Officials and documents detail Wichita man’s arrest in 1979 Colorado cold case killing
A 64-year-old Wichita man has been arrested in connection to one of oldest cold cases in Weld County, Colorado, officials said.
DNA evidence helped link James Herman Dye to the 1979 killing of 29-year-old Evelyn Kay Day, according to the Weld County Sheriff’s Office. With help from Wichita police and the FBI, detectives with the sheriff’s office arrested Dye at his home Monday before he was booked into Sedgwick County Jail.
Dye was interviewed at his house Monday and denied killing Day, according to an arrest affidavit released by a Colorado court.
He is awaiting extradition back to Colorado where he faces two counts of first-degree murder.
“(Day) had been beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled to death with a cloth belt of her own overcoat,” Weld County Sheriff Steve Reams said during a news conference Friday. “For more than 41 years, (Day’s) family and friends and the rest of the Weld County community have been waiting for the killer to be brought to justice.”
Day was last seen alive around 10 p.m. the night before coworkers found her dead in her red, 1977 Datsun station wagon parked on the side of the road. A student or students last saw her locking up the business lab where she worked at Aims Community College and in her car in the parking lot, officials said.
Her husband filed a missing person’s report the next day. Her coworkers found her station wagon around 5:30 p.m. that day.
Cold case Detective Byron Kastilahn reopened the case last year and sent DNA collected from the scene to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation in May 2020. The DNA was run through the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, to compare it to millions of people. The results came back in August.
Semen and DNA from Day’s sleeve and her fingernail matched Dye, according to court documents released last week.
Dye, who was in his early 20s at the time, was enrolled in automotive classes at the community college when Day was killed, the release said. And the building where he took a class was “directly north” of the business lab where Day worked before she was killed in November 1979.
He continued to take classes after her death, the release said. Dye also lived near Day, Kastilahn said.
Previous allegations and charges
Dye had a criminal history that included the sheriff’s office arresting him for sexual assault in 1977, the release said. The 1977 case had similarities to Day’s 1979 case, the release said.
The court document said the 1977 case involved a woman who stopped to help when she saw Dye and another woman, who was holding a baby, near a car on the side of the road. Dye asked for a ride to his house and then led the woman down a dirt road before he grabbed her by the throat and forced her to have sex with him, according to the court document.
He then had the woman put her clothes back on, the document said. Day was found fully clothed.
In Colorado, Dye was also arrested on suspicion of sexual assault on a child and attempted sexual assault in separate incidents in 1981, assault in 1982 and sexual assault on a child in 1987.
Public Information Officer Joe Moylan said Dye was convicted in all the Colorado cases. He was sentenced to up to five years in prison for the 1977 conviction, two years tied to one or both of the 1981 cases, one year in jail for the 1982 case and eight years in prison for the 1987 case, he said.
In 1988, a person reported to a tip line that he believed Dye to be involved in a homicide that “occurred nine years prior at Aims Community College,” the court document said. He said Dye was either the one who “killed the girl or very much involved in the murder” and it had been a few years since he heard from Dye, the document said.
The document said, on the night of the killing, Dye went home with “blood all over his clothes. He ‘got rid’ of them right after that. He … then sat down to watch the news on TV. He then told his wife (now ex-wife) that there was a girl killed out at Aims and stated this before it was on the news.”
“No follow up was found on this tip,” the document said.
When Kastilahn reopened the case, he interviewed Dye’s ex-wife and sisters. Dye’s ex-wife and one sister said they believed Dye was capable of killing someone, the document said, and another sister said Dye’s mother thought Dye had killed Day.
He has four convictions in Kansas, all in 2014 and occurring in Sedgwick County, according to Kansas Department of Corrections data. The convictions include forgery and drugs. He was released from prison in 2017.
This story was originally published March 26, 2021 at 3:03 PM.