In the winter of 2000, in a Colorado suburb still reeling from a notorious mass murder, a shocking double homicide in a sandwich shop would devastate the community anew.
It was the eve of Valentine’s Day, February 13th, and sixteen-year-old high school sophomore Stephanie Hart-Grizzell had spent the Sunday evening doing homework before saying good night to her mother and heading into her bedroom.
What Stephanie’s mother Kelly didn’t know, however, was that Stephanie wasn’t planning on going to sleep just yet. Instead, she snuck out of the house, got into her car, and drove the short distance to the Subway restaurant on Coal Mine Avenue in Littleton. Her fifteen-year-old boyfriend, Nick Kunselman, was working there that night, and it was almost time for the end of his shift. She wanted to be there when he got off work.
Nick and Stephanie had been inseparable since middle school, and only grew closer as they got older. Both were students at Columbine High School, a name familiar to most Americans as the site of a deadly mass shooting that occurred in April of 1999, in which students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered twelve of their classmates and one teacher before turning the guns on themselves. The town of Littleton, Colorado, unsurprisingly, had not come anywhere close to recovering from the tragedy; and in fact, consoling one another in the aftermath had been one of the things that caused Nick and Stephanie’s relationship to blossom from a close friendship to a deep and adoring romance.
Stephanie arrived at the Subway between ten and eleven p.m. and parked her car out front, then went inside the restaurant to see Nick. What happened next is still a frustrating and grisly mystery.
At around one in the morning, another employee of the store happened to be driving past it, and noticed that all the interior lights were still on, even though the shop was supposed to have closed three hours before. Concerned, the employee entered the establishment, and found both Nick Kunselman and Stephanie Hart-Grizzell lying in a pool of blood behind the counter. They had been shot to death.
In a heartbreaking turn of events, Stephanie’s mother Kelly had had no idea that her daughter was not at home, and saw news of the double murder on television on the morning of Valentine’s Day. To her horror, she spotted Stephanie’s car in the Subway parking lot in the news footage only minutes before police showed up on her doorstep to report that Stephanie had been one of the victims.
The motive for the double murder was uncertain; no money was taken from the shop, indicating that robbery had not been a factor. Witnesses came forward and described a man they had seen hanging around the restaurant at some time after the murder; the suspect was described as a white male in his late teens or early twenties with blond-ish hair, standing about five-foot-seven, weighing around one-hundred-sixty pounds, and wearing flared jeans, tennis shoes, a black baseball cap, and a black coat with a red lining (or a red t-shirt). Two composite sketches of the suspect were produced, but resulted in no significant developments. Once the case made national news, there was also a rash of confessions, none of which were found to have any validity; likewise, DNA and fingerprinting evidence led nowhere.
One possible lead that investigators looked into was the persistent rumor in Littleton that some employees of this particular Subway restaurant had been operating a drug ring with the knowledge of the franchise owner and management; and in fact Kelly Grizzell later sued the franchise owner, alleging that drug sales were going on in the store with management’s knowledge, citing as evidence (among other things) that the surveillance cameras in the restaurant were not functional. The case was eventually dismissed in favor of the franchise owner, however, and despite thoroughly investigating the drug connection, police have so far been unable to find evidence of a link.
The case is, at this writing, more than two decades old, and authorities are still hopeful that it will be solved. On the twentieth anniversary of the murder, the reward for information pertaining to the case was increased to twelve-thousand dollars.
Nick and Stephanie were buried together on the scenic slope of a Colorado mountain, and every Valentine’s Day, family and friends of the couple gather there to bring flowers and throw Frisbees in their honor.
Crime Immemorial 