Stephen White - Cold Case

"Do you want charming or do you want efficiency?"

"I want plumbing. I want to be able to smoke. And I want room service. Not necessarily in that order."

The smoking part would limit her choices considerably. I suggested she call the Sheraton.

My first wife, Merideth, had been a producer with Channel 9 in Denver. I still had some contacts at the station. I called one of them at home, a young man who had been an assistant producer. He had lusted after Merideth for the entire three years that he worked with her. I hoped that fact would make him guilty enough to agree to do me a favor.

It did.

I came home late Saturday morning after a long bike ride to Lyons and back and found that a messenger from Channel 9 had left the package beside the front door, as promised.

Inside were two videotapes. One was a compilation of clips of the disappearance and murder of the two girls in the Elk River Valley. The other was a compilation of clips of the kidnapping and murder of Gloria Welle.

I stripped out of my Lycra and took a shower. Lauren called while I was in the bathroom. She left a message letting me know that since I was seeing patients that afternoon, she and a girlfriend had decided to go shopping in Denver.

Maternity things. She thought she'd be home for dinner.

I made a sandwich and carried it into the living room. The first tape I stuck into the VCR was the Gloria Welle footage.

Nineteen ninety-two. Channel 9's talent was a lot younger then. Still, except for some curious hair styles and some dubious wardrobe choices, Ed and Mike and Paula looked pretty good back in 1992.

On tape, the entrance to the Silky Road Ranch was totally different from the one I'd seen recently in person during my visit with Lauren. The day that Brian Sample went to visit Gloria Welle with retribution and murder in his heart, no gate at all blocked the entrance to the ranch. No imposing stone pillars marked the spot where the dirt lane broke off the county road. No video cameras checked on the arrival of visitors. No speakers announced curt warnings; no microphones eavesdropped on conversations. In those days before the murder, the sign that hung above the rough-cut pine logs that marked the entrance to the spread was carved of wood and read

"Silky Road Ranch." It wasn't engraved on a stainless-steel plate that read

"Gloria's Silky Road Ranch-No Visitors."

The Silky Road wasn't a memorial to Gloria back then. It was just Gloria and Raymond Welle's horse ranch.

It didn't surprise me that few of the actual details of the murder had stuck in my memory. The television stories about the crime referred to the victim of the murder as a "Denver debutante," "a wealthy socialite," or "the daughter of railroad billionaire Horace Tambor."

None of the reports identified Gloria as a successful horse breeder, or even as Mrs. Raymond Welle. Ray's radio fame was barely starting to percolate; and his first term in Congress wouldn't start until 1994.

I was curious about having my memory tweaked. What had transpired on the ranch that day?

According to the television news reports, the whole affair had lasted only ninety minutes. During that brief window of time, Brian Sample had somehow entered the ranch house, joined Gloria for tea, forced her to make a telephone call in an effort to lure Raymond Welle home from his office, locked Gloria in a guest-room closet, and then shot her to death right through the wooden door.

Shortly thereafter, Brian had fired a few rounds at the arriving law enforcement authorities. The police had gunned him down as he made a dash to the woods to try to escape.

A follow-up story the day after Gloria's murder reported that authorities had learned that the suspect in the killing, Brian Sample, had been a patient of Gloria Welle's husband, psychologist Dr. Raymond Welle. Sample was, it was assumed, bent on revenge when he invaded the Welle home. Although the exact motive for seeking revenge upon his psychotherapist wasn't revealed in the report, the reason that Sample had sought mental-health treatment was already apparently the stuff of local lore. No one in town had any questions at all about what the precipitant was for the almost yearlong decline in Sample's emotional state.

Brian Sample had owned a local saloon called The Livery. On a Tuesday night eleven months before he killed Gloria Welle, Brian had been behind the bar of that saloon, pouring drinks. One of his customers that evening was a regular, a not-certified public accountant named Grant Wortham who played catcher on Brian's softball team. Wortham had come into the bar after work for a cheeseburger and a beer, and had left the establishment three hours later after consuming eight beers and two shots of Cuervo Gold. When he left to go home, Wortham climbed behind the wheel of his big old Dodge Ram pickup truck.

Wortham had managed to maneuver the vehicle only three blocks before he ran a stop sign at the edge of town while going almost fifty miles an hour. In the intersection, the big truck demolished a bright red Subaru. The driver of the Subaru didn't leave an inch of skid mark on the road. The driver of the Subaru never saw the big truck coming.

The driver of the Subaru was killed instantly.

The driver of the Subaru was Brian Sample's son, Dennis. He had been on his way home from a Drama Club meeting at the high school.

By delivering those beers and pouring those shots of tequila for Grant Wortham, Brian Sample had effectively handed a loaded gun to the man who would soon become his son's executioner.

On the ides of March, Sample sold the bar for less than he owed the bank. Weeks after that Brian attempted suicide, overdosing intentionally on Jack Daniel's, Valium, and penicillin. When he got out of the hospital, his wife, Leigh, kicked him out of the house.

Not too many more days passed before Brian Sample killed Gloria Welle.

The last clip on the videotape was a montage of scenes from Gloria's Denver funeral. A massive procession from the synagogue to the cemetery had tied up the metro area's streets for most of an hour. To get my mind off the tragedy of Brian Sample's family, I stuffed the second of the two videotapes into the VCR. This one would tell the story of the two dead girls.

I'd already crossed whatever line of psychological defense it required to think of them-deceased-as the "two dead girls," not as Tami and Miko. And, from the detailed presentation at the Locard briefing and from all the reading I'd done of the case documents, I already knew the details of the story that the television journalists were about to tell me, so little about the video anthology surprised me. My interest in reviewing the news reports was limited.

I had, in fact, only one goal. I wanted to discover the identity of the local residents who had been interviewed by the surprisingly tenacious reporter that Channel 9 had sent to Steamboat Springs to report on the developing story. I was hoping to uncover the names of some locals who seemed to have been well acquainted with Tami and Miko.

The first few reports had been taped in the late autumn days right after the girls had disappeared. The sheriff in Routt County, Phil Barrett, was a much smaller pork chop back then. He certainly gave a lot of interviews, and appeared to enjoy acting constipated around the media. One of his first impromptu press gatherings took place in front of the snowmobile trailer that had been discovered the day after the girls disappeared. The trailer had been found in the parking lot of a condominium near the gondola at the base of the ski resort.

The base area of Mount Werner was far from the Strawberry Park hot springs and even farther from the upper reaches of the Elk River Valley.

The mayor of Steamboat spoke on camera twice without revealing a thing. I assumed that her discretion soon caused her to be removed from a list of locals deserving airtime. Mr. and Mrs. Franklin made three different televised pleas for help and mercy, young Joey a silent witness in the background each time.