that still clung to her body. she come to rest against snow-covered rocks. it was just a little farther beyond that where the water gets calm where we located her remains. just over by that second bend there? yes, sir. she hadn t gone far. agent greg sadar, colorado bureau of investigation. how far from her house? rough guess off the top of my head 300, 350 yards. the news spread fast. today investigators say they found a body. that s a pretty bad day. your heart drops. let s find out what happened to her, along with humongous sadness. the county coroner broke the news to dale. they said dale, we need to tell you something. i m like, what? and i just went into convulsions. how did she get here? was it suicide, accident, or murder? there s a bridge just upstream from the place they found stephanie s body. dale told police she often liked to walk there.
walk to clear her head. temperatures well below freezing. you got to be kidding, said the prosecutor. his wife goes for a walk and he would not call anybody until 8 or 9 or 10 hours later? it does not make any sense. which by itself does not mean that dale was guilty. this is where some of the secrets spilled out of a fatally troubled marriage like the one stephanie told his friends about a spanking incident when she applied for restraining order. he s just red and he gets so mad and he goes in a red zone and he does not know what he does. and so said the friend. she was afraid to get a restraining order against dale because he threatened to harm or kill her stephanie never
but there was no physical evidence linking dale to the crime. at trial, his lawyer would portray dale as the victim of a rush to judgment. why, he asked, were stephanie s boyfriend ron, and his wife, simd cindy, cleared so quickly? once again, here s keith morrison. two winters passed here in the colorado rockies between the untimely demise of stephanie roller-bruner and the prosecutor s determination to pin it on dale. and he fumed in silence about the allegations against him. the lies are really tough to take. you just can t believe it. like really? waiting for trial, he continued to live here, all alone now in the family house by the blue river, working with his attorney in the effort to clear his name. robert burnhart is the attorney, a man not at all impressed, he told us, with the police investigation.
forgotten how terrified she was. she told the story to her friend jennifer just before the murder. threatening her and telling her to hit her. there were other times he threw her on bed and put her on her pregnant belly. how often does this happen? maybe two or three incidents that she talked about. there was maria aiken, lifelong friend of dale. he just wanted her dead, you know? maybe she would have a heart attack or get hit by a car. i kept telling him to stop. did dale really mean that? could he be truly violent? an ex-girlfriend in dale s past, a woman named jodi who told us
first murder in silverthorne in decades. but who would do such a thing? and why? it was just hours before stephanie took her walk in this virtually crime-free community that somebody robbed that nearby bank. so, did the robber later encounter stephanie and then assault and kill her? this is where a predator could have been hiding out. there s any number of opportunities at that point. still, it was so cold. perhaps too cold for a lurking predator. this is one of those very few cases where it s a whodunit, if you will, and we ve got i had at least three viable suspects. any one of whom had potential motive? absolutely. there was ron holthouse, the other man, who had just suddenly dumped stephanie. there was cindy, ron s wife, who, if she knew about the affair, could have wanted revenge. and then there was dale, dale bruner, the husband.