not getting in today. not on my watch. pests never stop trying to get in. we never stop working to keep them out. terminix. defenders of home. the year was 2004, and aaron candelario was 11 years old. his parents has recently separated were sharing custody. one day after a weekend at his dad s house, aaron went home to find there was just a note on the coffee table that was in kind of sketchy handwriting, but nevertheless said, i love you, my boys, and i m taking off. his mother, dina, was simply gone. aaron was devastated. what did your father suggest may have happened to her? that she possibly had moved to missouri. a guy that she had been talking
it s always been a fire that just drives you to do something. and then one day i had been going through so of my dad s stuff in the basement. i found a box of stuff that she had supposedly taking with her. a denim jacket her mother had given her, passport was there. what was that like. that was kind of the final straw. naturally if she was gone, she would have taken those things with her. that was my final piece of the puzzle. he left it there. left the box in the basement and emerged a changed person. shannon told us, aaron wouldn t talk much about his mother when they were married. but i would find him up at night just, over her stuff, just over papers. i mean, just emotional. going through her papers. just going through her stuff. whatever little bit and pieces he had left of his mother he couldn t even handle. just it wrecked him. and when aaron heard pam was dead my first response was, how did he do it. and then he told the cops
and what did he write in his letter? i went out the back, and the rear door glass was broken. some pieces fell out when i opened the door. ralph even had answers to questions he wasn t asked, like, why was the fireplace poker exactly where it belonged by the fireplace? normally if you used a weapon, you re going to find it somewhere around where your 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
yeah. the only thing, you know, that i know is that a lot of stuff was stolen from the house. okay. ralph stuck to his story. a deadly home invasion. and then i found her. yeah. and that s, you know yeah. i tried to deal with that. shannon pressed ralph for details. the one guy that hit me that i saw from the front was taller than me. okay. and he had a dark complexion. you know, he had marks on his face. and then something that didn t sound quite right. and i don t know. and that s and it felt like a split second. a split second? remember, in his letter, ralph said his cap tors held him and abused him for nearly two days. in my mind, if you re not going to tell me what happened, and you re going to dance around
7:00 a.m., january 16th, 2014. a cold morning in walsenburg, colorado. 911. where is your emergency? ralph and pam candelario s neighbor had been on her way to work. we need an ambulance. ver va had never encountered anything like this before. i looked over and he was saying, help me, help me. ralph was on the ground, in front of his house, hurt. i got to him and asked him if he needed help. and he seemed to be kind of out of it. finally ralph managed to get the words out. he and his wife had been attacked and robbed. very afraid the attackers might still be in the house, called 911. he looks like he had been shot. he said somebody broke in last night. how are they doing? he s not good. crying. he told me to go help her. she s in the kitchen. i m going to get my neighbor to help me here. ralph, we re getting help for