Sex. Murder. Mystery. (3 page)

Lloyd ran his video recorder, providing a calm voice-over to everything he saw.

Everything pointed to an ambush. The killer was lying in wait when Glen Harrelson entered his house. It was probably over quickly. The intruder double tapped—shot—Glen in the head, doused gasoline on his body, stoked the fire with some clothing, scattered the coins and left. It was a classic case of a staged homicide, and it only took the killer a few minutes to do it.

At 36, Elaine Tygart was a six-footer, a woman in a world of size sevens who carried her striking height beautifully and proudly. She had brown eyes and long, frosted blond hair. Bangs framed her face with a feathery touch. She neither looked like a police officer, nor had she ever dreamed of being one. In fact, being a cop had been someone else’s dream. Elaine Tygart was in the right place and the right time when, as a college student, her fiancé at the time applied for positions at various police departments throughout Colorado. Almost on a whim, she followed suit and was quickly hired by a suburban Denver police department in the spring of 1976.

A decade later, promoted to a position of investigator, she was one of only a very small number of American women holding such coveted posts. Though she worked property crimes, the new detective found her niche in persons crimes: adult sex crimes, assault and homicide. Elaine liked people and was expert at comforting them while extracting information that would help in the arrest and conviction of a perpetrator. If a victim needed to cry, she’d allow it. If they wanted to talk and talk and talk, Elaine Tygart was there to listen. She was never cold to the victim. She was never easy on the perpetrator.

Elaine was always one to get to the meat of the crime.

Her sheer physical presence had been an asset from the very beginning of her law enforcement career. While not as physically strong as her male counterparts in the department, Elaine’s height gave her an advantage over both male and female suspects. Raised with four brothers, she had been a tomboy growing up in Ohio. She knew toughness and bravado were advantages that could not be discounted.

And she could swear. She could let loose four-letter words in sequences that startled. Miss Prissy, Miss Goody-Two shoes,
Charlie’s Angels
wannabe, she was not.

Detective Elaine Tygart, accidental career cop, was as good as they get.

Years later, she told tales of how she proved herself in the matter-of-fact manner one might employ to tell a neighbor over the clothesline, if, indeed, people still had such chats.

She once lifted a belligerent drunk and tossed her down the stairs after she had been spat in the face and kicked in the shins.

“Goddamn you! You’re going downstairs! You’re going to jail.”

Another time when she was called for backup on a theft in progress only to find an officer about to get his head bashed in with a tire iron, she pointed her gun and stopped the perpetrator in his tracks.

“You move, asshole, and you’re fuckin’ dead.’’

Word circulated among cops that the six-footer with the frosted hair had real guts. She wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything. Even so, she did not hide that she was a woman. She always wore makeup, perfume and did her hair. She never once considered herself one of the guys—even though some treated her that way.

Youth had its advantages as well as its drawbacks. At 28, Glen Trainor was the kind of young detective whom senior, more jaded, investigators like to call-“green.” That somewhat derisive term was wasted on the young investigator. Although Glen Trainor had only worked two homicides and did lack experience, the tenacity of youth—the hunger for the hunt— more than made up for it. He came to the Thornton Police Department after a four-year stint in the Air Force security police ended in 1983 and became a detective in August 1987. Glen Trainor also loved his work. It held his interest in a way he imagined no other job could.

I can’t believe we get paid for what we do. A lot of people would do this job for no pay
, he thought.

Two miles away from the smoldering house, Trainor was reached at the home he shared with his wife Robin and their two-year-old daughter with the request to get over to 12370 Columbine Court. By the time he arrived, officers were canvassing the neighborhood to find anyone who might have seen something that could help determine what—and, more importantly, who—caused the fire that killed Glen Harrelson. The arson squad picked through the smoldering ruins and several neighbors gathered beyond the yellow tape. White vapors from the spectators’ warm breath caught the light of approaching cars as they talked about how their neighbor had recently married and that he and his new wife divided their time between Trinidad and Denver.

When Elaine Tygart got word there had been a suspicious death involving a Denver fireman in a house fire in Thornton, she was in the middle of the second day of a two-day blood spatter seminar at the Westminster Ramada Inn. Once alerted, the detective packed up her things and immediately went to the station.

It doesn’t add up. A firefighter dead in a fire in his own house? Doesn’t add up.

At the Thornton Police Department, plans were made to send Tygart and Trainor to Trinidad to make a death notification, and to solve a murder. A sergeant doled out a few bucks from petty cash for meals and lodging. Authorities in Trinidad had been notified Tygart and Trainor were en route and were standing by to render assistance as needed. Glen Harrelson’ s wife, Sharon, the Thornton police learned through conversations with the dead man’s coworkers, lived in a remote mountain home in Weston. They also learned more jarring information: It seemed Sharon’s second husband had died five years before, and while there was no murder investigation—that death was ruled accidental, a car wreck—there were some concerns.

It was a little after 3 P.M. when the pair got into their unmarked detective unit, an Impala, for the long drive south.

Their minds raced. There was no red flag larger in law enforcement: The woman they were going to see was twice a widow. Her husbands had died untimely, suspicious deaths.

“Wouldn’t it be weird if we cleared them both?” Det. Trainor asked as he and his partner merged onto I-25.

“Yeah,” she answered. “It would be.”

Glen Trainor was three inches shorter than Elaine Tygart, but neither saw themselves as Mutt and Jeff. They were professionals with a job to do. They drove on.

Most longtime Coloradans know of Trinidad and its surrounding environs. The place, in a word, had a reputation. It was an isolated town, a somewhat inbred haven for the alternative and the strange. Of course, the handiwork of Trinidad’s gender reassignment surgeon Dr. Stanley Biber and his world-renowned sex-change clinic routinely came up when people outside the community spoke of the town. Some in law enforcement considered Trinidad a postcard-pretty place with a dark side of corruption, mystery, and waitresses with five o’clock shadow.

As one native Coloradan half-joked, “Trinidad has seventy-three churches and eighty bars.”

The two detectives chatted about the mountain community as they drove Trinidad’s streets in search of the police station and Las Animas County Sheriff’s Department. Keenly aware of their outsider-status, they wondered what kind of assistance they’d get from the local cops. Secluded places like Trinidad don’t like strangers butting into their business. But to the detectives’ surprise, instead of resistance they were greeted with handshakes and offers to help when they arrived in the hand-cut gray stone building that housed both the sheriff and the police.

As the sheriff’s deputies began to talk about the woman the Thornton pair had come to interview, an unflattering and unsettling picture began to emerge. Sharon Harrelson had been the talk of the town from nearly her first days in the area. It seemed everyone knew her and no one was surprised the police wanted to talk to her. She was lusty, flamboyant. She was a bed hopper that would give the frogs of Calaveras County a run for their money. It seemed like she’d bedded half the men—married or single—in a hundred-mile radius. If you wore pants and were looking for a woman to spread her legs, this lady apparently obliged.

Some of it was gossip. Some of it was mean-spirited; the kind of talk that comes from horny men who didn’t get any at home. Sitting in the bar, bullshitting the hours away until closing, talking about the women they’d like to screw…the lady in the fancy house on Cougar Ridge frequently came up in conversation.

Whatever the reality of the basis of her reputation, it was doubtful any grass grew under the lady’s feet.

The sheriff’s deputy told Tygart and Trainor that as far as they knew, Sharon Harrelson was at home. The lack of phone service in the area made it impossible to give her a call to see if she was there. Though it was late, the only way to confirm it was to take the forty-five-minute trip out to Weston, where her home was perched on a mountainside. The Thornton detectives were put into the backseat of an older-than-the-hills Scout and taken to a house where they picked up a young man—the son of another officer—who knew the location of Sharon Harrelson’ s mountain hideaway.

“Never find it without a guide,” the deputy said, as the young man slid into a seat.

Neither of the Thornton cops disagreed. They wanted to get on with it. Even so, Trainor felt a little anxious. As they drove further and further into the blackness of the night, he wondered just exactly where they were headed. All the stories of Trinidad being a haven for crime and the weirdoes that flock to such places took hold. It was so remote. It was so Nowheresville. It was the perfect place to bump off a couple of nosy out-of-town cops.

Shoot us up on a hillside and say they never saw us…

Glen Trainor chatted nervously about fishing and hunting prospects in the area as though he were really interested. The local deputy promised to take him up to the reservoir, if they had time, to show him the area’s best fishing spot.

* * *

The siren of the mountains, the purported sexpot of the Rockies, was puffy-eyed and weary when the detectives and their local law enforcement escort went inside her grand, custom-built home. For all the Thornton police detectives had heard about her, the woman’s appearance did not match her reputation. Perhaps it was the terrible circumstances of their visit? At 43, Sharon Harrelson was soft-spoken and devoid of makeup. She was no man magnet. She was tired and wan.

The occupants of the house included two small children— identified as seven-year-old Misty and ten-year-old Danny Nelson—and a young woman named Rochelle and her husband, Bart Mason. None of them mattered, of course. At least initially, all eyes were on the woman who had lost her husband to a terrible fire.

Rochelle scurried the little boy and girl into the living room, while Sharon led her somber parade of visitors to the kitchen.

The flame of her lighter was a tiny torch held by fingers with candy-apple red nails. She put a cigarette to her full, sensuous lips and sucked hard. In a minute, as smoke streamed from her nose, Sharon started from the beginning.

BOOK I

Preacher’s Wife

“I was a perfect little minister's wife on the outside. I think probably most of our congregational members—except the ones I really let inside me—would have said I was a wonderful minister's wife.”

—Sharon Fuller

“So I thought, what kind of a woman is she? She’s coming down to Trinidad and she’s got two little kids and she’s married to a minister. Here she is shacking up with Perry at a motel.”

—Barbara Ruscett

Chapter 1

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A FRESH START. GOD KNEW the preacher’s thirty-year-old wife needed one. So did her husband. Four years in Durham, North Carolina, had been besmirched by the unthinkable, the unspeakable. Nerves had been frayed. Blame had been heaped deeper and deeper. No man’s shoulders could bear the enormous weight of it all. Seventh-Day Adventist Pastor Mike Fuller knew he had a problem. A pretty one, too. Her name was Sharon.

The family headed west to La Junta and Rocky Ford, Colorado, boiling over the circumstances forcing them from the eastern seaboard. It was the summer of 1976; platform shoes’ last stand, the year of the Bee Gees and Donna Summer. For the family in the convertible sliding across the mammoth asphalt belt of the interstate, it was not a happy time. The house they loved had been put up for sale; furniture loaded on a separate moving truck. Friends had been kissed good-bye. The couple’s two little girls, Rochelle, seven, and Denise, two, had been yanked from their playmates.

And it was all her fault.

Sharon Fuller had fallen in love with a man in her husband’s congregation. It was not the first time and, Sharon knew, it likely would not be the last. Within the embrace of the other man’s arms, Sharon told friends, she had found compassion, tenderness, love—emotions she derisively insisted her husband was incapable of offering.

The scenario played in Sharon’s mind like a bodice-ripper romance novel without a happy ending. Tattered dreams. Lost opportunity. Star-crossed lovers. To her way of thinking, such a romantic visage seemed to fit her predicament. Her voice would waver many years later when she would try to dissect what had happened when she had forsaken her husband for a man named Craig.

“It wasn’t so much that our marriage was bad at that point. Mike was never a sensitive person. He’d never been one to share like Rod McKuen poems. I’ll never forget the first time I went over to Craig’s apartment. He had a fantastic stereo system and he had a tape—he had lots of tapes—of Rod McKuen. One of them was The Jostling of Angels and it just struck me so,” she said, the bitter sweetness of the memory bringing a smile to her face. “It was like it was talking about me. The feeling I got was when you’re so self-sufficient and self-important and you’re walking down the street… be careful that your imaginary wings don’t jostle the real angels that are the common people.”

She could picture her husband walking down the street, his imaginary wings “mashing everybody in his way.” She felt Minister Mike considered himself a “legend in his own mind” and did not understand that there were “real people out there that he knocked around emotionally that had real worth.”