Sex. Murder. Mystery. (10 page)

“It was obvious that they had gotten away from each other pretty fast,” she said.

There had been other signs. Iona had seen the doctor and his assistant holding hands, and brushing ever so slightly against each other. Blanche also noticed times when Dr. Nelson’s hand lingered on Sharon’s shoulder. The relationship between the two—even in the office—was anything but businesslike.

What signaled to Iona Hamilton more than anything that something inappropriate was going on was the fact that many times when she left the front desk to retrieve a patient’s record for billing, or to let Dr. Nelson know a patient had arrived, the door would be shut. That was new. In all her years at the medical office, she could not think of a time when Dr. Nelson closed his door, unless he was with a patient. Whenever the door had been shut that summer, Iona would knock and find Perry and Sharon together.

In addition, it also troubled Iona how wherever Perry went into the office Sharon was right there with him. That wasn’t normal. No other office worker had ever done that. There was no need for it.

“She always makes it a point to be right next to him. Have you ever noticed that?” Iona said to Blanche.

Blanche had indeed. Even patients with the worst possible eyesight would have seen the same thing.

Sharon Fuller, they figured, was on a manhunt.

Blanche went to her husband with her concerns. Karl Wheeler had thought the same thing. Independently, both had agonized over their suspicions for several weeks. They worried what kind of influence the affair would have on their church and community.
How to handle it? What to say?

Finally, Blanche and Karl summoned the nerve to get in touch with Mike Fuller. It was odd, because, in the event the affair had involved someone other than his wife, Blanche likely would have called on the minister for guidance. The minister was the first person a good parishioner should seek out for help. The idea that it was the leader of their church who was being betrayed made the call excruciatingly difficult.

No one blamed Pastor Fuller. No one thought he had been at fault. Yet when the minister arrived that evening at the Wheeler’s country home he seemed agitated and defensive. As he listened to the couple’s concerns, he did his best to dismiss each bit of evidence. They were mistaken, he said. He batted their words right back at them. Somehow they had misconstrued innocent actions. His wife was a very friendly woman. Dr. Nelson, likewise, was a man who could talk a listener’s ear off. The combination of two outgoing people made it only look as though something was going on.

“Nothing is happening, I assure you,” he said.

By the end of the hour, the Wheelers were embarrassed they had even brought it up. They knew what they had seen and heard, but there was no convincing their minister that his wife had betrayed him with another man.

Karl Wheeler later remembered how Mike Fuller took the news.

“He was upset that we’d even think of such a thing. He got rather huffy with us.”

That night, Blanche and Karl reexamined Pastor Fuller’s response. How could they have handled it better? They had not told the man their suspicions in order to hurt him, but rather to spare him the humiliation of a scandal. Rocky Ford and La Junta were small towns. Word was guaranteed to rip through both places like a flash flood.

Then it hit them. The Wheelers felt Mike Fuller hadn’t been surprised by the revelations about his wife. It was almost as though his denials were an attempt to cover up for Sharon. Maybe, they wondered, he had been in that spot before?

The preacher was red-faced and angry when he got home. No one could blame him, of course. If he had hoped Colorado would be different, there was no doubt he had been mistaken. He’d left the Wheelers with the realization that not only was Sharon sleeping around again, she was carrying on without one bit of discretion. All of his congregation probably knew by the time the Wheelers confronted him.

“We can’t be anywhere, without you sleeping with somebody!” he declared when he saw Sharon and told her what Blanche and Karl had said.

She was backed into a corner, but Sharon was not one to give up a fight—even when there seemed no hope she could win.

“You don’t know I’ve done a damn thing! Nobody saw me do a damn thing! You’re taking that bitch’s word that something is going on… and if you sat in the lobby and listened, you’d hear Perry call ninety-year-old women doll or sweetie!”

Mike threw up his hands. He had been that route before. In Ohio, in North Carolina, and now Colorado. If Sharon was making excuses that night in an effort to placate him, Mike wasn’t buying anything she had to offer.

Still, Sharon held her ground, insisting her husband was wrong and the women in the office were conniving liars, jealous of her friendship with Perry Nelson.

Rocky Ford was the land of in-home sales parties. It was a world beyond Tupperware. Everything from candles to beauty aids to children’s toys were pushed over the kitchen table or in the paneled confines of a rec room. Some ladies hosted several such “parties” each year. The gatherings were a chance to make a little cash, share some gossip and get to know each other better. On the night of September 27, 1976, Julie Nelson went to a friend’s home to learn the wonders of a new face cream. Sharon Fuller, who had also been expected, was a no-show.

When Julie returned home about 10:30 that evening, she was confronted by a shaken figure on the front steps. It was Mike Fuller. The frazzled minister told Julie his wife had left him for her husband. He had been driving around all evening, trying to find where they had gone. He wondered if Julie knew. She had no idea.

Mike proceeded to admit he had been through this before with Sharon. She’d had several affairs in Ohio and North Carolina. He also admitted Rochelle wasn’t his daughter, but the offspring of one of Sharon’s many lovers. But Denise, born in North Carolina in 1974 during a period of marital stability, was his biological daughter. He told Julie they had come to Rocky Ford for a new start, and sadly for him and his daughters, it clearly wasn’t working.

Julie suggested calling her husband’s secretary.

“Maybe she knows something,” she said, reaching for the kitchen phone.

Barbara Ruscetti rubbed the sleep from her eyes and reached for the ringing telephone in her neat-as-can-be Trinidad home.

“Barbara, can you tell me where Perry is?” Julie asked.

“Perry?”

“Yes,” the doctor’s wife said. “He’s not home yet.”

Barb would have been deaf not to hear the worry that had seized Julie.

“He left the office at five o’clock with Sharon,” she said, trying to calm her.

“Sharon?”

“Sharon Fuller.”

“Do you know where they went?”

“No, I don’t. How would I know where they are?”

“Well, all right, he’s not home and it’s eleven o’clock and I’m quite concerned.”

A few minutes later, the phone rang. It was Perry. He told Julie that all the minister had told her was true. He was, in fact, leaving her for good to make a life with Sharon. He wasn’t sorry, not when such a wonderful love was at stake.

“I’ve never loved anybody like the way I love her,” he said.

Julie cried into the phone. “What makes you think you can trust each other with your histories?” she asked.

Mike Fuller looked on and nodded, as if to urge Julie on.

“I’d hate to be her and trust you. How are you going to trust her?” Julie asked once more.

“We love each other,” Perry said.

Julie Nelson cradled the receiver against her breast, before sliding it back into the phone. She stopped her tears and let out a sigh. She would never deny that her husband’s words and actions had hurt her deeply. Even as the truth of Perry’s affair with the minister’s wife came to undeniable reality, a strange feeling swept over her. It was relief. The other shoe had finally dropped. Maybe it was for the best?

Maybe she’d get on with her life, too.

The next day, Tuesday, first thing in the morning, Barb Ruscetti picked up the first line at the Trinidad office. It was Perry telling her to cancel his appointments for the day, and reschedule all for Thursday or Friday. Barb said she would. The optometry office stayed quiet that morning; Barb worked the phones and did a few frame repairs. She was a little ticked at the doctor for dropping his workload on to her lap. Sure she was paid to do whatever he asked, but she knew that patients kept their appointments and Dr. Nelson should keep his.

Just before lunchtime, Barb looked up from her desk to see Julie Nelson with a man she had not yet met.

The secretary smiled, but her friendliness was not returned.

“Barb,” Julie began, “we’re looking for Perry and Sharon. Do you have any idea where they are?”

Barb Ruscetti felt the blood drain from her cheeks. She knew instantly the reason for the visit. Without an introduction she knew that the handsome man with the broad shoulders and a touch of prematurely gray hair was Mike Fuller. Preacher Fuller.

Barb stood to face the pair. “No, Julie. I swear to you I don’t know where they’re at!”

“You know they haven’t come home,” Julie said. “We haven’t seen them.”

Barb shook her head. She conceded that she had talked with Perry that morning, but she had no idea he wasn’t calling from Rocky Ford. She had no idea what was going on. Not until now, anyway.

She studied the man for a moment.

God
, Barb thought,
this minister is good-looking. What does Sharon see in Perry if she’s married to this guy?

Finally, the minister spoke. He indicated in low, careful tones that something “drastic” had happened back in Rocky Ford.

“Sharon left a note saying she was leaving me and coming to Trinidad to live with Perry.”

”I don’t know a thing about that,” Barb sputtered. ”I don’t know anything. I don’t know where they are.”

When Julie and Mike left, they took a piece of Barb Ruscetti’ s heart right out the door. It was such a terrible mess. She felt sorry for the jilted spouses.

“So they drove around Trinidad and dumb fools, Sharon and Perry, had parked down at Prospect Plaza and taken a motel room there,” she told a friend about it later. “So what Julie and Mike did was they just went and got the sheriff and they had the sheriff open the door and they found Perry and Sharon in bed together and so Julie said, ‘We’re getting a divorce. I’m going to nail you to the wall.’ And eventually she did,” Barb said later.

Julie Nelson remembered the encounter between the minister, herself and the adulterers a bit differently, though no less dramatically than Barb. The spurned pair—Julie and Mike—had gone to the Trinidad police to get seven-year-old Rochelle away from an entirely inappropriate situation. The little girl was trapped inside her mother’s motel love nest and Mike wanted her home with him and her little sister, Denise. Though Rochelle was not his blood, she was never anything less than his daughter.

“The police went in with Mike and he told Sharon that he was there to get Rochelle and take her home so she could go back to school,” Julie recalled. “Perry was taking a shower at the time and Mike walked into the bathroom and ripped open the shower curtain and just stood there. I don’t know what he said. I don’t know if he said anything. He just wanted Perry to know that he knew he had taken his wife from him and his girls.”

Later, when Mike sought a restraining order against Perry and Sharon prohibiting unsupervised contact with his girls, he told Julie it was because Perry was shameless and Sharon was a neglectful mother.

“I asked Rochelle if Mommy slept with Perry and she said she did. Right there in the motel,” the minister said.

No matter his or her age, it was a child’s most terrible nightmare. It came to thirteen-year-old Lorri Nelson one night and it grabbed her like the bogeyman. She woke up with a start, her eyes wide, imprinted with what she had seen in her sleep. Her dad was not smiling. Her mom was sputtering cries and tears in the way that people do when nothing can soothe them. Outside the door of her dad’s dressing room were a pair of packed suitcases. Her mother said nothing as he gathered his belongings… it was over. All over. In the instant that her father would step from the house, the girl knew that the family would never be the same. Lorri stood in the hall, the scene frozen in her memory.

Later, when she was at a girlfriend’s house, the phone rang. It was her mother telling her to come home right away. There were no questions asked. No pleading to stay fifteen minutes longer. Lorri went home knowing what she was about to face.

Her bad dream had come true.

“My parents told me Dad was leaving… my dad told me that I’d always be his ‘favorite youngest’ daughter. He was crying, my mom was crying, we were all crying. We gathered to pray. My father knelt down and asked God for His protection. ‘Please help our family through this,’ he said.”

Then he left. Sharon’s name had never been uttered, yet her shadow had been cast over everyone at the house on the corner of Pine and 12th. The cheery white dwelling with the green shutters was no longer a safe haven, no longer a happy home. The family inside had been shattered.

A few felt sorry for Sharon Fuller, though most knew her misery was self-inflicted. Sharon had her new man, had scored the husband-hunter’s brass ring—a doctor. Sharon had youth and beauty. She had a nice body. She had money and, at least she hoped, all that comes with that. She had everything but what many women hold the most dear. Sharon no longer had her children. Her daughters were with her estranged husband.

When Mike Fuller came over to commiserate with Julie Nelson over the whole sordid mess, he said he doubted Sharon really loved her kids. His wayward wife loved to sew and she never seemed to make anything for her girls.

“It was all for her, all of the time,” he said.

Before he mentioned it, Julie had never given it a thought. But it was true. It had to be. Whenever she saw Sharon traipsing around town she was wearing some snug-fitting jumpsuit that she had made herself. Her daughters never had anything new.

Barb Ruscetti was another who could not imagine a mother leaving two little girls behind.
What kind of woman could leave her children? The pain Sharon must be feeling had to be devastating,
Barb thought.