Court dates loom in '98 stabbing

Kevin McKinney

AURORA | A man charged with murder last year in connection with a 1998 Aurora stabbing is set to appear in court next week.

Kevin Lewayne McKinney, 40, is set to appear in court Feb. 4 for a status conference and Feb. 7 for a preliminary hearing, according to prosecutors. McKinney does not yet have a trial date set.

McKinney was charged with murder last March after police said DNA evidence connected him to the 1998 stabbing death of Diane Caldwell, who was found dead in an Aurora drainage ditch.

He is currently serving a lengthy sentence for numerous charges in the Sterling Correctional Facility stemming from a 1999 attempted murder in Arapahoe County, according to state records. He isn’t up for parole in that case until 2016.

Caldwell, who was 47 when she was killed, was found dead in a drainage ditch near South Buckley Road and East Ohio Avenue on Nov. 23, 1998. She had been stabbed multiple times.

In a statement announcing McKinney’s arrest, police said DNA found at the scene matched McKinney in a 2003 test, but there wasn’t enough evidence at the time for police to file charges.

In July 2008, the department reinstated its cold case unit, which had been disbanded in 2002 because of budget cuts. From that time on, a detective worked on the Caldwell case and last year the Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office said there was enough evidence to charge McKinney with murder.

Police said last year they did not know what connection there was, if any, between McKinney and Caldwell before she was killed.

According to state records, McKinney, who goes by the nicknames Keb and K-Dog, has been arrested numerous times in Colorado for violent crimes and spent much of the 1990s incarcerated. In 2000, he was sentenced to prison for a May 1999 crime in Arapahoe County. In that case, he was charged with attempted murder, kidnapping, assault, menacing and robbery, among other charges.