On a warm June evening in 1949, after University of Colorado engineering student Roy Spore had finished his final exams, he called a women’s dormitory and arranged a blind date with another student, Doris Weaver. Spore’s leg was in a cast, but the couple slowly walked down the hill from Sewall Hall and sat and talked in the moonlight next to Boulder Creek.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, an assailant hit Weaver on the head. Spore yelled for her to run — the last words Weaver or anyone heard him say. Then, the sandy-haired sophomore was bludgeoned to death. His murderer has never been found.

“Roy was a kind, considerate man and had a warm sense of humor,” one of Spore’s fraternity brothers told a newspaper reporter at the time. “He was the last fellow in Boulder who should have met that kind of an end.”

The following day, Spore’s body was recovered approximately one block downstream from where the couple had relaxed at the end of their school year. Weaver’s injury required six stitches, but Spore had 29 separate head wounds, as well as additional wounds on his chest, arms, and hands.

Only six months earlier, Theresa Foster — another CU engineering student — had also been brutally murdered, but in a different location. Boulder sheet-metal worker Joe Sam Walker had been convicted of killing Foster and, at the time of Spore’s murder, was behind bars. Walker maintained his innocence, however, leading to speculation that Foster’s killer and Spore’s killer were one and the same.

Boulder Police and Boulder County Sheriff officials worked together in questioning suspects, but they never had any solid leads. Weaver said the attacker was wearing a dark plaid jacket, but she was unable to give a precise identification. The first suspect to be interrogated was a college student who was said to have been “behaving strangely.”

During the next few weeks, police scrutinized nearly a dozen additional suspects, but none of the men were arrested for murder. Those questioned included a Boulder taxi driver, a couple of carnival workers, a man found sleeping in a barn in Lafayette, a transient from South Dakota, two CU students found hitchhiking near New Orleans, a Denver truck driver, an amnesia victim found in Phoenix, and a Montana mental hospital escapee.

Weaver, meanwhile, gave as full an account as she could to a coroner’s jury, then transferred to another university to leave the horror behind her.

Not much else was known to the public on the case until 1954. According to newspaper reports, Harry E. Lum — a former CU engineering student and then a patient in a Los Angeles mental hospital — allegedly confessed to the crime in a letter to one of his sisters. The sister and her law enforcement husband then notified the Los Angeles Police Department.

In the newspaper accounts, Boulder authorities noted that Lum was not among the suspects originally questioned. But they discounted the man’s confession because he claimed to have attacked Spore with a rock, while Weaver had indicated that the weapon might have been a metal pipe.

The former mental patient is now deceased, and Spore’s murder has never been solved.

Carol Taylor and Silvia Pettem write on history for the Daily Camera, alternating weeks. Write Silvia at the Daily Camera P.O. Box 591, Boulder 80306 or email pettem@earthlink.net , and write Carol at boulderhistorylibrarian@gmail.com.