by Gregg Olsen
Rochelle and Bart made it to Round House in record time, probably less than fifteen minutes, though they didn’t time the drive.
Danny and Misty were in the front room playing when Rochelle and Bart went inside.
“Bart and Rochelle are here!”
“I'm so glad you’re here,” Sharon said. “Come and sit down. We’ll eat supper and watch a movie.”
“Mom, I think you better sit down,” Rochelle said, tears running from her eyes.
“What's wrong?” Sharon asked.
“Mom, Glen's mom just called… Glen died this morning in a fire at the house.”
Sharon stood perfectly still for a moment and started to cry, before words came to her lips.
“Oh my God, how did this happen?” she finally asked.
Rochelle held her mother, feeling her shuddering body convulsing with grief.
“How did this happen…”
She collected herself enough to tell the children the terrible news that their new stepfather was dead.
Danny Nelson stood in the front room, his eyes wide open and his mouth agape.
“Mommy,” the nine-year-old boy said, “why do all our daddies have to die?”
Something snapped. Her crying shut off like a tap run dry.
“Oh,” she said, as she fumbled with her shoelaces, tears obscuring her vision. “I’ve got to make a phone call. I’ve got to find out what's going on.”
Bart, who stayed out of most of the conversation, told his young wife to take her mother down the mountain to the pay telephone at Robinson's Mill. He would stay at the house with the little kids. It was all he could think to do. Everyone had been so shaken by this tragedy. Imagine the poor guy dying in a terrible fire like that. What could be worse?
Way up north, near the scene of the crime, Thornton Detective Glen Trainor was called out to the crime scene at the fireman's house. A bit later, Elaine Tygart also received news of the suspicious death. Within a few hours, the two would be heading for Trinidad. Driving down the freeway to solve not one murder, but two.
Chapter 28
SNOW WAS THREATENING, TURNING THE SKY OVER Brighton, Colorado, into a leaden lid. Lorri Nelson Hustwaite's knotted stomach rolled inside her and her knees nearly buckled as she walked the long corridor to the visiting area of the Adams County Jail. She was there to see Sharon Lynn, the woman who had been arrested following the Pizza Hut confession of her involvement in the murder of Perry Nelson. Lorri, pale and wan from the trip and the anxiety of the pending confrontation, had arrived from Montana to ask the question to which everyone had sought an answer.
Directed over to a seat separating visitors from prisoners by a wall of glass, Lorri spotted Sharon before her former stepmother saw her. As she moved closer, the woman who killed her father stretched forward as a delighted smile rushed over her face.
“Lorri,” Sharon called out with the kind of exaggerated excitement one uses to demonstrate to a long-lost friend a sense of joy for a reunion.
Lorri did not return the look. She did not match Sharon's smile, nor was her greeting given with any semblance of friendliness.
“I want to know one thing,” she said. “Why did you kill my father?”
The happy look long gone, Sharon shook her head sadly. “I never meant for it to happen,” she said. “I can’t possibly explain it all. It is far too complicated. My feelings. My feelings were all mixed up.”
As Lorri listened, Sharon trashed her father's memory. Sharon shifted blame and said Perry had cheated on her. He had an affair with another woman and it broke her heart.
“You don’t know what I was going through with his affair. It hurt.”
“You’ve had many, many affairs,” Lorri snapped. “And you’re not dead.”
Perry Nelson's favorite youngest daughter fought her tears and tried to keep her composure while Sharon went on about how no one could understand her. No one could understand the pain Perry had caused her by his betrayal.
Her father's betrayal? What betrayal? Sharon had slept with a half dozen guys and murdered Perry. Betrayal? Lorri had heard enough. She realized at that moment that she had come to say something, not to listen to the woman behind the glass. The woman behind the glass could say nothing that would undo what she and her lover had done.
“I want you to know that you not only killed my father,” Lorri began, her voice breaking into a million pieces, “you also killed my children's grandfather and my grandparents’ son. You killed your own children's father… and they say you paid a man fifty thousand dollars to do it.”
Sharon looked down as a preschooler does when caught misbehaving.
“I would gladly have paid you ten times the amount you paid Gary, if you would have spared Dad. But it doesn’t work that way, does it?”
“No, Lorri, it doesn’t,” Sharon answered, now irritated by her visitor.
Lorri stood up. “I hate you. And I will hate you forever.”
“I know,” Sharon said.
With that, Lorri turned to leave. How she found her way out of there, she would never quite know. A man offered help as she sobbed her way down the hallway, but she declined. Outside, she realized she had not returned the plastic-laminated visitor's tag that had been affixed to her blouse when she was processed for the visit.
She could think of nothing but her father and the lies her stepmother had told her.
On the way back to the Springs, the snow came down like talc. Lorri could barely see as she drove along the freeway, remembering Sharon and her father. Remembering the en-counter she had had with evil. Between the tears and the falling snow, Lorri would later wonder if only the hand of God had assured her safety.
After her sister was picked up by Tygart and Trainor and taken away to jail, Judy Douglas tried to figure out what had gone wrong and how it could have been stopped. When could it have been stopped? She knew whatever role Sharon had in the deaths of her second and third husbands, it was the result of a seed planted long ago. Sharon had been on a selfish course to disaster since she was a child. Sharon was a speeding train that could not be stopped. And though she had not allowed herself to believe that Sharon was capable of murder, Judy became consumed with guilt and worry that if only she had told Glen that things were not so great between him and his wife, that Sharon was a woman who could never settle for just one man at a time, things would have turned out differently. Maybe he would have been alive if Judy had told him to leave Sharon.
Judy also wondered if well-to-do Buzz Reynolds hadn’t been an intended murder victim a couple of years before.
“Maybe it just didn’t work out for Gary and Sharon at that time,” she said later. “I'm still not sure that Buzz and she were legally married, but I suppose that wouldn’t stop Sharon.”
But there had been money involved, though Sharon insisted that Gary took their love to the extreme and killed Glen so the two of them could be together. Killing Glen, she said, was never about money.
But it had not been for love, after all. As Andy Harrelson figured it, Glen's murder would have resulted in a bloody windfall for Sharon and Gary. She would have picked up half of the house, with equity of more than $100,000; life insurance of $30,000; balloon payments due from the businesses Glen had sold that would have been tens of thousands in proceeds; his house on Columbine Court; and his pension—which would have paid her $1,200 a month for the rest of her life.
Not to mention any life insurance policies that she might have taken out herself. Unless the brass-balled widow made a death benefit claim, such policies would likely never surface.
Grandma Nelson's neck had never healed properly after a nasty fall. It left the elderly woman with a stooped appearance, causing her to tilt her head upward to see straight ahead. Doctors told family members Perry's mother should have recovered more fully from the fall, but for the stress and devastation of losing her son. A broken heart, the doctor explained, can affect the body's ability to heal.
Yet every morning, as she had done for her whole life,
the nearly eighty-year-old woman would wake before dawn to kneel by her bedside and pray. Her hands were weathered and the veins rose to the surface as they often do in older people. After her son disappeared, Mrs. Nelson prayed he would be found safe and sound. After his body was discovered in Clear Creek, she prayed her boy had not suffered long.
It was after Sharon confessed to murder that Mrs. Nelson pressed her shaking hands together and prayed for answers.
“Why, Lord, why did You take our son away? Why did You let this happen?”
One time, as clear as a whisper in her ear, Mrs. Nelson received an answer. It came to her as if spoken by the Almighty.
“It was the only way I could save him,” the voice told her. “It was the only way.”
EPILOGUE
HAVING CONFESSED TO THE MURDERS OF PERRY Nelson and Glen Harrelson, Sharon Nelson and Gary Adams are now behind bars in “his and her” prisons in Canon City, Colorado. There had been no trial, no public stoning of a woman who stopped at nothing to get what she wanted. Sharon pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder, telling the world she had forfeited her right to a pair of murder trials to spare her children, Others speculated that she feared the death penalty. Gary Adams held out longer than his lover, insisting through his attorney that he was not guilty of anything.
But in the end, he also pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder when it was confirmed love-of-his-life Sharon would testify against him. He also made one last mistake concerning the whereabouts of the gun used to kill Glen Harrelson. Gary told a jailhouse snitch where he had hidden it. Authorities returned to the Dude Ranch and found the firearm under the porch steps. Ballistics proved an exact match.
Both Sharon and Gary took the easy way out: plea-bargains spared the state the expense of lengthy trials and ensured the love struck pair would never face the executioner.
And yet it wasn’t over. The obsession that led the two to kill for passion and money still lingers.
Sharon continues to wonder if Gary had ever loved her enough to divorce Nancy. It is a question she still asks, a decade after her arrest. She now says her confession was a big mistake, a manipulation by the authorities. She is a battered woman who had feared for her life. She is a victim.
Gary says he still loves Sharon and remains surprisingly blunt about his involvement in the crimes. While Gary concedes that he killed Glen Harrelson, he remains less forthcoming about his exact role in the murder of Perry Nelson. Yes, the ice blue-eyed killer admits, he tried to drown Perry that night in Clear Creek. Yes, he smashed his head with a rock.
“But he was alive, when I saw him last. He was alive,” he said.
Neither Gary nor Sharon will be eligible for parole until they are in their mid-eighties.
And while the pair were picked up and put in jail within hours of Sharon's Pizza Hut confession, the road to justice for others was a slow one. The surviving Nelson children—including Misty and Danny—filed a claim against the insurance companies that paid off Sharon, the killer of their father. As more information came to light, it appeared that insurance investigators were quite suspicious of Sharon Nelson. They held their cards to their chests, however. They never informed the police about what they had uncovered: that Perry had not left Trinidad alone the night he disappeared; that Sharon had purchased five of six policies within six weeks of the murder; that Gary moved in within days after Perry's disappearance; that she immediately sold off many of her husband's belongings and assets. If the insurance companies had been more forthcoming with the authorities, Sharon and Gary might have been prosecuted years before and Glen Harrelson’ s life might have been saved.
“This isn’t a case of twenty-twenty hindsight, piecing a murder together six years later,” said the Denver attorney representing Perry Nelson's children. “These facts are so obvious and transparent it would have been like pulling on a loose end of a ball of yam. The only people who knew all these facts and these patterns were the insurance companies.”
The fight for the insurance benefits that should have never found their way into the killer's hands was drawn out for almost a decade. There were several reversals, culminating with the original verdict finally being upheld in the summer of 1996.
The payout, plus interest, was divided equally among Perry Nelson's five children. For Lorri, of course, it was never about money. No mountain of dollars could replace her father. No cash could compensate her son and daughter for the absence of their grandfather.
No money could ease her broken heart.
And yet life goes on down in Trinidad and the surrounding Colorado communities touched by Sharon Lynn's selfish kind of evil. Her children, her neighbors, her friends… and her men… none can forget her.
Though they try. God, they try.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS & NOTES
IT IS IMPORTANT TO SAY HERE THAT THIS BOOK would not have been possible without Rod Colvin. Rod, a fine author and skilled journalist, had a passion for this story for many years. I am so grateful he entrusted his voluminous research material to me, much of which is the basis for this book. Rod, many thanks for your incredible research and the support you gave along the way. You are a great writer and an even better friend.
Others to whom I am indebted for their support of this project: literary agent Susan Raihofer of Black, Inc., New York; Charles Spicer, editor at St. Martin's Press, New York; Lucy Stille, film agent at Paradigm, Los Angeles. Also, thanks to readers and friends Paula Bates, Tina Marie Brewer, James Glenn Schwichtenberg, June Wolfe, Daniel Leonetti, Cliff Cernick and Patti Soloveichik.
While many of the sources in the book were extremely helpful in reconstructing the Nelson saga, it would be remiss to omit special thanks to Blanche Wheeler, Andy Harrelson, Judy Douglas and Julie Nelson for the photographs from their personal collections. Many of their images appear in the photo insert.
Even though it goes without saying, it must be mentioned here: None of my books could have been written without the support of my family. This is no exception. Thanks to my wonderful wife, Claudia, and my daughters, Morgan and Marta, for putting up with the long hours when phone calls come and I never leave the glow of my Mac.
Since most of the events described in this book took place several years ago, I have elected not to identify certain individuals featured in this true-crime account. Therefore, some names and personal characteristics have been changed. And while it happened long ago should not be forgotten, neither should the dredging up of it impact lives today. The perpetrators’ names, however, have not been altered.
Sharon and Gary cannot run. They cannot hide. Like shadows on sticky summer afternoons, their crimes will follow them the rest of their days. Lorri Nelson Hustwaite and the others who loved the victims will see to it.
Gregg Olsen,
Olalla, Wash.
Fall 1997
* * *
IF LOVING YOU IS WRONG
Gregg Olsen
Copyright © 2013 GREGG OLSEN
Cover Art: BEAUTeBOOK
OUTSTANDING ACCLAIM FOR GREGG OLSEN
If loving you is wrong
“Gregg Olsen's IF LOVING YOU IS WRONG is a wonderfully researched book that makes the tabloid stories about Mary Kay Letourneau and her forbidden love sound like comic-book stuff. Everyone who wants to understand the back story of the child-woman and her overweening passion for a man-child must read IF LOVING YOU IS WRONG. Olsen's book is both gossipy and sympathetic, searing and brilliant. If Mary Kay is the Humbert Humbert of the female sex—and she is—this book is her Lolita. A must-read for both true-crime aficionados and students of abnormal psychology! I read until 3 A.M.!”
—Ann Rule
The confessions of an American black widow
“Here are all the ingredients of a great crime story—murder, infidelity, greed, nymphomania… A must-read! Gregg Olsen's standing as one of America's finest crime journalists will rise ever higher with THE CONFESSIONS OF AN AMERICAN BLACK WIDOW.”
—Jack Olsen,
bestselling author of
Doc, Predator, and Hastened to the Grave
“Gregg Olsen introduces the reader to a character so mesmerizing, so frightening and so evil that one has to keep reminding himself that his amazing and fast-paced story is true.”
—Carlton Stowers, bestselling author of
Careless Whispers and To the Last Breath
For June Rose Wolfe
PROLOGUE
June 19, 1996
THE NIGHT WAS a pinpricked blanket over the dull sheen of Puget Sound. Errant seagulls—feathered rats, really—teetered on the edge of a Dumpster. In an instant, they slid inside looking for food before fluttering out and sending white droppings into Jackson Pollack splatters on grungy asphalt further marked by oil stains and melted bubble gum.
Music wafted from one of the boats in the guest moorage section of the marina in Des Moines, Washington, a suburb just south of the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. In its setting and size, Des Moines, Washington, held little in common with its Midwestern counterpart. The western-most Des Moines was on Puget Sound, facing west to the Olympic Mountains and Vashon and Maury islands. It was suburban, yet with the feel of a neighborhood place where people gathered in crime watches and fed each other's pets when vacations came.
Even the name wasn't pronounced the same in Washington as Iowa. The Washington Des Moines was pronounced with the s sound at the end, which gave most everybody not from there great difficulty when learning to say it so incorrectly.
That June night something very disturbing was taking place in Des Moines. And from the moment Dave Shields, 27, began his walk a very personal story started moving slowly from tragedy to the stuff of sleazy supermarket magazines and sordid tabloid television reports. In time, lawyers, writers, friends, and family of those involved would all lose sight of the one thing that had caught their concern and interest in the first place. It was a woman and a boy. A mother, a teacher, a wife. And a boy.
