The Ring He Gave His Next Wife: Kimberly Greene-Medina
Kimberly Diane Greene was fifteen years old and pregnant when she married Michael Jim Medina in 1993. By the time she was nineteen, the couple had two daughters together and were living in an apartment near Tower Road in Aurora, Colorado. On the night of October 29, 1996, around 10:30 p.m., Kimberly left the apartment to walk to a convenience store at Buckley Road and Mississippi Avenue. Michael later told investigators she said she was going to buy cigarettes and possibly make a phone call, an explanation that struck some who reviewed the case as odd on its face, since the couple actually had working telephone service inside their own home at the time. Kimberly never returned from that walk. Michael did not report her missing until October 31, two full days later.
A Marriage With a Documented History
By the time Kimberly disappeared, Michael Medina already carried a record of domestic violence arrests connected to their relationship, including one incident in Phoenix in June 1995 and another in Albuquerque in September 1995. Kimberly herself had obtained a restraining order against him at some point during the marriage. Just two days before she vanished, on October 27, 1996, she told her own father she was planning to leave Michael for good. Michael, when questioned by police after reporting her missing, offered his own explanation for where she might have gone, telling investigators he believed Kimberly had been having an affair with a coworker and had simply left of her own accord to be with him.
Kimberly's family rejected that explanation from the very beginning, telling investigators it would have been entirely out of character for her to leave without any warning, particularly given that she left behind virtually everything a woman planning her own departure would normally take. She never returned to collect her final paycheck, worth more than eight hundred dollars. None of her personal belongings were missing from the apartment. A bloodhound brought in during the initial investigation tracked her scent from the area near Tower Road, north along Buckley Road, then west on Colfax Avenue, ultimately losing the trail near Interstate 225, a path that told investigators nothing conclusive about where she had actually ended up.
A Case That Sat Unsolved for Years
Despite the documented history of violence, the restraining order, and Kimberly's own recent statement to her father about leaving, the case did not produce any charges against Michael Medina in the years immediately following her disappearance. In 1998, authorities investigated a report of possible human remains in rural Elbert County, but the search produced no conclusive evidence tying anything found there back to Kimberly. No activity of any kind ever appeared afterward on her bank accounts or her Social Security number, the kind of total financial silence that investigators generally treat as strong circumstantial evidence against any theory that a missing person simply walked away to start a new life elsewhere.
A Second Wife, A Second Tragedy
The break in the case did not come from new physical evidence but from Michael Medina's own life continuing to unfold in the years after Kimberly vanished. He remarried, to a woman named Becky Garel, and the two of them had a son together, a toddler named Degan. In 2005, according to Garel's later account, Michael confessed directly to her that he had killed Kimberly, describing how he had beaten her with a baseball bat during an argument after discovering, or believing, that she had been unfaithful to him, and that he had then buried her in a field in east Aurora. Garel told reporters years later that her initial reaction was disbelief, that she assumed at first Michael was simply trying to frighten or manipulate her, before gradually coming to realize he had actually been telling her the truth.
What happened next turned an already devastating confession into something considerably darker. After Garel reported Michael's confession to police, he went on to kill their own young son, Degan, not yet two years old, whose body was later found near a wastewater treatment plant in Monte Vista, Colorado. Michael was convicted in connection with his son's death and sentenced to forty eight years in prison, a sentence he was already serving by the time investigators finally moved forward with formal charges connected to Kimberly's disappearance as well.
A Journal, and a Body Still Not Found
Investigators corroborated Garel's account of Michael's confession with a second piece of evidence recovered separately, a written journal entry in Michael's own hand stating plainly that Kimberly was dead, a document that directly contradicted the story he had told police back in 1996 about her simply running off with another man. According to court documents connected to the eventual prosecution, Michael had also described, in disturbing detail, hearing Kimberly still gurgling and breathing as he buried her, an account that, if accurate, indicated she was still alive at the moment he put her in the ground.
An Arapahoe County grand jury began examining the case in 2007, and in March 2012, more than fifteen years after Kimberly disappeared, that grand jury formally indicted Michael Medina on charges of kidnapping and first degree murder. He went to trial the following year, and on November 15, 2013, a jury convicted him of first degree murder in Kimberly's death. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on November 17, 2013, a sentence he now serves alongside the separate forty eight year term imposed for killing his son.
Details That Never Added Up, Even at the Time
One detail investigators returned to repeatedly over the years involved a heart shaped ring Kimberly had been wearing at the time she disappeared. Michael eventually gave that same ring to Becky Garel during their own relationship, a detail that struck investigators as a particularly cold, tangible thread connecting the two women in his life, one he had murdered and one he would go on to confide in about it years later.
A Pattern That Repeated Itself
What makes this case especially difficult to sit with is how directly Michael Medina's pattern of violence against Kimberly appears to have repeated itself with the family he built afterward. He married young, to a pregnant fifteen year old, accumulated a documented history of domestic violence arrests spanning at least two states, and was accused by his first wife's own family of behavior serious enough that she had already sought a restraining order and told her father she intended to leave before she ever vanished. Rather than that pattern ending with Kimberly's death, it continued forward into an entirely new marriage and a new child, culminating years later in the killing of his own toddler son, a pattern that investigators and prosecutors would eventually be able to trace backward once Becky Garel came forward, connecting a killing that had gone unpunished for nearly a decade to a second act of violence that finally forced the case into the open.
Still Missing
More than twenty five years after Kimberly Diane Greene-Medina walked out of her Aurora apartment for what her husband claimed was a simple trip to buy cigarettes, her remains have never been located, despite a confession, a journal entry, a conviction, and a life sentence. Michael Medina has never disclosed where in that east Aurora field he actually left her, leaving Kimberly's own family, and her two daughters, with a legal resolution to her murder that has still never produced the most basic thing they continue to want most, a place to finally bring her home.
Sources
- The Charley Project: Kimberly Diane Greene Medina
- CBS Colorado: Justice Finally Served In 1996 Murder Of Aurora Woman
- Sentinel Colorado: Murder charges filed in 15-year-old Aurora case
