Unless new clues surface, an arrest in the shooting death of Palmer Lake cyclist Timothy Watkins is unlikely, a prosecutor and top investigator said Friday.

Authorities offered a dour outlook on their prospects of solving the September killing in a popular recreational area on Mount Herman. Their hope is that someone comes forward with new information.

Detectives have identified persons of interest, but none of them rises to the level of a suspect, and the hunt for Watkins’ killer or killers has otherwise turned into a cold case, prosecutor Amy Fitch and El Paso County sheriff’s Detective Kurt Smith testified.

The assessment emerged in court Friday during a hearing over a public records dispute between The Gazette, which sought the release of Watkins’ autopsy, and the El Paso County Coroner’s Office, which asked a judge to seal the public document on the ground that its release would endanger the stalled investigation.

Fourth Judicial District Judge Eric Bentley sided with the Coroner’s Office, ruling that the county had “clearly” met its burden of establishing that “substantial injury to the public” would result from the autopsy’s release, satisfying an exception written into public records laws.

Information about the number of Watkins’ wounds, the trajectory of the fatal bullet or bullets, and the distance from which the rounds were fired are among the details that could dash hopes of solving the case, Bentley said. The report could also help pinpoint when and where Watkins was attacked.

Tipsters might be the last hope for solving the case, and such information could lead bad actors to step forward with fabricated allegations in hopes of earning special favor from authorities, the judge said, affirming an argument by Deputy El Paso County Attorney Diana May.

Releasing the autopsy would result in “potentially killing the investigation, potentially shutting off the possibility the crime might be solved,” Bentley said.

Watkins’ widow, Ginger Watkins, joined in the request to block the report’s release, citing privacy and the potential of harming the investigation.

In arguing for the document’s release, Gazette reporter Kaitlin Durbin argued that the Coroner’s Office has engaged in a “pattern and practice” of seeking to withhold autopsies in prominent El Paso County homicide investigations, even though Colorado law and legal precedent have held they are public records except under “extraordinary circumstances,” and only when “substantial injury to the public” will result.

The Gazette and the Colorado Springs Independent have together hired legal counsel to fight a similar attempt by the Coroner’s Office to block the release of the autopsy report for sheriff’s deputy Micah Flick, who was fatally shot while trying to arrest a suspected car thief Feb. 5 in east Colorado Springs.

The document could shed new insight into conflicting accounts of Flick’s death and whether his shooting “may have resulted after deviations from law enforcement policy,” Durbin previously reported in The Gazette

For example, Sheriff Bill Elder said in February that law enforcement officers, though in plainclothes, were identified by appropriate insignia when they confronted Manuel Zetina in the parking lot of Murray Hill Apartments. But resident Thomas Villanueva, who got caught in the crossfire and was paralyzed from the waist down, said the officers did not announce themselves and didn’t have law enforcement insignia on display. Autopsy reports generally specify what a person was wearing at the time of their death.

Villanueva has since filed a notice of claim against he city and county — a precursor to a lawsuit — blaming law enforcement agents for his life-altering injuries.

In granting the coroner’s request on Friday, Bentley noted that his ruling applied narrowly to the Watkins case and shouldn’t be interpreted in a way that would create “categorical exemption” pertaining to unsolved homicide cases.

The Gazette, which in two years has contested five attempts to block autopsy reports, won a round in 2017 when Judge Timothy Schutz ordered the release of an autopsy for Donat Herr, a Colorado Springs liquor store owner fatally shot during a robbery.

In that case, Schutz ruled that no substantial injury to the public would result.

May, of the County Attorney’s Office, said the coroner doesn’t intend to challenge the release of all autopsies involving unsolved killings, saying its requests will be issued on a “case-by-case basis” based on unique circumstances.