A retired Aurora police detective who spent 41 years on the job kept 30 boxes of investigative material in his home under his floorboards for years, Chief Todd Chamberlain said in a news conference Thursday.
The chief called the retired detective’s actions “unacceptable” and acknowledged that the records-keeping breach raises “legitimate concerns” about the police department’s processes.
The detective, whom Chamberlain declined to name, kept the materials — which included binders, reports, photographs, VHS tapes, handwritten notes and other documents — in a crawlspace under his home, Chamberlain said in a Thursday news conference.
The chief said the material has been connected to 35 cases. Eric Ross, a spokesman for the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s office, said prosecutors were reviewing about 80 filed cases connected to the materials. Chris Hopper, a spokesman for the 17th Judicial District Attorney’s office, said prosecutors there were examining 11 cases.
Asked about the discrepancy, Matt Longshore, a spokesman for the police department, said the 35 cases were the cases police identified in which a suspect was convicted and there was “some sort of significant impact.”
“We’ll call them high-profile cases,” he said. “Someone was actually arrested, charges were filed. That is the 35 number.”
Chamberlain said investigators have not found evidence that the retired detective tampered with evidence or acted with malice, which could constitute a crime. He said the police department can’t take administrative action against the detective since he is retired. He added the investigation is ongoing.
The police department became aware the retired detective kept the material in March, when a current detective working a 1997 cold case could not find “case materials” related to that investigation, Chamberlain said. The current detective contacted the retired detective, who had handled the case previously, and the retired detective had the materials at his home, along with material related to other cases, the chief said.
“That caused a number of red flags,” Chamberlain said.
Police officials launched an investigation, seized the investigative materials from the retired detective’s home and alerted local prosecutors in April, according to the police department. Police investigators have spent months combing through the materials, examining and re-cataloguing them, Chamberlain said.
Investigators found that much of the material the retired detective kept at his home was redundant to material in the police case files — that is, the detective took home copies. Investigators did not find any direct physical evidence, like DNA, blood samples or fingerprints, among the hidden-away boxes, Chamberlain said.
While much of the material was redundant, not all of it was, Easterwood said. The boxes did include some unique information in open cold cases, she said.
Police investigators found no information in the boxes that “compromised any prosecutions,” the chief said, though Ross and Hopper each said prosecutors’ reviews are still ongoing.
“There is no information that there was anybody that was tried, anybody held accountable, any case, any victim, any suspects that were impacted in any way by any of the material that was found in that retired detective’s home,” Chamberlain said. “That is incredibly important to me.”
James Karbach, a spokesman for the Office of Colorado State Public Defender, said Thursday that the discovery of the materials raises concerns that defendants in the past were unfairly prosecuted.
“From a defense attorney perspective, we see frequently discovery problems where information does not make its way the way it is supposed to from the police department to the prosecution to the defense,” he said. “And this really raises concerns about whether all of the notes and casework that this detective was doing made its way.”
Ross said prosecutors in the 18th District, which includes Arapahoe County, have not yet found material that was not properly disclosed during prior prosecutions, but emphasized that the review is ongoing.
“We’re reviewing it,” Ross said. “We have not found any cases thus far where evidence was withheld or not given to the defense, but if we do find them, we are legally obligated to turn over that discovery to the defendant’s counsel.”
Hopper said prosecutors in the 17th District’s office, which covers Adams County, “are cross-referencing each file to confirm that all evidence has been properly preserved and disclosed during the prosecution of each case,” and said that review, which is underway, will determine prosecutors’ next steps.
Karbach criticized Chamberlain for declining to share the retired detective’s name and questioned whether defendants in affected cases would be notified.
“This is not full transparency,” Karbach said. “…A press conference without any case numbers or names and without naming the detective is not notifying anybody of anything.”
The retired detective was hired in 1981, worked as a major crimes detective from 1996 to 2011 and retired in 2022, Chamberlain said.
“For whatever reason, this detective felt like it was something that I want to collect, this is something that I want to remember, this is something I want to keep, I don’t want to give up,” Chamberlain said. “…It is without question unacceptable. And I will embrace that standard, and I will make sure that this never happens again.”
Chamberlain said the department’s policies and procedures have changed in the years since the detective took the boxes home and since the detective retired, and that much of the material the retired detective had on paper is now stored digitally.
He emphasized that the detective appears to be an outlier, and said the detective seemed to have wrongly “normalized” keeping the material. Chamberlain said outside entities, including the city auditor’s office, have been involved in the aftermath of the discovery.
“There is no pattern of conduct, there is no systematic aspect of this as far as the organization,” Chamberlain said.
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