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Small Nebraska Town Ripped Apart After Local Woman Found Dead in a Pool of Blood · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I want you to picture your ultimate safe haven, like
• 0:03
  really think about it.
• 0:04
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, like that perfectly secure bubble.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Exactly, think about that physical place where your shoulders finally,
• 0:10
  you know, drop away from your ears, a place where
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  you don't even think about whether the front.
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: Door is unlocked, right, because why would you.
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  Speaker 1: Exactly, you walk down the street and not only does
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  everyone know your name, but they know your parents' names,
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  they know the kind of car you drive. They probably
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  know your.
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  Speaker 2: Dogs bark, Yeah, they know your whole life story.
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  Speaker 1: Right. It is that quintessential image of absolute unquestioned security,
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  the idyllic Rockwellian bubble. But today we are taking that
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  perfect crystal snow globe and we are going to well,
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  we're going to drop it directly onto the.
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  Speaker 2: Concrete because today we're looking at Colon, Nebraska.
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  Speaker 1: Yes, Colon, Nebraska, a quintessential farming town with a population
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  hovering right around barely one hundred people. Yeah, okay, let's
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  untack this. We have a massive stack of investigative reports,
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  case files, all detailing the really brutal two thousand and
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  three murder of a sixty six year old woman named
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  Sharon Erickson.
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  Speaker 2: And it's a tough read, really tough, it is.
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  Speaker 1: But our mission for this deep dive isn't just to
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  walk you through a true crime timeline, right. We are
• 1:14
  dissecting the actual anatomy of a small town's shattered innocence.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, we're looking at the terrifying complexities of what happens
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  to a stalled investigation when it's stuck inside a closed
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  loop community.
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  Speaker 1: Exactly, And most importantly, we are trying to understand the
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  devastating ripple effects of violence when it strikes the most trusting,
• 1:34
  isolated environments on the map.
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  Speaker 2: Because you know, geographic isolation is almost universally coded as
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  safety in our.
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  Speaker 1: Brains, right, you think distance equals protection.
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  Speaker 2: Exactly, When you are forty miles from a major city,
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  surrounded by just endless acres of agricultural land, you feel
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  like distance is your primary buffer against the chaos of
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  the urban world.
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  Speaker 1: You feel totally insulated, you do.
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  Speaker 2: But when violence bypasses that geographic buffer, the psychological collapse
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  is absolute. It's total. The very isolation that makes a
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  place like Colon feel secure becomes the precise weapon that
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  makes it incredibly vulnerable.
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  Speaker 1: Wow.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, there is no anonymity to hide behind when the
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  thread is inside the perimeter. The community's foundational belief system
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  about who they are and who their neighbors are is
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  just completely upended.
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  Speaker 1: I think that geographic reality is the perfect place to start.
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  Let's really look at the physical setting here Colon, Nebraska.
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  It sits in Saunders County, which is about forty miles west.
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  Speaker 2: Of Omaha, right out in the farmland.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, and when the census says a population of barely
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  over one hundred, we have to conceptualize how microscopic that
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  is by modern standards.
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  Speaker 2: It's basically a single neighborhood in a city.
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  Speaker 1: Not even the documents describe Main Street as literally a
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  single block.
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  Speaker 2: One block. That's it.
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  Speaker 1: One block. You have a post office, you have a bank,
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  and you have a small restaurant where the locals gather
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  for morning coffee and the daily exchange of news. That
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  is the entire commercial epicenter. Outside of that, beyond that
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  one block, it's just surrounded by corn and soybean fields
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  stretching all the way to the horizon, Tractors rumbling down
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  gravel roads, families who can trace their property lines back three, four,
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  maybe five generations.
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  Speaker 2: Which creates a social fabric that is incredibly dense it's
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  almost impermeable to outsiders. What do you mean by impermeable, Well,
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  sociologists refer to this as having multiplex relationships in a
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  major city. Your relationships are mostly simplexy, Like the person
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  who pours your coffee is just a barista. The person
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  who delivers your mail is just a postal worker.
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  Speaker 1: Right, you don't really know them beyond that transaction exactly.
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  Speaker 2: But in a town of one hundred people, the postmaster
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  is also your cousin, and they sit next to you
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  in church, oh wow, and maybe their property but your farm,
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  and you had a boundary dispute with them ten years ago.
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  Every single interaction carries this heavy, invisible weight of decades
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  of shared history and precedent.
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  Speaker 1: That makes so much sense, and looking at the no
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  one embodied that historical precedent more than Sharon Rickson.
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  Speaker 2: She was a fixture completely.
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  Speaker 1: Let's paint a picture of who she was, because her
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  identity is really central to why this crime broke the
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  town apart. She was born in nineteen thirty seven, and
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  she spent more than thirty years working as the deputy
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  county treasurer.
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  Speaker 2: Thirty years.
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  Speaker 1: That's a lifetime in local government, right, And I was
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  thinking about this, and the best way I can describe
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  Sharon is that she is like the foundational load bearing
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  pillar of a building. She is quiet, she is sturdy,
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  and she is structurally essential.
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  Speaker 2: That is the perfect analogy. Yeah, oh, definitely, because in
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  a rural, agricultural county, the treasurer's office isn't just a
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  bureaucratic hub. It is the vault of the community's.
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  Speaker 1: Lifeblood, like all their land and taxes.
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  Speaker 2: Exactly. For three decades, she handled the property taxes, the
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  vehicle registrations, the land titles. She knew who was buying land,
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  She knew who was quietly struggling to pay their.
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  Speaker 1: Taxes, which is huge in a farming community.
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  Speaker 2: Huge. She knew who was subdividing the family farm. She
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  was a custodian of their financial realities. Her colleague Don
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  Clark actually noted in the files that she had the
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  highest standards of anyone at the courthouse.
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  Speaker 1: I read that too impeccably dressed, always, unfailingly courteous, and
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  fiercely precise.
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  Speaker 2: That with Sharon.
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  Speaker 1: So she retires in nineteen ninety eight, right, and she
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  transitions into this incredibly unique living setup. She lives in
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  a converted former grocery store right on Main Street with
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  a detached garage just across.
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  Speaker 2: The streets, which is so quaint and so small town
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  it is.
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  Speaker 1: She walks to the post office every single day, She
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  chats with the bank employees. She is the physical manifestation
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  of routine, and it brings up a question I can't
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  shake as I read through these initial case files.
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  Speaker 2: What's that?
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  Speaker 1: Well? Why is it that in communities this incredibly small,
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  the victim is almost never a transient stranger. It's almost
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  always someone woven deeply into the daily fabric of everyone's lives.
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  Why is the violence so often directed at the pillars?
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  Speaker 2: It really comes down to visibility and access. In a
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  fractured urban environment, crimes of opportunity often target the marginalized
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  or the anonymous.
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  Speaker 1: Right because they won't be missed as quickly.
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  Speaker 2: Exactly, the perpetrator is looking for a victim who won't
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  trigger an immediate, massive response. But in a one hundred
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  person town, there is zero anonymity none.
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  Speaker 1: Everyone sees everything right.
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  Speaker 2: A community's identity is entirely built on predictable, shared routines.
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  Sharon's daily walks to the post office wasn't just her
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  personal chore. It was a rhythmic pulse of the town.
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  Speaker 1: Oh, that's a good way to put it.
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  Speaker 2: People literally calibrated their day by those small interactions. So
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  when someone targets a person of her standing, it transcends
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  a crime against an individual. It operates as a direct,
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  intentional attack on the civic order itself.
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  Speaker 1: Like they're attacking the town as a whole, exactly.
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  Speaker 2: The perpetrator is violently disrupting the town's central nervous system.
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  Speaker 1: And it's important to note for you listening the file show,
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  Sharon wasn't naive to the world. She was an immensely.
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  Speaker 2: Practical woman, very practical.
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  Speaker 1: She kept a handgun in her home for protection, and
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  she wasn't described as paranoid by her friends or family,
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  just fiercely independent.
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  Speaker 2: Right. She lived alone.
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  Speaker 1: She lived alone, she was an older woman, and keeping
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  a firearm is just a standard practicality in rural environments
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  where you know, police response times are measured in miles,
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  not blocks.
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  Speaker 2: It's just common sense out there, exactly.
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  Speaker 1: But on a late June evening in two thousand and three,
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  that quiet practicality collided with a scene of unimaginable horror.
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  Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is that the scene, upon initial discovery,
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  created a massive cognitive dissonance for the people who found her.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, let's walk through that day, because it's just awful.
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  It's June thirtieth, two thousand and three. The first domino
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  falls when Sharon misses her daily phone call with a relative.
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  Speaker 2: And in a town dialed into routine.
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  Speaker 1: A myst call isn't an oversight, it's a blaring siren.
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  The family member immediately calls the local bank employees to
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  ask if they've seen her walk by.
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  Speaker 2: They haven't, which is an immediate rede flag.
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  Speaker 1: Motor red flag. So the postmaster, a man named Rick Hartman,
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  who is a close friend and holds a spare key
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  to Sharon's house, he agrees to walk over and check
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  on her.
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  Speaker 2: Because it's literally just down the block.
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  Speaker 1: Right at six forty two pm, he makes the discovery.
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  He finds her body in that detached garage across the
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  street from her house.
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  Speaker 2: Just horrific.
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  Speaker 1: He makes a frantic, traumatized nine to one one call
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  reporting what he believes is a suicide, and when the
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  Saunders County Sheriff's deputies arrive, they walk into an absolute nightmare.
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  Speaker 2: The physical reality of the scene is staggering in its brutality.
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  Speaker 1: The details in the report are grim. Sharon is lying
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  in a massive pool of blood on the garage floor.
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  The trauma to her head and face is so severe
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  that she is nearly unrecognizable to her own friends.
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  Speaker 2: It's just devastating.
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  Speaker 1: There is a handgun resting right near her head. She
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  is wearing what appeared to be pajamas or nightclothes, and
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  there's a small purse nearby right And because of the
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  visual combination of the gun and the body, the initial
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  working theory from l local law enforcement just mirrors the
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  Postmaster's nine to one one call. They think they are
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  looking at a self inflicted gunshot.
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  Speaker 2: Wound, which is a conclusion drawn entirely from environmental context
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  rather than forensic reality.
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  Speaker 1: Wait, hold on, I'm stuck on this point. I totally
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  understand how a civilian like the postmaster walks in sees
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  blood and a gun and panics thinking it's suicide, sure,
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  of course, But professional investigators they walk into a scene
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  with a physically cut phone line inside the house, an
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  alarm actively blaring on the back door, and a bloody
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  shoe print. How does professional training just evaporate in the
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  face of those massive, glaring red flags.
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  Speaker 2: It is a phenomenal question, and it speaks to a
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  very specific psychological phenomenon that plagues early stage investigations. It's
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  called anchoring bias, and it leads directly into tunnel vision.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for me.
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  Speaker 2: When any human being, and yes, even a highly trained
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  first responder, walks into a chaotic, highly traumatic scene, their
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  brain desperately seeks order tes to categorize the trauma using
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  the most obvious immediate visual anchors.
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  Speaker 1: If they see the gun and the blood.
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  Speaker 2: Right in this garage, you have a deceased victim, a
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  massive amount of blood, and a firearm resting inches from
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  the head, the brain immediately supplies the most common narrative
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  script for those three elements. Gun plus body equals suicide.
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  Speaker 1: So the brain essentially builds a narrative box and just
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  forces all the other evidence into it or ignores it completely.
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  Speaker 2: Precisely, it is a psychological defense mechanism as much as
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  an investigative shortcut. The human brain wants the trauma to
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  make sense quickly. It takes immense conscious discipline to step back,
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  override that initial powerful visual anchor and ask the disruptive
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  questions to say, wait, if she shot herself, where is
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  the magazine? Why is the weapon completely empty? Where is
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  the bullet casing? Why is there a bloody shoeprint that
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  doesn't match her footwear? It requires the investigator to actively
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  dismantle their own initial assumption, and.
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  Speaker 1: Once they finally do dismantle that assumption, the reality they
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  uncover is terrifying because the inconsistencies just pile up to
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  reveal a savage.
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  Speaker 2: Attack, an incredibly violent attack.
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  Speaker 1: The gun, as you mentioned, has no magazine, it has
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  no bullets. There are no shell casings anywhere in the garage,
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  so a self inflicted gunshot is physically impossible impossible. Furthermore,
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  there are blood smears on the door of a car
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  parked nearby. Inside the converted grocery store, the phone line
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  has been physically severed, which is huge, huge. There are
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  clear signs of force entry at the back door, which
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  triggered that blaring alarm. Her bed is unmade, and an
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  empty gun holster is sitting on a table nearby.
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  Speaker 2: And then the autopsy confirms it all right.
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  Speaker 1: The subsequent autopsy drops the final hammer she wasn't shot
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  at all. The sheer volume of blood at the scene
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  was from blunt force trauma. She died from the trauma
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  and asphyxiation. She was beaten, strangled, sexually assaulted, and she
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  had broken ribs, which indicates a massive, desperate struggle for
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  her life.
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  Speaker 2: The forensic reconstruction of the timeline based on that scattered
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  evidence is one of the most chilling sequences of events imaginable.
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  Speaker 1: It really is. Walk us through that reconstruction.
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  Speaker 2: Think about the spatial logistics of the crime scene. We
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  have the house, the street, and the detached garage. If
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  we map the physical evidence to human behavior, we can
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  see exactly what happened. Okay, Sharon is in her home.
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  She's likely asleep or getting ready for bed, given her clothing.
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  The killer approaches the house. They deliberately cut the external
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  phone lines.
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  Speaker 1: Cutting the lines is so calculated.
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  Speaker 2: Very They force entry through the back door, which trips
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  the security alarm. The blaring alarm wakes Sharon up. She
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  realizes someone is in her home, and she realizes the
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  phone is dead. She cannot call nine one one. It's horror,
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  so she reaches for the one defensive tool she has, her.
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  Speaker 1: Handgun, but the gun is completely unloaded. The magazine isn't
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  even in it.
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  Speaker 2: It's an unloaded weapon. Now we can only speculate why.
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  Perhaps she kept the ammunition separate for safety, or perhaps
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  in the sheer terror of waking up to a home invasion,
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  she simply grabbed the gun without grabbing the magazine.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, in a panic like that, who knows what you'd.
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  Speaker 2: Grab exactly, But the psychological terror of that moment is profound.
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  She is facing an intruder holding a useless piece of metal.
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  God her fire or flight response takes over, and with
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  the weapon unloaded, flight is the only option she runs.
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  She bursts out of her house in her night clothes
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  and flees across the dark street toward her detached garage.
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  Speaker 1: And the prevailing theory from investigators is that she was
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  desperately trying to reach a cell phone she kept inside
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  her car parked in that garage.
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  Speaker 2: Which demonstrates incredible presence of mind under extreme duress. She
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  was trying to save herself, but he caught her. The
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  killer pursues her. He chases her across the street, corners
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  her in the garage, and that is where the horrific
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  final struggle occurs. She fought back as evidenced by the
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  defensive wounds and the sheer violence required to subdue her.
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  Speaker 1: To me, the physically cut phone line is the most
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  terrifying detail in this entire sea equence, absolutely because it
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  dictates that this wasn't an impulsive, chaotic accident where someone
• 14:05
  just stumbled through the wrong door. The killer built a
• 14:08
  cage before he walked inside. He ensured her isolation. Yes,
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  Sheriff Kevin Stuckenholtz, the lead local authority, he recognizes this
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  severe premeditation immediately, and the realization that there is a
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  predator who planned this attack triggers a visceral, terrifying backlash
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  within the community of Colon.
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  Speaker 2: And logically so when law enforcement encounters a crime scene
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  demonstrating that specific level of premeditation like cutting communication lines, Yeah,
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  it implies a hunter.
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  Speaker 1: A hunter exactly.
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  Speaker 2: It implies an offender who surveiled the environment, understood her vulnerabilities,
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  and took calculated steps to neutralize her ability to someone
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  help for the community. The implication is apocalyptic.
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  Speaker 1: They must have been terrified.
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  Speaker 2: The thought process is literally, if they hunted Sharon, the
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  most sable person in town, who else are they hunting?
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  Who is next? On the list.
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  Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting. The immediate aftermath in
• 15:02
  Colon is a portrait of a community entirely losing its
• 15:05
  psychological footing completely. Don Clark, the coworker we discussed earlier,
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  is quoted in the files describing the atmosphere. He said,
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  and I quote, people started pointing fingers at each other.
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  I bet he did it, or he did it, or
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  he did it.
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  Speaker 2: The suspicion was instant.
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  Speaker 1: The behavioral shifts in the town are drastic and overnight.
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  People in rural Nebraska who have literally never locked their
• 15:28
  front doors in their entire lives are suddenly driving to
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  hardware stores to buy heavy dead bolts.
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  Speaker 2: That's a huge cultural shift for them.
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  Speaker 1: Children who normally had free reign of the town until
• 15:39
  the street lights came on, are being pulled inside well
• 15:42
  before dusk. When people cross paths at the bank or
• 15:45
  the post office, the casual, friendly gossip is replaced by
• 15:49
  whispered theories and paranoid sideways glances.
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  Speaker 2: The trust is just gone.
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  Speaker 1: The sheriff officially places the town on high alert, which
• 15:56
  of course only ratchets the tension even higher.
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: It is the rapid disintegration of structural trust we talked
• 16:03
  earlier about multiplex relationships. Everyone knows everyone in multiple capacities.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: Right, the cousin who's also the postmaster exactly.
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  Speaker 2: In times of peace, that density is a comfort. In
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  times of terror, that density becomes a nightmare.
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  Speaker 1: I keep coming back to this analogy in my head.
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  It is like the entire town was suddenly forced into
• 16:22
  a real life game of Clue, but with horrifying real
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  world stakes.
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  Speaker 2: That's a great way to think about it.
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  Speaker 1: Think about how a murder of mystery game works. Right.
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  The confined setting is what makes it tense. Everyone is
• 16:34
  a suspect, and every piece of mundane history is suddenly
• 16:37
  scrutinized as a potential motive. Every little grudge, yes in
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  colin the game board is a single block. Someone taking
• 16:44
  a walk at midnight to clear their head is suddenly
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  viewed as prowling. A loud argument over a fence boundary
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  three years ago is suddenly viewed as a homicidal grudge.
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  Everyone is viewing their neighbors through a hyper paranoid lens
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  of suspicion.
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  Speaker 2: The confined game board analogy is that's redibly apt. If
• 17:01
  we look at the criminology of rural environments, we have
• 17:05
  to examine how different populations process the trauma of violence. Okay,
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  how so in a sprawling metropolitan area when a brutal
• 17:12
  homicide occurs, the psychological defense mechanism for the general public
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  is stranger danger, right with some random guy. It's the
• 17:20
  belief that the violence was perpetrated by a random drifter,
• 17:23
  gang activity, or just an outside element. That narrative, whether
• 17:28
  it's true or not, allows city dwellers to maintain their
• 17:31
  sanity because the threat is externalized. It's out there.
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  Speaker 1: It's not in my apartment builder exactly.
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  Speaker 2: But in a town like Colon, geographic isolation strips away
• 17:40
  that defense mechanism entirely because who else even knows where
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  Colon is?
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: Literally?
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  Speaker 2: No one right, who else would know the specific layout
• 17:47
  of Sharon's converted grocery store and detached garage. The mathematical
• 17:51
  probability and the environmental logic strongly suggests the killer is
• 17:55
  not a passing transient. The killer is a neighbor.
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  Speaker 1: And that is where grief becomes totally poisoned by paranoia.
• 18:02
  You are trying to mourn the horrific loss of this
• 18:05
  foundational woman, but at the vigil you are secretly analyzing
• 18:08
  the body language of the person standing next to you.
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: You're wondering if they did it.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: You are questioning the alibi of the mechanic who fixes
• 18:17
  your tractor. The trauma isn't just the loss of Sharon.
• 18:20
  It's the sudden, suffocating realization that a monster is breathing
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  the same air you are, and you have no idea
• 18:27
  whose face they are wearing.
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  Speaker 2: Which brings us to the investigative reality because the police
• 18:32
  are facing the exact same suffocating environment, but they actually
• 18:36
  have the burden of proving it. Good luck with that, right,
• 18:39
  How to detectives sift through the tangled alibis of one
• 18:42
  hundred people who all know each other's schedules, who all
• 18:45
  share familial ties, and who all have a vested interest
• 18:48
  in protecting their own.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: Put yourself in the detective shoes for a second. It
• 18:52
  creates a massive investigative bottleneck. So let's dive into how
• 18:55
  the investigation actually unfolds, because it quickly slams into a
• 18:59
  wall of dead ends, false leads.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: They needed help right away, Yeah.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: The local sheriff brings in the Nebraska State Patrol to
• 19:05
  help manage the scope of the investigation. The detectives fan
• 19:08
  out and they utilize a strategy of concentric circles. They
• 19:13
  start at the absolute epicenter of the crime scene and
• 19:15
  work their way outward.
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: Which means starting with the person who called it.
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: In exactly, which means the very first major suspect is
• 19:23
  the man standing in the garage when the police arrived,
• 19:26
  Rick Hartman, the postmaster.
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: From an investigative standpoint, it is the only logical place
• 19:30
  to start. You look for proximity and access. Right, he
• 19:33
  discovered the body, he had a key to her home,
• 19:36
  and he was the last person known to be at
• 19:38
  the scene.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: Right. And to make matters significantly worse for him, his
• 19:42
  behavior during the initial police questioning is highly suspicious to
• 19:46
  the detectives. He reacts very aggressively to being interrogated. He
• 19:49
  got defensive, very At one point in the interview, he
• 19:52
  flat out refuses to give a formal written statement. He
• 19:55
  becomes combative and literally tells the officers they will just
• 19:58
  have to arrest him. He is textbook definition of defensive, which.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: Is incredibly common yet almost universally misread by investigators and
• 20:07
  the public alike.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: Okay, expand on that, why is telling the police to
• 20:10
  just arrest me a common response for an innocent person.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: It sounds like guild. I mean, if I was innocent,
• 20:18
  I'd be trying to explain everything.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: Because we operate on a deeply ingrained societal script of innocence.
• 20:25
  We believe that an innocent person with nothing to hide
• 20:28
  should be perfectly calm, cooperative, polite, and eager to assist
• 20:31
  law enforcement. But that script completely ignores human biology and
• 20:36
  the realities of trauma. Ah, I see, Imagine you are
• 20:40
  Rick Hartman. You have just suffered the extreme visceral trauma
• 20:43
  of finding your close friend brutalized in a pool of blood.
• 20:47
  You are in a state of profound shock.
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: Law enforcement then places you in a small interrogation room
• 20:52
  and begins aggressively implying that you are the monster who
• 20:55
  did this.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: Your brain perceives it as a secondary attack, exactly. Your
• 21:00
  autonomic nervous system takes over the fight or flight response,
• 21:04
  floods your body with adrenaline. You feel cornered, helpless, and
• 21:08
  utterly powerless. Anger and defensiveness are natural biological reactions to
• 21:13
  a false accusation under extreme stress.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: So he's not confessing.
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: When Hartman throws his hands up and says, just to
• 21:19
  resume that he isn't confessing. He is displaying a classic
• 21:22
  symptom of an innocent person acting guilty under the weight
• 21:27
  of an absurd accusation. He's essentially daring them to do
• 21:31
  their worst because the situation has become so surreal and
• 21:34
  hostile that he just wants it to end.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: That makes profound sense when you contextualize the trauma, and
• 21:39
  ultimately the objective data backs him up. His wife provides
• 21:43
  an airtight alibi placing him at home during the suspected
• 21:46
  time of the murder, and later DNA testing entirely clears
• 21:49
  his name.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: He's completely innocent, so.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: The epicenter circle is cleared. The detectives widen the net
• 21:54
  to the immediate neighbors. Next up, they look closely at
• 21:57
  a neighboring truck driver, and in.
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: Rural property dynamics, neighbor disputes are often the first place
• 22:01
  you look for a motive.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: Exactly the files note that this truck driver had a
• 22:06
  documented history of property disputes with Sharon. They had arguments
• 22:10
  over parking, logistics, fence lines, that classic neighborly friction that
• 22:15
  can sometimes escalate into bitter grudges.
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: And small towns, and it happens all the time, but.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: The detectives hit another wall. The truck driver is able
• 22:22
  to produce physical receipts proving he was driving his rig
• 22:26
  out of town on the night of the murder.
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: Establishing alibis through objective third party data like timestamp for
• 22:33
  Septs is the holy grail for investigators in these.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: Environments because it's not just someone's.
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: Word right, Because, as we discussed, eyewitness testimony from friends
• 22:42
  and family in town of one hundred is incredibly clouded by.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: Bias, which brings us directly to the introduction of James Mars.
• 22:50
  Mars is a twenty well some case files say twenty
• 22:52
  seven year old local farm hand, and his proximity is undeniable.
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: He's right there. He lives with his.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: Mother in a house situated directly behind Sharon's property. Their
• 23:02
  backyards basically touch. He is known to law enforcement too.
• 23:06
  He has a minor criminal history, mostly petty stuff, a
• 23:09
  reputation for getting into trouble and drinking.
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: Heavily on their radar.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, when detectives bring him in for an interview, he
• 23:17
  readily admits he has known Sharon since he was a
• 23:19
  little kid, but he acts completely shocked and devastated by
• 23:23
  her death.
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: And in a town this small, the detectives have to
• 23:26
  treat him with kid gloves initially because he is a local.
• 23:30
  What does he offer as his alibi for the night
• 23:32
  of June thirtieth.
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: He provides a highly specific timeline. He claims he was
• 23:36
  working a roofing job in Kansas during the day. After work,
• 23:40
  he says he drove to a nearby town called Wahoo
• 23:42
  to go drinking with friends. Okay, he states he didn't
• 23:45
  return home to his mother's house in Colon until roughly
• 23:48
  one thirty in the morning. And here is where the
• 23:51
  investigative bottleneck really tightens. His mother completely corroborates his timeline.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: Ah the mother and a.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: Friend of his also vouches for the exact timeline. They
• 24:00
  swear he was in Wahoo. So, as an investigator, you
• 24:03
  have a suspect with proximity, but his alibi is locked
• 24:07
  in by two separate members of the community.
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: This is the defining hurdle of rural policing. Investigators are
• 24:13
  trying to navigate a dense web of long standing relationships
• 24:17
  where loyalty almost always supersedes abstract concepts of justice.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: They protect their own in a.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: Closed loop community. People will absolutely cover for a friend
• 24:27
  or verify an alibi without actually knowing the true severity
• 24:30
  of what they are covering up.
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: That's a crucial distinction. They might not know they're covering.
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: Up a murder precisely. Let's look at the psychology of
• 24:37
  the mother and the friend. The friend knows James Mars
• 24:40
  has a history of getting into petty trouble. Maybe James
• 24:43
  calls him and says, hey, man, I got into a
• 24:45
  bar fight in Wahoo, or I got a dui. If
• 24:47
  the cops ask, just tell him we were drinking together
• 24:49
  until one thirty.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: Oh wow. Yeah.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: The friend agrees, thinking he is just saving his buddy
• 24:54
  from a minor misdemeanor charge. He has no idea he
• 24:58
  is actually providing an alibi.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: For a brutal humme side that is so twisted.
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: The investigator isn't just trying to find the physical truth.
• 25:04
  They are actively trying to untangle decades of familial loyalty,
• 25:09
  shared secrets, and inherent community bias against outside law enforcement.
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: And because of that tangled web, the investigation grinds to
• 25:16
  a devastating halt. The alibis hold, the leads dry up
• 25:20
  for ten agonizing months. The case goes cold ten months,
• 25:23
  and I think we really need to pause and absorb
• 25:26
  the terrifying reality of those ten months. For the town
• 25:28
  of Cologne, for nearly a year, the killer lived a
• 25:31
  completely mundane, normal.
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: Life right under their noses.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: He slept in a house right behind the victim's bloodstain property.
• 25:38
  He bought coffee at the same diner as the sheriff's deputies.
• 25:41
  He walked the exact same single block main street as
• 25:45
  Sharon's grieving friends, entirely confident that his web of small
• 25:48
  town loyalty had protected him. He thought he had committed
• 25:52
  the perfect crime.
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: It is a profound psychological violation. It's ten months of
• 25:56
  false security for the grieving town and ten months of
• 25:59
  abba salute arrogant confidence for the killer.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: But the arrogance had a blind spot, because while small
• 26:05
  town loyalty can obscure eyewitness testimony, it cannot obscure biology.
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: Thank god for that.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: Fast forward to April two thousand and four, the forensic
• 26:14
  team at the State crime Lab had managed to extract
• 26:17
  a viable DNA profile from seamen found on Sharon's nightclothes at.
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: The crime scene, a huge breakthrough.
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: Initially They ran it through COTIS, the national database, and
• 26:26
  got zero hits. The killer wasn't in the system, but
• 26:30
  the investigators on the ground in Colon had been executing
• 26:32
  a localized DNA dragnet.
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: Which is a fascinating and highly aggressive tactical maneuver by
• 26:38
  law enforcement.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: I was wondering about this. How does a police department
• 26:41
  legally and practically execute a DNA dragnet in a town.
• 26:44
  You can't just force people to give up their DNA right.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: Legally, no, you cannot compel a DNA sample without a
• 26:50
  warrant based on probable cause. But practically, in a microscopic community,
• 26:55
  law enforcement relies heavily on social pressure.
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: Oh, I see where this is going.
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: Let's down the mechanics. In a major city, you can't
• 27:03
  swab an entire zip code, it's logistically impossible. But in Colin,
• 27:09
  the suspect pool is geographically confined to an incredibly small
• 27:12
  number of adult.
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: Males, just dozens maybe, right.
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: The investigators essentially go door to door explaining they are
• 27:19
  trying to eliminate suspects. They ask for a voluntary buckle swab,
• 27:24
  a simple Q tip on the inside of.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: The cheek, so it's voluntary, but is it really.
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: Psychologically Absolutely not, because in a town of one hundred people,
• 27:32
  everyone knows the police are going door to door. If
• 27:35
  you are the one adult male on the block who
• 27:37
  refuses the voluntary swab, you instantly paint a massive neon
• 27:41
  target on your own back.
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: The rumor mill would destroy you.
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: The tab will know you refused, The gossip mill will
• 27:46
  convict you in the court of public opinion before the
• 27:49
  police even get a warrant. So the social pressure to
• 27:51
  comply is overwhelming, and through this systematic wide net swabbing,
• 27:55
  they finally hit the match.
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: And the DNA is a definitive, unargued match. To James Mars,
• 28:01
  the twenty five year old farm hand living right behind.
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: Her house, it's over for him. At that point.
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: The moment the DNA hit is confirmed, the dominoes that
• 28:09
  had been standing for ten months finally collapse. Law enforcement
• 28:12
  circles back to Mars's friend, the one who corroborated his
• 28:16
  alibi about drinking.
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: In wahoo Ah Bit. He changed his tune.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: Oh Instantly, faced with the reality of DNA evidence linking
• 28:22
  his friend to a homicide, the friend immediately retracts his statement.
• 28:26
  The alibi evaporates. In May two thousand and four, James
• 28:29
  Mars is officially arrested, and once he is sitting in
• 28:33
  the interrogation room, confronted with the overwhelming biological evidence that
• 28:37
  places him squarely in that garage, his defenses crumble. He
• 28:41
  breaks down and confesses to the crime.
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: A confession is critical for the legal prosecution, but it
• 28:47
  also usually provides the missing piece of the puzzle, the
• 28:50
  motive what drove a farm hand to brutally attack an
• 28:53
  older woman he had knows in his childhood well.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: The motive he provides in his confession is both infuriatingly
• 28:58
  banal and utterly terrible. He claims that on the night
• 29:01
  of June thirtieth, after a night out, he was heavily
• 29:04
  intoxicated on alcohol and significantly high on cocaine.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: So substance abuse is playing a huge role.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah. He says he ran out of money and decided
• 29:12
  to burglarize Sharon's home simply to steal cash. He details
• 29:16
  the physical confrontation emitting he pried, opened the back door
• 29:19
  and cut the phone line. He admits that Sharon unexpectedly
• 29:23
  woke up and confronted him with her unloaded gun.
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: The panic sets in.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: He describes the chase across the dark street into the garage,
• 29:30
  the savage beating, and the strangulation. However, he employs a
• 29:35
  very specific defense mechanism. During the confession. He claims memory
• 29:39
  loss regarding certain points of the assault and actively avoids
• 29:42
  fully admitting to the rape. Right, but he concedes that
• 29:44
  the break in and the murder perfectly matched the physical
• 29:47
  evidence the police found.
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: That selective memory loss is a textbook minimization tactic. Perpetrators
• 29:55
  of extreme violence, particularly sexual violence, often compartmentalized the most
• 29:59
  heinous aspects of their.
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: Actions just won't say the words out loud.
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: They will admit to a burglary gone wrong, but their
• 30:05
  ego and their psychological defense mechanisms prevent them from verbalizing
• 30:09
  the sexual assault, even when the DNA makes it a
• 30:11
  near futable fact.
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: But looking at this confession, I have to draw a
• 30:15
  hard line on mars narrative. Here he claims this was
• 30:18
  just a burglary that accidentally spiraled out of control because
• 30:21
  he was out of his mind on cocaine and drunk,
• 30:24
  a crime of pure chaoting opportunity.
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's his story, But.
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: We already established that he had the presence of mind
• 30:31
  to physically sever the external phone line before he ever
• 30:34
  stepped foot inside the house, which is key. You cannot
• 30:37
  convince me that a chaotic, drug fueled crime of opportunity
• 30:40
  involves the foresight to neutralize rural telecommunications. Cutting a phone
• 30:45
  line requires tools, it requires specific intent to isolate the victim,
• 30:50
  and it requires premeditation.
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, that is
• 30:54
  the critical analytical leap we have to make, and it
• 30:57
  highlights why we cannot take a killer's confession to face
• 30:59
  value right. If we synthesize the contradicting facts, we see
• 31:03
  how extreme crimes actually escalate. It is rarely a purely
• 31:08
  binary situation. It's almost never just a meticulous, cold blooded
• 31:12
  assassination or just a wild, impulsive, drug fueled frenzy.
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: So it's both.
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: The reality is usually a lethal cocktail of both.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: So how do you combine calculated premeditation with a chaotic frenzy?
• 31:25
  Walk me through that by looking.
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: At the timeline of his intent. The initial plan the
• 31:30
  burglary was absolutely premeditated. He lived right behind her, He
• 31:34
  knew she was an older woman living alone. He likely
• 31:37
  knew she had cash on hand.
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: He targeted her.
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: He took the calculated, cold blooded step of cutting the
• 31:43
  phone line to ensure he had a guaranteed window of
• 31:46
  uninterrupted time to search the house. That is the calculation,
• 31:50
  but the substance abuse, the heavy cocaine and alcohol consumption,
• 31:53
  acts as a massive volatile catalyst.
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: It pours gasoline on the calculation.
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: Precisely when share An unexpectedly wakes up and confronts him,
• 32:01
  the situation instantly goes off script. A sober, calculating burglar
• 32:05
  might have simply fled out the back door the moment
• 32:07
  the homeowner.
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: Appeared, because the goal was cash, not murder, right, But.
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: A burglar whose nervous system is flooded with stimulants into
• 32:13
  presence has a totally distorted threat response. Cocaine strips away
• 32:18
  impulse control, amplifies aggression, and induces paranoia.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: So they just snaps.
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: So a planned, albeit poorly executed property crime instantly detonates
• 32:28
  into an uncontrollable, disproportionately violent frenzy. The terror of the chase,
• 32:34
  the savage beating, the sexual assault. That is the terrifying
• 32:37
  result of chemical volatility overwriting any remaining rational thought or
• 32:42
  moral boundary.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: It is a lethal combination of geographic proximity, premeditated intent,
• 32:47
  and chemical combustion, and the psychological horror for the town
• 32:51
  of Colonne when this confession goes public is just profound.
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: I can't even imagine.
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: The monster wasn't a drifter passing through on the highway.
• 32:58
  It was the farm hand living in her literal backyard.
• 33:02
  The killer was the guy whose mother you sat next
• 33:04
  to in the pews at church, or who you chatted.
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: With at the diner, just shattering for them.
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: The resolution is finally here, the arrest is made, and
• 33:11
  the town can finally stop looking at each other with suspicion.
• 33:14
  But the journey through the justice system is going to
• 33:16
  force this entire community to sit in a courtroom and
• 33:19
  relive the nightmare all over again.
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: Because an arrest only stops the bleeding, it is not
• 33:24
  the end of the story. It is simply the beginning
• 33:27
  of the legal reckoning, which is often its own form
• 33:29
  of drawn out trauma.
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: The legal proceedings stretch out over the next couple of years,
• 33:34
  keeping the wound open. The reports very slightly on the
• 33:37
  exact date of the final disposition, placing it in either
• 33:40
  two thousand and five or two thousand and six, But
• 33:43
  the outcome is definitive. Facing an insurmountable mountain of DNA evidence.
• 33:48
  In his own partial confession, James Mars pleads guilty to
• 33:51
  second degree murder. Okay, the judge hands down a sentence
• 33:54
  of life in prison without the possibility.
• 33:56
  Speaker 2: Of krol, a definitive legal conclusion that removes him from
• 34:00
  society permanently.
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: It is definitive, But the way Mars conducts himself during
• 34:04
  the proceedings adds another deep layer of insult to the
• 34:07
  profound injury this town is already suffering. Desperate to mitigate
• 34:11
  his culpability or perhaps explain away the damning DNA evidence
• 34:14
  of sexual assault, Mars attempts a truly disgusting deflection.
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: What did he do?
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: He tries to claim on the record that he had
• 34:21
  an unsubstantiated casual relationship with this sixty six year old
• 34:25
  Sharon Erickson, a.
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: Claim that is as absurd as it is offensive.
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: Completely baseless. There is zero evidence to support it. It
• 34:33
  violently contradicts the brutal reality of the crime scene, and
• 34:36
  it is universally rejected by everyone who knew Sharon.
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: Just a desperate lie.
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: But the fact that he tried to drag her reputation
• 34:43
  through the mud in open court just twists the knife
• 34:46
  for the community. The former prosecutor on the case, Scott Tingelhoff,
• 34:50
  gave an interview years later, and his quote really encapsulates
• 34:54
  the lingering psychological damage of this entire ordeal.
• 34:58
  Speaker 2: What did he say?
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: He said? I think he start wondering, do I really
• 35:01
  know that person? Do I really know my neighbor? And
• 35:03
  are they capable of something?
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: That quote perfectly distills the insidious, corrosive nature of betrayal
• 35:09
  in a small community. The legal system can lock James
• 35:13
  Mars in a cell, but it cannot repair the shattered trust.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: And as if dealing with that internal shattered trust isn't enough,
• 35:20
  the case ends up drawing intense national media attention. The
• 35:24
  sheer brutality of the crime, combined with the extreme small
• 35:27
  town setting makes it irresistible to television producers.
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: Of course it does.
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: The murder of Sharon Ericsson was featured on major true
• 35:34
  crime documentaries on the Oxygen Network with dramatic titles like
• 35:38
  an Unexpected Killer and The Killer among Us. So now
• 35:44
  this tiny town of one hundred people, which just wants
• 35:46
  to close ranks and heal in private, has camera crews
• 35:49
  walking down their single block main street. That's rough, Their darkest,
• 35:53
  most vulnerable moment is being broadcast into living rooms across
• 35:56
  the country as entertainment.
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: Which highlights a fascinating and deeply uncomfortable contrast between the
• 36:02
  statistical reality of rural crime and the magnified emotional consumption
• 36:06
  of it.
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? Let's explore that contrast.
• 36:10
  When I look at the timeline, the arrest, and the
• 36:12
  media circus, it strikes me that the legal system provides
• 36:15
  a hard end point. The judge bangs the gavel, the
• 36:19
  prison door's lock, the documentary errors, and the rest of
• 36:22
  the world moves on right. But the legal system doesn't
• 36:24
  provide emotional closure for the people actually living on that
• 36:27
  gravel road. How does a town of one hundred people
• 36:30
  genuinely absorb the reality that they raised a monster in
• 36:33
  their own soil.
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: It's almost impossible.
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: How do they process the sickening fact that they sat
• 36:39
  next to his mother or waved to him from their
• 36:41
  porches for ten whole months while he was actively successfully
• 36:46
  hiding his crime.
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: That is the ultimate question regarding community trauma. If we
• 36:50
  look strictly at the data, violent crime is incredibly rare
• 36:55
  in rural agricultural communities compared to dense urban centers. You
• 37:00
  are statistically much much safer living in a town like
• 37:02
  Colon than you are in a major metropolis.
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: The numbers back that up, But that statistical rarity is
• 37:08
  exactly what makes the trauma so infinitely deeper when violence
• 37:11
  does occur. When a murder happens in a city of
• 37:14
  two million people, it is a localized tragedy, but it
• 37:17
  is ultimately absorbed into the ambient noise of urban life.
• 37:21
  The city doesn't stop, the coffee shops stay open, life
• 37:23
  goes on. But in a microscopic town like Colon, the
• 37:26
  impact of the trauma multiplies exponentially Because of the density
• 37:29
  of the social networks we discussed earlier. The trauma isn't
• 37:33
  being shared among strangers. It is being shared among people
• 37:35
  who share a lifetime of history. The shockwave doesn't dissipate,
• 37:39
  It bounces back and forth off the walls of the community.
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: It fractures the very foundation of their shared reality. Because
• 37:45
  if the boy who grew up behind the grocery store
• 37:47
  can do this, then nothing is safe. Everything is a
• 37:50
  potential threat.
• 37:51
  Speaker 2: Yes, but the sociology of tragedy also offers a blueprint
• 37:55
  for how communities survive this kind of catastrophic fracture, how soon.
• 38:00
  While the source materials note that in the decades since
• 38:02
  two thousand and three, Colan has slowly, painstakingly rebuilt itself,
• 38:09
  and they didn't achieve that by obsessing over James Mars
• 38:11
  or letting the paranoia win. They rebuilt their community by
• 38:15
  consciously actively choosing to focus on Sharon Erickson's legacy. I
• 38:19
  love that they remember her unmatched standard of kindness, They
• 38:22
  remember her fierce professionalism at the Treasurer's office, they remember
• 38:26
  her dedication to the mechanics of the town.
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: That's how it should be.
• 38:29
  Speaker 2: By deliberately elevating the memory of the victim over the
• 38:31
  infamy of the killer, a community reclaims its own narrative.
• 38:35
  They acknowledged the permanent scar like people in Colon still
• 38:38
  locked their doors now, and newcomers are certainly scrutinized more
• 38:42
  closely than they were in the nineteen nineties, but they
• 38:44
  absolutely refuse to let the violence be the final word
• 38:47
  on who they are. It is a profound, hard won
• 38:51
  example of collective resilience.
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: And that collective resilience is exactly what we have to
• 38:55
  hold on to as we synthesize this entire deep dive.
• 38:59
  We have looked at the deeply tragic death of a
• 39:01
  universally respected woman. We have walked through a town's heartbreaking
• 39:05
  overnight loss of innocence.
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: We really have.
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: We have examined the agonizing mechanics of a ten month
• 39:10
  localized cold case that was finally cracked by the cold
• 39:13
  objectivity of DNA technology, precisely because traditional neighborly trust prove
• 39:18
  too tangled and bias to navigate, and ultimately we are
• 39:21
  looking at the sobering reality of rural vulnerability.
• 39:24
  Speaker 2: It forces a necessary dismantling of the romanticized myths we
• 39:28
  hold about small town life.
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: It really does. We consume so much true crime media,
• 39:33
  and so often the entire narrative focus is hyper fixated
• 39:36
  on the perpetrator. We dissect the psychology of the murderer,
• 39:40
  the mistakes of the murderer, the audacity of.
• 39:42
  Speaker 2: The murder, always the killer.
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: But the true core of this deep dive, the real
• 39:46
  lasting lesson buried in these case files from Colon, Nebraska,
• 39:49
  is about the delicate ecosystem of community. It is about
• 39:53
  how deeply we rely on our neighbors for our fundamental,
• 39:56
  everyday sense of safety. And it is about how terrifyingly
• 40:00
  fragile that trust really is when it is pushed to
• 40:03
  its absolute breaking point.
• 40:05
  Speaker 2: And that realization leaves us with a necessary, if deeply uncomfortable,
• 40:09
  paradigm shift to consider long after the details of this
• 40:13
  specific case fade.
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: Oh what's that?
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: We almost universally think of geographic isolation, putting miles and
• 40:19
  miles of open fields and dark roads between ourselves and
• 40:22
  the crowded city, as a physical barrier against violence. We
• 40:25
  view distance as armor. But the tragedy of Sharon Erickson
• 40:29
  forces us to ask an unsettling question. Does isolation actually
• 40:32
  create a uniquely dangerous vulnerability? When you are forty miles
• 40:37
  from help and you truly believe you know the heart,
• 40:39
  the soul and the history of every single person living
• 40:42
  around you, are you actually safer or are you just
• 40:45
  infinitely more exposed when the threat finally comes from the inside.
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: That is the reality of Colin, Nebraska, and it is
• 40:51
  the thought that is going to linger the next time
• 40:53
  you think about leaving your front door unlocked. Thanks for
• 40:56
  joining us on this deep dive. Everyone, We'll catch you
• 40:58
  next time