McKinney pleads not guilty, trial set

Kevin McKinney

AURORA | A man charged with murder last year in connection with a 1998 Aurora stabbing pleaded not guilty last week and is scheduled for trial in November. 

Kevin Lewayne McKinney, 40, entered the plea at an arraignment hearing Friday morning, according to prosecutors. 

His trial is scheduled to last nine days starting Nov. 7. 

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.

At a preliminary hearing in February, McKinney’s lawyer argued that McKinney was wearing an ankle monitor that showed he was in his home when Caldwell was slain.

But police said during the hearing that the initial coroner’s estimate about Caldwell’s time of death was inaccurate, possibly by more than three hours.

Aurora police Detective Steve Conner, the cold case detective who reopened the investigation a few years ago, testified that the coroner’s office ruled Caldwell died between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. Nov. 23, 1998. 

McKinney’s ankle bracelet showed he was inside his mother’s Aurora home — about a mile from the ditch where police found Caldwell’s body — by around 10 p.m. the previous night, according to testimony.

The ankle bracelet evidence appears to show McKinney wasn’t near Caldwell when she was killed, but Conner said that’s not the case.

The coroner’s office determined Caldwell’s time of death based on the temperature of her liver, Conner said, a technique they have since decided wasn’t very accurate and stopped using.

Mckinney’s lawyer, James O’Connor, argued during the hearing that the ankle monitor evidence was just one example of the flaws in the case against McKinney.

O’Connor said the only evidence against McKinney is his DNA, which only shows he had sex with Caldwell, not that he killed her.

The fact that police waited almost seven years after a 2003 DNA test linked McKinney to the case to charge him proves the case’s weakness, he said.

But prosecutors said a forensic gynecologist ruled Caldwell was killed in the same place where she had sex with McKinney, which points to him as her killer.

A judge ruled at the end of hearing that there was probable cause for McKinney to stand trial on the murder charge, though he noted that there is a low evidence burden for prosecutors during a preliminary hearing.

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.