A Cold Case Frozen in Time

Lorenzo Chivers had been working for Paul for a few months. They'd met through Teresa, since Lorenzo lived with her sister. He was a mellow, nice guy who could strike up a conversation with anybody. He was a father of two — fifteen-year-old Josh, who lived with him, and twelve-year-old Aubrie — and it wasn't like him to just take off and not let his kids or their mother know where he was. Even though Lorenzo was separated from his wife, Misha, they were still close. Recently, they'd even talked about reconciling.

Misha didn't know what to think when Josh called her that Monday to say that his father hadn't shown up the night before. She asked to talk to Bobbi Jo. "I know he's not coming home," she remembers Bobbi Jo telling her. "I know something horrible has happened to him."

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It was Wednesday before anyone could convince the police to check out the Tuff Movers lot. A Westminster officer met Jerry there and told him to open the gate. Jerry said he didn't have the key, and didn't want to cut the lock in case it was evidence. Irritated, the officer slammed his car into the fence, then jumped onto his hood and over the gate.

"You coming?"

Inside, Jerry tried to think of what was different from how he'd left the lot Saturday. He noticed a puddle of oil partly covered by a piece of plywood and pointed it out. "Can you prove that he didn't change his oil?" the officer asked.

Jerry went up to the big moving truck that he'd noticed parked funny on Monday and tried to peek inside the cab without touching anything. "That's unusual right there," he said. "The truck's clean. We live in these trucks."

The cop grabbed the driver's-door handle and whipped it open.

"I feel he destroyed more evidence than he was willing to look at," Jerry says. "To him, there was nothing unusual there. I was disgusted with him."

The officer left the lot unconvinced that a crime had been committed.

Another day passed with no sign of Sarah, Paul or Lorenzo. Josh Chivers had been staying at his mom's house. On Thursday night, Misha took him to his dad's so that he could pick up some clothes. They found everything from Josh's room packed up and waiting by the door. "I guess you don't have a room at Daddy's house anymore," Misha told her son.

Sharon Skiba finally flew back to Denver on Saturday, February 13. All week, she'd been calling police; all week, they'd been telling her not to worry, that Paul had probably taken off with Sarah and would eventually come back. But she knew her son wouldn't do that. His business and life were in Colorado. He'd recently taken out a second mortgage on his house to pay off credit-card debt, and he'd been to court enough times to know that keeping Sarah would only hurt him. He was careful to never even drop her off late.

Desperate, Sharon went to the phone book and hired a helicopter so that she could scan the area for Paul's car, a '72 Chevelle. She had the pilot fly over the Tuff Movers lot and also over Brighton, since Teresa had told her she'd been to a psychic who said that Paul and Sarah were dead and that Paul's car would be by a gravelly area near a lake or river. But they didn't find anything.

On Sunday — a week after Paul, Sarah and Lorenzo had last been seen — Rich Lesmeister got a call from Teresa. It was the first he'd heard that Paul and Sarah were missing. He and Carol asked if there was anything they could do to help, and then spent the morning hanging up fliers — which turned out to have the wrong license-plate number for Paul's car. That afternoon, the Lesmeisters met Sharon at the Tuff Movers lot. Rich, a mechanic, had been there recently to rebuild an engine for one of Paul's trucks. As they pulled up, he spotted the new lock and the odd way the big truck was parked. He and Carol hopped the fence and told Sharon to wait outside.

There were bullet holes in the truck that Rich had been working on, and a fresh oil stain. Carol saw a smear of blood on the big truck's door — like a print from a bloody shirtsleeve. And then they both spotted what looked like a small chunk of scalp near the windshield. "When we found that, we decided to get out and call the police," Rich says.

They climbed back over the fence and told Sharon it didn't look good. Through tears, she called Gordy in Minnesota. He and his father needed to get to Colorado. And then they called the cops.

When the Westminster police arrived, the scene quickly turned into a fight between officers and Paul's friends and family members. The police insisted that Paul had taken off with Sarah. "They threatened to arrest us if we didn't leave because there was no crime committed there," Rich remembers. "And we should all go home."