And Then She Killed Him (18 page)

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Authors: Robert Scott

Tags: #Romance, #True Crime, #General

BOOK: And Then She Killed Him
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C
HAPTER 28
A W
OMAN
P
OSING AS
S
HARON
Even after the arrest of Miriam Helmick, the investigation against her did not cease. Investigator Jim Hebenstreit noted that he and FDLE agent Larry Perez learned that Miriam Helmick had been using identification with the name of Sharon Helmick, Alan’s first wife. Searching this name at pawnshops around the Jacksonville area, Perez discovered a person claiming to be “Sharon Helmick” had pawned a necklace at Value Pawn and Jewelry on November 29, 2008. Of course, this was impossible, since Sharon Helmick had been dead for many years by then. It had to have been Miriam Helmick, using Sharon’s name.
Hebenstreit and Agent Perez went to the pawnshop on Atlantic Boulevard in Jacksonville, and a transaction slip there showed a woman who had identified herself as Sharon Helmick, using a Florida driver’s license. She had received $35 for a ten-karat necklace.
Looking more closely at the driver’s license, Agent Perez said the numbers were not consistent with Florida driver’s licenses. It had to be a fake. Later, Hebenstreit and Perez looked at surveillance video of the transaction. The woman purporting to be Sharon was actually Miriam.
The next day, Hebenstreit went with Florida agent Greg Holycross to A&B Marketing, which was a distributor of RainSoft water-conditioning products. Miriam had been working at A&B Marketing after leaving Colorado, but she was passing herself off as Sharon Helmick. Once Hebenstreit and Holycross arrived at the office, general manager Jay Toblin said that he assumed they were there to talk about Sharon. According to Toblin, several employees had seen a story in the local newspapers about the person they had known as Sharon Helmick.
The files on “Sharon Helmick” at A&B Marketing included copies of a birth certificate and Colorado driver’s license. There was also a W-4 form, with the signature of Sharon Helmick. “Sharon” had written as her work history that from 1990 to 1999 she had been a receptionist/secretary for the East Slope Mortgage Company. As to why she had quit that job, she wrote:
My husband owned the business and passed away.
The application was dated September 8, 2008. The termination report at A&B Marketing was for November 21, 2008, and the reason was absenteeism/tardiness.
Investigator Hebenstreit spoke with Chris, Miriam’s son, about this business enterprise. According to Chris, he thought Miriam had quit her job with A&B Marketing because she was going to move to Orlando, Florida, to work as an assistant for the company’s owner, Michael Keck. Both Keck and Toblin said that was not true. In fact, they said that Miriam had not done a good job while she was employed with them at A&B Marketing. They certainly weren’t going to hire her as an assistant in Orlando.
Asked by Investigator Hebenstreit if Miriam had made any friends while working at the company, Keck and Toblin said that she had often talked with a woman named Pamela Miller while on her breaks.
Meanwhile, Sergeant Henry Stoffel talked with Aline Lee, Miriam’s next-door neighbor in Florida. Lee had plenty to say about Miriam. Later, Lee recalled, “Miriam was my neighbor back in 1988 when she was married to Jack Giles. She moved and I didn’t see her again until August 2008. She called me out of the blue. I knew her son, Chris, and attended the same church he did. When Miriam came back, we met at a Chili’s restaurant in Jacksonville.
“She told me about her husband in Colorado being murdered, and she was a widow. And she told me about the dance studio. She had moved out to Mississippi and she was in contact with someone there who set her up in a dance studio in Denver.” (Lee had misunderstood and thought Miriam was in Denver, not in Grand Junction.)
“She started telling me about what she was doing on the day her husband was murdered. She said she had gone shopping and he was supposed to meet her for lunch. She kept calling him and he didn’t show, so she decided to go home. And then she found him. She found him in the house. She said the house was all ransacked.
“She told me that when they were first married, how happy they were. A happy marriage. They did a lot of fun things together and had a lot in common. She said that at first she didn’t date him because she didn’t date students, but he pursued her. There were months before she agreed to go out on a date with him, and they just hit it off. They went sailing, liked horses, and they fell in love. She said he provided for her and took care of her. She was very, very happy. He lavished her with a nice, beautiful home and everything.
“One thing was strange when I met her at Chili’s. Her hair color was black, and she’d had brown hair like mine. I’d never seen it that dark before. She just didn’t look the same. She had lost a lot of weight. But it was mainly her hair color that stuck out.
“While at Chili’s, I asked her point-blank if she had killed him. She said that she hadn’t and there was a prenup. Then she said that he’d been shot by a robber. She cried. Not hysterically, but she cried. She said she loved him. I thought it was all kind of strange telling me there at Chili’s, but she acted like a grieving widow.
“She said that she was not allowed to live in the house after the murder. She said that the locks had been changed and the police wouldn’t let her live in the house.” (That, of course, was not true.) “Alan’s children had changed the locks. That’s what she said. She said she had been living out of her car until she got to Florida. She hadn’t even been able to get any of her personal belongings out of the house. Her papers, birth certificate, or purse.
“She said that she had a driver’s license and it was of Alan’s previous wife. I told her, ‘Miriam, you can’t do that! You need to get your own driver’s license.’ But she said she couldn’t because it was kept by the police. So I asked her, ‘Were you a suspect and not supposed to leave?’ And she said no. Later, at some other time, she said that she got a Georgia driver’s license. She said that she didn’t have to use a birth certificate there.
“Beforehand, she did say that she had a driver’s license from someone who had her weight and hair color.” (Actually, it was Sharon Helmick’s driver’s license. And that may have been why Miriam dyed her hair black upon returning to Florida.)
“Miriam said that Alan had given her a wad of money, so she had a little of that. Later I gave her money. I wrote her a check for a hundred dollars. The check was made to Chris, her son, because she had no way of cashing it. She said that the car she was driving was a gift from Alan, and that was one of the only things she had left from him.
“Miriam said that one of the daughters was causing trouble for her. They didn’t get along. The daughter’s name was like a car—Porsche.” (The name was actually Portia, easily mistaken as the auto name by Aline.) “There was some kind of holdup with Alan’s estate, and she was trying to get what belonged to her. She said that they (Portia and law enforcement) could reach her through her lawyer, and so forth. She did say that she was eventually cleared by the authorities in Colorado.”
One thing that Aline thought was odd was that Miriam used a disposable cell phone. Aline recounted, “It was like a prepaid thing. It couldn’t be traced. And I told her, ‘Well, if they (Alan’s daughters and law enforcement) tried to get ahold of you, how could they do it?’ And she said that they knew she was in Florida and could contact her at her son’s house. And she said she was also in contact with her lawyer.”
As far as Miriam keeping up with the murder case, Aline related, “Miriam said she tried, but she couldn’t get through to the authorities. That sounded odd to me.”
And about Alan and his business practices, Aline recalled, “Miriam described him as an unusual businessman that didn’t keep good records. She did talk about how rich he was. It was over a million dollars. But he was sick the last few months of his life. Miriam came here with just the clothes she wore. And she needed good clothes because of the job she was doing in Florida. A water softener–type thing.
“She was the size of my daughters, so I took her two big bags of clothing from them. I took ’em to Chris’s house, where she was staying. And it was at that time that she was on a computer at the house. She started talking about being online with a dating service. I thought it was kind of strange, but she showed me the Web site. It was to meet someone online.
“She said she wanted a sexual partner, someone to have fun with. She said she needed a sugar daddy. She also said that she was horny and needed some sexual satisfaction and to be taken care of. She needed to let her hair down. Her exact words were that she was as ‘horny as hell.’”
Aline said that Miriam showed her the ads that she was looking at. Aline observed, “She didn’t have anything in common with some, and others didn’t have enough money. She wanted one with lots of money. A high income. She showed me one man from Orlando. His name was Kilpatrick.” (Obviously, Aline was referencing Kirkpatrick.) “He liked horses, was a dancer, and had lots of money. He even owned a dance studio.
“She was excited about going and meeting him, but kind of nervous, too. I was very nervous for her because I didn’t really think she should go there, because it’s kind of scary the way the world is now. She had never met him in person, and she was going down there. To her son, she said she was going for a job interview. A personal assistant–type job.
“And I talked to her on the phone when she was actually at the restaurant with this man. He went to the bathroom, and Miriam told me that everything was great. He was awesome. He was a gentleman and everything was wonderful.
“I even talked to her on the phone a day later. To make sure she was all right. She was at his place, and said everything was fine. She said he was everything she dreamed of. She was very impressed with him.”
 
Jim Hebenstreit did more investigation on Miriam Helmick while he was in Florida. Hebenstreit discovered that Miriam had the cell phone number of a man named Chuck. Hebenstreit contacted Chuck and asked if he knew a woman from Colorado who had run a dance studio and had a horse training center. The name Miriam didn’t mean anything to Chuck, but the description of a dark-haired woman, answering to the name Sharon, did. She had contacted him on a Web site titled MillionaireMatch.com. In fact, “Chuck” was Charles Kirkpatrick.
Chuck said that he had met “Sharon,” and she had even stayed at his apartment for a couple of days in December 2008. Chuck said that she made it clear that she was very interested in starting a relationship with him and wanted to relocate to Orlando. “She was pretty aggressive about this move, and that was a turnoff to me,” Chuck said.
Hebenstreit asked if Sharon had mentioned a husband dying in Colorado. Chuck said that she had mentioned something about it. And Chuck could not remember Sharon ever telling him her last name. Asked about his financial situation, Chuck said that he was a business owner and had sold two companies in the previous year. One of the businesses he sold was an Arthur Murray dance studio, and he was well-off financially. After Sharon’s insistence about moving to Orlando, he’d had little contact with her. They had only exchanged e-mails from that point forward.
The next day, Chuck phoned Investigator Hebenstreit and said he did remember on one occasion that Sharon told him that her husband had died. She told him that her spouse had died from a brain tumor. It was interesting to Hebenstreit that Sharon didn’t say her husband had died from a heart attack, cancer, or something else. According to her, he had died from something to do with his head—the exact place where Alan had been shot.
Hebenstreit asked if Sharon had said how long in the past it had been that her husband had died. According to Chuck, Sharon said it was about six months previously. That would have put it in the summer of 2008, the time when Alan had died. Chuck asked Sharon if it was okay with her that she was out dating so soon, since not that much time had passed since her husband had died. She told him it was okay, because her husband had been sick for a long time before dying.
Hebenstreit asked Chuck, “Did you and Sharon have intimate relations when she spent the night?”
Chuck replied, “Yes, we did.”
 
Meanwhile, back in Grand Junction, Colorado, Miriam and her defense lawyer, Steve Colvin, waived her right to a preliminary hearing within the next thirty days. And the local newspapers learned just exactly what the arrest warrant contained. One of the notations by an investigator was that even though Alan Helmick’s body was lying on the kitchen floor next to a .25-caliber shell casing and a wallet, the residence was not greatly disturbed. There were a few desk drawers opened in an adjoining room and an overturned wastebasket. But as the investigator wrote,
None of the drawers were on the floor and nothing else appeared disturbed.
To the investigator, it was not the usual burglary scene, where many rooms are usually ransacked.
Mesa County pathologist Dr. Robert Kurtzman had also stated an opinion on this matter. He had told the investigators, “We should proceed under the assumption that this was a homicide, based on the scene and condition of the body.” Kurtzman did not believe that it was a suicide.
The reporters were also able to track down an inconsistency in Miriam’s statements. She had told investigators that Alan had been too drunk, after coming home from the Elks Lodge in Delta, to speak on the phone to his daughter, Portia, on the evening before his murder. Bartenders at the Elks Lodge stated that Alan hadn’t been there in four or five months, and a toxicology report after Alan was deceased proved that there was no alcohol in his system.

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