Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  When the Harrelsons arrived at the Schindler home for a pre-Christmas get-together in December 1984, Jim and Jayne saw firsthand how strained things had become. Things were bad; though they prayed their friends would work it out. Their prayers, it seemed, went unanswered. A few days later, on Christmas Day, a distraught Glen called Jim to tell him Andy had asked him to move out.

  “He was at the absolute bottom of the world,” Jim later recalled. “He felt it was coming. He was very much in love with Andy. He didn’t know what to do to put his marriage back together.”

  Glen was crying.

  “I don’t want my family to break up, I really don’t,” the soft-spoken man muttered over and over.

  Not long after the separation, Glen saw a counselor. With help, he hoped he would be able to put his life back together. He was lonely. He missed Andy. As Jayne Schindler later said, “he seemed like a lost puppy.”

  It was around that time he decided his lonesomeness could not be slaked by his same old friends. Glen wanted to date again. As his divorce became final, Glen joined a singles group at Northglenn Christian Church. He also bought a toupee.

  Starting over in middle age is always tough. It was especially hard for Glen, who had not wanted to start over in the first place. The bar scene was intimidating, and he’d never been the type to strike up a conversation with a woman in the produce aisle at the supermarket, as some of the fellows in the firehouse had said had worked for them. Glen was not overly shy—his music was proof that performing for others was a joy, not a dread. But in his forties, he was awkward and alone.

  When Glen talked to Jim Schindler about entering the dating scene again, it was with a sense of worry, not excitement. Glen was lost. He did not know what to do. The singles group at the church was a start, but he felt he was too old for most of the women there. Twenty-year-old Mikki Watson, for one, at half his age, would never be more than a friend.

  One night Jim and Glen talked until the sun came up. Glen rambled on about his fears and regrets and Jim, who was worried about his friend's mental state, shirked off much-needed sleep to keep his buddy talking.

  Glen Harrelson was not a loner and he was very lonely.

  When he told Jim and Jayne Schindler that he was advertising in a singles magazine, they were skeptical. They wondered what type of woman he could meet that way.

  Glen told them he had already responded to a woman's ad.

  “She told me to bring two six-packs and come over to her place.”

  “What did you do?” Jayne prodded.

  Glen flashed a smile. “I went,” he said.

  The Schindlers burst out laughing. Glen's sense of humor was evident for the first time in months.

  “What happened?” Jayne asked.

  He let a wry smile cross his face. “I’ll tell you this, I didn’t stay that long. She wasn’t my type.”

  A few weeks after the woman with the six-pack, he met a new woman. A fun-loving, classy beauty.

  “Her name is Sharon, but she likes to be called Sher,” he said.

  Rick Philippi, 38, was glad for the invitation to join Glen Harrelson and Sher Nelson for lunch, even if they were only eating at the Burger King off 104th Avenue and Federal Boulevard, a few blocks west of Thornton. Rick, who knew Glen through a church bowling team and his friendship with Jim and Jayne Schindler, had heard so much about the new woman in his friend's life that he was pleased he’d finally be able to put a face with the name. He had been seeing less and less of his friend around church and around the events that promoted their mutual interest in classic cars. It was high time to meet the woman behind it.

  Glen and Sher were already at Burger King when Rick, a good looking fellow with blue eyes and a blond moustache accenting the northern Spanish features of his ancestors, ar-rived from the nearby Ford dealership where he was a lot manager. It was one of those moments that begged for a Kodak to prove the description later, the gal made such an unforgettable first impression. Sher sat like a homecoming queen gone bad in tight slacks with a cigarette lodged in the corner of her mouth, moving like a metronome when she spoke. She was neither warm nor particularly friendly.

  The lunch, not surprisingly, went downhill from there. It seemed that Sharon didn’t really want anyone around other than her beau. She sat between the two bowling buddies, intentionally leaning forward to block Rick's view of his pal. It was obvious as could be. She didn’t want Rick involved in the conversation she was having with her new boyfriend.

  Once or twice when Rick tried to wedge his way into the discussion, Sharon turned and glared at him. It was subtle and out of Glen's view.

  Annoyed, Rick studied his watch as though he was concerned about the time.

  “Oh, I have to get back. You guys probably have a lot to talk about,” he said, swallowing hard. He had lied to one of his closest friends. He didn’t have to get back to the car dealership for any reason at all. His lunch hour was far from over. He just couldn’t stand sitting there with Sharon for one more minute.

  “She didn’t even have to talk, I just didn’t like her. I tried to be nice. I tried not to show my feelings. The way she looked, the glare, the stare. The way she carried herself like she was cocky,” he recalled later.

  As the days passed into weeks of the spring and summer, Glen's circle of friends shrunk until it barely included anyone but Sharon. Old friends were set aside as the friendly fireman and his love took long drives together, went out to dinner, to the movies. Everything seemed to happen so fast.

  Sharon complained she didn’t like her rental house. She didn’t like the neighbor's skinny mutt barking all hours of the night. It wasn’t a good place for Danny and Misty to live.

  Glen offered Sharon and the kids a place to stay. They could move into his house on Columbine Court. The ranch-style home had a nice yard for the kids, was close to Sharon's job at the eye doctor's and would give everyone a chance to see if they could work things out. When Sharon agreed, Glen told friends he was the happiest man in the world. The haste of their living arrangement surprised many, but no one said a word to Glen about it.

  No one wanted to ruin what happiness he had finally found.

  Tara Harrelson was a typical teenager of divorce. Though she lived with her mother, she felt a special closeness for her father. The split of the Harrelson family had been hard on the teen. She harbored resentment and a little bitterness, and she rebelled. And even though the stirred-up feelings from her parents’ divorce had settled, she was still hurt that they could not be a family as they had once been. When it came to women and their interest in her father, Tara was fiercely protective. She wanted the best for her dad.

  When she met her father's live-in, Sharon, for the first time,

  Tara had a feeling that this former preacher's and doctor's wife was different from the others he had dated. She was nice, but a little pushy. It seemed to take no time at all for Sharon to force herself into their lives. In almost the blink of an eye, Sharon took over her dad's house. She posted religious verses throughout the house. She arranged the furniture the way she wanted it. She did a little magazine-inspired decorating makeover on a couple of the rooms. She allowed Danny and Misty to have the run of the place.

  Soon after Sharon and the kids moved in, Tara found business cards from an optical company. The surname astonished her: SHER HARRELSON.

  What is this? The teenager had not heard any talk of marriage. Not a peep. Her father and Sharon had just started going out. It was true that Sharon had moved into the house in surprisingly short order, but that didn’t mean the two were getting married. What Tara saw on the little card bothered her. Using another man's last name seemed inappropriate even to a sixteen-year-old who might doodle Mrs. So-and-So on the back of a Pee-Chee school folder.

  “I think she just kind of pushed her way into his life. He just wanted to be loved,” she said later.

  At first, at least on the surface, it seemed Sharon also wanted to be liked.

  When Tara whined
about wanting to drive her father's prized 1967 Camaro her pleas fell on deaf ears. It was Glen's pride and joy; he had lovingly restored the car with buckets of money and gallons of sweat. No way was he going to let a sixteen-year-old drive it.

  It was Sharon who pressured Glen to give in.

  Give the girl a thrill.

  She’ll be good,

  I’ll be good, too.

  “I think that she did it just to get me out of her hair because I was bugging her so much,” Tara commented later. “She didn’t care about the Camaro, not as much as my father did.”

  Sharon, of course, had been down that route before with Perry's daughter, Lorri. How it was that she would find men with teenage daughters was beyond her. She had buddied up cajoled, sucked up and lied to her lovers’ and husbands’ kid to get them out of the way. She had done so with the kind o: finesse that's born of practice.

  Chapter 23

  DIVORCE HADN’T NULLIFIED THE RESIDUAL feelings of closeness and affection Glen and Andy Harrelson had shared during their two-plus decades of marriage. When Glen told his former wife that he was out of his personal funk and involved with a wonderful woman named Sharon Nelson, Andy was delighted. And as time went on, it quickly became obvious this Sharon was more than a fling. Glen wasn’t the type to engage in serial dating. He wanted to settle down. He was in search of his second chance.

  “There's one problem,” he told his ex-wife over the phone during one of their almost daily conversations. “She doesn’t know if she wants to get married again.”

  He explained how his new love's first marriage to a preacher had ended in divorce and her second husband had died in a terrible auto accident.

  “She feels like it's bad luck to be married to her,” Glen said. “Like there's a black cloud hanging over her.”

  Andy Harrelson didn’t say anything, but the words bothered her. She felt like the woman's comments were a manipulation of a lonely hearted man. She was pulling back, to make Glen want her more.

  Andy concluded Glen's new sweetheart was an operator.

  It was very peculiar. Whenever Andy Harrelson showed up to pick up the kids or return something she had borrowed, Sharon would disappear into the back bedroom before introductions were made. And she stayed there.

  Glen would make some excuse, but the fact of the matter was clear to Andy. Sharon simply did not want to meet her face-to-face. Andy wondered if Sharon was embarrassed about sleeping with her ex-husband. Maybe she was just plain ashamed. She had been a Seventh-Day Adventist minister's wife, after all. “Living in sin” was definitely not Adventist-approved.

  The odd aspect of her back bedroom disappearing act was that Sharon was always very pleasant on the telephone whenever Andy called. She was warm, chatty and very accommodating. It was so strange that Glen's new love was able to talk to on the phone without any apprehensions, but could not face her in person.

  Maybe Sharon is shy, Andy thought.

  It was late at night when the bedside phone woke her from slumber. Andy Harrelson's heart thumped, as most are prone to do, when the startling ring comes in the dark hours. The voice was familiar, though somehow different. It was Glen, but he sounded very weak.

  “Could you get me and take me to the hospital?” he asked in a near whisper.

  Andy knew Glen had mononucleosis and had been languishing with the debilitating illness for several days. Andy got up and dressed in record time to go after him. All the while, she worried about her former husband and wondered about his girlfriend.

  Where was this new love of his life, Sharon?

  Her answer came mid-morning when Sharon finally showed up at the Denver hospital where Glen was on medication and bed rest.

  “I met an old friend, “Sharon announced to her boyfriend while he lay within the stainless steel rails of a hospital bed as IV tubes provided precious liquid to his depleted system.

  “It's okay if we go out with other people, isn’t it?” she asked.

  Glen's dry lips barely moved. And really, what could he say? When Andy Harrelson thought about it later, she considered Sher's comment to her laid-up boyfriend very strange. Very cruel.

  “Of course, Glen wanted the relationship exclusive… I guess it was a manipulation to make him hold on tighter,” Andy told a friend.

  Outside of Rick Philippi and Mikki Rector—soon-to-be Baker, having fallen in love with Porter Memorial Hospital orderly Steve Baker—none of Glen's friends met Sharon Nelson. Glen talked about Sharon effusively. She was the most wonderful woman that had ever landed in Colorado. She was a great cook. She was a sharp lady. And while he never went into the details—he was too much of a gentleman for that—he told a few buddies Sharon was a fantastic lover. Even though just two had met the mystery woman, most of Glen's other pals saw her influence.

  None more so than fire department dispatcher Dean Hastings.

  Dean had known Glen for almost ten years, having worked alongside him both in dispatch and at the firehouse. Not long after Glen told him of his new girlfriend—whom he said he met through church—he came into work one day without wearing his toupee.

  The transformation startled Dean.

  “How come you’re not wearing your hair?” Dean asked.

  Glen flashed a sheepish smile. “Well, Sher wanted to see me without it and she likes me better without it.”

  Later, when they talked about his new love, Glen told Dean how happy he was. How nice her children were. How Sharon owned a beautiful place down in southeast Colorado, a mountain house near Trinidad.

  “How could she afford that?” Dean wondered out loud.

  Glen was quick with the answer.

  “Insurance money after her husband died in a car wreck. She has the money now, but it was quite a wait for her to get it.”

  The friendship had frayed like the hems of someone's weekend blue jeans. Rick had stood firm in his resolve to be a true friend, a friend who wouldn’t lie. He hated Sharon from the onset and blamed her for the dissolving relationship between the two friends. Whenever the group was getting together, Glen would make an excuse for Sharon's absence. In time, Glen stopped coming around, as well.

  “I don’t trust her,” Rick said, his blue eyes boring a hole through his friend. “She's trying to keep you from your friends.”

  Glen didn’t get it. He disagreed. He said he was stuck in the middle.

  “I'm trying to keep the peace,” he said.

  “But we’ve been friends longer than you and Sharon.”

  None of that mattered to Glen, at least not enough to pull away from Sharon.

  “She was always the controller, always wanting to control,” Rick said later. “I kept telling him she's no good, but he wouldn’t listen. He just wouldn’t stay away from her.”

  Sharon Lynn Nelson was not the type of woman the now-newlywed Mikki Baker would have picked for Glen, either. She was not the type of woman he had picked in the past for himself when he expressed interest in a woman. Andy Harrelson was a natural beauty, with fine features and little need for makeup. While Mikki, who had battled a few extra pounds, thought Sharon was pretty and had a good body, she considered her sense of style to be somewhat tawdry.

  Thank goodness she has a nice figure, because her pants are so form fitting.

  “They were so tight you couldn’t believe it,” she told Rick Philippi. “She probably had to lay down to put them on. She had camel toes.”

  When Sher wore shorts her attire left nothing to the imagination: it recalled the fashion of the 1960s.

  “She doesn’t dress like a woman of her age… or like a mother,” Mikki said.

  Rick concurred.

  “The girls we know just don’t wear that type of stuff.”

  As far as Glen's closest friends were concerned, Sher Nelson was a hot divorcee on the make and Glen was a lonesome guy looking for love. It was that loneliness and desperation for love and companionship that must have made him go with the woman from Weston.

  Rick shook his head
at the improbable.

  Glen was not that type of person that would have a woman like her, he thought.

  “I wonder what he sees in Sher?” he asked Mikki. “I can’t get him to see what I see. She has something that blinds him.”

  Mikki didn’t have an answer. She didn’t really need one. Not long after it seemed that Glen and Sharon were inseparable, reports came through other Mends that the relationship was over.

  The day Tara Harrelson learned Sharon had left her father and returned to Trinidad was both happy and sad. When she saw her father, her heart broke as he cried about the woman who had left him. Tara felt an awkward surge of happiness for herself. She had not felt that close to her father since Sharon had taken over his life.

  “I thought we were back on the right track,” she told a friend later.

  Reality had set in. Hooray for reality. Rick Philippi would have jumped for joy if he was sure Glen Harrelson wouldn’t sense it on the other end of the line. He could not have been happier with his friend's disclosure.

  “Sher's out of my life,” he said.

  “Why?” Rick asked, though the why didn’t really matter.

  Ding dong the witch is dead!

  “She's got another boyfriend.”

  Glen's voice was wracked with grief, but Rick didn’t want to rub it in. Now wasn’t the time for that; there probably never was a time for that. Sher Nelson had done what she was bound to do. Rick hadn’t liked her since their lunch at Burger King.

  “She's got another boyfriend and she's been dating you at the same time?”

  “Yeah,” Glen said.

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “On and off for a few years.”

  They talked for a while longer and made plans to get together in a day or so. When Rick hung up he had a smile on his face. His old friend was back. Glen was back.