Driven by misogyny and petty grievances, failed businessman Lyndon McLeod murdered five innocent people in Denver before being stopped.
Denver and Lakewood, he wrote versions of their deaths. In a self-published trilogy called Sanction, McLeod created a protagonist named “Lyndon MacLeod” who slaughtered dozens of people he believed had wronged him. Two of McLeod’s future victims appeared under their real names. The locations and methods he described bore disturbing similarities to the murders he would later commit.
McLeod did not predict the future. He rehearsed the violence he was already imagining and disguised his grievance list as fiction. He had spent years convincing himself that people in Denver’s tattoo and cannabis communities had conspired against him.
McLeod controlled a tattoo business known as All Heart Industry, which used the trade name Flat Black Ink Corp., although city records showed he was never licensed as a tattoo artist or body-art business owner. Several people he later targeted had connections to the business or Denver’s surrounding tattoo community. Former associates described him as threatening, controlling and perpetually aggrieved.
On December 27, 2021, McLeod put his revenge fantasy into action.
At approximately 5:25 p.m., the 47-year-old entered Sol Tribe Tattoo and Piercing on South Broadway and opened fire. He killed owner Alicia Cardenas, 44, and jewelry manager Alyssa Gunn-Maldonado, 35. Alyssa’s husband, piercer James “Jimmy” Maldonado, was shot but survived.
Cardenas was a muralist, educator, mother and trailblazer in Denver’s tattoo community. She opened her first shop in the 1990s and worked to create a safer, more inclusive industry, particularly for women, people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Gunn-Maldonado was also a yoga instructor remembered by friends as loving, resilient and deeply compassionate.
In 2012, McLeod pleaded guilty to felony menacing after threatening two coworkers at a cannabis business with a gun. The charge was later dismissed after he completed a deferred sentence. Following the collapse of his tattoo business, he retreated to an off-grid property in southern Colorado and published the three Sanction volumes under the name Roman McClay between 2018 and 2020.
There had been other warnings. Denver police investigated McLeod in 2020 and again in 2021, but neither case produced charges. In January 2021, a man in Germany named Andre Thiele contacted Denver authorities after reading McLeod’s books and interacting with him online. Thiele warned that McLeod might commit an attack. Police later said investigators had not found probable cause to arrest him or a legal basis to continue monitoring him.
Eleven months after Thiele’s warning, McLeod left Sol Tribe and drove to a building on West Sixth Avenue, where he targeted tattoo artist Jeremy Costilow. Costilow escaped with his partner and infant before McLeod forced his way inside, fired through the home’s doors and walls, and set Costilow’s van ablaze.
McLeod then drove to an apartment building near Cheesman Park. Wearing tactical gear marked “POLICE,” he gained access to the building and killed 67-year-old contractor Michael Swinyard inside his home. McLeod had accused Swinyard of cheating him in a cannabis venture, and a fictional Michael Swinyard had already been murdered in Sanction.
Denver officers located McLeod’s van, but he exchanged gunfire with them, disabled a patrol vehicle and escaped into Lakewood. At approximately 5:58 p.m., he entered Lucky 13 Tattoo and killed its 38-year-old manager, Danny Scofield, another former associate. Police said McLeod knew four of the five people he killed.
Lakewood officers found McLeod’s van near the Belmar shopping district. He fired a rifle at Agent Brianna Hagan before abandoning the weapon and running into the crowded complex. He briefly entered Ted’s Montana Grill, where he threatened an employee with a handgun, and then walked into the Hyatt House hotel.
Behind the front desk was 28-year-old Sarah Steck, who was covering for a sick coworker. Steck did not know McLeod. She was a recent Metropolitan State University of Denver graduate, a promising artist and a woman remembered for her infectious laugh and love of kittens, music and Blink-182. McLeod shot her after a brief exchange. She died at the hospital the following day.
At 6:12 p.m., Lakewood Police Agent Ashley Ferris encountered McLeod outside the hotel. She realized he was not a Lakewood officer and saw him handling handgun magazines. As she backed away, Ferris pleaded, “Don’t do this.”
“I’ll show you what I’ll do,” McLeod answered before shooting her through the lower torso.
Ferris fell but returned fire from the ground, fatally striking him. Despite her severe injuries, she had ended a killing spree that lasted approximately 47 minutes.
McLeod spent years constructing a story in which his failures were caused by enemies and his violence made him powerful. He wrote the deaths of real people into that fantasy and then tried to force reality to follow his script.
But the story he left behind does not belong to him. It belongs to Alicia Cardenas, Alyssa Gunn-Maldonado, Michael Swinyard, Danny Scofield and Sarah Steck; to Jimmy Maldonado and Ashley Ferris; and to the communities across Denver and Lakewood forced to survive the consequences of one man’s cultivated resentment
