David Shier Part 2: Graveyard of Secrets
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This has cracked open a huge fissure in Colorado. My lawyer said, you need to be careful because we're pissing off a lot of people. I have to tell you, that picture of those legs in that grave haunts me almost every day. I'm just not convinced that that second body isn't my husband in that grave. And I really need to know. Maybe I can put him to rest, just generally speaking.

She says, "Well, I have you on the phone. You better do some checking because I am told that there are several bodies that have been buried in your cemetery without your knowledge." "What?" "I know about your dad because you told me, but I don't know about any other bodies. What are you talking about?" Yeah. She says, "There's a reliable source that is saying there are more bodies up there." I'm thinking, wait a minute. You went into my property to do, in my opinion, when something's not only immoral, but illegal at least three times, and now I'm learning maybe five times.

Last week you heard part one of David Shire's story. You learned about Dave's sudden and unexpected disappearance from Trinidad, Colorado on February 11th, 2022. Dave's wife recalled that he had asked her to drive him somewhere because a person had called him about a property. She didn't know much more than that. But that morning, Dave was frustrated with his wife because she already had plans to run errands for one of their daughters.

She last saw Dave around 11 a.m. And when she returned from those errands, Dave was missing, though she didn't realize it immediately. She assumed that he was napping or tinkering with something outside. Once it became clear that Dave was actually missing and no one had seen or heard from him, his family decided to report him missing.

Considering his age, law enforcement immediately took Dave's disappearance seriously. They began searching and alerting the local community to keep an eye out for him. That evening, a snowstorm blew into town, and the search efforts had to be paused for the night. The next morning, searches for Dave resumed, and those searches were extensive. Even months and years later, the areas were searched again and again.

The family was concerned about the positioning of Dave's truck. They thought it could be an important clue because it wasn't parked the way he usually left it. Then there was a report from a neighbor about a white truck seen at the Shire residence around the time he disappeared.

A couple of weeks after Dave had vanished, a neighbor reviewed trail cam footage. The neighbor had immediately turned the footage over to law enforcement, but it wasn't looked at because they didn't have the technology to view it. The neighbor spotted Dave on the footage from the day he went missing. The timestamp said 1 p.m., though law enforcement noted the time was off by one hour, making the final sighting of Dave Shire at 12 p.m. With all of the searches turning up empty, Dave's case went cold.

The family pushed law enforcement to look more closely at the clues left behind, but still nothing. Then, more than a year later, there was a strange twist in the case when the local county coroner came under fire after the body of a man was exhumed, a man who had been considered a missing person for several years.

And during the exhumation, they found two bodies inside the grave, where there was only supposed to be one. There was concern that the other body could be Dave. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation began looking into what was going on in Los Animas County, while the Shire family waited for news about Dave. I'm Marissa, and from Wondery, this is episode 490 of The Vanished, part two of David Shire's story, Graveyard of Secrets.

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When news broke about the exhumation and the discovery of a second body buried in the same grave, Morgan feared the worst. She wondered if her father had been found without anyone realizing who he was and quietly buried without the family ever being notified.

The thought was devastating. She believed the discovery would spark immediate action, that authorities would move quickly to identify the unknown person. But that didn't happen. What shocked her even more was the lack of urgency and the absence of public outcry. Instead of answers, she and her family faced silence, resistance, and delay. For Morgan, she felt as though she was stuck in the middle of a nightmare, with no clear way out.

This town, things happen on a handshake. There's deep family roots, people that will do whatever they can to protect each other. And in many ways, I admire that and have benefit from it myself. At the same time, it was human beings. And I asked myself, you know, would I have even cared this much if I hadn't had to consider that it was my own family member down there? And I don't know the answer to that. I like to think that I would have cared. But I

I just was forced to contend with that idea or had the opportunity to really contend with that idea and just realize that this isn't okay, even if this isn't my father. It was somebody's family member, and I know what that feels like to not know where they are. So yeah, there's absolutely the small town stuff, and I'm not convinced that didn't play a role in this one way or another. Like maybe my father died very innocently and profanely

Perhaps he was unrecognizable when somebody found him. And I was like, oh, just throw him in the pile with the other ones. And I just think that we should take better care of our most vulnerable people.

No matter our cultural or religious background, most of us share common rituals when someone passes away. These traditions, whether it's burial or cremation, a formal religious ceremony or an informal celebration of life, are how we begin to process grief. They represent the final act of care, a way of honoring the person we've lost, and a step toward beginning to heal. So when Mark heard what was unfolding with the county coroner, Dominic Verker,

He started digging for answers, just as many of us would. Mark assumed there would be clear laws in place for how unidentified or unclaimed remains must be handled, and also a standard protocol for any burial. But what Mark discovered shocked him. The safeguards he thought existed weren't there, or at least it appeared they weren't being followed.

The thought occurred to me, well, what are the rules? And that's how I turned up that CDC research. I found it to be kind of disconcerting when I found out through that research, it showed that pretty much the only qualification in Colorado for dealing with someone's death is having a pulse and being over 18. And that in many states, that's the case. That CDC research, I kind of stumbled upon it. I opened up the spreadsheets. I was appalled.

I guess there's a bit of an honor code going on in some places, but it looks like in a lot of states, I guess Colorado is one of these states, if they just find someone on the road, they don't have to really do anything. Hence, you get the situation that they had in Los Animas County where they're finding people and just throwing them into holes. And then we looked into it and couldn't figure out who they are. And we put them in a nice coffin and we gave them a nice burial when that just wasn't the case. It makes me think,

Holy cow. If it's so lax, if finding a random person dead on the road or in a building, if it's so lax in so many states, what it takes to get custody of that body and dispose of it, then how many people in NamUs are sitting in random holes and random private cemeteries? And I know that's completely beyond the scope of what we're talking about here, but it was kind of eye-opening, like, well, wait a minute.

Is there something really big? And that's where my cousin and I both, we kind of feel like we're crazy. We're like, are we both thinking the same thing? Is there something really big going on? This is just one little cemetery in one little podunk town and you got this going on? It's insane.

Morgan has been working tirelessly to push forward the investigation into her father's disappearance. But when that grave was opened in 2023, and two bodies were found inside, it became about more than just finding her dad. The man they had been exhuming was himself a missing person for several years, before finally being identified. And the way his remains were handled, and how his family was treated when they tried to honor him, felt deeply wrong. Morgan knew she had to act.

Not only because there was a chance her father might be the second person in that grave, but because no family should ever have to go through something like this. For Morgan, it wasn't just personal anymore. It was about justice, dignity, and making sure this never happens to anyone else.

My father went missing in February of 2022. September of 2023, those bodies were discovered in the grave. October, I learned about it. And then in December is when Tom Murphy and myself gave a presentation to the county commissioners about it. And then we spent basically six months in 2024. We had initiated a recall of the coroner.

and the investigation was going on. I do think it raised a lot of awareness. I don't know how lasting the awareness was, but just like in Colorado, for example, in rural areas, we rely on folks that don't necessarily have full training to do this. But states like New Mexico, for example, they have like a

like a centralized system through University of New Mexico and people are dispatched and things like that. So yeah, I learned a lot about sort of the funeral business and a lot of things in the process of this that I wouldn't necessarily have known about had I not been involved in this

Rosemarie shared that a family friend named Tom, who works in the funeral industry, was on site the day of the exhumation. He had been filming the process and later brought a chilling concern to the family. He believed the second body found in the grave could be Dave. As Rosemarie watched Tom's footage, something jumped out to her, something she couldn't ignore, and it raised even more questions about what really happened to her husband and who exactly was buried in that grave.

Starkville Cemetery, which is probably about a mile from our home. Our friend Tom, who is an investigative reporter who is also a mortician, did a ton of research on this. I actually saw pictures of that body because Tom was filming the whole exhumation. And the person that did that, he was a mortician. I know that's not the correct word anymore, but he was out of Denver, but has done over 100 exhumations. He's kind of like the state expert on that.

he actually had to step on the second body to retrieve the first body that was on top. And they were in a head-to-crotch position. I mean, this is such a disgusting thing, this cornered the edit. But anyway...

Denver morticians told Tom the second body was fresh, was the term he used. And Tom asked for a little bit more explanation. He says it hasn't been here more than 18 months. But at that time, that's about how long Dave had been missing. But the other notable thing, the

The picture of the second body, Dave was a very tall, thin man. And he'd shrunk a little bit, but not a ton. He was still tall. His height was in his legs. He had these incredibly long legs, especially from his knee to his ankle. And in the picture, in the body bag, you can see the shape of those legs and they are long, skinny legs. So needless to say,

We got involved and couldn't get any information on the second body. And if you follow the money, I mean, you don't even have to be an investigator to see just the numbers alone speak for itself. And that's why I was so happy when the CBI came in because, I mean, it's a small town. There's a lot of corruption here. I know what I suspect, but I have no proof to say who's corrupted, who's not, but

But I mean, nothing's hidden. I mean, people are kind of proud of it. It's probably no different than most small towns in America. You know, you get this core cluster of people and they scratch each other's back or whatever that old adage is. I don't know. It's weird. But I feel there's a deep-seated coercion, if nothing else.

Mark told us that Dave wasn't the only possible identity for the second body found in the grave. Another family had also come forward, believing it might be their loved one who had also been missing. No one knew for sure who it was, and multiple families were left holding their breath, hoping for answers, and dreading what those answers might be.

Our best guess is another person that went missing who was kind of intermittently homeless and whose family was looking for them. And if it is that person, he had been shot in the back of the head, found their body in an abandoned house in a section of town that is kind of known for transiency. And that family has been trying to get the body back. So here's the thing. The coroner basically said when it came to that gentleman, the one who had been shot,

They did the, I guess, autopsy, and then they just went and buried the body. Meanwhile, the family had been asking, hey, we want to get our loved one back. We want him back. We want him back. And they kept saying, well, we can't do that. We can't do that. And then eventually, they too kind of cornered them into that family was walked out the one cemetery, but it wasn't the right cemetery. And because of all of this, one of the things I told Morgan several months ago, I said, look, start

so that you don't get any more overwhelmed with this. I said, just start writing everything down in one place and then you can always go back and fix, put everything in one place so that you have one narrative to hook onto when you're talking to people.

The Colorado Bureau of Investigation eventually joined the inquiry into the coroner's actions. But for Rosemarie, it wasn't enough. Coroners are elected officials, and that meant real accountability would have to come from the community. What he had been accused of—mishandling of remains, secret burials, and lack of transparency—wasn't just negligent. To Dave's family, it felt deeply depraved. So Rosemarie, along with Morgan and their family friend Tom—

began working to initiate a recall. They didn't just want an investigation. They wanted the coroner removed from office because they felt that a person who had done something like this should never be trusted with the care of anyone's loved ones again.

We spearheaded the recall. It was really us collecting signatures. We got about 10%, 15% over the number required. But in a recall, at least in Colorado, they disqualify so many signatures that we didn't have the minimum number of acceptable signatures. There were some options we could have extended and gotten more, but we were exhausted by that time. You know, I feel we made the community aware of

He comes up for election again in a year and a half or two years. You know, I figure we'll beat him at the ballot box. But no, he has no business with the public trust. And I had no idea how much power a coroner had.

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go to goodrx.com slash vanished. That's goodrx.com slash vanished. Just like we did with Dave's case file, we submitted a public records request to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, hoping to learn more about their review of the coroner's actions and the efforts to identify those buried in Starkville Cemetery. What we received was a hefty file, pages of written reports, and hours of recorded interviews.

According to the documents, the Los Animas County Sheriff's Office officially requested assistance from the CBI in December of 2023. The sheriff asked them to investigate what he described as potential abuse of a corpse. His narrative outlined how an individual, whose name was redacted, had been buried in what the report called a mass grave at Starkville Cemetery, and that this was done without the knowledge of the property owner. No burial permits were filed, as

as required by Colorado law. The report also stated that this same individual listed himself as the funeral home when burying the body. The sheriff's request made the concern crystal clear. He wrote, I'm seeking justice for the abuse of his bodily remains. Considering the coroner's failure to perform due diligence, history of losing unidentified remains and secrecy,

I believe it would be in the state's best interest to use ground-penetrating radar to find the truth for our families. Transparency and accountability are needed, not just for closure, but for the dignity of the unidentified. They need to be entered into the NamUs database. The audio interviews included in the file were heavily redacted as well, especially when it came to the names of other families involved. So as you listen, you'll notice some gaps.

Awkward silences where names have been removed for privacy. One of the people CBI interviewed was the owner of Starkville Cemetery. He told investigators that his cousin Leroy served as the caretaker and was the one more involved with the day-to-day operations at the cemetery. The owner himself said that he had very little oversight or involvement with what had taken place there.

Just to give you some context of what my opinion is. It turns out that this corner had these bodies, homeless bodies. By his conversation, he told me that they did not have a popper cemetery.

cemetery. If he'd gone through the proper channels, if he'd got a hold of me and said, hey, you know what? The county has these homeless people. We really have nowhere to bury them. We don't have a proper cemetery. Do you think we could do something there? I'm pretty sure that I would probably say, you know what? If you want to bring the equipment up and maybe clear some trees, we could probably set off a section for that. You need to bury people. I mean, in my opinion, every human being is entitled to a

proper dignified burial, right? Any decent person would think that. So what Leroy's role has been probably since the 1990s, if somebody needs to bury somebody, they call him, he opens the gate. What's happened is that Leroy, they probably call Leroy, he's gone down and opened the gate. Okay.

So the county can get in, open the grave. Then on the day of the funeral, he'll open the gate so the funeral can be done. Okay. The county will have the machine there. They'll cover the grave. Memorial Day weekend, he will go and open the gate so the people going out to decorate graves at the end of each night, he would make sure the gate is locked. Okay.

The cemetery's owner told investigators he hadn't realized anything was wrong. That was until a certified letter showed up in his mailbox. It was from the daughter of the man who would later be exhumed. The same exhumation that revealed a second body buried in the same grave. That letter set off a chain of events that no one could have predicted. What began as one family's search for answers quickly unraveled into something much bigger.

exposing a disturbing pattern and raising serious questions about how the dead were being handled in Los Animas County. This is a letter dated October 10th of 22. So I get this letter. First thing that I do is call Leroy. Leroy says, I don't know nothing about it. He lied. And he's lied to me three times. We'll get into that. I am not going to cover anybody on something like this because this whole thing is immoral, unethical. And in my opinion, it's straight up evil. What happened here?

He said he didn't know nothing about it. So I called Dominic Berger in the corner. So I said, I've got a letter here from a lady. She's claiming that you buried this body up there and won't help her get access to visit the gravesite. He goes off on this tangent about what a piece of shit this lady is. She has been the living nightmare of my life for the last couple of years and this and that. And he says, she's wanting to go into your property. He made it sound like he was trying to protect her.

my rights as a property owner. And I said, well, what do you mean? He says, well, she's threatened to sue me. I'm afraid she'll probably go into your property and slip a fall or some language like that to have a reason to turn around and sue you. And I'm like, what do you mean? Yeah, if you want to let the people drive up, they go. But I'm listening. And he says, and she's just really a piece of work. And I've already told her that she can't go into your property. And if she tries to go into your property, I'm going to have her arrested. I'm thinking to myself, this is not your property.

So, okay, it's not adding up. And I said, well, you know what? Can I just come down and talk to you? He says, yeah. So I'm thinking within that week from getting that letter, my wife and I went down. And in the meantime, I call her.

to get her side of the story. She's hostile to him. And I said, well, what's happening? And then she runs the story down. She says, my father is a Vietnam vet. He's been missing for I don't know how many years. I've been trying to find him for years. She found him evidently by some missing persons organization. I don't know which one. Was able to find out that he was interned at

And then how she found out he was dead or that Berkert had the body, I'm not clear. She says, well, I finally found him. They identify him by DNA. And I found out that he's in your property behind a locket and I can't get in there. She said, I want to visit him and I would like to have a funeral with military honors and the whole thing because he was a veteran. None of this sounds unreasonable.

She says, "And I'm thinking of maybe exhuming him and bringing him back home, but I don't know if I can afford that." What is the problem between you and Mr. Burgess? Well, he's just stonewalling me every step. And I said, "Well, what do you mean?" She says, "He will not allow me to go on the property." I had to go to the county assessor to find out who the owner of the property is. Well, they won't give you a phone number. They'll give you an address and then you can write to them, hence the letter. She says, "But all I want to do is go on there and maybe have a funeral, maybe discuss the policy of exhuming him later or whatever."

Okay. And I says, and what is the problem? Well, he's stoned along. He's telling me that I can't go on that property. He's not going to get shot by somebody. You've been known to shoot at people on your property. I think to myself, where does this come from? I don't even know him. I know that my dad knew his father. It's a small town down there. So I said, let me go talk to Mr. Berker and I'm sure that we can accommodate you somehow. I'm not going to tell you that you can't go in and visit your father's grave. That just doesn't make any sense.

But the shooting at people kind of disturbed me. So I told my wife, I said, you know what? Go on Facebook and see if there's any posts that she's making in there. So she did. She pulled them up. One was some of the effect of after so many years, I finally found my father and he's in the cemetery behind a locked gate of private property and the property owner will not let me in there. I hadn't even been involved in it. There's that one. Then another one made a vague comment about the owner being known to shoot at people. And I'm thinking to myself, this is crazy.

I never threatened to shoot anybody, and I would not shoot some little old lady for trying to visit her father in my property. So I go down to talk to him, my wife and I. We met him there at the morgue. And we walk in, and he started asking the questions. And he runs the story down that they had this homeless man that they found. He showed me pictures. The skull.

Don't know that he should have done that. It almost seems like a privacy issue. Again, he's just claiming that, you know, you don't want this lady on your property. She's going to be a problem for you. And I'm thinking, you know, he's this adamant. There must be something about it. And I said, well, okay, well, I appreciate it. Let me do some more checking into it and we'll go from there. The other thing was that he went on this trade about why is she worried about him now?

He's been gone for all these years and homeless people this and homeless people that. And I'm like, maybe she just found out or maybe just one day she decided. I don't know why, but it is her dad, right? So then I get back and I call her back, still not understanding the hostility. I said, well, you know what? I don't see any reason why you can't go in. I can accommodate you somehow. We can do that.

The next time the cemetery owner heard from her, she told him that she was ready to move forward with the exhumation of her father. But she also had something else to share, something that sent a chill down his spine. She heard there were more bodies secretly buried in his cemetery. And from that moment on, the situation shifted from unsettling to something far more serious. I'm at work and I get a call from her.

She says, we're going to be exhuming my father next Friday. I have found a mortician in Denver, Fred Marshall. He's licensed to do exhuming bodies. What does that mean? She says, well, I have this man that's willing to do it, and we want to do it next Friday. And she said, and we're in contact with Dominic Berger, and he is still involving us again. And he's telling Fred Marshall that he can't go on that property.

It's private property and it's his county. And if anything's to be done, he will be there. He's not going to allow him on that property. And I said, well, once again, it's not his property. Before this gets blown out of proportion, do you have the number of the mortician? She says, I will get it for you. I said, I'm going to call you right back. So I called Berger.

I says, I understand they were exhuming the body. This is next Friday. I don't know. I haven't spoken to that lady in months. Now it's really getting weird. You see what I'm saying? I says, well, let me call you right back. So I called her back out the number of Fred Marshall and I called him. He goes on a tirade over Dominic Berger. He says, well, I did take the case. I've been trying to get with Mr. Berger to get in there and he's giving me a hard time. He's rude, profane, vulgar, and

He's telling me that if I try to go on that property, he will have me arrested. It's not his property. He says, and the thing is that he has no involvement in it. He says, he's the coroner down there, but he has no involvement. He says, the way this works is you go to the State Department of Health, you get the permit. He says, I will bring the permit to you. I cannot do anything until you sign it. When you sign it, that is the only permission I need. But once you sign it, that guy can do it.

I said, well, that's not a problem. So I called her back and she says, well, I have you on the phone. You better do some checking because I am told that there are several bodies that have been buried in your cemetery without your knowledge. What? I know about your dad because you told me, but I don't know about any of the bodies. What are you talking about? Yeah. She says there's a reliable source that is saying there are more bodies up there. Who that source is, I do not know. Okay.

Alarmed by what he had heard, the cemetery owner went to another individual named Pete, who had also been involved with the cemetery and might know more about what was going on there.

She drops that information that there are several waters. Okay, let me go back. I went back to Pete. I went to his house, knocked on the door. He came to him. I said, they're going to exhume that body this next week. I said, I've got to remember where the grave is at, but I may have to get with you to show us where it is. He said, well, that's not what I'm going to do. But he was kind of, I don't know, he had that look of, uh-oh, something's going on. Didn't even say anything to him about the other bodies. He says, well, you're not going to like what I have to tell you now. I said, what's that? He says, there's three bodies up there.

I said, three? He says, yeah. I said, Pete, you told me only one. He says, I know I did. I'm not trying to throw anybody under the bus, but if it's coming to this, you need to know there are three bodies up there. Uh-huh. And I'm thinking, oh, my God. I said, Pete, we only saw one grave up there. Please tell me that these bodies aren't in the same hole. He says, no, but there are two in one hole. I said, oh, my God. Well, how did all this happen? He says, well, the first one happened, and then there was two more, so we did two more. Okay.

So first the lady. First the lady. Okay. And then what he told me, he says, when the lady died, Verker contacted me. He says, the way I got acquainted with Verker, he was a maintenance man at the JLP was, which is...

right where the mortgage is. Somehow they got acquainted. He says there was actually times that he needed help moving equipment and stuff in the bodies. I would go over and help you. And that's kind of how I found out about the homeless guy that still hadn't told me about the woman. He says, I'll go up there with you and I'll show you where it's at. So we went up and sure enough, you could tell that the ground had been somewhat disturbed there. And he said, it's right there where that bush is at.

I said, "Nobody marked the grave." He says, "No, there was no marker, no grave marker." I said, "Well, how did this whole thing come down?" Honestly, he said, "I thought I was just doing something for charity. The man had nowhere to be buried, told me he would go up to Stark Hill." Well, it turns out that wasn't the truth. It turns out that they had buried a lady up there. That is the first one supposedly that they buried. And that's the one where he showed me the grave was.

That's where the female was? Yeah. I was under the impression that's where Mr. was. Yeah. It was this late. By the day of the scheduled exhumation, tensions were running high. The cemetery owner decided he wanted to be there. He was deeply unsettled by everything that had come to light and wanted to see for himself what had been happening on his own property. He recounted the experience to the CBI agent during his interview, describing what he remembered from that day and the unease that had only continued to grow.

So, we get set up there and Berker's there, Tom is there, Fred Marshall's there. We dig up the grid. Pete showed up and he was there with a shovel. And he was on the backhoe. Pete actually got down in the grid. Berker says, you got to go down about eight feet. Well, why eight feet? You should go like six feet because of the other body. So, we dig it up and I've got a pretty strong stomach. I would

I worked in that pen for 22 years. I have seen the evil things that people do to each other. I've worked security in the hospital. I have taken bodies from the floor to the morgue, from the morgue to the corner. I've seen autopsies. I've seen mangled bodies. But when they dug that up, and then I saw that there was just two bodies in body bags just laying on top of each other like that. No dirt between them. It turned my stomach. I thought, this is, how could you do this to a human being? So anyway, Fred gets down in, and he identifies Mr. H.

body, I think because the female was missing. So they put the body in the car while they're doing that. And then he gets back down into the grave and he looks up to Berkler and he says, do you want me to take this other body out? Why he said that, I don't know. But Berkler says, no, leave it there. But anyway, while Fred was down there, and I didn't catch this then, but I did in a conversation myself and Tom and one of the Shire ladies had on a conference call that Fred had said while he was down there that he felt the body and that there was still

I guess, semi-solid muscle tissue on the shoulders. And he said it was a man. It was definitely a man. He says, but that body was not embalmed. Tom says, well, how do you know that? He says, because if the body was embalmed, that is a white body bag, there would be embalming fluid seeping through. It would have stained that bag and you would see it. He says, and the other thing is that body's not been in that grave for four years, not in that condition, because by then it would have been just disintegrated.

And so we asked him, well, in your opinion, how long would you say? And he says, well, in my professional opinion, from doing hundreds of these, I would say that body's been there six months to two years. In the meantime, Fred had told me, he says, you know what? I cannot see where they issued a permit to bury the bodies. So I asked him, well, how does that work? He says, well, when you have a death and you're going to bury somebody, you have to get a permit from DHS. And then when you go to the cemetery, you offer it to the owner. That was one of the reasons I wanted to break it.

because one asked him where were the permits and number two how can you tell me about bodies so over there and i asked him i says hey dominic what are other permits for burying these bodies and he says i don't think there are any permits because i said what do you mean i don't think i don't think i says well hold on i says i got two people that are involved in funeral business here that are telling me that you have to have a permit to bury body he says no i don't think there are any permits

I said, "The second question, Dominic." I said, "When I talked to you a year ago and when I talked to you a week ago, how come you didn't tell me that there was more than one body up here?" And his response was, "It wasn't on purpose. I just didn't." I said, "Excuse me?" He said, "Well, it wasn't on purpose. I just didn't." I said, "Oh, okay." I said, "Well, you know what? I want to know who these people are. I want their date of birth. I want their date of death. And I want to see those permits because I cannot believe that you did this to human beings. These people

People, they deserve the dignity of a proper burial. They didn't deserve to be thrown in a hole like that. He said nothing, offered no explanation. One of the key questions the CBI agent was trying to answer was whether there had been any misappropriation of funds. She was following the money, looking for signs of any financial misconduct. So she asked the cemetery owner if any money had changed hands.

I said, now, did he pay for anything? He said, what Verker did is he gave me a gate. You know what a farm gate is? You see these green gates? He said, well, Verker provided a gate. The old gate was kind of tore up. I said, let me ask you a question. I'm trying to understand something. When that happened, I saw them bodies like that. You know, that kind of bothered me. He says, you bought me two. I get it. Pete said several times in our conversation that Verker was very crafty.

cold, very hard, hard, hard towards homeless people. He said, I don't know if Donnick did well. I'm not trying to throw him under the bus, but he's that way. I said, so you dug the hole big enough for three people? He says, it was a huge hole. I said, so then why didn't you bury them side by side? He says, well, that's what I thought we were going to do.

But when the second body slipped down, it just landed on top of the other one. You think, well, you just dropped it in there. I said, didn't that give you pause, Pete, to see that? He said, it did. It did. And I told Berker, why don't we move the body at least to the side before we cover it? And Berker said, no, I don't know about this cover. And I said, you didn't press it any further? He said, well, I mean, it was kind of his thing.

I said, so we just covered them right one on top of the other like that? He said, yeah. I thought that was pretty gross. You told me that for the first one, for the lady, that he had provided the gate. I said, well, how about one day bury the other two? Did anybody get paid? And he gets real quiet. And I said, Pete, did he pay anybody when he buried the other two bodies? And the other paused.

But then he finally says, yeah. Who got paid? He said, my dad. I said, how much did he get paid? He said, I don't know. I said, what do you do with the money? He put it in his pocket. I don't know the amount. This is the way it all went down. Did Pete say anything about any more bodies that he knows of? I didn't ask. He only mentioned the three, and he mentioned that the grave was dug for the feet body. Right. I didn't even say, well, there are only two in there, because I thought,

Maybe this is a question for an investigator. Yeah, okay. So I'm wondering, but there are five bodies listed there. There are still two more bodies listed, so where are they at?

Are they in that same masquerade? Are they somewhere else? That's something I need to know. And that's something somebody else has to bear the expense for. Because I didn't authorize this. I don't like it. So what happens 20 years from now is we're getting this part here and boom, we dig up two or five bodies. That's not right. But I think what the thing was initially when this lady found out about her dad, I think what he was trying to hide, you know, when she comes down here and we dig that up and she finds out that her dad's in, she's going to go up the ask. Well, yeah.

And then so when that happened, then we started to go up the exhumed bodies. Now I think what he was trying to hide is that there's more bodies up there. As CBI agents dug deeper into the records, comparing who was supposed to be buried at Starkville Cemetery with those who were actually there, they uncovered even more disturbing details. Here's a clip from a phone call between a CBI agent and the coroner that shed some light on just how troubling things had become.

I'm going to be calling Dominic Verker the Los Angeles County Coroner.

Hi, it's Julie Patterson. How are you? Good. How's it going? Good. I have one more couple of questions for you and then I'm done. So Mr. Do you remember? Okay. So on his death certificate and on the list of folks that you have buried at Starkville, you have him listed as buried in Starkville. I spoke to his daughter and she told me that she actually has his cremains in Oregon. The

that you had him sent to her? I looked at my file. Yeah. When I looked at the file, there was nothing in there about that. So I just wanted to double check with you. And then there was this call. What you're about to hear raised even more red flags for investigators. I was calling because I'm doing an investigation into, and he is the gentleman that was

when your father had passed away and when he was found. And I'm sorry that I have to talk to you about this. It's okay. I have his death certificate, and I have the folder, but it doesn't quite say exactly if there was any DNA done. Yes, that's how his body was identified. Okay. The sheriff's department contacted who sent a police officer here

in order to collect the DNA sample. It was on Halloween 2019. 2019, okay. And that was like the first week I was even notified that he'd gone missing. Did you get any notification when the DNA was positive? No, I was, because I had to try to kind of find out. I was trying to follow up on it. Okay. I

I was told that there was no information given to him by the sheriff's department and he was buried under the wrong name. His death certificate's incorrect. He was buried under the wrong name? The actual name of him was... The actual name. And then said he had no contact information for me at all from the sheriff's department.

and he had no address or any other information whatsoever when the body was brought in. And then you had the DNA done in 2019. When is the last time that you think that you talked to him?

Because I had kind of called through death certificates to even find if one had been filed, and we had a heck of a time finding it. And then they called because he had to notify me directly because I'd never technically been notified. And so the death certificate people couldn't, I guess, legally tell me anything. Okay, that makes sense. Okay. They sort of backdoored me in and gave him my phone number, and then he returned my call. I want to say it was in, like, June of 2020, at least. Okay.

That's when I ordered the death certificates and stuff like that for him. Did you know where he was laid to rest? I have no idea. I was told that since nobody had claimed him, they buried him. The information I have is he is buried in Starkville Cemetery in Trinidad, Colorado. It's a family cemetery. I mean, just like I said, I don't know really where the mistakes were made. Right. Because I know that there were a lot of them starting back in 2017. Right.

This whole thing has just been a mess. Somebody emptied out his house. Oh. And apparently the sheriff was okay with that. Yeah, I mean, they didn't have an address for him. They had nothing. And he owned property and had a house. And so I just really don't understand.

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Starkville Cemetery is a small, family-run place. The owner explained that over the years, various relatives had helped maintain it. In the next call, one of those relatives shared with the CBI agent what he could remember. Not just two bodies being buried in a single grave, but three. Here are some clips from that conversation. The reason I'm calling is

had buried some folks up in the Starkville Cemetery. I'm calling and talking to people to get what they know, not, you know, rumor. And I know that you had just a small tidbit of information because you had been up there, possibly. Can you tell me about that? Had you ever been up there when they were burying a body?

I worked there. I had never seen anything like that before. You know, I had never seen that, but I thought it was a norm. I thought this is what they do. He was very, very, very nice. Very nice man. And then there was a young lady there, a county, who was there to open the grave. When I got there, the grave was already open. They went there, and then they put one bag out, and the smell was not very pleasant. They got one.

Really easy. They slid one in, and then they slid the other one in, and then the other one in. And it was three. I said to myself, in my mind, is this really real? Because it was a first for me, you know? So anyway, they slipped them in there, and then the guy in the back hole just put the dirt in and leveled it off. Hey, we're going to mark these. I was going to say, prayer. It's kind of humanitarian reason that we did it.

Jumped in there and he gave me $250, provided the gates, and that was that. So you said that you saw three body bags go into... That's what I remember. I didn't think it would come to this. Yeah, I'm sure. But, you know, man, I think I'm going to write a story about this thing, man. Everybody's talking about it. Everybody's talking about it, yeah.

Earlier, Mark told us that another family believed the second body found in the grave might be their loved one. In this next call, you'll hear clips from a CBI interview with a member of that family, sharing their bizarre experience, their suspicions, and the long wait for answers.

Kind of give me the gist of your story. That way I can get it written down and start working on your and what's going on with how you found out and just everything. From the very beginning of it, I mean, I keep telling this for everyone to let know. He was not homeless. That's first and foremost. He was not homeless. He just served the homeless with a pastor and then he hung out with the homeless.

was June of 2019. I was coming through and I stopped there in Trinidad and stayed a couple of days. We hung out and everything and he was better than that he has ever looked. He was doing pretty good, you know, and everything. And so I continued on and then it wasn't even two weeks later, I get a phone call. He got a hold of me and said that it's been a little over a week and hasn't seen

and that's not normal. That kind of gave me a concern, so I came down there to kind of look around and see what's going on, you know what I mean? Really didn't come up with anything, and then that's when I went to the sheriff's department and filed a missing report, person's report, with Detective Martin. You know, I spent the next three days looking around town. I went to the local newspaper place, and they

They really didn't want to have much to say with me too much because they were just not really interested in it. Contact with Mr. Martin through months and months, I kept asking about, you know, if they had found anybody or if they had found any bodies. They mentioned a body that they had found, but the body was decomposed. They would have to do a DNA test on him and I'm not sure what didn't leave his name with it. The coroner?

I've had several conversations with him, and he was like, well, this is a smaller frame person. I personally can't really think that this is a match. And I was like, DNA, and they kept saying that there was so much DNA stuff going on that it was so backed up that it was not a high priority or whatever. Time went on. They finally went and got some DNA from me.

Okay. They also ended up getting some records from where he had a broke jaw. They're like, well, the state doesn't have the funding to do a DNA test. And I'm like, well, how much is that? Because we will do that if that's what will help us find closure or whatever. So we ended up making arrangements to pay these people to do this. And then...

called me and like well we found safe funding or in-house funding or something but they were going to pay for the DNA test it was shortly after that they called and confirmed that that was

Okay. Granted, this is in January of 2021 that they finally confirmed it was the body that they had found. Okay. First thing I mentioned was, where is his body so we can have it? Right. And they told me that they had already buried it. They said that certain bodies, they can only keep them so long, and if they don't know who they are, they just bury them.

I was like, well, then I want to have his remains and put them with the family, you know, bury them. They said it would cost at least $10,000, and they didn't know if I could even do it because it was on a private cemetery. To exhume them, okay. I then said, well, can we do some kind of memorial for the family so we can have some kind of closure? Because, I mean, two years are going on, and we've just not known nothing about it. Sure. They said, yeah, and they would show us where...

This is where things took a turn. The family explained that they had traveled to the cemetery themselves, hoping to find some clarity. But when they got there, no one could tell them exactly where their loved one was buried. No records, no markers, just more uncertainty. Something they had already been dealing with for years, while their loved one was considered a missing person.

So in March of 2021, we went through Trinidad, the family, and we did a memorial. After the memorial, his associate took us to this cemetery to show us where they buried him. We walked around the cemetery. They showed us around for, I would say, an hour, maybe two hours. We started getting really upset at it.

How come he cannot show us where they buried him? Yeah. Knowing that this was not going to be good, we were just going to make things worse, we walked down the hill to the car. He finally showed them where they said that they buried him. They said there was like an archway where you walk through like a fencing and then there was a tree and then the associate was like, yes, yes, this is the spot. I mean, it's like nothing. Okay.

That is not where they're saying that records are being buried. At the Starks Village Cemetery, they showed us it was the old cemetery that's like 100 yards to the left of there. Okay. After that, we just kind of have been in the dark about all this. I mean, we just kind of just went like, wow, this is the way it is. You know, we kind of just try to take this as life is over. The years have gone by now and...

All of a sudden, the man, he's like, you might want to check out some stuff on the news. I started watching some of the news stuff, and they were talking about finding bodies buried, and I was just like, wow. When this family heard about the exhumation, they watched the videos closely. But there was a problem. The grave shown in the footage wasn't even close to where they'd originally been told that their loved one was buried during their visit to the cemetery.

What you're saying is where they showed you was buried is not. Not nowhere close to where. They showed them on the cliffs on the news or whatever, but it's not the new cemetery. It's the one off to the left. You're saying that where the news is showing and where you were shown are two different places. Right. That was not the same spot. Okay.

Earlier, Rosemarie shared that a family friend had been present at the exhumation and recorded a video of the event. It was that footage that first made her fear that the second body could be Dave. That family friend, Tom, owns a funeral home in Trinidad. He later met with CBI investigators, and the account he gave of things that had unfolded in Trinidad added even more context to an already troubling story.

Trinidad had a history right before we got here in the early 80s of corruption, and it's kind of been the culture here. You know, this is mid-1976. Grand jury with the, I mean, the DA and all these other people, and they said there were families that controlled Trinidad for a long period of time. Loosely, it's still kind of that way. This is like high school mean girls, and I'm not in the end crowd. Yeah, that's Trinidad.

Tom went on to describe a series of events that raised red flags for him. According to Tom, someone told him that they noticed a stark change in how they were treated, right after they had chosen to have their loved one taken to Tom's funeral home, instead of a local competitor. It was a small detail, but one that hinted at something deeper, and possibly a pattern.

He said, "My brother's at the coroner's office. He says if we don't find his adult children that they're going to bury him out in Honi." I think the commissioners, they were trying to find a rural cemetery to bury the indigent. And he says, "If we don't find the adult children, we're going to take and bury him in two weeks or four weeks." And I'm like, "I don't understand." I said, "Will you come meet with me?" So he came and met with me. So he was living with you, yes. He died in your house, yes. He called the coroner. What did the coroner do? He says, "Well, what kind of home do you want?"

And so he says, okay. They take the body. But I think somebody called him and said, hey, you should go to Tom. And so he's like, okay. The coroner's saying, once I change to you, if we don't find the adult children, we're going to take and bury them in Oney. That's not the law. It's your spouse, then it's the adult children, then parents, then adult siblings. So I texted him. I said, I'm taking possession of this. When can I get in? And then it took two or three days. And I had already arranged...

I want a civil standby. I don't want anything either way. I'm not a violent person. Last time I went and picked up a body, he was like, why do you hate me? This was a few days after me exhumed the body. But I'm not confrontational. I don't understand what's happening that he would even say that.

At first, Tom was confused. That comment caught him off guard. But as he thought back to other incidents over the years, things began to click into place. He shared his own history with the coroner, details that, in hindsight, took on a much more troubling meaning. And it's important to remember, Tom isn't just a bystander. He owns a funeral home right there in Trinidad.

It really goes back 40 years. How long have you been in business here? We bought the printer home November 4th, 1981. You need to understand that Trinidad is like high school that never ended. There's a lot of nepotism, xenophobia, and you'll understand as I tell the story why people are doing some of the things that they're doing. We bought the business from the people that are competitors down the street. They sued us. My dad, I had just gotten out of college, went to Denver to get a job, and he said, "Can you come back and help? I'm still here."

My relationship with the coroner is not good. He got elected in 2010. And so in 2015, the coroner came by to sign a death certificate. I slide him the paper and he says, I've killed a man before. I didn't know where he was going with this. And then he says, I shot him several times and I got off because it was self-defense. And I'm still like thinking, if somebody had shot somebody, I would probably know that. I have no idea what I'm supposed to say here. And then he says, he looks at me, I'm 6'1", 205. He's

He's maybe five foot four, he says. And he was a big guy like you and I wasn't afraid. In my mind, I'm like, did I take it as a threat? You know, as a bigger guy, sometimes you have these guys with short man disease and I'm just... At that point, I didn't have an issue with the coroner. So I'd go upstairs and I think Paul had been off that day. I said, do you remember a worker shooting somebody? He says, no. I'm like, that's weird. Did I take it as a threat? Yes and no. But it was like, I don't get it. I just put it away. The next year, 2016, we had the family that got hit by an Amtrak. Five

Five out of six died. And I ended up meeting with them and they choose me. The only problem in that was I kept calling the coroner and find out where the bodies are. And he was a real ass. And I'm like, what the hell is his problem? When I went to do the application for the victims of the crime and the gal was like, you overcharged them. I'm like, what are you talking about? According to the coroner, you overcharged them. I'm like, no, I didn't. My general price list is very specific and it abides by the Federal Trade Commission, which implemented the rules.

I said, bullshit. But they're like, well, then we need an explanation from you. And I wrote out a detailed letter, line by line of here's what I did. And the gal was like, Berker says he's investigating you. I'm like, when did the coroner investigate me? You know, it's another file it away. So the next year, Pastor comes to see me. So he comes upstairs and we're having coffee. He says, Don, we need to know something.

I want to tell you what happened. The parents were from like Ohio and Montana. I said to him, what funeral home do you want to choose? We don't know because we're not from here. And so he says, well, let's pray on it. So they end up choosing me. So he calls the coroner and he says, we want Murphy. And the coroner says, I think you need to reconsider and go to the funeral home. And he says, the coroner's not supposed to do that. And I'm like, he did what? There's this underlying thing with my competitor. They've been using

Ambulance and people like that to do their removals and solicit business. It's not legal for the coroner, if you go to the mortuary law, for doctors and nurses and ambulance people to direct business. You're supposed to be impartial. But having been in the newspaper business, I started doing open records requests on Berker. He admits in one of them that he and his deputy coroner at that time, who works for the DA, this gets complex. All work for...

funeral home. I have that in an admission in an open records request. So I continue. It's like, I'm going to build up this case. I did a presentation to the county commissioners. I get an email from the DA, Henry Solano, saying, you give me all your information and I'll decide whether what you're doing is legal. I go to the chairman of what the hell is going on here. Isn't the county coroner's

Pam Nelson?" I said, "Yeah, Tom." But he went to the DA. So now I realized that threat was real. He has motive because back in 2015, I'm thinking this is just a shirt man popping off. Now it's like, "Wait a minute. So the guy who investigates death has threatened to kill me and the chief law enforcement officer, the district attorney is now his attorney and still his attorney."

Frederick Marshall, the guy who exhumed the body, will tell you that she called him representing herself as the DA, telling him he couldn't exhumed the body. I did another open records request on Henry Solano, and he says, we have nothing to do with that. On Frederick Marshall's phone, you're going to find calls from the DA's office. You want to get rid of me, I'm surprised I'm not in Starkville, frankly.

During his interview with CBI, Tom explained that he was speaking with the owner of the Starkville Cemetery one day when the topic of an upcoming exhumation came up. What started out as a casual conversation quickly took a turn.

So he starts telling me, he says, there's a guy coming from Denver, Frederick Marshall, to exhume a body. I'm like, really? How come? He says, well, because the coroner's been burying bodies in my cemetery without telling me. I'm like, wait a minute, what? Can I be there and film? He's like, yeah, sure. So that time comes, I show up with my cameras, I set up my camera and I take pictures. And while we're there, I was like, in the background as an observer, I didn't engage. And then as things progress, they come in, they're like, there's another body underneath there. And I

And I have this all on film. What? There shouldn't be two bodies in a grave. Unless it's family and you get permission, you can do that. But if there's no permission, you can't do that. So I'm like, well, that's pretty bizarre. And at one point, I got the impression he said something about being mummified. But I called Frederick Marshall with the other body. Was that embalmed? I guess he's exhumed a lot of bodies, hundreds of bodies. He says, no. I says, well, how do you know? He says, because it would have bleached through, the chemicals would have bleached through

It's a white body bag and it would have stained the body bag. So why would that body be intact? I end up doing an open records request. The bodies that Verker buried said 2019. There's no way that a body would be in the ground and not decompose. So it's like, what's the probability that that body... The next day I'm over telling my wife, I said, this is really getting more and more bizarre because if Verker buried bodies there in

in 2019, it's bad enough there's a body underneath, but how could that body be intact? For years, Tom had felt targeted. He assumed it was just the nature of running a competing business in a small town. But now, with everything he'd learned, what he'd seen, heard, and experienced firsthand, he began to wonder if this was more than just a business rivalry. Maybe this was something much bigger.

Worker? The ambulance. So I started doing open records requests on the ambulance and it showed. My competitor didn't have to get out of bed. She just called the ambulance and they went and picked up the body. I was like starting to ask all these questions and I think I was getting closer. And it's in these requests where it shows where I finally said, "Do you work for a funeral home?" And he says, "Yes." And these other people, "As needed." Well, that might not necessarily be legal, but if you're using like they were ambulance equipment and

And now, corner equipment, now we got a problem. You're an elected official and you're making side money. We got an issue. And the last request, I had no response, but I think it matches up. If you go through here in the date, that's when I got an email from Henry Solano, the DA. Because what I started to ask was like, how many cases do you handle a year? What percentage goes to general? If there's accidents in Trinidad and the people aren't from Trinidad, they don't know

So how is it that 98% of these calls go to an intern home without some direction? She's like, Tom, since 2014, you've done about a dozen. You have done either 100 or 200 or 300. Oh, wow. So I will say again, this is civil rocketeering. I don't know that you guys are going to go this deep. Right now, we want to find...

Afterwards, I hope that you guys will consider the deeper what's causing this. On September the 13th, I did an open words request on...

on the county saying, "Well, if the county's digging the grave, what records do you have?" And that's where they say, "Oh, we don't have any records. We don't know anything what you're talking about." So I do my presentation and two days later, I get a thing from the county saying, "You know that thing you asked about? We do have those records, but it doesn't show any Starkville diggings." And I just... This is where I'm overwhelmed. Verker alleges that

The county dug the graves. There are so many... I mean, this is when we tell people this story. It's like, my head hurts trying to tell this story. And I'm the funeral director and I know the paperwork and whatnot. It's like, there's so many facets to this. And I talked...

This morning, she's like, just remember to tell them the dates aren't right. The date that they found my father is not, you know, you don't want to start throwing that out there. But we're starting to wonder if this isn't, are they just disposing of some of the homeless people and start to save money? Are they in a mess, right? They don't want to spend any money on the homeless in the casket or anything like that. And it's like, how does that work? Other than this is the civil recutarian again, where they're using people to direct business to them.

Tom began working alongside the Shire family, determined to help them get to the bottom of what was really going on. For him, this wasn't just about supporting friends. It was about uncovering the truth. After the exhumation of the two bodies, do you by chance know where those two bodies went? The one body stayed there. I can show you pictures, you know, that we took that day.

I have the video. I think Frederick says on camera, do you want me to get this other body? And Berker says no. I'm getting a little emotional about it because it's like, thank God you guys are here. We were like, why didn't they show up the day after the body was exhumed? Why isn't CBI called us? What's going on? I'm like, there's that body. Dave Schauer's missing. It could be his body.

It doesn't make sense that the body is intact. Because Dave Shire's shop is just right around the corner. And all of a sudden it's like, oh my God, what if that is Dave? I've been in this business a long time and I'm not a criminal. But what if I want to get rid of somebody? We have over 100 rural cemeteries in Los Animas County.

From that point on, it was game on. I knew Darby's sister, Morgan, the doctor, and we started collaborating and talking and meeting and going, what? You know, I started doing open records requests like I did in 2017. I said, are you a funeral home? Are you operating as a funeral home? No. I said, do you have a business license? No. It's like, then why is the coroner operating as a funeral home? The coroner and the deputies have been driving business. It's an open secret in the funeral business.

They're running a side business using government equipment. You know, they're making money on the side and doing this. This isn't just a one-off where the coroner decided to get rid of a homeless person. And this is where we'll pick up next week in part three. We heard how families began to question whether their missing loved one could be the other person found during the exhumation, including Dave Shire's family, and how confusion over burial records only deepened the mystery.

We also learned about Tom, a local funeral home owner who had long felt targeted. But eventually he began to connect the dots, and how he joined forces with the Shire family to seek answers and accountability. Next week in Part 3, we'll take you deeper into the investigation. You'll hear interviews with the coroner himself, and we'll look at how the case officially concluded, and what those findings meant for Dave Shire and his family. Because even with an investigation completed,

The answers they were given didn't bring peace. They only brought more uncertainty. That's coming up next time. If you have any information regarding the disappearance of David Shire, please contact the Los Animas County Sheriff's Office at 719-846-2211.

Do you have, for the rest of the five people, do you happen to have the date of when they were buried in Starkville? I don't know. Okay. So our thoughts are to quell all the rumors and put it out there to maybe exhume the bodies. That's what I remember. We kind of went back and forth yesterday, and if that is something that we can do to prove, okay, this is...

not that i think that was kind of our kind of quality pretty good on that yes but i have questions i need to know if they ever ever looked at dave's case as possibly being criminal thinking that his body might have been disappeared in a cemetery you know a half a block away from the junkyard those pieces fit and i just want to make sure they're 100 ruled out

That brings us to the end of episode 490. I'd like to thank everyone who spoke with us for this series.

If you have a missing loved one that you'd like to have featured on the show, there's a case submission form at thevanishedpodcast.com. If you'd like to join in on the discussion, there's a page and discussion group on Facebook. You can also find us on Instagram. If you like our show, please give us a five-star rating and review. You can also support the show by contributing on Patreon, where you can get early and ad-free episodes. Be sure to tune in next week for part three of David Shire's story. Thanks for listening.

If you like The Vanished, you can listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

In the early 20th century, a seemingly ordinary cook in New York City became the center of a medical mystery and a public health crisis. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery's podcast, American History Tellers. We take you to the events, times, and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams.

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