A storage hunter seeking a cop car light stumbled upon something far more significant in a storage unit.
Rick Ratzlaff bought an abandoned unit for $50 in 2017 after its contents piqued his interest.
Storage units are auctioned off to the highest bidder when the original owner fails to pay the fees. Ratzlaff certainly got more than he anticipated.
Upon opening the unit, one of the first things he saw was a collection of envelopes labeled ‘evidence’.
Initially, Ratzlaff didn’t think much of it, but as he continued to explore the unit, he discovered increasingly disturbing items.
“There was a lot of police lights off cop cars, and I wanted one. So I kept bidding on it until I got it,” the Colorado resident told KKTV at the time.
“I noticed envelopes that said ‘evidence’ on them. At first I didn’t think it was that big until I started pulling out shell casings and hatchets.”
“What really fazed me was when I pulled out bloody clothes,” he added.
He eventually realized that the items pertained to a decade-old cold case involving the death of a teenage girl.
In August 2006, Candace Hiltz, 17, was found fatally shot in her family’s home. The case remains unsolved to this day.
Ratzlaff alerted the police about his discovery, leading to the revelation that the unit had once been rented by Sheriff Lieutenant Detective Robert Dodd.
The Colorado Bureau of Investigations investigated the situation, and Dodd was placed on administrative leave during the inquiry.
A year later, Dodd was found guilty of misdemeanor abuse of public records for altering a homicide case file and received two petty counts of second-degree official misconduct for failing to properly handle potential evidence. He was sentenced to 15 days in jail.
Candace Hiltz’s mother Dolores expressed dissatisfaction with the brief sentence, calling it ‘a tap on the wrist’, according to The Pueblo Chieftain.
Though the Hiltz family believed Dodd deserved more time in prison, they considered his conviction ‘a small win’.
Despite Dodd’s conviction, Candace’s killer remains at large, potentially due to Dodd’s actions.
In 2020, a judge who denied Dodd’s appeal of his evidence misconduct failure conviction noted that Dodd had ‘never obtained DNA tests for any of the items in the storage unit,’ resulting in the loss of ‘potential relevant evidence in criminal prosecutions’.