Ep. 38 - Murders at the McCormick Farm

The McCormick Ranch is located in a remote part of the Eastern Plains in Stratton, Colorado. Mike McCormick and his father worked the property with the help of homeless men they hired during the 1980s. No one can be sure if these homeless men were actually paid for their work because many of them ended up dead. The ranch was the perfect place for serial killers to do their dastardly deeds as no one would hear the victims scream. Several bodies were found on the property, but not all of them, and that may be why this ranch is crawling with paranormal activity. 

The town of Stratton in Colorado was incorporated in 1917 and was named in honor of the gold miner and philanthropist Winfield Scott Stratton. This has always been a tiny agricultural community and it was here that a twisted family laid down roots with a farm. I don't know the name of the patriarch who established the farm or when he bought the land, but it was bordered by the state of Kansas and spread out over more than 2,000 acres. The farm grew corn, soybeans and wheat and livestock was raised. This man was rage filled and not liked in the community. The farm was passed onto his son Thomas McCormick and Tom is described as a man who was very anti-social. The apple didn't fall far from the tree.

Work on a farm can be tough, especially when it basically is in the middle of nowhere. Tom McCormick needed help on the farm and so he would travel to Denver to recruit workers. He had very specific requirements. He wanted transient and homeless men, which more than likely meant they had no connections to anybody. So they wouldn't be missed. The best place to find these men were at missions and although I don't know this to be true, I would bet that this place was the Denver Rescue Mission. This is a place that I helped at when I was younger and has had a place in the Denver community since 1892. Homeless men would have to attend a church service and then they were given a hot meal and a place to stay. Tom would bring back a couple men and keep them hanging around promising to pay them and never getting around to it. They were housed in a bunkhouse where each man had his own room and shared a kitchen and bathroom with the other men. There was also a cook that made all the meals for the men. Tom would supply these workers with drugs and alcohol and this helped quiet down their requests to get paid. Little did they know that McCormick had no intention of paying them.

Once a man reached a point of frustration that food and board and drugs and alcohol weren't enough and he started demanding his money, he would disappear. It wouldn't be until 1986 that it was discovered that these men didn't just go missing, they had been murdered and buried on the property. Tom had a son named Michael who was raised to help him in all these endeavors. Despite saving money by not paying workers, the farm fell into financial trouble by 1980 and in 1981, Tom had to file for bankruptcy. Parts of the property were sold off and the feedlot they ran was closed. The McCormick family needed a new source of income and this would lead to their discovery as serial killers.

Stealing cars and opening a chop shop seemed like a good alternative to the McCormick family. Now their farmhands would be used to help them steal cars and trucks and strip them down to sell off the parts. This is how an Idaho truck driver named Hubert Donoho came into their orbit. Donoho was reported missing and an investigation was started in 1983 into his disappearance. He was supposed to meet a friend at a Wheat Ridge truck stop and never showed and he never called his wife. At this time, there were rumors flying around that the McCormicks were running that stolen vehicle ring, but investigators didn't dig into any of the information. The District Attorney in Fort Morgan asked the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to look into the ring, but they too didn't investigate. Then during an inspection of a semi in Oregon in 1984, it was found that the rig belonged to Donoho. The new owner was asked where he got the truck from and this led to Mike McCormick who had sold it at an auction. There wasn't enough evidence though to arrest him. He would be arrested on June 24, 1985 after a grand jury indicted him on 14-counts of theft. Five of these counts were in regards to Donoho. Mike posted bail and ran to California where he was soon arrested and transported back to Colorado. It was during that transport that the macabre story of the McCormick family would finally see the light of day.

Mike decided he would pin everything on good ole pop. He told investigators that his father killed Donoho by hitting him in the back of the head with a sledgehammer. Mike made a deal with investigators that he could get them information about murders that happened on the farm, but only if they agreed to only charge him with the thefts and drug charges they already had on him. Basically, he would squeal if they didn't charge him with murder. The investigators agreed as long as he cooperated fully, took and passed a polygraph test that would unequivocally demonstrate that he was truthful in stating that he had not personally killed any of the victims on which he gave information and had truthfully identified the killer and led them to the bodies. Mike took the polygraph and passed, showing he was going to be truthful, and he told the police that for years his father had been killing homeless farmworkers on the farm and then making Mike bury the bodies. Mike led them on January 30, 1986, to Donoho's body, which was found dumped in a shallow grave in Byers, Colorado. 

Then the authorities took Mike to the McCormick Farm and they gave him a dozen wooden stakes to mark off the locations of other bodies. The graves that were found were 50 yards from each other and around three feet deep. The oldest burial was from ten years previous. Mike only identified three graves. He couldn't remember where the other graves were. The murdered men were James “Jim” Irvin Plance who had worked as either a cook or foreman and Mike claim his father killed him after he stole from Mike. There was James “Jim” Perry Sinclair who worked as a ranch-hand and was supposedly shot to death by Tom when the two men fought over alcohol. And there was Robert Lee Sowarsh who had been a ranch hand and driver. He was shot five times with a pistol and once with a shotgun. This made the police believe there was more than one murderer. Mike told investigators that his father had tied Sowarsh up and locked him in the cellar and Mike could hear him thumping around during dinner. After dinner, the men took him out to the barn and tied fencing wire around Sowarsh’s ankles and then hoisted him up on a hook, nearly amputating one of his feet in the process. Mike left the barn and that is when he said his father killed the man. The rest of what happened to Sowarsh is so gruesome I won't get into it, but I pray he was dead when it happened. The other farmworkers would be told that murdered workers were just leaving, so none of them knew how much danger they were in.

Tom McCormick, who was 52 at the time, was charged with murder and kidnapping in the Donoho case. Mike testified against him in a preliminary hearing, but witnesses contradicted the things Mike testified to. The case against Thomas McCormick continued. More interviews of Michael continued and he continued to contradict his previous claims. By June of 1986, the District Attorney's office knew that Mike had been lying to them. They knew he was unreliable and all the evidence was pointing at Mike, not Tom as the murderer of Donoho. Any agreement with Mike was nullified and he was charged, while Tom was released. He would never be charged with any of the murders his son claimed he committed. To this day, no one really knows how many murders there were and who committed them. 

The theft trial went first and the trial court found Michael McCormick guilty of eleven of the counts charged in the indictment and he was sentenced to an aggregate term of forty-eight years of imprisonment. The murder trial came next and in June 1987, a jury found Mike guilty of murder and kidnapping and he received four years for the kidnapping and a life sentence for the murder. So Mike should've died in prison, but he filed an appeal that claimed that his trial lawyer had been ineffective and his conviction was overturned. This made McCormick a free man on March 21, 2006. Prosecutors refiled charges and Mike agreed to plead guilty to 2nd degree murder and get time served, which had been 18 years. Once he was free and clear, Mike left his wife who had stayed with him through everything. And he went back to his life of crime, this time preying on people whose homes had gone into foreclosure. He would have them send him money to take care of the foreclosure and he would run while the house went into foreclosure. One of his partners in this endeavor was a woman named Michelle Lee Thompson-Larimer.

Larimer and McCormick became romantically involved and Mike really became obsessed. He told his brother how obsessed he was and that he was suicidal. Part of the reason he felt that way was because a retired detective was working on cold cases and the ones from the ranch had come up and he probably felt a net closing in on him. Linda Holloway was that detective and she got NecroSearch to help look for possible gravesites. On April 7, 2010, Mike convinced Michelle to come with him to Granby Ranch to check out a home he wanted to flip. What Mike actually did was kidnap Michelle. She managed to call her roommate to report she had been abducted. Police found Michelle’s car at a gas station in Parker, Colorado. The police managed to trace Mike back to a neighborhood where they found his car and they swarmed the house on April 8, 2010. They heard a single gunshot and entered the house where they found a murder-suicide. Thus ended the investigation into the disappearances of as many as 17 homeless men from metro Denver who had worked at the McCormack farm. Tom McCormick had died in the 1990s and now Mike was dead. District Attorney Bob Watson of Kit Carson County who had reopened the McCormick farm murder investigation in 2005, said of this event, "At this point there were only two suspects in the McCormick Ranch murders and they are now dead. I have to believe there is still justice for them, but it won’t be on this earth."

Chuck and Leslie Clapper acquired the McCormick Ranch in 1985 and they still own it. They had no idea what had happened on their property before they got there. In 1988, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation showed up and started digging. The finding of the three bodies explained a lot for the Clappers as they started thinking the farm was haunted. They lived in the Old McCormick House until it burned down in 1998. Their dog would stand at the top of the basement stairs and growl and bark at nothing. The Clappers daughter would be in the kitchen and cabinet doors would open on their own. The family began to see shadow figures and full-bodied apparitions. Leslie would feel something unseen sit down on the bed. They were touched by things they couldn't see. Unexplained sounds were also heard. One of the sounds heard is scraping and disembodied footsteps in the shop building on the property. The Clapper's sons were working in the shop one night when they looked up and saw an old man's angry face in the window. The face just stared at them for awhile and then disappeared. The next night they saw the same face.

Activity ramped up over the years and they eventually invited Portals to Hell with Jack Osbourne and Katrina Weidman to come out and investigate in March 2021. The initial walk-through had the Mel Meter going crazy in all the buildings. Katrina was touched by something on her back in the Old Tire Shop. This is a building that has always made Leslie Clapper feel very uncomfortable. One of the ranch hands named Miguel told Jack and Katrina that he was in the Bunk House when he felt something tap him on his right shoulder. He turned around and nobody was there. Other ranch hands get touched in the Bunk House and feel like they are being watched. Two employees quit right before Portals of Hell came out because of the activity. They saw glowing red eyes outside. Leslie said that her scariest experience was one night she was walking away from the bunkhouse when she felt something rush up right behind her. Leslie also heard an audible "Hello" one day in the Bunk House. Another time she heard a male voice say "Hey You" outside and she caught it on her phone while she was making a video.

Katrina and Jack were most disturbed by the stories of seeing red eyes on the property because that indicates something other than a human spirit. They brought Psychic Shaun Crusha out to walk the property and he felt terrible stomach pains, which he assumed meant that someone on the property had suffered from a stomach issue. He was sure it was someone involved in doing the killings. Later research revealed that Mike McCormick had a prescription for a medication for stomach issues. The psychic also picked up on a line of people in the field that he felt was residual. A dusty smell came to him in one of the buildings and he always relates that to an older, more ancient spirit. The psychic felt that the killings brought in this spirit. This is probably the red-eyed thing and the psychic said that is a negative entity.

There are some people who believe dozens and dozens of men were buried on the farm. I've seen reports of as many as 72 bodies. That would explain hauntings. We imagine these victims would like to have their bodies found. What happened at the McCormick Ranch was horrific. Is it haunted? That is for you to decide!