somebody was breaking into the house. the police, of course, brought that up with ralph. 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.
it was, said the prosecutors, one of the more disturbing motives for murder they d ever heard. so his religious beliefs were more important than somebody else s life? ralph candelario s life was more important than anyone else s life. so the jury got the case. and they worked till the end of the day and then through a second and then a third. tick tock. whether they convict him or they don t is going to be a different set of emotions. and then in the middle of the third day we the jury find the defendant, ralph leroy candelario, guilty of count number one of first degree murder. guilty. but the end of ralph s story? oh, no. on the day set aside for his sentencing ralph decided the plot needed one more twist. the jail issued him a safety razor to clean up for court. ralph used it to slash his wrists and throat. his own son was not sympathetic.
best he could remember said ralph, he got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. then decided to go downstairs to make sure the wood burning stove was still lit. on the way to the bottom of the steps, he said, somebody hit him from behind and again from the side. i put my arm up and boom. it hit me like a ton of bricks. it hit me hard. so i went backward. the ringing. i could not see if i more. ralph see anymore. ralph was knocked unconscious. i don t remember anything else other than waking up in the morning. then said ralph, still disoriented, he tried to sit up. i looked down the hallway. i could see pam. her legs. she was s she was there. revealed by the first rays of
painstaking police work before investigators finally had enough evidence to arrest ralph candelario for the murder of his wife pam, but they d have to find him first. ralph was on vacation or maybe on the run. i initiated some phone calls with ralph so that we could try to track him down. they tracked his cell phone and caught up with him. driver, get your hands in the air. in northern california. walk back to the sound of my voice. back to me. you all right? yeah. charged him with first degree murder. pam s daughters were relieved when they got the news. all i could think to myself was finally. what was that like? it was like yea, then it was like this is reality all over again. it s starting. meaning, of course, reliving the crime at the trial. i m antsy. i m eager. you want to go and testify? yeah.
can you tell me anything? 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 captors 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 the issue and tell me different