Gwendolyn Harris was 27 when she was killed in Denver in the winter of 1980. Family remembered her as a bright, soft-spoken, athletic woman with a perpetual smile who loved life. She was last seen on the evening of December 20, 1980, at the Polo Club Lounge near 15th and Tremont. Her body was found the next day at East 47th Avenue and Andrews Drive in the Montbello neighborhood; she had been fatally stabbed.

For decades the case remained unsolved. Between 2013 and 2018, DNA linked her murder to three other unsolved Denver homicides from 1978–1981, indicating a single perpetrator killed Harris, Madeleine Furey-Livaudais, Dolores Barajas, and Antoinette Parks. Investigative genetic genealogy later pointed to Joe Michael Ervin, who had lived a block from where Harris’s body was found at the time of her killing. Ervin died by suicide in custody in 1981 after his arrest for another killing, and was publicly identified in January 2022 as the man responsible for the string of murders.

Did anyone who knew Gwendolyn or saw her on December 20, 1980, ever come forward with information?