1869
The town began as the Union Colony of Colorado, founded in 1869 by Nathan C. Meeker, an agricultural reporter for the New York Tribune.
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FILE 663 / 8 January 2026 / 182 MIN / full
Greely Colorado is where we're going... This is in Weld County. about 0:05:17
The town began as the Union Colony of Colorado, founded in 1869 by Nathan C. Meeker, an agricultural reporter for the New York Tribune.
about 0:05:36It was set up as an experimental utopian farming community based on temperance, religion, agriculture, education and family values.
about 0:05:48Horace Greeley was the Tribune's editor, visited Colorado during the gold rush in 1859 and popularised the phrase 'go west, young man'.
about 0:06:20The colonists acquired 12,000 acres then known as the Island Grove Ranch.
about 0:06:42The town began as the Union Colony of Colorado, founded in 1869 by Nathan C. Meeker, an agricultural reporter for the New York Tribune.
about 0:05:36It was set up as an experimental utopian farming community based on temperance, religion, agriculture, education and family values.
about 0:05:48Horace Greeley was the Tribune's editor, visited Colorado during the gold rush in 1859 and popularised the phrase 'go west, young man'.
about 0:06:20The colonists acquired 12,000 acres then known as the Island Grove Ranch.
about 0:06:42About 500 people came to take up residence.
about 0:06:49The settlement was renamed Greeley after Horace Greeley.
about 0:06:53In 1943 Greeley had two prisoner of war camps during the Second World War, one for Germans and one for Italians.
about 0:07:02A vote to allow the sale of alcohol barely passed in 1969, after a hundred years of temperance.
about 0:07:0930%
Biggest faith: Catholic, 14.1%
about 0:11:23White 55% · Black 2% · Asian 1.3% · Hispanic 39.4%
Ethnicity can overlap race.Property crime
▲ about 15% above average
Violent crime
▼ slightly below average
Two-bedroom trailer listing
about 0:13:36Three-bedroom house listing
about 0:14:06Four-bedroom house on 30 acres listing
about 0:14:46"about 15% above average"
Comparison: "average". Direction: above.
As told in 2026 about 0:17:55
"slightly below average"
Comparison: "average". Direction: below.
As told in 2026 about 0:18:26
"107,014"
No direction stated.
As told in 2026 about 0:10:24
"50.2%"
No direction stated.
As told in 2026 about 0:10:42
"31.7"
No direction stated.
As told in 2026 about 0:10:48
"about 48%"
Comparison: "national average". No direction stated.
As told in 2026 about 0:11:04
"55%"
No direction stated.
As told in 2026 about 0:11:14
"2%"
No direction stated.
As told in 2026 about 0:11:14
"1.3%"
No direction stated.
As told in 2026 about 0:11:14
"39.4%"
No direction stated.
As told in 2026 about 0:11:14
"30%"
Comparison: "50-50 is the normal". Direction: below.
As told in 2026 about 0:11:23
"14.1%"
Comparison: "most of any religion here". No direction stated.
As told in 2026 about 0:11:39
"$60,601 a year"
Comparison: "national average, about $9,000 below". Direction: below.
As told in 2026 about 0:11:54
"113"
Comparison: "100 is average". Direction: above.
As told in 2026 about 0:12:25
"$420,600"
No direction stated.
As told in 2026 about 0:12:30
"$1,430 a month"
Comparison: "national average, about $200 more". No direction stated.
As told in 2026 about 0:13:00
"$58,000"
No direction stated.
As told in 2026 about 0:13:36
"$265,000"
No direction stated.
As told in 2026 about 0:14:06
"$2,850,000"
No direction stated.
As told in 2026 about 0:14:46
1.4 / 5 · average of 5
“A lifelong resident has had such good experiences there, calling it a very small but very friendly town that can suit someone who wants a quiet, isolated life.”about 0:07:50
“Not very safe on the east side of town, but it keeps a small town feel even as it grows.”about 0:08:36
“Really scary, with a lot of hard drugs in the area despite the town being in the middle of nowhere.”about 0:08:58
“Wishes they did not live by an apartment complex whose tenants steal and are very disruptive.”about 0:09:22
“Lives by a park where cars are parked all night and believes drug sales are happening.”about 0:09:31
“The west side is beautiful with parks and shopping, but everything east of 35th Avenue has a lot of crime, bikes and a camera are stolen in daylight and the police mostly just drive around.”about 0:09:52
Christina Marie Tornai, known as Tina, was born on March 17th, 1972, in Indiana, the second of nine children of Michael and Mary Ellen Tornai. Her father was a police officer for a time. The family moved to Colorado, and Tina graduated from Windsor High School, where she ran track and played volleyball and basketball, competed in the knowledge bowl, played trumpet in the band and sang in the choir. She studied nursing at Aims Community College and then at the University of Northern Colorado, graduating in 1995 in the top five per cent of her class with a bachelor's degree in nursing. She worked as a licensed practical nurse at the Northern Colorado Medical Center and then in its oncology department. Everyone who knew her described her as kind and hard-working, and nobody had a bad word to say about her.
His family was chaotic. His father, Ephram, had won a college scholarship in the 1950s and wanted to be an attorney but became a biker who drank Jack Daniels and used drugs; his mother, Mary Lou, was one of fourteen children, worked as a nurse and later sold cosmetics, and the house was so cluttered that visitors had to carve a path through it. A friend named Michael taught him how to break into houses. His first serious girlfriend, Jenny, moved into the basement when they were sixteen; when she left him he threatened to kill her, and she had to move to Pueblo to get away. He followed her anyway. In 1982 he was first picked up by police for smoking weed. In July 1983 he helped Michael burgle a house and a man chased the intruder off with a shovel, leaving Michael's motorcycle behind; Michael served ninety days. In April 1987, on his first day with the BFI trash company, a woman jogging on Reservoir Road in West Greeley was attacked from the bushes. Later that year he killed a former girlfriend's dog and left its collar on her parents' door handle.
He kept stalking women. Tina began calling his cousin Jesse, asking why she was not enough for him. She nicknamed him the panty sniffer. In August 1995 she told him she wanted a divorce and moved out, and she and Jesse had a brief affair that summer.
She never did. About one in the morning they knocked at his door and found his aunt Gabby, who refused a search.
Searches of the Pierce gravel pits, Black Hollow Reservoir and Sunset Memorial Gardens found nothing, and the family put up thousands of flyers. In 2009 a new assistant district attorney, Michael Rourke, reopened the file, and Detective Keith Olson noticed two of Tina's credit cards listed on the 1995 evidence diagram. They had never been processed. Sand from a river bed in his pockets, hood and flashlight, and salt rings from sweat on his shirt, suddenly mattered. His house held large portraits of Tina, their wedding album and more than a hundred videotapes of women he had stalked and assaulted, some recorded over Sam's Club training tapes.
He led them to Sunset Memorial Gardens, the cemetery across the highway from Tina's apartment where he had worked digging graves in the summer of 1995. He had dug two feet below an open grave, to a depth of about eight feet, laid her wrapped in layers of industrial plastic, and the burial of a Second World War veteran went ahead above her that afternoon. Tina was found in 2017, 7,826 days after she disappeared, and was buried at Lake View Cemetery in Windsor. Jesse Sandoval died on February 23rd, 2017, aged 52. Much of the account comes from the book In Tina's Shadow by Sharon R. Dunn.
October 19th, 1995 / Greeley, Colorado
As told in the episode, on 8 January 2026.
Accused
Public places are marked on the map.
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