The Haunting Story of 10-year-old Jessica Ridgeway | Colorado Cold Case

The Haunting Story of 10-year-old Jessica Ridgeway | Colorado Cold Case

Westminster, Colorado. October 5th, 2012. Late Wednesday night, police announced a body had been found near a park in the Denver suburb of Arvada. At this point, they won’t officially confirm it is 10-year-old Jessica Ridgeway, but multiple… “She’s my rock. She… She’s I mean, she’s all of our great voice of my little girl. She needs to come home.”

She woke up that morning and put on her favorite color, purple. She was 10 years old, a fifth-grader, a girl who loved cheerleading and butterflies and knock-knock jokes, a girl her mother described as very mature for her age, the kind of little kid who wanted to do everything herself, who wanted to look like a grown-up before she was a teenager.

She was proud of that. The independence of it. The feeling of being trusted to walk to school on her own, to meet her friend at the park, to take those three blocks alone and arrive safely on the other side. Her name was Jessica Ridgeway, and she was born on January 23rd, 2002, in Westminster, Colorado, a quiet suburb northwest of Denver, where neighbors knew each other’s names and parents let their kids walk to school because the world, at least in that neighborhood, still felt generous and safe.

On the morning of Friday, October 5th, 2012, Jessica’s mother, Sarah, watched her daughter walk out the front door. She was heading to Chelsea Park, just three blocks away, to meet a friend before they walked together to Witt Elementary School. It was a mile, a perfectly ordinary mile, the kind of route a 10-year-old walks a hundred times before anyone thinks to count.

Jessica never made it to the park. She never made it to school. And by the time her mother found out, by the time the voicemail from the school finally played on the phone of a woman who had just worked an overnight shift and gone to sleep, the monster who took her little girl had already been home for hours.

Before we go any further, my name is Joe, and if you are new here, welcome to Vanished Women and Children. This channel exists because stories like Jessica’s matter, because little girls, women, children, and the vulnerable disappear and are harmed and the world keeps moving and their families are left standing still asking questions no one should ever have to ask.

We talk about the forgotten. We talk about the failed. We refuse to let the silence win. If that means something to you, hit subscribe right now. We are a brand new channel, and every single subscriber tells the algorithm that these stories deserve to be seen. Every subscriber is a promise that we will keep telling them.

Hit that subscribe button and ring the notification bell so you never miss a story. Now let us go back to Westminster. Sarah Ridgeway was a working mother doing everything right. She worked night shifts and slept during the day. She had watched her daughter leave that morning the way parents do with a particular confidence of routine.

The quiet trust that this day would be exactly like every other day. When Witt Elementary called at 10:00 in the morning to ask about Jessica’s absence, no one could reach Sarah. She was asleep. She did not hear her phone ring. It was not until 4:30 in the afternoon when she woke up and finally played her messages that the world she thought she lived in collapsed entirely.

“I knew something was wrong,” she would later say. “When they called and said she hadn’t come to school, I knew.” Westminster police were notified that afternoon. An Amber Alert went out at 9:15 that Friday night. By Saturday morning, more than 800 volunteers had assembled to search the area. Bloodhounds, helicopters, dive teams, and nearby Ketner Reservoir.

The kind of mobilization that tells you a community is scared and desperate and refusing to stand by. 75 law enforcement agencies would eventually be involved. Investigators canvassed neighborhoods, photographed cars, guarded school crosswalks, and collected over 700 DNA samples from people connected to the area. They also, in those early days, told residents something chilling.

The person who took Jessica was probably someone they already knew. On Sunday, October 7th, two days after Jessica disappeared, her backpack was found on a sidewalk in the neighboring town of Superior, 6 miles from her home. Inside, her glasses, the pink and purple frames that made her recognizable to everyone who knew her, along with assorted clothing items.

Investigators later said the backpack had been placed there deliberately. It was meant to be found. It was a message. On Wednesday, October 10th, Westminster police sent out a tweet that stopped the city cold. A body had been discovered near Partridge Park Open Space in Arvada, about 9 miles from Jessica’s home.

Police would not confirm whose body it was. The next day, they tweeted again. The identification process was complicated, they said, because the body was not intact. On Friday, October 12th, exactly 1 week after Jessica disappeared, Westminster Police Chief Lee Berk stood before cameras and said the words no one wanted to hear.

“Our focus has changed,” he said, “from the search for Jessica to a mission of justice for Jessica.” She was gone. She was 10 years old, and she was gone. What the public did not yet know, what investigators were only beginning to piece together, was that a monster had been living less than a mile from Jessica’s front door.

He had walked the same elementary school hallways she had walked. He had studied the same neighborhood, and on the morning of October 5th, he had been waiting. Austin Reed Sigg was 17 years old in October of 2012. By most outward appearances, he seemed like a quiet, intelligent young man. Former high school classmates described him as smart.

Some called him a total sweetheart. He had dropped out of Standley Lake High School after 11th grade, earned his GED, and enrolled at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton, Colorado. He was studying mortuary science, the preparation of the dead, embalming, funeral direction. He had also competed in forensics in high school and won second place.

His friends said he had a fascination with death. His college classmates said he seemed creepy. A classmate named Jacqueline Miller, who was in his psychology 101 class, described him that way. She was not the only one. He had an obsession. Investigators would later find internet searches on his computer for torture, rape, and child pornography.

He had been planning this, not impulsively, not accidentally. He had been planning this the way someone plans something they have thought about for a long time. Five months before Jessica disappeared, on May 28th, 2012, Memorial Day, Austin Sigg had made his first attempt. A 22-year-old woman was jogging at Ketner Reservoir, a park directly across the street from Witt Elementary School, the same school Jessica attended.

Sigg grabbed her from behind and pressed a rag soaked with a chemical, homemade chloroform, against her face. She fought. She escaped. She called 911 and described her attacker: white or light-skinned, roughly 5 ft 8 in tall, brown hair, between 18 and 30 years old. She had survived because she fought. Police investigated.

They took a report. The case remained open, and Austin Sigg went home and waited for another chance. That chance came on October 5th, 2012, when a little girl in purple glasses walked past his car on her way to meet her friend at a park three blocks from her house. Investigators would later establish that Jessica was abducted less than 1,000 ft from her own front door.

Sigg told investigators what happened next in detail during his confession. He bound her arms and legs. He drove around for a while. Then he took her back to the house he shared with his mother, a house in the 10,600 block of 102nd Avenue in Westminster, just blocks from Ketner Lake Open Space, just blocks from Witt Elementary School, just blocks from where Jessica had lived.

He took her to his bedroom and he strangled her. Jessica Ridgeway, age 10, born on January 23rd, 2002, died of asphyxiation by strangulation. She had wanted to grow up faster than her age. She had loved cheerleading and butterflies and the color purple. She was a joyous kid, her family said, a joyous kid who never made it to the park.

After she was dead, Sigg dismembered her in the bathtub of his mother’s home. He placed her torso in black garbage bags and dumped it along the roadway near Partridge Park Open Space in Arvada, where maintenance workers would eventually find it. Other remains were hidden in the crawl space under the house. Her backpack was placed in Superior, miles away.

Positioned, investigators said, to be found. He wanted people to know she was dead. A psychologist who testified at his sentencing hearing later told the court that Sigg had felt no empathy for Jessica. None. She said the attack was planned, deliberate, and sadistic. She said Sigg was sexually aroused by what he did to her body. He was 17 years old.

For 18 days, Westminster had a name for him: unknown suspect. For 18 days, parents walked their children to school. Officers stood at crosswalks. Mailboxes and trees all across the neighborhood were wrapped in purple ribbon, Jessica’s favorite color, because the community did not know how else to hold the weight of what had happened.

Then, on October 19th, 2012, a resident contacted investigators and told them something. A young man in the area had a fascination with death. FBI agents followed up and took a DNA sample from Austin Sigg. They processed it. The results were coming, but it was not the DNA test that would break the case open. It was a mother.

On the evening of October 23rd, 2012, Mindy Sigg sat down with her son. Exactly what passed between them in those moments, what she said to him, what he said to her, what finally broke open in that conversation, we cannot know. What we know is what happened next. She picked up the phone. She called 911.

“Hi,” she said to the dispatcher, “I need you to come to my house. My son wants to turn himself in for the Jessica Ridgeway murder.”

The dispatcher paused. “What’s going on there, ma’am?”

“Did you not hear me?” Mindy Sigg said. “He just confessed to killing her.”

She handed the phone to her son. “I murdered Jessica Ridgeway,” Austin Sigg said calmly to the dispatcher. “I have proof that I did it. There is no other question. Just have to send a squad car, something down here.”

On that 911 recording, which was later played in court and obtained by CBS 4 News in Colorado, you can hear Mindy Sigg in the background so overcome she said she could not breathe. At one point, the dispatcher confirmed that she and her son were hugging.

“Okay, you definitely did the right thing,” the dispatcher told Mindy Sigg, acknowledging the unimaginably painful, gut-wrenching, impossible right thing to look at your own child and understand what he had done, to make that call, to hand him that phone.

Austin Sigg also told the dispatcher about the attack on the jogger at Ketner Lake 5 months earlier. He told officers that Jessica’s remains were in the crawl space under the house. When asked about weapons, he said, “I have knives in my room and we own a few guns, but I’m giving myself up completely. There will be no resistance whatsoever.”

When officers arrived, Sigg told them everything. Investigators found his DNA on Jessica’s clothing. They found her remains where he said they would be. He was taken into custody that night. Jessica’s father, Jeremiah Bryant, who had flown in from Independence, Missouri, days earlier and stood in front of cameras barely keeping himself together—”I just want to find my daughter. I just want her back home”—now had an answer.

“I try to stay positive about it, but uh yeah, it’s hard. I just want to find my daughter.”

It was the answer no parent ever wants, but he had an answer. Sigg was held without bond. A judge ruled he would be tried as an adult despite being 17 at the time of the crime. The law in Colorado and under US Supreme Court precedent prohibited the death penalty for offenders who were under 18 at the time of their crime. He could not be executed, but he could spend the rest of his life in prison. And that is exactly what happened.

On October 1st, 2013, 2 days before his trial was scheduled to begin, Austin Sigg stood before a judge and pleaded guilty to all 15 counts against him. He did it against the advice of his own attorneys. He offered no concessions, no deals, no negotiations. He just said guilty 15 times. The charges included first-degree murder, second-degree kidnapping, sexual assault of a child, robbery, criminal attempts related to the jogger attack, and sexual exploitation of a minor. 15 counts, guilty, guilty, guilty.

The sentencing hearing took place on November 18th and 19th, 2013, in Jefferson County District Court in Golden, Colorado. Two days of testimony about who Jessica Ridgeway was, what had been done to her, and who Austin Sigg was. The psychologist hired by prosecutors, Dr. Ann Saltzman, a specialist in sex offenders, told the court that Sigg was sadistic and had exhibited no empathy for his victim.

Defense attorneys argued that Sigg’s mother had inhaled paint while pregnant. That trauma before and during his birth had left him with physical deformities. That multiple surgeries before age six had shaped who he became. They urged the judge to consider that a juvenile was being sentenced. “Your honor,” his defense attorney said, “you are sentencing a child today.”

A close family friend of the Ridgeways stood and spoke, too. “A part of me died that cold October day in 2012,” Scott Fischel told the court. “She was a kind, sweet, innocent child who was bound for greatness in this world.”

Judge Steven Monsinger looked at Austin Sigg, who sat through the entire hearing without visible emotion, and said, “Evil is apparently real. It was present in our community on October 5th, 2012.” He sentenced Sigg to life in prison for the murder charge. Because Sigg had been a juvenile, Colorado law would have made him eligible for parole after 40 years. But Monsinger added 86 additional years for all the other crimes, the sexual assault, the kidnapping, the attack on the jogger, stacking sentence on sentence on sentence until the math became impossible.

Austin Sigg will die in prison. District Attorney Peter Weir made it plain: “We are confident that this sentence ensures that Austin Sigg will never, ever leave the Department of Corrections, and he will never, ever be in a position to prey on members of our community.” He was right. Sigg has been in the Colorado Department of Corrections ever since.

And there is something worth saying about the woman who made the call that night, about Mindy Sigg. She had sat in the courtroom during the sentencing hearing, crying, watching the proceedings that she herself had set in motion by picking up that phone. Her ex-husband, Sigg’s father, Rob Sigg, said his ex-wife’s choice had been a courageous act, unimaginably painful for any parent. That is perhaps the most restrained possible description.

What Mindy Sigg did on October 23rd, 2012, took a kind of courage most of us will never be tested to produce. She saved other children. She gave Jessica’s family an answer. She will carry what she carries for the rest of his life.

On October 5th, 2013, exactly 1 year after Jessica disappeared, the city of Westminster dedicated a park to her memory. Chelsea Park at 10,765 Moore Street in Westminster was renamed the Jessica Ridgeway Memorial Park. It is the park where Jessica was supposed to meet her friend on that last morning. The park she never reached.

The Westminster City Council had voted to transform it, to make it something joyful and permanent in her name. Hundreds of volunteers donated their time to build it. The playground equipment is purple and green, Jessica’s favorite colors. The sidewalks are etched with knock-knock jokes, the kind she loved. Her grandmother, Christine Ridgeway, stood at the dedication ceremony and said, “Jessica’s laughter will be here, echoing forever.”

She looked out at the crowd and told the children gathered there not to stand around mourning. “Jessica would not want you standing here,” Christine Ridgeway said. “She would want you to go play.”

Hundreds of people came to that dedication, dressed in purple. Westminster Mayor Nancy McNally told the Ridgeway family, “As you have moments when you question if you are alone, I hope you look out and remember that this community stands behind you.”

Jessica’s mother, Sarah Ridgeway, went on to work for the Klassy Project (Lassie Project), a child tracking app that maps a child’s typical routes using GPS, designed to alert communities quickly when a child goes missing. It was inspired by Jessica’s story. Sarah found a way to make her daughter’s life mean something beyond the tragedy. She found a way to keep walking forward.

The Jessica Ridgeway Legacy Foundation was established in Jessica’s honor. It has funded cheerleading camps for children ages 6 to 12 through the Westminster City Recreation Department. It has given other little girls the joy that Jessica loved. A community that was broken by what happened on October 5th, 2012, chose to honor her with laughter and purple slides and the names of little girls who got to go home.

In May of 2020, when the high school graduating class of Westminster finished their final year, the students of Standley Lake High School, the class that would have been Jessica’s, drove their cars in a procession to Jessica Ridgeway Memorial Park. They came honking their horns. They brought flowers. They left them for her family.

Jessica’s aunt, Rebecca Ridgeway, stood there watching and said, “I can’t even put into words how amazing it feels. I miss her so incredibly much.” A classmate named Carson Schmidt, who had been in fifth grade with Jessica, remembered the butterflies. “I really wish she was here with us today,” she said. “But I know she is graduating with us in spirit.”

She would have been 18. She would have been picking out a prom dress, filling out college applications, figuring out who she was going to be. She loved purple. She loved cheerleading. She wanted to be a grown-up before she was a teenager. She was a joyous kid, and she was bound for greatness. And on October 5th, 2012, a 17-year-old who had spent months planning exactly this robbed her and her family and an entire community of everything she had not yet become.

There are a few things this story should make you sit with long after this video ends.

The first is the woman who survived. The jogger at Ketner Reservoir on May 28th, 2012, who felt hands grab her from behind and a chemical-soaked rag pressed to her face, who fought, who got free, who called 911. She did everything right. She reported it. Police took a report. And 5 months later, on that October morning, the same man was back. The investigation that followed her attack did not stop him, did not catch him, did not prevent what happened to Jessica. We cannot know if a more aggressive follow-up on the May attack would have changed anything, but we know that a young woman tried to raise the alarm. And a little girl still paid the price.

The second thing is this. Austin Sigg told investigators he knew what he did was wrong. He told an officer after his arrest that he wanted to know if pleading guilty would give Jessica’s family comfort. He said he would make up for it someday. Those words, the way he spoke them, calmly, with apparent sincerity, are perhaps the most chilling part of this entire story. Because they suggest a level of awareness that makes the crime not more forgivable, but less explicable. He knew. He knew before he did it, and he did it anyway.

The third thing is what his sentence means. It means that Jessica’s family has lived every day since 2012 knowing where he is. They know he is behind those walls, and he is never coming out. That is not healing. That is not the same as having their daughter back. But it is the particular peace that comes from knowing the man who did this will never have the chance to do it to anyone else’s child. It is the promise that Chief Judge Monsinger made when he said those words: Evil was present in our community on October 5th, 2012. Was, past tense, behind bars for life.

Jessica Ridgeway, born on January 23rd, 2002. She loved the color purple. She loved butterflies. She loved knock-knock jokes. She loved cheerleading and her dog and wanting to be older than she was in the way of all the best 10-year-olds who are in such a hurry to become.

Her mother called her the light of her life. Her grandmother wanted the children at her memorial to go play because Jessica would have wanted that. Her aunt still says she will never stop thinking about her. Her fifth-grade classmates, years later, carried her name to their graduation. A park bears her name. Purple slides and purple ribbons and sidewalks full of the knock-knock jokes she loved. A GPS app that parents use to keep other children safer. A legacy foundation that sends little girls to cheerleading camp. A community that, 10 years later, still wraps purple ribbons around mailboxes and trees every October 5th.

She was 10 years old and she was walking to school and she never got there. And she deserved every single thing she never got to have.

Say her name: Jessica Ridgeway. May she rest in peace, and may her name never go quiet.

Now, it is your turn. Where are you watching this from? Drop a comment below and tell me. Tell me if you remember when this story broke. Where you were, what you felt when you heard about a 10-year-old girl who never made it to school. Tell me what you think about Mindy Sigg and the impossible choice she made. Tell me what you believe about a system that took a DNA sample from Austin Sigg 4 days before his mother called 911. And what justice truly looks like in a case like this one.

I read every single comment. Every single one. And this community is built by people like you who refuse to look away from the stories that matter.

See you in the next story.