The young man’s name was Tyler Mace, and he was 24 years old and sitting at his kitchen table in Denver at 2 in the morning when he made the decision that would end his grandfather’s freedom and begin after 47 years the possibility of peace for a family in Pueblo, Colorado, that had been waiting since 1977.

He had spent three nights reading his grandfather’s old journals, boxes of them found in the basement of the family home during a move, dusty and brown spined and not meant to be read by anyone still living, had been in Tyler’s apartment for two weeks. He had read them cover to cover twice. What they contained, buried in the ordinary record of a man’s daily life across 30 years of journal entries, was something Tyler had needed to read four times before he fully understood what he was reading.

Dates, descriptions, a name, a location, and a sentence that appeared almost casually between a grocery list and a note about a car repair. a sentence that Tyler would read to a PBLO County cold case investigator two days later, word for word, from memory, because it had not left him since the first time his eyes landed on it.

 He called the non-emergency line at 217 a.m. He told the dispatcher he needed to report information about an unsolved homicide from 1977. He gave his name. He gave his grandfather’s name. His voice was steady. The dispatcher noted in the call log that the caller appeared composed and clear.

 But before we get to those journals, we have to go back to 1977. Because to understand what was taken from Ellen Marie Goss and what her family carried for 47 years without a name to put on it, you first have to understand who she was. It was July of 1977 and Pueblo sat on the Arkansas River in southern Colorado under a summer sun that had none of the softness of mountain altitude.

 Pueblo was high plains, not Rockies, and its July heat was direct and serious, and the people who lived there were accustomed to it in the pragmatic way of workingclass Coloradoatans who did not have the option of leaving for the season. The city was a steel and manufacturing town, smaller and less glamorous than Denver. Proud of its own identity in the specific way of cities that know they are not the state’s first thought.

 The neighborhoods were dense and rooted, people stayed. Ellen Marie Goss was 19 years old. She had just completed her first year of study at Pueblo Community College where she was enrolled in an early childhood education program. She wanted with the specific clarity that some young people possess to work with children in their earliest years.

 And she had been volunteering at a PBLO Head Start program on weekends for the past several months. The program coordinator, a woman named Mrs. Archeletta, told investigators that Ellen was one of those volunteers who the children ran toward rather than waited for. that she had a natural ease with small people that was not something you could teach and was genuinely rare.

At home, Ellen was the oldest of three children. Her father worked at the CFNI steel mill. Her mother kept the house on avenue with the efficiency of a woman managing a great deal on a modest income. Ellen was her parents great source of quiet pride, the first in her family to pursue any form of postsecary education, doing it seriously and without drama.

She had a summer job at a laundromat on Thatcher Avenue to help with tuition. She was saving change in a coffee can for a used car. On the evening of July 23rd, 1977, Ellen finished her shift at the laundromat at 7 p.m. and began the walk home to Aero Avenue, a route she had taken dozens of times through the familiar streets of a neighborhood she had grown up in.

Her mother had expected her by 7:30 p.m. At 8:00 p.m., she called Ellen’s workplace. At 8:20 p.m., her father left the house to walk the route himself. He did not find her. A neighbor did the following morning in a vacant lot adjacent to an alley two blocks from Asero Avenue. Ellen had been there since the previous evening.

The Pueblo Police Department opened a homicide investigation immediately. Detective Gus Morero took primary responsibility and worked the case with intensity through the fall of 1977. The neighborhood around Asero Avenue was canvased thoroughly. Ellen’s workplace contacts, her college classmates, and every person who could be placed in the vicinity of her walking route on the evening of July 23rd was interviewed.

 A man who had been seen in the alley area earlier that day was identified and questioned. He was cleared. Another person of interest, a recently released individual with a prior record who lived several streets away, was interviewed twice and regarded with sustained suspicion, but the physical evidence of the time, blood typing, hair microscopy could not connect him to the scene. He was not charged.

Edward Mace was 31 years old in 1977 and lived on a street that intersected Ellen’s walking route. He was interviewed as part of the neighborhood canvas, a routine interview. Nothing of note in the record. He had lived in the neighborhood for two years, worked at a hardware supply warehouse, and had no criminal record.

 He answered the questions briefly and correctly. He was not identified as a person of interest. By 1979, he had moved to Denver, where he would spend the next several decades raising a family, attending a church in the Highlands neighborhood, and keeping journals, 30 years of journals stored in boxes in a basement that contained somewhere in their pages the true account of what he had done.

 On a July evening in 1977, he became in Denver, a grandfather. His daughter gave him a grandson named Tyler, born in 2000. Tyler grew up knowing his grandfather as a quiet, church-going man who liked fishing and fixed things around the house and occasionally told stories about the old PBlo days. The PBLO days were a long time ago.

Nobody thought much about them. The decades accumulated. Ellen’s parents died. her father in 2001, her mother in 2008 without an answer. Her younger sister, Carol Goss Hartley, had continued making the annual call to the PBLO Police Department and had been told consistently that the case remained open.

 In 2015, Pueblo County established a cold case review unit. The Goss file was reviewed. The biological evidence stored for 38 years was reanalyzed. Adena profile was obtained. It went into Cotus. No match returned. The case remained open. The evidence stored. The annual calls continuing. Every case on this channel represents weeks of research, verifying facts, and piecing together real lives that were lost.

If you want us to keep uncovering the truth behind stories like this one, take a second to like and subscribe. Drop a comment letting us know where in the world you’re watching from. Now, let’s get back to Ellen. The case had been cold for 47 years when the answer arrived not from a database, not from a genealogy algorithm, not from a scientific breakthrough, but from a 24year-old man sitting alone at a kitchen table at 2 in the morning, reading his grandfather’s handwriting and deciding what kind of person he

intended to be. Tyler Mace had found the journal boxes during a family house move in 2024. His grandfather, Edward, now 78, had moved to an assisted living facility in Denver, and Tyler had helped clear the house. He had taken the journals home, intending to eventually ask his grandfather about them, or perhaps keep them for family history purposes.

He had no expectation of what they contained. What they contained was specific enough that Tyler, when he brought the journals to the Pueblo County Cold Case Unit 2 days after his 217 a.m. phone call, did not need to explain why he was there. The entry in question, one entry among thousands of ordinary ones, dated July 1977, the month and year sufficient, described an encounter with a young woman on a walking route in Pueblo in language that was not a confession in any formal legal sense, but was a description of events,

including a location and a detail that matched the physical evidence in the Goss case file, that no person other than the person responsible for Ellen’s death could have written. The name Ellen appeared once. The location matched. The date matched. The cold case unit obtained a court order for Adena sample from Edward Mace collected at his assisted living facility in Denver.

The comparison to the 1977 crime scene evidence was completed in 8 days. The match was confirmed. Edward Mace was arrested at the facility the following week in the room where he had been living for 4 months surrounded by family photographs that included Tyler. Tyler Mace did not attend the arraignment.

 He issued a statement through the PBLO County Sheriff’s Department that said he had done what he believed was right and that he was not prepared to say anything further publicly. People who know him have said that he has not spoken in detail about the decision in the months since and that he describes what he is experiencing not as satisfaction or relief but as a kind of sorrow that he did not expect and does not yet know what to do with.

Edward Mace was charged with firstdegree murder. He entered a not-uilty plea. Legal proceedings are ongoing. Carol Goss Hartley, Ellen’s younger sister, was 64 years old when she received the call from the PBLO cold case unit. She sat on her back porch for a long time afterward looking at the Colorado sky. And then she went inside and called her own daughter to tell her that Aunt Ellen’s case had been solved and that the person responsible had been a neighbor and that his grandson had been the one to turn him in. Her daughter

asked how she felt about that. Carol said she had no words for it yet. She said she thought the right word might come to her eventually, but that right now she was just sitting with the fact that after 47 years, someone had told the truth. Ellen Marie Goss was saving change in a coffee can for a used car.

 She volunteered on weekends with children who ran toward her rather than waited for her. She was the first in her family to pursue any form of higher education. And she was doing it without drama and with a specific clarity about what she wanted to do with her life, teach children in their earliest years.

 When the learning that shapes everything else takes root. She did not get to do it. She was 19 years old on a July evening on a street she had walked dozens of times. and someone who lived in her neighborhood made the decision that ended every other decision she would ever make. Tyler Mace was 24 years old at his kitchen table at 2 in the morning and he read something he could not unread and he had to decide who he was.

He chose to be someone who tells the truth even when the truth belongs to his grandfather. That choice will cost him things he is only beginning to understand. It is also the reason Ellen’s name is no longer only a cold case file number in a PBLO county storage room. What does Tyler’s choice mean to you? Can you imagine making the same decision, turning in your own grandfather? And what do you think it cost him to do it? And what does it say about the nature of guilt that a man could write it down in a journal and

keep those journals in boxes and still somehow believe they would never be read? Leave your thoughts in the comments. Justice came for Ellen Marie Goss after 47 years. Stories like hers are why this channel exists. If you believe truth is worth pursuing, no matter how long it takes, subscribe so you don’t miss the next case.