Bizarre Colorado Killing Subject of Mortician Murder Docuseries

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

That was the case in 2012, when rural southern Colorado was rocked by the death of Byron Griffy, a funeral home director from Fowler.

Griffy was shot execution-style in the back of his head on October 12, the day before his 77th birthday. He was found on the floor of his farmhouse with little blood and no DNA evidence at the scene, suggesting it had been thoroughly cleaned. There were no signs of forced entry or struggle, but police speculated that the body had been moved and the crime scene staged.

The peculiarities piled on as the investigation continued, uncovering sex and lies at every corner. The details of the salacious case were laid out in The Rocky Mountain Mortician Murder, a three-episode documentary series from Investigation Discovery released on November 26.

The documentary series explores four primary suspects in the murder case, all of whom had different motives for wanting Griffy dead.

The teen’s mother, Griffy’s daughter-in-law, disputes the claim in the documentary. She describes her son as violent and manipulative, accusing him of lying about the molestation and of physically assaulting her. But the teen is not the only person who alleged that Griffy paid them for sexual favors.

Tommy Tomlin, a reported drug addict who often did odd jobs for Griffy, also told police that Griffy paid him for sex acts. As an investigator in the documentary put it, Griffy would invite Tomlin over just “to have turkey pot pies and to watch porn.”

Though Tomlin and the step-grandson were both suspects in the murder, the investigation ultimately pointed to two other men as the culprits: brothers Charles Giebler and Anthony Wright, who ran a different community funeral home.

Giebler was the mayor of Florence and the pastor of the St. Jude the Apostle Parish. He and Wright ran the Charles-Anthony Funeral Home together, along with multiple other local businesses. The pair were friends with Griffy and even handled the arrangements for his funeral, with Giebler delivering the eulogy.

Giebler and Wright told police that they planned to have lunch with Griffy on the day of the murder to celebrate his birthday. But when they arrived at Griffy’s farmhouse to pick him up, they claimed the gate was locked and he didn’t answer their phone calls, so they left.

Their story doesn’t add up for multiple reasons: In the documentary, Griffy’s family claims the brothers had come to the farmhouse multiple times using the non-gated road and should have known how to get in, and investigators allege that the pair lied about the vehicle they drove to the house, arriving in a two-seater van that suggested they never intended to drive Griffy to lunch.

But the most shocking revelation had little to do with the crime.

During the investigation, it was revealed that Giebler and Wright were not brothers, as they had told the community since they moved to town in the 1990s. They were secret gay lovers.

The couple had a financial motive to take out Griffy. According to his family, Griffy had entrusted the men to store his collection of gold and silver coins, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Griffy reportedly gave the coin collection to Giebler and Wright after his own home was burglarized, fearing it would be stolen.

Some members of the community accused Wright of killing his alleged partner-in-crime, while others believed Giebler had taken his own life to avoid prison. But ultimately, his death was ruled a result of natural causes.

Stalled by the shocking death, police waited another seven months to arrest Wright for the murder of Griffy, in August 2013. Amid the delay, Wright had married a local woman whom he allegedly left Giebler for before his death.

During the trial, Wright’s defense attorney emphasized the lack of physical evidence in the case. They had no murder weapon and no DNA linking Wright to the scene. In the documentary, an investigator argued that the clean scene further points to Wright and Giebler’s guilt, noting that the men previously worked as crime scene cleaners for a coroner’s office in Utah.

Meanwhile, the defense attorney insisted upon their innocence, pointing to tips given to police from two anonymous informants who both died before the trial. One allegedly claimed that Tomlin had confessed to the killing. The other reportedly said Griffy had discussed hiring a hitman, suggesting that Griffy could have potentially hired his own killer as a means of committing suicide.

In the end, the jury could not agree on a verdict. The July 2015 trial ended with a mistrial.

The district attorney’s office later offered Wright a very generous plea deal. He pleaded guilty to accessory to first-degree murder in January 2017, with prosecutors concluding that the deceased Giebler had killed Griffy and that Wright assisted in the crime. Wright was sentenced to ten years of probation.

Today, Wright lives in southern Colorado with his wife, according to the documentary. Despite the guilty plea, he maintains that neither he nor Giebler had anything to do with Griffy’s murder.

The Rocky Mountain Mortician Murder is currently available to stream on HBOMax and other streaming platforms with subscription add-ons.