James Agnew pleaded guilty in Jefferson County after investigators found James O’Neill’s body inside a South Ammons Street home.

LAKEWOOD, Colo. — A Lakewood man was sentenced in April to five years in prison after admitting he hid another man’s body and used the man’s identity while Social Security payments kept flowing into the victim’s bank account.

James David Agnew, 56, pleaded guilty in Jefferson County District Court to tampering with a deceased body and identity theft in the case of James O’Neill, 62, whose remains were found July 3, 2025, inside a condominium in the 3400 block of South Ammons Street. The sentence gives Agnew five years on each count, served at the same time, with credit for 276 days already spent in jail. Prosecutors dropped five other felony counts under the plea deal, including abuse of a corpse, theft, attempted theft, a second identity theft count and unauthorized use of a financial device.

The case began not with a death report, but with a brother’s search. On June 19, 2025, O’Neill’s brother asked Lakewood police to check on him after years of little or no contact. The family had not seen O’Neill since 2019 and had not spoken with him since 2021, court documents said. When officers went to the South Ammons Street home, a man came out and identified himself only as “James.” Police said he acknowledged that relatives had been trying to reach him but said he did not want contact. Investigators later said the man was not O’Neill, but James Agnew. When police showed the body-camera footage to O’Neill’s brother, the brother said the man on the video was not his sibling.

That moment shifted the welfare check into a broader investigation. Suzanne Ruth Agnew, 58, first told police that O’Neill had moved away years earlier after meeting a foreign woman online, documents said. O’Neill’s brother later contacted her about an inheritance and was told O’Neill was sitting next to her but did not want to talk. When the brother said O’Neill would need to appear at a bank in person to sign papers, contact ended, investigators said. Detectives then found that monthly Social Security deposits were still going into O’Neill’s account and that the money was being spent. Surveillance from a 7-Eleven showed James Agnew using O’Neill’s debit card, according to investigators. Court documents put the amount spent after O’Neill’s death at $17,406.

Detectives returned to the condominium July 3 with a search warrant. According to the affidavit, Suzanne Agnew told them they would find O’Neill’s body inside and indicated he was dead. Police found the body on the floor of a bedroom, beneath or near a deflated air mattress. Suzanne Agnew told investigators that she, her husband and O’Neill had been in a three-way intimate relationship for years and had lived together. Both Agnews told detectives that they woke one morning in December 2023 and found O’Neill dead. James Agnew told police there had “probably” been drug use the night before, documents said. Neither James Agnew nor Suzanne Agnew has been charged with causing O’Neill’s death, and the official cause and manner of death have not been made public.

The affidavit described a long delay between O’Neill’s death and the search that found his remains. Suzanne Agnew told investigators that she initially did not report the death because she was not ready to “give up” O’Neill, whom she called Jim. She also repeatedly said it was wrong not to report his death, according to investigators. Police said she described covering the body after about a week because the couple’s Chihuahuas began chewing on him. The air mattress became part of the grim scene detectives later documented inside the bedroom. Investigators also wrote that James Agnew knew how to access O’Neill’s bank account and knew the personal identification number for the debit card. He later said the money was a consideration in not reporting the death.

Agnew’s guilty plea narrowed the criminal case against him to two convictions tied to the handling of O’Neill’s remains and the use of his identity. The five-year terms run together, meaning the prison sentence is not stacked. With jail credit already applied, he is expected to serve less than the full five-year term in state custody, depending on corrections rules and later decisions. The plea also ended the pending charges against him that had accused him of theft, abuse of a corpse and unauthorized use of a financial device. The agreement did not resolve the separate case against Suzanne Agnew, who has pleaded not guilty to charges tied to the body, alleged theft and financial use.

Suzanne Agnew’s case remained active after her husband’s sentence. Court records showed a pretrial conference scheduled for May 26, 2026. Her pending charges include tampering with a deceased body, abuse of a corpse and theft. Prosecutors have not publicly accused her of killing O’Neill. The coroner’s findings remain central to the unanswered questions, because investigators said the couple reported that O’Neill died in his sleep in December 2023. The criminal filings focus on what allegedly happened after that death, including the failure to report it, the concealment of the remains and the spending of benefit money. The record also shows how a family inquiry about inheritance, not a police call about a death, exposed the case.

The South Ammons Street condominium sat at the center of the investigation for nearly every major turn. It was the place officers first met a man calling himself James, the place Suzanne Agnew said O’Neill had supposedly left, and the place detectives later entered with a search warrant. The apartment also held the evidence that changed the case from a missing-person concern into a body-tampering and fraud prosecution. In statements to police, the Agnews gave a version of events that placed O’Neill’s death in December 2023 and the body’s discovery in July 2025. That left about 18 months in which the remains were kept inside the home while monthly benefit deposits continued. For O’Neill’s relatives, the discovery followed years of distance and failed contact.

The next scheduled milestone is Suzanne Agnew’s May 26, 2026, pretrial conference, while the public record still does not include a final cause or manner of O’Neill’s death.

Author note: Last updated Sunday, May 17, 2026.