Richard Barbee wants to confess to a murder, but he says no one will listen. Matthew Mirabal is serving a life term for a murder he says he didn’t commit.
Authorities say there is good reason to be skeptical that Barbee is the one who strangled and decapitated a woman in 1999: The real killer — Mirabal — is already locked up.
Detective Steve Ainsworth of the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office said that for whatever reason, Barbee is trying to help Mirabal, a fellow prisoner, go free after Mirabal murdered his own wife. In part, Ainsworth said, Barbee has nothing to lose by confessing to a crime he never committed. He’s never leaving prison anyway.
Barbee, 38, said he has 59 years left to serve on a 74-year prison term for shooting a man who had picked him up in 2002 while he was hitchhiking. Barbee first contacted The Denver Post in a letter.
“I strongly believe that someone else is in prison for it,” Barbee wrote, referring to the September 1999 murder of a Longmont woman. “My days on this earth will be cut short. Before my time comes to meet my God, I’d like to do so with a clear conscience knowing that I tried to right my wrongs to the best of my ability.”
In a phone interview Tuesday, Barbee said he kidnapped a woman in Boulder County; put on gloves that he found in the car to hide his identity; forced her to drive to a secluded spot in the woods; strangled her and then cut and sawed her head off with a 12-inch serrated knife. He never even knew her name, he said.
After years of sobriety in prison and afflicted with a disease that left tumors crawling up his spine, he contacted everyone he believed would help him atone for the murder, Barbee said.
“I wrote The Innocence Project, Centurion Ministries, The Exoneration Project, the public defender, the Boulder DA, and the (Colorado) Attorney General,” Barbee wrote. “But none responded.”
One person Barbee hadn’t reached out to was Ainsworth, who investigated the Sept. 26, 1999, murder of Natalie Mirabal in Longmont.
Late at night, Matthew Mirabal, then 21, said his wife went grocery shopping. Matthew Mirabal awoke around 3 a.m. and, realizing his wife hadn’t returned home yet, called friends, family and police, he said in an interview Tuesday.
Natalie Mirabal’s red car was discovered in the parking lot of a nearby grocery store. Hikers found her remains in a remote area of Lefthand Canyon. She had been strangled and decapitated.
Evidence didn’t point to a stranger, Ainsworth said, but directly at Matthew Mirabal, who was having an affair with his brother’s wife. Mirabal had recently taken out a $250,000 life insurance policy on his wife only because the insurance company refused to let him take out a $1 million policy on her, Ainsworth said.
A cut in the left-hand glove found in Natalie’s car, which was stained with her blood on the outside, had Matthew Mirabal’s blood on the inside. There was a cut on his left hand in the exact location.
Mirabal and Barbee are being held at the same prison, Limon Correctional Facility.
Contrary to what he stated in his letter, Barbee acknowledged that he knew the name of the woman he had killed and that her husband was at Limon. In fact, he had once worked with Mirabal in the kitchen.
Barbee said if investigators are truly after justice, they will check for his fingerprints on the trunk of the red car, which he says he touched before he put on the gloves.
Mirabal proclaimed his innocence in his wife’s murder and said he hopes investigators will try to confirm Barbee’s account, including checking to see if hairs found in his wife’s car were left by Barbee.
“If it was a cold case, they would try to solve it,” Mirabal said. “But they see it as a case that has already been solved.”
He’s right, Ainsworth said.
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206, kmitchell@denverpost.com or twitter.com/kirkmitchell, denverpost.com/coldcases
