People:
odd Indian man wandering in the road in the snow
hotel staff
woman who found blood in #210, Anna (Sheriff
took her home)
woman who found mess in #101, Molly
managers (2 different ones)
night shift desk clerk I talked to, Sarah, works 11PM-7AM
desk clerk who checked us in, ca. 7:30 PM
bellhop trying to soothe upset housekeeper
waitress
Sheriff Marcus Wilheim
Deputy Sheriff Sean (Shaun? Shawn?) ______?
Another local law enforcement officer we didn't meet;
off duty at the time
Hotel guests:
Monday late afternoon, Jan. 10, 2005.
Adam, Hazel and I were driving through a heavy snowstorm enroute to the village of Miner's Folly, about 15 miles from Aspen, in a rented Honda SUV (I assume it was a CRV?). Adam lost control of the vehicle, which slid off the road. However, due to the already poor driving conditions, we were not going very fast and no one was hurt. Shortly thereafter, the Subaru Forester we had been following backed up and a woman offered assistance. Using a shovel the woman had, I dug out around the SUV while Adam and the woman attached chains and got out cleats for the tires. Without too much trouble, the woman was able to pull the Honda back onto the road, with Adam at the wheel and me pushing. Hazel sat nearby and watched.
The woman identified herself as Katherine (Kathy) _____? She lived nearby and was familiar with the area, and offered to see us through to Miner's Folly. Having more confidence in the driving skills of this new arrival, Hazel jumped into Kathy's car. At Adam's insistence, I joined them. So the Subaru headed off through the snowdrifts, with the Honda following.
It was slow and tedious, with visibility barely beyond the end of the hood. Hazel chatted about her work and pressed Kathy with questions, to which Kathy replied tersely that she needed to concentrate on keeping the car on the road. We plodded a few more miles down the highway, then took the turnoff to Miner's Folly, an even narrower road. Coming around a sharp curve we collided with a man in the middle of the road. He was walking through the snow, apparently oblivious to the storm or the traffic. Though we were not going fast, the collision knocked him down. I jumped out of the car and ran to him, but he apparently was alright; he was already getting up on his own.
He appeared to be a Native American man, long black hair, patchy clothes, a deerskin over his shoulders. I didn't smell any alcohol on him, but he may have been tripped out on something. He refused all offers of assistance, pushed me away, and headed off the road into the darkening woods. I decided there wasn't much I could do for the man, short of tackling him, so we let him go.
Eventually, about 7:00, we made it to the Clearwater Hotel on the edge of the small mining town ominously named Miner's Folly. The snow was still coming down hard. The three of us checked in, and we got Kathy a room for the night too, since the roads were so bad she decided to spend the night. It was the least we could do, considering we probably wouldn't have made it that far without her help. Kathy used the front desk phone to call the local police to report the man we'd run into in the road.
Adam and I went to our room, Hazel went to her room, and we freshened up after a long day of skiing and a tense drive. We regrouped in the hotel restaurant and Kathy joined us. A woman at the bar was complaining loudly to anyone who would listen about how her vacation was ruined, with this storm and all. We took a table as far from her as possible. Dinner conversation drifted around Hazel's plying Kathy with questions about her job, Hazel's enthusiastic descriptions of gravesites and dirt, Adam and I supplying a few details about ourselves, and Kathy wondering how the three of us knew each other.
After dinner Kathy returned to her room and Hazel came to Adam's and my room to play cards and watch TV for a bit. We may have been tired from a day of skiing, but the tense anxiety of several hours of driving through snowdrifts on mountain roads had us keyed up and none of us was particularly eager to retire for the night.
As we played cards we became aware of a noise nearby, something like a shutter banging in the wind perhaps. Except this hotel didn't have shutters. It seemed to be coming from next door. Finally Hazel opened the window and peered out into the snow, still falling furiously, and let a whole lot more snow into the room. It appeared the window of the next-door room was broken, hanging down, and flopping in the wind. Hazel was for going next door and checking, but Adam and I talked her out of it. Instead, I dialed the reception desk and let them know. They said they'd send someone up to check.
Feeling we'd done our duty, we returned to our card game. A few minutes later, about 9:30, we heard a scream from next door. Adam and I raced for the door and out into the hallway. A maid had opened the door next to ours, the door to room 210, screamed, and fled back down the hall. Adam ran after her. I cautiously approached the still-open door.
The room was splattered with blood, with a dark pool on the carpet under a chair in the corner. The chair had remnants of rope on it, as if someone had been tied to it, and one of the bottom rungs of the chair was broken. Whoever had sat in that chair had done a great deal of bleeding, both onto the carpet and spraying the walls. But there was no body. The window was broken outward, with the frame still clinging by a hinge and banging in the wind. A great deal of snow was blowing in as well. The blood on the walls seemed to be mostly dry, the soaked carpet appeared still damp. I estimated 1-3 hours had passed since whatever it was had happened. The room did not appear to have been searched.
I retreated from the room in time to pull the door shut and prevent anyone else from peeking in and seeing the scene. Hazel and Kathy had come out into the hall by this time. I told someone to call 911, but we found that the phone in our room was dead. Adam tried his cell phone but could get no signal. The phones in Hazel's and Kathy's rooms were also dead.
I stayed outside the room to make sure no one else tried to touch the door or go inside, while Adam went downstairs and tried calling the police. The phones were out in the whole building. Someone made the short trip into town to get the sheriff. I wanted to go outside and look for tracks before any were obliterated by the snow; Kathy offered to stand guard outside the room. First I ducked into our room to get my bullet-proof vest and 9mm.
Borrowing a flashlight from the front desk, I tramped out into the snow and around to the back of the hotel. There was no sign of any tracks, but anything over an hour or so old would have been buried or blown away. The drifts were three and four feet deep in places, the ground swept nearly clean in others. The hotel was built on the edge of a deep ravine, which ran along the back of the hotel and disappeared in shadow. A wooden fence marked the edge of the ten or fifteen feet of no-man's-land between the hotel and the drop-off. Room 210 was at the near end of one wing of the hotel, so I didn't have far to go. I found the broken glass in the snow, a large shard perched upright in a drift directly below the window, and many smaller fragments rapidly being buried. No tracks, but I found some drops of blood on the fence. Beyond the fence, the ravine disappeared into inky blackness and swirling flakes. It looked for all the world like whoever had been in the room had not only jumped through the (closed) window, but had somehow managed to clear the fence too, diving right into the ravine. Mystified, not to mention cold, I went back inside.
As a homicide detective in Chicago, I'm familiar with the way crime scenes are handled in the big city. We didn't definitively have a homicide here, so I could understand the medical examiner not coming, but I guess I was expecting at least two or three officers and a battalion of crime lab technicians with all their equipment, crime scene tape, photographer, and so on. I was a little surprised when the local sheriff and his deputy showed up, and that was it. They did the dusting for prints and the photography themselves. When I asked if they had a K-9 unit for searching the ravine, the sheriff looked at me as if I had suggested he fly his private helicopter down there. He patiently explained this was a small town, and they were pretty much the whole operation.
With my identification, however, at least they didn't throw me out of the room right away. I watched over his shoulder as the sheriff pulled a suitcase out from under the bed. It had a small lock on the zipper, which was easily dispatched. Inside was a briefcase, locked with a more heavy-duty lock, and clothes looking like a man on a business trip. The deputy returned from talking with the manager and reported that the room was registered to one Damien Carson. Carson had checked in the previous night (Sunday) about 7:00. This evening, he had been seen at dinner in the restaurant and was believed to have returned to his room afterwards, though when this was, was uncertain.
I gave the sheriff one of my cards, including my cell phone number (though that didn't seem to be working out here), and left them to do their thing. I wandered downstairs and found that in the meantime, Adam had had us moved to different rooms. He and Hazel were discussing the meager video options the hotel had to offer. Hazel suggested something with John Candy, so Adam suggested "Planes, Trains, & Automobiles," to which I replied, "You want to watch a movie about people who are trying to get somewhere and keep getting stuck?" We decided on "Ghostbusters."
I had to have been past midnight when we finally all went to sleep. Hazel was still freaked and asked to sleep in our room on the floor.
Tuesday, Jan. 11
I should have slept like a rock, given yesterday's events, but I woke up at 5 in the morning. My mind was mulling the possibilities of a wounded person taking a flying leap from a second-floor window and clearing a fence ten feet away. And about the local police. If they didn't even have a K-9 unit or a crime scene team, how much forensic evidence would those two guys be able to gather? And how long would it take for it to be processed? I got up and made coffee in the room, showered, and wandered downstairs.
It was still dark outside. I stopped at the front desk to chat with the receptionist (Sarah). I asked if it had stopped snowing and she said Yeah, it had stopped finally around 3 AM.
Kathy came down fairly early as well, and we had breakfast in the restaurant together. I had asked the receptionist for a local area map, but it didn't go into the detail I was looking for. Kathy went and got a topographical map from her car. I was wondering about the ravine behind the hotel, where it led and how far it went. It had been impossible to tell anything the night before. Kathy said she intended to leave that morning, to try and get home. I gave her one of my cards and she gave me her cell phone number in case we (or the sheriff) needed to reach her. A short time later she came back, having discovered that the roads were still impassable.
An hour or so later, Adam and Hazel joined us in the restaurant. I was trying to eavesdrop on nearby conversations to see if I could pick up any talk of the odd discovery in #210, but I didn't get much, and Adam's and Hazel's discussion about something random drowned out most of it anyway.
Then around 10:00 we heard some kind of commotion down the first-floor corridor. I got up to investigate (I think Kathy did too?). We found a housecleaning woman in hysterics, crumpled on the floor in the hallway. Several other employees were trying to comfort her. A manager hovered nearby trying to shoo people away. The woman was babbling incoherently, but she obviously had had a horrible shock. I tried to ask the manager what had happened, but he just kept saying Please go back to the restaurant and we need to wait til the police get here. The phones were still out, but someone had gone to fetch the sheriff, apparently. At the end of the hall, a door stood open slightly. I started toward it. The manager again told me we needed to wait for the police, whereupon I flashed my badge and said "I AM the police. Now what's going on?" He took my badge and studied it, then backed down and sort of nodded toward the door at the end of the hall. I told him to keep everyone else away, and went to check it out.
It was bad, worse in fact than anything I've seen working Homicide in Chicago. The mess in the room last night was nothing compared to this. It smelled of blood and death, and looked more like a butcher shop than a hotel room. I felt sick to my stomach, but took a few steps into the room anyway.
The first thing I saw, aside from indiscriminate blood everywhere, was some kind of internal organ. It might have been part of the digestive system; I'm not that good with internal anatomy, especially when it is somewhere it's not supposed to be. Most of the carcass was near the window, which was smashed inward. Under the bed was the woman's head. It was the loud blonde from the bar last night. The rest of her was scattered about the room, and much of it looked as if it had been GNAWED on.
"Ray?" someone called my name out in the hallway. I quickly retreated from the room and pulled the door shut. It was Kathy. "The woman's name is Dr. Cynthia Carmichael," she said. She had apparently gotten a little more information from the manager. Then, seeing the ashen look on my face, she asked, "Is she dead?" I swallowed and nodded. "Yeah." I was trying to think. Finally said, "Well, she's not going anywhere. I'm going to have a look outside."
The only thing better about this morning than last night was that I didn't need a flashlight this time. I found plenty of tracks this time. They were large, bigger than any man's foot I'd ever seen, and they were definitely not boot tracks. I almost thought they looked like bear tracks--kind of. Not really. They went along the fence at the back of the hotel, stopping outside #101. The tracks milled around outside the window some, as if whatever it was had stood outside and looked in for a while, but the tracks didn't go up to any of the other windows. Then it looked as though the creature had backed up and taken a running leap at the window. After tearing apart Dr. Carmichael it had apparently gone back out the way it came, as there was another set of tracks going back the direction it had come from. The desk clerk had said it had stopped snowing around 3 in the morning. These tracks looked like they had been made after the snow had stopped.
I went back inside to wait for the sheriff to arrive. Adam was talking to people in the restaurant. When the sheriff arrived (by himself this time), I told him what I knew, and mentioned the tracks. The only suggestion I could think of was possibly bear. But since when does a bear jump through a hotel window to attack someone? Even I know that's unusual. After checking out the room, Sheriff Wilheim went outside with me to inspect the tracks. He said they looked too long to be bear tracks. So what is it, Bigfoot? I kept that thought to myself.
I rejoined Adam in the restaurant, feeling shaky. Kathy recommended evacuating the hotel, which was not a bad idea. But the sheriff pointed out that the roads weren't clear yet and where could they put all these people anyway? Aspen was a good 10-15 miles away through the mountains. I wondered how, with his miniscule team, the sheriff was going to get a medical examiner in here to analyze the crime scene (is it even a crime scene if it's a wild animal attack?), and I wondered, if any technicians were able to take a look at this scene, what microscopic information they would find. What was that thing? Would any of Dr. Carmichael be missing?
Back to Journals Next Entry (2)
[Home] [Introduction] [Characters] [Rules] [Tidbits]