Richard Paul White was born in 1973. He grew up partly in the far south of Colorado, near the New Mexico line, and was living in Denver by the time of the killings.
In 2002 he picked up Annaletia Maria Gonzales, twenty-seven, on Colfax Avenue in Denver and took her back to the house in Park Hill that he shared with his girlfriend. With the girlfriend out, he tied Gonzales up in the garage and tortured her. He told her she was going to die, and strangled her with a belt while she begged him not to.
Days later he took Victoria Lyn Turpin, thirty-two, to the same house and held her in the basement with her hands tied behind her back, raped her and tortured her, and killed her. Both women were buried in shallow graves in the garden of the house.
Three other women were raped and tortured and lived. Their evidence is the reason this case was ever made.
None of it came to light through the killings. On September 7, 2003 he shot Jason Reichardt, twenty-seven, of Aurora, whom the accounts describe variously as his roommate, his former co-worker and his friend. Reichardt's body was found by his supervisor, who had gone to the house to check on him. White was hunted for two days and arrested by a Douglas County SWAT team on September 9. He said the shooting had been an accident.
Then he began to talk. He told his sister, and then detectives, and by one account more or less anyone who would listen, that he had killed five women since 1998 and buried them around the state. Investigators initially took him for a braggart. Digging at his former Denver address, 2885 Albion Street, produced Gonzales and Turpin.
He also took police to places where he said others lay: to Costilla County near the New Mexico border, west of Mesita, where he had lived as a boy, and there were further searches near La Junta in Otero County. One of those searches recovered remains.
The fourth name in the case is Torrey Marie Foster, twenty-five. White was never charged with her murder: the charge was dropped as part of the plea agreement, in exchange for his help in finding her body. She had two young children.
A Denver grand jury indicted him on May 20, 2004 on thirty-three felony counts, and a superseding indictment in June ran to fifty-three. He considered a jury trial and then took the deal, which spared his life and required his cooperation in the search for other victims. He pleaded guilty in September 2004 to Reichardt's murder, and in Denver to the murders of Gonzales and Turpin and to three counts of sexual assault with a deadly weapon.
On November 29, 2004 he was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment without parole for the two women and to a further one hundred and forty-four years for the offences against the three survivors, with a separate life term for Reichardt. He is held at the Centennial Correctional Facility.
Two corrections to this entry as it stood. It gave the count as a range of three to six; three murders were charged and admitted, a fourth charge was dropped under the plea, and five women is the figure he gave himself. Those are three different facts and are now separated. And it dated the sentencing to November 2003 in one field and November 2004 in another; it was November 29, 2004.