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. yes. coming up, secrets in the basement. i had been going through some of my dad s stuff in the basement and found a box of stuff that supposedly she had taken with her. when dateline extra continues.
hadn t happened. and when they hit the little bumps most young marriages encounter, it colored everything. did your father and her mother s relationship have anything to do with what happened to you and shannon? you know, we were pretty determined not to let their relationship have an effect, but, you know, it s always something that s in the back of your head. after a year and a half, shannon and aaron divorced. pam and ralph s marriage, on the other hand, thrived. they moved into a big house on a corn lot in the walsenburg, an owed coal mining town about 50 miles south of pueblo. they opened up an antiques mall in the center of town. then bought a vacation home in oregon. that was the happiest i ever remember seeing her. for nearly three years, shannon still hurt, rarely spoke to her mom. but then one day pam asked her to lunch. she was so focused on wanting
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? about as well as you expect
me to know that we had a future together, her and i. wow. so finally she was coming around on her own accord. it felt like it, yeah. you know, when i told her, i said, i can t handle you being my mother and being doing what you did, i said, but i want to be your friend and i want to try this. so this is a break-through lunch. it seemed like it at the time. it was a break-through lunch, yeah. or a beginning at least. and then just a few days later 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. you re always going to look at the closest people to the victim.
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. 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.