Kenia Monge was killed by Travis Forbes, a 31-year-old Denver bakery operator who strangled the 19-year-old in the back of his delivery van after offering her a ride home from a downtown nightclub on April 1, 2011. He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The Night She Disappeared
Monge, a recent Cherry Creek High School graduate, left the 24K Lounge in Denver’s LoDo neighborhood around 12:30 a.m. on April 1, 2011. She left in a hurry, without her purse or cell phone. After leaving the club, she was seen walking with a homeless man before accepting a ride from Forbes, who was driving a white 1999 Chevrolet van he used to deliver gluten-free granola bars for his bakery.
Forbes later told police he had found Monge drunk and incoherent near the nightclub and offered her a ride home. He claimed she asked to stop for a cigarette, so he pulled into a Conoco on the 500 block of Speer Boulevard around 3:15 a.m., where he said she walked off with another man. Investigators would eventually prove that account was a lie.
How Forbes Became the Suspect
Monge’s stepfather found a text message from Forbes on her recovered cell phone, which drew police attention to him early. Forbes stuck to the gas station story, but the evidence began to contradict him.
Detectives obtained surveillance footage from the bakery where Forbes rented space. Cameras captured him entering the owner’s office the night after Monge disappeared and unplugging the surveillance system. A second camera he apparently didn’t know about recorded him wheeling a cooler into the building and placing it inside a freezer. When detectives searched the back of his van, they found an overwhelming smell of bleach and new carpet laid over the floor.
On May 4, 2011, Forbes was picked up in Austin, Texas, for driving a stolen car. Police questioned him for hours. He didn’t confess, and investigators still lacked the physical evidence they needed to charge him.
The Fort Collins Attack That Broke the Case
The break came from a second crime. On July 5, 2011, Lydia Tillman, a 30-year-old sommelier, was attacked in her Fort Collins apartment by a stranger after she returned home from a Fourth of July fireworks celebration. Her attacker sexually assaulted and strangled her, beat her head, shattered her jaw, and left her for dead. He then poured bleach over her body and throughout the apartment before setting it on fire.
Tillman survived. Despite her injuries, she leaped from her second-story window and reached an ambulance that had just arrived. She suffered a stroke and spent more than five weeks in a coma.
The bleach was meant to destroy DNA, but Tillman had fought back. Detectives recovered DNA from under her fingernails and matched it to Travis Forbes. He was arrested in July 2011, and the parallels to Monge’s disappearance were immediate: the same man, the same use of bleach to destroy evidence, the same pattern of violence against women.
The Confession and the Body
Facing a potential death penalty, Forbes agreed to cooperate. He confessed to strangling Kenia Monge in the back of his van and said he had stored her body in a freezer at the bakery before burying her. On September 7, 2011, Forbes led detectives to a shallow grave under a cottonwood tree in Weld County, near Keenesburg, roughly 40 miles northeast of Denver.1Denver District Attorney’s Office. Joint News Release – Body Found
Because of decomposition over the five months since her death, the coroner could not determine a specific cause of death. The manner of death was ruled a homicide; the official cause remains undetermined.
The Guilty Plea and Sentence
On September 26, 2011, Forbes pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in Kenia Monge’s death. Under the plea agreement, the Denver District Attorney’s Office agreed not to seek the death penalty, and Forbes received the mandatory sentence: life in the Colorado Department of Corrections without any possibility of parole.2Denver District Attorney’s Office. Guilty Plea in Kenia Monge Case
Forbes also pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree murder, sexual assault, and arson for the attack on Lydia Tillman. For those crimes he received a 48-year prison sentence with five years of mandatory parole, to be served consecutively after his life sentence.3CBS Colorado. Forbes Pleads Guilty In Fort Collins, Says ‘I’m Evil’ Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey said prosecutors wanted the additional years stacked on top of the life sentence to ensure Forbes could never be released under any circumstances.
Who Travis Forbes Was
Forbes had a criminal history stretching back to his teens. As a juvenile in Fort Collins, he was arrested for breaking into sixteen homes and businesses. He later said publicly that he had spent three years in prison on a burglary conviction and had been addicted to drugs, stealing painkillers from dentists’ offices. By 2011 he had reinvented himself as a small business owner running a bakery, but the pattern of criminal behavior had not stopped.
Without the DNA Lydia Tillman preserved by fighting her attacker, Forbes might never have been connected to Kenia Monge. Her survival is the reason the question of who killed Monge has an answer.