Smooth Talker: Trail of Death, page 8
Young also located Lucille Burton in Denver. She was in frail health but readily recalled the summer she and her daughters met Roy Melanson. There was one other thing she had never told anyone else. One of her daughters, the young girl who had accepted Melanson’s offer to go horseback riding, later told her that he had raped her. The girl was afraid of him and had said nothing at the time.
Lucille Burton said her daughter, Sally, was living in California, so Young made arrangements to go and interview her. On the way, she stopped in Las Vegas to see Frank Spadafora, who had given up sheep ranching to run a small casino off the strip.
Spadafora didn’t show at their prearranged meeting, so Young moved on to California to see Sally Burton. She encountered a mixed-up young woman who had been through a series of
disastrous relationships. She remembered Roy Melanson real well.
Yes, she said, her relationship with Melanson had been sexual— whether she wanted it that way or not. His moods could swing from one extreme to the next in an instant. He never hit her, but he always let her know who was in control and that she had better not cross him. “One time I wanted to leave the cabin, but he said I couldn’t,” Sally recalled. “He didn’t say what he would do if I tried, but I saw his eyes and knew I wasn’t goin’ nowhere.”
Burton recalled the red Mazda station wagon with all the camping equipment in the back, and said she would be willing to come back and testify if charges were ever filed.
On the way back to Colorado, Young called ahead to set up another appointment with Spadafora, who claimed to have mixed up the previous appointment time. She arrived in Las Vegas only to be stood up again.
When she returned to Gunnison, Young called the Las Vegas Police Department and reached a detective, Parker McManus. She started to explain what she was trying to do when he interrupted her.
“You know Punch McManus?” he asked.
Sure, Young said. Punch was a popular school teacher in Gunnison who had retired just a few years earlier.
“She’s my mom,” McManus said. “I grew up in Gunnison, and I remember when Michele Wallace disappeared.” He said he would personally go “take care of the problem” with Frank Spadafora. The former sheepherder called the next day. He agreed to meet with Sheriff Murdie, who was going to Las Vegas on other business. This time he kept the appointment.
John Paul Steele, the former inmate who had told Fry a similar story to what Hassig had related, also took months to locate. Young finally found a parole officer in the state of Washington who gave her an old telephone number he had for Steele. The number was for a garage where Steele had worked as a mechanic. A woman answered and said Steele still worked there; in fact, she was his wife.
“He’s not in any trouble,” Young explained. “I just want to talk to him about an old case and a guy named Roy Melanson. Ask him to call collect.”
Steele called back that evening. He remembered Melanson and related what he had told Fry many years before.
Young was impressed that the stories both Hassig and Steele told her remained consistent with their nearly 16-year-old statements. Their recollections of what Melanson had told them were almost exact.
As difficult as it was to locate some of the witnesses, there were two with whom she had no luck at all. They were dead. Kolz, the hiker who had found the hair, had died in a crash. Kolz’s widow was still in the Montrose area, so Young talked to her about where they had been hiking that day.
Young heard that Thurman Gene Wilder also had died in a crash. The detective took no chances and persuaded a Louisiana State Trooper to go to the cemetery where Wilder was buried to check for his headstone. It was there, as was Wilder’s body.
Young felt such efforts were important. Without a body, how were they supposed to prove that Michele Wallace was even dead, rather than living anonymously in some other part of the country? The prosecutors would be trying to prove a negative by demonstrating there was no evidence that Michele was alive. No messages to her family or friends. No credit card activity. No bank loans. No applications for a passport or driver’s license. No contact with law enforcement for nearly two decades. It was more than suspicious, but was it proof?
Even if the jury concluded that she was dead, how could the prosecution prove beyond that same standard of reasonable doubt that she had been murdered? That she hadn’t died in an accident up in the rugged mountains that made up this part of Colorado, her remains lying at the bottom of some cliff she had failed to climb?
The prosecution would get one shot at Melanson. If they missed, they could never try him again for killing Michele. A detective was even sent to Spain to reinterview the Basque sheepherder who had been a potential suspect. After so long a time, and without Michele’s body, it was going to be doubly important to show a jury that they had left no stone unturned.
Young would have had a difficult time explaining why she was so driven. Part of it might have been the closeness in age between herself and Michele, and that they had both come to this same beautiful, rugged country as independent young women looking for adventure. One had found a home, a family, and a career; the other had found death.
Part of it, too, may have been that Michele’s was such a sad story. Jackson had told her about the suicide of Maggie Wallace and the note asking that her daughter’s body be buried next to her. Young assumed that George Wallace was deceased. There had been no contact with him for more than ten years.
In late 1990, she was talking to a member of the Civil Air Patrol who had been in on the original search, when she learned that Michele had a relative living in Arizona. She called the relative and was surprised to learn that George Wallace was still alive. As a matter of fact, Debbie Fountain and her husband had just left to return home to Florida, where George and his second wife were also living.
Young called Debbie Fountain only to hear from the other woman that she wasn’t sure that reopening the case was such a good idea where George was concerned. He had remarried, with a wonderful woman named Melba, but had never really gotten over the deaths of his daughter and first wife. George was near 70 and frail, and Fountain insisted that Young funnel any questions or updates on the case through her, “so I can choose times when he’s strong enough.”
“Just tell him we’re working on the case again,” Young said.
After conferring with his investigator and Deputy Jackson, Sheriff Murdie had broached District Attorney Stern with the subject of charging Melanson with Michele Wallace’s murder. The prosecutor hadn’t said no; in fact, he told Young that if she could find the witnesses after all these years, he might try a bodyless homicide. But, he also cautioned, they were a long way from making a case stick.
A major turning point occurred in early 1991 when Young and Jackson decided to reinventory everything in evidence for the Michele Wallace case. The evidence lists were long, but not very detailed. For instance, they noted the presence of a South Carolina driver’s license, but the list didn’t specifically state it was Michele’s. The investigators were wasting a lot of time when questions arose by having to go and search out individual items; they wanted a master list with complete details.
In the evidence room, they opened one old box and began matching items to the list. Young pulled out a bag with a hairbrush in it. There was a case number on it—Michele’s case—written by then- Undersheriff Steve Fry, with a date and the address of Michele’s apartment. There was no mention of who it belonged to or where it had come from.
Fry had retired from the department but was still in town, running a sporting goods store. Young called him and asked about the brush. He remembered it well. “I asked for things that only she had used,” he said.
Now Kathy Young was really excited. Apparently, when the mass of hair was found in 1979 and sent to the CBI, no one had recalled the hairbrush. Young had noticed that it still contained several long, dark strands of hair.
It would be just one more stone in a field of boulders she had overturned, but she now had a way to prove that the two long braids found on Kebler Pass belonged to Michele Wallace.
Sidetracked by more current cases, Young finally sent the hairbrush and the mass of hair back to the CBI, to their lab in Montrose, on August 1, 1991. Twenty-seven days later, CBI Agent Joe Snyder called. The hair from the brush and the hair found on the pass were a perfect match.
Not long afterward, Young ran into Jennett, the now-former CBI agent. “Mr. Jennett,” she said, walking up to the tall, dark-haired criminalist, “I don’t know if you remember me, but I used to take classes from you.”
Jennett smiled down at the short redheaded woman. “Of course, I remember. What are you up to these days?”
Young explained what she had been doing for the past two years. “I wanted to let you know that we’re working the case again,” she said. Jennett might be asked to testify, and she was letting him know as a professional courtesy. “And I hope to file charges someday soon.”
Jennett nodded. “I always wondered what had happened to that case,” he said. “How’s it going?”
Young briefed him on what she had. And what she didn’t: a body.
Jennett paused and thought a moment, then asked, “You ever hear of the ‘pig people’?”
When she shook her head, he went on to explain that a criminalist colleague of his who worked for the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, Jack Swanburg, had told him about a new group he was working with. “It’s a bunch of scientists and cops who’ve been burying pigs to see if they can figure out how to find clandestine graves. ... Maybe you ought to give him a call.”
“Pig People” was just a nickname, Jennett said. Their real name was NecroSearch International.[1]
[1] Steve Jackson, No Stone Unturned (WildBluePress, May 2015), Kindle Edition
XVII
April 13, 1992
Kathy Young arrived at the penitentiary in Kentucky on what would have been Michele’s 43rd birthday. After nearly six years of investigation and preparation, there was one more thing for the intrepid investigator to do: speak to the man who killed Michele at age 25.
There was still hope that Michele’s remains could be found before going to trial. Although at first a little skeptical of the group with the morbid-sounding name, she’d met with NecroSearch International in Denver, and they’d agreed to conduct a search for Michele’s remains when the snow melted in the Colorado high country.
Not convinced that the NecroSearch team would have any better luck than the thousands of searchers before them, she was nevertheless impressed with their professional and scientific approach. She’d sent them Michele’s hair and from studying pine needles and other biological material found in the hair, NecroSearch botanist Vickey Trammell had narrowed the search area. So there was hope.
Whatever happened with the search, the prosecution of Roy Melanson would be going forward. It was under that premise that Sheriff Murdie set up another conference with District Attorney Stern, whose offices were in Montrose, nearly 70 miles west of Gunnison.
The Seventh Judicial District was comprised of six large rural counties, of which Gunnison County was just one. This meant that Stern’s resources were stretched thin. Also, the Seventh District wasn’t exactly on the cutting edge of homicide trials. In all the years since Michele had disappeared, there had been a handful, all garden variety, quickly solved, and quickly adjudicated.
Stern didn’t have the trial experience to handle this one and he knew it. To his credit, he brought his second in command, Wyatt Angelo, an experienced trial attorney, into the conversation.
Still, Stern brought up the usual arguments against prosecuting a body-less homicide—starting with the need to prove that the victim was not only dead, but that she had been murdered. The first was perhaps easier to get past a jury now that seventeen years had elapsed without any word from Michele. However, the second issue—was she murdered?—was more difficult.
Even assuming that the jury agreed that Michele had been murdered, could they prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Melanson? His past criminal record, including his rape convictions, would probably not be allowed to be presented to the jury. So how could they prove that he was the killer, rather than Matthews or some unknown assailant who had accosted Michele after Melanson took her car? And finally, what murder charge should they file?
Young and Murdie wanted first-degree murder. At the time of Michele’s disappearance, Colorado’s death penalty statutes had been struck down as unconstitutional; it had since been reinstated, but they would only be able to charge Melanson as the law applied in 1974. Still, a conviction for first-degree murder would mean life without parole. No woman would ever have to fear him again.
For first-degree murder, the prosecutors would have to prove deliberation—that Melanson had thought out the act of killing Michele before he committed the crime, even if only for a few moments, the time it takes to deliberate. Or would they have to settle for second- degree murder?—that Melanson acted “knowingly,” that he knew that what he was doing would likely lead to Michele’s death.
Throw all that on top of the fact that the case was nearly two decades old—some of the witnesses were dead; others’ memories might be faulty—and they were looking at a difficult conviction at best. At worst, it was a trial they could easily lose.
Wyatt Angelo weighed all this as he listened to Young, Murdie, and Stern. He had been practicing law in Gunnison since 1973, and recalled the disappearance of Michele Wallace. It had been all over the radio and television news, as well as the local newspapers. Other than the media, however, all the information he had up until this point had been by way of the courthouse rumor mill. It was clear then that Melanson was the main suspect, and Angelo had always wondered what happened to the case. Angelo joined the district attorney’s office in May 1987, and was promoted to second in line in January 1988. A year later, he had heard about it when Ric Murdie broached the idea of reviving the Wallace case.
Young had with her a photograph of Michele, taken by some unknown person, smiling as she stood with her dog and an unidentified family at some trailhead in the Rocky Mountains. Her hair was in two long, dark braids, just like the hair found on the logging road. This was the young woman they would present to the jury.
Michele and Okie posed for a photograph with an unidentified family while on a backpacking trip shortly before she disappeared. Photo courtesy of Gunnison County District Attorney’s Office.
The detective had already done a lot of the homework for the “victimology” Angelo said he would need to try the case. A detailed profile of Michele: her habits, her goals, her relationships with family and friends.
It was apparent to Angelo that he would be able to point out to a jury that Michele had had many reasons to live. She was bright, attractive, engaged with life. She never missed a telephone call to her mother. They might not be allowed to use Mrs. Wallace’s suicide in court as evidence of how deep the relationship went, but it was clear that Michele loved and was loved by her family.
She was a budding photographer who would not have blown her first big assignment. Her dearest possession was her camera, and look whose hands it had wound up in, and whose photograph was on the last frame of the roll found in her pawned camera—Roy Melanson. It was a striking piece of circumstantial evidence.
By the time Young had finished answering his questions, Angelo was convinced that, win or lose, they needed to try this case. It was going to be tough; no prosecutor he knew had ever won a body-less homicide trial. Still, when asked by Stern what he thought, he replied, “I’d go with it tomorrow morning.”
She wanted to know everything about this man before they met, so she had flown in to Brandenburg, Kentucky, a couple of days earlier to pursue several leads.
One involved two Kentucky inmates who claimed that Melanson had bragged about “disposin’ of an unwillin’ woman” in the Colorado Mountains “where it’s hard to find a body.” According to one, Melanson added that he “liked it” when women got “feisty” and he had to get rough with them.
The next lead was a little more unusual. Demonstrating that Melanson had lost none of his charm, he had met a widow through her son, a fellow inmate, and after a brief courtship, talked into her into marriage while he was still in prison.
Young had arranged through Detective Tommy Stiles of the Kentucky State Police to meet another one of the woman’s sons— one, Stiles had told her earlier, who wasn’t very happy about his mother’s marriage.
This son invited Young to their home, where he begged her to speak with his mother. “You tell her about the crimes he’s committed,” he said. “She won’t listen to me. She’s head over heels.”
Young said she would try. As far as she was concerned, Melanson had victimized enough women, and maybe she could prevent this one from wasting any more of her life on him. Later that day, she met with the new Mrs. Roy Melanson.
She told the woman about the rape cases her husband had already been convicted of, but the woman brushed them off. Roy had told her all about it. “He was wrongfully accused,” she said. He had been let go after receiving a life sentence in Texas, he told her, because the authorities there had discovered they had the wrong man.
Young told her it wasn’t true. He was let go because his habitual offender conviction was overturned, but nothing the detective said could change the woman’s mind.
Young tried a different tack. “You realize that Roy is suspected of beating a man to death in prison?”
The woman smiled as she leaned forward and put her hand on Young’s arm. Her husband had told her about that as well. She explained away the alleged beating with a racial slur.
