By all rights, Donta Page never should have come to Colorado. In October 1998, Page was serving a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery in Maryland when officials there decided to grant him early release so that he could enroll at the Stout Street Foundation, a private drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in Denver. When Tuthill returned home unexpectedly to walk her dog, Page brutally raped her, beat her and killed her. Last month, Pat Tuthill, Peyton's mother, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Maryland in Denver District Court, claiming that in sending Page to Colorado, that state had broken the provisions of the Interstate Compact, which oversees the supervision of parolees and probationers moving between states. Colorado became the first state in the country to pass an updated version of the Interstate Compact, an agreement originally approved back in 1937, when there were few parolees or probationers moving between states.
Today there are tens of thousands.
So Colorado has taken additional steps to protect itself. In the spring of 1999, just months after Tuthill's murder, the legislature put House Bill 1353 on the fast track. Donta Page certainly qualified as the sort of person that Colorado wanted to watch. Citizens of Colorado have a right to know when offenders are coming in from other states for treatment. The programs themselves had more forms to fill out, more questions to ask potential clients.