Sex. Murder. Mystery. (15 page)

“You know, I was married to a minister before Perry,” she said.

Candis admitted she had heard something about that.

“Well, we had been transferred out to Rocky Ford from North Carolina. Candis, it was a bad marriage. Very bad. I was very unhappy with Mike. He didn’t treat me right at all.”

The schoolteacher nodded, sipping her drink, wide-eye while her neighbor described her soap-opera life.

“You know, my husband had records on all the members of the church, how much money they had, what they owned and what not. I just helped myself to the records. Looking through the tithes I found Perry’s name. He had daughters in private school he had an airplane, a nice house. Best of all, he was a doctor.”

Candis hung on each word, but instead of being entertained by the story of the beginning of Sharon’s pursuit of Dr. Nelson, she became uneasy.

It seems kind of calculated
, she thought.

“I went after him. Based on the records, I decided I would have Perry Nelson. I set my sights on him. And I got him.”

When Candis told her husband about the conversation, he wasn’t surprised by Sharon’s confession. Perry Nelson wasn’t the first man to be snagged by a determined woman. He could easily imagine Sharon scouring the church books in pursuit of the man with the most money. She had lust for money and material things—anyone who spent five minutes with her could see that. The Thorntons knew Sharon was the type of woman who could use her charms to get what she wanted. All of her charms, they figured, involved sex.

Sharon had a lovely singing voice. People who heard her often remarked that she could perform professionally. Others thought her voice was a gift from God, and as such, belonged in the venue of a church. It was only after time passed and folks got to know Sharon that such comments were made with less frequency.

Though to the outside world it appeared they had everything stashed up at Round House, one thing was absent. Sharon had longed for a piano so that she could practice songs for the occasional wedding and for the community church she and Perry sometimes attended after the Seventh-Day Adventist leaders in Trinidad told them they were no longer welcome. One day, a Weston neighbor invited Sharon to practice on her old upright piano.

Another local woman remembered the story of an incident resulting from one of Sharon’s practice sessions. It involved Sharon’s interest in the neighbor’s husband.

“The first Saturday Sharon showed up she was wearing slacks and a sensible top. The next Saturday she had on short-shorts. The next time, the lady told Sharon that she had to go out of town, but Sharon could practice anyway. When she got there the woman’s husband was sitting on the front porch reading the paper. Sharon was wearing short-shorts and a revealing blouse. When the lady left the house, she had a funny feeling and she decided to come back. There was no husband on the porch. No Sharon at the piano. She found the two of them on the couch all over each other. The lady picked up a broom and beat Sharon top to bottom all the way out of the house. Later, I heard Perry asked her how she got those braises. Sharon said she fell down.”

During a trip to look over some Colorado real estate, and to visit with old optometry school buddy Perry Nelson, Bob and Donna Goodhead from Oklahoma City tried to adjust to the new wife. Donna was very uncomfortable around Sharon. Everything Perry’s second wife did and said seemed to relate to sex.

“I could really be happy with you, Bob,” Sharon said in her innuendo-dipped way of speaking.

Bob took it as an innocent comment, a compliment that Perry’s wife thought he was a good-hearted man.

Donna Goodhead didn’t take it that way.

“She really wants you in bed,” she told her husband later when they were alone.

She didn’t mean that at all. You have to be kidding. That’s Perry’s wife you’re talking about.”

Donna felt like laughing out loud.

“Boy, are you naive. That woman has eyes for any ball-bearing mammal that walks the earth. Let’s get realistic, Bob. The woman has no shame.”

BOOK II

Doctor’s Wife

“The reason Perry stayed with her was purely sexual. Sharon gave everyone the impression she was a real hot number. She was one of those little tarts with a round ass and large bust that comes around in short-shorts that show her crack. But there was something lurking beneath the surface with Sharon. You wanted to be real careful around her”

—Terry Mitchell, Trinidad chiropractor

“Everyone, lock up your husbands! Sharon’s coming around.’’

—Barbara Ruscetti, Medical-office assistant

“She led Perry around by the penis.”

—Donna Goodhead, friend of Dr. Nelson’s

Chapter 10

IT WAS A SNOWY MONDAY MORNING, NOVEMBER 20, 1988. Icy air swirled over the roadways, filling ditches with white powder and forcing even the most seasoned mountain driver to take it a bit slower around the curves. Bundled-up kids pulled clothing tight to their bodies as they puffed “smoke rings” of hot breath while waiting for the bus to round the bend and take them to the warmth of a classroom. Snow splattered and drifted from Weston to Trinidad like seven-minute frosting flung off the ends of beaters by a sloppy cook.

It was as cold as a merry widow’s heart.

Sharon Nelson drank cup after cup of tepid coffee and smoked cigarette after cigarette, her ashtray resembling a stinking scrub brush of yellowed butts, ends dipped in the red of a lipstick. As she sat with her grown daughter, Rochelle Mason, in her Trinidad home, Sharon agonized over the horrific events of the night before. The terrible news relayed by her heartsick mother-in-law, the police interrogation, her distraught young children, all of it seemed to hit Sharon quite hard. Her face was puffy and pale, and she jumped to her feet several times to run to the bathroom.

Nineteen-year-old Rochelle expected her mother to be broken up over Glen Harrelson’s death, but she had not expected such an extreme reaction. She could understand such a response if her mother had been married to Glen for fifteen years—-but the two had been man and wife for less than one. Sharon’s oldest daughter tried to put whatever it was that was eating at her out of her mind. People grieve in their own way. No two survivors of a tragic loss acts the same. No one knows how a broken heart feels, unless, Rochelle knew, it is their own.

Thornton police detectives Glen Trainor and Elaine Tygart fueled themselves with coffee as they waited for the woman to come down off the mountain. They did not know Sharon Fuller Nelson Harrelson had gone to her daughter’s home in town in preparation for her interview. Neither did they know what would happen when she arrived or if she would have a change of heart and change her mind about coming at all. At least this time, they’d be in control of the environment. At the mountain house, Sharon was in her own element, able to get up and move freely about whenever the questions became too “painful” or too uncomfortable. She could go to the counter for more coffee. She could check on her children. She could leave for the bathroom. At the sheriff’s department, she’d be a visitor, not a hostess.

Accompanied by Rochelle, Danny and Misty, Sharon arrived right on time, around 10 A.M.

She wore a sweater and honey-dipped-tight jeans with high-heeled boots balancing lovely legs that gave her the tottering gait of deer on cobblestones. She wore little makeup and had fluffed up the wiry curls that came from her head like a Barbie doll with a ten-year-old girl’s curling iron makeover. In the harsh fluorescent light of a police station, Sharon was less attractive than she had been the night before.

Anyone who reads fashion magazines targeted at American women like Sharon knew: The warm light of an incandescent bulb is a tonic for middle-aged skin. Fluorescents show every wrinkle, every flaw.

Though she had willingly come to give her statement, Sharon arrived with slight bitterness. She had flirted with the idea that she would tell the cops off for subtly suggesting she might have had something to do with Glen Harrelson’s tragic death. She was going to set the record straight right then and there: “Now I’ve lost a husband, my second husband… and what in the hell are you doing? Why don’t you go look for the person?”

With the kids waiting outside the room, Sharon was motioned to a chair behind a mammoth antique oak conference table in the Trinidad Police Department, the law enforcement office on the other side of the building from the Las Animas County Sheriff.

The widow sat at an angle, her back to the door, her legs crossed. She was offered the seat by the open door for a reason. The detectives wanted her to maintain a sense of freedom, to think that she could come and go as she pleased. The more comfortable she was, the more she’d likely stay put and talk. Almost from the start, it was clear that though the woman had been gossiped about as a man-eater she didn’t seem anything of the sort at that moment. She was sweet. Nervous. Demure. She even focused her attention on the female detective, refusing to live up to a reputation which made her out to be an insatiable flirt.

Trainor turned on the little tape recorder.

“Okay, Sharon,” he said, “uh, before we get started I just want to let you know that you’re here of your own free will, okay? You understand that you are not under arrest or anything like that?”

“I know,” she said, her eyes again meeting only Elaine Tygart’s.

They spent the next few minutes reviewing Sharon’s personal background. She told them who her parents were; when she was born. She listed the Adventist schools she attended. She told them how she was a young bride when she married Rev. Fuller. Over the next couple of hours, the investigators simply allowed Sharon to speak. It was easy. Talk, she did.

Sometimes Sharon was blunt. Other times she was evasive. And always, she let the investigators know that she was a good woman, though she had to admit she didn’t always do good things. As Tygart and Trainor tried to sort out the story of her involvement with Dr. Nelson and how it had led to the breakup of her marriage to Preacher Mike, it became obvious there was plenty between the lines that she didn’t want to bring up.

They pushed her gently.

“Did you have a relationship before Perry, before you got, you guys got divorced?” Trainor asked as he continued treading a fine line on a question that might put Sharon on the defensive.

Sharon didn’t bat an eye, however. “No, I was separated. Yes, yes. Um.”

“What year did this, what year did you meet him?”

“Seventy-six, seventy-six.”

“When were you divorced from him? From Mike?”

“Seventy-six.”

“And then when were you married to Perry?”

“Seventy-seven.”

“Within a year’s time?”

“Seventy-seven, yeah.”

As the three continued to talk, Sharon’s two young children became somewhat anxious and loud. The little boy and girl wanted their mother’s attention.

God, they wanted anyone’s attention.

Det. Tygart stepped into the hallway and suggested to Rochelle that it might be a good idea to take Danny and Misty to her house until the interview had run its course. Though Sharon’s oldest daughter seemed concerned about her mother, she readily complied. What choice did she have? The kids had been through a great shock. Taking them home would get them out of the emotional fray.

When the subject of extramarital affairs during her marriages to her second and third husbands was more directly broached, Sharon conceded she hadn’t been perfect. But she wasn’t a cheat, either.

Yet once more she failed to mention Gary Adams.

Det. Trainor leaned closer and fixed his gaze on the woman with the hopelessly crumpled Kleenex. He did not bark out his questions, but he was firm.

”I asked you this once last night, and I’m gonna ask you again, just to put it on tape. As far as you know, did Glen have any extramarital affairs?”

“No.”

“What about yourself?”

“No,” she said unflinchingly.

“Is there anyone that could, that other people might have misconstrued a relationship going on with either you or Glen?” Tygart asked.

Again she answered in the negative.

“Someone that would appear to be extra friendly, or just a little more fond than normal?”

Sharon’s resolve stayed intact. Her arms tightly across her breasts, she shook her head.

“No.”

Outside of son-in-law Bart Mason, Sharon continued, there was no one who helped out with chores or house maintenance while Glen was gone during the week. Sharon did admit, however, that she did have male visitors up at the house.

She named a man who had come up to see her from time to time, but once again, it was not Gary Adams.

“Did your relationship ever go beyond just a… a friendship?” the detective asked, again treading so gently.

Sharon hesitated, hunting for an answer. She said she had strayed only once. A fling took place when she came back to the mountains after breaking up with Glen, but that was before their marriage. She also mentioned a brief love affair with a man named Harry Russell, but that happened after Perry had died and before she met Glen.

Still, no mention of Gary Starr Adams.

Even though she could have ended the interview there, her soiled virtue still intact, she continued to talk. As she spoke, she became visibly upset. Nearly two hours had elapsed and with each minute, the woman with the two dead husbands slowly began to tighten up.

“Sharon, there’s something you’re not saying. I’ve been listening to you talk and I don’t know the reasons, but you’re not telling us the truth.”

Sharon feigned shock.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Sharon, you’ve got to tell us the truth.”

Trainor patted Sharon’s arm. It was a gesture meant to comfort her and continue the interview.

“And the most important thing in your life now is finding out who killed Glen Harrelson. Okay? Sharon, you’re covering up for someone; okay? You don’t need to be a part of that. You didn’t kill your husband.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“But you know who did. You absolutely do. You don’t need the kind of trouble that can cause you. And it’s just—and it’s going to prey on your mind and it’s going to get worse and worse and for your children’s sake so that they can get on with their lives and so that you can get on with your life, you need to tell us everything you know. You’re not doing that”