Groom-to-be for dinner and a talk. ralph was every bit a devout a believer as pam. so some premarital guidance perhaps? oh, no. nothing like that. they told us, we ran off, we eloped and got married. wait, what? your mother and aaron s father? yes. who does that? i don t know. but i can t tell you how much it felt like i got hit by a bus. do you know what that meant? it meant that by the time you got married, you were marrying your stepbrother. right. i didn t say much. i was just like, well, we re leaving. and suddenly jerry realized how blind he d been. you didn t understand, but then afterwards it all all the pieces fell into place. you were never suspicious? i trusted her. don t we do that? in a relationship? no trust now. shannon and
Was hurt. and he was air lifted to the nearest trauma hospital. walsenburg, as local reporter eric mullens knew, was not equipped to handle an investigation of this magnitude. you have small town departments, five, six, seven people. you don t have murder cops on staff. you don t have forensic professionals on staff. so by the time shannon arrived at the hospital looking for her mother, an agent of the colorado bureau of investigation was there to meet her. along with aaron. how did she take it? about as well as you expect anybody to get hit by a sledgehammer or whatever. first you re just kind of shocked, then a little bit of denial. suddenly i realized that that last conversation i had with her was that was it. no fresh start now. her mother was dead. and then shannon saw ralph. and he lost it. he just turned into a sobbing, shaking maniac. ralph s face was banged up.
Its original place. here s what ralph wrote. i picked up the poker to stir up the fire. i saw blood on the end of it and put it down. so investigators studied ralph s manifesto for clues. and thanks to the huerfano world journal, so did everybody else in town. neighbors, mike and dina it sounded like a novel to me. a bizarre one at that. shannon who had been angry at ralph for not protecting her mother, read the letter and began to have thoughts that were much more disturbing. i didn t get through more than a page and a half and i threw it, and i said, this is bull (bleep). i said, this is the worst i could barely stomach to finish it. and aaron, shannon s ex-husband, ralph s son? aaron went to a very dark place indeed. oh, you have no idea. you were 11 years old when your mother disappeared.
you know, we had such a connection. no kidding. both jehovah s witnesses, both home schooled by their mothers. or at least aaron was home schooled until his parents marriage broke up. we were so drawn to each other, that two people were so driven, and so optimistic, and just wanted to do big things in life. so after high school, they got engaged, and full of excitement, planned a wedding. then one night shannon s mother, pam, sent the girls off to bible study and told their father, jerry, they needed to talk. she looked up and says, i don t want to be married to you anymore. i don t want to be here. everything was fine, fine, fine, then we seemed to be getting along. everything was fine. she said, this is it, i m done. what did that feel like? it was a crush. you were crushed. what happened? no one knew. except that now these two had one more thing in common. both products of broken homes. the wedding day approached, just a few days to go, when shannon s mother, p
Future. but until then, i am going to file an appeal for this particular motion. reporter: for now his future is life without the possibility of parole. i had never had a weight so heavy lifted. it was exactly. it was wonderful. reporter: i got to say, by the way, don t want to embarrass you, but i have found that investigators of homicides are the biggest softies on the planet. [laughs] we re not supposed to let that out, but once in a while it happens. reporter: you re not supposed to care as much as you do, but you really do. you do. oh, absolutely. you become very attached. those girls are special. pam had a part in that, and they re hopefully they ll be able to live on her legacy. reporter: and ralph s legacy? because of him, aaron will go on searching, hoping to learn what happened to his mother. yeah. i will be looking. probably in oh, in some way my entire life i ll always be asking questions. reporter: and shannon he needs to realize this