Sleeping Dad’s Photo Awakens Children’s Long Quest for Justice

Lawrence Ocrant looked serene, his left arm stretched out across the bed, his right fist tucked below his chin. It was almost as though he was sucking his thumb.

The 52-year-old stockbroker was dead, a bullet through his head, the gun in his right hand. He was found that Sunday morning in 1984 by his wife, Sueann, who said she had come in to wake him. Police called it suicide, and so did nearly everyone else.

Then an old Father’s Day snapshot turned up that would help transform the Ocrant case into a murder mystery, force a police chief to resign, and set this affluent Denver suburb abuzz with gossip and speculation, cries of cover-up and counter-cries of political witch hunt.

The photo showed Ocrant sleeping in the same position as his body was found--left arm stretched out across the bed, right fist tucked almost under his chin.

To his two grown children, it was the clincher. How could a man who had just shot himself look as though he was alive and sleeping peacefully? How could he shoot himself in the head and then tuck the gun under his chin?

The photograph set son Andrew and daughter Sara on a quest for justice that was finally vindicated in March when a federal civil jury ruled that Ocrant had been murdered and police had covered it up.

Police have made no arrests and insist that they have no suspects, and Greenwood Village’s first homicide remains a mystery.

But some officers privately called it their department’s dirty little secret.

The police chief himself helped Sueann clean up the scene, keeping the coroner out for 20 minutes. Ocrant’s body was cremated, the gun and bullet melted down. Ocrant tested positive for gunpowder residue, and the case was quickly closed.

Attorneys for Ocrant’s children have said that if it wasn’t a suicide, it was homicide, but since the evidence was destroyed, there was no case.

Ocrant had left Nancy, his wife of 20 years, for Sueann Adair, his secretary at the Denver investment firm where he was administrator. He lavished clothes and jewels on the former cheerleader, and they moved into a $600,000 house with six bedrooms and a three-car garage.

His wife dabbled in politics, first with the homeowners association and then on the board of assessment. She became friends with council members, and later with Police Chief Darryl Gates (unrelated to former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates).

Then Sueann started telling her political friends that her husband was a wife-beater. Ocrant began to talk of divorce and put the house up for sale.

Gates showed up at Ocrant’s home on May 20, 1984, shortly after he was notified of the death. To an officer, he referred to it as a homicide. But by the time Ocrant’s body was carried away two hours later, Gates had decided it was a suicide.

The 1980s were turbulent times in Greenwood Village politics. Some police officers wanted Gates out, and there was whispering about the Ocrant case.

In 1989 the Greenwood Village City Council ordered a sweeping investigation into alleged improprieties in the Police Department, including the investigation of Ocrant’s death. Three months later Gates resigned.

Then a grand jury began looking at the city’s problems and soon learned of the circumstances involving Ocrant’s death. The jury would neither indict nor clear anyone. Its report was immediately sealed under state law.

Ocrant’s son, Andrew, who is now 35, went to the Legislature and, in a rare move, got it unsealed. The report concluded that Ocrant had been murdered.

But because most of the evidence was gone, and the statute of limitations had expired on people who may have tampered with it, there was no way to prosecute, the grand jury said.

Sueann Ocrant denied killing her husband and said the grand jury probe was sloppy and incomplete.

Sara Stump, Ocrant’s 36-year-old daughter, refused early on to believe the grand jury’s conclusion of foul play. But after she discovered the Father’s Day photograph, she began to question other details of the investigation.

“My father never woke up before noon on weekends. For him to wake up, get out of bed naked and go downstairs to get his gun, get back in bed, pull the covers up and shoot himself . . . it was preposterous,” she said.

Experts told the children and their attorney, Dan Mahoney, that most people who kill themselves aren’t found with a gun in their hand, and that it would be almost impossible for Ocrant to have shot himself, although he tested positive for residue.

The only person known to have been with Ocrant that day was Sueann. His death left her with nearly $1 million in assets and life insurance. The day after he died, she took the house off the market.

Moving in a circle of powerful political friends, she was elected to the City Council, and she supported those politicians and officials who supported her in her time of need.

She bought a 20-foot boat and puttered around Denver-area reservoirs. She named it the “Margin Call,” a stockbroker’s term for calling in an investment.

Angered by the lack of progress, Ocrant’s children filed a federal lawsuit against Gates, the city and investigators, alleging that their civil rights had been violated by the inadequate investigation.

Sueann was dropped from the lawsuit after she filed for bankruptcy in Washington. She said she had spent her inheritance. She and her attorney declined to comment on the case, acknowledging that police could still file charges.

The federal jury heard 10 days of testimony in March. Police admitted that there was no murder investigation, no evidence left, and no one to arrest. Jurors decided that there was a police cover-up and that Ocrant did not commit suicide. They awarded his children $2.3 million in damages.

Carmella Gutierrez, forewoman of the jury, said the photo of Ocrant sleeping and the photo of the body helped persuade the jury that Ocrant had been murdered.

“I said, ‘Something is fishy here,’ ” she told reporters at the time.

Daniel Satriana Jr., the lawyer for Gates, investigators and the city, argued that evidence proved that Ocrant killed himself, probably because of financial troubles, marital difficulties and deep depression.

He says that the grand jury probe was a political witch hunt, that the investigation was conducted properly, and that the city plans to appeal the verdict.