Mindy Lee’s mysterious death is a cold case in more than one sense. The 33-year-old mother’s frozen corpse was found five days after friends told police she jump out of their truck and ran into woods in the shadow of Colorado’s Pike’s Peak on the night of November 26, 2010.

When Woodland Park police concluded Lee’s death was a suicide, her family turned to Colorado Spring’s famed “Apple Dumpling Gang,” a trio of retired homicide detectives who have cracked other seemingly unsolvable cold case killings. Bobby Brown, also known for his several seasons helping bounty hunter “Dog” Chapman track down fugitives on television, immediately realized there were many unanswered questions that don’t fit the suicide theory.

Why would Lee, the mother of two girls, leave her four-year-old daughter and disappear into the freezing night, while wearing no shoes or socks and dressed in only light clothing? Why did police a tracking dog’s indication that Lee had gone inside a vacant house, which was never searched for evidence? Why did it take five days before searchers found her next to the Woodland Park high school football field a half-mile away?

Why were her feet unscathed if she ran over rough terrain in the dark? How could a school police officer find her body in the same area that was closely searched days earlier by Lee’s family? How did Lee get inside a locked 6-foot-high chain fence? How did two 55-gallon barrels get on top of the woman if it was a suicide?

Mindy’s mother said her last contact with her daughter a disturbing phone call at 6:30 p.m. on that Thanksgiving Eve. “All she could hear Mindy say was ‘mom, mom’ as she was whispering and she was trying to get help from her mom,” Brown told “Crime Stories with Nancy Grace.”

Brown told Grace he is optimistic about eventually solving the mystery, pointing to a new lead about the case of another woman who froze to death on the same street where Lee reportedly disappeared.

[Feature Photo: Vicki White]