One Wild Ride

A tenacious boy she met at summer camp took Michelle's virginity when she was fifteen. He'd follow her home from Thornton High School each day and pressure her for sex. Michelle didn't really know how to say no -- she didn't want to upset him or have someone not like her -- so she relented. After that, she took to ditching class and making out with boys in the band room, and she sneaked out to another boyfriend's house to hook up over lunch. But it wasn't until her junior year that she realized she thought about sex a little differently than most people.

"I was with another boyfriend at the time, and we were hanging out with one of his friends," Michelle remembers. "And there was just a lot of guy talk going on. They were talking about wanting to tag-team me, and I was just trying to keep up, be one of the guys, so I was like, 'No problem, I can take you both' and whatever. So we drove behind a shopping center, they flipped a coin, and one guy stayed outside as a lookout while I had sex with the first guy. It felt good. They were making a big deal out of me, paying all this attention to me, but then when it came time for the second guy, he chickened out, and that gave me this power. I had something to hold over him. And that's when it added a whole new element to it; I started to see I could control people with this sex drive."

She'd obsess over targets and build them into an ideal fantasy, then screw them, explode the fantasy and move on. And on. And on. After graduating from high school, at nineteen she married Bill, the guy who hadn't chickened out of her first threesome attempt. They moved to Silverthorne, where Michelle found work with a nearby vet.

"Things immediately didn't feel right," she remembers. "I figured I could make things work. You hear about people getting married and falling in love afterwards, but that didn't happen. I was still calling my parents and checking in with them all the time, making sure I was doing everything right. That's how little power I gave him. That's how little power he took."

It didn't help that Michelle was fucking everyone at the office. Not all at the same time, but systematically. She'd go after a co-worker, male or female, obsess over them, sleep with them once, then want nothing more to do with them. In the eleven months she was with Bill, Michelle estimates that she screwed around with at least a dozen people. It wasn't about the sex; it was about the power and the attention, having people want her, need her. Michelle kept her mouth shut about her activities, but in the small mountain town, word spread faster than her legs.

When Bill figured out that the rumors of his wife's behavior were true, he hopped on his motorcycle and hit the road. Somewhere between Fort Morgan and Brush, he steered his bike into an oncoming semi. A few days later, Michelle got his suicide note in the mail, blaming her.

"My parents came and picked me up," she remembers. "And the whole thing was just kind of swept under the rug. My dad saw the note -- of course I denied everything --and we just decided that there was no need for anyone to know about this, that it would just upset people. God forbid we do something like that."

Bill had purchased that motorcycle from Dennis Ormond and was still paying it off. After a missed payment, Dennis got in touch with Michelle. She told him that Bill was dead and offered to pay for the rest of the bike, but Dennis told her that it was Bill's debt, and they would just call it even. Then he introduced her to his wife, Barbara.

Bill died in August 1992. By late October of that year, Michelle had moved in with Dennis and Barbara and was sleeping with both of them. By July of the following year, Barbara was out of the picture and Dennis and Michelle were wed, embarking on a thirteen-year marriage that was ultimately anything but happily ever after.

The first sign of trouble came in 1995, after Michelle had been accepted into the Denver Sheriff's Department academy.

"She had portrayed herself to me as having an occasional sexual experience in high school," Dennis says. "I really didn't know much about her past or tendencies. She was openly sexual, but so was my first wife. Of course I didn't know it at the time, but she went to work at the Denver Sheriff's Department and immediately got herself involved in a sexual affair with another officer in the academy."

"Once I had sex with him the first time, I was done with him," Michelle says. "But he was a strong personality, and he was not going to let the relationship end. I was seeing him every day, and I didn't know how to back out of it, so I just figured I would ride it out until we graduated. We would be assigned to separate posts, and that would be that."