A young woman with a cloudy background, a suspect whose dark fantasies were rife with trussed-up and helpless women, a nude body flung down an embankment.
Those are elements of a mystery surrounding a woman found murdered in Boulder County in 1954 and buried under the name Jane Doe.
It was another cold case on its way to being forgotten until Boulder historian Silvia Pettem pressed to have Jane Doe’s bones exhumed in the hope that modern science could identify her.
In 2004, the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office agreed to reopen the case if the exhumation could be done without taxpayer money. Pettem raised $3,500 in cash plus in-kind donations.
Now a forensic anthropologist has superimposed a photo of Katharine E. Dyer, who disappeared from a Denver boarding house on March 26, 1954, on a cast of Jane Doe’s skull
The anthropologist couldn’t rule out Dyer, which is good news to Pettem.
The sheriff’s department is circulating a picture of Dyer, who was 27 when she disappeared from her home at 1118 Washington St., in the hope that someone will recognize her and add another link in a chain of evidence leading to an identity for Jane Doe.

Katharine Farrand Dyer in 1949
“Without knowing who the victim is, it is hard to pursue a homicide,” said Boulder Detective Steve Ainsworth.
Now-deceased Boulder Sheriff Arthur Everson followed a host of dead-end leads in the hunt for Doe’s killer.
The young woman’s body was found in Boulder Canyon in April 1954. She was in her early 20s, detectives said, with strawberry-blond hair. She had been beaten to death, stripped naked and tossed off a steep embankment to the creek below.
When Everson learned that Harvey Glatman, an electrician who confessed to murdering three women in California, lived in Denver at the time Jane Doe was found, Everson’s suspicions turned to Glatman.
Posing as a photographer, Glatman would lure women to model for him, frequently taking pictures that showed them bound and gagged. Some lived; some he killed.
He stashed all the pictures in a tool box.
Under questioning, he identified each of the women in the photos, giving police detailed information about them.
Everson asked the Los Angeles police to question Glatman about Jane Doe, who had perfect teeth and a scar from an appendectomy.
Four sets of photos showed women that Glatman met in Denver, Everson said.
“He knew a lot about these women. (The detective) pulls out another set of a woman tied up. Glatman said I don’t remember her name, and I never saw her again.”
Asked whether the Colorado women were alive, Glatman replied: “Unless they have been run over.”
Forensic investigators who examined Jane Doe’s skeleton found fractures that were consistent with being hit by a car.
Two other women that Glatman said he photographed here have never been found.
“I just don’t think he started killing in Southern California. I think those were at least his second, third and fourth murders,” Ainsworth said.
In Los Angeles, Glatman found women at lonely hearts clubs, told them he was a photographer who shot cover art for the crime magazines of the day and convinced them to model for him.
Frequently, he hired models from agencies, paying them $20 an hour.
When his murders made national headlines, it rang alarm bells in Colorado, where he had a record.
As a teen attending East High School, he had followed women he fancied to their homes, then entered through an open window or door. He carried a length of rope and a gun.
He tied and gagged his victims, then fondled them. But there was no rape, no murder.
Police caught him breaking into a Vrain Street apartment in 1945, and he confessed to a number of burglaries but said nothing about the women he molested.
While awaiting trial, he abducted a woman in Boulder, took her to Sunshine Canyon, then tied her up and fondled her, before taking her home.
She reported him, and at 17, he was sentenced to one year at Colorado State Prison. [NOTE: Glatman's conviction, which landed him in the Colorado State Penitentiary, was for yet another assault, not the one in Sunshine Canyon.]
After his parole, he moved to Yonkers, N.Y., and began plying a trade he learned in prison, repairing televisions. He committed more assaults similar to those in Colorado.
Busted again, he spent two [NOTE: 5, not 2] years and eight months behind bars, some of it at Sing Sing. When he was released, he returned to Denver.
In 1954, Dyer was 27 and living at 1118 Washington St. A picture taken before she disappeared shows a woman with a perky smile, her eyes narrowed against the sun, wavy hair brushed back from her face.
Before she married Jimmie Dyer in 1949, she went by the name Katharine Farrand. Her marriage certificate gives her place of birth as San Antonio, Texas, but Pettem hasn’t found any record of her in that city.
“She is quite a mysterious person. Even before she disappeared, there is not a whole lot known about her life. I think, for some reason, she didn’t want to be found,” said Ainsworth.
She was a blond [NOTE: hair was light brown] who sometimes colored her hair. She worked at a soda fountain in Denver after moving here with her husband from Arizona.
At least once, the couple climbed one of Colorado’s fourteeners together.
And just a block from the boarding house where she was staying after separating from Dyer was the Clara Lane Friendship Society, a franchised dating club, where singles sought a match.
“It is very likely she could have met (Glatman) there,” said Pettem.
In reviewing photographs taken of Jane Doe’s body, Ainsworth found what he believes is a ligature mark on her wrist.
He thinks Glatman took her to Boulder Canyon and parked on a pull-off close to where she was found. Then he did something that echoed an earlier abduction.
“He has her get in the back and get undressed as he did with the other woman in Sunshine Canyon [NOTE: Glatman and the Sunshine Canyon victim walked into the mountains; no car], and somehow she gets loose and takes off.”
If Dyer proves to be Jane Doe, investigators may be able to establish who her friends were, where she hung out and how she might have come into contact with Glatman.
“I am more certain that he is the killer than I am that Katharine Dyer is Jane Doe,” Ainsworth said. “It isn’t only proximity, it is his MO in the cases in California. He lived here, he abducted one gal in Boulder and took her up to Sunshine Canyon. How many people with this propensity would have been running around here in 1954? The answer is, not a whole lot.”

Contact information: Anyone with information about this case is asked to contact Detective Steve Ainsworth of the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office at 303-441-3627 or sainsworth@co.boulder.co.us/.

Note: This cold case entry was written by Denver Post reporter Tom McGhee. Contact him at 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com/.

Comment »

Thanks for covering this story and for your interest in Jane Doe. Harvey Glatman was at the Colorado State Penitentiary from Dec. 1945 to July 1946, then moved to NY. From Oct. 1946 to Sept. 1948 he was at Elmira Reformatory in NY, then from Sept. 1948 to April 1951 he was at Sing Sing Prison in NY. After he was paroled in May 1951, he returned to Denver. Katharine Farrand worked at the Republic Drug Store in Denver in 1948, married Jimmie Dyer in Prescott AZ in 1949. Katharine and Jimmie Dyer moved to Denver in 1950, and she worked as an elevator operator, first at the Evans Investment Co. and then at American Furniture Co., both in downtown Denver.
Comment by Silvia Pettem — April 27, 2008 @ 7:35 pm