the police arrived. went into the house with guns drawn. and there at the entrance to the kitchen, still in her nightgown, lay pam candelario. her head covered in blood. i knew she was dead when the ambulance showed up, because they didn t go into the house. they just stayed, and were working on ralph. ralph wasn t shot, but he 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?
My boys, and i m taking off. his mother, dina, was simply gone. aaron was devastated. what did your father suggest may have happened to her? that she possibly had moved to missouri. a guy that she had been talking to online for quite some time, you know, maybe she ran away to be with him. a missing persons case was opened, but nothing came of it. aaron and his brother moved in with ralph full-time. but aaron couldn t move on. she had to have left some trail somewhere. barely a teenager, he taught himself every web search engine, looked for years. but found no sign of his mom online. and a terrible suspicion took hold of him, hardened into something like certainty. his mother must be dead. his father must have done it. and after that, it became more of, okay, where would he put her body? he was maybe 13 or 14 when he thought about those old coal mines around walsenburg. you actually went and looked?
i was at work. and i see aaron s name come up on my phone. right. he s like, you know what? something as a happened in walsenburg. my dad s being returned to the hospital and they can t find your mom. but i think someone s dead. coming up, who was dead? and was the killer on the loose in a small town? the family in shock, and an ex-husband under suspicion. n ex-husband under suspicion. .free your gut. and your mood will follow. i m the latest hashtag challenge. this is going to get tens and tens of views.
Since as a jehovah s witness, she wasn t allowed to. so then you filed for divorce. i filed for divorce. accommodating to the end. to the end. and now, the police were calling. and i told them i d be more than happy to talk to them. if they come up to nebraska. i said if you ve got about six hours, you can be here to talk to me. nebraska? jerry had moved far away. which cleared him for sure. of course, they would need to look at shannon and aaron, too, given their falling out with pam and ralph. but they were cleared almost immediately, because they were nowhere around? yeah, they were not involved. dead-end. the crime scene people did find some things, mind you, including a bloody fireplace poker that turned out to be the murder weapon. the marking on her head was the exact replica of the shape of the fire poker, the end of the poker.
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. 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