Who were they? The efforts to learn about family members brutally murdered in Englewood
The bodies of murder victims, Bethany MacLaren and her 35-year-old daughter, Ruth, will be laid to rest Monday with the help of the Colorado Nepal Alliance.
It follows a challenging effort to identify family members of the two women whom police say were killed by the husband and father of the family, 81-year-old, Reginald MacLaren.
Reginald allegedly killed his wife and daughter with an axe on March 25, after expressing worry that the family might become homeless after he lost a job.
Reginald was not much help to authorities, who were faced with the task of trying to find the victim's family members.
Immediate efforts by the Arapahoe County Coroner's Office were complicated by the fact that in recent years, it appears the family had grown more isolated. They did discover that in some documents, Bethany MacLaren had used a different name at first, Pavitra.
"The name itself is like very common in Nepal, so maybe that kind of hinted us that maybe she is," said Sangeeta Shrotriya, who is active with the Colorado Nepal Alliance and a Nepalese community leader.
The coroner contacted the alliance, first speaking with executive director, Anne Hines.
Anne and Sangeeta went to work, with an image from Bethany's license supplied by the coroner.
"The coroner's office allowed us to share the name and the picture, but nothing else... we weren't allowed to say that there had been two homicides," she expressed.
That's because the family had yet to be informed.
Sangeeta took it to a funeral for a well-known Nepalese community member.
"And there were like 600 people and nobody could tell that they knew her," Shrotriya said.
But soon she did learn of someone who connected her to a former Coloradan, who had moved to Kansas but remembered being helped by a woman named Pavitra he met at a grocery store 13 or 14 years ago.
"And he kind of expressed, 'OK I'm looking for a job,' and then she was like, 'this is the person that I know, I can take you there," she said.
That instance revealed the kindness of the woman they began to learn more about, but it led nowhere.
"He was able to give us only so much information. And we were also able to go to the person who still owns the restaurant and talk to him. He did not remember her at all," Hines said.
But soon after revealing the name as Pavitra and the belief that she may have been of Nepali descent, the news led to a note via social media to Shrotriya. She communicated with a woman in India, while texting Hines at the same time.
"She knew specific physical characteristics of Ruth, and that's when you said this got to be a relative," Hines recalled while the two remembered.
"Then she opened up and it happened to be Pavitra's niece," Shrotriya added. "She never saw this coming. She would not even be able to imagine that this would happen to them."
She sent images of Ruth and Pavitra and explained their history. The mother's maiden name was Pavitra Rana.
While of Nepali descent, the family was actually from the Kalimpong area of northern India.
"It looks like they had been in India for a few generations. Because both Pavitra and her sister were born in India," she said.
Pavitra was a nurse in India and possibly in the United States as well, but no one knows yet. She helped her sister with medical advice.
Family says Pavitra met her husband through a newspaper ad. He came to India to meet her and was for a time a preacher. Ruth was born in the United States.
"To me that was the most important thing is you were able to find her sister and her niece. And then for Ruth we found some of her friends," Hines said.
They also say that Ruth's middle and high school years were good. But she had a disability and lived with her parents at the time of her death.
"There were questions about who was going to take the bodies," explained Hines. "And at one point the bodies were going to be cremated which was expressly against the wishes of the family in India who wanted a Christian burial, that was incredibly important to them."
The Nepal Alliance has again stepped up, to claim the bodies and set up a burial. The Colorado Victim's Compensation Fund will pay for the burial, but it will only cover enough to place the mother and daughter together. The alliance is putting together money for a gravestone.
"They're more than victims," Hines expresses.
The efforts have brought the realization of what the women were about and that someone will mourn them.
"Somebody had to do it right, so that we are glad that we were able to be a part of this and we were able to find some information," Shrotriya said. "On top of that, I think they were really good human beings. Which we would not have been able to discover if we had not talked to these people. There are so many uncovered parts of the stories that we don't know yet about their life. I'm sure they have touched more life than we know."
Services for Bethany and Ruth are open to the public and will take place on Monday at 8:30am inside Marshall Funeral Home at 3500 Forest St., Denver, CO 80207.
The burial will follow at Saint Simeon Catholic Cemetery located at 22001 E. State Highway 30, Aurora, CO 80018.
