Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  Later, Louis told his friend Barb Ruscetti about his encounter with the widow Nelson's omnipresent boyfriend.

  “I was scared,” he said. “I told my boss that if you want to deliver gas up there, you take it yourself. I won’t take it.”

  Barb agreed.

  “I wouldn’t go up there, either,” she said.

  Sharon's sister Judy had been through the mill when it came to men. She had her abusive marriage and no-good boyfriends. Over time, her sense of smell became acute when it came to men: Judy could smell a rat.

  There was something about Gary Adams that gnawed at her sensibilities. He had a kind of innocuous handsome country-boy look, but underneath the aw-shucks facade was something unsettling. She could never put her finger on it. Instead of forcing the issue and analyzing the man, she tried to back off a bit. Gary Adams was a little scary.

  One weekend visit at Round House ended abruptly for Judy and her children. Gary was fussing at one of Sharon's children, and Judy jokingly flipped him the bird. In an instant, Gary turned his ire from the child to her.

  “This is my house!” he raged. “I’ll do anything and treat anyone any damn way I please. This is my place and no one is going to tell me what to do!”

  Judy became frightened. Sharon tried to intervene, albeit halfheartedly. Judy didn’t care what Sharon said. She knew Gary meant every word he was saying. Yet this wasn’t his house. It was Sharon and Perry's house. Judy decided to leave. She was not going to spend one more minute, let alone another night, there. It was the last time she ever visited Sharon at her home in Wet Canyon.

  In a way, Judy Douglas needn’t have worried too much about her sister. Sharon's old ways kept her from forging permanent relationships with any man, good or bad. Sharon's backup boyfriend Buzz stayed in the picture whenever Gary Adams was shoved aside. Every couple of weeks, it seemed Sharon would tire of Buzz and return to the mountain house. Back there, she’d summon Gary to her bedroom. Over and over. Back and forth. Sharon was the one holding all the cards; she ruled the world.

  Barbara Ruscetti knew the address the instant she pulled the envelope from her thick stack of holiday mail. She knew the handwriting on the envelope belonged to Sharon. It was a greeting card sent by the woman she was certain was behind a terrible murder five months earlier.

  Under the cheery holiday salutation was a note: Barb, I miss you very much… could we still be friends? Could I come by and see you?

  Even though there were times when she despised Sharon, Barb couldn’t help but be moved by the pathetic little note. She addressed a little card for Sharon and indicated that she would be happy to see her.

  Forty-eight hours later, Sharon was in Barb's holiday-decorated and Christmas tree-scented living room, drinking fresh-perked coffee and eating fruitcake. As the buxom widow with the new winter outfit and the cinnamon-twist headed former secretary sat across from each other, there was no denying the tension. Even the muted strains of Christmas carols could do little to mitigate the awkwardness and antagonism.

  If Sharon had wanted to be friends, if Barb had thought by inviting her over she was doing the right thing, both were wrong.

  Barb had a question that she had wanted to lay on Sharon since that Monday morning when her neighbor had called across the street with the news Dr. Nelson was missing.

  “I have something to ask you,” Barb began, her chest heaving slightly with stifled consternation.

  Sharon smiled sweetly and looked up from her steaming cup.

  “What?” she asked.

  Barb let out her breath and blurted the question.

  “Did you kill Perry?” she asked.

  Sharon set her cup on the table. She turned pale and shook her head with great vehemence. Her fingers brushed her lips.

  “No,” she said, “but I sure wish I had.”

  Though Sharon punctuated her response with a nervous little laugh, Barb didn’t think it was a joke. Uneasiness hung in the air. Though Sharon chatted a bit more before making up a hasty excuse that she had to leave, the conversation over coffee fruitcake was over.

  “She never came back to my house. She knew I knew. When she left, she said, ‘I’ll be seeing you.’ But she never came back anymore. She’d see me on the street and cross over to the other side. She knew. She was a rotten baby. You can’t believe the things she did.”

  The school Christmas play had been a community tradition for as long as many could remember. Everyone in Weston halfway connected with the school attended the event that kicked off the holiday season with the joyous song of Weston's youngest children.

  Sharon Nelson entered the school auditorium wrapped in fur and dressed to the nines. Audience members stopped talking and turned to watch her. And watch, they did. She wore heels and a short dress. Her makeup was done to movie-star perfection. For a minute, many stopped breathing.

  All knew she had wrangled a portion of some life insurance money before there had been conclusive proof that Perry Nelson was dead. Everyone knew it was blood money that had paid for the sumptuous coat. Everyone knew she was shacked up with Gary Adams. The big question was still bantered about, however: What really happened to Perry?

  While most of the women had little regard for Sharon, either because they were jealous or they felt she was a world-class husband hunter, men continued to be divided.

  And yet as one local explained to an outsider, when it came to Sharon it seemed men fell into two camps.

  “Those who would fall for her and those who were disgusted by her. It was as if their eyes were looking at two different women. A man who could read Sherry was a lucky man. Many were not.”

  If Perry was dead, at least Sharon was left with some money. Julie Whitley's memory turned back to three weeks before Perry's car went in to the black water of Clear Creek.

  Julie had stopped in to the eye clinic to pay for some glasses and made a remark to the effect that if it isn’t one thing, it is another. Money just didn’t seem to go far enough.

  “I know what you mean,” Sharon said.

  As they talked—Julie couldn’t recall how it came up—but the subject of life insurance was broached.

  Sharon confided that she had purchased three policies on her husband's life. It was her way of ensuring her survival in the event that the unthinkable happened.

  “If anything happens, I can’t make it alone. I had to forge his name,” she said.

  Sharon was such a talker, such a relentless braggart, Julie Whitley wasn’t sure if she had in fact forged her husband's name, or if she was just thinking out loud.

  “I wish I could get away with that,” Julie shot back. “If I could, I would. Dying is the only thing that you can count on. Might as well have someone profit from it.”

  Sharon nodded.

  As Julie Whitley saw her, Sharon was a woman with ambitions far beyond Trinidad. She wanted to be ensconced in the country-club set in a place where the cachet actually meant something. Trinidad wasn’t big enough, fast enough, good enough.

  “In Trinidad they are either on welfare or they are wanting out. I didn’t think anything of Sharon's desire for more. I wanted out of Trinidad, too,” Julie later said.

  When the rumor mill churned with the persistent gossip that Perry had fled to Mexico and was awaiting Sharon to break away to come to his side, those closest to the Nelsons almost laughed. Why would sleeping with Gary Adams be part of such a plan? Why would Perry renew his pilot's license just days before his disappearance? Why get the VW all fixed up for camping when you’ll never have a chance to use it?

  Sharon continued to be a figure who invited opinions, a woman who courted rumor. Innuendo was her shadow. As her true character became more evident, the talk increased. She was a slut. A whore. Probably a killer. Even though they were the closest neighbors to the Nelson place, the Thorntons tried to stay out of the fray and kept their opinions to themselves. When

  Nester Baca, a Las Animas County Sheriff's deputy, visited with Ray one afternoon at their r
anch house, he started the ball rolling. His gut told him that Sharon had killed her husband. “I know it,” he said. “I just can’t prove it.” Sharon wasn’t completely out of the loop. She heard the occasional comments about her character after Perry disappeared. She knew people could be nasty with their comments. Gossip was an Olympic event in rural Colorado. But what did they know of her life? What did they know of what she had gone through before Perry died?

  “I can easily understand why people would say I was greedy,” she told a friend sometime later. “I can understand that. Things, status, meant a great deal to me. They were my shell, I guess you could say. I wasn’t white trash. I loved the things Perry bought me. I loved the freedom to buy whatever I wanted without having to account for a dime. It was almost like everything Sharon wants, Sharon can have. She doesn’t have to account for it. I’d had to account for change from a quarter if I bought a dime pack of gum with Mike.”

  Terry and Kay Mitchell couldn’t wait to get out of Trinidad. The chiropractor and his wife considered the town a pit. When they relocated Dr. Mitchell's practice to the Denver area in December 1983, they assumed most of what had bothered them about the place would be left behind.

  Sharon Nelson had other plans. She wanted to keep in touch.

  Over the course of 1984, Sharon made several visits to the Mitchell home. Despite the fact her husband was still missing, Sharon seemed happy.

  Very happy.

  “You haven’t let things get you down,” Kay commented during one of the visits.

  Sharon nodded affirmatively. “Things have worked themselves out,” she said.

  Kay was uncomfortable with the happy-go-lucky attitude. Perry didn’t even come up in conversation.

  It hasn’t been a year since his disappearance and she's not even thinking of him anymore, she thought.

  Kay said, “It's amazing how quickly you’ve gotten through this.”

  “Everything's just falling into place,” Sharon answered. “Everything is working out so well for me.”

  Over the next few weeks and months, it became clear the reason she was doing so much better than most would have expected was on-and-off-again Gary Adams. Sharon brought her new man up to Dr. Mitchell's office in Parker, Colorado, for treatments. Gary had suffered some hearing loss and was treated with acupuncture.

  Dr. Mitchell had no doubts—even at the first visit—that Sharon was sleeping with her helpful neighbor. Sharon, as far as he knew, didn’t hang around with a man unless she was having sex with him.

  One time in 1984, Sharon arrived alone at the Mitchells’ residence. Her hair was done, makeup perfect. She never looked happier. She was also busting with some news.

  “Gary and I got married,” she announced.

  Kay acted surprised that she and Terry hadn’t been invited.

  As if we would have wanted to go.

  “Oh, it wasn’t that kind of a wedding,” Sharon said as the two women sat down to talk. “Gary and I went together to the mountains and said our vows in a field of wildflowers.”

  “Oh, I see,” Kay said, thinking it was about the dumbest thing she’d ever heard.

  Some wedding… another of Sharon's useless little lies.

  Sharon Nelson had her own way of doing things. She was not shy. She didn’t care one bit what anyone thought of her, especially when she was in love. Not too many months after her husband disappeared, Sharon and Gary paid a visit to the single-wide mobile home of Ann and Bernard Parsons. The Parsons were in the midst of building a new home, and for the time being had to make do with the tiny quarters. When Sharon and Gary arrived, they were invited inside. Ann Parsons was the kind of woman who peppered her speech with “hon.” Bernard was a man who never knew a stranger. They were glad for the company. Visits in the country were few and far between and, consequently, almost always welcome. Yet this visit was unsettling to the hosts. Sharon was holding Gary's hand, very much in love. She snuggled up next to him on the couch. In doing so, the glint of gold was unmistakable and overt. If the sun had been shining on the diamond-studded pendant around Gary Adams’ neck, it could have blinded someone.

  Sharon noticed Ann's eyes linger on her boyfriend's pendant.

  “I had a jeweler make it especially for Gary,” Sharon said. She recounted how she had come up with the design. That was like Sharon, she was always the one with the best, the most unique ideas. She was always proud of her creations. But as she talked, it was the source of the gold that made the Parsons a bit uneasy.

  “I had the jeweler melt down Perry's wedding ring. I couldn’t see any sense in keeping it anymore.”

  Ann and Bernard exchanged fleeting glances. Neither wanted to call attention to what they were thinking, but neither wanted to miss the opportunity to ensure they were on the same wavelength.

  When the visit was over and Gary and Sharon had gone, Ann Parsons immediately turned to her husband.

  “What do you think about that necklace?” she asked.

  Bernard Parsons shook his head.

  “I know what you mean.”

  Ann was appalled. “Have you ever heard of such a bloodthirsty thing in all your life? Imagine melting down your husband's wedding ring for jewelry for your boyfriend.”

  Bernard was nearly dumbfounded.

  “Pretty cold, I’d say,” he finally muttered.

  As they talked a bit more, a chill passed between them.

  “You’re not going to tell me that Perry's not dead? Those two know something,” Ann said. “I’ve got a gut feeling that he's dead and they know it.”

  It was on May 29, 1984. As Perry Nelson's youngest daughter by Julie, Lorri, marked her twenty-first birthday, she came to the realization her father was gone forever.

  “My dad would never miss my birthday, not this birthday.

  No matter what kind of trouble he was in, my dad would have called me,” she said.

  She could barely let the idea pass through her mind: Her father must be dead.

  Chapter 19

  THE MAKESHIFT FAMILY—ANOTHER MAN’S WIFE, a part-time lover and a missing or dead doctor's two young children—drove the brown Jeep Eagle toward Trinidad, nearly to the lake that had been the place of so many trysts. In the Jeep was Gary Adams, Sharon Nelson, and her children Misty and Danny. It was a happy time, so needed when happy times had been in short supply. Sharon scooted next to Gary, in the manner in which teenage girls often do, while her boyfriend drove. Windows were cracked to suck out the silver smoke from Sharon's ever-present cigarette. The kids sat quietly in the backseat.

  It was August 14, 1984, almost thirteen months after Perry Nelson vanished.

  A sheriff's car coming from the opposite direction stopped and did a U-turn, sirens blaring. Gary skidded to the side of the road and got out, ready to tell the deputy that he wasn’t going all that fast.

  “I want to talk with Sharon,” the deputy said. “Away from the kids.”

  Gary nodded and told Sharon to come out. In an instant, and as gently as the man in uniform could, he told her about a discovery made up north. A few minutes went by and Sharon returned to the car. Tears filled her eyes, though she did not let any fall.

  “They found Perry's body in the creek,” Sharon said. “Along a sandbar up near Golden.”

  Without talking about it much more, Gary drove the car to town, where they did their laundry and shopped.

  Remarkably, for more than a year of exposure in the brittle freeze and griddle heat of Colorado wilderness, the body found along the waters of Clear Creek was quite preserved. It was wearing the same clothing as Sharon had described when her husband left for the optical convention in Denver thirteen months before.

  Terry Mitchell got word that Friday that the corpse found in Jefferson County was purportedly his friend. Yet the description didn’t ring true. News accounts indicated that the man found on the sandbar was in his thirties.

  Perry was fifty when he disappeared.

  The body was still clad in socks, trousers and
a shirt.

  “This doesn’t sound like it could be Perry,” he told Kay. “I'm going to go see the body.”

  Kay thought an inspection was a good idea, too. She had been bothered by the details.

  “How could they mistake a thirty-year-old for a fifty-year-old?” she asked.

  Since the Jefferson County coroner's office was not far from their home, it was not a problem for Dr. Mitchell to get over there right away. He got a woman on the line and told her who he was.

  “I’d like to come and view the body of the man pulled from Clear Creek. He's supposedly a friend of mine.”

  “Oh, you can’t see him,” the woman monotoned.

  “It’ll be fine. I'm a doctor.”

  “He's in a bag and I can’t open it.”

  “I can open it. I'm a doctor. I can handle it.”

  “You can’t, I'm sorry.” She droned on about proper procedure and told Dr. Mitchell he would have to call back on Monday when the coroner was in the office.

  Disappointed, Terry Mitchell agreed and hung up.

  First thing Monday morning, he telephoned the coroner. A clerk answered.

  “This is Dr. Mitchell calling. You have a Dr. Nelson there, I want to come in and view the body.”

  “Sorry, Doctor,” the clerk said. “Dr. Nelson's remains were sent to the crematorium this morning. His wife is having the remains sent to Michigan for burial.”

  Terry Mitchell couldn’t believe it. What was the hurry? The clerk said the body had been identified through dental records. Why had they moved so quickly? Why had they cremated him when they knew another physician wanted to make a visual identification?

  The timing of everything seemed so odd. Just days before, an insurance adjuster who thought Perry, Sharon and Gary could be in cahoots had called Dr. Mitchell to set up an interview appointment. Sharon had not been paid all of her life insurance proceeds because there had been no body to prove a death had, in fact, transpired.

  The insurance man called back a few days later and told the chiropractor the body had been found. The case was closed. Why so fast? Terry wondered. Then the answer came: Sharon was getting her money. Every last dime of it.