The Hammer Killer

For twelve days in January 1984, someone was getting into Colorado homes and swinging a claw hammer at whoever was inside. A couple in Aurora survived an attack on January 4, and a flight attendant was beaten and raped in her garage on January 9. On January 10, fifty-year-old Patricia Smith was sexually assaulted and beaten to death in her Lakewood condominium. Six days later, also in Aurora, Bruce Bennett, twenty-seven, his wife Debra, twenty-six, and their seven-year-old daughter Melissa were killed the same way. Three-year-old Vanessa Bennett was badly injured and lived.

The attacker left the state and the cases went cold. Alex Christopher Ewing was arrested in Arizona that summer over an attack there, and in August 1984 he escaped from deputies in Henderson, Nevada, broke into a house and beat a couple with an ax handle. He was caught two days later near Lake Mead and spent decades in Nevada prisons. In 2018 his prison intake DNA went into the national CODIS database and matched evidence from both Colorado scenes.

He fought extradition in the Nevada courts for eighteen months. An Arapahoe County jury convicted him of the Bennett murders on August 6, 2021; three consecutive life sentences followed on August 17. A Jefferson County jury then convicted him of killing Patricia Smith, and on April 12, 2022, he received a fourth consecutive life sentence.