Tangled

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Speaker 9 He said he couldn't handle talking about it.

Speaker 9 I was angry at him. If you're not going to tell me what happened, then you're going to dance around the issue and tell three different stories.
What are you hiding?

Speaker 10 It started as a teen romance.

Speaker 9 Two of my girlfriends were like, there's this guy and you need to meet him. I was in love.

Speaker 11 Yes.

Speaker 10 It ended in one of the strangest love stories you'll ever hear.

Speaker 9 It felt like I got hit by a bus.

Speaker 10 Right before their wedding, her mother and his father got married.

Speaker 14 They told us, we ran off, we eloped.

Speaker 9 Who does that?

Speaker 10 Two families in a small town left stunned. But it was nothing compared to what happened next.

Speaker 16 It looks like he's been shot. You said someone broke him last night.

Speaker 10 A deadly attack in the dark of night.

Speaker 17 Her mother murdered.

Speaker 9 I realized that last conversation I had with her is that was it.

Speaker 18 His father, bruised and bewildered.

Speaker 19 I don't remember anything else other than waking up in the morning.

Speaker 22 Was it a robbery?

Speaker 20 Television's on.

Speaker 10 Was it revenge?

Speaker 23 You're always gonna look at the closest people to the victim.

Speaker 10 Or was it something much darker?

Speaker 24 You were 11 years old when your mother disappeared.

Speaker 10 A missing woman, a murdered woman, and a lie.

Speaker 9 I didn't get through more than a page and a half when I threw it. I could barely stomach to finish it.

Speaker 27 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 10 Here's Keith Morrison with Tangled.

Speaker 9 We can't put words to that.

Speaker 9 It was very surreal.

Speaker 11 911, where's your emergency?

Speaker 30 It's true.

Speaker 31 The old saying, when you marry someone, you marry their family, too.

Speaker 16 We need an ambulance. He looks like he's been shot.
He had someone broke in last night, even his life close.

Speaker 29 Mind you, not a bad thing.

Speaker 33 to turn to mom or dad for advice and counsel.

Speaker 35 It's unreal. It's hard.
Sometimes you think maybe it didn't happen, but yet it really did.

Speaker 37 It's with their help and support after all that true love could deepen and grow and last.

Speaker 9 I watched the crime scene shows on TV, you know, and I never,

Speaker 24 never ever thought that, oh, that's going to be my life.

Speaker 6 Yes, it really is all about family.

Speaker 33 The high desert opens up near Pueblo, Colorado, 100 miles or so south of Denver, among the highest of the nation's deserts, a little closer to heaven, perhaps.

Speaker 6 This is where Shannon Palmer's mom and dad set out to create a good, safe, and holy life for their daughters, far from the risks and temptations of the city.

Speaker 9 It was awesome. Got to grow up with horses and dogs everywhere and chickens and 40 acres to run around on.

Speaker 34 Shannon and her sister Kelsey went to school right at home.

Speaker 28 Their mother Pam, devoutly Jehovah's Witness, was their teacher.

Speaker 7 I loved it.

Speaker 9 I don't think that I missed out on any aspect of my education.

Speaker 46 There were strict guidelines, of course, about beliefs, family, marriage, sex.

Speaker 44 There were no birthday or holiday celebrations, and they learned that members who commit adultery or who divorce can be cast out, shunned.

Speaker 2 Shannon and Kelsey's dad, Jerry, didn't share the faith, but he respected Pam's, though he was never a real fan of the homeschooling.

Speaker 46 He wanted them to go to public school, but Pam wouldn't have it.

Speaker 9 She always wanted us to be this tall and be her little girls. You know, she very genuinely loved us and we were her world.

Speaker 5 Well, you were her reason to be.

Speaker 9 Yes, oh yeah.

Speaker 33 But finally, when it was time for high school, Pam relented.

Speaker 9 I think she realized that you can't control an environment for a child forever, though.

Speaker 49 What was it like to make the transition?

Speaker 9 It was a culture shock.

Speaker 9 It was different i was there maybe a week and my new friends are like let's educate you on the ways of the world and i was i was like oh my gosh

Speaker 43 which of course included boys

Speaker 9 two of my girlfriends were like there's this guy and you need to meet him and i think you two are just really get along and i'm like ah great

Speaker 50 the guy was aaron candelario and before long

Speaker 27 i was in love Yes, I was very much in love.

Speaker 9 You know, we had such a connection.

Speaker 52 No kidding.

Speaker 15 Both Jehovah's Witnesses, both homeschooled by their mothers.

Speaker 2 Or at least, Aaron was homeschooled until his parents' marriage broke up.

Speaker 9 We were so drawn to each other that two people were so driven and so optimistic and just wanted to do big things in life.

Speaker 54 So after high school, they got engaged and, full of excitement, planned a wedding.

Speaker 3 And then one night, Shannon's mother, Pam, sent the girls off to Bible study and told their father, Jerry, they needed to talk.

Speaker 35 She looked up and says, I don't want to be married to you anymore.

Speaker 25 I don't want to be here.

Speaker 20 Everything was fine, fine, fine, fine.

Speaker 35 We seemed to be getting along. Everything was fine.
She said, this is it. I'm done.

Speaker 24 What did that feel like?

Speaker 35 I was a crush. You were crushed.

Speaker 12 What happened?

Speaker 39 No one knew.

Speaker 2 Except that...

Speaker 57 Now these two had one more thing in common, both products of broken homes.

Speaker 41 The wedding day approached, just a few days ago, when Shannon's mother Pam and Aaron's dad Ralph invited the bride and groom to be for dinner and a talk.

Speaker 41 Ralph was every bit as devout a believer as Pam, so some premarital guidance, perhaps?

Speaker 34 Oh,

Speaker 39 no,

Speaker 29 nothing like that.

Speaker 9 They've told us.

Speaker 14 We ran off, we eloped, and got married.

Speaker 12 Wait, what?

Speaker 20 Your mother and Aaron's father?

Speaker 9 Yes.

Speaker 58 Who does that?

Speaker 9 I don't know, but I can't tell you how much it felt like I got hit by a bus.

Speaker 59 Do you know what that meant?

Speaker 21 It meant that by the time you got married, you were marrying your stepbrother.

Speaker 9 Right.

Speaker 27 I didn't say much.

Speaker 39 I was just like, well, we're leaving.

Speaker 53 And suddenly, Jerry realized how blind he'd been.

Speaker 35 You didn't understand, but then afterwards, it all...

Speaker 35 all the pieces fell into place.

Speaker 60 You were never suspicious.

Speaker 35 I trusted her.

Speaker 35 Don't we do that in a relationship?

Speaker 42 No trust now.

Speaker 5 Shannon and Aaron were furious, told the elopers, interlopers more like, stay away from the wedding.

Speaker 29 But they couldn't pretend it hadn't happened.

Speaker 33 And when they hit the little bumps most young marriages encounter, it colored everything.

Speaker 59 Did your father and her mother's relationship have anything to do with what happened to you and Shannon?

Speaker 27 You know, we were pretty determined not to let their relationship have an effect, but, you know,

Speaker 27 it's always something that's in the back of your head.

Speaker 55 After a year and a half, Shannon and Aaron divorced.

Speaker 29 Pam and Ralph's marriage, on the other hand, thrived.

Speaker 1 They moved into a big house on a corner lot in Walsenburg, an old coal mining town about 50 miles south of Pueblo.

Speaker 36 They opened up an antiques mall in the center of town and then bought a vacation home in Oregon.

Speaker 9 That was the happiest I ever remember seeing her.

Speaker 45 For nearly three years, Shannon, still hurt, rarely spoke to her mom.

Speaker 61 But then one day, Pam asked her to lunch.

Speaker 9 She was so focused on

Speaker 9 wanting me to know that we had a future together, her and I.

Speaker 21 Wow, so finally she was coming around on her own accord.

Speaker 9 It felt like it, yeah. And she, you know, when I told her, I said, I can't handle you being my mother and being, did, you know, doing what you did.

Speaker 9 I said, but I want to be your friend and I want to try this.

Speaker 15 So this is a breakthrough lunch, really?

Speaker 7 It seems like it's a little bit more.

Speaker 9 It was a breakthrough lunch, yeah.

Speaker 52 Or a beginning, at least.

Speaker 44 And then, just a few days later.

Speaker 9 I was at work and I see Aaron's name come up on my phone. Right.
He's like, you know what? Something's happened in Wilsonburg. My dad's being rushed to the hospital and they can't find your mom.

Speaker 9 He said, but I think someone's dead.

Speaker 13 Who was dead?

Speaker 10 And was a killer on the loose in a small town when we returned.

Speaker 16 He's crying, and he's telling me to go out first in the kitchen.

Speaker 10 A family in shock and an ex-husband under suspicion.

Speaker 23 You're always going to look at the closest people to the victim.

Speaker 45 7 a.m., January 16th, 2014.

Speaker 12 A cold morning in Walsenburg, Colorado.

Speaker 11 911, where's your emergency?

Speaker 33 Ralph and Pam Candelerio's neighbor had been on her way to work.

Speaker 16 I'm bringing an ambulance.

Speaker 34 Ferry Trajil had never encountered anything like this before.

Speaker 26 I looked over and he was saying, help me, help me.

Speaker 15 Ralph was on the ground in front of his house, hurt.

Speaker 26 I got to him and asked him if he needed help and he seemed to be kind of out of it.

Speaker 18 Finally, Ralph managed to get the words out.

Speaker 2 He and his wife had been attacked and robbed.

Speaker 33 Ferry, afraid the attackers might still be in the house, called 911.

Speaker 16 He looks like he's been shot. He said someone broke in last night, him in his light clothes.

Speaker 11 How are they doing? Oh, he's not good.

Speaker 16 He's crying, and he's telling me to go help her. She's in the kitchen.
I'm going to get my neighbor to help me here.

Speaker 16 Ralph, we're getting help for you, Ralph. Okay?

Speaker 41 The police arrived, went into the house with guns drawn.

Speaker 42 And there at the entrance to the kitchen, still in her nightgown, lay Pam Candilario, her head covered in blood.

Speaker 26 I knew she was dead when the ambulance showed up because they didn't go into the house. They just stayed and were working on Ralph.

Speaker 2 Ralph wasn't shot, but he was hurt, and he was airlifted to the nearest trauma hospital.

Speaker 29 Walsenberg, as local reporter Eric Mullins knew, was not equipped to handle an investigation of this magnitude.

Speaker 49 You have small-town departments, five, six, seven people.

Speaker 21 You don't have murder cops on staff.

Speaker 49 You don't have forensic professionals on staff.

Speaker 17 So, by the time Shannon arrived at the hospital looking for her mother, An agent of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation was there to meet her, along with Aaron.

Speaker 21 How did she take it?

Speaker 27 About as well as you expect anybody, you know, to get hit by a sledgehammer or whatever, you know.

Speaker 27 First, she was kind of shocked, then a little bit of denial.

Speaker 9 And suddenly, it was, I realized that that last conversation I had with her is

Speaker 9 that that was it.

Speaker 5 No fresh start now.

Speaker 34 Her mother was dead.

Speaker 43 And then Shannon saw Ralph.

Speaker 39 And he

Speaker 9 lost it.

Speaker 9 He just turned into a sobbing, shaking

Speaker 9 maniac.

Speaker 13 Ralph's face was banged up.

Speaker 2 He had bruises in several places.

Speaker 50 He was confused, like a man coming out of a concussion.

Speaker 19 Just exhausted.

Speaker 19 My head still just hurts.

Speaker 36 And then, as soon as he was able and still in his hospital clothes, Ralph talked to agents of the CBI.

Speaker 64 Sorry to hear about your loss.

Speaker 39 No, it's been a horrible day.

Speaker 61 Best he could remember, said Ralph.

Speaker 36 He got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, then decided to go downstairs to make sure the wood-burning stove was still lit.

Speaker 13 But on his way to the bottom of the steps, he said, somebody hit him from behind, and then again from the side.

Speaker 19 I put my arm up and boom. I mean, it just hit me like a ton of bricks.

Speaker 49 It hit me hard, you know.

Speaker 20 And so I went backwards.

Speaker 48 The ringing, I couldn't see no more.

Speaker 20 Ralph was knocked unconscious.

Speaker 19 I mean, I don't remember anything else other than waking up in the morning.

Speaker 36 Then, said Ralph, still disoriented, he tried to sit up.

Speaker 65 I looked down the hallway.

Speaker 66 I could see Pam.

Speaker 3 Her legs.

Speaker 52 She was there.

Speaker 1 Revealed by the first rays of a warm morning sun.

Speaker 11 Her head, her

Speaker 11 spot all over, and there was blood on the floor and

Speaker 16 I touched her cheek and

Speaker 11 she was cold, cold, cold.

Speaker 39 And

Speaker 11 I ran out of the house.

Speaker 21 And that, said Ralph, is when he saw his neighbor fairy and yelled for help.

Speaker 6 But who did it?

Speaker 46 Robbers or someone else?

Speaker 48 Normally, said Walsenburg Police Captain Vince Suarez.

Speaker 23 You're always going to look at the closest people to the victim.

Speaker 56 Except in this case, Ralph was also a victim and clearly wanted to help find the killer or killers.

Speaker 45 CBI agent Jody Wright.

Speaker 67 He was very cooperative, absolutely.

Speaker 61 So, investigators turned their attention to the spurned ex-husband, Jerry Palmer.

Speaker 35 Actually, the next day was when the investigators called me.

Speaker 33 It was no secret Jerry and Pam did not get along after the divorce.

Speaker 46 A divorce which, by the way, she asked him him to file, since as a Jehovah's Witness, she wasn't allowed to.

Speaker 35 And so then you filed for divorce? I filed for divorce.

Speaker 59 Accommodating to the end.

Speaker 25 To the end.

Speaker 29 And now the police were calling.

Speaker 35 And I told them I'd be more than happy to talk to them.

Speaker 59 If they come up to

Speaker 35 talk to me.

Speaker 36 Nebraska.

Speaker 15 Jerry had moved far away, which cleared him for sure.

Speaker 61 Of course, they'd need to look at Shannon and Aaron, too, given their falling out with Pam and Ralph.

Speaker 12 But...

Speaker 67 They were cleared almost immediately because...

Speaker 33 They were nowhere around.

Speaker 67 Yeah, they were not involved.

Speaker 29 Dead end.

Speaker 12 The crime scene people did find some things, mind you, including a bloody fireplace poker that turned out to be the murder weapon.

Speaker 67 The marking

Speaker 67 on her head was the exact replica of the shape of the fire poker, the end of the poker.

Speaker 34 They cataloged everything they found.

Speaker 3 Broken glass in the back door.

Speaker 17 They even took the knobs off drawers and sent them to the lab, hoping the intruders left DNA or fingerprints on them.

Speaker 45 And then, quite unexpected, something remarkable turned up.

Speaker 62 Came right through the front door of the local newspaper.

Speaker 59 So what did you think when you first read that document?

Speaker 49 I felt I had my own little

Speaker 49 version of the Pentagon papers in a way.

Speaker 10 Coming up, a letter that has everyone in town talking.

Speaker 49 I remember reading it and putting it down and thinking, no, it didn't say that.

Speaker 10 When dateline continues.

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Speaker 33 It's a grand name, perhaps, for a weekly paper in an out-of-the-way little town, the Warefineau World Journal.

Speaker 56 But then, Walsenburg was once the hub of Warefino County, and thriving coal mines offered endless promise.

Speaker 38 Now,

Speaker 29 antique stores like Pam and Ralph's fill the gaps left behind by departing commerce.

Speaker 49 I think in all small towns you see maybe a certain degree of selling the heritage because there's nothing else left to sell.

Speaker 36 So, no surprise, said the World Journal's Eric Mullins.

Speaker 62 The invasion and killing of the Candelarios place was a very big deal for the weekly paper and for the whole town.

Speaker 68 We didn't know who was out there.

Speaker 29 People like the Candelarios neighbors, Dina and Mark.

Speaker 68 I was afraid.

Speaker 68 I didn't even want to go to my paint class that I do in the evening because I was afraid to be out.

Speaker 50 A lot of people got guns.

Speaker 65 A lot of neighbors told me. I went out and got a gun.
You know, I want to protect myself.

Speaker 41 Everybody knew the Candelarios had a nice house filled with vintage treasures.

Speaker 45 There's a little jewelry in here, guys,

Speaker 70 that

Speaker 19 hamkepped us as her for dresser.

Speaker 31 Some of which were missing, as Ralph told the police during a videotape tour.

Speaker 20 All the television's on.

Speaker 15 Okay.

Speaker 41 The Candelarios had been about to leave on vacation, so maybe the intruders thought they were gone and were surprised to find them at home.

Speaker 43 But who?

Speaker 41 As Citizen's Tip supplied a possible lead.

Speaker 23 He brought up

Speaker 23 individual names that he believes were involved in this homicide.

Speaker 33 Ramon Barros and Jose Nina Walfa, known drug users, both had rap sheets, a history of breaking and entering an assault.

Speaker 62 One informant said Ramon was trying to sell jewelry the day after the murder.

Speaker 61 So you have a responsibility to check into that.

Speaker 59 Yeah.

Speaker 41 Pam's daughter, Shannon, found herself blaming Ralph for not preventing what happened.

Speaker 9 I was angry at him. In my mind, I was like, why didn't you protect my mother? That's your role as, you know, her husband.

Speaker 50 And right about then, the biggest scoop of Eric Mullen's career landed right in the lap of the Werfeno World Journal.

Speaker 49 I mean, I've been in news since I was 15 years old. I've seen a lot of things walk in the newsroom, but I had never seen anything like this.

Speaker 38 In through the front door marched Ralph Candelario with an open letter to the whole town.

Speaker 49 It was him explaining what he could remember after he had been treated up in Pueblo for his injury and interviewed by the CBI.

Speaker 20 This is my story.

Speaker 3 This is my story.

Speaker 49 This is what happened to me.

Speaker 2 To whom it may concern, he began.

Speaker 31 And we're including his typos exactly as they appeared in his letter.

Speaker 50 His memory was coming back.

Speaker 55 He wanted to explain, and maybe Shannon was right.

Speaker 44 He felt guilty.

Speaker 41 I am angry at myself for not finding a way to do more or just getting myself killed, too.

Speaker 41 Now he wrote he had an image of who his attackers were.

Speaker 62 I got a glimpse of that person, the tall dark man with yellow glasses, short curly hair, wide nose, large lips, and marks on the sides of his face.

Speaker 20 The tall guy was talking on the phone in Spanish, he said.

Speaker 31 One of the two felons the tipster called out, hard to know.

Speaker 20 But one of them knocked him out, he wrote, and when he came to, there was Pam.

Speaker 45 But not dead, as he first told the police.

Speaker 21 Says here she was still alive.

Speaker 41 She started to convulse, and I held her hand for just a couple minutes, and she just went quiet.

Speaker 36 I yelled at her again, and just started crying.

Speaker 41 And then the two men returned. I just broke down.

Speaker 62 I was crying, and I was cold, and I was freaked out.

Speaker 61 Pam was there with me, just a few feet away.

Speaker 54 Things took a turn for the worst, he wrote.

Speaker 4 Then he pointed his gun at me and fired.

Speaker 6 It just clicked.

Speaker 62 I can't fully say what happened to me at that point.

Speaker 31 In fact, he was so scared he said he soiled his pajamas.

Speaker 33 He wrote that his ordeal began after he and Pam went to bed on Tuesday night, not Wednesday as he originally thought, and it lasted nearly two days.

Speaker 37 He woke up on Thursday morning.

Speaker 50 I thought my nightmare was over.

Speaker 15 But I looked down the hall and I could see Pam's legs in the kitchen.

Speaker 1 That's when he ran out of the house and found his neighbor who called 911.

Speaker 37 Of course, the World Journal printed all that, though the police weren't too happy about it.

Speaker 38 And Eric Mullins?

Speaker 49 I remember taking it home and reading it and putting it down and thinking, no, it didn't say that, and picking it back up again.

Speaker 34 But remarkable as Ralph's letter was, it still wasn't the whole story.

Speaker 6 A few weeks after the murder, he mustered up the courage and told the police.

Speaker 23 While he was held captive, he had asked to go to the restroom and he was sexually assaulted in the bathroom well why didn't he say anything about that before

Speaker 71 his explanation was is that he was embarrassed and from what i understand it might be a little bit difficult to talk about but the smallest details could be very important so keep that in mind ralph agreed to show the investigators exactly what happened and where

Speaker 19 he grabbed me with the other hand on my hip right here

Speaker 19 and um

Speaker 19 he proceeds to slight me

Speaker 7 so that was the whole awful story but

Speaker 43 if ralph thought that sharing his new more detailed recollections would clear the air

Speaker 53 he was wrong

Speaker 67 what did you think when you saw it i was pretty blown away by um what was written

Speaker 10 coming up Back at home with detectives, Ralph gets his own surprise.

Speaker 19 What happened to all the knobs?

Speaker 67 He was very upset that they were missing.

Speaker 19 Well, I don't understand why the knobs are gone.

Speaker 28 A better question, why would he care?

Speaker 1 Ralph Candelario appeared to believe that his 3,300-word letter about the murder of his wife would be the accepted true account of that terrible event.

Speaker 15 But here's what Pam's daughter Shannon thought.

Speaker 9 It felt overly dramatic and very just glamorous that he was the victim of this.

Speaker 9 And that wasn't...

Speaker 9 that made me sick.

Speaker 7 And angry, obviously. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Her sister Kelsey's interpretation?

Speaker 9 I thought it was very strange.

Speaker 30 I thought...

Speaker 9 that he had some work to do on a story because it sounded really phony.

Speaker 29 Entitled to their opinions, of course.

Speaker 34 But then, so were the cops.

Speaker 50 Recovered memory?

Speaker 41 No, said the CBI's Jody Wright.

Speaker 37 More like a cover-up.

Speaker 67 Nothing in his statement matched anything that I knew to be at the crime scene. It just didn't make sense.

Speaker 69 None of it.

Speaker 62 It wasn't really that Ralph changed his story in his World Journal Manifesto.

Speaker 34 Not exactly.

Speaker 29 More like he kept adding to it.

Speaker 47 So he watches very carefully what you're doing and tailors his story

Speaker 65 to match what he thinks you're finding.

Speaker 4 Ralph kept explaining, kept offering not less, but more detail.

Speaker 15 About, for example, the drawer poles in his house, the ones investigators removed to test for fingerprints.

Speaker 67 In the event that one of the invasion persons touched them.

Speaker 61 Now, here's Ralph with the police at his house just after Pam was murdered, noticing the missing knobs.

Speaker 19 What happened to all the knobs?

Speaker 67 He was very upset that they were missing.

Speaker 19 Well, I don't understand why the knobs are gone.

Speaker 59 And he would know you were looking for fingerprints of these home invaders.

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 2 But what if they didn't find any fingerprints besides his and Pam's?

Speaker 63 Well,

Speaker 56 in his letter written a few days later, Ralph provided a new detail.

Speaker 61 that accounted for that possibility.

Speaker 67 All of a sudden, now his attackers, he remembered that they wore gloves with LED lights on them, which would explain why no one else's prints would be on the knobs of the drawers.

Speaker 17 You ever heard of gloves with LED lights on them?

Speaker 12 Well, we researched them because I had never heard that.

Speaker 14 They do exist.

Speaker 46 In the letter, Ralph also changed the time of Pam's death, backed it up by more than 24 hours.

Speaker 63 Why?

Speaker 61 Could that perhaps have been a response to this investigator's challenge?

Speaker 60 She didn't die at 3 o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 25 Had to be earlier than that.

Speaker 60 And we're going to go after today.

Speaker 37 We'll know that.

Speaker 70 Okay.

Speaker 21 And that's going to come back to you.

Speaker 39 Okay.

Speaker 44 But that's when Ralph reported the invaders were in his house just a few hours.

Speaker 6 Now in his letter, he remembered the ordeal lasting nearly two days.

Speaker 34 And do you remember we mentioned it a while back, that broken glass in the back door?

Speaker 38 Thing was, the glass fell out the door, not in, as you'd expect it would do if somebody was breaking into the house.

Speaker 45 The police, of course, brought that up with Ralph.

Speaker 18 And what did he write in his letter?

Speaker 15 I went out the back, and the rear door glass was broken.

Speaker 61 Some pieces fell out when I opened the door.

Speaker 15 Ralph even had answers to questions he wasn't asked, like, why was the fireplace poker exactly where it belonged by the fireplace?

Speaker 23 Normally, if you used a weapon, you're going to find it somewhere around

Speaker 23 where your victim is.

Speaker 66 Uh-huh.

Speaker 23 And it looked like the poker had been put back in its original place.

Speaker 62 Here's what Ralph wrote.

Speaker 54 I picked up the poker to stir up the fire.

Speaker 29 I saw blood on the end of it and put it down.

Speaker 62 So, investigators studied Ralph's manifesto for clues.

Speaker 28 And thanks to the Werefenno World Journal, so did everybody else in town.

Speaker 31 Neighbors Mike and Dina.

Speaker 66 It sounded like a novel to me.

Speaker 68 A bizarre one at that.

Speaker 55 Shannon, who'd been angry at Ralph for not protecting her mother, read the letter and began to have thoughts that were much more disturbing.

Speaker 9 I didn't get through more than a page and a half, and I threw it and I was like, this is bull.

Speaker 9 I said, this is the worst. You know, I didn't even, I could barely stomach to finish it.

Speaker 13 And Aaron, Shannon's ex-husband, Ralph's son, Aaron, went to a very dark place indeed.

Speaker 29 Oh, you have no idea.

Speaker 25 You were 11 years old when your mother disappeared.

Speaker 24 Yes.

Speaker 10 Coming up, secrets in the basement.

Speaker 27 I have been going through some of my dad's stuff in the basement today. Found a box, stuff that supposedly she had taken with her.

Speaker 10 When dateline continues.

Speaker 72 Hey, weirdos, I'm Elena, and I'm Ash, and we are the hosts of Morbid Podcast. Each week, we dive into the dark and fascinating world of true crime, spooky history, and the unexplained.

Speaker 73 From infamous killers and unsolved mysteries to haunted places and strange legends, we cover it all with research, empathy, humor, and a few creative expletives.

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Speaker 17 The year was 2004, and Aaron Candeleria was 11 years old.

Speaker 41 His parents had recently separated, were sharing custody.

Speaker 6 And one day, after a weekend at his dad's house, Aaron went home to find.

Speaker 27 There was just a note on the coffee table that was in kind of sketchy handwriting, but it nevertheless said, I love you, my boys, and I'm taking off.

Speaker 56 His mother, Dina, was simply gone.

Speaker 6 Aaron was devastated.

Speaker 21 What did your father suggest may have happened to her?

Speaker 27 That she possibly had moved to Missouri. A guy that she had been talking to online for quite some time, you know, maybe she ran away to be with him.

Speaker 2 A missing person's case was opened, but nothing came of it.

Speaker 33 Aaron and his brother moved in with Ralph full-time.

Speaker 29 But Aaron couldn't move on.

Speaker 33 She had to have left some trail somewhere.

Speaker 45 Barely a teenager, he taught himself every web search engine, looked for years, but found no sign of his mom online.

Speaker 2 And a terrible suspicion took hold of him, hardened into something like certainty. His mother must be dead.

Speaker 4 His father must have done it.

Speaker 27 And after that, it became more of, okay, well, where would he put her body?

Speaker 33 He was maybe 13 or 14 when he thought about those old coal mines around Walsenberg.

Speaker 57 Did you actually go out and look?

Speaker 37 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 27 Oh, yeah. I went through a lot of those mines myself.

Speaker 7 Alone?

Speaker 59 You're looking for the remains of your own mother. I mean, I can't imagine what that is.

Speaker 27 I can't explain it. It's always been there, that fire that just drives you to do something.

Speaker 38 And then one day...

Speaker 27 I had been going through some of my dad's stuff in the basement. I found a box, stuff that supposedly she had taken with her.

Speaker 27 It was a denim jacket that her mother had given her a passport driver's license a cell phone were down there wait a minute what was that like that was kind of the final straw and naturally if she was gone she would have taken those things with her exactly no that was that was my final piece of the puzzle

Speaker 36 he left it there left the box in the basement and emerged a changed person Shannon told us Aaron wouldn't talk much about his mother when they were married, but

Speaker 9 I'd find him up at night just

Speaker 9 over her stuff, just over papers, and he just emotional.

Speaker 21 Going through her papers.

Speaker 9 Just going through, like, her stuff, her, whatever little bit and pieces he had left of his mother, he couldn't even handle.

Speaker 9 Just, it wrecked him.

Speaker 27 And when Aaron heard Pam was dead, my first response was, How did he do it?

Speaker 17 And then he told the cops about his mother.

Speaker 3 Now you may have a serial killer on your hands, serial killer of spouses.

Speaker 63 Yeah, something like that.

Speaker 9 That was the thought.

Speaker 55 Two wives, one missing, the other dead.

Speaker 53 And the one thing they had in common was Ralph Candelario.

Speaker 2 But suspicion alone wasn't enough, wasn't proof.

Speaker 57 So the investigation continued.

Speaker 36 Yes.

Speaker 41 In an effort to shake him, or maybe even get a confession, they sought help from the one person whose presence back at the hospital made Ralph break down and cry, Shannon.

Speaker 9 CBI had me call him, bugged my phone, and tried to get him to tell me what happened.

Speaker 57 She must have been so nervous, by the way.

Speaker 67 She was terrified. It was probably one of the hardest things she's ever had to do.

Speaker 9 Ralph, hey, this is Shannon.

Speaker 2 But Shannon did it.

Speaker 9 I've been waking up having panic attacks. I just, I can't deal with this.
I want to know what happened.

Speaker 9 Can you tell me anything?

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 70 The only thing, you know, that I know is that a lot of stuff was stolen from the house.

Speaker 30 Okay.

Speaker 45 Ralph stuck to a story.

Speaker 33 A deadly home invasion.

Speaker 70 And then I found her.

Speaker 39 Yeah. And that's, you know.

Speaker 39 Yeah.

Speaker 70 And I try to do it bad.

Speaker 57 Shannon pressed Ralph for details.

Speaker 70 The one guy that hit me that I saw from the front was taller than me. Okay.

Speaker 70 He had a dark complexion. You know, he had marks on his face.

Speaker 36 And then something that didn't sound quite right.

Speaker 70 And I don't know. And that's...
And it just saw him for like a split second.

Speaker 15 A split second?

Speaker 17 Remember, in his letter, Ralph said his captors held him and abused him for nearly two days.

Speaker 9 In my mind, I.

Speaker 9 If you're not going to tell me what happened, and you're going to dance around the issue and tell three different stories,

Speaker 9 what are you hiding?

Speaker 41 Investigators wondering the same thing tried to find answers in the evidence.

Speaker 36 On a laptop, they found hits for Match.com just days before the murder.

Speaker 57 So somebody had been visiting the site at least.

Speaker 67 That would have been our suspicion.

Speaker 59 It's going to be either Pam or Ralph.

Speaker 39 Right.

Speaker 62 And then they found Ralph's real-life mistress.

Speaker 53 Yes, he had one.

Speaker 41 And she said they carried on from most of the time he was married to Pam.

Speaker 21 So now, Shannon thought back to the last time she saw her mother.

Speaker 9 Because I asked her if she was happy.

Speaker 45 So what'd she say?

Speaker 26 She

Speaker 9 realized that she had given up her family because she had destroyed this relationship with me and Kelsey.

Speaker 9 And she's gotten into this new marriage telling me that she just wasn't as happy as she should have been.

Speaker 2 Lots of circumstantial evidence.

Speaker 30 Almost enough. Not quite.

Speaker 34 And then the antique rugs.

Speaker 67 I was searching the kitchen area and found in the washing machine two small size rugs. And the rugs were still very wet and they were balled up to one side.

Speaker 61 But when Ralph saw the rugs during a walkthrough with the police, he didn't seem to recognize them.

Speaker 70 Man, I've never

Speaker 19 seen these rugs.

Speaker 67 The minute we heard he'd never seen them, we knew the rugs had importance. We just didn't know how.

Speaker 28 They sent the rugs to the lab.

Speaker 29 And months later, they heard back.

Speaker 57 What did you find when you tested them?

Speaker 23 Pam's blood was found on the the rugs.

Speaker 50 They had caught Ralph in an obvious lie.

Speaker 43 He must have put those rugs into the machine himself, hoping to wash away the evidence.

Speaker 33 Finally, they had enough. Almost nine months after Pam's death,

Speaker 40 officers went to the antique store with an arrest warrant.

Speaker 23 That's when we learned that he decided to go on vacation.

Speaker 7 Ralph Candelario was gone.

Speaker 1 Coming up,

Speaker 10 a manhunt for a suspected killer by cell phone.

Speaker 23 I initiated some phone calls with Ralph so that we can try to track him down.

Speaker 7 But would he answer?

Speaker 61 It took nine months of painstaking police work.

Speaker 40 before investigators finally had enough evidence to arrest Ralph Candelario for the murder of his wife Pam.

Speaker 53 But they'd have to find him first.

Speaker 54 Ralph was on vacation or maybe on the run.

Speaker 23 I initiated some phone calls with Ralph so that we can try to track him down.

Speaker 40 They tracked his cell phone and caught up with him.

Speaker 2 Where he's doing

Speaker 33 in Northern California. Walk back to the side of you boys.
Back to me.

Speaker 55 You all right?

Speaker 40 Yeah.

Speaker 45 Charged him with first-degree murder.

Speaker 3 Pam's daughters were relieved when they got the news.

Speaker 9 All I could think to myself was finally.

Speaker 15 What was that like?

Speaker 9 It was like, yay, and they were like, oh my God, this is reality all over again. It's starting.

Speaker 13 Meaning, of course, reliving the crime at the trial.

Speaker 9 I'm Ancy. I'm Iger.

Speaker 59 You want to go and testify?

Speaker 9 I want this to be over.

Speaker 9 And I know that I need to cope with whatever answer comes.

Speaker 33 You're opening.

Speaker 23 Yes, Roger.

Speaker 54 Then, here it was, February 25th, 2016.

Speaker 17 Already, Ralph had managed a victory, had tied prosecutor Ryan Brackley's hands, in one way, anyway.

Speaker 75 Well, we tried to tell the entire story about Ralph Candelerio and Ralph Candelario's life.

Speaker 13 In other words, the very suspicious disappearance of Dina, the first wife, whose body has never been found.

Speaker 39 But.

Speaker 75 Ultimately, the judge denied that motion, and we went to trial without that piece.

Speaker 56 You've already heard about the prosecution's evidence, Ralph's open letter to the Wirfino World Journal, which said prosecutor Matt Durkin had been exposed as an elaborate lie.

Speaker 64 That letter was

Speaker 64 in itself a very sensational story,

Speaker 64 but it was inconsistent with all of the physical evidence in the investigation that had

Speaker 64 occurred to that point,

Speaker 44 which the prosecution listed in detail for the jury to hear.

Speaker 43 But there's always more than one side to a story.

Speaker 13 Defense attorney Dariel Weaver told the jury that when she read carefully through all the prosecution material, here's what jumped right out at her.

Speaker 14 When you take a good, hard look at their evidence,

Speaker 14 when you see that they've interpreted the evidence to fit the conclusion that they drew in the first 12 hours of this case,

Speaker 14 you see that all it is is assumptions and suppositions and cut corners.

Speaker 20 But, said the defense, if the jury looked at facts and not assumptions, they'd see that Ralph's story about what happened to Pam had to be true.

Speaker 56 Remember those two men fingered as possible killers? They had records, drug offenses, burglaries.

Speaker 14 She walks in on a burglary.

Speaker 14 Burglaries aren't uncommon in Walsenberg, especially with all the drugs around.

Speaker 42 Then, said the defense, one of the bad guys saw Pam and...

Speaker 14 He hits Pam in the head hard.

Speaker 14 He's standing there in the kitchen, fire poker in his hand, wondering what to do.

Speaker 33 The robbers must have thought Pam and Ralph had already left on vacation.

Speaker 14 This family was supposed to be gone. That was the talk around town.

Speaker 47 So for the jury, it came down to whose story to believe.

Speaker 17 Prosecutors said the police cleared those suspects right back at the beginning,

Speaker 34 but nothing could clear Ralph.

Speaker 36 and nothing could soften a truly shocking allegation.

Speaker 6 Ralph murdered Pam because divorce would get him disfellowship, cast out from his church.

Speaker 64 Pam wasn't leaving, and so he had only one option left.

Speaker 63 If he became a widower, he'd be free to marry again.

Speaker 50 It was, said the prosecutors, one of the more disturbing motives for murder they'd ever heard.

Speaker 45 So his religious beliefs were more important than somebody else's life.

Speaker 75 Ralph Candelerio's life was more important than anyone else's life.

Speaker 50 So the jury got the case and they worked till the end of the day and then through a second and then a third.

Speaker 15 Tick-tock.

Speaker 9 Whether they convict him or they don't is going to be a different set of emotions.

Speaker 29 And then in the middle of the third day.

Speaker 60 We, the jury, find the defendant Ralph Leroy Candelerio guilty of count number one, first-degree murder.

Speaker 52 Guilty.

Speaker 2 But the end of Ralph's story?

Speaker 39 Oh no.

Speaker 36 On the day set aside for his sentencing, Ralph decided the plot needed one more twist.

Speaker 45 The jail issued him a safety razor to clean up for court.

Speaker 36 Ralph used it to slash his wrists and throat.

Speaker 2 His own son was not sympathetic.

Speaker 27 Well, you know, the suckers, you know,

Speaker 27 could rather go out than actually face his destiny that way.

Speaker 36 Suicide attempt, delaying tactic?

Speaker 28 Whatever it was, it didn't work.

Speaker 3 A day later, the judge ordered Ralph back to court.

Speaker 60 People versus Ralph Lee, Candelario sentencing.

Speaker 55 And Ralph, bandaged up, got another day in the spotlight.

Speaker 31 Your Honor, I've maintained that I've been innocent through this whole process.

Speaker 37 And then...

Speaker 34 A keen observer might almost have heard the jaws drop around the courtroom.

Speaker 76 Pam will be resurrected. We will be able to see her again.
We will be able to watch her laugh and sing and do all the things that made her such a special person.

Speaker 76 And in that regard, I put my hope in that future. But until then, I am going to file an appeal for this particular motion.

Speaker 36 For now, his future is life without the possibility of parole.

Speaker 67 I had never had a weight so heavy lifted.

Speaker 67 It was

Speaker 67 wonderful.

Speaker 31 I gotta say, by the way, don't want to embarrass you, but I have found that investigators of

Speaker 31 homicides are the biggest softies on the planet.

Speaker 67 We're not supposed to let that out, but once it's supposed to care as much as you do, but you really do.

Speaker 23 You become very attached.

Speaker 67 Those girls are special. Pam had a part in that.
And they're

Speaker 67 hopefully they'll be able to live on her legacy.

Speaker 37 And Ralph's legacy?

Speaker 36 Because of him, Aaron will go on searching, hoping to learn what happened to his mother.

Speaker 27 Yeah, I will be looking. Probably, you know, in some way, my entire life, I'll always be asking questions.

Speaker 36 And Shannon.

Speaker 9 He needs to realize this isn't over. He didn't just murder someone and have nothing afterwards.
He left behind family. He left behind a disaster.

Speaker 9 And if I'm the only thing to remind him of that, then that's what I'm there for.

Speaker 10 That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.
Thanks for joining us.

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