by Robert Scott
Time passed, and Watts was going through her canceled bank checks and noticed that some bank statements seemed off. She contacted her bank, and they faxed her copies of canceled checks. She noted that some of the check signatures were not in her handwriting.
Soon she went to her other bank and found that the same thing was occurring there. Watts was sure by now that Miriam had stolen some of her checks in Gulfport and was forging them. She wanted Miriam returned to Mississippi so that she could be arrested.
On top of that, Watts heard that Miriam was trying to set up her own dance studio in Grand Junction and was “stealing” Watts’s dance students right out from under her nose. One of those students was Alan Helmick. In a bold move, Watts faxed Alan documents about Miriam and warned him about her.
Then, in a clever ruse, Watts contacted Miriam and told her to come back to Gulfport, Mississippi, for more dance training. Surprisingly, Miriam complied. As soon as she did, she was arrested.
Apparently, Miriam was able to raise bail. Once she did, she got in her car and left Gulfport. In response, Watts said, she faxed Alan Helmick every damaging thing she could about Miriam that same day. “Like bank statements and such. I warned him and told him not to let it happen to him,” she said.
Around that same time, Watts went to the cottage, where Miriam had been staying, to retrieve a computer that was there. She found two envelopes. One of them was marked Personal, and the other had no writing on it. The envelopes were pasted shut, but when she held them up to the light, she could see that they contained her altered bank statements.
Then, in an incredible set of circumstances, Barbara Watts flew out to Colorado and tried contacting Alan while she was there. Instead, Miriam answered the phone and wanted to know if she was fired. The employer said that Miriam was not f ired—just why Watts did not fire Miriam at that point is not clear. Perhaps she wanted Miriam to do some new illegal activity where she could be arrested in Colorado.
Once back in Mississippi, Watts found a diary with Miriam’s handwriting. In one portion was a very strange notation. Miriam had written that she was in love with Keith and would do anything for him. She would even “die for him,” according to the diary.
Also, while cleaning out the cottage, she found a garment bag with a lot of documents inside. They concerned Miriam’s father and stepmother and some kind of fraud that Miriam had perpetrated upon them.
A short time later, Miriam wanted this garment bag sent to Colorado. When Watts did not send it right away, Miriam sued her. Not long after that, Watts was able to contact Miriam’s parents in Florida. In a new twist to all of this, Miriam’s father contacted Miriam. He said if she continued the lawsuit against Barbara Watts, he would come to Colorado and testify on Watts’s behalf. Miriam did not want that to happen, so she dropped the lawsuit.
Meanwhile, Barbara Watts countersued about all the shady business deals that Miriam had been involved in with the dance studio in Grand Junction. This was eventually settled out of court. Even then, Watts said she was so concerned about Miriam, she bought a gun for protection.
Barbara Watts told Chuck Warner, “Miriam said to me, ‘I’m looking for a sugar daddy to take care of me.’ I even told Alan Helmick about this statement. I warned him over and over about her! I think she is capable of a lot of things.”
Watts added that when Miriam first met her, Miriam went by the name Francehssea Giles. Watts believed that Miriam had a document stating that she had come from Salt Lake City, Utah. Apparently, Miriam had never been there and certainly had not been born there. How Miriam had obtained this document remained a mystery.
The dance school proprietor said that she no longer had Miriam’s diary. It had been lost during Hurricane Katrina. A few of the comments she could remember were about Keith and the way Miriam was in love with him.
Miriam had written, I will do anything to keep us together.. . . I can mesmerize anybody.
Asked by Investigator Warner if she thought that Miriam was involved in Alan’s murder, she said yes. “If I had gotten a good attorney in Mississippi, Miriam would have gone to jail and would not have married him.” Then Barbara Watts said she felt partially responsible for Alan’s death for not having warned him in even stronger terms about Miriam Giles.
CHAPTER 15
48 HOURS
Stories about what the investigators were discovering seeped into the local newspapers in bits and pieces. Stymied by the lack of information he was getting from MCSO, reporter Paul Shockley, of the Grand Junction Free Press, was able to interview Miriam Helmick at her residence in Whitewater. Miriam had, of course, returned to live there after the police had allowed her to do so. Miriam told Shockley, “I feel real close to Alan here. All of this was our project.”
Miriam wanted to send some photos of her and Alan together to Shockley’s newspaper, but she said that she couldn’t because they were on the computers. The MCSO investigators had seized all the computers after Alan’s murder.
Miriam related that she had printed one of Alan’s favorite sayings on his funeral program: “I wonder what the poor people are doing?” She quickly added that he didn’t mean money. “What he meant was, smelling the roses. Enjoying themselves.” Alan had often remarked upon that when he took a boating trip to Lake Powell. It was about using one’s money to enjoy life and not just storing it away in a bank somewhere.
Then Miriam told Shockley about her first husband, Jack Giles. She said that Jack Calloway Giles had committed suicide only six years before. This had happened in the home that Miriam and Jack shared in Jacksonville, Florida. According to Miriam, Jack had shot himself while they were in bed together. He had done so because of the accidental death of their daughter, Amy, who was only twenty-three years old.
Miriam said, “He couldn’t handle it. He sat there on his birthday, before he killed himself, and waited for her phone call. Of course, she could no longer call him.” After the death of Alan, Miriam told Shockley, “I thought that kind of life was over.” What she apparently meant was the violent death of a husband.
Asked why she had moved to Colorado after the death of her first husband, Miriam told Shockley that a dance studio where she was working in Mississippi had indicated a new dance studio was opening up in Grand Junction. Miriam not only wanted a change of scenery, but the chance to manage a dance studio as well.
After her transfer to Colorado, Miriam related, one new student who came in for lessons was a recent widower who had always wanted to try ballroom dancing. Miriam said, “I usually don’t associate or fraternize with students. I guess he (Alan) sort of grew on me. Such a gentleman and very sweet.” Miriam didn’t speak of moving in with Alan, but she did say they got married in June 2006.
Speaking of Alan’s business ventures, Miriam told Shockley that Alan was hard-pressed to find the time to enjoy one of his biggest passions, golf. She also said that he was the big decision maker in their family, and that he was more logical than she was. Miriam added that she was more of the artist in the relationship. Miriam commented, “I never saw a business situation where he couldn’t pull a rabbit out of a hat.”
Asked about the suspicious car fire in Delta in April, Miriam said that she had been with Alan that day. She was inside a building where he was selling a business. When Alan started the car, there was an immediate fire coming from the gas tank area. She also said that there was a full tank of gas that day, because she had recently filled up the car. Asked if this incident was somehow related to Alan’s murder, Miriam replied, “I don’t know. It very well could be related. I know he thought it was random.”
Shockley wanted to know who would want to harm Alan. Miriam said she didn’t know, but it was part of the ongoing investigation. Then she said that once the investigators had researched that angle, they would let her know.
As to what she had done and where she had been when Alan was murdered, Miriam said that she had gone on a shopping trip into Grand Junction. She had left the house about eight-thirty in the
morning. Miriam added that everything had been fine when she left the house. Alan was supposed to meet her later at a Chinese restaurant on North Avenue in Grand Junction for lunch. Worried when he didn’t show up, she kept calling him. After a few calls, she left the restaurant and returned home to find out why he hadn’t returned her calls. Miriam said, “That’s when I found him, and it all went downhill from there.”
Shockley wanted to know if Miriam had noticed items missing from the home, or if it looked as if it had been ransacked. She declined to elaborate, except to say that she hadn’t looked around at the condition of the house. “My first concern was him,” she responded.
By now, even CBS’s national program 48 Hours thought something fishy was going on concerning the Alan Helmick murder. The Grand Junction Free Press learned that 48 Hours was doing preliminary research on the case. And the reason why was because of Melody Sebesta’s words in print and online. Sebesta had been a friend of Alan Helmick since high school, and she had been quoted in newspapers and was posted on the Internet. A staffer for 48 Hours contacted Sebesta about the case and wanted to know more details.
Looking into this angle further, the Free Press learned that MCSO spokesperson Heather Benjamin was scheduled to meet with a producer of that television show. Benjamin told the reporter, “I really don’t have anything new to tell them that I haven’t told locals.”
The reporter also noted in his piece that if a segment on Alan Helmick aired, it would be the third time in recent years that 48 Hours did a show about murder in the Grand Junction area. On June 10, 2008, only hours after the body of Alan Helmick had been discovered, a one-hour program about the case of a missing thirty-four-year-old mother, Paige Birgfeld, aired nationally on 48 Hours. A few years before that, they ran a program about a man named Michael Blagg, who was convicted of murdering his wife, Jennifer, and his daughter, Abby. Jennifer’s body was found buried in a landfill. Abby’s body was never found.
CHAPTER 16
THE YELLOW ENVELOPE
On June 22, 2008, Miriam started telling Penny Lyons about strange things occurring at her home in Whitewater. Penny recalled, “She said the lights that she had never turned on were on, when she came home. Cabinet doors that she had never opened were left open. Doors that she had never touched were unlocked. She was scared, but I admired her courage for staying home. If someone was trying to scare her, then I admired her strength to stay. And besides, she didn’t have anywhere to go.”
A few more days passed, and on June 26, 2008, it seemed like any other day at Miriam’s home on Siminoe Road in Whitewater after Alan’s murder. As Penny Lyons recalled, “I was at work and Miriam phoned me. She had been out in the earlier part of the day, and she didn’t want to go home by herself. So I told her that I only had about an hour’s work left and why didn’t she just go out to my house and relax for a while. Then I had a bunch of errands to do in the afternoon and she could come along with me.
“She came with me to an appointment I had with a lady in Palisade. I had a haircut there. Miriam and I had a pleasant afternoon. We got back to my house at about a quarter to six. When she was getting into her truck, I said that I would follow her out to her home. It took about fifteen minutes to get there.
“We pulled up to the garage doors, and she usually left the garage door partially open so that her dog, Cisco, could run in and out. She always went into the house through the garage doors, and not the front door. We just walked into the garage first. We kind of walked in side by side, and Miriam looked through the window in an easterly direction, where she could see the front door.
“She said that the police tape was off the door, and she hadn’t removed it. She said that she didn’t want to tear the stucco off when it was removed. And she never used the front door, anyway, so she just left it there. I went around the corner of the garage and I walked up toward the front door, with Miriam a ways behind me. I looked down and noticed a bright canary yellow envelope sticking out from the corner of the doormat.
“I reached down to pick it up. And handwritten on the front was ‘To the greving [sic] widow.’ I said, ‘Miriam, it’s addressed to you.’ She came up behind me, and then we opened up the card and read it together. On the inside of the card, it said, ‘Allen [sic] was first, your [sic] next. Run, run, run.’
“It really scared me. She started to shake and just seemed to tremble and kind of crumble. And I was terrified because I didn’t know if someone was watching us or if they had been waiting all day for Miriam to be at her front door.
“I swore. I swore a lot. And I just threw the card down and grabbed her hand and said, ‘Get in the car! Get in the car!’ We both just started running for the car. And I wanted to make sure I had that envelope, so I ran back and threw it and the card into the backseat of the car. Then I took off down the road.
“I was terrified and Miriam looked scared to me. I started to phone 911 right away, and my cell phone did not work at their home. It never did. I had to go a little ways down the road to get a signal. I started to phone 911 again, and Miriam asked me not to call the police. I wanted to, but she said, ‘Please, Penny, don’t second-guess me. Please call my attorney. Just call my attorney.’ So I called her attorney, Colleen Scissors.
“When we got home, the card and envelope were in the backseat of the car. And I put the card in the envelope and took both of them into the house. At first, Miriam just wanted to go back home because she wanted to get the truck so that she would have a vehicle to use. I didn’t feel that we should go back there.”
On Friday, June 27, 2008, Investigator Pete Burg spoke with Kirsten Turcotte, who had been a house sitter for the Helmicks on occasion when they were not at home. Kirsten, who was also known as Katie, told him that she had received a telephone call from Miriam at six fifty-three on the previous evening. Miriam told her that she had received a threatening letter, and she was leaving the area. Miriam did not say where she was going.
Then Kirsten related that Miriam had said, “This needs to stay between you and [me]. I have got to leave the house. I need for you to feed the horses for me tonight and tomorrow morning and don’t go into the house.” And then she added a strange addendum: “Don’t go into the garage, either. I don’t want you to leave your prints on anything.”
Turcotte told Investigator Burg that the whole conversation had been “really weird.” She related that she did not have a key to the Helmicks’ house, but usually she could go straight into the home because the doors were always unlocked. Kirsten also said that while Miriam was making her phone call, she could hear another, unidentified female’s voice in the background.
Miriam had told her, “Take the little truck to feed the horses.” But as soon as she said it, Kirsten could hear the unidentified female say, “No, don’t have her take the little truck in case there are fingerprints in it.”
Asked by Investigator Burg what the threatening message was about, she said she didn’t know, other than Miriam had said, “I got a threatening message and they said they were going to kill me.”
Burg queried Turcotte if she had asked Miriam if she had gone to the police about this strange phone call. She had indeed asked her that question and Miriam had replied that she hadn’t done so yet. In fact, Miriam said she was going to talk to a lawyer first about the matter. Then Miriam added that she knew someone had been in her house recently, but she could not prove it. Miriam claimed that on the previous Monday she had left the house. When she returned, she knew that some things inside the house had been moved around. Then on Tuesday, the same thing had happened. Miriam got back home that day to find things moved around in the kitchen. On Wednesday, she returned home to find the balcony door was unlocked, when she knew she had locked it. And one night, the dogs had been barking very loudly. When she shined a spotlight outside, she did not see anyone there.
Miriam told Kirsten that on Thursday afternoon, June 26, she had returned home to find lights on in two bathrooms, both unused medicine cabinet doors opened, an
d items moved around in the kitchen. Also, the yellow police tape, which had been attached to the door, was now gone. Miriam said that it was on Thursday evening that she and a female friend had approached the front door and Miriam spotted an envelope protruding from the front doormat.
About this doormat, Miriam had told her that a key had been under the mat until a year before, and then it disappeared. As to what was in the envelope, Miriam didn’t tell her at that point. She did say, however, “I just want this to be over! I almost wish they’d come back and finish the job and just kill me, ’cause I’m sick of this!”
Turcotte was worried about this line of reasoning, but Miriam assured her that she wasn’t suicidal, because she didn’t want her son to lose another parent that way. Miriam then said she was going to go to the neighbors and ask if they had seen anything suspicious lately. And she also wanted the neighbors to write down any vehicle license plate numbers they saw in the area. Miriam added that two weeks previously she had seen taillights go past the lower driveway when she had been in one of the house’s bathrooms. Miriam had then walked outside and saw a white Chevrolet truck. The driver must have spied her, because the truck suddenly “peeled off.”
That same day, Friday, June 27, Investigator Jim Hebenstreit received a message from Colleen Scissors that Miriam Helmick wanted her to report suspicious activity at the Helmick residence. Scissors told Hebenstreit that Miriam believed someone had entered her residence on several occasions when she wasn’t home.
Investigator Hebenstreit went by Colleen Scissors’s office and retrieved the yellow envelope and card. It was a greeting card, and on the envelope was written in capital letters: TO THE GREVING WIDOW. On the inside of the greeting card was written, also in capital letters, ALLEN WAS FIRST—YOUR NEXT! RUN RUN. The name “Alan” had been misspelled as “Allen.”