Steven Wicks was 10 when he and a 7-year-old friend, Ronald DeFond, left to buy ice cream from a grocery at East Colfax Avenue and Williams Street in Denver on the afternoon of March 8, 1980. The boys never returned. Later that day a passerby in neighboring Adams County found them lying side by side in a field off Tower Road near Aurora, south of East 56th Avenue. Both children had sustained a single gunshot wound to the head and were later pronounced dead at Denver’s public hospital.

The remote stretch where the boys were found produced few immediate leads. Photographs show the children’s caskets leaving Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church on March 14, 1980 and the pair were buried side by side at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Jefferson County. Cold-case records list Steven’s homicide in Aurora within Adams County. Investigators have at times identified a prime suspect who died several years ago, but the case remains open and no arrests have been recorded.

Did anyone in the area at the time remember seeing the boys that afternoon or notice suspicious activity near Tower Road?