"I said, you know, 'It sounds like him…he likes bleach. "She had been attacked and beaten and left for dead and her apartment set on fire, and she managed to jump out the second-floor widow to save herself, and that's what we knew," Willy Tillman said.Īfter learning that Tillman was doused with bleach, Denver Detective Nash Gurule had a good idea of who the stranger could be. It was a significant discovery, police said, because Forbes had told them he was making deliveries that day. Another camera captured Forbes carting in a cooler and putting it inside a freezer. Surveillance tapes from the bakery where Forbes rented space raised even more suspicion: On the night after Monge's disappearance, the bakery's security camera had captured Forbes coming into the bakery owner's office and unplugging the surveillance system. As for the gas station where Forbes claimed to have taken Monge - police learned it had been closed and dark at the time Forbes said he brought Kenia there for cigarettes. At the time, Forbes was on probation for domestic violence and had several other run-ins with the law. Though he ran his own business - Forbes made a living selling gluten-free granola bars - his background was spotty. His old van smelled overwhelmingly of bleach and its carpet was brand new. At the gas station, Forbes claimed, Monge encountered a fellow smoker and, in a drunken stupor, walked off with him.Īs police dug into Forbes' story, several red flags appeared. He offered to give her a ride home in his van but on the way, he said, Monge wanted a cigarette so Forbes stopped his van at a Conoco gas station. Tillman would later learn that police had already been building a case against her attacker for an assault on another woman - an assault that ended in murder.Īfter 19-year-old Kenia Monge went missing in downtown Denver on April 1, police questioned Travis Forbes, 31, a local entrepreneur, after Monge's step-father found a text message from Forbes on Monge's cell phone.įorbes told police that he had met Monge while she was drunk and incoherent near a popular nightclub. When the medics asked whether she knew the assailant, Tillman repeatedly told them "No, no, no" before suffering a stroke that left her in a coma for over five weeks. To cover his crime, police say the man then poured bleach on her body and throughout her apartment, then started a fire.ĭespite the physical trauma, Tillman found the strength to survive by leaping out of her second-story window and running into an ambulance that had just arrived. Sometime after Tillman attended a 4th of July fireworks celebration in downtown Fort Collins, Colorado, a stranger sexually assaulted and strangled her, beat her head, shattered her jaw, and left her for dead in her apartment.
"I'm tough," said Tillman, an acclaimed sommelier and a seasoned world traveler.
For a woman who spent over five weeks in a coma after being sexually assaulted, strangled and doused in bleach, this is no small feat.
10, 2011 - "I can talk," said Lydia Tillman with pride and great effort.