victim is. and it looked like the poker had been put back in 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
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, pam, and aaron s dad, ralph, invited the bride and 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.
welcome to dateline. shannon palmer and aaron candidateelario were young and in love and engaged to be married. but their family was rocked by scandal. then murder. aaron s father was found at the crime scene dazed and confused. but his confusing story had police questioning his version of events. here s keith morrison with tangled. you can t put words to that. it was very surreal. 911. where is your emergency? it s true, the old saying, when you marry someone, you marry their family, too. we need an ambulance. he looks like he s been shot. he said someone broke in last night. him and his wife both. not a bad thing to turn to mom or dad for advice and counsel. it s hard. sometimes you think maybe it didn t happen. but yet it really did.
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. who was dead? and was the killer on the loose in a small town? coming up when dateline continues. t e can be tough on his body. that s why he wears dr. scholl s massaging gel insoles. they provide all day comfort so he has the energy to keep moving. delivering joy every step of the day. dr. scholl s. born to move.
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. they cataloged everything they found. broken glass in the backdoor. they even took the knobs off drawers and sent them to the lab hoping the intruders left dna or fingerprints on them. and then quite unexpected. then, quite unexpected, something remarkable turned up. and right through the front door of the local newspaper so what did you think when you first read that document?