A murder has taken place in Boulder. In a day or two it is obvious that a member of the family did it. An arrest is made within a few weeks. The story dips from sight, and it is only the sharp eyed who notice that a plea for murder in the second degree was accepted and the offender sentenced to 30 to 40 years.

No, that wasn’t a satire. That is what happens, more often than not, when someone dies under suspicious circumstances in Boulder County. Details can be added to our typical case. If it wasn’t a family member, it was a fight in a bar. The case was in Longmont’s jurisdiction as often as in Boulder. Too often, the victim was a child.

From 1992 through 1999 there have been some 46 deaths in Boulder County that raised suspicion of foul play. About 80% of the time an arrest was made and a person sent to jail. Is that a good or bad record? It is certainly distressing for those involved with the unsolved cases, but 80% is not that different from Colorado as a whole, which has an 85% arrest record over the last two years, or for the entire nation. Nationally, the percentage of murders that are solved has actually been declining, despite technological advances, falling steadily from 80% in the mid 70’s to just under 70% currently. The publicized failures to solve the murders of JonBenet and CU student Susannah Chase, notwithstanding, Boulder authorities are no more or less successful than other jurisdictions at solving murders.

The vast majority of murders in Boulder County originate in one of two situations: domestic violence and fights at a party or a bar. Of 30 recent murders that were solved, seven were women murdered by husbands or boyfriends. Three women killed their husbands or boyfriends. Six deaths were inflicted by family members other than spouses. One man killed another man during an argument about a mutual girlfriend. That totals to 17, more than half. Six men have been killed at parties or in bars.

The remaining cases ran the gamut. A robbery gone bad, a drug deal out of control. One police officer, Beth Haynes, killed in the line of duty. Some unsolved cases would probably turn out to be stranger murders as well.

Domestic violence cases and fights at parties get treated very differently. We’ve finally decided that domestic violence is a problem. We used to wonder what might have provoked it, or why the woman didn’t get out. Now, we’ve rightly decided murder is murder, and we really don’t care to hear about extenuating circumstances.

We don’t regard a sudden fight leading to death the same way at all. Here we’re still willing to think that a few hot words constitutes a provocation that explains murder. We’d still say that the victim should have just walked away. We’d probably laugh at anyone who suggested that this was a serious problem. Yet, six men in Boulder county have died this way compared to seven women. Perhaps someday we will take the wisdom we’ve slowly acquired about domestic violence and apply it to all situations and not accept any excuses for any murder.

In the last ten years there have been exactly four trials for murder leading to three convictions for Murder One, and one acquittal. All the other cases have pled out (three times the offender killed himself). A typical plea is to murder in the second degree with a sentence of 40 years. Manslaughter pleas yield prison terms varying from 3 months to 30 years.

Varying sentences are applied to domestic violence cases. Of the seven men, two got life, one 40 years, one killed himself and two got lighter sentences. One got off with just probation. Deanna Furlong was pushed down a flight of stairs by her husband. Even if you assume that harm, rather than murder was intended, 20 years of probation seems a light sentence.

The three women who killed their husbands were treated much more leniently. All three women had been abused. Two still in the abusive relationship got probation for murder. The third, Cynthia Jakob-Chien, received 28 years for a premeditated murder occurring after she’d left the relationship and while a police officer stood nearby to protect her during the recovery of her personal effects from her husband’s house.

There is an enormous variation in the press coverage given to murders. A murder in Longmont may not receive even a single mention in the Denver or Boulder media. A blond budding beauty queen in Boulder who bits the dust gets a thousand stories across the nation each year. Ah, but you say, that was an adorable, innocent child, and the inability of the police to solve the case kept it in the public eye. No, that can’t explain it. The murder of 3 month old Alec Olbright and of two year old Angelo Jaramillo (both in 1994) interested the media not at all, in spite of the fact that both cases are still unsolved. The murder of two year old Kaleb McClary in 1998 got little attention, even though it was after the celebrated "JBR" case and had details the press could sensationalize: the boyfriend of the child’s mother fed Kaleb adult painkillers and then beat the child.

The publicity given to the killings of JonBenet and Susannah Chase may be deserved, but together with national obsessions such as OJ, and TV portrayals of complicated, bizarre cases that are solved in time for the final commercial give us a distorted picture of the violence that claims lives and unrealistic expectations for perfection from those who investigate. Most of the time, it’s people we know that kill us, not strangers. Most of the time the police arrest and the DA’s convict.