Sex. Murder. Mystery. (22 page)

Sharon later recalled her visit with the police.

“I'm bananas by now. They are saying, calm down, calm down. We can call the doctor to give you something. I said, ‘How can I calm down? You people don’t even know what's going on here. You tell me someone is coming to my house, nobody comes to my house. I don’t sleep all night. I know I’ve got patients coming in. I don’t know where my husband is. Get my kids to the sitter… I’ve got an office full of people that's going to be sitting…’ “

Something terrible had happened. Chiropractor Terry Mitchell was almost in tears as he stood at Julie Whitley's front door.

“It's Perry. His car went into Clear Creek Canyon up by Golden,” he said.

“Oh no,” she said. “He was just here last night.”

“What do you mean?” Terry asked.

Julie Whitley had a vision, a dream. It was a message from that other place that a few people can tap into. Julie had been teased about being a witch or weirdo, but she didn’t care. She could feel it in her bones. Perry Nelson was alive and he needed her help.

“He was at my door, asking for help… He's someplace and he needs help.”

In the space of a few minutes, Sharon and her group of supporters and their children were gathered up and away they went in Dr. Mitchell's van to search for the doctor. Emotions ran high. Periods of silence followed bursts of speculation about what might have happened to Perry.

But halfway along the way, something strange happened between Sharon and Jim Whitley. He felt her rub his thigh.

Come again?
he thought.
What's going on?

For a minute, Jim Whitley passed it off as the innocent result of sitting in a van that was too crowded for comfort. When it happened once more, he felt very uncomfortable. Sharon kept touching his leg, stroking his inner thigh with her fingertips. It was very unsettling. After the second and third time, Jim could not discount his concern. The woman whose husband was missing was putting the moves on him. She was playing with his leg. Jim tried to scoot away from her, but there was nowhere to go.

Good God, what is this woman doing? My wife's sitting right behind us! Her husband is missing in the creek! And she's groping me?

Sharon kept saying how upset she was, but her actions clearly didn’t fit. There were no tears. There was no sobbing. Just a wandering hand and the unspoken communication that she was interested in the man sharing her seat in Terry Mitchell’ s van. Maybe her petting of his thigh was the way she sought comfort?

Jim Whitley didn’t want to find out for sure. He did his best to stay away from Sharon.

God, she must be one mixed-up woman!

Chapter 16

THE NEXT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS WERE A BLUR FOR the Trinidad gang. Sharon and the searchers stayed at a motel outside of Denver, heartsick that there had been no word on Dr. Nelson. Where could he be? Everyone wanted to know, though at times it seemed as though Sharon was the least interested among the group. She shed few tears. Instead, she was hungry. She was tired. She wanted to get some sleep.

And so they did. Sharon shared the motel room with Terry and Kay Mitchell and slept like a baby.

The next morning, the Trinidad search party visited the sheriff's department and the fire department. No one had heard of Perry Nelson's missing persons report. No one seemed to care. A visit to the wrecking yard was fruitless. When Dr. Mitchell asked if they had considered that the man could have been thrown from the car and was wandering the roadside in a dazed condition, they dismissed it. Beyond pulling the VW from the water, they hadn’t done anything at all. Zero.

Sharon, who seemed very composed, stayed in the car while the searchers looked over the vehicle at the junkyard.

The VW had been flattened like a beer can under a worker's boot. Terry Mitchell barely could discern how that mangled object in the twisted heap had once been his friend's car.

“It looks like it's been through a damn meat grinder,” he told his wife.

One of the emergency rescuers told the group that nothing was found in the car. The only thing that remained of its contents was a sleeping bag that had somehow hooked on to the passenger-side mirror and dangled in the water.

“Kind of weird-looking,” the man said.

A patrol officer accompanied the searchers to the place where in all likelihood the little car and its driver had met their horrific fate. The guardrail was twisted and marred with the grinded-on striping of black paint. The officer explained that for the barrier to sustain that kind of damage, the car would have been traveling in excess of 80 mph.

Sharon informed the officer that the VW had been painted only two months before. The paint, she reasoned, hadn’t had a chance to become “baked” on yet.

The search party went to the Coors plant in Golden to make sure that Perry hadn’t been caught in the big screen the company employed to keep large debris from contaminating the water. From there, they backtracked, covering two miles along Clear Creek. Bits of the VW had washed ashore, bedding, maps. All were signs that Dr. Nelson's car had, in fact, taken the terrible ride down the raging creek. A stoic Sharon told the searchers not to give up.

“He's here,” she said. “We’ve got to find him.”

A former medic with the Air and Sea Rescue unit of the Air Force, Jim Whitley had brought along binoculars to aid in the search in a unique way. He used them look beneath the surface of the water. The rush of the surface is a curtain, but the submersed binoculars were used to create a window through it. Whitley was disappointed. The technique brought no results that day.

The group scanned the far side of the creek. Would anything catch their eyes? They looked for pieces of clothing. Blood. Limbs. Bits of Perry. Anything. But they found nothing.

Nothing at all.

When the Mitchells suggested it would be a good idea to bring photographs of Perry to the bus station, airport and various Denver cab companies, suddenly Sharon didn’t want to be bothered.

“But maybe he's alive,” Terry said.

“I don’t think so,” she answered with a measure of certainty. “I think he's gone for good.”

The next day, the Trinidad Chronicle-News marked the sad story with the headline,

SEARCH FOR LOCAL OPTOMETRIST UNDERWAY NEAR CLEAR CREEK.

Barb Ruscetti had locked her front door and was walking to her car when her neighbor yelled over to get her attention.

“Barb!” the woman called out from across Colorado Ave.

“Did you know your old boss is missing?”

Barb hadn’t heard a word. “What do you mean, he's missing?”

The neighbor recounted what she had read in the paper.

“Well, Sharon made a report that he had left their place Friday night and he hadn’t shown up yet. She finally went to the police yesterday.”

Barb felt dizzy. What was going on here?

“Why did she wait so long to report him missing?” she finally blurted out.

When the neighbor didn’t have an answer, Barb spun around and went back into her house and called the Trinidad chief of police.

“Yeah, Barb, it's true,” the chief responded when she related what her neighbor had said. “Sharon claims she waited so long because she thought he was going to come home.”

“She killed him,” Barb said flatly, “I know she did.”

The Whitleys were not rich, but they had more than many in Trinidad. When Sharon asked if she could stay at their place on the corner of San Pedro and Goddard, Julie and Jim agreed. With what the woman had been through, it was the least the friendly couple could do. Sher said she wanted to be close to the police in case news about Perry came in, and, even more importantly, she had things to take care of with the optometry business.

“I don’t want to drive back and forth,” she explained.

Jim Whitley knew Sharon's reputation, as did just about everybody in town. He knew that she had slept with half the county and with the little move she made in the van, he was sure she was after him. He wanted no part of her and he did his best to keep her at arm's length.

“I need money,” she announced one morning over coffee in the Whitleys’ sunny kitchen. “We’re behind on our bills and I’ve got to come up with some cash.”

Jim understood. As they talked, Sharon said she was considering selling some of Perry's belongings—his guns, for example.

“I think I’ll look for a buyer for the business, too.”

Jim Whitley did a lot of listening. He thought it was a bit rushed—Perry could still turn up alive—but he didn’t have her bank account or responsibilities.

The next day, Gary Adams, whom Sharon introduced as her neighbor and “Perry's good friend,” showed up at the Whitley residence.

Sharon said Gary would help them gather up Perry's guns for sale. Jim was impressed by the guns the doctor owned. When Gary mentioned a 30-30 Winchester, Jim said he wished he could afford to buy it.

“You can pay me later,” Sharon said.

Jim shook his head. Not only didn’t he want to owe anybody money, he didn’t think it was right to buy something that belonged to Perry.

“He could still be alive,” he reminded her.

Sharon dismissed the possibility. She wasn’t about to cool her heels waiting around for Perry Nelson to come to his senses and return home—if he could do so.

Over the week following the doctor's disappearance, Gary Adams became a regular visitor at the Whitleys. One time he came with the kids and picked up Sharon for an outing. Mostly, though, he came alone. Jim told his wife that he suspected Sharon and Gary had once been lovers, but he felt that part of their relationship was in the past. The way Sharon Nelson acted, it seemed she’d probably had a dozen men since Gary Adams.

“Something didn’t feel right,” Jim said later. “Something from the very start didn’t seem right about those two. It wasn’t

Gary. I liked Gary. He was decent. It was Sharon that gave me the creepy feeling.”

Jim didn’t want to say anything to Sharon at the time, but he told wife Julie it was more than likely that Dr. Nelson was dead.

“There's no way he could have survived in that icy river after a crash like that. That car had been thrown down the creek and smashed up. Imagine what it would do to a man?”

Julie didn’t agree.

“He wasn’t in the car when it crashed,” she said.

Jim didn’t question Julie. He knew her well enough to trust her instincts—or whatever people wanted to call it.

“Hi, how are you?”

The voice on the telephone was her sister Sharon's, calling from a friend's house in Trinidad.

“Fine,” Judy Douglas said.

“Have you talked to Mom?”

“No, I haven’t. Is everything all right?”

“Haven’t you talked with Mom?”

“Sharon, for Christ's sake, is Daddy dead?”

Sharon hesitated for a second. “No, Perry is—at least he's missing.”

Though Sharon seemed oddly calm given the situation, Judy focused on her sister's words, not her demeanor.

Sharon proceeded to tell her how Perry had gone off to the convention in Denver and never returned. His car had been swept into a river near Golden during a flash flood.

“I'm on my way up,” Sharon said. “Please don’t ask any questions about what happened. Misty and Danny have adjusted and we don’t want to stir things up. No questions, Judy. None.”

Judy hung up the phone with a quiet and gentle touch. She blinked back tears as she gathered up her children to inform them Uncle Perry had been in a car accident and was most likely dead. The legacy of growing up in the Douglas clan was a lack of close family members. Perry was as much of an uncle figure as Judy's children had ever known.

“We’ve got to get our crying done now,” she said. “We can’t say anything about this to Aunt Sharon and the kids. We don’t want to upset them.”

When Sharon and her children arrived in Colorado Springs, Judy kept her promise. No one uttered a word about Perry. There were no outbursts. It was a nice, pleasant visit. It was almost as if nothing had happened.

Back in Rocky Ford, everyone knew Dr. Nelson was missing, presumed dead—or, if he had a lick of sense left, had run away from his no-good second wife. When Sharon came to the Watkins Medical Arts Building to tell the tale of Perry's tragic disappearance, she gathered a group of women together in one of the back offices. She sobbed about being left alone, not knowing what happened or what her future held. She cried into a tissue as she professed her love for her missing husband.

Iona Hamilton was among those who saw Sharon that day. Iona, of course, had known Perry long before he got involved with the preacher's wife. She’d never thought much of the marriage in the first place. She remained cool to Sharon, and sensed Dr. Nelson's wife clearly understood that she’d get no sympathy from her.

After Sharon departed, Iona and Blanche Wheeler marveled over her grief-ridden performance.

“I doubt those tears were genuine,” Iona said.

Blanche agreed with Iona's blunt assessment.

Sharon seldom returned to Rocky Ford after that particular visit.

If Perry Nelson were dead, he wasn’t even cold by the time Sher put his Trinidad practice on the sale block. If Dr. Nelson were alive, she surely must have known he wasn’t coming back. She had waited only a matter of a few days after his car was yanked from Clear Creek. As she had always done, Sher Nelson surprised everyone.

Later, she tried to explain her actions.

“The reason I put the practice up for sale so soon is—it took over two years to find a buyer for the RF [Rocky Ford] practice and I knew also that a practice without a doctor doesn’t sell very well, and I want his practice to continue with a new doctor—and according to the president of the Colorado Optometric Association the sooner a practice is listed after death, the better chance a doctor will be willing to take it over. That's why.”

Not long after Sharon put it up for sale, Jim Whitley talked with one doctor who had been mulling over buying Dr. Nelson's Trinidad practice.

“I'm looking into it,” the other doctor said. “Sharon Nelson is going to continue on, keeping the books—”

Jim cut the man short.

“You don’t want her. Buy the equipment. Buy the business. But leave her alone. Can’t trust her for anything, especially bookkeeper.”