The Horrific Murder of Sharon Copp
A local woman is heinously killed, no one is ever charged with the crime.
The murder of local housewife Sharon Marie Copp is, to this day, one of the strangest cases out of Pueblo, Colorado, and one of the grisliest murders ever to happen in the state. Currently, the case is an open homicide and has puzzled investigators for over 40 years.
Sharon Marie Copp was a 34-year-old mother of three little girls from Pueblo who was estranged from her third husband, Donald Copp, at the time of her murder. A fisherman visiting the Pueblo Reservoir on August 16, 1976, caught more than he wanted when he discovered a plastic bag full of human body parts. A woman’s handless arms, legs, and severed breasts were in the bag, and as the day went on, the rest of her body was found 20 miles on the other side of Pueblo, in pieces—she had been dismembered, her head cut off, and her body mutilated after her death.
It was determined she died of fractures to the skull and had been tortured and sexually assaulted before being killed. Parts from golf clubs were found in the bags with the body parts, and investigators suspected they had been used to beat her to death.
There was little to go on ... Sharon had been reported missing by her mother and had last been seen at a bar a couple of nights before her body was found. In the process of a divorce from her third husband, she had been living in an apartment with her three little girls, whose father was her second husband.
A sketch released by police a few days later based on a man some late-night fisherman saw near the reservoir resembled a California killer, Edmund Kemper, who had killed his victims in a way that closely resembled Sharon Copp’s murder. He was ruled out due to being in a mental institution in California at the time of the murder. Donald Copp was ruled out as a suspect at the time, as he was listed as incarcerated at the Pueblo County Jail for a driving violation; however, it was later discovered he had been on a work-release program at the time of her murder.
Several suspects have been considered over the almost 45 years since Sharon Copp was killed. The list includes known serial killers, Ottis Edward Toole, Henry Lee Lucas, and Richard Turner. As DNA testing has advanced, the evidence has been retested, but no new suspects have been identified.
The thought by many involved in the investigation was that Sharon was killed by Donald Copp, who was seen out in bars the night she went missing, not sitting in jail. He died after a car accident in the mid-1980s and no new evidence has been uncovered since then to directly tie him to the crime.
To this day, there is very little evidence to go on in this almost-half-a-century-old crime. It's one of the most gruesome, horrible, and unusual crimes the area has ever seen. The body was left in more than one place, clues are scarce, the whole thing is bizarre, and remains an open homicide.
The Pueblo Police Department and Pueblo Crime Stoppers are still hoping to one day solve this case, as they do with all cold cases here in Colorado. Anyone with information related to this case is asked to call (719)-542-7867.