“My dad would never miss my birthday, not this birthday.
No matter what kind of trouble he was in, my dad would have called me,” she said.
She could barely let the idea pass through her mind: Her father must be dead.
Chapter 19
THE MAKESHIFT FAMILY—ANOTHER MAN’S WIFE, a part-time lover and a missing or dead doctor's two young children—drove the brown Jeep Eagle toward Trinidad, nearly to the lake that had been the place of so many trysts. In the Jeep was Gary Adams, Sharon Nelson, and her children Misty and Danny. It was a happy time, so needed when happy times had been in short supply. Sharon scooted next to Gary, in the manner in which teenage girls often do, while her boyfriend drove. Windows were cracked to suck out the silver smoke from Sharon's ever-present cigarette. The kids sat quietly in the backseat.
It was August 14, 1984, almost thirteen months after Perry Nelson vanished.
A sheriff's car coming from the opposite direction stopped and did a U-turn, sirens blaring. Gary skidded to the side of the road and got out, ready to tell the deputy that he wasn’t going all that fast.
“I want to talk with Sharon,” the deputy said. “Away from the kids.”
Gary nodded and told Sharon to come out. In an instant, and as gently as the man in uniform could, he told her about a discovery made up north. A few minutes went by and Sharon returned to the car. Tears filled her eyes, though she did not let any fall.
“They found Perry's body in the creek,” Sharon said. “Along a sandbar up near Golden.”
Without talking about it much more, Gary drove the car to town, where they did their laundry and shopped.
Remarkably, for more than a year of exposure in the brittle freeze and griddle heat of Colorado wilderness, the body found along the waters of Clear Creek was quite preserved. It was wearing the same clothing as Sharon had described when her husband left for the optical convention in Denver thirteen months before.
Terry Mitchell got word that Friday that the corpse found in Jefferson County was purportedly his friend. Yet the description didn’t ring true. News accounts indicated that the man found on the sandbar was in his thirties.
Perry was fifty when he disappeared.
The body was still clad in socks, trousers and a shirt.
“This doesn’t sound like it could be Perry,” he told Kay. “I'm going to go see the body.”
Kay thought an inspection was a good idea, too. She had been bothered by the details.
“How could they mistake a thirty-year-old for a fifty-year-old?” she asked.
Since the Jefferson County coroner's office was not far from their home, it was not a problem for Dr. Mitchell to get over there right away. He got a woman on the line and told her who he was.
“I’d like to come and view the body of the man pulled from Clear Creek. He's supposedly a friend of mine.”
“Oh, you can’t see him,” the woman monotoned.
“It’ll be fine. I'm a doctor.”
“He's in a bag and I can’t open it.”
“I can open it. I'm a doctor. I can handle it.”
“You can’t, I'm sorry.” She droned on about proper procedure and told Dr. Mitchell he would have to call back on Monday when the coroner was in the office.
Disappointed, Terry Mitchell agreed and hung up.
First thing Monday morning, he telephoned the coroner. A clerk answered.
“This is Dr. Mitchell calling. You have a Dr. Nelson there, I want to come in and view the body.”
“Sorry, Doctor,” the clerk said. “Dr. Nelson's remains were sent to the crematorium this morning. His wife is having the remains sent to Michigan for burial.”
Terry Mitchell couldn’t believe it. What was the hurry? The clerk said the body had been identified through dental records. Why had they moved so quickly? Why had they cremated him when they knew another physician wanted to make a visual identification?
The timing of everything seemed so odd. Just days before, an insurance adjuster who thought Perry, Sharon and Gary could be in cahoots had called Dr. Mitchell to set up an interview appointment. Sharon had not been paid all of her life insurance proceeds because there had been no body to prove a death had, in fact, transpired.
The insurance man called back a few days later and told the chiropractor the body had been found. The case was closed. Why so fast? Terry wondered. Then the answer came: Sharon was getting her money. Every last dime of it.
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.