
True Crime Blueprint
An Unspeakable Orgy Of Violence: Denver's 1984 Hammer Murders
An Unspeakable Orgy Of Violence: Denver's 1984 Hammer Murders In January 1984, a stranger walked into four homes in the Denver suburbs over twelve days and used a hammer. Patricia Smith, a 50-year-old interior designer who had just started her own business, was killed in her Lakewood townhome in the middle of the afternoon. Six days later, Bruce, Debra, and Melissa Bennett were murdered in Aurora, and three-year-old Vanessa Bennett was left for dead. More than 500 interviews later, police had nothing. It took 34 years, a change in Nevada state law, and one forensic scientist entering routine inmate samples into a database to finally put a name to it: Alexander Christopher Ewing, a drifter and plumber who had been living two blocks away the whole time. This is the full story of the people at the center of it, the decades of aftermath for the little girl who survived, the paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis that never became a defense, and the Colorado crime lab scandal that has put the DNA evidence back in question in 2026. This is True Crime Blueprint. 10minutemurder.com

