No one had anticipated the need for security, so there wasn't any. Briefly, back in 1988, things had been different. After what happened to the two local girls that year, some of the ranchers began carrying loaded rifles and shotguns in their pickup trucks. A few went so far as to strap handguns to their hips while they did their chores. But that geyser of paranoia didn't endure, and four years later, in the spring of 1992, Colorado's Elk River Valley just didn't feel like a dangerous place.

The Silky Road Ranch filled a horseshoe canyon on the west side of the valley. The ranch was rimmed on three sides by the gentle slopes of the Routt National Forest and shadowed by the high wilds of the Mount Zirkel Wilderness. The northern edge of the Silky Road abutted the banks of Mad Creek while the open end of the horseshoe lined the county road that ran along the swell of the Elk River.

The new ranch house -- of logs and stone imported from southern France -- was situated to the south and west of a thick stand of aspen trees, the dwelling meandering over 5,306 square feet on one level. The two housekeepers who managed the estate were a lesbian couple in their forties who lived a quarter mile away in the original frame house that had been built on the ranch when it was christened the Crooked Diamond spread in 1908. Care of the ranch's 316 acres of land and its twenty-seven horses required two full-time hands who bunked in better-than-average quarters adjacent to the modern stable.

Gloria Welle loved her ranch and treasured the house that she had designed, as she told the second of her three architects the day before she fired him, "to appear to have been built by someone who had moved gleefully from Provence to the Colorado Rockies." Her stable -- she would never refer to the building as a barn -- was designed to the same exacting specifications as her home. Gloria adored every one of her horses, confided intimacies to her two cowboys, and tolerated her rather apathetic gay housekeepers because she didn't want it to appear to anyone in the valley that she might be letting them go solely because of their sexual orientation. Sometimes she prayed at night that the girls, as she called them, would just see fit to resign. But Gloria prayed as she did most things not involving money, which is to say haphazardly, and the girls stayed on.

The day that Brian Sample knocked on the front door of the sprawling pseudo French country house the housekeepers were in town running errands and the cowboys were in Gallup picking up the two new horses that Gloria had purchased on a recent trip to New Mexico. Gloria's husband, Dr. Raymond Welle, was at his clinical psychology office on the second floor of a nicely renovated old mercantile building on Lincoln Avenue in nearby downtown Steamboat Springs.

When Gloria threw open her front door she probably didn't know her visitor's name, though he might have seemed vaguely familiar to her. No doubt she had seen him once or twice around town. The person she greeted was a middle-aged man wearing freshly laundered Levi's corduroys, a neatly pressed blue chambray shirt, and good cowboy boots. For many of Steamboat's residents this outfit constituted their Sunday's best, and Brian Sample's presence at her door likely caused no alarm to cross Gloria's face.

People who knew him well say that Brian Sample probably smiled in his own shy way -- his eyes deflected off to one side -- before he introduced himself and asked if he could come in. Given the events in his life over the previous year, though, he may have forgone the smile. If the worn black cowboy hat that he called his "day-off " hat was still on his head when Gloria answered the door, Brian would have removed it or at the very least tipped it as he greeted her. People who knew her insist that Gloria wouldn't have considered her alternatives for long. She would have quickly invited the stranger into her living room, which was a cavernous post-and-beam enclosure that was large enough to entertain most of a traveling circus. Gloria was especially proud of the room and loved to show it to strangers.

It appears likely that Brian Sample didn't display his true intentions to Gloria Welle for, say, twenty minutes or so. During that time, Gloria fixed them both some Celestial Seasonings tea -- Sleepytime for herself, Red Zinger for him. Given that Ranelle and Jane, the housekeepers, were gone for the morning, Gloria went to some special trouble preparing the refreshments, cutting a slice of lemon for her guest to squeeze into his Red Zinger. Gloria didn't take lemon in her tea. She also set out some Girl Scout Cookies on a ceramic plate, one she had thrown and fired herself during one of her periodic self-improvement phases. The selection of cookies included both Trefoils and Thin Mints. Girl Scout Cookie deliveries had taken place a few months before, but Gloria always bought in quantity. The only surprise was that she was willing to share her Thin Mints with a relative stranger. Gloria's friends often joked about her addiction to Thin Mints.

Most locals assumed that if Gloria and Brian talked casually, they probably talked about horses. Perhaps they even discovered that they both used the same large-animal veterinarian, Lurinda Gimble. Horses was definitely Gloria's favorite conversational topic. And it hovered somewhere in Brian's top three or four, though it certainly came in after his two boys -- and after fly-fishing.

If Gloria was in one of her infrequent moods when she allowed herself to pay attention to her guest, as opposed to paying attention only to her own graciousness as a hostess, she would have found Brian to be a tired, sad man who had recently picked at his cuticles until they were cracked and bloody. She might have heard him talk about the family and emotional problems that had forced him to lose not only his business, but also, imminently he feared, his home. Although it wouldn't have been like him to go into it, he might also have mentioned his recent failed suicide attempt, a clumsy overdose of Valium and penicillin that had caused him more humiliation than medical risk. Virtually everyone with an opinion believes Gloria must have heard Brian Sample vent about his rage at his psychologist, who happened to be Gloria's husband, Dr. Raymond Welle.

Folks think that it was sometime after the tea was poured and before the cookies were gone that Gloria learned that she was being taken hostage. People in the Elk River Valley still argue about whether or not Brian initially had anything else on his mind that day or whether what happened later was just a sign that something went terribly wrong inside Gloria's home on the Silky Road Ranch.

At some point after the tea and cookies were served Brian revealed his weapon and stood by in some reluctant but menacing fashion as Gloria called her husband at his office. She explained that one of his patients was visiting and that she would like him to come home and deal with this situation right away. Her voice was tight and pressured as she spoke. Raymond Welle had listened carefully for nuance and warning in his wife's words during that phone call. He was, after all, a psychologist. He'd even taken some notes. Twice Gloria implored her husband to hurry and twice she insisted that he must not call the police.

He wrote down her directives each time.

Copyright © 2000 by Stephen White