Town note
Gunnison is named after John W. Gunnison, an explorer looking for a route for the Transcontinental Railroad, who stayed three days before travelling west to Utah.
about 0:09:02The story
In 2015 Jake Millison, whose full name was Jacob, was twenty-nine years old and living on the 7-Eleven ranch, a 700-acre property between Parlin and Gunnison in Gunnison County, Colorado. Their parents split when Jake was six and their father, Ray, moved to a ranch in New Mexico. As Rudy aged the heavy work fell to Jake.
The ranch was not prospering. Jake worked twelve-hour days for no wage and had to ask his mother for cash to go to the Alamo, the dive bar in Gunnison where he shot pool with a close group of six or seven blue-collar friends. He cut and sold firewood, did some landscaping, and had a scheme to grow weed and mushrooms for the college students at Western Colorado University, though he smoked most of the weed himself. He was furious about that.
The feud sharpened over the boy's name: Alun had been named after Jake's best friend, Alan Howells, a soldier killed in combat in Baghdad at twenty, and Jake believed his sister had hijacked the name of a friend who was his, not hers.
Jake was last seen on the weekend of 15 and 16 May 2015. On the Friday night he drove to Crested Butte with a friend to see Mad Max: Fury Road, then came back to Gunnison to play pool at the Alamo, and returned to the ranch. The last activity on his phone was at 2:29 a.m. on the Saturday. Four or five days later, on 20 May, two friends, Nate Lopez and Randy Martinez, drove out to the ranch because nobody had heard from him. His truck, his motorcycles and his dog were all there. His phone, she said, was in a bag of rice in the kitchen after falling in an irrigation ditch.
A Gunnison County officer, Mark Michael, heard in town that Jake was missing and called the ranch. His friends kept pushing. In June a friend called Jake's father in New Mexico, who had not heard from him either and suggested a missing person report. A Facebook page, Where Is Jake Millison, was set up.
Over the next two years the friends watched the family sell Jake's motorcycles.
In 2017 the sheriff's department asked the Colorado Bureau of Investigation for help. On 17 July 2017 officers, car dogs, ambulances and fire crews descended on the 7-Eleven ranch. They found Jake's skeletal remains, missing an arm, buried in a seven-foot pit in the manure pile inside the corral, under a barrel of goat and sheep skulls and other dead farm animals.
She said she had waited until Jake fell asleep, walked upstairs with her .357 Lady Smith revolver, asked herself whether she wanted to live the rest of her life like this, and pulled the trigger. She claimed self-defence, though the judge refused to allow that defence because Jake was asleep. She said she disposed of the body alone, rolling it in a plastic sheet and using toe straps, a winch and an ATV, invoking what she called Yankee ingenuity and her knowledge of physics and chemistry. Investigators did not believe her: she weighed eighty-seven pounds, had had gallbladder surgery nine days before the killing, had been on light duty at the nursing home where she worked, and could not lift a bale of hay. Jake weighed about 175 pounds.
The prosecution had argued that she had at least pushed her mother to change the will and to harm Jake, pointing to her Facebook posts about big news and to her statement that the only way Jake would leave voluntarily was in a body bag, but admitted it had no direct evidence of a murder plot.