Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  Maybe it was also the way she spoke; the way she licked her slickened lips as she contemplated a man from top to bottom, from his eyes to his size. The breathless timbre of her voice was also sweetened with the remnants of a Carolina accent.

  That was Sharon. Sherry. Sher.

  As the weeks passed, the Fullers moved from the Rocky Ford motel to a camping trailer near a local department store, to a little house five blocks from the Nelson residence. By then, the families had become good friends. There were veggie pizza dinners, shared baby-sitting, even camp-outs in the Nelson motor home in the midst of the splendor of the Spanish Peaks. Most of the conversation between the four adults revolved around the church, but even for Sharon that was better than nothing. She was a lonely woman in a town that she had a hard time taking a liking to. Mike had church duties and Sharon had the kids. There seemed to be nothing in between. The Nelson family was a godsend.

  When Perry and Julie Nelson invited the Fullers to accompany them on a Memorial Day weekend camp-out in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, it was Sharon who readily accepted. The group departed immediately after church, planning to spend that night at a campground and hiking the next morning. Everyone was buoyant. It was a good weekend to leave Rocky Ford; the temperature was expected to hover just above one-hundred degrees.

  Perry parked the motor home along a lazy creek; the air was fragrant with blooming wildflowers and cacti. It was as lovely as any place on earth. The beauty was not lost on Sharon, who found her appreciation for the desert deepen. While it was not North Carolina with its vast green hillsides, she could not deny it was awash with a life of its own.

  The next morning, Julie stayed in the RV while Perry, Sharon, Mike and the girls hiked up the mountain. Not long after they departed, Mike became queasy and returned to Julie in the motor home.

  While the little girls scrambled ahead on the trail, the two adults talked about their lives, at first disclosing only the most minor of details. Sharon conceded she hated Colorado; hated the fact her husband had been transferred out west. Perry told Sharon of his love for Taos; his passion for flying his plane from place to place. The conversation was warm and lively. Only once did it take an uncomfortable turn. It was Sharon who brought up her past.

  “What have you heard about me?” she abruptly inquired.

  Perry shrugged. He insisted he had heard not a word. He looked at her quizzically.

  Sharon stared into his eyes. “I just wondered if you heard I was the minister’s wife who’d hop in bed with anybody.”

  If the eye doctor was shocked by the candor of the remark, he didn’t let on. Maybe he had, in fact, heard a thing or two.

  “Why, no,” he said. “Haven’t heard anything like that at all.”

  Later, while Sharon was hanging on Perry Nelson’s every word back at the campsite, Julie noticed that toddler Denise was missing. She and Mike searched the immediate area and alerted Sharon and Perry.

  Sharon didn’t seem concerned.

  “I think she was found almost right away,” Julie later remembered. “But it still struck me as strange that Sharon didn’t care one bit. She couldn’t be bothered with her children. Not when she had my husband to talk to, I guess.”

  Julie made a call to one of her girlfriends from the Adventist congregation when she returned home from the Memorial Day weekend camping trip. She described how she and the new minister had been left to their own devices in the motor home while their spouses had gone off hiking. Julie seemed a little uneasy about the weekend, but she concluded the conversation by telling her friend it was probably just her reaction to having a miserable time. There was probably nothing more to it.

  Perry Nelson was the antithesis of Mike Fuller. It would take Sharon an hour to come up with a list of positive attributes about her Bible-waving husband. Negatives, however, came easily. Mike was gruff. He was impatient. He didn’t give a hoot about anyone or anything but his precious position in the church. He didn’t care one iota about Sharon’s needs as a woman or a human being. He was as cold as a Colorado glacier. At least, he was all of that in Sharon’s eyes.

  Perry Nelson, however, was none of those things. As Sharon saw him, the eye doctor had an intriguing gentleness that resonated through all his actions. He radiated a kind of personal warmth that proclaimed to the world he was a healer. But he was not a mealy-mouthed do-gooder. He was not a bore. Perry had a playful sense of humor. He could put anyone to quick and welcome ease with a quip or off-the-cuff joke. But, more than anything, Sharon would later insist, Dr. Nelson had caring eyes. His eyes told her that she was special. She was somebody.

  “He was so easy to talk to. It was like I’d known him all my life. We just fell into a real easy friendship,” she later said.

  Perry Edson Nelson, II, had done his Cedar Lake, Michigan, parents proud. They were simple, God-fearing folks who put all of their hope and effort into their children. The times did not make it easy. The oldest of two boys and two girls, Perry was born in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression. The senior Perry Nelson found work in a foundry, as a cook in a sanitarium and later assembled redwood furniture at a local mill. Esther Nelson could stretch a nickel from the icebox to the refrigerator, because she was frugal and because she skimped on herself and her husband. Their children were not spoiled, but they did not go without the necessities. When her kids were older, and money was tight, Mrs. Nelson also worked as caregiver and, later, at the same furniture mill as her husband.

  Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Nelson was educated beyond high school, but they saw education as the opportunity for their brood to enjoy a better life. None held as great promise as Perry. He earned good grades, went to church, and when he decided to make a career in optometry, his parents were overjoyed. A doctor! He would be the embodiment of the American Dream. Their sacrifice and scrimping had paid off. The day in 1962 when their oldest son—married to Julie and with a growing family—graduated from the Southern School of Optometry in Memphis, Tennessee, was the brightest moment the family had ever known.

  Not long after graduation, the elder Nelsons said good-bye to their prodigal son as he and his young family went west. There was great excitement and hope for the future. At 29, Dr. Nelson was opening an optometry office in Rocky Ford, Colorado.

  The Georgia Watkins Memorial Medical Arts Building was in the final months of completion when the Nelsons arrived in the town that would be their new home. Connected to Pioneer Memorial Hospital, the Watkins Building was a simple building with a low-slung roof, utilitarian and undistinguished, save for its decorative use of the multi-toned stone mined at a ranch just south of Rocky Ford. A waiting room for the four main offices was shared. It was a good idea for such a small community. Rocky Ford, tiny and out in the middle of nowhere, had done itself proud. Few towns its size had their own hospital and even fewer had such accomplished doctors in private practice.

  Over the years, several MDs, chiropractors, dentists and optometrists would run their practices out of the small building. None would leave a lasting mark of greater importance than Perry Nelson. All would remember him and what happened after a sexual cyclone named Sharon blew into town.

  Chapter 2

  IF ONLY SHE HAD NEVER MARRIED MIKE FULLER. IF only she had acted upon her own impulses. Sharon drummed her fingertips on the tabletop and remembered there had been an out one time. She had considered the alternative.

  The crisply engraved invitations were in the mail and Sharon, then barely twenty, wanted to cancel the November 1963 wedding. She had made a mistake. She sat at the kitchen table with her parents, Morris and Josephine Douglas, in their Maryland home. Sharon pleaded with her folks to back her up, to help her this one last time.

  But Morris and Josephine were stone-faced. Crimson came to the old man’s ears. Mrs. Douglas fidgeted with a handkerchief and daubed at the shiny surface of the table.

  “I don’t want to marry him,” Sharon said softly. Tears pooled in her eyes.

  Josephine shook her head and defe
rred to her husband.

  “You’d be a damn fool to pass up this chance. He’s going to be a minister. He’s making something of himself.”

  The volume of his voice increased. Sharon felt herself sinking in her chair, getting smaller and smaller. She was Alice falling into the rabbit hole. Going down. Way down.

  Later, when retrospection was possible, albeit justifiably suspect, Sharon recalled her thoughts at the time.

  “They were reinforcing this little girl in me that marry up, maybe if you marry somebody that’s all white and clean and happy, you’ll be okay. You won’t have to deal with some of the things from your childhood. You won’t have to deal with your feelings of I'm not good enough…”

  Three days after John Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, Sharon donned a white wedding gown that looked like the yardage of lace used to make it had depleted the world’s supply. At twenty, she was a beautiful bride. Her hair was dark and thick, her eyebrows shaped to perfection. Dimples cut into her exquisite, milky skin. If there had been a prettier bride in 1963 or any year before it, none who was at the wedding could think of her.

  While her parents looked on, Sharon stared into Mike Fuller’s eyes and in a soft voice holding traces of her father’s southern accent, promised she’d remain his forever, until death.

  And the numbing years flew by. Mike’s career as a minister led them from Ohio town to Ohio town. Sharon batted her eyes for the old men in the Adventist governing body. It was all for Mike. Everyone thought she was so lucky to be married to a man with such a future.

  Problem was they didn’t have to live with him. They didn’t have to walk in the rut he created.

  It was 1968, and despite the terrible and bloody war in Southeast Asia, for many, America would never be more free in spirit than it was that hot, humid summer. It was inescapable and, in a way, inevitable. The grainy images on television and the ink-smudged front pages of newspapers begat a kind of social, a kind of gender consciousness that had been dormant for so very long. It was time for everyone to turn, turn, turn. And while Cleveland, Ohio, was by no means San Francisco, there was still the patchouli-scented promise that the world was changing, and women like Sharon Lynn Fuller were changing along with it. More freedom and more fun. More possibilities. The young wife listened to church-prohibited music on a transistor radio, she went to movies that were forbidden by the church… she took it all in. For the first time in her life, Sharon even drank and smoked. And she liked it. As wrong as it all was, Sharon Fuller liked it.

  Five years into her marriage to up-and-coming minister Mike Fuller and still childless, Sharon had once and for all seen the future as her husband and parents had indelibly outlined it. There would be no love, no excitement, no fun. Only mind-numbing work and sex whenever he wanted would mark their time on this planet. Sometimes it would sneak into Sharon’s consciousness that only death would bring euphoria. Life had become a predictable bore completely centered around her husband’s responsibilities with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. When she married Mike, she had cemented her lifelong role. She was the dutiful minister’s wife, a frozen fixture with a rote smile in a second-row pew. She was to flawlessly type up newsletters, sermons, meeting minutes. She was to serve punch at church functions, help out with the youth camp, teach Bible lessons, lend an ear to the troubled, the confused and the bitter.

  Even their fun was tiresome. Saturday nights were reserved for Mission: Impossible and big bowls of popcorn made on the stove top and smothered in a cube of melted butter. Sharon, many assumed, had bought into that kind of existence. She smiled with the happy and consoled the sad as the popcorn bowl emptied. But in reality, as the commercials rolled and as conversations with guests waned in the evening, she silently weighed the options of her life.

  At 23, Sharon was young and beautiful; and, in time, she began to use those assets. Men’s eyes were riveted to her breasts and backside as she came and went from a room. Whether they were members of the church or good-looking passersby on the street, Sharon could feel their eyes as if they were fingers, touching, poking, stroking.

  The attention felt good. Sharon was intoxicated by it and wanted more. She wanted to feel the physical embodiment of the rush that lust brought to her each time she smiled at a man who eyed her. She wanted to know how an orgasm felt when excitement and hunger for a man caused it, instead of the mechanical rubbing of her husband.

  Sharon was employed as a secretary at a Cleveland printing business typing letters and answering the phone when she gave in to her impulses for the first time. In the beginning, she had not seen herself as a career woman, liberated with bras burning in the fireplace at home. She was earning extra money out in the world and trying to see exactly where she fit in.

  Not long after she started at the printer, Sharon began sleeping with one of her bosses, a man of fifty who was old enough to be her father. Even worse, even more taboo, he was married and had two children. The affair went on for months. Sex and companionship were a combination that she craved. It was good and it was safe. While her husband preached, his wife put out. The weeks zipped by without anyone the wiser. But by late 1968, a complication irrevocably altered the balance. Despite a reliance on birth-control pills, Sharon became pregnant by her lover. By then she had marked her twenty-fourth birthday. She lied to Mike and told him that he was going to be a father.

  Guilt, shame, and hurt, Sharon would later say, nearly got the best of her.

  One night after friends arrived at the Fullers’ tidy duplex to watch television, a tired Sharon curled up and drifted asleep on the couch. Around 1 A.M. she woke up to overhear her husband telling their friend that he did not love her. Never had. The words bit like a taunted scorpion, leaving a welting sting that time would never erase. As long as Sharon would live, she knew the truth would haunt her. From both sides, the marriage had been a terrible mistake.

  “I’ve never loved her. She’s like a millstone around my neck.”

  No one paid much attention to the woman near the concrete steps leading down to the smelly beach that traced the edges of Lake Erie. She was in the last stage of pregnancy, her body gravid beyond belief. So much so doctors had agreed to set a date to induce labor. Even so, the woman had neither the radiant glow nor the Madonna smile most associate with the blessed state. Arched by perfectly plucked brows, her eyes were cold, flat. She made her way quickly and purposefully to the chilly, black water. One step, then another. In no time, she was breast deep.

  The woman was Sharon Fuller. She would never forget that moment, and over the years, she would tell others of her despair.

  “I was just going to do away with me and the kid. That was the only time in my life I have been that ready to just end it. I remember standing in the water, the feel of it. I remember seeing the sunset. If it [the water] had been warmer, I might have kept on walking, but it was cold. It was really cold.”

  Her desperation turned to anger.

  “I wouldn’t let Mike do this to me,” she recalled many years later. “I wouldn’t let Mike put me to a point where I was ready to end it.”

  Sharon turned around and went back up the steps, the lights of the city of Cleveland looming before her, a trail of water following her. Her clothes clung to swelling thighs and a stomach stretched so tight her belly button had all but vanished. The modified flip that was her hairdo was limp. Her shoes sloshed with each step.

  Mixed with the lake water were tears.

  Sharon would never forget the night she first wanted to tell Mike about her affair and how the baby she was carrying was not his, but a secret lover’s. Two nights after she had considered suicide in the waters of Lake Erie, Sharon and Mike sat on the front steps of their duplex. It was the end of May, 1969. The night air was warm and scented with the heady smell of lilacs. Sharon once again stated she was not happy, that she never could be happy as a minister’s wife… his wife. She had been living a lie.

  “I want you to find me an apartment,” she finally said. “I want o
ut.”

  Mike refused. He insisted whatever problems they had could be resolved.

  “You can’t leave me. It will destroy our lives. We’ll find a way to work it out.”

  Sharon, she would later assert, knew better.

  At 12:30 A.M., June 1, 1969, Rochelle Fuller was born. A day later, Sharon and her beautiful dark-haired baby were settled at home alone—Mike was off at a Seventh-Day Adventist camp pitching tents for a revival. Stranded without a car,

  Sharon called her lover to come over to hold his baby. She was playing by her own rules.

  By mid-August, heat and the stress of new motherhood had stretched Sharon’s emotions to the snapping point once more. The fact that Rochelle was colicky only exacerbated the tensions in the household. There was no nursery in the duplex, so the baby’s bassinet was kept in Mike’s study. Though there was no other place for his daughter’s little bed, Mike was annoyed by the inconvenience. He complained whenever his wife set stacks of clean diapers on the corner of his oak-and-Formica desk. He had sermons to write, church business to conduct. She was not helping matters.

  Sharon’s blood began to boil and she started to rant.

  “You don’t want me. You don’t want the baby! All you want is somebody that can be a minister’s wife. I wanted you to get me an apartment. I wanted out!”

  Her husband sat calmly. His unflagging composure inflamed the situation.

  So Sharon stabbed him with words. It was all she could do.

  “You don’t have to worry,” she yelled. “I’m going to find a way to get out of your life! Rochelle is not yours anyway!”

  Mike was outraged as any man would be. Even so, he betrayed little emotion. He sat on the edge of the bed. He just wanted the facts. He told Sharon, that the only way they’d be able to salvage their marriage was for her to come completely clean.