by Gregg Olsen
“This is the way people are supposed to live,” the 46-year-old told a friend.
It was still dark when Bob Lloyd and the others first arrived on the scene, following reports the home had been burned while the owner was away. Arson, they all suspected. It was a good guess. A cursory examination, even in the black of the early morning hours of November 20, 1988, indicated the fire had been isolated to an area off the garage entry into the house. Firemen with beard-stubbled, smudged faces and wet boots told the investigators that charred “pour” patterns around an open pit in the floorboards indicated an accelerant had more than likely had been used by the arsonist.
Criminalist Lloyd walked the perimeter of the residence. It was a one-story, a brick ranch house with neatly groomed landscaping, and, even in winter, a flawlessly clipped-on-the-bias front lawn. Real estate agents love to call such attention to detail as “pride of ownership.” He walked along the sidewalk noting nothing unusual, with the exception of an iron security grate having been removed from a window well that fed a diffused column of light into the basement level. A drift of curly, brown cottonwood leaves nested in the depth of the well.
A quick round of questions confirmed the security grate had not been removed by firefighters in an effort to make a rescue or to gain access to extinguish the blaze. The criminalist knew, firsthand, that sometimes the very best “clues” turned out to be nothing more than a misinterpretation of what had been done to the fire scene—before it was roped off as a crime scene.
The beam of his portable light knifed through the air, catching the dusty filaments of a spider web.
No one had come in or out of the house through the window well.
Without exception, investigators from all divisions of law enforcement feel the jolting surge of adrenaline when suspicions rise at a crime scene. But it is not a thrill. It is not merely a reaction to the excitement of a discovery. For many, it is far deeper. It is the rush of the hunt. The feeling of pursuit seizes them and propels them. No one who works the scene of a terrible fire or murder is bored. No matter what time a cop is hauled out of the quiet and warmth of a bed or out of the arms of a wife or husband, they readily go. All investigators are hunters.
Bob Lloyd followed his beam of light around the house. The three-car garage had two vehicles parked inside. The largest of the garage doors had been open when the firemen first arrived. A beautifully restored white Camaro and what had become many suburbanites’ everyday auto, a pickup track, sat waiting for their driver.
“Where is Glen?” asked a fireman who knew Glen Harrelson, the owner of the burned home. Harrelson was known to many who had arrived on the smoldering scene. As it turned out, Harrelson was a veteran Denver firefighter.
It was Glen Harrelson’s house, for Christ’s sake. A goddamn fire had ruined the house of one of their own. A goddamn arsonist had targeted one of their own.
As far as anyone knew, Glen Harrelson wasn’t home. The fireman was nowhere to be seen.
Further searching of the smoky confines of the house turned up nothing to indicate he had been home. A firefighter’s shield and a packet of photographs were on the nightstand. The bed was made. The clothes in his closet were hung in the starched precision that commonly suggests military training. If he wasn’t home, where was he?
A call to his fire station revealed the missing man was not scheduled for duty until 6:30 that morning. He had a good work record and was never late. It was more than likely he was still down south in Trinidad with his wife, Sharon.
A few on the scene allowed themselves a sense of relief when they heard their colleague was not there, and that he often was gone for several days at a time.
Bob Lloyd stepped around a scattering of coins in the living room as he walked through the house.
“Maybe a burglary?” a young officer suggested.
The criminalist, nicknamed “Dr. Detroit” by his coworkers, didn’t think so. Beyond the coins, nothing had been disturbed. The drawers in the master bedroom had been left alone. No one had ransacked the closet. No one had taken the firearms neatly arranged on a shelf. The bureau in the guest room was untouched.
The coffeemaker, the smoke detector, the television, everything plastic had been melted into Dali images by the heat of the fire.
In the basement, a chair pushed over to the window with the missing grate indicated a point of entry.
But the spider webs are still intact, Lloyd reminded himself. No one got in or out of here through the basement.
Whoever set the fire, he reasoned, had come in through a door, and with a house so secure—burglar alarms, window grates with panic buttons for emergency release—it had to have been with a key.
Or an invitation.
If it had been an invitation, then where in the world was Glen Harrelson?
Just inside the garage entrance to the inside of the house was the charred depths of the crawl space. Bob Lloyd knew he would return to that area. He knew most of the answers to the questions police and firefighters were asking would be contained in the blackness of that hole. Since most certainly an accelerant had been used, analysis of the burned-out flooring would yield the answer to what it was. He directed his flashlight through the darkness, but saw nothing but debris.
He had stood in that spot before. Too many times. He leaned forward, craning his neck.
“There’s something down there,” he said, indicating that halogen lights from his truck would be needed. In a few minutes, a power cord from the police generator snaked its way through the garage, past the Camaro, through the entry door and into the area adjacent to the smoldering flooring.
Six halogens blasted into the hole. Eyes focused on the mess below. It took a few seconds for Bob Lloyd to adjust his vision as the white beam eradicated the dark. What appeared to be a seared gasoline can caught his eye. Of course. The beam of light plunged deeper, revealing charred fabric, probably clothing and melted carpet bunched up in a pile. Then he saw a twisted figure.
It was a man.
“We’ve got a homicide,” he said. His tone was flat, matter-of-fact. Still, his heart pounded.
It was Glen Harrelson, 45, blackened like a briquette, contorted in the pugilistic position that is the result of incineration of muscle and tendon: his arms pulled up to his chest; his legs stiffened and tight. He was on his back, his head fully intact.
“The skull didn’t explode,” someone remarked.
Bob Lloyd nodded. He knew it was more likely than not that the man in the crawl space had died from a gunshot wound to the head. Without the piercing by a bullet or the fracture by a hard instrument, the human head almost always explodes in the heat of a fire.
Though not much was left of his face, it was clear that it was still there. Like Edvard Munch’s famed painting Scream, Glen Harrelson’s mouth was open as if to shriek.
But of course it did not. He could make no sound. Never again.
Notifications to the Thornton Police Department were made that the arson investigation at Columbine Court was now a murder case. The victim, more than likely, was the owner of the house, a fireman named Glen Harrelson.
Later that morning, two shell casings were picked up by detectives; one was found by the television set, another closer to the door, near the sofa. After necessary warrants were procured, a fireman went into the hole and gingerly put the dead man’s remains onto a board for removal. The victim’s bones were so brittle, his skin so charred, that the fireman held his breath so as not to break the corpse into a million pieces. Bob
Lloyd ran his video recorder, providing a calm voice-over to everything he saw.
Everything pointed to an ambush. The killer was lying in wait when Glen Harrelson entered his house. It was probably over quickly. The intruder double tapped—shot—Glen in the head, doused gasoline on his body, stoked the fire with some clothing, scattered the coins and left. It was a classic case of a staged homicide, and it only took the killer a few minutes to do it.
At 36, Elaine Tygart was a six-footer
, a woman in a world of size sevens who carried her striking height beautifully and proudly. She had brown eyes and long, frosted blond hair. Bangs framed her face with a feathery touch. She neither looked like a police officer, nor had she ever dreamed of being one. In fact, being a cop had been someone else’s dream. Elaine Tygart was in the right place and the right time when, as a college student, her fiancé at the time applied for positions at various police departments throughout Colorado. Almost on a whim, she followed suit and was quickly hired by a suburban Denver police department in the spring of 1976.
A decade later, promoted to a position of investigator, she was one of only a very small number of American women holding such coveted posts. Though she worked property crimes, the new detective found her niche in persons crimes: adult sex crimes, assault and homicide. Elaine liked people and was expert at comforting them while extracting information that would help in the arrest and conviction of a perpetrator. If a victim needed to cry, she’d allow it. If they wanted to talk and talk and talk, Elaine Tygart was there to listen. She was never cold to the victim. She was never easy on the perpetrator.
Elaine was always one to get to the meat of the crime.
Her sheer physical presence had been an asset from the very beginning of her law enforcement career. While not as physically strong as her male counterparts in the department, Elaine’s height gave her an advantage over both male and female suspects. Raised with four brothers, she had been a tomboy growing up in Ohio. She knew toughness and bravado were advantages that could not be discounted.
And she could swear. She could let loose four-letter words in sequences that startled. Miss Prissy, Miss Goody-Two shoes, Charlie’s Angels wannabe, she was not.
Detective Elaine Tygart, accidental career cop, was as good as they get.
Years later, she told tales of how she proved herself in the matter-of-fact manner one might employ to tell a neighbor over the clothesline, if, indeed, people still had such chats.
She once lifted a belligerent drunk and tossed her down the stairs after she had been spat in the face and kicked in the shins.
“Goddamn you! You’re going downstairs! You’re going to jail.”
Another time when she was called for backup on a theft in progress only to find an officer about to get his head bashed in with a tire iron, she pointed her gun and stopped the perpetrator in his tracks.
“You move, asshole, and you’re fuckin’ dead.’’
Word circulated among cops that the six-footer with the frosted hair had real guts. She wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything. Even so, she did not hide that she was a woman. She always wore makeup, perfume and did her hair. She never once considered herself one of the guys—even though some treated her that way.
Youth had its advantages as well as its drawbacks. At 28, Glen Trainor was the kind of young detective whom senior, more jaded, investigators like to call-“green.” That somewhat derisive term was wasted on the young investigator. Although Glen Trainor had only worked two homicides and did lack experience, the tenacity of youth—the hunger for the hunt— more than made up for it. He came to the Thornton Police Department after a four-year stint in the Air Force security police ended in 1983 and became a detective in August 1987. Glen Trainor also loved his work. It held his interest in a way he imagined no other job could.
I can’t believe we get paid for what we do. A lot of people would do this job for no pay, he thought.
Two miles away from the smoldering house, Trainor was reached at the home he shared with his wife Robin and their two-year-old daughter with the request to get over to 12370 Columbine Court. By the time he arrived, officers were canvassing the neighborhood to find anyone who might have seen something that could help determine what—and, more importantly, who—caused the fire that killed Glen Harrelson. The arson squad picked through the smoldering ruins and several neighbors gathered beyond the yellow tape. White vapors from the spectators’ warm breath caught the light of approaching cars as they talked about how their neighbor had recently married and that he and his new wife divided their time between Trinidad and Denver.
When Elaine Tygart got word there had been a suspicious death involving a Denver fireman in a house fire in Thornton, she was in the middle of the second day of a two-day blood spatter seminar at the Westminster Ramada Inn. Once alerted, the detective packed up her things and immediately went to the station.
It doesn’t add up. A firefighter dead in a fire in his own house? Doesn’t add up.
At the Thornton Police Department, plans were made to send Tygart and Trainor to Trinidad to make a death notification, and to solve a murder. A sergeant doled out a few bucks from petty cash for meals and lodging. Authorities in Trinidad had been notified Tygart and Trainor were en route and were standing by to render assistance as needed. Glen Harrelson’ s wife, Sharon, the Thornton police learned through conversations with the dead man’s coworkers, lived in a remote mountain home in Weston. They also learned more jarring information: It seemed Sharon’s second husband had died five years before, and while there was no murder investigation—that death was ruled accidental, a car wreck—there were some concerns.
It was a little after 3 P.M. when the pair got into their unmarked detective unit, an Impala, for the long drive south.
Their minds raced. There was no red flag larger in law enforcement: The woman they were going to see was twice a widow. Her husbands had died untimely, suspicious deaths.
“Wouldn’t it be weird if we cleared them both?” Det. Trainor asked as he and his partner merged onto I-25.
“Yeah,” she answered. “It would be.”
Glen Trainor was three inches shorter than Elaine Tygart, but neither saw themselves as Mutt and Jeff. They were professionals with a job to do. They drove on.
Most longtime Coloradans know of Trinidad and its surrounding environs. The place, in a word, had a reputation. It was an isolated town, a somewhat inbred haven for the alternative and the strange. Of course, the handiwork of Trinidad’s gender reassignment surgeon Dr. Stanley Biber and his world-renowned sex-change clinic routinely came up when people outside the community spoke of the town. Some in law enforcement considered Trinidad a postcard-pretty place with a dark side of corruption, mystery, and waitresses with five o’clock shadow.
As one native Coloradan half-joked, “Trinidad has seventy-three churches and eighty bars.”
The two detectives chatted about the mountain community as they drove Trinidad’s streets in search of the police station and Las Animas County Sheriff’s Department. Keenly aware of their outsider-status, they wondered what kind of assistance they’d get from the local cops. Secluded places like Trinidad don’t like strangers butting into their business. But to the detectives’ surprise, instead of resistance they were greeted with handshakes and offers to help when they arrived in the hand-cut gray stone building that housed both the sheriff and the police.
As the sheriff’s deputies began to talk about the woman the Thornton pair had come to interview, an unflattering and unsettling picture began to emerge. Sharon Harrelson had been the talk of the town from nearly her first days in the area. It seemed everyone knew her and no one was surprised the police wanted to talk to her. She was lusty, flamboyant. She was a bed hopper that would give the frogs of Calaveras County a run for their money. It seemed like she’d bedded half the men—married or single—in a hundred-mile radius. If you wore pants and were looking for a woman to spread her legs, this lady apparently obliged.
Some of it was gossip. Some of it was mean-spirited; the kind of talk that comes from horny men who didn’t get any at home. Sitting in the bar, bullshitting the hours away until closing, talking about the women they’d like to screw…the lady in the fancy house on Cougar Ridge frequently came up in conversation.
Whatever the reality of the basis of her reputation, it was doubtful any grass grew under the lady’s feet.
The sheriff’s deputy told Tygart and Trainor that as far as they knew, Sharon
Harrelson was at home. The lack of phone service in the area made it impossible to give her a call to see if she was there. Though it was late, the only way to confirm it was to take the forty-five-minute trip out to Weston, where her home was perched on a mountainside. The Thornton detectives were put into the backseat of an older-than-the-hills Scout and taken to a house where they picked up a young man—the son of another officer—who knew the location of Sharon Harrelson’ s mountain hideaway.
“Never find it without a guide,” the deputy said, as the young man slid into a seat.
Neither of the Thornton cops disagreed. They wanted to get on with it. Even so, Trainor felt a little anxious. As they drove further and further into the blackness of the night, he wondered just exactly where they were headed. All the stories of Trinidad being a haven for crime and the weirdoes that flock to such places took hold. It was so remote. It was so Nowheresville. It was the perfect place to bump off a couple of nosy out-of-town cops.
Shoot us up on a hillside and say they never saw us…
Glen Trainor chatted nervously about fishing and hunting prospects in the area as though he were really interested. The local deputy promised to take him up to the reservoir, if they had time, to show him the area’s best fishing spot.
* * *
The siren of the mountains, the purported sexpot of the Rockies, was puffy-eyed and weary when the detectives and their local law enforcement escort went inside her grand, custom-built home. For all the Thornton police detectives had heard about her, the woman’s appearance did not match her reputation. Perhaps it was the terrible circumstances of their visit? At 43, Sharon Harrelson was soft-spoken and devoid of makeup. She was no man magnet. She was tired and wan.
The occupants of the house included two small children— identified as seven-year-old Misty and ten-year-old Danny Nelson—and a young woman named Rochelle and her husband, Bart Mason. None of them mattered, of course. At least initially, all eyes were on the woman who had lost her husband to a terrible fire.
Rochelle scurried the little boy and girl into the living room, while Sharon led her somber parade of visitors to the kitchen.
