A grand jury in Arapahoe County has indicted Ronald Lowry, 52, for first-degree murder in the 2023 death of his estranged wife, Richelle, at her Bennett home.
Ronald Lowry is charged with first-degree murder and stalking. (18th Judicial Circuit via Scripps News Group of Denver)
Lowry is accused of killing his wife and attempting to make it look like a suicide. The indictment says he stood to gain over $1.3 million if her death was ruled a suicide.
He’s also being charged with stalking, tampering with evidence and crimes of violence. All are being charged as acts of domestic violence, according to a release from the 18th Judicial District.
The case stems from Richelle’s death in October 2023 after Arapahoe County deputies responded to a welfare check at her home and found her dead with a gunshot wound to the head and a gun laying beneath her shoulder, according to the 55-page indictment. She had recently returned from a work trip.
Richelle and Ronald had been in the process of finalizing their divorce at the time of her death, according to the court document. Multiple people who knew Richelle told investigators that she was scared of Ronald and had feared for her life, the document shows. Multiple people said they didn’t believe she would kill herself.
Richelle’s brother, Dave Norman, told Denver7 that “the whole family was looking to Ron.”
“She was afraid of him, and she told everyone that,” he said. “She said, ‘If anything happens to me, look to him.’”
The indictment also claims that Ronald had stalked and surveilled Richelle leading up to her death.
Cell phone records and location data included in the indictment show that Ronald had “a continued pattern” of going to Richelle’s home when she wasn’t there and show he filmed her on at least one occasion. The investigation also places a man that appears to be Ronald in the area of Richelle’s home the night her security cameras stopped working, two days before she was found dead. His phone was on airplane mode at the time.
An analyst concluded: “The only reason the system would have stopped recording would have had to have been from human intervention,” the indictment states.
Lowry was booked into the Morgan County Jail Friday, records show.
This story was originally published by Scripps News Group of Denver.
