1880
Originally named Ute City, from the Ute tribe; renamed Aspen in 1880.
about 0:07:35The story
Nancy Merrill Fister was born on the fourth of July, 1956, the middle of three daughters of Art and Betty Fister, the couple who did more than anyone to create modern Aspen, Colorado. Art had been a fighter pilot in the Second World War before selling file folders and buying a 700 acre ranch in Aspen in 1954 for $30,000. Four years later he helped found the Buttermilk ski area. Betty had flown with the Women Airforce Service Pilots in the war and won the All Women's International Air Race twice. By the 1960s the family was wealthy and well known, although a friend said the pair were good at everything except parenting. She never married. She had a daughter, Juliana, in 1986 by a former polo player she met in Argentina, and a son about nine years later, and raised them in the log house her father built for her at West Buttermilk Road in 1991.
Her parents kept the family money in a trust run by a lawyer, and the three sisters were famously cash poor, forever fighting. Nancy was her main carer, and immediately after the funeral she drove to the house to collect her mother's sweaters, a wooden giraffe and a string of pearls, which she wore every day afterwards. Late in 2013 Betty's life insurance paid out nearly two million dollars to each daughter, but the trust still controlled the land.
In October 2013 the s answered Nancy's newspaper advertisement and agreed to rent the house for $4,000 a month. He had been left frail by a backhoe injury to his leg, a chronic pain condition and what doctors likened to Lou Gehrig's disease. They had lost most of their money through bad investments, a stock market crash and lawsuits, and were hoping to open a spa.
They moved in on 22 November 2013. Within days the relationship collapsed. The s said the stove and dishwasher did not work and withheld rent; Nancy said they ran up nearly $670 on her credit card, stopped paying utilities, refused to leave and broke her bed. She was in Australia, in Byron Bay, trying to buy a house and rent her own place out again.
He put a bin bag over her head, pulled her off the bed onto a sheet, bound her legs with an extension cord, dragged her into the walk-in closet, wrapped her in towels, blankets, sheets and bin bags, flipped the blood-soaked mattress and swept her prescription bottles, phone, boarding pass and pearls into a bag to make it look as though she had left on a whim. He then went back to the hotel in Basalt where the couple were staying.
She drove back to Aspen for a spare key and returned with the dog. Opening the closet, she found what looked like a pile of laundry and called 911, sobbing, then drove part way down the road before a dispatcher made her stop. Deputies found the body at six in the evening. The medical examiner found blunt force trauma to the head and strangulation or suffocation, no defensive wounds, and concluded she was attacked while asleep, probably within minutes.
Within days the evidence piled up. A blood-stained hammer and ten of Nancy's prescription bottles were found in a bear-proof bin in Basalt near the s' room at the Aspenalt Lodge, along with her passport, licence and boarding pass and paperwork in the s' names. The key to the owner's closet was found on the pavement twenty five feet from room 122. The couple's Jaguar contained reddish brown stains and cleaning supplies.
He said he had acted alone, that his wife had been asleep at the hotel and knew nothing, and that he had killed Nancy because he believed it would end the couple's problems. He described the hammer blows, the packaging of the body and the removal of the pearls.
He left no note. His million dollar life insurance policy, which covered suicide, paid out to his former wife, and the money was shielded by her bankruptcy.