Renting your first apartment is an unofficial rite of passage to adulthood, but for a pair of teenage girls, it led to a sudden and violent end.
On October 13, 1970, Denver residents woke up to a sensational headline on the front page of The Denver Post: “Two Teen Girls Murdered, Police Say.” A horrific double murder took place in a mansion-turned-apartment building in Northwest Denver.
Marianne Weaver and Cara Lee Knoche were found dead in a second-floor apartment at 2555 W. 37th Ave. by a friend who stopped by to check on the girls.
The apartment complex was previously a mansion built by prominent lumber baron John Mouat in 1890. Mouat established the John Mouat Lumber Company in 1885, which played a significant role in helping to develop early Denver.
On a brief aside, the Mouat family made the news in 1889, when the Rocky Mountain News reported that his son, Eddie (or Harry) Mouat, was stabbed by a grocer in the Northside. The proprietor was said to have snapped after being harassed by neighborhood boys and run out of the grocery store, brandishing a knife. He stabbed the first boy he saw, which unfortunately, was Eddie Mouat. After the incident, the child was carried back to his home by a neighbor to get his wounds treated. Initially, Rocky published that Mouat’s son died from his wounds, but they published a few days later that Eddie survived and was recovering from his wounds.
For a time, the Mouat residence served as the location for Denver Business University.
The Mouat family moved out of Denver around 1917, and the mansion changed hands over the years. However, by 1970, it had become a rundown apartment house in Northwest Denver, with rent as low as $48 a month, which amounts to $316 today.
According to new reports, John Lechuga, a mutual friend of the two girls, drove by the apartment and noticed something was amiss because he saw Marianne’s car nearby, but the lights upstairs were off.
He found the front door of the second-floor apartment slightly ajar. He called out Cara’s name but received no answer. He turned on the light and discovered Marianne’s fully clothed body on the bed. He also saw a foot sticking out from under the bed.
With no phone in the apartment, Lechuga had to go nearly a mile to contact the police. He also flagged down a passing police car and led the officers back to the scene.
He told the officers, “There’s something awful. There are two dead women there,”
When the police entered the apartment, they discovered that Marianne had died of a gunshot wound to the head, while Knoche had been strangled. A small-caliber shell casing was found on the bed near Marianne’s body, and a kitchen paring knife was on the floor near Knoche.
The police investigation revealed little to no signs of struggle in the apartment. The front door lock was broken, but this may have been because of a previous burglary reported several weeks earlier.
Cara and her roommate, who was out of town when the murders occurred, reported to police that someone had broken into the apartment less than a month ago. One investigator noted marks on the door where a knife or other instrument had been pushed to unlock the door “many times in the past.”
Cara lived in a one-bedroom apartment for about a month with a roommate from out of town.
Marianne recently graduated from Bear Creek High School and attended Arapahoe Community College, while Cara wasn’t enrolled in class. She had been attending Wheat Ridge High School but transferred to Arvada High School the previous school year.
Before her death, Cara celebrated her 17th birthday with plans to move out of the apartment.
Cara’s parents described their daughter in an article after the murder as a person with a solid sense to leave home even though she was 16 years old at the time.
“She’s always been a very independent young person, and it seemed to hit her much earlier than it does most girls,” said Mrs. Richard Knoche in an interview with The Denver Post days after the double homicide.
Cara told her parents that she was planning to re-enroll in high school and had a new job with a new apartment, away from the converted northwest Denver mansion-turned-apartment building.
The investigation ground to a halt; the police were not able to find any solid leads on who killed the two teenage girls.
The Mouat Mansion fell into disrepair, but in the mid-1990s, the building was meticulously restored and transformed into the Lumber Baron Inn. The apartment where Cara and Marianne were killed is dubbed the Valentine’s suite and is a hotspot for paranormal investigators who are attempting to discover the truth of who killed these two girls.
The Lumber Baron is the subject of a Netflix documentary, “28 Days Haunted,” where paranormal investigators stayed in the mansion for 28 straight days.
