Clunky car led to murder of 18-year-old Karolyn Walker
Claudine Walker, whose 18-year-old daughter, Karolyn, was murdered at the age of 18 on July 4, 1987, holds one of the last photographs taken of her. The photo was to be her high school senior portrait. Karolyn is one of an untold number of young women murdered in the Denver area whose killings are unsolved and who may have been the victims of a serial killer — or killers.
By
KIRK MITCHELL |
[email protected] | The Denver Post
PUBLISHED: September 1, 2012 at 1:03 p.m. | UPDATED: April 28, 2016 at 2:29 p.m.
Karolyn Walker’s fate was tied to a clunky car.
On July 4, 1987, her boyfriend’s vehicle stalled on a busy street, leaving her stranded. She needed help, and police believe someone pulled over, pushed the car into a parking lot and then kidnapped the 18-year-old woman.
In thinking about that night, Karolyn’s mother, Claudine Walker, imagines a very powerful man — or multiple men — taking her daughter.
“She grew up wrestling her brothers,” Claudine Walker said in a recent interview. “I used to call her my Comaneci,” a reference to Nadia Comaneci, the Romanian Olympic champion gymnast.
Karolyn won many medals in gymnastics, was on a swim team and could whip her boyfriend in a wrestling match. She had just graduated from St. Mary’s Academy in Englewood.
A quarter century later, she is one of an untold number of young women murdered in the Denver area whose killings are unsolved and who may have been the victims of a serial killer — or killers.
Claudine Walker thinks back to Karolyn and remembers a girl who had a soft side.
Claudine Walker raised six kids alone and always had a big stack of bills, including fees for sending all her children to Catholic schools. Karolyn would cash her paycheck and ask Claudine, “How much do you want, Mom?”
The night she was killed, Karolyn went with her boyfriend, Gregory Moon, to a Glendale bar. She drove him home in his green Gremlin and then headed to her house to beat her midnight curfew. The car stalled at Colorado Boulevard and East 13th Avenue. The transmission had gone out.
Arapahoe County cold-case investigator Marv Brandt said someone kidnapped her — with a weapon or by force — raped and strangled her and dumped her body in a ditch south of East Colfax Avenue.
Claudine Walker awoke with a start.
“I was terrified,” she recalled. “I looked at the clock. It was 11 and Karolyn wasn’t home.”
She paced through the night, knowing her daughter would not miss curfew. Then she had to wait 24 hours before authorities would take a missing-person report.
The next day, police came into her living room and told her that Karolyn’s body was in the morgue. It made her angry. It couldn’t be. Her son went to the coroner’s office, returned and said, “Mom, it’s her.”
She told a mortician she wanted to see her daughter, but the woman told her, “Trust me, you don’t want to see.”
“I said, ‘I don’t want to see her, but I have to see her,’ ” Claudine Walker said. “She opened up the coffin. She was swollen and unrecognizable. I said, ‘That’s not my daughter. Close it and don’t open it no more.’ That was the most horrible thing I experienced in my whole life. I never felt so alone.”
Claudine Walker will never comprehend what drives people to kill.
“What is there about killing that makes them want to do it?” she said. “I’ll never have a grandchild from her. It’s like they killed a whole human race — her children and their children.”
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206, [email protected], Facebook.com/kmitchellDP or Twitter.com/kmitchellDP
