Retired Colo. Police Officer Ensures City's Murder History Survives

Dwight Haverkorn’s new book detailing the history of the Colorado Springs Police Department started with bloody murder.

It was 1998 and the now retired Colorado Springs police investigator was having breakfast with friends. One of them told Haverkorn a story about a downtown house her mother once owned before being converted into apartments. After stopping to visit, she met a tenant whose young daughter was having nightmares about blood all over the home and enlisted Haverkorn’s help in finding out if anything bad had happened in the house.

When he asked a police buddy for a list of Springs homicides, Haverkorn was shocked to learn no such database existed. The records had essentially been trashed through the years, which wasn’t unusual for police departments, he says.

After he determined that yes, there had indeed been a gruesome shooting at the location, inspiration struck. He decided to put together a record of homicides with the help of the Pikes Peak Library District’s special collections department.

“(They) said we get questions all the time — did something happen at this address or that address,” said Haverkorn, who worked for CSPD from 1968 to 1982, then again in 1983. He was an investigator for the department’s legal office until 1987, then worked in the city attorney’s office until retiring as a litigation specialist in 2003.

“I thought I could help out and start with what I worked on in the ’70s.”

For the next 25 years, Haverkorn went through several thousand old newspaper articles, pulled out the police stuff, and typed up the homicide articles on his computer because microfiche was tricky to read and he needed a way to search the articles if necessary.

The result is 10 three-ring binders documenting the city’s homicides up through 2019 that now live in the library’s special collections department.

But Haverkorn wasn’t done. That historical research sparked a new project — a book about the history of the Springs Police Department from 1875 through the 1950s.

“Murder in the Shadow of Pikes Peak: A Look at the Early Colorado Springs Police Department” was released in August through the local publisher Rhyolite Press. It’s available online at Amazon.com.

“Somebody needed to put the history together because nobody knows it,” said the Springs native and Palmer High School graduate. He was in the school’s second graduating class.

The historian is quick to spin a tale from our city’s history, but for all the murder and mayhem he uncovered, Haverkorn doesn’t see the city as some wanton Wild West: “Colorado Springs was pretty quiet,” he said.

But there were some bizarre homicides. “There were ax murders in 1911 done by a serial killer across the country,” he said. “And a big shootout on Friday the 13th in 1918 at Nevada Avenue and Colorado Avenue where our chief of detectives was killed. This gang had gotten started in 1913 and between then and 1918 they killed nine police officers in shootouts. These guys were maniacs.”

And the city’s first two constables also make for colorful tales. Our first died of exposure in Lake City, probably due to the syphilis he contracted from prostitutes. At least, that’s what Haverkorn thinks. Our second, a well-liked guy, left his position as constable, then wound up killing a man and going on the lam after some townsfolk posted his bond. Though people never found out where he went, through his research Haverkorn figured out the former constable fled to Montana, where nobody knew he was wanted for homicide. He got hit by a trolley and died there in 1895.

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