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.