COLD CASE: STRANGE HOLIDAY MYSTERY IN COLORADO SPRINGS

On Thanksgiving night 1953, police officer Richard Burchfield, 34, was shot dead in his patrol car near Bijou and El Paso streets in Colorado Springs - in what's become one of the city's oldest and strangest cold cases.

Detectives identified potential suspects and encountered hoaxers. Nothing panned out. His desperate widow took to stalking city streets at night in search of the gunman, the Rocky Mountain News said. Detectives believed Burchfield encountered a man responsible for a series of armed holdups and purse snatchings across the city - the most recent happening minutes before the murder, based on evidence recovered at the scene. Witnesses saw an older Ford coup nearby - and described the murderer as a young white man, tall and thin. Burchfield suffered multiple gunshot wounds. Police recovered nine empty cartridges.
A lie detector test cleared a suspect named Lyman L. McVicker, 37, of 1446 Stout Street in Denver, the News said. A man wounded in a gun battle with Los Angeles police was also quizzed. In Nevada, a convict claimed he was the killer - and then admitted he lied. A suspected auto thief in Indiana also claimed he did it.

The Colorado Springs police chief, I.B. "Dad" Bruce, told the News he believed Burchfield knew his killer - based on the officer's patrol car radio habits.

“Whenever he stopped anyone during an investigation ... Burchfield would radio in the license of the car he was stopping, the identity of the man he was stopping, if he knew it, and why or where he was stopping,” the chief said.

Because didn't do that, Bruce said, it indicated the killer was ‘‘definitely known to him"- either as "a punk criminal he could handle or a friend.”

Photo: Colorado Springs Police Department]