6 westword.com WESTWORD JUNE 11-17, 2026 | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | history,” Epstein says. “You have a quadruple murder and a 25-year veteran cop charged with the crime. He was facing the death penalty, and he had not a single parking ticket or anything like that in his entire life. Why would he do something like this? Why would his own former colleagues charge him with something like this? The police department was on trial on both sides of the case.” Investigators believed the deadly robbery must have been an inside job; only a current or former security guard would have the knowledge necessary to maneuver the bank’s security procedures. Among the guards who could have committed the crime, King fi t the bill. He matched the physical description of the suspect, had access to the fi rearm and am- munition used in the killings, and lacked a solid alibi. Perhaps most damningly, King upgraded to a larger bank safe-deposit box on June 17 — the day after the robbery — and returned to the box six times in the follow- ing two weeks. After King’s arrest, police didn’t fi nd a single dollar inside, nor any items large enough to justify the upgrade, Epstein reports. King was in substantial debt and had worsening health issues that made work diffi cult. But beyond needing the money, he had a personal score to settle with United Bank. During his time as a guard, King criticized the bank’s security protocols and recommended improvements that went ig- nored. He disapproved of the company’s recent decision to disarm guards, choosing to carry a weapon on duty even without authoriza- tion, according to Epstein. In February 1990, King was reprimanded for refusing to let a moving crew into a secure area without confi rming their clearance. “Somebody was trying to teach somebody a lesson,” Epstein speculates. “[King] had gone from graduating fi rst in his class as a police cadet and thinking he would one day become the chief of police, to having such a lackluster career. He failed the lieutenant’s exam, he was told he didn’t have the chops to be a lieutenant. ... Every time he tried to improve security at the bank, he was told basically to mind his own business. “It makes sense that this man wanted to prove to all of these people — both at the Denver Police Department and United Bank — that he was right and they were wrong. That the life he was forced to live was their fault, not his.” The story adds up, but there was no physi- cal evidence to back it. After killing the security guards, the perpetrator took all of the security footage tapes that would have captured the crime. No fi ngerprints or DNA evidence were left at the scene. And both the murder weapon and the stolen money were never found. During King’s trial, prosecutors relied heavily on eyewitness testimony from the bank tellers, which proved unreliable. The suspect had obscured his face, wearing a fedora, sunglasses, a cheek bandage and a mustache that could have been real or fake. King’s defense attorney highlighted the effectiveness of the disguise by showing witnesses a photo of a mystery man wearing the same accessories. None of the witnesses could identify the man. In a dramatic gamble, the attorney revealed that the disguised man was the famous movie star, Harrison Ford. After nine days of delib- eration — the longest in state history at the time — jurors found King not guilty. Many of the jurors would go on to say they believed King was the killer, but that the prose- cution failed to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. “Anybody who was on the police and prosecution side of this case, it’s kind of haunted them all these years,” Epstein says. “What they believe was a guilty man escaped the grip of law.” King died from dementia in May 2013, at 76 years old. He maintained his innocence to the end, taking whatever information he may have had to the grave. Now the city can only speculate on the many unanswered questions left behind. Inexplicable alarm Four hours before the killer arrived at United Bank, something strange occurred that prosecutors never managed to explain. Just after 5 a.m., one of the bank’s motion- activated alarms was set off in a record stor- age area. Someone in the security monitor room manually turned off the motion detec- tor without investigating the cause of the alarm, violating standard protocol. Then, at 9:33 a.m. — minutes after all four guards had been murdered — the motion detector was rearmed, Epstein reports. This discovery plagued the investigation. “Detectives couldn’t make heads or tails of these pieces of evidence. Not on Father’s Day. Not ever,” the book notes. King was at his Golden home at 5 a.m., so who was lurking inside the bank? Why would someone in se- curity deactivate the motion detector? Why would the killer later rearm it? “I don’t have the foggiest clue,” Ep- stein says. “It’s inexplicable. There are a lot of things that are hard to explain.” King’s defense team used the alarm incident to insinu- ate that one of the murdered guards working that morning — Mankoff or McCullom — had colluded with their soon-to-be killer, helping to plan and execute the robbery before being double-crossed. Both of the men had taken the weekend guard job to help pay down considerable debts. Another former bank guard seemed a more likely suspect than King. Paul Yocum was a weekend guard at United Bank from 1985 to 1990. His em- ployment ended after being charged with stealing nearly $30,000 from the bank. He went to trial and was found not guilty, but the accusation was enough to force him out. On the morning of the Father’s Day Massacre, Yocum’s neighbor told police she saw him heading toward downtown holding a duf- fel bag, wearing a hat and sunglasses. After investigators questioned him about the rob- bery, Yocum was caught trying to dispose of a bag full of incriminating evidence, Epstein reports. At Yocum’s home, police found a stockpile of fi rearms, burnt remnants of papers with “United Bank of Denver” printed on the top, and a diary detailing Yocum’s outrage over being falsely accused of theft and vowing to “get even eventually.” But investigators ultimately concluded that Yocum did not match the physical description of the robber provided by witnesses. A different suspect confessed to com- mitting the massacre: Serial bank robber Dewey Baker wrote three letters to King’s lawyers during the trial while he was im- prisoned in California, taking credit for the Denver robbery, Epstein reports. “I don’t want that poor guy’s life on my mind,” one of the letters read, referring to King’s po- tential death sentence. Baker was out on parole at the time of the crime. Beforehand, he had reportedly told a friend he had “a big job in Denver” coming up. Investigators found Baker an implausible suspect be- cause he was an outsider lack- ing the internal knowledge they believed was necessary to pull off the Denver heist. Baker later recanted his con- fession. If either of the men were involved, their time to face justice has passed. Yocum died of a heart attack in 1992, four months after King’s acquittal. Baker died in 2017. Unsolvable cold case It’s not unheard of for Colorado crimes to be solved decades after the fact. Nearly thirty years after Terri Turachak was murdered in her Denver home, her killer was fi nally convicted this year. The Coldest Case continued from page 5 continued on page 8 The massacre remains among Denver’s deadliest mass shootings in recent history. James King had no criminal history at the time of his arrest for the quadruple murder. Left to right: Scott McCarthy, Todd Wilson, William McCullom and Phillip Mankoff. NATIONAL GUN VIOLENCE MEMORIAL DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, WH2129 DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, WH2129
