and Bruce was deer hunting. She said that Bruce was looking forward to the hunt and wanted to get a bigger buck than the big twenty-nine inch buck she had once shot. Clearly agitated, the woman talked on and on. She said Bruce insisted that it was love at first sight when they met.” Janice had also told Larry that she refused to live with Bruce before they were married because she was old fashioned. She referred to Bruce as her “little honey bunny.”
Larry, obviously drained by his own ordeal, continued telling his story to Deputy Patrick. “As we waited for help, Janice straightened out Bruce’s glasses and wiped some dirt from his face. She covered him with a down vest that had been lying by the body. She removed her gray sweatshirt and put it over Bruce. After a while, Fred returned with the truck and Janice suggested that they put Bruce into the truck to try to find help.” Knowing that nothing could be done, Larry discouraged this idea. Nevertheless, Janice still seemed to feel Bruce was unconscious but not gone. She took a multicolored blanket from the truck and spread it over Bruce’s body.
= chapter 2 =
The original 911 call about Bruce’s death had gone to a dispatcher in Delta County who spent a considerable amount of time trying to determine which county sheriff’s department had jurisdiction. The death occurred on the Uncompahgre Plateau in the Uncompahgre National Forest. Uncompahgre, pronounced “Un-come-pah-gray,” is a Ute Indian word meaning “Dirty Water.” The place is located at one of the farthest southern reaches of my jurisdiction and just a few miles from the Delta and Montrose County lines. The Uncompahgre River flows from the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado as mineral-laden waters from myriad small streams draining old mining districts and odoriferous, sulfur-rich hot springs water from near the town of Ouray. It is a beautiful, remote location at an elevation of 9,000 feet on the slopes of Snipe Mountain and is in an area with good-sized herds of deer and elk.
To reach the scene from Grand Junction, one travels about forty minutes on paved roads before turning onto a dirt service road that pretty much bisects the plateau, called Divide Road. One then climbs tight switchbacks for several miles before topping out on the plateau, a rolling landscape of mountains, creeks and canyons where ranchers run cattle from spring to fall. It is populated by a wide array of flora, with meadow grass, sagebrush, gambel oak, pinion, juniper and trees like ponderosa pine, aspen and spruce. It is peaceful and bucolic—at least most of the time.
The shooting had occurred just after sunrise on Sunday, the second day of the hunting season. At 12:45 P.M., Investigator Nick Armand, a twenty-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Department and an officer with considerable crime scene experience arrived on the scene. Armand is a big red-haired man who carries his considerable excess weight effortlessly. He has a gentle manner which is disarming. He quickly scanned the area to get his bearings and to take note of whom and what was present. The rolling terrain was dotted intermittently with sagebrush, mountain mahogany, serviceberry, and other low shrubbery surrounding patches of gambel oak and larger open grassy meadows. Spruce trees grew in the higher areas and north facing slopes. By this time of the day, the mostly sunny sky had taken the chill out of the air. It was unseasonably warm for mid-October, probably reaching fifty degrees and feeling even warmer in the sunshine. Looking around, Armand noticed a sheriff’s department Jeep along with an older Ford Bronco and an even older Volkswagen camper. He also saw several hunters in the area, including a woman. Deputy Patrick, who had arrived first, provided Investigator Armand with what information he had obtained to that point, including the fact that the female hunter was the wife of the victim. He also directed Armand to the location of the body. As he approached the dead man, Investigator Armand continued writing down his observations, which he would later put into report form and detail in several diagrams. One thing which caught his eye was the presence of three fired rifle casings on the ground two and a half feet from the victim’s right elbow.
A foot further in the same direction was a bolt-action hunting rifle with the bolt open. Eight inches beyond the rifle was a blaze orange hunting vest. Close to that was a blaze orange baseball-style cap. Colorado law requires all big game hunters to wear five-hundred square inches of blaze orange outer-clothing, including a blaze orange hat, at all times while hunting as a safety measure. The body lay about twenty feet from a barbed wire fence composed of weathered old cedar fence posts and four strands of rusty wire. One post, approximately twenty feet from the body, had what appeared to be a bullet hole a few inches from the top. Special Agent Dan Michaels with the Forest Service discovered this as he was examining the crime scene. What appeared to be the bullet’s exit hole faced the body and several fresh wood splinters were blown out in the same direction.
At this point, Investigator Armand was rapidly excluding in his mind the possibility of an accidentally self-inflicted gunshot. An accidental stray shot was still an option. Looking through the hole in the fence post away from the location of the body, Armand could see a patch of oak at the edge of a rise around fifty yards to the northwest.
After he examined, recorded and photographed the scene immediately around the body, Armand “strung” the apparent bullet path. Using a fluorescent orange plastic string, with the help of Special Agent Michaels and other officers who had arrived, Armand ran the string from the location of the body, through the hole in the fence post, and back to an area in the oak brush in line with the probable path of the bullet. It led to a spot just at the peak of the rise. If this wasn’t an accident, he thought, it would be a perfect spot for a sniper to remain concealed, while still having a broad view of the trail on which the victim had been walking that morning. Although Armand, Michaels, and Deputy Patrick searched that area for evidence, they found none. Armand took some additional photographs and made measurements that he later used in preparing a crime scene drawing.
By the time he was done with the preliminary processing of the death scene, it was 3:45 P.M. and it was growing chillier. He went up the hill to the hunting camps and introduced himself to the dead man’s wife. “I’m Nick Armand, an investigator with the Mesa County Sheriff’s Department,” he said. “Please accept my sympathy in the death of your husband.”
With a startled look, the woman replied, “No. He’s not dead.”
Not wanting to further alarm her as she appeared distraught, he didn’t argue. Instead, Investigator Armand gently asked her name. She told him, “Janice, pronounced the French way: Janeece.” She provided her address in Cedaredge, Colorado. After obtaining this preliminary information, Armand told her, “I really need to ask some questions about your hunting trip, if that would be okay.”
She nodded and without waiting for his first question, said, “Bruce and I arrived at our campsite on Friday evening, October 13. I got up around 5:00 A.M. this morning, lit a fire in the stove in the camper and made Bruce some coffee, since he is ‘cold blooded’ and always needs something hot in the morning. The day before I took him to a spot along the ridge and told him that was where he should sit in the morning.” The plan was that she would leave first and that he would leave about half an hour later. This would give Bruce time to get to his spot before first light and Janice would have time to get to the bottom of the draw from where she would drive the deer toward Bruce. Janice had an elk license and Bruce had a deer license. “We did the same thing the morning before. We were supposed to meet back at camp at 9:30 A.M.”
Janice continued on, telling the investigator that she arrived back at the camp around 8:30 to get a drink of water. While in camp, she noticed a hunter at a tent just sixty yards from her camp, at the edge of a clump of oak trees. “I went over and talked with him,” she said, “and learned that he and I are from the same part of East Texas.” According to Janice, she returned to her camp after that and checked the oil in the Bronco. When asked what rifle she carried that morning, Janice spoke almost in a whisper. “It is an Austrian-made .270-caliber Mauser. I unloaded it and put it in the back of
