which White described the killings. The DVD was titled "Denver's Linkin Park Strangler" and sold for $39.95. It was not immediately clear how the father had obtained the videotape, the Associated Press reported. He said he planned a second DVD that summer, reportedly showing his son speaking to God after the detectives had left the interview room.
The father told 9News that part of the money would go to the children of his son's victims, through a bank account set up for them, and that he hoped the recording would answer questions about the case. He said he had sold some copies but had not yet covered his costs, that no money had yet reached the children, and that he had not contacted any of the victims' families. The DVD's website had gone down when he could not pay the fees and came back up within days.
Annaletia Gonzales's father said he had heard nothing from the White family. "It angers me. His son killed my daughter," he told 9News, and he said he believed the family was profiting from the crimes and that the Denver District Attorney, Mitch Morrissey, should look into where the money went. Morrissey declined to comment. Craig Silverman, a former chief deputy district attorney in Denver, said Colorado had a strong law meant to keep people from profiting from crimes, and that he would be very worried about it if he were the father. Such statutes are known as Son of Sam laws, after the publishing offers made to the New York killer David Berkowitz in the 1970s.
A later Westword report described White as serving multiple life terms in the state supermax prison. He did not respond to the paper's request for comment.
White's name returned to court through the Hebert case. In May 2007, according to the Tenth Circuit, Hebert learned that the man who had testified about the gun was, in his lawyers' words, an actively psychotic serial killer, who had been charged several months after Hebert's verdict and later indicted for multiple murders, kidnappings and sexual assaults committed between August 2002 and February 2003. Hebert argued that the state had violated Brady v. Maryland by failing to disclose evidence of White's crimes. The Colorado Court of Appeals rejected the claim because White was indicted months after Hebert's conviction and nothing showed that the prosecutor had known of White's crimes before it. On September 28, 2012, the Tenth Circuit affirmed the denial of Hebert's federal habeas petition.
Hebert also argued, in a motion described by Westword, that White himself was the real killer of Carol Hebert. He pointed to White's record, to a claim that a girlfriend of White's had known Carol Hebert and had been in the Hebert home, and to two affidavits from men who said they had shared a cell with White. Judge Michael Mullins, who presided over both Hebert's trial and White's Denver case, rejected the motion, writing that the evidence produced at trial did not suggest an alternate suspect. Hebert appealed. In January 2024 the Denver District Attorney's office announced, after a review, that Hebert's conviction would stand, CBS Colorado reported.
White's own count of his victims went beyond the court record. He told investigators he had killed five women, and in September 2004 the district attorney's office said he had claimed three other killings around the state since 1998, besides the two Denver women. Only one of those three, Torrey Marie Foster, was identified, and he was not charged with any of them.
The two cellmates whose affidavits Hebert filed said White had boasted of killing more people than the authorities knew about. Their names were blacked out, the claims were not tested in court, and the judge who heard Hebert's motion found no support in the trial evidence for White as an alternate suspect.
The facts of the Reichardt killing were also told in more than one way: as an accident, in White's statement to detectives; as a shooting during an attempt to take Reichardt's truck, in his sister's account to police; and as a robbery and murder, in the charge.
October 29, 1972: Richard Paul White is born.
2001: Carol Hebert is killed; her husband, Hal Hebert, is later charged.
2001 to 2002: White lives for about a year in Denver.
August 2002 to February 2003: period of the Denver indictment's charges against White involving five women.
June 2003: White testifies for the prosecution at Hal Hebert's trial; the jury finds Hebert guilty on June 27.
September 2003: Jason Reichardt, 27, is found shot to death in Aurora; White is arrested at a campsite in Pike National Forest and, under questioning, describes killing women.
September 2003: Victoria Lyn Turpin and Annaletia Maria Gonzales are found dead in Denver.
2004: a Denver grand jury returns a 53-count indictment against White.
September 7, 2004: White pleads guilty in Arapahoe County to the first-degree murder of Jason Reichardt.
September 2004: he pleads guilty in Denver to the first-degree murders of Turpin and Gonzales.
2004: Judge Gerald Rafferty sentences him to life in prison in Arapahoe County; a Denver judge imposes a term reported as 144 years to life.
April 2005: his father begins selling DVDs of his videotaped statement to police.
August 2005: Torrey Marie Foster, found dead in Costilla County, is identified.
May 2007: Hal Hebert learns of White's crimes and raises them in his appeals.
September 28, 2012: the Tenth Circuit affirms the denial of Hebert's habeas petition.
January 2024: the Denver District Attorney's office announces that Hebert's conviction stands.