Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  On July 1, 1977, the pair that had scandalized Trinidad and Rocky Ford exchanged wedding vows in a private ceremony at the St. Francis of Assisi Mission in Taos. It had to be Taos, for Sharon. The place had seemed magical from that first weekend trip during which she’d gotten to know Perry. The couple honeymooned over the next couple of days, spending their last afternoon in Santa Fe.

  When they returned to Colorado, the local gossip line percolated with the latest.

  He married her. The eye doc married the minister’s wife!

  For many in Rocky Ford, the news that Sharon and Perry had tied the knot brought more resignation than joy. When they came back as man and wife, few marked the occasion with a gift. It just didn’t seem appropriate.

  Nor, to some, did it seem genuine.

  “I felt like the whole marriage was a show,” said a woman who knew all parties in the sordid and tragic Nelson saga. “It was like they were trying so hard to portray that they were so happy. They were trying to prove to the world they had done nothing wrong, that their love was good and right. It didn’t matter about Mike and the kids or Julie and the girls. Their love was higher than that. Sharon was always a big one for appearances. She wanted everything new and perfect in her home. But it was just for looks. Her marriage was the same way. There was no heart to anything she had or did.”

  Living in California with Lorri, Julie, for one, was surprised when she got word of the July union. She checked with her lawyer and he confirmed that though the divorce was pending, it had not yet been made final at the time of the Taos wedding. Julie let it sit. She didn’t want the man anymore.

  Those two deserve each other, she thought.

  Sharon Nelson could spit tacks. She had never been so angry in all her life; at least, she couldn’t think of a time when she had been. At the end of a visit, Rochelle Fuller informed her mother that her daddy was moving her and her sister to Ohio the next morning. Since Mike had legal custody, Sharon saw no way of stopping him.

  “I saw them drive away,” she told a friend, “and I didn’t know when I’d see my girls again.”

  Three weeks later, a letter arrived addressed to Sharon. In the missive, Mike indicated that even though he had moved to pastor a new church out-of-state, visitation with their daughters could continue. Sharon and Perry would get Rochelle and Denise for Christmas vacation and two weeks in the summer. They’d have to arrange for transportation to and from Ohio.

  Sharon considered waging a legal battle for her daughters, particularly Rochelle, whom she knew was not Mike’s biological daughter.

  “I didn’t know how to do it without tearing [Rochelle] up, totally. How do I drag [Rochelle] through court without screwing [her] up more than [her] mother?” she asked.

  Sharon did what she did best when it came to her children. She let them go. She let Mike have them.

  * * *

  Sharon was supposed to pay the bills at the office. It was such a joke. Sharon paid nothing. All the money that came into the business was hers. She was now the doctor’s wife and she was entitled to all the bucks that come with the title. She certainly wasn’t helping matters. Whenever there were two nickels in the till, she’d liberate the funds. She had made a practice of shopping in the mornings and coming back to the office to show Barb what she had purchased before leaving for lunch with her husband.

  One day Barb got a nasty surprise when she got on the line to place an order for contact lenses with a Dallas manufacturer that had been doing business with the Nelson practice for years.

  “Barb,” the account manager said before they could barely exchange the pleasantries that cross-country vendors and clients often do, “we can’t send you any more lenses until your bill is paid.”

  “What do you mean? It’s paid the first of every month.”

  “No, it hasn’t been paid in almost three months.”

  Barb was at once embarrassed and angry. She knew the problem was that short-skirted woman with access to the office checkbook. She told Perry what the lensmaker had said.

  Perry bristled at the implication.

  “Barb, you’re out of your mind.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Later, Barb learned Sharon had tired of paying the bills. It bored her. Rather than eat crow, Perry secretly took over the responsibility for the payables. He didn’t dare ask Barb to do it, though she would have. He didn’t want an ”I told you so.”

  Sharon continued to help herself to the daily receipts. A few times when Barb went to cash her paycheck, the teller apologetically informed her that there wasn’t enough money in Dr. Nelson’s account to cover it. Money, Barb knew, was tight. Dr. Nelson had alimony, child support and a staggering debt load that needed major cash flow. If all corners were cut to a circle, maybe they’d get by. But not with what Sharon had in mind. It blew Barb’s mind when Dr. Nelson showed up with a thousand-dollar ring that Sharon had “bought” for him. For one thing, members of his church didn’t wear jewelry of any kind. With Sharon by his side, everything had gone out the window. When Sharon whined for a new dining-room set, three thousand dollars that the doctor didn’t have was somehow found to buy it.

  Anything for Sharon.

  Barb Ruscetti could see Dr. Nelson getting sucked in deeper and deeper and she knew the reason why.

  “She was gorgeous. She was very busty, had a nice figure and this reddish-brown hair and she’s got blue eyes. Very beautiful and she really manipulated her men. She got whatever she wanted.”

  Then the news came at the height of a hot August summer: Sharon was pregnant.

  Around Christmas 1977, Julie Nelson returned to Colorado to help out with her daughter Kathy’s wedding at a church in Thornton. The former optometrist’s wife held her head up high and focused on the task at hand: making the wedding day perfect for her daughter. The fact that a very pregnant Sharon was there with her husband—just six months’ divorced—was a difficult pill to swallow. But Julie bit her tongue and did her best to keep any bitter feelings to herself.

  “I’ve been so busy getting this wedding together,” Sharon told a Rocky Ford couple who had driven up to Denver for the occasion, ”I didn’t have time to get out any Christmas cards this year.”

  Poor thing, and pregnant to boot!

  When the remark made it to Julie’s ears back in the church’s basement kitchen, she tried to come up with an excuse for her rival.

  “Maybe she meant she had been so busy making her dress or something,” she said.

  Blanche Wheeler didn’t think so.

  “She wore that dress at the office Christmas party.”

  “Well, maybe I should just take it as a compliment. Maybe she wants to take credit for it because it turned out so nice.”

  Three months later, in the first week in March, Sharon gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. A few who did the math, including Julie, were certain the baby was no preemie. Sharon had probably been pregnant when she and Perry married.

  Had to be a reason for that quick-draw wedding in New Mexico.

  Sharon didn’t care about the rumors. She simply crowed over the obvious.

  “At least I gave Perry a son. Julie only had daughters,” she said.

  Baby Danny Nelson quickly became the apple of his father’s eye.

  “There was no man prouder or happier than Perry when they brought that little boy home. I’ll tell you, I thought the marriage just might work out. They seemed so thrilled,” said a friend of the family.

  Stuck in Paradise, California, and bitter as a peach pit, Lorri Nelson blamed her mother for ruining her family. If only Julie Nelson had been more of what her husband had wanted in a woman. Prettier, sexier, more fun…all the things Sharon was, all the things Perry had been denied. While the ex-Mrs. Nelson cried her evenings away, she got little real compassion from her youngest daughter.

  Later, Lorri would berate herself for the way she treated her mother.

  “I was young and selfish. I blamed her over things over which she had no c
ontrol. Here she was working in a new job, trying to get on her feet and she had a daughter who made it clear that I wanted to be with my dad—not her. I’m sure I hurt her very much.”

  In the spring of 1978, Lorri’s nonstop prayers were finally answered. She was getting out of Paradise and going home to Colorado. Her folks agreed that she should spend the summer back in Rocky Ford. When fall came, she would enroll in Campion Seventh-Day Adventist Academy in Loveland, Colorado. She’d be with her father again.

  For Lorri and her father, the happy times returned. When Perry laid out the itinerary for a summer vacation, Lorri could hardly wait to go. But even if the trip hadn’t included such destinations as New York City, Niagara Falls, Washington, D.C., and Colonial Williamsburg, Lorri would have been enthusiastic just the same. Traveling with her father, Sharon and baby Danny would be a blast.

  Sharon was so much fun. She’d make up silly little road songs, she’d join in when they had their “Big Mac Attacks” and sought the famed Golden Arches of the hamburger chain. When a state line marker came into view, Sharon, Lorri and Perry would stretch their limbs to the very front of the motor home to see who could lay claim to be the first one in the new state.

  When they stopped at Sharon’s parents’ house in Maryland to show off the new grandson, everyone had a great time.

  “They were really nice people,” Lorri said later of Josephine and Morris Douglas. The elderly couple did not appear to be as controlling as Sharon had portrayed during her monologue about her youth.

  “I was expecting them to be a lot more strict, but they seemed very kind.”

  The first time Lorri Nelson ever drank enough to get drunk was New Year’s Eve, 1978. She was fifteen. Her drinking partners were Sharon, Perry and a would-be boyfriend named Luke. Sharon started things off telling the teens that it was better for them to drink at home than off on the road somewhere. She poured sickly sweet tumblers of Tom Collins mixer and vodka, as well as flutes of champagne, as if the kids could drink like an adult with poor judgment. As the midnight hour approached, Lorri munched on dried-out Christmas fudge as she watched the walls begin to move.

  Sharon made it seem so fun… until the booze got the best of Lorri.

  “I was never so sick in my life,” Lorri said later. “I think that’s what my father had in mind when he let me drink, though it was Sharon that was really pushing. Back then, I thought it was cool.”

  It was shortly thereafter that Sharon started buying alcohol for Lorri.

  “Don’t tell your father.” She flashed a conspiratorial smile. “He’d go through the roof. He’s loosening up, but not that much.”

  Sharon showed Lorri how she could hide peppermint schnapps in a mouthwash bottle so she could drink whenever she wanted back at the academy in Loveland.

  “I thought she was great,” Lorri said later. “I thought she was a buddy. I really, really liked Sharon.”

  In reality, Sharon was no one’s buddy. It wasn’t until many years later that Lorri discovered just how wrong she had been when she had thought of her stepmother as a friend. Lorri met up with Campion Academy’s girls’’ dean in Bozeman, Montana. The dean had sent word she wanted to see how this hellacious young girl—the former thorn in her side—had turned out. By that time, Lorri’s life was proof positive that people really could turn their lives around. She decided to go.

  “I felt so sorry for you,” the woman began. “With what you had going on at home and what your stepmother was doing behind your back.”

  Lorri was startled by the remark.

  “I don’t understand. What was Sharon doing?”

  “She kept calling up telling us to search your room. She said she had reason to believe that you were smuggling alcohol into the dorm.”

  Lorri’s heart dropped. She could feel her face grow warm. Sharon had set her up. Sharon had tried to destroy her. No wonder her father had sometimes seemed aloof. It had been Sharon. Sharon had said something ugly to him as well.

  Lorri’s mind flashed to the image of Sharon sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and smiling. Smoke curled from the ashy end of a thin, long cigarette.

  “If you want to call me Mom, I’d consider it a great honor,” she had said. “Of course, I understand you have a mother already.”

  Lorri tried it out in her head a few times, but was never able to call Sharon mother. Instead, she chose the nickname Sharon preferred above all others: Sher.

  Before the disclosure made by the girls’ dean had stunned her into a silent disbelief, Lorri had believed a terrible lie. She had been oblivious to the nature of the woman who had infected their lives like some kind of insidious disease. She had not heard the sarcasm in Sharon’s voice when she talked about her sisters or her mother. She had not seen how really snotty

  Sharon was when things irritated her or when she didn’t get her way.

  “I thought she was so wonderful. I thought she gave me so much freedom. I thought she really liked me. But she didn’t, did she? I guess she didn’t like anyone but Sharon.”

  Lorri had wondered to herself what it was that kept drawing her toward trouble. Sometimes she chalked it up to the scabbed over hurt of her parents’ divorce. Occasionally she blamed her religion. Other times she was more pragmatic, and knew she made her own choices—and frequently they were poor ones.

  In the late summer of 1980, only four weeks into her senior year, she was in a patch of trouble once more. As she had done before, she was drinking and being defiant and irresponsible. The dean at Campion wanted her to shape up, pull her act together, get with the program. Or else. She could concede she was a problem, but no more so than many other teens. She wasn’t running away. She was going to school and partying.

  Perry had been notified and he and Sharon, along with toddler Danny, made the trip up to Loveland to straighten out the girl. Lorri had never seen her father so angry as he lashed out at her for making a mess of her life, making a mess of his life. Sharon held Danny and smiled smugly.

  Though Lorri was nearly grown at seventeen, a frenzied Perry threw her across the bed, pulled off his belt and whipped her. Lorri had been spanked before, though it had been awhile. But she had never been spanked so hard in her entire life. Sharon egged her husband on. Lorri needed to be taught a lesson.

  “This has been going on too long. She can’t keep doing this to us!”

  As Lorri thrashed on the bed, she broke some blood vessels in her nose and started to bleed. Blood stained the bed sheets and pillow.

  After the whipping, Perry told Lorri to clean herself up. Sharon had wanted to go to the movies and that’s where they’d go—as a family. The film was Caddyshack.

  Lorri sat stonily, glancing at her father and his wife. Sharon was no longer the best friend, the older girlfriend. She was no longer the woman to whom she’d confide. The woman laughing out loud at the antics of the gopher on the golf course was no one she wanted to know.

  While the Nelsons were watching Caddy shack, Lorri’s roommate discovered blood on the bed and notified the dean. The school administrator flew into action, nearly ready to report a terrible crime, until Lorri returned and explained what happened.

  Two weeks later, Academy officials expelled Lorri Nelson. No one wanted a repeat of what had happened. No one wanted to see the violence escalate. Without her father’s knowledge, Lorri was sent to her mother’s. By then, Julie Nelson was living in Walla Walla, in the very southeast corner of Washington State.

  “At the moment I saw her smug face while I was being spanked, I knew that she didn’t really care about me,” Lorri later explained. “She had convinced my father that I was no good and that I deserved everything I got. I’ll never forget the look on her face. Even through my tears, I saw her smile.”

  Long after the sharpest of the memories associated with the beating at Loveland had faded, Lorri Nelson talked with Barbara Ruscetti about what happened in that dorm room. The doctor’s daughter was still mystified.

  “Mrs. Ruscetti,�
� she said, “why do you think he did that?”

  Barb didn’t mince words. “Because Sharon told him to do that to you. I heard her.”

  Lorri pressed for details and Barb recounted something she heard Sharon tell Perry.

  “Perry, I think you ought to take your belt off and just beat the holy hell out of Lorri. Teach her a lesson!”

  As Barb saw it, Lorri’s father was under Sharon’s spell.

  ”I bet if Sharon said, Terry, we’re going down and rob the Trinidad National Bank tonight,’ he would have gone. He wouldn’t have asked any questions.”

  Not everyone was blind to Sharon’s modus operandi when it came to Lorri. Blanche Wheeler would hear of things Sharon had done to Lorri through her daughter, Kerry.

  “She was almost conniving,” Blanche said later. “She almost seemed to make trouble for Lorri.”

  Shortly after she packed her things for Walla Walla, Lorri received a letter from Sharon. She wrote to request the return of “everything I bought you to get you set up for your dorm.” She listed some director’s chairs, bedcovers, a curtain she had made. She wanted it returned right away. Lorri boxed it all up and shipped it to Colorado, even though she knew that it was her father who had paid for the stuff, not Sharon. She did so because she knew that no one could win an argument with Sharon.

  Lorri enrolled in Walla Walla Senior High with the understanding that most of her credits from her Adventist schooling would transfer over and she’d be able to graduate with her class. As it turned out, many credits did not carry over. Bitter and disappointed, Perry Nelson’s “favorite youngest” daughter quit school to work full-time for an accounting firm. She didn’t know it then, but she was pulling herself up from an abyss so insidious that she had not even known it had consumed her. Eventually, Lorri earned a GED.