Town note
In the 1880s the Northern Pacific Railroad brought European and Chinese settlers into the area.
about 0:04:51The story
Paul William Gruber was born in Schofield, Wisconsin, in 1941. He taught for twenty years and also dealt cards, and he retired with enough money to move to Sandpoint, Idaho, where he lived near Lake Pend Oreille and had been there about a year and a half by the winter of 1993. He spent Christmas that year in Reno, Nevada, with his daughter Shelly, her husband and their son Josiah, and on 5 January 1994 he set off on the drive back to Idaho.
Shelly expected him home within a couple of days. When she called, the answering machine picked up with the greeting removed, so there was only a beep, and the calls went unanswered for weeks. On 23 February, her son's birthday, she heard a voice on the machine that was not her father's. On 28 February 1994 she filed a missing persons report, and the Bonner County sheriff's department sent deputies to do a welfare check. There was no sign of a break-in, but his clothes, the guns from his safe, his computer, his television and all his personal papers were gone.
A short, cold birthday card arrived, and Shelly compared the handwriting with cards she had kept; it did not look like her father's. A couple of weeks later his new Ford pickup was found abandoned about an hour from the house with the keys still in the ignition, and in March a passer-by found his mobile phone at the side of the road. More than $22,000 was taken from his account over two weeks at ATMs that happened to have no cameras, yet his electricity, gas and truck payments were kept up and his post office box was emptied regularly.
Shelly set a trap, leaving a message about sending money for her husband's birthday, which was not coming up. Five days later a card arrived with a $25 cheque from her father's chequebook. A document examiner said the writing matched Gruber's, but Shelly insisted the letter p's looked like lollipops, which her father's never did.
On 17 April 1994 detectives found a rug glued to the floor of the house; under it was a gouge that tested positive for gunshot residue, with bloodstains beneath and around the rug. Cadaver dogs found nothing.
On 23 August 1995 Detective Harvey Thompson walked the house with the contractor who built it. A patch of floor was soft and sunken, and when they dug it up they found Gruber's decomposed body four feet below in the crawl space, wrapped in a deflated air mattress, with four .22-calibre bullet wounds. A friend of the s said Christine had asked her to burn Gruber's gun case and throw his briefcase, papers and video camera into a landfill; the state paid about $50,000 to reopen the closed dump and recovered the briefcase.
Extradited to Idaho, he faced a state demand for the death penalty.