It was nearly midnight; an hour and a half had passed and it was time to leave. A basic foundation of the woman’s background had been laid. She had offered an alibi of watching videos the night before at the home of a neighbor. Best of all, she agreed to come into the police station in Trinidad the next morning to make a final statement that would tie up the loose ends.
“I have funeral arrangements to make,” she said, “but I guess I can make it down there.”
She explained that she’d have to make provisions for the care of her two small children, but provided that could be reasonably worked out, she’d be back for more first thing in the morning.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, as if they had been to a dinner party and not an inquisition.
Elaine Tygart left with the feeling Sharon hadn’t had a direct hand in the death of her firefighter husband, but she knew more about what had happened at Columbine Court than she let on.
Glen Trainor put it simply: “She killed him or she had him killed.”
They got back in the car and headed down the mountain toward Trinidad and their motel.
“You guys didn’t let her breathe in there,” said the Las Animas County sheriff’s sergeant who had accompanied them. “You were firing those questions at her one after another.”
The young man who had led them to the house piped up.
“That woman’s guilty as sin,” he said.
No one disagreed. No one said anything about how people handle grief in different ways. No one said she was innocent of anything.
“We just have to prove it,” Trainor said.
The Thornton detectives were on an unmercifully tight budget which left them little in the way of expense money. Meals were not going to be shared at the best places in town, if indeed outpost Trinidad had such an establishment. And insofar as hotel accommodations were concerned, that first night the two shared a double room. The fact they were good friends made the discomfort of the situation easier to bear. That they were on the case of their lives didn’t hurt, either. As they organized things for the following morning, they lamented over the fact they had not been able to bring Sharon the news of her husband’s death. It seemed Glen Harrelson’s mother in Iowa had already been notified and she passed along the shocking news to her son’s wife.
Catching her off guard had been their great hope. Unfortunately, Sharon had ample time to frame a story, shore up an alibi and play the tragic widow.
Times two.
Elaine Tygart did not mince words.
“She’s as guilty as shit,” she said as the two cops discussed their interview strategy for the next morning. “She knows more.” They began to write down everything the widow had said in the kitchen that night. They began to sequence each part of her statement. Further scrutiny would come in the morning when they had her face-to-face once more.
And, almost immediately upon their return, their motel room phone rang. It was the Las Animas County sheriff calling, with a name worth checking into.
“Gary Starr Adams,” he said.
As he listened, Trainor searched his memory. He said the name out loud, communicating the possible lead to Elaine Tygart. She also drew a blank. It was not a name Sharon had mentioned in her interview. Yet according to what the sheriff was saying, the man was a key individual in the new widow’s life.
“Right after her doctor husband disappeared, Adams was living with Mrs. Nelson and driving a brand-new pickup.”
The more the investigator and the sheriff talked, the darker the picture of this woman—a former preacher’s wife, of all things—grew. It seemed that suspicions around her second husband’s disappearance and death had run like a brushfire over a mesa. Everyone voiced an opinion. And all the opinions were the same: Sharon and Gary had conspired to kill Perry Nelson.
“Nobody came forward with information that could prove Dr. Nelson was murdered by Sharon and Gary,” the sheriff explained. “But lots of people thought so.”
Chapter 6
AS THE SUMMER OF1976 WENT ON, SO DID THE GOS-sip and innuendo. The affair Perry Nelson and Sharon Fuller had vehemently denied was the worst-kept secret in southeastern Colorado. Julie Nelson tried to keep her husband on a shorter leash and Mike Fuller did what he could to see that his wife stayed closer to his side. It was clear, however, that none of that would work. There was no stopping those two.
Sharon, in particular, invited gossip wherever she went.
When she helped out at a Seventh-Day Adventist Bible school, rumors once more wound their way through the canyons.
An upset Sharon was nearly in tears when she told her husband and others how a bunch of hormone-charged teenage boys had attempted to proposition her for sex at the school.