51The friend group slowly began to disperse: Lopez moved to Texas;
Katheiser was in Colorado Springs. Sometimes Ajarian thought
of Jake almost as a ghost—there and not there at the same time.
Although the investigation stalled for years, the Gunnison
County sheriff’s department disputes the idea that it didn’t take
Jake’s friends’ concerns seriously. “We were working pretty hard,”
Mykol told me. “It just takes a really long time. You can’t just
show up somewhere and search—there’s a thing called the Fourth
Amendment, you know what I mean?” Mykol also pointed out
that the department had only one investigator for the entire county.
Finally, the sheriff’s department asked the Colorado Bureau
of Investigation for help on the case. Two years after Jake’s dis-
appearance, Ajarian met with a CBI agent who told him they
were making progress. “She said, ‘I can’t tell you anything— but
things are in the works for you guys.’ ”
On July 17, 2017, official vehicles crowded the county high-
way by the 7-11 Ranch. As ambulances and fire trucks waited,
search teams and dogs spread out over the 700 acres. “Later on
that day there are reports that they’ve found a body, and you just
know,” Katheiser recalled. “There’s not another reason for a body
to be out there.”
The news spread fast across the small town. While Jake’s
friends had been calling the sheriff, visiting the ranch, posting on
Facebook— for nearly all of that time, his body had been wrapped
in a tarp and buried in a manure pile in the corral.
The fact that Jake’s body was found on the 7-11 Ranch
seemed to confirm that at least one member of his family had
played a role in his death. But which one? There were almost too
many potential motives: Steph’s lifetime of animosity toward her
brother, plus the tension over who would inherit the ranch; the
constant clashes between Deb and her son. And then, of course,
there was Dave. In the weeks before he vanished, Jake had told
friends that if anything ever happened to him, Dave would
be responsible.
Investigators questioned Deb, Steph, and Dave separately
many times. Their stories were contradictory, confusing, and self-
serving. Everyone agreed that Jake had once been his mother’s
favorite, but that in the years before his death, the dynamics in
the family had shifted; Deb began complaining to Steph about
Jake, and Steph was happy to egg her on. As Deb told investiga-
tors, Steph was insistent that her mother evict Jake. He was a
freeloader, she argued. Without tough love, he’d never become
independent. Sometimes she hinted that more drastic measures
might be necessary. “The only way that he’s going to leave here
voluntarily,” Deb claimed Steph had said, “is if he’s in a body bag.”
Steph’s efforts at persuasion seemed to work. Investigators
found an amended version of Deb’s will, dated three weeks before
Jake vanished. Instead of leaving the ranch to Jake and Shane,
the property— and everything else she owned—would now go
to Steph. Jake would get nothing.
Deb told investigators that the week Jake went missing, she
had been exhausted from working the night shift at a nursing
home. She’d asked Jake to take care of an errand; he’d left the job
half finished, then gone into town. This, she said, was the last
straw. She waited until he fell asleep that night and shot him in
the head. She claimed that she disposed of his body on her own.
The investigators pressed her on this point. How was this pos-
sible, considering how small and frail she was? “Yankee ingenuity,”
Deb said. She had rolled his body in a plastic sheet, then used
tow straps and a winch to maneuver it out of the lodge and onto
an ATV. She insisted that Steph and Dave had known nothing.
When investigators told Steph that her mother had confessed
to murdering Jake, she broke down. “Oh my God,” she said, sob-
bing. “Are you fucking serious? I can’t breathe.”
But the officers suspected that she knew more than she was
letting on. There was that Facebook post about “awesome news”
once Jake was gone, and her apparent lack of concern for her
brother. They kept pressing her.
“Okay,” Steph said eventually. “Honestly I didn’t know any-
thing until a couple months ago.” Dave had been digging in the
manure pile when he’d uncovered the body of what looked at
first like a large animal, she said. It was partially mummified, and
wrapped in plastic. Dave had encountered plenty of carcasses
while living on the ranch, but this one unnerved him. He could
see parts of a rib cage poking out. He’d called Steph over. “Is that
what you think it is?” he asked.
“Maybe,” Steph replied. “I’m going to call Mom.”
Deb told her daughter to stay away from the body, Steph said,
claiming that it was a mountain lion or a bear Jake had shot. “It’s
illegal game; that’s all I’m going to say,” Deb said. She told her
daughter to cover it back up with manure and leave it alone.
In the ensuing weeks, Steph and Dave made awkward jokes
about what they’d found. They said they talked about calling the
police but never did. Then the investigation ramped up again. With
officers sniffing around the ranch, Steph insisted that the remains be
reburied somewhere more secure. The family avoided articulating
what they were really discussing. Sometimes they called the body
“it”; sometimes they referred to it as “the bear.” But Steph eventu-
ally admitted that was a ruse. “I knew in my heart it was Jake,” she
said. One afternoon, Dave used the backhoe to dig a hole inside
the corral. A couple of days later, the “bear” was gone from the
manure pile, and the hole was packed with fresh dirt.
There were reasons to doubt each of these accounts. Accord-
ing to Deb’s medical records, she weighed 97 pounds at the time
of Jake’s murder, and was still weak from the gallbladder surgery
she’d had nine days before. At work, she’d been assigned to “light
duty”; at the ranch, she wasn’t able to lift a bale of hay. When her
doctor examined her a few days after the murder, none of her
stitches had torn. Jake had weighed at least 170 pounds. WouldWITH NO OFFICIAL ACTION,
IT WAS HARD NOT TO FEEL AS
THOUGH JAKE’S DISAPPEARANCE—
AND HIS LIFE—DIDN’T MATTER.