Smooth Talker: Trail of Death, page 3
Sitting in the bus station, waiting to board, Donna thought she’d made a clean getaway. But as she was looking out the window at the snow-covered mountains, there came Michele, trudging through the drifts in her cowboy boots and eating a yogurt out of the plastic container without a spoon. She looked like Annie Oakley with her braids and outfit and lack of makeup, no longer the teen who couldn’t live without her mascara.
Michele explained that she wasn’t about to let her go without saying goodbye. So they stood there, arms wrapped around each other, crying until Donna finally had to get on the bus and leave her friend standing in the snow waving as tears streaked both of their faces.
That was Michele. Warm. Loving. Life-affirming. About the only thing that had ever really knocked her down was when their friend, Kathy Pransky, died in a car accident a few years earlier. Kathy, married and the mother of a young daughter, was killed in a traffic accident.
Kathy’s death had devastated Michel and seemed to weigh her down like nothing else ever had. The Good-Time Charlie disappeared. And though she remained a loving, carefree spirit, a sadness seemed to linger over her.
Tall, blonde and outgoing, Margaret had married and had children young. Now she lived vicariously through her daughter. She encouraged Mush to travel and live the life of adventure she’d wanted, listening raptly to the stories her daughter brought home or divulged in their weekly telephone conversations.
Her father, George Sr., while he’d brag about Michele’s exploits to friends, wasn’t as big a fan of his daughter’s sometimes harrowing accounts of her life. But “Mush” had always been independent and inclined to go against the grain, so with her mother’s blessing, there was nothing much he could do about it.
As the summer of 1974 came to a close, the Wallaces thought they had it made. They had been married thirty-four years and were still in love. George’s Italian restaurant was a success; the money was rolling in. Best of all, the kids were doing okay. Their son was married to a nice girl and, finally, out of the house. And Michele, a happy, confident girl, was embarked on what promised to be a wonderful journey through life.
The Wallaces were ecstatic that their daughter, an unfocused student for most of her young adulthood, seemed to have finally found something in photography that she would stay with. She had a real talent for it, both nature and “art” pieces, like the self-portrait she had taken while still a student at a photography school.
The black-and-white photograph was grainy and highly contrasted. It appeared to have been taken in winter when the leaves had fallen from the thin, dark trees of a city park. In the photograph, the slender silhouette of a young woman, Michele, stood in a clearing turned toward a bright light coming up over a hill in the background.
George Wallace thought it was a powerful photograph, almost disturbingly so, though he couldn’t say why it made him feel that way. Then Michele didn’t call on September 1 as she had promised.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Donna Campeglia told Michele’s mom. “She’ll call soon.”
V
September 3, 1974
The woman on the phone with the Gunnison County Sheriff’s Office was absolutely certain something had happened to her daughter who she said had been backpacking in the area. “She didn’t call Sunday when she was supposed to,” the woman, who’d identified herself as Margaret Wallace, said.
“Maybe she just forgot to call or decided to camp an extra day,” the Sheriff’s Office dispatcher suggested.
“Not my daughter,” Margaret replied. “She always calls when she says she will.” She insisted that a search begin immediately. “She was going to be in the Schofield Park area.”
Although there was nothing unusual about one of the area’s young outdoor enthusiasts losing track of time in the mountains, or not checking in with their parents, the next morning, Gunnison County Undersheriff Steve Fry stopped by Michele’s apartment just to see if she’d returned. But she wasn’t there nor was her roommate, Theresa Erikson.
Fry frowned. Schofield Park was rugged country. The girl could have been injured and was waiting for help. He decided to call the Mt. Crested Butte Police Department and ask if someone could drive up to Gothic and look around for her car.
They checked the next day. But there was no sign of Michele or her car near Gothic.
When Michele still hadn’t returned home by the following morning, and with Maggie Wallace calling for frequent reports, Fry and his boss, Gunnison County Sheriff Claude Porterfield, decided it was time to get serious about the missing girl. A massive search mission was launched by the Gunnison County SO with the assistance of the Civil Air Patrol, Monarch Search and Rescue Team, Mt. Crested Butte Police Department, Crested Butte Marshal’s Office, deputies from neighboring Pitkin County, and numerous civilian volunteers.
Officially, Michele was listed as a missing person, but after several days of air and ground searches, Porterfield and Fry worried that she was more than missing. There was still no trace of her—not even her car, which should have stuck out like a bright, red sore thumb.
Fry returned to Michele’s apartment and met with Theresa Erikson, who had returned. He asked her to identify Michele’s possessions. “Only the things that she alone used,” he said. Erikson handed over a brush and eyeglasses.
Just 24 years old and working on what would become his first major case, Fry did everything by the book. He carefully packaged, sealed, and identified each piece of evidence and placed them in the basement evidence room of the sheriff’s office, not knowing if his diligence would someday pay off.
On September 6, Chuck Matthews was listening to the radio as he sat with the other ranch hands at the kitchen table of his boss, waiting for breakfast. The morning news was led by a story about a missing girl. Matthews nearly choked on his coffee when he heard the description of the girl, her dog, her car, and her last known whereabouts: Schofield Park.
Matthews realized that they were describing the young woman who had given him and “Roy” a ride to Gunnison on August 30.
Why, he thought, I rode in the backseat of the red Mazda station wagon with that same dog. He called the sheriff’s office and gave the deputy who answered a brief description of meeting a girl who sounded like their missing person. The last time he had seen her was outside the Columbine Bar as she drove off with a guy he had met the day before. “Said his name was Roy … and that he worked for a sheep rancher in the Schofield Park area.”
Matthews told the deputy that after his drinking buddy said he’d be right back and then left with the girl. He’d waited until 9 p.m. for Roy to return in his truck and give him a lift back to the ranch where he worked. But when Roy didn’t come back, Matthews called another friend to come get him. He went home and thought no more about Roy, the girl, or her dog.
The next morning, he said, his friend took him to his car near Gothic so he could pick up his rifle and saddle. He noticed that Roy’s toolbox was still in the car, so he left it there in case he came back for it.
Matthews’s story wasn’t what the sheriff’s investigators wanted to hear. If he was to be believed, Michele had made it back to Gunnison but disappeared in the company of a man she did not know. In fact, nobody seemed to know who this Roy might be. Or where.
The news got worse the next day when Bob Niccoli, a rancher who lived ten miles south of Crested Butte, called the sheriff’s office to report having killed a dog matching the description of the missing girl’s German shepherd. The dog was chasing his cattle on September 4, when he shot and then buried the animal.
A deputy and Michele’s cousin, Debbie Fountain, who lived in Denver and had come to Gunnison to help with the search, were dispatched to Niccoli’s ranch. He took them to the field where he had buried the dog. But they didn’t have to dig the animal up; he had kept the dog’s collar, on which hung a tag with both the dog’s and Michele’s names on it.
It was further evidence that something had happened to Michele, that she hadn’t simply picked up and moved on. Other people called to say they had seen the dog wandering in the area since August 31. Still more reported seeing girl backpackers, some of whom had dogs with them, in the Schofield Park area. They were all checked but none panned out; there were a lot of female hikers in the mountains.
Among the people they talked to was a young couple who remembered a middle-aged man they met on a trail who had a teen-aged girl with him. “He was kind of a slick-talking guy,” the male in the couple recalled for the police. But the girl, who didn’t speak and seemed subdued, was obviously too young to have been Michele.
On September 11, based on Chuck Matthews’ recollection that Roy said he’d worked for a sheep rancher who grazed his stock in Schofield Park, the sheriff’s investigators located Frank Spadafora. Yeah, the rancher acknowledged, he’d hired a Roy, a Roy Melanson, to be exact. He noted that his former employee didn’t own a vehicle or much else for that matter. “I had to give him an old coat,” he added, “and bought him a sleepin’ bag to use.” He’d had to fire him, but heard he had been living since in a Schofield Park cabin “with a bunch of hippies.”
Up to now, the searchers and police had hoped that Michele was all right. Injured, maybe, waiting for rescue, but alive somewhere in the mountains around Schofield Park. Now they feared something worse had happened to her. Something to do with this Roy Melanson.[1]
[1] Steve Jackson, No Stone Unturned (WildBluePress, May 2015), Kindle Edition
VI
Thirty-seven-years-old, Roy Melanson was a six-foot-one, 190-pound drifter with thinning hair and remarkably large hands. He was also a nightmare for unsuspecting women.
Born on February 13, 1937 in Breauxbridge, Louisiana, he was already well-known to law enforcement in southern Texas and Louisiana before his twentieth birthday. In August 1956, he was given a two-year suspended sentence “with supervision” for forgery and impersonating a federal officer in Corpus Christi, Texas. Apparently the supervision wasn’t enough to stop him from committing a burglary in Louisiana for which he was sentenced to four years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in December of that year. He was paroled after serving one year then proceeded to rack up more burglary charges in the towns of Orange and Port Arthur, Texas until they finally put him back in the Huntsville penitentiary for two years.
While it’s doubtful he kept his nose clean in the interim, Melanson was accused of another crime within six months of getting out of prison. This time it wasn’t just burglary.
In June 1961, he violently attempted to rape his first cousin in Pinehurst, Texas. He wasn’t caught and arrested until November and then it took another year to convict him. He was then sentenced to twelve years in Huntsville but served only a little more than five years before he was released in July 1970.
Again it’s anybody’s guess what crimes he committed over the next two years—the police would have their suspicions later—but in August 1972 he was arrested for raping a woman in Orange, Texas. At his preliminary hearing, a proceeding to determine if there was enough evidence to go to trial, the woman testified that on the evening of August 8, 1972, she’d been on her way to a club when her car got a flat tire. Two men in a pickup truck stopped to offer assistance.
The driver, who said his name was Roy, was stocky with a beer belly. The passenger was younger, around 22, slender, and had short hair. The two men checked her spare tire, found that it was also flat and offered to drive her to get it fixed.
On the way, Roy said he needed to change trucks and then drove to a house where they left the young male passenger off. Roy put the tire in a different truck and the woman got in with him to get the tire fixed.
Instead, she testified, Roy drove to a secluded area where he “lunged” at her. He acted like she expected his advance and told her he was “going to fuck” her. She resisted but the more she fought, the more violent he became as he described what he was going to do to her.
Roy Melanson in a photograph from the 1970s. Photo courtesy of Gunnison County District Attorney’s Office.
Roy punched her in the face with a closed fist, she said, which stunned her. However, she continued to resist until he twisted her arm back and pinned her down. He then pulled her pants off one leg and down to the knee of the other before raping and sodomizing her. Forcing her to perform other sexual acts, he talked to her throughout, telling her to “respect” his wishes as he sexually assaulted her for more than an hour.
After Roy finished, she testified, “he just sat there,” at which point she decided to try to humor him, hoping she might outwit him. She made him laugh and offered him some tissue to clean himself, which she threw the tissue out the window along with her torn underwear so that it could be found later.
Allowing her to put her pants back on, Roy started apologizing, she said. Eventually, he drove to a gas station and arranged for someone to fix the tire. He then took her back to her car and changed the tire while she memorized his license plate number. When he was done, he apologized again for attacking her.
Back in their own cars, an acquaintance of the woman saw her and stopped to see if she was okay. Roy took off and was later arrested after she gave his license plate number to the police and described how to find the tissue and torn underwear.
During the preliminary hearing, a problem for the prosecution arose when the woman was asked to point out the person who had been driving the truck that stopped to assist her. Melanson was sitting in the courtroom, as was the young male passenger. The woman identified the young male, however it wasn’t clear if she’d heard the question correctly and thought she’d been asked to identify the passenger.
In any event, the judge decided that the prosecution has presented enough evidence to bind the case over to trial. However, Melanson made bail and skipped town.
Two more years passed with Melanson managing to stay under the radar as far as coming to the attention of law enforcement while living in various towns in Texas and Louisiana with a woman he impregnated.
Then in February 1974, he was accused of brutally raping another woman. The 17-year-old victim told police that her attacker had first played the part of a Good Samaritan when he pulled into a gas station where she’d stopped to look for gas. There was a gas shortage at the time and the station was out. However, Melanson told her he knew where to find some, but once he had her alone, he abducted her. He then raped her before tying up and taking her to Louisiana where he continued raping her over a period of several days while threatening to kill her. She eventually talked him into letting her go.
The teenager was able to identify Melanson who had showed her his driver’s license. However, she had a nervous breakdown and was sent to a psychiatric hospital. In the meantime, Melanson fled the area with his pregnant girlfriend.
In March 1974, Melanson was living with his girlfriend in a motel in Tucson, Arizona when they got in an argument and he left her. Where he went next wouldn’t come to light for many years. However, on July 16 he was in Denver, Colorado where he visited a pawn shop and then caught a Trailways bus to Grand Junction, a small city on the western side of the state off Interstate 70 and almost to the Utah border.
Two weeks later, he was sitting in a Grand Junction bar when he got to talking to 40-year-old Frank Spadafora who said he had a sheep ranch in Somerset, near the town of Crested Butte. Spadafora complained that while he had a couple of Basque herders to watch the sheep, he needed someone to shoot coyotes that were preying on his flocks in their summer range in Schofield Park, a beautiful but rugged area high in the mountains.
A world-class bullshitter, Melanson convinced the sheep rancher that he was just the man for the killing. It was a perfect setup for him. He had nothing more than the clothes on his back, but now not only did he get free use of a rustic but serviceable cabin in a remote and beautiful part of the country, Spadafora loaned him a rifle and sleeping bag.
Melanson, however, didn’t spend a lot of time working, especially after he discovered the Burton family. Lucille Burton and her five daughters were spending a few weeks of their summer in a cabin in Schofield Park while Lucille’s husband remained in Pueblo. The log cabin had been in the family for several generations and wasn’t much more than four walls, a roof, and a floor. But it was soon home, sweet home to Melanson.
Melanson was glib and worldly. He claimed to speak fluent French and soon had the girls and their mother enthralled with his stories. It was obvious he enjoyed the company of any young woman, even gallantly offering to take a friend of one of the girls, who had come for a visit, for a horseback ride. Nobody remarked on the fact that after they returned, the girl was quiet and subdued.
Of all the women, Melanson took a particular interest in 14-year-old Sally Burton. He began to spend so much time with her and not doing his job that on August 17, Spadafora fired him and took back the gun and sleeping bag he had loaned.
Melanson shrugged and moved in with his new friends. Such were his charms that a week later, when it was time for the Burton family to return to Pueblo, Melanson talked Sally’s mom into leaving the teenager, 23 years his junior, with him.
It wasn’t long before Sally saw at least part of what lurked beneath Melanson’s charm. He kept her a virtual prisoner in the cabin. If she questioned his authority, he’d lunge as though to strike her, and then laugh as she cringed away. When he wanted sex, he demanded sex. If she protested that she wasn’t in the mood, he got angry and insisted. She soon learned that if she didn’t go along, he would force her anyway, and so, afraid of his temper, she acquiesced. Adding insult to injury, he gave her a case of body lice.
Sally, however, was lucky. She got to leave. On August 28, Melanson let her catch a bus home to Pueblo; however, he said, he’d be joining her soon. The next day, Melanson decided to head for Pueblo, 160 miles to the east. He didn’t own a car, so after hitchhiking the 28-miles to Gunnison he purchased a bus ticket.
