In January 1984, fear descended over the Denver metropolitan area as an unknown predator entered homes and attacked his victims with a hammer.
On January 10, 50-year-old Patricia Smith was found sexually assaulted and murdered inside her Lakewood home. Less than a week later, another horrifying crime scene was discovered in Aurora. Bruce and Debra Bennett and their seven-year-old daughter, Melissa, had been bludgeoned to death inside their family home. Melissa had also been sexually assaulted. The couple’s three-year-old daughter, Vanessa, was found gravely injured—but alive.
Despite an extensive investigation, the man responsible for the crimes remained unidentified for more than three decades. Evidence was preserved as investigators waited for forensic science to catch up with the killer they could not find.
That breakthrough finally came through advances in DNA testing and genetic genealogy. The evidence pointed to Alex Christopher Ewing, a violent offender who had been imprisoned in Nevada since the mid-1980s following another brutal hammer attack. Ewing was extradited to Colorado and placed on trial nearly 40 years after the murders.
In 2021, a jury convicted Ewing of murdering Bruce, Debra, and Melissa Bennett. The following year, he was convicted of the rape and murder of Patricia Smith. He received multiple life sentences, finally giving the victims’ families the justice they had been denied for decades.
This episode examines the terrifying crimes of the man known as the Hammer Killer, the remarkable survival of Vanessa Bennett, the cold case investigation that lasted nearly four decades, and the forensic technology that finally exposed Alex Ewing as one of Colorado’s most vicious murderers.
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