By Kirk Mitchell
The Denver Post
POSTED: 01/03/2010 01:00:00 AM MST
In this photo taken Friday, Jan. 1, 2010, Fort Collins Police investigate a shooting scene in an alley next to the Fort Collins Downtown Transit Center in Fort Collins, Colo. Police shot and killed man suspected in a kidnapping. (Fort Collins Coloradoan | Rich Abrahamson)
Julie Ann Kilgore says she is not sure how she managed to survive.
When her boyfriend, Dennis Gene Cox, 50, kidnapped her at her home at gunpoint Tuesday afternoon, his intention was to eventually shoot her.
Through four days and three nights of being tied, handcuffed, threatened with a gun and a Taser, shunted among various hiding places and repeatedly raped, the 48-year-old Brighton nurse managed to stay calm and never antagonized her captor.
Finally, on the morning of New Year's Day, after sleepless nights dreading her fate, she heard Cox announce it was time to shoot himself in the head. In a soft voice, Kilgore made a simple plea.
"I said, 'I haven't done anything (to escape),' " Kilgore said Saturday in a telephone interview.
"I've been good," she told him.
He agreed, and then said he had changed his mind about shooting her — but not about killing himself. She then coaxed him to leave their Laramie hotel room.
Her subsequent escape and Cox's death that night after being shot by Fort Collins police ended an on-again, off-again relationship that had spanned 35 years.
Junior high sweethearts
Cox and Kilgore first stole glances at each other across a cafeteria at North Junior High School in Brighton in 1975. She was 13; he was 15.
"He was a grade above mine, and he would sit with his two friends and stare at me sitting with my two friends," Kilgore said.
Several times during high school they were boyfriend and girlfriend, but she always ended up breaking up with him so she could date other boys.
After he graduated, he proposed marriage and they made plans. But when she finally refused, he joined the Marines, he told her during the kidnapping.
Though Kilgore wouldn't see Cox for decades after he moved to Durango, he would call every few years and tell her they were friends and he loved her forever.
In Durango, Cox worked at his father's music store, married three women and got arrested 41 times for crimes including domestic violence, drug possession and drunken driving.
Kilgore never married and became a nurse, working for many years in emergency rooms, caring for trauma patients. Remaining calm in such stressful circumstances likely prepared her for her ordeal the past several days and saved her life, said her mother, Colleen Kilgore.
At a 2008 high school reunion, Cox, just released from parole after a menacing conviction, and Kilgore met again. A romance quickly blossomed.
He moved to Brighton to live with her and worked in construction. He confessed only that he had been arrested a few times, once after breaking a man's nose during a fight.
Cox doted on Kilgore, waking early each morning to make her coffee, hot tea and honey, and pack her lunch for work. They went camping, rode on his motorcycle and read together.
"I loved him, and he loved me," she said.
Kilgore said she didn't want to discuss what went wrong with their relationship other than to say they argued occasionally. After an argument last Sunday, she told him to go to his parents' home in Durango for a few days to give her some space.
"He thought I was ending our relationship," she said.
"He had this vacant look"
On Tuesday afternoon, she was babysitting her 7-year-old niece at home when Cox, who had driven in his mother's car from Durango, picked the lock to her house and confronted her with a .45-caliber handgun.
"He said, 'This can go one of two ways. You can come with me willingly, or I'll put a gun to your head and put a bullet in your head,' " Kilgore quoted Cox as saying.
"He had this vacant look I've never seen before."
Cox agreed to bring her back home in 15 minutes. Kilgore didn't want to leave her niece alone, but she also didn't want to put her in harm's way. She told her niece to lock the doors.
But when Cox took Kilgore to her Oldsmobile Bravada, he handcuffed her, put her in the back seat, duct-taped her mouth and tied her ankles with string. He forced her to lie down and tied a rope around her waist that he secured to the seat so she couldn't get up.
Cox showed her a Taser and his gun.
"He said he didn't have anything to lose. I had pushed him over the edge. He didn't want to go on any more."
Cox threw Kilgore's cellphone out the window.
They drove around for hours until he stopped at a hotel in Wheat Ridge. But when they entered the room, she told him only "riffraff" stayed there, and he took her to a nicer hotel. Once inside their new room, he closed the blinds and handcuffed himself to Kilgore.
"There was sexual assault throughout the whole time," she said.
When they left the hotel room the next day, she noticed that he had left the handcuffs behind.
Over the next two days, they went to two restaurants. Both times, he warned her that he would shoot the lock of the bathroom door if she locked it.
A few times she thought about snatching his gun, but she knew she would have to use it on him or he would wrestle it away and kill her.
Seeing their story on TV
He was sometimes considerate: buying her carrot juice, loosening her handcuffs and warning her to duck behind the bed if police broke into their hotel and bullets flew.
Wednesday they drove to a Fort Collins motel, but 10 minutes after they arrived and turned on the TV in their room, a news story came on about her suspected kidnapping. He ordered her into his 1993 Ford Taurus, and they drove to Laramie.
He rented a room at the Ramada Inn, but when they saw another news program about them, they moved the car a block away and removed the license plates.
Cox promised her he would release her the next day at 10 a.m. But when the time came, he told her he was keeping her an extra day.
She wasn't naive. She had seen shooting victims in the emergency room and was aware what might happen.
She tried different approaches to coax him into releasing her. He told her he couldn't spend the rest of his life in prison.
Kilgore told him things that she loved about him. He reciprocated.
" 'My whole life all I ever wanted to do was live with you,' " she said he told her.
He wrote a will and told her he didn't want a funeral.
The next morning, as 10 a.m. approached, Cox confessed that his original plan was to shoot her. He said he was going into the corner to shoot himself. She pleaded for him not to.
He told her to wait 15 minutes after he left before doing anything. After he closed the door behind him, she crept to the door and silently locked it and waited 5 minutes before trying to call police. The phone didn't work.
She carefully peeked through the curtain and saw a cleaning cart and two cleaning ladies. She banged on the window.
"I started yelling, 'Please help me, please call 911,' " Kilgore said.
She opened the door and ran to the office. When she heard a car driving up, she hid under a desk. But it was a Laramie police officer. She called her father, hysterical.
Cox left his car and somehow made it back to Fort Collins. About 4 p.m., police shot and killed Cox.
On Saturday, the Larimer County coroner's office said Cox died of multiple gunshot wounds.
"I need time to heal mentally," Kilgore said. "I'm still really numb."
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
Police fatally shoot kidnapping suspect
Published: Jan. 2, 2010 at 1:19 AM
FORT COLLINS, Colo., Jan. 2 (UPI) -- A Wyoming man suspected of kidnapping his ex-fiance was fatally shot Friday in a confrontation with police officers, authorities said.
Dennis Gene Cox, 50, had pointed a pistol at officers who recognized him near a bus stop in Fort Collins about 4 p.m., police told The Denver Post. He died at Poudre Valley Hospital.
Cox's former fiance, Julie Ann Kilgore, 48, of Brighton, who had been missing since Tuesday, was found safe Friday morning at a hotel in Laramie where she had been held at gunpoint, police said.
Brighton police spokesman John Bradley told the Post a hotel clerk called police and said the "Colorado kidnapping victim was with her."
Kilgore fled the hotel room after Cox left Friday morning, police said, without elaborating.
Cox has a long criminal history, with kidnapping and sexual assault among the 41 charges he has faced in Colorado since 1986, the Post reported.
Three Fort Collins officers involved in the shooting were put on routine administrative leave during an investigation.
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