when you start out, you must feel like you re terribly alone. i don t know where i would have gone. i would have meandered around and felt absolutely helpless. as soon as the car was found burned, you go out and you realize, there s just miles and miles of nothingness. this is big country out here. you go out for, usually two hours, you come back to the command center, get some liquids. and it wasn t 20, 30 minutes, somebody would hold up a map and say we d headed out again. there were no slackers. everyone went. they would go again and again and again. paige s children, occupied with god knows what terrors, had their grandparents at least for now. paige s 8-year-old daughter even joined the search, decorating search poles for rescuers to use. even by then, searchers were not confident they were looking for a person who was still alive.
that other than to know her stuff was there. trouble is that the sheriff s department couldn t make much sense of it either. opened the door for a lot of speculation. could that have been placed there by paige as a trail? could have been placed there by a suspect as a diversion. could it have been blown out of a vehicle going down the road unwittingly. alas, apparently a romantic meeting with an ex-husband. a burned out car, hers, yielded no useful clues. papers scattered by a highway, miles out of town. who left them there? a search that by now covered hundreds of square miles of high desert around grand junction and no sign of paige birgfeld. but were police looking in the right places? paige s first husband, ron bigler, told a believable story about the last night with paige, but what about ex-husband number two? father of her three children. everybody who knew paige also knew that marriage was deeply
investigators decided a conversation with mr. bigler, the last person after all known to have seen her was certainly in order. it was a typical, you know, late teenage romance that turned into love and marriage. they were, said bigler high school sweethearts. they got married in 1995. began quarrelling soon after. they had known each other when they were young. and they, she had told me they had both said we don t want kids. and she just had this really the maternal instinct became very, very strong. she wanted babies. and he didn t. and that that was most of the problem. so, after two years, they divorced in 1997. paige was just 24 then. what could she be doing ten years later in the company of ron bigler in the hours that led up to her disappearance. we were going to meet for the day in eagle together. we were going to have a picnic
that s the thing. we all knew she would never leave her kids intentionally. but something bad must have happened. mesa county sheriff stanley hilkey was inclined to agree and began retracing paige s last movements to look for any evidence of foul play. you have really got to look at the relationships first. and almost immediately at a person of interest. as far as police could determine unless something came up, the last person to have seen paige was the first of her two ex-husbands ron bigler. i have a hard time looking back on the day with any fond memories at this point. it s a given in the police business that husbands, especially ex-husbands, become important subjects of the investigation when the woman suddenly disappears, and in this case there was a clue buried in the past. bigler was once cited for domestic violence, spent the night in jail. though paige did not pursue the charge.
pleasant person to be around. but then, this was years ago, detective duncan was called in to investigate those allegations by jones ex-wife a woman named lisa. duncan has retired now, but when the possible connection to paige s disappearance came up, he read the old record, and the reports allude to the fact that in the home ralph physically restrained lisa. lisa in her statement calls it kidnapping. they re not minor things. they re firearms involved. ed evidence is there and it s clear. but it s one thing to say the man has a past. quite another to connect them to the disappearance of paige. in other words, the investigation stalled, and paige s father was reduced to writing jones a letter begging for his help. i said, i m aware that you knew my daughter paige. who s been missing. first, the letter is asking to meet me somewhere and tell me whatever it is with your