A Nevada prison inmate is fighting extradition to Colorado where he now stands accused of committing the long-unsolved murders of a couple and their seven-year-old daughter I cited in Reasonable Doubt.
The killings of Bruce and Debra Bennett and their daughter Melissa in their Aurora, Colo., home occurred two months after the Hendricks family killings and bore some similarities. Another daughter, age 3, survived the brutal attacks committed with a hammer.
Alex Christopher Ewing, now 58 years old, has until April 15 to file briefs with the Nevada Supreme Court explaining why he shouldn’t be turned over to Colorado authorities. They charged Ewing with the Bennett murders after Nevada authorities uploaded his DNA to a national database. They also accused him of the murder of an Aurora-area woman that occurred a week before the Bennett killings.
Ewing becomes eligible for parole in Nevada two years from now. He’s serving a 40-year sentence there for attempted murder. He beat a man with a slab of granite, escaped while being transported between jails and then beat a couple with an ax handle—all of this occurring several months after the Colorado deaths.
Six years ago Nevada made mandatory the collection of DNA from people convicted there of certain crimes. It was during a nightly sweep of a national DNA database that the Colorado Bureau of Investigation linked Ewing to the Denver-area murders.
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