hurt and he was air lifted to the nearest trauma hospital. the local reporter as eric mullens knew was not equipped to handle an investigation of this magnitude. we have small apartment houses, we don t have murder cops on staff, forensic specialists on stof. by the time shannon arrived at the hospital the colorado bureau of investigations was there to meet her along with aaron. how did she take? about as well as you d expect anybody to get hit by a sledge hammer. first she was shocked and in denial. suddenly i realized that last conversation i had with her, that was it. no fresh start now. her mother was dead. and then shannon saw ralph. he lost it.
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. 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?
aaron and his brother moved in with ralph. 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? oh, yeah, i went through a lot of those mines myself. alone? mm-hmm. you re looking for the remains of your own mother. i mean, i can t imagine what that i can t explain it. it s always been a fire that just drives you to do something. and then one day i had been going through some of my dad s stuff in the basement. i found a box of stuff that she had supposedly taking with her.
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 isn t over. he didn t just murder someone and have nothing afterwards. he left behind family. he left behind a disaster. and if i m the only thing to remind him of that, then that s what i m there for.
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? i felt i had my own little