Sex. Murder. Mystery. (29 page)

It was a place full of memories. It had been such a place for Perry Nelson, too. Once when Perry and Julie were going through the motions of holding their tattered marriage together after Sharon had left for Texas, Perry started crying uncontrollably at the Pizza Hut.

“This is where Sharon and I used to go…I can’t stand to be here anymore,” he said to his heartsick wife. “This is where she told me good-bye.”

The Walsenburg Pizza Hut was the place where Sharon Nelson took her pointy heels and stomped on his heart like a Mexican hat dance.

The Thornton detective, along with his partner Elaine Tygart, still didn’t know what Sharon was going to confide when she asked them to drive there. Though they had no time to talk about it, both cops had the feeling the woman with the bunched-up Kleenex and smeared lipstick was going to inform them who had killed her husband, fireman Glen Harrelson. She knew something. Tygart and Trainor were sure of that. Somehow Sharon was up to her pretty eyeballs in it.

“I'm tired of living a lie,” she had said back in Trinidad before they drove the forty miles to Walsenburg.

Even though Sharon indicated she knew the truth would set her free, she was still quite frightened. At least, she had said so many times. She cried and gasped for air. She was so scared.

Of what? The police? A boyfriend? Who, Sharon? Who?

Det. Glen Trainor made a brief phone call to his captain in Thornton.

“She's going to talk,” Trainor said. “Send some people down here.”

Done. In a few minutes a posse would be sent for Sharon. The captain told Trainor to arrest her.

Advised of her rights and the little waiver signed, Sharon slid into the dark folds of a Naugahyde booth, while Danny and Misty were given a fistful of quarters to play arcade games in front of the restaurant. Neither child appeared to be aware their world was changing forever. Sharon knew she was in trouble. The silence she had maintained in front of her children en route to Walsenburg was about to end.

She knew she could go to jail.

“It all started a long time ago,” she began as if she were about to launch into a bedtime story. She started slowly, carefully. Words were chosen one at a time, giving her sentences a cadence that suggested worry and uncertainty. She told the detectives how she and her husband Perry had tax and financial obligations that were consuming their marriage. No marriage is easy, she said, but one with money problems can be doomed from the start.

Sharon stopped herself for a moment to ask a question.

“First of all, tell me why you—why do you suspect Gary Adams? What do you know?”

Det. Tygart did not want to reveal any more than necessary to keep the conversation going. She wanted Sharon to tell her story. And as she had at the interview at the sheriff's office in Trinidad, Sharon fixed her gaze on the female half of the pair of detectives.

“Well, his name came up amongst the townspeople,” Tygart said.

Trainor jumped in, adding it appeared Gary and Sharon had been involved in a love affair.

Sharon slowly nodded and continued. She referred once more to her financial worries. The lien the IRS had placed on her Round House in the Wet Canyon was a whopping $265,000.

Trainor tried to focus her on the issue at hand: the death of her husband, firefighter Glen Harrelson.

“Okay,” he said. “What happened after… what does that have to do with—”

Sharon complied. She continued recounting her see-saw marriage to Perry and her unhappiness. Though she clearly had an agenda that she hoped would ease her complicity in whatever crime had been committed, she still was going to tell the truth.

Yes, she knew, the truth would set her free.

“Okay. During our marriage, I fell in love with Gary. I don’t know why, but I did. I got to the point that I didn’t know what to do. Gary said he could arrange for Perry not to be around anymore.”

“Did he say how?” asked Tygart.

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

Sharon wept into a tissue. “He said he’d do it,” she said.

Sharon Nelson spilled her guts in the sticky booth of a pizza restaurant. She was spinning a tale so strange that if there hadn’t been a recorder preserving every word, the detectives might have asked her to slow down so that they could log down every peculiar utterance.

“He rode with Perry from Trinidad to Denver—and I don’t know—I still don’t know whether he killed Perry first and then pushed the car in the river—or what happened. I really don’t know.”

She indicated there had been insurance money after Perry's death, and she figured the police could consider the money part of the motive.

Glen Trainor pressed the widow for further details. He wanted her to cough it up. He wanted it all. He wanted The Big Confession.

“Now, people make mistakes, Sharon, and sometimes we make some really big ones, but when you’re a good person like you know you are, it always comes to light and you always do what you can to make it better. Okay? And this is the first step toward starting a new life, doing what you can do to just make things right. Did Gary ever report back to you, tell you what he did?”

Sharon nodded through her sobs.

“He said it was… ‘it's done’.”

“And never brought up the subject again?”

“I went through all the investigation of Perry's death. Gary said the only things that really covered tracks was fire and water.”

The investigators let the woman talk. She had things on her mind, and it seemed that she was going to follow her own instincts when it came to what she would or wouldn’t talk about. She told them Gary wouldn’t let go of her. Their on-and-off relationship had torn up her life. Even when she married Glen, she could not shake Gary Adams’ attentions. He was jealous. He hated seeing the two of them together.

He killed for love and money.

Elaine Tygart turned off the recorder at 3:52 P.M.

What to do next? The Pizza Hut was filling up with hungry diners and with quarters exhausted, Sharon's children were bored. Though she was not handcuffed, Sharon was reminded she had been arrested and was in custody of the Thornton Police Department. Rather than sit in the car and wait it out for the Thornton contingent to arrive, the two detectives decided to rent a room at the Best Western Motel next door.

Glen Trainor made arrangements for Danny and Misty, telling Sharon he’d drive them back to Rochelle's house in Trinidad.

The little boy and girl started crying. They didn’t want to leave their mother. They didn’t know what was happening. No one told them to what their mother had confessed while they were eating pizza and playing video games. No one told them that their mother had set up their father and stepfather. Sharon held her son and daughter and tearfully instructed them that the nice policeman would drive them back to big sister Rochelle's house in Trinidad. Sharon said she had some business to take care of and she wouldn’t be coming home that night.

Det. Trainor did his best to console the kids; and once on the road, away from their mother, their tears, in fact, did stop.

In the confines of the modest motel room, Sharon chatted about her fate, about her crimes.

“What is it going to be like in prison?” she asked.

Elaine Tygart was surprised at the question. In her mind, Sharon had moved herself from victim of a twisted lover to convicted killer ready to serve out a life sentence.

“You’ll probably go to Pueblo,” she answered. “It's newer. You’ll get fed and taken care of. It's clean and warm.”

Sharon nodded and made more small talk.

“We’ve got some time to kill,” the detective said. “It will be a few hours before the troops from Thornton get down here. If you want to rest or take a nap, be my guest.”

Sharon said she would.

Tygart had a hard time connecting the woman with the crimes. Sharon seemed so very ordinary. She was the next-door neighbor. She was the Avon lady. She was not particularly glamorous, nor was she rough.

Over the next few hours, as the police came from up north and discussions were held with a deputy district attorney from Adams County, plans were made to arrest Gary Adams. By that time, Sharon had told the police where they could find the wedding ring Gary took from Glen as proof of his deed. It was in the house back in Weston. She also told her captors that the note he wrote indicating when he left town after killing Glen was still in her mailbox.

She said Gary had several guns, a supply of ammunition and perhaps some explosives. Outside of a gun he kept in his truck, she did not know where he stored any of his arsenal.

Sharon explained how Gary had come to see her in the early morning hours after killing Glen. She said they had tried to make love, but he had been too tired and couldn’t do anything.

“She made it sound as though it was a seal of duty,” the detective later said.

Elaine Tygart knew it was true. She held no doubts about the underlying reason for the murders of Glen and Perry. Sharon Lynn Fuller Nelson Harrelson was in love with Gary Adams. It was an obsessive and a dangerous love. When she talked about him, it was clear that their hold on each other was deep.

He was everything she had dreamed about in her teenage years. He was the lover that she had wanted.

When Sharon ran down the list, it was lengthy.

“Ruggedness…a wild side. Totally outside of every boundary I’d ever known. Not religious. Black hair… blue eyes… ice blue eyes. Survivalist. Protector, I thought. Military. Macho. Guns… I’d never experienced this side of life before. I’d never been around anyone like this before. I didn’t know people like this existed. I thought, I wonder what this side of life is like?”

Tygart could see where Gary Adams fit into the whole crazy scenario. He was the bad boy to Sharon's good-girl image. Gary was the biker-greaser a preacher's daughter runs away with in her senior year. The Thornton detective could see that Perry Nelson was the bridge to another life, one of money and power.
But what of Glen?
Sharon insisted there were no insurance policies, no great wealth for her to make claim to in the event of his death. Elaine was left to wonder: Maybe Sharon liked Glen, she might even have loved the firefighter.

To hear the woman sacked out on the Best Western Motel bed, her love for her most recently murdered husband was deep and mutual.

“What's wrong? Don’t I make you happy?” Sharon claimed to have asked Glen one night, when it was evident something was eating at him. The conversation took place early in their living-together arrangement.

“No,” he said, “it's not you. Sharon, I couldn’t ask for anybody who was better suited for me. It's just that I'm having a hard time with your kids. It's my problem, not yours.” Sharon asked Glen if he wanted her to pack up and get out. “No,” he answered. “I want you and the kids to stay here. This is my problem and I should be the one to go.”

No woman knew a more chivalrous man. Even for a woman used to getting her way, Sharon was nonplussed. Glen was some kind of nice guy; perfect for what she had in mind.

There was something familiar about Sharon Nelson Harrelson. Elaine sensed it, but couldn’t come up with any reason why she might know the woman who had confessed to setting up two husbands to die. What was it about her? In time, a memory came back. First foggy, then clear and indisputable. Frighteningly so. And though some might wonder how it could have eluded her, Elaine Tygart's brush with Sharon had been months before in the most unlikely of places.

Sharon Lynn Harrelson had been to the detective's home in Thornton that summer… so had her second victim, her husband Glen.

Elaine Tygart's motorcycle had to go. It wasn’t that she didn’t love the exhilarating feeling she got when she rode with her husband; she loved the thrill of the speed, the air rushing by, the sense of freedom all riders enjoy. Elaine simply loved her husband much more. He had been injured in a motorcycle accident and Elaine had decided that she could no longer enjoy her Yamaha 750. Her riding days were over.

So Elaine Tygart ran an advertisement in the local paper in July 1988.

Todd Harrelson answered the ad. He was a nice kid, a senior at Thornton High. He told the detective he would bring his father over to take a look at it. It was to be a graduation present.

Todd introduced Glen and Sharon to the detective a week later. Sharon burbled about how proud she was of her son, and how excited she was that he might be getting the motorcycle.

“It's cheaper than a car,” she said.

Elaine invited Sharon inside while father and son talked about the merits of the Yamaha. She talked about her husband's job as a fireman and how her son worked at Checker Auto. She was friendly and pleasant. When a beaming Todd came back, it was definite: The motorcycle was going to be his.

Sharon got out her purse and wrote out a check. They’d go to the credit union for the rest of the money.

When the recollection of that earlier encounter came flooding back, Elaine worried Sharon might remember her, too. She wondered what the odds were for a murderer, the victim, and the arresting police detective to have met before the crime.

“It made me think how ordinary a killer can be. A person responsible for killing two people… can kill your neighbor, your husband. A murderer was in my home.”

Everything had been where the Black Widow said it would be: the wedding ring in the bedroom, the note in the mailbox. Sharon Lynn Nelson had been an investigator's dream come true. She had laid it all out and had the evidence to back up what happened.

The only thing missing was the key to the burned-out house on Columbine Court. Sharon had put it back on the key ring that held her car keys; that set of keys had been given to Rochelle when the kids went to stay with her after the first interrogation at Trinidad's police station.

It was left to Det. Tygart to tell Rochelle Mason her mother was never coming back to Trinidad to take care of Danny and Misty. It was more than likely she would never be coming back, period.

“You’ll need to make arrangements,” the detective said to the unblinking nineteen-year-old. “Your mom told us she had a part in Glen and Perry's deaths.”