Sex. Murder. Mystery. (26 page)

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.

Dr. Mitchell continued to doubt the body extracted from the creek had been there for more than a year.

“I saw what the river did to that Volkswagen. It had been crushed to barely two feet tall. It had been beat up so bad that you could barely tell it had been a car. What would a year in that river do to a human body? There would be nothing left. Not socks on a man's feet? A shirt? That water rushed through there at forty-five miles an hour. It would rip the arms off a man. If it was Perry, I don’t think he was in there that long,” he said later.

It didn’t take long for Dr. Mitchell to alter his theories on what had happened to his friend, Perry Edson Nelson, II. When he first came to doubt Sharon Nelson's story, he thought she and her husband had plotted the disappearance in an elaborate insurance fraud scheme. When Gary Adams became part of the picture, the Colorado chiropractor thought the carpenter with eyes for the widow was a part of the plot.

“All three of them are in on this,” Terry told his wife.

But when he thought of the condition of the corpse and the quick disposal of it, he wondered if Perry had been the victim of a double-cross.

“Perry came back to get the money and Sharon and Gary Adams didn’t want to split the pie three ways. They hit him on the head and threw his ass in the river. That's what I think.”

When Barb Ruscetti heard another doctor's description of a mostly intact corpse, she was dumbfounded, too.

“Why didn’t that body disintegrate? Why didn’t animals eat it?” she asked.

The man, an MD from Rocky Ford, didn’t have an answer for that. No one did.

But Barb kept pushing. “There's coyotes up there,” she said. “There's bears up there, there's mountain lions. They would come down and eat him. Why didn’t this body disintegrate? Why didn’t this body blow up?”

When Barb ran into Sharon after she returned from making the identification of her husband's body, the former secretary asked if she was sure it was Perry.

Sharon held no doubts.

“Yes, Barb, I am. I’d know that long-legged bastard anywhere.”

When she had composed herself after the terrible news, Lorri Nelson Hustwaite sat down and wrote a letter to her father, a tribute to the man she loved. And even though she held his picture close, it was hard for her to focus on his life and not the unseemly facts surrounding his death.

“… your body lying in the river, neglected and at times, forgotten, for the past year. You were left to the mercy of nature, slowly rotting away, with the rest of us were caught up with rumors and stories that you were still alive… “

She wrote how she wanted her father to know that she hoped in time she could claim the traits that had made him such a wonderful man. She wished for his friendliness, his generosity, his sense of humor.

“… most of all, your ability to make a child feel so special and loved… “

Word came from Sharon that there would be no memorial service for her late husband.

“I just can’t deal with the trauma of losing him all over again.”

Three days after Perry Nelson was found, his widow and her lover brought him home to Round House—in a box from the crematorium.

She shook it carefully, like a curious child does to a Christmas present when someone has just exited the room. The box was so small it hardly seemed possible a man's remains could be compressed inside. The glint of her painted fingernail caught Gary Adams's eye as she pierced through the tape that kept the ashes from leaving a trail from the door to the kitchen counter. Sharon told her lover that she was curious… she had gone so long without the certainty she had wanted… she had to see what was left of her dead husband.

Sharon's curiosity turned to sobs as she peeled back a corner of the lid. Inside, the fine, granular ashes of Perry Nelson shifted in the box.

“There's no doubt,” Gary said, trying to console her with a dose of reality. “Perry's dead, all right.”

A body meant more money. A body meant the end of financial worry. A body meant Sharon could have whatever she wanted. With the discovery of Dr. Nelson's remains, the insurance companies holding out more than $200,000 had to pay up. Sharon dropped her legal maneuvering with her attorney in Trinidad. She didn’t have to sue anyone and she didn’t have to have her husband declared dead, because he was dead.

Sharon and Gary had talked about what the bucks would mean and how they’d divide it all up. It was Gary who came up with the first proposal. He was back in bed with Sharon, while wife Nancy had left for errands in town.

“I’ll take a third, you take a third,” he said. “And you take a third of it for the kids.”

Splitting the insurance proceeds had not been an issue before Perry's disappearance, because it was assumed by both Gary and Sharon that they would live together happily ever after. Wrong. It was clear almost right away the two were great as lovers, lousy as a couple.

The money, they asserted, would be as great a bond as their love.

While there was celebration in Round House, hundreds of miles away in Michigan there were more tears. Perry's distraught parents tried to understand their daughter-in-law's strange grieving process. Good Lord, they tried. When they learned there would be no memorial service for their beloved son in Colorado, they planned one in Michigan.