In memory of Lauri

Forty years after murder in Macky, plaque will honor CU student

Felix Doligosa Jr., Rocky Mountain News

Saturday, October 14, 2006

BOULDER - A breeze sent yellow and red leaves fluttering near a sandstone rock covered in lichen and green moss.

Alan Cass, shivering from the cold air blowing across a lawn on the CU campus, walked by the rock this week as his thoughts wandered back 40 years to a horrific murder.

Cass worked as a theater manager for Macky Auditorium, where Elaura Jeanne Jaquette was beaten to death.

He has worked for decades to keep alive the memory of a student he never met and sought closure for a tragedy that will never be explained fully.

"It's something that sticks forever," Cass said about the murder of the young woman from western Colorado. Cass is a historian who has kept hundreds of documents and files regarding the murder of Jaquette. "Sometimes, it's fresh as ever."

Today a plaque on the sandstone rock will be dedicated near that same grassy gully on the western edge of the campus, where on a hot summer day in 1966 Jaquette took a break.

The 20-year-old CU student, whom family called Lauri, was waiting for two boys she baby-sat.

The children were at the nearby Flatirons movie theater on the Hill to watch The Amazing Mr. Limpett.

Jaquette passed the time that sunny afternoon eating her lunch and gazing at birds with her binoculars. A zoology major, she was fond of animals.

Several hours after she was last seen, two students walked 17 steps up a spiral staircase of the west tower of Macky and found Jaquette's body in the organ recital room.

Blood was splattered across five of the six walls in the L-shaped room. Smudges of blood reached as high as seven feet above the wooden floor, which was littered with broken glass. A thick plywood board, a 1-gallon jug and ashes were found near Jaquette and the organ.

The smell of window cleaning liquid mixed with the warm stench of the victim's blood as police investigated.

Jaquette was raped and beaten to death. She had multiple fractures to the head and face. Several teeth were knocked out of her jaw. Cuts and bruises covered her neck, throat and buttocks.

Investigators who studied the room concluded she tried to crawl away from her attacker.

The killer swung Jaquette by her feet.

Joseph Dyre Morse, a janitor from Longmont who worked on campus, would later be convicted for the death of Jaquette.

He was sentenced to 888 years in prison.

About 150 yards away from Macky, at the rock in the lawn where Jaquette was last known to be, friends and family will meet today to remember the slain woman.

Today is Jaquette's birthday. She would have been 61.

"It has taken awhile," said her mother Opal Jaquette about the memorial.

"She was such a good student who spent as much time serving the Lord as she did in school," she said.

A brass plaque has been placed on the rock with the victim's name and a quote from poet Theodore Roethke, "It is neither spring nor summer: it is always."

"For the family, there has never been closure," Cass said. "Maybe this plaque will allow that to happen."

A life in a three-ring binder

Opal Jaquette keeps mementos of her daughter in a black three-ring binder.

Often looked at and much cherished, the scrapbook is filled with Elaura's belongings that were taken from three stuffed boxes in her family's home in Fruitvale, just east of Grand Junction.

Elaura's report cards, pages from her school planner, Bible certificates and programs from her piano recitals fill the binder.

"It's so thick, I can't put anything more in it," Opal Jaquette said.

One page holds a wedding anniversary card Elaura bought for her parents. The card is blank.

She bought it in advance and died six months before her parents could celebrate their 22 years of marriage.

"She was always thoughtful," said Opal.

Elaura loved to sing and often performed in solos and duets at church. She had just started skiing and wanted to one day become a biology teacher.

She worked various jobs and earned extra cash one summer by picking fruit from cherry trees to help pay for contact lenses.

"There was never a lazy bone in her body," Opal said.

Opal finds it easy to talk about her daughter because she had to stay strong for the other two children she and her husband, Frank, raised. The couple ran a wholesale flower business.

After their daughter's death, the family moved to Guam to cope with their loss.

"You don't give up," said Opal. "You keep going. Getting away helped."

Twenty-two years later, the Jaquettes moved back to western Colorado.

But the pain lingers for Frank Jaquette, 84. Frank, a former math teacher at Grand Junction High School, chose not to talk about his daughter and will not be attending the plaque ceremony.

"Frank has had a hard time for 40 years," said Opal. "He is not doing well. Enough said."

A death unexplained

After interviewing more than 1,600 people and 30 days after Jaquette's body was found in Macky Auditorium, police arrested Morse on suspicion of first-degree murder.

What led to arrest of the then 37-year-old janitor were his two curious teenage daughters who noticed him carrying a bucket of bloody clothes home on the day Jaquette was killed.

A bloody palm print found on the plywood board near Jaquette matched Morse's hand.

Morse spent the rest of his life in prison and died in March of last year at 77, according to the Colorado Department of Corrections.

Morse maintained his innocence until 1980 when he confessed. He provided little insight into what happened July 6, 1966.

He said he met Jaquette when she worked part time in the CU admissions office and that she rejected his sexual advances in the Macky building.

Morse never said how he lured Jaquette from the lawn where family will remember her today by the sandstone rock memorial.

They will always remember Jaquette sitting on the grass, watching the birds.

"This was one of her favorite places to go," said Cass who still works in Macky and is the curator for the Glenn Miller archive.

"It's the most logical that the memorial will be here than at the site of the tragedy. She spent a lot of time here.

"It is a place of solitude. It's very restful."

To donate the Elaura Jaquette Memorial fund, contact Alan Cass at 303-492-5317.

doligosaf@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2970