cop asked me he s all, what what is that, you know? the detective goes, what happened there? i said, well, i burned myself at work. he s like, well, are you good enough of a friend to burn a car down for george, you know? a startling discovery about it was a traumatic time in grand junction, colorado, that summer of 2007, what with the fruitless search for the missing mother of three loved by so many who turned out to have secrets and the day planner and voice mails and phone records that seemed to point eight different ways at once, two ex-husbands and six clients. i don t think that i ve ever seen a more difficult case in my entire career. reporter: one by one, the detectives cleared their suspects or tried to. ex-husband number one and current boyfriend, ron beigler. we were able to determine
detectives, her killer buried her five years earlier, way back in 2007 when she first disappeared. eventually, what was left of her was unearthed by a heavy spring runoff so said the d.a. here we go, this is what we have been waiting for. now we need to really put pedal to the medal and make a decision. reporter: now, finally with a body, they decided to fashion a murder case against one of the eight possible suspects, the two ex-husbands, rob dixon and biegler had solid alibis. both being hundreds of miles away when paige was kidnapped and kill. so, that left the six clients. of course, lester ralph jones was at the top of the list. but george coralluzzo, remember him? coralluzzo was the alternate suspect that gave me as the d.a. heartburn and concerns. that s because his alibi was so hard to pin down. witnesses say he was partying at jose s apartment. but what time exactly? that depended on who you spoke
found scattered by the highway, but still no paige, alive or dead. and now detectives had two ex-husbands to investigate. ron beigler, the last person known to have seen her alive and rob dixon, the man she told friends she lived in fear of. most people that she knew, friends, believed that rob dixon had something to do with this. so he pops right up to the top of your list? absolutely. he and rob beigler, both. reporter: as for hard evidence, there was very little. except for the investigators little secret, the one bit of evidence they d been hiding from everyone, even the birgfelds, something that by pure luck survived that car fire, paige s day planner. the melted dash had fallen down onto the floor covering up the day planner and so it was protected from the heat as well as from the fire because it had an upper layer on it.
starbuck children, their father was essentially a victim of a kind of marital profiling. a suspect simply because husbands and ex-husbands of murder victims are always suspects. if not for that bias, they said, the investigators would have found the real murderer. the evidence is shoddy. reporter: and there s so many other possible suspects, they say. take this theory of blake s. not long after clay s arrest, there were news reports about a man named israel keys. he was arrested for murdering a young coffee barrista in alaska and later admitted he d killed many more people, some in washington state. a serial killer whose family hailed from, of all places, a town just a few miles from chanin s house. well, why would you think it was israel keys? because he has killed over ten women. he admitted to four in washington. he was arrested a month about after my dad, so he wouldn t have been on the radar until
clayton and they had shared custody of the baby. was it an amicable divorce or did they fight? they had some disagreements, you know. they definitely had disagreements. ex-husbands, husbands, spouses are always looked at? they are. did you feel he was an person important to talk to as well? we did. did you call him right away? we actually went and seen him. it was the middle of the night just hours after brooke s body was discovered when investigators arrived at clayton s house, chief philips woke him up. what did you say to him then? we didn t tell him that brooke was deceased. and our goal was to fine out what he was doing this evening. you wanted to hear the story as it relates to brooke? that s right. clayton told investigators he had their son that weekend.