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 stories, what are you hiding? investigators wondering the same thing, tried to find answers in the evidence.
event. here s what pam s daughter felt. it felt overly dramatic and really just glamorous that he was the victim of this. and that wasn t that made me sick. and angry obviously. yeah. her sister kelsey s interpretation? i thought it was very strange. i thought that he had some work to do on a story because it sounded really phony. entitled to their opinions, of course. but then so were the cops. recovered memory? no, said the cbi s jody wright. more like a cover-up. nothing in his statement matched anything that i knew to be at the crime scene. it just didn t make sense. none of it. it wasn t really that ralph changed his story in his world journal manifesto, not exactly. more like he kept adding to it. so he watches very carefully what you re doing and tailors
something like that. that was the thought. two wives, one missing, the other dead. and the one thing they had in common was ralph candelario. but suspicion alone wasn t enough. it wasn t proof. so the investigation continued? yes. in an effort to shake him, or maybe even get a confession, they sought help from the one person whose presence back at the hospital made ralph break down and cry. shannon. cbi had me call him, bugged my phone and tried to get him to tell me what happened. she must have been so scared. she was terrified. it was probably one of the hardest things she s ever had to do. ralph? hey, this is shannon. but shannon did it. i ve been waking up having panic attacks. i can t deal with this. i want to know what happened. 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.
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.