by Gregg Olsen
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.
The little box of gritty remains that Sharon had displayed on the kitchen table was laid to rest in the Cedar Lake Cemetery.
He sleeps awaiting the call of the Life-Giver.
Gary Adams was glad he found the note in the mailbox, and not Nancy. He was once more at the Dude Ranch with Nancy giving him another chance, and he didn’t want to blow it. Some wondered if he was with Nancy for the sake of their son. Others figured he was whipped by both women and couldn’t make up his mind. Yet, when Sharon's note came, her siren song drew him away from Nancy.
“Come up and see me,” it read.
He made an excuse and left his family. He wondered how they could believe him about anything, he had lied so often. One lie, he knew, was always used to cover another. The lies would stack up until they tumbled and fell, taking him with them.
He went to the outside door off Round House's master bedroom and let himself inside.
“Here's ten thousand,” Sharon said with a smile as she handed over a fat-with-money envelope. The two made love, the money an unnecessary aphrodisiac.
Over the weeks and months that followed, more insurance money rolled in. Sharon didn’t have to prove Perry was dead. She didn’t have to put up with the cruel remarks that her husband had fled the country for Mexico. She didn’t have to sue to get what was hers. When the checks arrived, she planned on paying off Round House, splurging on some goodies and putting the rest into investments that would keep her secure for the rest of her life. She also had to pay off Gary.
Checks in her purse, Sharon and Gary drove up to Colorado Springs to take care of a little banking. Gary wanted his name put on the six-month, $55,000 certificate of deposit that Sharon had purchased with proceeds from the insurance windfall. While the interest from the CD was coming directly to Gary, he wanted to make sure when it matured, he’d get the full amount.
The bank refused to eliminate her name. Instead, they wrote in a co-owner of the amount: Gary Starr Adams.
Sharon told the teller that when the CD matured, she wanted the funds released to Gary.
So happy, so agreeable. Things were so good.
While it was true that she liked to spend the dough on herself, Sharon was anything but tightfisted with her money when it came to others. She bought new clothes and toys for her children. When Gary wanted a new motorcycle, Sharon plunked down the cash. For herself, she bought a blue fox and a mink coat on a trip to Pueblo. She could afford it. When all the death benefits rolled in, Sharon had added more than $250,000 to her bank account.
Gary appreciated what Sharon gave him, but he told her to slow down. It was the old grasshopper and the ant scenario. She was playing and spending all day and night, while she should
be saving, planning and preparing for the future. Gary grappled with her extravagance and mixed-up priorities.
“I tried to tell Sharon she needed to spend the money wisely, but she’d go and have her fingernails done, have little gold things put on them… it cost fifty dollars. I’d try to explain to her that fifty dollars maybe doesn’t seem like much when you’ve got all this money. But years down the road, it could buy a lot of food.”
His suggestions for cooling it down only brought spasms of anger from Sharon. Mike had tried to control her, Perry had, but not Gary. She wasn’t going to cave in to anyone.
Others noticed Sharon's penchant for waving her money all around town and beyond.
Barb Ruscetti, still bitter over Sharon's failure to pay for her unemployment insurance, was one. It stung whenever she heard of Sharon's latest purchase with the blood money from Dr. Nelson's death.
The former optical assistant never let a chance to berate Sharon slip by.
“Let me tell you all the stuff she bought,” she told a friend. “She bought a new Bronco, she bought her a fur, she bought a mink coat. But you add up all the other things she bought for other people.”
Barb let out a heavy sigh.
“She spent it all! She spent it.”
And though she had all the money she had ever dreamed about, Sharon still wanted one more thing. She wanted Gary to divorce Nancy and marry her. She wanted it so bad. She couldn’t understand why Gary kept putting her off. Why didn’t he just dump that mousy little woman and get on with living the high life? Sharon wanted to marry Gary and she said so many times. She assumed that with his divorce from Nancy final, they’d set a date. Even with the on-and-off foundation of their relationship, she still wanted the ring that told the world he was all hers.
For some reason, perhaps unclear even to the man himself, Gary stalled her.
“If we get married, Sher,” he told her a time or two, “you’ll lose your Social Security. That's four hundred dollars a month you’ll lose! It's not worth it. We can live together. Why don’t we just keep pretending we’re married?”
Chapter 20
EVEN WITH A BANK ACCOUNT FATTER THAN A SIDE of Nebraska beef, Sharon still liked to sneak into the movies or away from restaurants without paying. She did it two or three times at Pizza Hut, until an employee confronted her in the parking lot.
“You didn’t pay your bill,” the young employee said.
Sharon feigned shock. “Oh, didn’t I? I'm sorry, I forgot.”
When Sharon and Gary enjoyed a little getaway in Las Vegas, Sharon cajoled Gary into skipping out on a $30 dinner bill at an Italian restaurant.
“Sharon liked the rush. She liked the adventure,” Gary once told a friend, though he didn’t think much of his lover's choices when it came to adventure. “If you’re going to do something, do something big,” Gary advised. “The rest of it— always be straight. If you’re going to be a criminal, hit a bank, don’t rob 7-Eleven.”
Teenager Rochelle Fuller was the spitting image of her mother. She had thick, dark hair and full, pouty lips. She even sounded like Sharon when she spoke. To those who knew them both, the resemblance was almost eerie. Yet, Rochelle wasn’t Sharon. She had spent her whole young life wondering about a mother she didn’t really know and at the same time wishing she wouldn’t make the same mess out of her life. Distance had been a blessing. She and her younger sister, Denise, were raised by their father, preacher Mike Fuller, in Ohio.
When Rochelle's world had been rocked one last terrible time by her mother, the young woman would tell a confidant that as far as she was concerned, the woman who had given birth to her had never been a real mother to her.
“She made my life hell; every time I reached out to her and all the time knowing that she didn’t have anything to give. The whole time I’ve known her, it has been one big charade.”
And even though there was a deep bitterness between the two, a mix of abandonment, jealousy and distrust, there was also an undeniable connection. When Rochelle, at 15, pleaded with her mother to let her live in Colorado—away from her minister father and the tedium of the Midwest—Sharon agreed.
Sharon, however, could no more be a mother to Rochelle than she had been to Lorri Nelson. Sharon had to be her daughter's friend. She wanted to drink with, dance with, carouse around Trinidad with Rochelle.
Sharon was an equal—until, of course she needed to exert her considerable power to get her way.
And so they tried to be mother and daughter. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.
The two enjoyed watching videos in front of the television with a bag of chips or bowl of butter-sopped popcorn. One movie in particular absorbed Sharon's attention: the Debra Winger/Theresa Russell thriller, Black Widow.
“She mates and kills,” had been the film's tagline.
“It was like she was so fascinated with the movie you wouldn’t believe it,” Rochelle told a friend later. “She was so drawn to it that I couldn’t talk to her or anything.”
Rochelle, like everyone else, tried to sort out her mother's boyfriends, lovers, whatever she called them. Gary Adams was so off and on, that Sharon's daughter didn’t know for certain where he fit in. Sharon would live with him, get dumped by him, rebound over and over. She would pick up a new guy. She would go back to another. Buzz Reynolds, the man who had been the source of the greatest hurt in Perry Nelson's messy marriage to Sharon, was one of those on the yo-yo string. Sharon told her family, her parents and sister, that she was going to walk down the aisle again. This time, she was going to marry Buzz Reynolds. Sharon's parents said they’d make the trip from Maryland to attend the wedding.
Maybe she was going to settle down, once and for all?
It was as if their daughter stayed up nights thinking of the most inappropriate acts, the most hurtful things that she could do. The checklist was long. The affairs had never been discussed, but Morris and Josephine Douglas were not completely blind. They knew more than Sharon ever gave them credit for. And before their visit to Round House on the eve of Sharon's supposed marriage to Buzz Reynolds, they might have thought the very fact that their daughter took up with another man while wed to a preacher would likely be the topper for most good girls gone bad. Not for their Sharon Lynn.
When the Douglases arrived for Sharon's wedding they were shocked to find their daughter shacked up with a man— and not even the groom. Gary Adams was sharing Sharon's bed as the ceremony with Buzz loomed. Even as she cut out the pattern for the wedding dress she was sewing, Gary was sprawled out waiting for her in the master bedroom.
It was too much. Once more, their middle daughter's behavior was over-the-line and unbelievably offensive.
The Douglases could not stay another second in Round House. They gathered their things and left with barely a goodbye. They would not come to the wedding. They would not come to the reception. The future Mrs. Reynolds had, once more, gone too far.
Sister Judy remembered an indignant Sharon talking about it later.
“Sharon has always been mad that Mom and Dad made such a big deal out of it and left before the wedding. What did she expect?” she asked.
Judy went to the wedding, which actually amounted to little more than a big poolside party at the Reynolds’ sprawling ranch. A fairly decent band played and dozens, maybe a hundred, locals showed up. Judy considered Buzz a nice fellow and she hoped her sister would be happy.
When Judy left, however, she doubted things would work out between Sharon and Buzz. Sharon had been so vague about the legal aspect of the ceremony, Judy questioned if her sister was really married this time. Of course, just as she hadn’t really married Gary Adams in the mountain meadow, she hadn’t legally married Buzz.
Judy considered the whole thing another of her sister's strange charades.
“I doubt this wedding is real,” she confided to a friend. “I hope Sharon knows what she's doing.”
And while she was “married” to Buzz, Sharon, in fact, did have plans. She
did have other things in mind. She still had her mountain man in her life.
How was it that Sharon could make the most outrageous requests seem as garden-variety, as benign, as asking someone to take out the garbage? Gary Adams stared at Sharon, focusing first on her eyes, then the gloss of her lips. Her lips had a life of their own; they drew him closer. Wet and luscious. Maybe whatever came from the lips was too powerful for him to dismiss.
He fought for reason to take control.
“Buzz needs to have an accident,” she said.
“Accident?” Gary asked, though he knew Sharon's idea of an accident meant causing the accident.
“Yes. I think he could have an accident real soon.”
Gary shook his head.
“Sharon, it's too soon.”
Why didn’t he say, “Sharon, you’re crazy?” Or, “Sharon, you are out of your fucking mind?”
“Too soon, baby,” he told her. “It's only been a couple of years since Perry.”
Sharon nuzzled her face in Gary's muscular chest and took a deep breath. She didn’t seem to care about how something might look. Coincidences happened all the time. One mother gave birth to three sets of twins. One man won the Lotto twice. Surely other women have lost two husbands. She didn’t want to give up. Water had worked before. It covered all mistakes. Gary himself had said so many, many times: Fire and water were the ways to cover a crime.
“It’d be real easy,” she cooed once more. “All you have to do is hit him on the head and have him fall in the lake.”
Gary wasn’t buying. It was a stupid and greedy idea.
“Think, Sharon. Here you are ‘married’ to two people…they’re dead and water is connected.”
Sharon backpedaled for a moment. She ditched the idea of the drowning. She suggested when Buzz was out making business deliveries might be a better time to get rid of him.
“He drives around out in the Canyon, you could drive by and shoot him and make it look like a robbery,” she said.