parole. i had never had a weight so heavy lifted. it was wonderful. i got to say, by the way, don t want to embarrass you, but i have found that investigators of homicides are the biggest softies on the planet. we re not supposed to let that out. you re not supposed to care as much as you do. you do. you become very attached. those girls are special. pam had a part in that. and hopefully they ll be able to live on her legacy. and ralph s legacy? because of him, aaron will go on searching. hoping to learn what happened to his mother. yes, i will be looking. probably in some way my whole life i ll always be asking question questions. shannon, he needs to realize this isn t over. he can t just murder someone and
the thing was, the glass fell out the door, not in, as you would expect it would do if 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
for her mother, an agent of the colorado bureau of investigation was there to meet her. along with aaron. how did she take it? about as well as you expect anybody to get hit by a sledgehammer or whatever. first you re just kind of shocked, then a little bit of denial. suddenly i realized that that last conversation i had with her was that was it. no fresh start now. her mother was dead. and then shannon saw ralph. and he lost it. he just turned into a sobbing, shaking maniac. ralph s face was banged up. he had bruises in several places. he was confused. like a man coming out of a concussion. just exhausted. my head still just hurts. and then as soon as he was able, and still in his hospital clothes, ralph talked to agents of the cbi. sorry to hear about your
it was, said the prosecutors, one of the more disturbing motives more murder they d ever heard. so religious believes were more than important than someone s life. ralph s life was more important than anyone else s life. so the jury got the case and they worked until the end of the day and through a second and then a third. ti whether they convict him or they don t is going to be a different set of emotions. then in the middle of tv third day. we the jury find the defendant ralph guilty of count number i, 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.
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 three different stories, what are you hiding? investigators wondering the same thing, tried to find answers in the evidence. on a laptop they found hits for, match.com, just days before the murder. somebody had been visiting the site at least. that would have been our suspicion. it s going to be either pam or ralph. right. and then they found ralph s real life mistress. yes, he had one. and she said they carried on for most of the time he was married to pam. but now shannon thought back to the last time she saw her mother. because i asked her if she was happy. what did she say? she realized that she had given up her family, because she had destroyed this relationship with me and kelsey, and she s gotten into this new marriage,