i don t know enough to know what happened. still trying to figure it out. what in god s name was his wife doing, walking out into the brutal cold? more to the point, what happened to her? middle class married mother of three, where did she go? without a word to him or her friends. you can t imagine that this is happening to you and to your friend. she was just plain missing. yes, she was. it was terrifying. dreadful in the end. as events were about to prove, a shocking lesson on what can dwell hidden beneath a person s public skin. this is really a secret thing, as far as you know? a lot of it, sure. everybody has secrets, of course. stephanie roller-bruner s secrets lived as she did in a skier s paradise. they met at the top of a mountain. dale was taking photographs of
as detectives dug deeper into the bruner marriage, ugly secrets emerged that would put dale at the very top of the suspect list. here again is keith morrison with secrets in the snow. it s horrible. i mean, it s i i don t even know how to explain having a microscope go into your world. it s surreal. there are few secrets in a person s life that will escape the attention of a determined homicide detective. everything comes out. absolutely everything. dale and stephanie, it turned out, had their share of secrets. the weird thing one chilly morning six weeks before stephanie was murdered as stephanie told her friend, jennifer. she heard spanking and she told me she counted at least eight spanks before she got up the stairs and down the hall to the kitchen. well, my boy was acting out far beyond, you know, the norm. and i said, come on.
pried at the windows and licked under the door frames at the bruner house here in silverthorne, colorado. hardly a night to take a walk, certainly not an all-night walk. had she hurt herself, or had someone else hurt her? it wasn t like her to just disappear. seemed more of like a stranger might be involved or she herself might have run off into despair and maybe hurt herself. stephanie s friends and family poured over those last few weeks, so full of change, secrecy, turmoil. were there clues? some knew about stephanie s relationship with her new man and how upset she was about losing her job. still, she seemed to be holding the trouble at bay. six weeks before she disappeared, as dale recalled, she suggested a little family holiday. she said let s go to glennwood springs for the weekend, all classic, wonderful place. it was almost romantic, said
bruner, the husband. and any one of them, thought the detective, was certainly physically capable of committing the crime. her husband, six foot, 200-pound, very athletic guy. mr. holthouse, big, strong guy. his wife was actually a very physically fit woman. so, she would be out gunned by one of them? i believe so. yes, sir. they took ron in for questioning several times. again and again, he insisted it wasn t him. i screwed up my marriage. i made a mess of my life. he admitted that in the last hours of stephanie s life, he met her here in this clothing store parking lot, around dinner time, and it wasn t a happy meeting. i was actually trying to tell her that it was over. he earlier had sent her a break-up e-mail, he said. she insisted on seeing him in person. she wasn t taking it well at all.
idea that her new love was leaving her. i think he got angry at that, hit her with something, then he strangles her, believes that she s dead. she s probably unconscious at this point, but she s not dead. takes her to the river and dumps her in the river. it was kind of quick, which is always worrying. dale bruner stood, awaited his fatd. you re trying to maintain, not melt. so you prepare yourself to just breathe, just breathe. and then there it was. we the jury find the defendant dale bruner guilty of murder in the second degree. dale bruner was also convicted of two counts of sexual assault and sentenced to a total of 112 years in prison. an appeals court vacated the