Speaker 1: In a community where main street is only one block long,
with the population of barely one hundred, the folks of
the farming village of Colon, Nebraska have come to rely
on each other.
Speaker 2: That's just the way it is. People know each other
and help out who We're.
Speaker 3: Just good folks with good hearts.
Speaker 1: But on a late summer evening in two thousand and three,
that idyllic harmony is shattered when the shocking murder of
longtime resident Sharon Ericksson turns main street into a crime scene.
Speaker 4: There's a gang laying by her head in a pool
of blood.
Speaker 5: Someone had to get over that fence and cut the phone.
Speaker 4: Life everybody across the border.
Speaker 1: Shocks and questions of who the killer may be break
communal bonds.
Speaker 2: People started pointing figures at each other, saying.
Speaker 4: I bet he did it, or he did it.
Speaker 2: He did it.
Speaker 5: It's in the town of one hundred and forty or
less people. They're all suspects.
Speaker 4: It's hard to believe and accept. The killer probably was
somebody living next door.
Speaker 1: No locals who once looked out for each other looking suspiciously.
Speaker 6: Each other.
Speaker 7: On June thirtieth, two thousand and three, I was on patrol.
It's evening time in the middle of the summer, and
there's still plenty of sunlight. I received a call from
our dispatch center.
Speaker 1: N I need an ambulance.
Speaker 8: Okay, what's going on?
Speaker 9: And neighbor a lady in Colin was missing founder.
Speaker 3: And if she possibly did I guessn't hold that we
need the shar.
Speaker 4: It probably a mort.
Speaker 10: Or.
Speaker 7: Dispatch center indicated that somebody in Colwan had located a
deceased female and believed that she had committed suicide. And
she's in a garage along Main Street.
Speaker 4: Main Street is one block long. There's the bank in
the post office, and the restaurant and bar, but there
are houses there.
Speaker 7: I arrived at the scene, made contact with the volunteer
firefighters and the ladies from the bank that were standing there.
The bank employees got a call from Sharon's family member
saying that she had missed their.
Speaker 4: Five o'clock phone call.
Speaker 7: They had been asked to go over and check on
Sharon Erickson. The garage was open and I could see
the car inside along with the deceased female. She was
on the left side of the car with her head
near the front left tire.
Speaker 1: In a small town of Colon Karna Codin also happens
to be the local prosecutor.
Speaker 4: I meet with the deputy that was first on the scene.
He shows me where the body is. She was wearing
what appeared to be like clothes that she would be
sleeping in, just like a pajama outfit. There's a gun
that is laying just by her head, which is in
a pull of blood, and it appears that maybe it's
a self inflicted gunshot. She had a small purse, we
were guessing at that time maybe that's where she carried
her handgun.
Speaker 7: I did notice that Sharon's shorts were pulled down slightly
on one side and her tank top was pulled up
just a little bit, exposing her stomach, and also noticed
that there was a blood smear on a car.
Speaker 5: Sharon had been married, what was divorced, didn't have any children.
It looked like it could have been a suicide.
Speaker 4: We talked to everybody at the scene. We learned Sharon
had a very definitive routine. Every morning, about eight am,
she would go to the postmaster, Rick Hartman get her mail.
The post office list right next door to Sharon's residence.
She would talk to him for you know fifteen twenty minutes,
go over to the bank, check, chat with the ladies,
do her business, and then go about her day from there.
Speaker 5: Sharon and her relative communicated at least once a day,
generally at five o'clock. On the day her body was found,
her family member hadn't received a phone call and then
contacted the bank and asked the employees if they had
seen her, and when they hadn't seen her, then the
family member requested that they do a welfare check.
Speaker 4: The bank ladies contacted Rick Cartman, the postmaster, and asked
if he had seen her earlier that day. He said
he did not see her. So Rick Hartman actually had
a key to her place, so they went.
Speaker 5: To her home. Her house was unlocked, that was unusual.
There was an alarm going off.
Speaker 7: She had an alarm that went around a door handle
on the back door, and they've turned that off.
Speaker 4: They can't find her in her residence. Assurance's residence was
on one side of the street. Her garage where she
kept her car, was actually across the street. The postmaster
found the garage door opener, opened the garage door.
Speaker 8: And.
Speaker 4: Rick Cartman found her body laying next to her car
in her garage.
Speaker 1: Analyzing the tragic scene, something cutches the eye of investigate us.
Speaker 4: We walk around to the back of the car and
the deputy says that he's concerned because there's blood on
the back of the bumper. He couldn't explain why it
was there. We could never find a shell casing, but
we thought maybe it got tucked into her clothes and
we would find it at the autopsy.
Speaker 7: And then also found that there was no magazine in
the gun.
Speaker 4: In the evening, as the sun lord, it started shining
into the garage opening and at that point we noticed
that there was actually blood on the doorframe. Deputy Coglin
opened the door and then you could see on the
inside the doorframe that there was a noticeable amount of blood.
That totally changed the way we're looking at everything. We
both thought, Okay, somebody else had to have done that,
because she could not have shot herself and then struggled
with the door, shut the door and then put herself
in that position without blood being in a different spot.
At that point we realized it was not self inflicted
gunshot wound.
Speaker 6: This isn't a suicide, this is a murder.
Speaker 1: Now, investigators explore the scene with new eyes looking for
clues as to who could have done this, and outside
Sharon's garage, word spreads along Main Street.
Speaker 2: I was in the office when people came in said,
did you hear about Sharon? Sharon was found murdered.
Speaker 4: I went, what.
Speaker 2: Quiet little community that people always got along good. It's
scary and unbelievable.
Speaker 8: Oh, I couldn't believe that when the news came out.
Sharon lived on Main Street and I lived one block
off in our little community.
Speaker 4: You just don't even think of those things. It doesn't
happen in Colon.
Speaker 2: Well, the first thing comes to you when you're thinking
who could have done it? Well, anybody.
Speaker 6: Frightened by her murder.
Speaker 1: Colon's tight knit community wonders why anyone would kill someone
so well regarded as Sharon.
Speaker 5: I had a lot of interaction with her at the
Treasure's office. Sharon Erickson was very well known in Colon,
and she was well known in the county as she'd
worked for the County Treasure's office for over thirty years.
Speaker 2: Sharon Erickson had probably the highest standards of anybody that
worked at the courthouse. She was always dressed properly, very
cordial to people. My kids got to know Sharon mostly
when we'd go to a convention, because Sharon liked to swim.
Sharon jumped in the pool, and of course my kids
are in right with her.
Speaker 8: Sharon was bubbly. She always had positive things to say
about other people.
Speaker 2: This is a retirement party for Saron at the courthouse.
Everyone bought a dish and they had a cake. It
was just wow, can you believe Sharon just retired? And
so that was really sad.
Speaker 1: At Sharon's property, some investiga just keeps speaking with the
locals while others had to cross main street to begin
a suite of Sharon's home where she recently installed.
Speaker 6: I did protection.
Speaker 4: We found out that Sharon had just constructed a new
final fence within a few days of the crime happening.
Speaker 5: Friends of Sharon indicated that she was pretty paranoid. She
was concerned about her safety, the fact that she lived
alone and everybody in town knew she lived alone.
Speaker 4: Law enforcement, trying to figure out what happened at the house,
noticed that her phone mine was cut, so.
Speaker 5: Someone had to get over that fence, and then they
had to go there and cut the phone line. So
someone was somewhat familiar with either her and or her residence.
Inside of her home, you can see that it's neat,
but the back door had a prime mark on it.
Someone had tried to get into the house.
Speaker 7: Who did find one object that looked like maybe it
could have been used to pry the door open. It
was a cold chisel, a heavy metal object, kind of rusty,
that was laying on the floor.
Speaker 1: Moving into Sharon's bedroom, investigators uncover more telling clues.
Speaker 7: We don't find any signs of struggle, but we do
see that there's a empty holster that's sitting on a
table that looked like she might have been in bed
and might have taken the gun out of the holster
and left in a hurry.
Speaker 5: Because the phone line was cut, we were pretty certain
something happened in the home. First, we believed that the
clothes she had on, some small shorts, underwear and a
tank top, may have been bedtime calling. We assumed she
ran across to get into her garage because she needed
to escape because she couldn't call for help. Sharon didn't
keep a large amount of cash or any particular valuables
in her home. We discovered that there was cash in
her purse, so the assailan who was trying to get
into their home. It wasn't clear to us what they
were going in there.
Speaker 1: For Investigators look for ANSAs from Sharon's main Street friends
who found our buddy.
Speaker 4: Everybody that's there is a suspect, so we wanted to
talk to the bank ladies and the postmaster.
Speaker 7: I asked the different people involved to all write out
a statement as to what happened. Everybody who was very patient,
with the exception of the post master Rick Hartman. A
couple different times I had to ask him to step
back because he kept coming up close to the garage
or in the garage. Kind of started wondering why he
was inserting himself so much in the situation.
Speaker 5: The postmaster did.
Speaker 7: A complete one hundred and eighty degree flip. He got
angry and said to me, if you're gonna arrest me,
arrest me, but I'm leaving.
Speaker 6: Coming up.
Speaker 4: This is something that was personal.
Speaker 5: People said, you need to check further on where that
neighbor was, because this person's not telling you the truth.
Speaker 3: Sharon was not one to shy away from conflict.
Speaker 4: We started hearing rumors that the postmaster and Sharon were
more than friends.
Speaker 10: The killer among US mostly on Ncomming new series Somebody's
at Seven on Oxygen true crime.
Speaker 1: After sixty six year old retiree Sharon Erickson is found
dead in her main street garage in Cola, Nebraska, authorities
take note of the postmaster's bizarre actions at the scene.
Speaker 6: Is this something the postmaster is trying to conceal?
Speaker 4: Rick Hartman was the postmaster. His interaction stood out because
he was trying so much to inject himself into the scene.
So we talked with the postmaster.
Speaker 5: Mister Hartman was a postman for a number of years,
very friendly with Sharon at her house all the time.
He said when she would go on vacation or out
of town, he would watch her place. He had a
key to her place. But when you're interviewing somebody, their
body language, anything emotionally that's coming out, you're trying to
judge is this unusual or is it not unusual? And
his lined up on the unusual side. He was kind
of like, come on, what else do you have to
ask me?
Speaker 1: Detective's number one question is where was Rick when Sharon
was being murdered.
Speaker 5: The postmaster's alibi was that he was home. His wife
also came to the scene, and his wife confirmed that
you have to be aware of how valid the alibi is.
Does that person have anything to gain or lose by
giving you a bad information? Do you think they're hiding something?
Do you think they're lying about something? And mister Hartman's
relationship with Sharon, we weren't one hundred percent sure what
that was, so he was involved in her life. I
will say that.
Speaker 7: What we're trained is not just to necessarily react based
on what somebody says right then. So we made the
decision to go ahead and release everybody and we would
follow up later if we needed to.
Speaker 4: We had the transport come in, bagged the body, and
then just took it into the autopsy. We didn't finish
up with a scene till about five thirty or six
the next morning.
Speaker 6: The day after Sharon's body is discovered.
Speaker 1: Investigator's first look to establish a time frame in which
the murder must have occurred.
Speaker 4: We were in contact with her family. We learned that
the day prior to the murder, Sharon had met some
family for supper. She got on about five thirty, so
we knew the time frame was about five thirty in
the evening the day before and up to when she
missed her morning visit to the post office, probably eight
am the next day.
Speaker 9: Sharon was really good friends with her cousin in Lincoln, Nebraska,
and it was this cousin who actually dropped her off
at her home the evening before Sharon was murdered.
Speaker 1: I'm just speaking with the cousin who had nothing out
of the ordinary to note. Investigators then begin extensively compassing
the community of Main.
Speaker 5: Street, so we have the bank personnel, the postman, They're
all suspects until we can exclude them. We started out
going door to door asking them if they heard a
dog barking, if they saw a light somewhere, heard a noise,
anything that was out of the ordinary.
Speaker 4: Sharon had lived there a lot of years. The Mars
has lived in the back and kind of catty corner
from Sharon. She knew the Mars family. There were a
couple people in town that were oh, just nothing serious,
but would get in trouble, such as their son, James Mars.
Speaker 1: James Mars is twenty five years old and works as
a farm haunt in the area.
Speaker 5: When we talked to the family, James Mars was pretty
cooperative in answering questions. His mom was cooperative. The knight
of the homicide, mars said he had been drinking in
a bar and Wahoo and then said he went to
a friend's house and then went home. We talked to
that friend and he'd confirmed mars Alibi his mom was
up waiting for him and verified that he came home.
James mars Alibi checked out.
Speaker 6: As the main streets canvas cut his own.
Speaker 1: Investigators learned Sharon kept a sharp eye on her street
and her neighbors.
Speaker 3: Sharon was said not to be one that would shy
away from con flicked.
Speaker 5: Sharon would complain from time to time about people that
would stay up too late because she was on Main
Street and there was a bar across the road. Someone
would leave the bar radio would be allowed grab their
car up. But they were all pretty minor things that
just happened in a small community.
Speaker 1: However, investigators discover the one neighbor whom Sharon had a
deeper dislike for was the one closest to her new fence.
Speaker 4: We learned that Sharon had a argumentative, contentious relationship with
the trucker next door. They weren't the best of friends.
And then we heard it from other people that Sharon
really did.
Speaker 2: Not like him.
Speaker 10: The killer among us sost My islandcomming new series Somebody's
at Seven on Oxygen True.
Speaker 1: Crime, detectives learned Sharon Erickson had some run ins with
a trucker next door. Could this Man Street residence be
responsible for ending Sharon's life?
Speaker 4: Right next to Sharon's residence, there was a trucker that
had a shop. He would park his vehicles there do
a lot of work on his semi which is loud.
Speaker 5: The truck driver and Sharon both had strong personalities and
they would both tell each other what they thought. She
had a number of conversations with a trucker. Can you
turn that off earlier? Can you not park here?
Speaker 4: In speaking with the trucker, he said that Sharon liked
her piece and quiet, and at times he would maybe
antagonize Sharon on purpose.
Speaker 1: Detectives pressed the trucker asking where he was the night
of June the thirtieth.
Speaker 5: The trucker said the knight of the homicide, he was
in another state. Had receipts at a truck stop.
Speaker 1: The trucker promises to a ton with receipts, but until
then he demands a suspect, one of many in the
eyes of detectives on townsfolk alike.
Speaker 2: People go on main street sort of pointing figures at
each other saying, I bet he did it, or he
did it, or he did it, And so people got
labeled and people had to live with them. So if
you knew Saron, then you could be a suspect very easy.
Speaker 3: And if it is somebody in town, then that means
that they're still there.
Speaker 5: I knew most of the people in Colon. There's some
people that you just go, there's no way, and then
there are other people that you go, I can see
a possibility here. You hope you're wrong, but you wonder
if the killer's watching you. You wonder if the killer's
doing something to cover up evidence, and then you always
wonder what am I missing.
Speaker 1: Detectives find that new leads are difficult to come by,
but one week since her murder, Sharon's autopsy concludes, and
the results cause investigators to ask what kind of killer
are they facing.
Speaker 4: Everybody in law enforcement, myself included, at that point, we're
leaning to somebody shot her and just dropped the gun there.
We tended the autopsy and we learned that there actually
was not even a gunshot. There was no bullet hole.
It was actually roll that she died of strangulation. Everybody
across the border shot.
Speaker 5: And then she had blunt trauma to her head, so
it was pretty clear that she was confronted, beaten and
then strangled.
Speaker 4: They did sexual assault swab and they sent those in
for testing. But once you realize that strangulation was the
cause of death and you start thinking this is something
that was personal, strangulation doesn't happen a few seconds. It
takes a while for that to happen. So somebody had
to be up close with her and determined to make
sure that they ended her life.
Speaker 9: Strangulation can be motivated by very intense emotions, be it power, control, anger, retaliation,
even revenge.
Speaker 1: Well, the cause of death revealed as an exceptionally brutal strangulation.
Sauandre's Country detectives huddle up with renewed Vigot.
Speaker 4: We had a few days where we were theorizing on
what could have happened. Who have we all talked to
at the scene, who would all be living within a
two block three lock radius, which essentially is the whole
town in Colon, and who could be a potential suspect
from that.
Speaker 1: Pool, and the suspect that surfaces to the tub is
the trucker with whom Sharon had a beef.
Speaker 5: You wonder if there's maybe something that's more hostile.
Speaker 1: When investigators follow up, the trucker provides a proof he
was far from Main Street the night of Sharon's death.
Speaker 5: The trucker was in another state. He had receipts at
a truck stop, so we were able to prove that
he was completely out of state. Didn't have to worry
about a timeline.
Speaker 1: Now, with the trucker cleared, investigators still don't have a
top suspect, but when results from the DNA swaps come in,
they wonder if their luck is about to change.
Speaker 4: We found out that there was actually seamen that was
discovered on the swamp. It really made people wonder what actually.
Speaker 10: Happened the killer among us host going Alan Comming New
series Sundays at seven on Oxygen. True Crime.
Speaker 1: Swabs taken from Shannon Ellickson's autopsy reveals she had not
only been beaten and strangled, sexually assaulted, deepening the mystery
for detectives.
Speaker 4: So you start theorizing did the sexual assault occur? At
the residents and they got in a fight and they
ran across the street. Or did the assault occur only
at the garage and the strangulation occurred from there.
Speaker 1: Armed with this new intel, detectives urgently shuttle the swab
from Sharon's autopsy to the lab, hoping it will yield
a DNA profile of the killer.
Speaker 4: So we sent the evidence to the un MC the
Medcenter in Omaha, Nebraska. It will be a few weeks
before we could possibly get just the profile back. But
once we determined that there was seemen located, and anytime
you see a strangulation, it becomes more personal. You're up
close with somebody and you're in contact with them, we
were able to focus on narrowing down who would be
personally associated with Sharon.
Speaker 5: Then we started asking for swabs just so we had
them on file.
Speaker 1: Based on the new sexual homicide profile, detectives turn their
sites on Sharon's male friends and the token ton points to.
Speaker 6: One man.
Speaker 4: Started hearing rumors that maybe the postmaster and Sharon were
more than friends.
Speaker 3: Folks around town who'd sit around the coffee shop and say, well,
I wonder who did it?
Speaker 4: His name would pop up.
Speaker 2: I was golf with the Postmaster at the time, and
he said it was just terrible the way he was
treated by some people, shunned and scared of him. You
have compassion for him, but it's hard to make a
conclusion because maybe he did it.
Speaker 1: Investigators postmaster Rick higher on that suspect list. When he
shows up one place, in particular, Sharon's estate sale.
Speaker 4: You always hear about the onlookers at a scene that
are actually the ones that did it. We were wondering
would the killer show up at the estate sale and
look at her items or you just want to be there?
What's going on? So we decided that we're going to
get a list of everybody that attends to the state
sale and find out who's buying Sharance property.
Speaker 1: The day of the estate sale, detectives discover Rick Hotman
is in attendance and he's keen on one specific item.
Speaker 4: Law enforcement called and said, we saw the postmaster buying
the bed mattress.
Speaker 5: The fact that we were trying to determine the level
of his relationship with Sharon and then he bought her
bed at the auction, you have a sexual assault.
Speaker 4: So you start wondering if he knew that there could
be some DNA from him on the mattress.
Speaker 1: Because of their Discoverty detectives bring back Rick from another
round of questioning.
Speaker 5: When we talked to him about that. What was even
more unusual is he denied that he purchased the bed.
Why would you be trying to conceal that?
Speaker 1: Detective's press Rick on his purchase of Sharon's mattress, finally
getting him to fess up.
Speaker 5: He said he had some kids that were leaving home
going to college and bought it for them. But he
just did a number of things that caused us to
second guess everything he was telling us.
Speaker 1: Then a call from the lab about Sharon's autopsy Swabs
breeds new life into the hunt.
Speaker 4: The lab was able to get a DNA profile from Swab.
We run it through the database, which was a little
bit smaller in two thousand and three because not all
felony convictions were required to submit. We didn't have any
matches at the time. We just had a DNA profile.
So if we find our guy and he's a match,
we're going to be pretty sure we have the right suspect.
Speaker 6: The killers.
Speaker 1: DNA has yet to be compared to Swab's previously collect
a pen sticking process, and as the month throwby, no
matches come back from the lab, leaving investigators with no
proof depend Sharon's murder on anyone.
Speaker 5: We looked into every lead we had. We were in
Colon probably every day. We just didn't have anything. Your
fear is that how long is it going to go?
Speaker 4: We were always actively involved, but at some point you
realize that you're going to start losing potential witnesses or
information and it's just not going to be easy to solve.
Speaker 5: You certainly don't want somebody out there who's capable of
beating someone, strangling them and sexually assaultment.
Speaker 3: We still had no answers into who committed this crime
against Sharon. You wanted to know that Sharon, her family,
and her friends would be able to get some justice
in knowing who did this and maybe why.
Speaker 1: The main street regular who investigates us keep coming back
to is the man who knew Sharon best Rick Harton.
Speaker 5: We were trying to figure out the extent of his
relationship with Sharon. He agreed to a polygraph that the
polygraph was inconclusive, so he naturally was one that we
wanted to exclude with DNA. Mister Hartman submitted a DNA sample.
Speaker 6: Then, knowing they could be just one step away from
cracking the case.
Speaker 1: A new tip surfaces, putting a different Main Street neighbor,
one who lives just as stone's throw away from Sharon,
back in the crosshairs. The twenty five year old farm
hunt James Mars.
Speaker 5: James Marsh who lived right behind her. The individual that
was providing the James Mars alibi. We started hearing that
James asked him to confirm that he was at his
house if the police came and asked questions. Other people said,
you need to check further on where James Mars was
because this person providing the alibi is not telling you
the truth. The alibi for James Mars started to lose credibility.
Speaker 10: The killer among us was to go on incoming new
series Somebody's at seven on Oxygen True Crime.
Speaker 1: I mean, just receive a tip that James Mars may
have manufactured as alibi. Detectives mobilized to obtain his DNA.
Speaker 5: Initially, Mars alibia where he was that night checked out.
Mars had indicated that after the bar we went to
a friend's house. We heard from many people that James
had asked that friend, if the police asked where I
was that night, you need to tell him that I
was here. As the investigation proceeded, we talked to that friend.
The individual that was providing the alibi wasn't very credible
and never admitted to line about the ally. The people
that James Mars associated with were no strangers to law
enforcement in the community. Although James wasn't brought in and interrogated,
he submitted a DNA swab.
Speaker 1: Authorities rushed the Mars DNA sample to the lab, joining
the swab collected from Rick Hartman, hoping.
Speaker 6: One will match the murderous DNA.
Speaker 5: Our top suspects were mister Hartman and James Marr's. Mister
Hartman had a close friendly relationship with Sharon Erickson, the
fact that he was at her house all the time,
purchased her bed, and he's being a basie. James Mars
was on the list for a number of reasons. One,
he was out drinking that night and James Mahr's parents'
home where he resides is right behind Sharan's house. When
we suspected that he was lying about his alibi, that
raised the concern even more, but we were also wondering,
is there someone that we've completely missed.
Speaker 1: Then, after tracking down leads for ten relentless months, detectives
finally get the call they've been waiting for her.
Speaker 4: I get a phone call from the med center and
they tell me they had a DNA match. I actually
had to stop and think about it. Did I hear
that right? She tells me that they actually got a
match with a sample that was taken from Sherman.
Speaker 5: She said, they've got a match, and then it matched
James Mars. The DNA hit was enough to arrest him,
but there was still some investigation that need to be
done with James Mars.
Speaker 1: James Mars is arrested for the margin of Shannon Edison.
Investigators bring Mars to the station an attempt to get
him to confess.
Speaker 5: James Mars was brought into an interview room. He didn't
volunteer anything. His confession came bits and pieces. Well I
didn't remember that, and then he would eventually say it,
so it wasn't like he just finally said, yeah, here's
what I did. Mars said that he had been drinking
in a bar and wahoo, he did a line of
cocaine with a friend. James came home. He was hoping
to find up some gas money and bear money, so
he went to Sharon Erickson's home, jumped the fence, cut
the phone line, and was kicking her back door in
when the alarm went off, and then she confronted him.
Speaker 4: And her gun was not loaded. She probably grandished the
weapon to scare James.
Speaker 5: She recognized who he was, called him and asked told
him to get out of her backyard. When she called
him and asked, his demeanor changed. You could just feel
it when he said, I told her go ahead and
shoot me, and when she didn't fire, he started beating
her and then she ran into her house. He jumped
the fence again and he saw the garage door go open,
and he knew that she was going to get into
her car and go for help, so he went across
the street confronted her by her car, where he admitted
that he told her to shoot him again, and when
she didn't, he started beating her again and then strangled her.
Everything he was saying fit the entire aspect that we've investigated,
but he would not admit to the sexual assault and
almost started to shut down in his confession.
Speaker 4: When I went to that, James said he was breaking
in to steal something. I don't know that the assault
was intended initially, but I think that it happened because
the opportunity was there. Sometimes you never know those answers.
Speaker 9: Even killers have their own strange moral codes. For some,
a murder could be justified, but a sexual attack, no,
it was impulsive, it was base, it was animalistic, and
it's something of.
Speaker 6: Which he is ashamed. With Mars and Custody. Main Street
residents are relieved.
Speaker 1: And yet deeply saddened to hear that Sharon's accused killer
is one of the own.
Speaker 8: Our son had gone to school with James Mars, and
never in my life would I have dreamt that he
could have been involved in anything like that. It is heartbreaking.
It's not just the person that gets murdered, it's the
family that's involved is hurting him too.
Speaker 2: I knew his family. When I met his dad at
the acid job, I said, I'm very sorry to hear
what's going on, and he could tell that he was very,
very remorseful. You always think, well, why did it happen?
I mean, it doesn't make any sense, but at the
time a young man thought it did.
Speaker 5: I thought it was important that he admitted it. I
realized family, neighbors maybe don't want to believe it, but
this guy's an evil person.
Speaker 6: The Mayers confession is also vitally important for child.
Speaker 5: I can't rely just on the DNA. You have to
have other evidence and circumstances.
Speaker 6: That's the prosecution preps for court. That's a huge problem.
Speaker 4: Unfortunately, James Mars never established that he was waving his
right to an attorney. That confession ended up being suppressed
and we were not able to use that for a trial.
Speaker 10: The Killer among Us host to go on incoming new
series Somebody's at Seven on Oxygen True Crime.
Speaker 1: The prosecution team must learns James Marr's confession for margining
shot in Edison cannot be used in court.
Speaker 4: Mars never established that he was waving his right to
an attorney. We can't use anything from that interview, but
we were able to determine that everything that he said
fit with all of the evidence we had. First, we
were able to tie him.
Speaker 11: To the scene through the DNA match, and there was
a tool that was found at the scene we believe
was used just to break in the house and cut
the phone line.
Speaker 5: We found the tool belonged to James Moore's dad.
Speaker 4: We also determined that James had to ask someone to
generate an alibi for him that wasn't factual.
Speaker 5: And then there were additional personal confessions that we had
with other inmates. Mars talked to six different cellmates. He's
bragged about what he had done.
Speaker 1: Two years since Sharon Erickson's murder, James Mars learns his fate.
Speaker 4: James Mars was charged with first degree murder and we
proceeded towards trial with those charges. We talked with the family.
The part that would have been harder to prove with
the first degree would be some of the intent. They
understood the challenges that a trial would have, so we
decided to a plea offer of second degree murder. We
knew that we could still get justice for Sharon and
her family through that plea.
Speaker 1: Unlike first degree murder, the charge of second degree murder
doesn't include premeditation.
Speaker 4: James Mars accepted that lee offer and pled guilty to
the second degree murder.
Speaker 3: That day, all so happened to be Sharon's sixty ninth birthday,
so for family and friends, they did get a little
bit of resolution, and that they were in court that
day that he took that plea agreement.
Speaker 1: In early two thousand and six, James Myers a sentenced
to life in prison without the possibility of parole and
with Sharon's killer behind bars for good life, and Colin
continues on forever changed.
Speaker 5: You think you're an innocent little community, and all of
a sudden you have this horrific thing that's not supposed
to happen in a small town, and when it does,
then you got to deal with it.
Speaker 4: I think people start wondering, do I really know that person,
and not specifically just mister Mars, Do I really know
my neighbor and are they capable of something?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 8: It broke my heart, for one thing, because Sharon had
a lot of things she could done yet, and she
was just really starting to enjoy her retirement and that
was all taken from her.
Speaker 5: Then a neighbor kills a neighbor.
Speaker 2: You have a suspicion that maybe they could happen to you.
I'm sure people have that in the back of their mind,
but I do not. Colin drew together. They embraced each other,
and I think as a close knit community they did
a phenomenal job.
Speaker 1: For Colin residents and Sharon's loved ones. Her Men's Street
murder remains an unimaginable tragedy her life of community service,
and it's unfathomable, and so have to remind us all
that every moment is a gift, and no act.
Speaker 6: Of kindness too small.
Speaker 1: For it's been said, we make our friends, make our enemies,
but God makes our next door neighbors.