I Grew Up in the Shadow of a Neighborhood Killer. He May Have Finally Been Caught.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast
Matthew Sullivan was a young boy in Aurora, Colorado, when the Hammer Man killed his victims in 1984. As police charge a suspect, Sullivan confronts some old, terrifying demons.
To anyone living in the suburban boomtown of Aurora, Colorado in the 1980s, the horror story is familiar: at some point after midnight on the night on January 16, 1984, on a quiet cul-de-sac in a newer housing development near the Aurora Mall, an intruder armed with a hammer entered the home of Bruce and Debra Bennett.
They were a young couple with two young daughters, aged 7 and 3, and they had recently moved to Aurora to raise their girls after the 27-year-old Bruce wrapped up a stint in the Navy.
As of now there’s no way to know the exact sequence of events that happened in the house that night, but the whole family was likely asleep when the intruder slipped in.