Stephen White - Cold Case

But instead we moved from fingers to toes. Brightly painted, beautifully proportioned toes. The color of the nails was turquoise, and the background skin tones were a gorgeous gesso of subdued gold and amber.

Immediately, I decided that this was a different girl.

The camera lingered for a few moments and then pulled back from the toes to reveal an ankle of perfect proportion, a slender calf and an unbent knee, and a seemingly endless expanse of unblemished thigh. The beauty of the leg distracted me, but not totally. I was still waiting for the blood.

The next image on the screen was a wagon wheel. Totally unlike the arm and the leg, the wagon wheel was old and weathered, the spokes radiating out from a rusted iron hub. Through the spokes, behind them, I could see the vertical shoots of out-of-focus golden grasses. Cultivated grasses. Hay.

Lauren squeezed my arm again, released her grip, and lightly caressed my forearm. Wait, it's coming.

Using the hub of the wheel as the center of the world, the camera pulled back again. Quickly this time. At one side of the spoke rested the hand with the silver-and-amethyst ring. Hanging beside the wheel was the exquisite leg and the foot with the turquoise toes.

Here comes the blood.

The silence ended and Lister's recorded voice forced its way into every cubic centimeter of space in the theater.

"Colorado," he said as the wagon-wheel image exploded to a snapshot that showed two young women laughing deliriously, mugging for the camera. They were posing in a field on an old buckboard, the rolling mountainsides in the background dotted with stands of aspen. One of the girls was sitting on the buckboard, her legs draped over the side. The other was standing, leaning languorously against the wheel. The one whose hand we'd studied was an outdoorsy blonde. Her face was so vibrant and joyous I wanted to smile along with her. The one with the painted toes was of Asian ancestry. Japanese. On reflection, I decided that she was not quite so vibrant. I sensed some pressure in her mirth and her eyes were averted from the lens by a degree or two.

She was the follower.

Her friend was the leader.

"The Elk River Valley near Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Steamboat is a mountain town in the northern Colorado Rockies, founded by ranchers, but developed by skiers. Its residents call it "Ski Town USA."

"The camera closed on the blonde.

"Steamboat Springs was the only home that Tamara Franklin ever knew. Everyone in town knew her and everyone called her Tami." The lens moved to the young Asian.

"Steamboat was the home of Mariko Hamamoto for only eight months. Her new American friends called her Miko. Her family… did not" The screen went suddenly white. So fine was the focus that I could make out the crystalline forms of snowflakes and ice crystals. I waited for the camera to pull back. It did. Protruding from an uneven bank of snow were a hand and, four or five feet away, a foot.

On the hand was a silver-and-amethyst ring.

On the foot were five toes with glistening turquoise nails.

I stopped worrying about the blood. Now that I'd had my first view of the murder scene, I was sure that every drop would be frozen.

The film lasted another ten or twelve minutes.

Tami Franklin and Miko Hamamoto had been juniors at Steamboat Springs High School. They were friends who were last thought to have been together on a November evening just before Thanksgiving of 1988. Sometime in the late afternoon Tami had driven her dad's pickup truck away from her family's cattle ranch near the tiny township of dark, high in the Elk River Valley in the shadows of Mount Zirkel. Behind the truck she was towing a snowmobile on a trailer. She had told her brother that, snow permitting, she was going to meet Miko for an evening ride to one of the hot springs not far from town. Her brother, Joey, had thought she said she was heading to Strawberry Park. But he wasn't sure.

Mariko's parents had told investigators that their daughter had left home to meet her friend after completing her homework. They didn't know anything about a snowmobile outing. Mariko's mother guessed that her daughter left right around six o'clock. Maybe ten minutes before or ten minutes after.

That was the night the two girls disappeared. No witnesses reported seeing them together that evening. No one acknowledged seeing the truck. A massive search was mounted the next morning; attention primarily focused on the trails that led to the most popular of the nearby hot springs in Strawberry Park. The search continued for the entire day. But early that evening a memorable storm blew in from the north. Skiers waiting at the base of Mount Werner rejoiced.

Nearby Rabbit Ears Pass was closed under forty-three inches of snow.

The girls were declared missing. A day later the snowmobile trailer was discovered in a parking lot near the gondola in Mountain Village. The snowmobile was not on the trailer. The pickup truck was found almost a month later in Grand Junction, hours away, abandoned.

The bodies of the two girls lay undisturbed until the springtime thaw of 1989 was well under way. A cross-country skier who had moved off of a main trial in order to find a secluded place to urinate spotted one of the skids of Tami's snowmobile as it was beginning to protrude from a snow-filled ravine above Pearl Lake, high in the Elk River Valley. The location of the snowmobile was not in the direction of the hot springs that Tami had told her brother was her destination. Not even close.

A bloodhound brought to the scene by the Routt County sheriff discovered the bodies about six hours later. The grave where the girls had been dumped was a natural hollow in the earth that had been created by the fall of a diseased fir tree as it broke free of the steep slope where it had been growing. The hillside to which the tree had tried to cling faced north. The location where the bodies were found was at least seventy-five yards from the overturned snowmobile. Due to the nature of the terrain, however, neither of the two crime scenes was visible from the other.

To investigators at the scene there did not appear to have been any attempt to bury the girls. The only shroud over Miko's and Tami's bodies was snow. A lot of snow. At the nearby ski area that winter, the official snowfall total on top of Mount Werner had been 361 inches.

When their inadequate graves were discovered by the bloodhound, the girls' bodies were still encased in snow and ice. Only Miko's once lovely foot and Tami's once elegant hand protruded. The exposure of the limbs to the elements had been recent; small animals had barely begun to nibble on the exposed flesh.

The crime scenes were complex and would have challenged virtually any experienced homicide-crime-scene investigator. However, no experienced forensic personnel were available that day either in Routt County or in nearby Steamboat Springs. The personnel who did arrive at the scene didn't correctly recognize the challenge they faced.

Especially after they discovered that the hand that protruded from the snow was the only one still attached to Tami Franklin's body. The other one was gone. As were the toes of her friend's left foot.

The primary focus of Kimber Listers short film was to spotlight the forensic and investigatory shortcomings of the initial investigation. A litany of problems was listed. Poor crime-scene management. Careless recovery of the snowmobile.

Possible contamination of both crime scenes by unnecessary personnel.

Mishandling of the dead bodies at the crime scene. Incomplete laboratory analysis and mishandling of specimens from the autopsies. Witnesses who should have been interviewed, but weren't. Witnesses who should have been reinterviewed, but weren't.

The list went on. The more I listened, the more I wondered why I'd been asked to be a member of the team that would reinvestigate this case. Laurens invitation made much more sense to me. She was a deputy DA in Boulder County with an extensive background in felony investigations. She could advise Locard on a myriad of local legal mores associated with the earlier and the current investigations.