The Murder of Aarone Thompson

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

May 13, 2026

On November 14, 2005, a man named Aaron Thompson called police in Aurora, Colorado to report that his six-year-old daughter, Aarone, had run away from home. He said the two of them had argued that afternoon, sometime between 12:30 and 1:30, over a cookie his girlfriend had refused to give her, and that Aarone had stormed off into the freezing, snowy weather and never come back. It was, on its face, a devastating but ordinary missing child report. It took investigators very little time to start doubting it, and considerably longer to uncover just how wrong the story actually was. Aarone Thompson had not run away that day. By the time her father picked up the phone to report her missing, she had already been dead for as long as two and a half years.

A Story That Fell Apart Immediately

Police noticed the cracks almost right away. Neither Aaron Thompson nor his girlfriend, a woman named Shely Lowe, behaved the way parents of a missing six-year-old typically behave. Neither appeared distressed. At one point, while officers were still actively searching the freezing streets for a small child, Aaron said he wanted to go to sleep. By the next day, both he and Shely had stopped cooperating with investigators altogether.

What detectives found as they dug further only deepened the contradiction. A social worker had visited the home just forty-five minutes to an hour before Aaron placed his call, and had seen no sign of Aarone at all. There was no toothbrush belonging to her anywhere in the house. There was no mattress or bed that could be identified as hers. She had no current school enrollment. Neighbors told police they hadn't actually seen Aarone in at least eighteen months. And no current photographs of her existed anywhere, an almost impossible detail for a family with a living six-year-old, but an entirely explainable one for a family hiding the fact that she wasn't living anymore.

Investigators eventually placed her actual death sometime around 2003, likely during a window between May 2002 and August 2004, roughly a year and a half to two and a half years before anyone outside the household reported her missing at all. The reason the report finally came in November 2005, prosecutors would later argue, had to do with Aaron's mother. She was planning to visit for Aarone's seventh birthday at the end of that month, and there was no longer any way to keep explaining her granddaughter's absence without someone eventually noticing.

Seven Children in One House

Aarone was one of seven children living in the home on Kepner Place under Aaron Thompson and Shely Lowe's care, and the picture that emerged from the surviving children's testimony was of a household run on terror. Children described being beaten with braided coaxial cable, hard enough that the wire cut into their skin and left scars. They described being tied naked to a pole in the basement for extended stretches. Only Thompson and Lowe were permitted to eat name-brand food; the children were given generic substitutes and punished severely for infractions as small as eating the wrong food, and were coached, repeatedly, to lie to anyone in authority who came asking questions.

Some of that coaching extended specifically to covering for Aarone's absence. Other children in the household were made to impersonate her during phone calls to relatives, so that anyone checking in would believe she was still there, still fine, still simply unavailable at that particular moment.

What finally began breaking the case open was that the children who had originally backed up the family's story started recanting. They told investigators that Shely had instructed them what to say, and slowly, over the course of the investigation, the outline of what had actually happened inside that house started to take shape through their accounts and through people outside the family that Shely had confided in.

What the Witnesses Said

A man named Eric Williams Sr. told investigators that Shely had described Aarone going still in the bathtub, unresponsive, and that she'd attempted to revive her without success. A friend of Shely's named Tabitha Graves had secretly tape-recorded conversations in which Shely referred to Aarone entirely in the past tense and talked about burying her body. A woman named Velma Jean Belzaire recalled a much earlier, almost offhand conversation from 2003, in which Shely had asked her what someone should do if a child stopped breathing in the middle of being disciplined, a question that reads, in hindsight, like someone rehearsing an excuse before she ever needed one.

The children's own trial testimony was the hardest evidence to sit with. One child described being handed a knife by Aaron Thompson after Aarone had already been severely beaten, and being told to finish the job; he said he stabbed her in the chest. Another testified to a morning beating over bedwetting, after which Aarone simply disappeared from the house, with Thompson and Lowe later telling the children she had gone to live with relatives in Detroit. A boy named Andrew Lowe told investigators he had heard Aaron beating Aarone in the basement, heard her screaming, and then heard the screaming stop abruptly. He said a bad smell lingered in the basement for weeks afterward.

Digging a Yard and Finding Nothing

Investigators eventually secured a court order to excavate the backyard of the Kepner Place home, based on information suggesting Aarone might have been buried there. The search turned up nothing. Later accounts, drawn partly from Shely's own taped comments, suggested the body may have instead been disposed of in a field somewhere away from the property, though no remains were ever recovered from any location searched. To this day, Aarone Thompson's body has never been found.

Shely Lowe never faced trial for any of it. She died of a heart attack in May 2006, months after the investigation began, having never agreed to a formal interview with police and maintaining, to the people around her, that she had done nothing wrong.

The Trial

Aaron Thompson was indicted in 2007 and stood trial in the fall of 2009, an eight-week proceeding that began in August and ran into September. He faced fifty-five charges in total. His defense strategy amounted to an admission wrapped in a deflection: his attorney conceded that Aarone was dead and that Aaron had helped conceal it, but argued that Shely was the one who had actually killed her, and that Aaron's guilt extended only to the cover-up, not the killing itself. Aaron never took the stand in his own defense.

The prosecution's case rested heavily on the surviving children, who described in detail the abuse that defined life in that house and the specific events surrounding Aarone's death. One prosecutor summarized the case simply: it was about the life those children actually experienced while they lived on Kepner Place.

On September 28, 2009, the jury returned guilty verdicts on thirty-one of the fifty-five charges, including child abuse resulting in death, conspiracy to commit child abuse resulting in death, concealing a death, false reporting, and multiple counts connected to the other children in the home. Jurors could not reach agreement on two remaining charges, abuse of a corpse and conspiracy to commit abuse of a corpse, resulting in mistrials on those two counts alone.

Sentencing

Aaron Thompson was sentenced on November 10, 2009. Judge Valeria Spencer handed down a term of 102 years in prison plus an additional 12 years in jail, effectively a life sentence with no realistic prospect of release. Addressing him directly, the judge told him he had failed as a father and failed as a man.

Thompson has consistently declined to say where Aarone's remains are located, a silence his own defense has suggested is at least partly strategic, out of concern that admitting a specific burial location could expose him to additional charges or complicate his appeals. He filed an appeal in December 2009 challenging both his conviction and his sentence. Prosecutors expressed confidence there was no reversible error in the trial record.

What Was Left

Aarone Thompson would be an adult now, in her late twenties, had any of this gone differently. Instead, she is remembered through a single available childhood photograph, a handful of surviving siblings who lived through the same house and had to testify about it in open court, and a legal record that runs to fifty-five separate charges without ever producing a body to bury. She was six years old, by the account her father gave police, when she supposedly ran away over a cookie. She had, in reality, already been gone for years by then, and the field or plot of ground where she actually ended up has never been found.

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