November 3, 2011 – Day 94 of Morgan’s Stalking. Back to the rocks…

It was a clear night with only tiny patches of snow remaining. Poor Morgan did not get much sleep. The alarm on Rhonda’s side of the house goes off shortly after midnight and then rocks on Morgan’s windows hit off and on for the rest of the night until sunrise. Morgan doesn’t want to call the deputies, so she just covers her head with a pillow, and tries to ignore the harassment.

First thing in the morning Morgan has an anonymous text message from 970.xxx.xxxx. She it too tired to make her morning classes, so she sleeps in, and talks to Detective Glassmire about the text message. He wants her to send another letter about that particular incident and then he will talk to her about it when he comes to see her over the weekend. That letter becomes one of the group of letters sent on November 5.

Morgan’s letter to Sheriff:
11.5.2011
Dear Detective Rob Glassmire & Detective Meagan Alstatt,
This Thursday morning @ ____ am I was woken up by a text message from a phone number I do not recognize. I immediately thought it had to be the stalker since it said:
Great pic of you in the morning. You will just never be a morning person like your Dad.
I had changed my Facebook profile picture to a sleepy looking face resting on my bed. Since I used to be friends with Brooke Harris a long time ago she has my cell # from way back then, and Keenan might have gotten it from Brooke Harris. The phone the text came from was # 970-xxx-xxxx I responded, “Who is this?” But never received an answer.
Morgan Jennifer Ingram
case #11-20197

Morgan’s friend, on his own, snaps and can no longer take what is happening to Morgan.  He decided this is getting to be too much, and no matter what the sheriff’s say about staying out of it and letting them handle it, he decides he will try to talk with Keenan by sending him a FB private message warning him to stop stalking Morgan, and to leave the Ingram’s alone. The conversation quickly degrades into two young men verbally sparring about who is going to do what to whom.  Evidently at one point Keenan tells him he is out of the state right now, but when he gets back he will decide if this friend of Morgan’s is worth the trouble or not. The verbal argument was just this one time, and attempts to get copies of exactly what was said had proved unsuccessful, but I now have a copy of that conversation.

Our neighbor Elliott lets me know that he has heard that Keenan is out of the state for the week and has been gone for at least two days, he is not positive, but says he will verify it for me. This would confirm what Morgan’s friend has been told by Keenan.  As for my concern about Elliott popping up whenever something happened, this could have been purely a neighbor trying to be helpful, but it was sounding more like pure gossip, and a certain desire to know from me what had really happened.  I decided that I would share nothing with him about the video recorded of the walkabout, which was easy because he never really asked.  As it was we had not really gone over it at any length so far.  Only enough to know that there was a person who had left the footprints and it looked like a “she,” and it looked like Brooke Harris.  It seemed completely diverse from our other video and camera photo captures, which made perfect sense now, because now it appeared Keenan was out of the state anyway.

Elliott had seen Steve walking the deputy around house and down the street.  Elliott came across the street and tells me he wishes I would have called him before the footprints started to melt, because he has a high resolution camera that he could have used to take very detailed pictures and they could have proved useful later. He wanted me to call him right away if anything like this happened again.  Then he asked about the video.  I told we had not had a chance to really look at it yet as we had just been so under the gun with everything else, which was not completely true, but pretty true.

Perhaps I was being too obvious, or maybe I didn’t care if it was completely obvious.  But from Elliott’s reaction I could tell he was not happy that I was withholding from him.  I weighed that possibility for a moment, and decided it was probably for the best.  I decided right then to not give in to any more requests from Elliott for information, and see how that went.  It did not last long.

See below, the copy of an email I received later that day from the felony stalking detective, Sheriff Glassmire.  The “flyer” he is talking about is a flyer he designed for all local law enforcement (police & sheriffs) to be on the lookout, with a picture of Keenan, a picture of his car and information about the victim “Morgan” and what to do if seen following her, or if he is seen by our house, etc.  It had our address, along with some other information, this is what Detective Glassmire had told me.  Here is the email from him to me on this day:

Subject: RE: case #11-20197

Toni,

Thanks for the update. Deputy Hoover told me about the footage you were able to get. I did get those flyers out to our patrol staff. With the exception of a few that were not there ( I will email it to them) everybody is up to speed on the case. This should help alleviate any confusion if a deputy who has been in the Parachute area for a while has to rotate to the Carbondale area. I prefaced by saying, “keep this flyer in your car, you may not even go to Carbondale for months, but when you do you will have this information.”

Also, the text message, in my opinion, very important. It’s also very suspicious and creepy. I will be following up on that. I used a law enforcement data base to check on the number and it did not show anything. This isn’t too unusual, especially for prepaid cell phones. I did check our sheriff’s office records and a person in 2008 was using that phone number that lives in Rifle. This is definitely a lead that we will be following up on. Does he still have that phone number? Does he have a criminal history? Where does he currently live? Like I said the only profile we have on this guy is from an accident in 2008.

I also think it might be feasible to request for a search warrant for the phone records for that phone number. This is a very lengthy process. Once served to the company they have up to 30 days to provide the information. Unfortunately, companies like Verizon, Sprint, ect, often take far to longer than the 30 days and the enforcement process is very difficult. Regardless, it is a lead that I will be following up on.

If you receive additional texts do not reply. We will take photos of the text message(s) on Sunday. I’ll also do a little bit more research on the person in Rifle. Due to the old file I’m hesitant to think that it is him. I also don’t have too much information on him. Also, as investigators, we have to be careful how we introduce a new name or potential suspect to the victims. I’m going to talk to Megan and see if she thinks there is a forensically sound method to see if you recognize the person. I’m thinking something along the lines of a photo lineup. I’ll let you know on Sunday.

In the meantime, continue to call, text, or email me day or night. Stay strong.

Rob

No sign of forced entry? No intruder? Really?

The morning of Morgan’s death, without even asking, I was assured by the lead Detective on her felony stalking case that officers had thoroughly checked the house, and there was no sign of forced entry.  Please remember this was the morning we had just found our youngest daughter dead, and we were in extreme pain, and were not asking many questions because we were crying so hard.  After that day this point was revisited a few times, and the answer became more positive from the sheriffs to the point that they were insisting nobody could have been in the house.  So now I want to visit that point, and share with you some things.  Once again just the truth, and you decide if it was possible for her stalker to have been in the house on the night she was killed, and you see, I didn’t even say murdered, because for that we need someone to be the killer. Or who knows maybe there could be more than one.

Floorplan for Morgan's HouseFirst start with this floorplan of the house, now this is not an exact floor plan, but it is very close.  Just delete the mud room coming in from the garage, and add two more windows to the Master bedroom, along the wall that is shown as a solid wall, and that was pretty much our house.

Morgan’s room is called BEDROOM 2, and, as you can see there, there are five points of entry through doors:

  • The front door.
  • Two sliding glass doors, and another door all opening out onto the covered patio.
  • A door from the garage.

 

All of those doors had key locks in them. And if you read some earlier posts you know that the front door’s lock broke, and was replaced by a dead bolt lock that had both a key, and a numeric key pad.  Steve had one key to the front door, and the other was in a decorative stack of three dishes that sat on the kitchen bar top, and both keys were accounted for on the day we moved.

There were two codes entered into the front keypad.  One was used by Steve and Toni, and one was used by Morgan.  Not that it kept track or anything like that, it was just Morgan had her 4 digit number, and we had ours.  One time during the stalking, after a few overheard attempts to use the keypad, Morgan’s code was changed.

So my first guess of how it might be done hasn’t changed, and is the same today. Watch Morgan, or Steve, or I from a distance, and see what numbers we press to unlock the door  – maybe it takes one try or two or even ten, but eventually you have it.  At night the numbers on the keypad light up as you press them.  We were told a hunting aid called a spotting scope would make an ideal tool to do this.

And to add weight to my theory, a retired federal special agent said the door lock should have had a cowling such as is used on numeric keypads on military bases to prevent someone from having a direct line of sight to the numbers.  He felt someone from a bush across the street could have the code in a few days at most.  The same investigator felt that without regular cleaning the numbers most used would be “smudged” and far easier to detect.  Coincidentally on a  Facebook page of Keenan’s, he claims to have bagged a 5X5 buck at 288 yards, one shot – interesting, huh?  Another investigator calls this a “world class shot”, 3 football fields away.  He feels that a person capable of that could easily watch us enter, maybe only once, and know the code, we of course, would have no idea he had the code.  (Please note the use of Keenan’s name in my posts – if you read the sheriff’s own reports you will see that they considered him their #1 suspect, he was the suspected stalker and Morgan identified him multiple times as her stalker)

Not to imply whatsoever it was a Psychic Medium that figured this out, but more of an eye opener for me, and whether you choose to allow for the possibility or not, it won’t hurt my feelings, but this Intuitive (who works with law enforcement and the FBI on many missing persons and homicide cases had been 100% right on everything she had told us so far), she had never been to our house, and from over a thousand miles away, “saw a male entering our front door code”, and based on this vision was correct on the first three digits, but did not see the fourth number (which by the way was the same as one of the other numbers she had already told us so she did get all the numbers right).

The neighbor's door, but it is just like ours

This is the neighbor’s door, but it is identical to our two sliding glass doors

The three doors that lead to the covered patio, two sliding glass doors, and one swinging glass door had locks but, we never had keys for them, and they could only be locked by us from the inside.  The keys for those locks could have been lost a long time ago, or gathering dust at a realtor’s office.  But here’s a sort of long shot possibility.  Steve recalled a time when he was talking to Brooke’s dad, James Harris, who told him that as the HOA President he had an old box of keys to most of the empty houses, makes perfect sense in case something should come up, and access is needed.  This was at a time we saw him in an empty house that he should not have had access to.  So I’ll call it only a small possibility, but that is theory number two since Keenan had moved in with Brooke and James (3 houses down from us) approximately 2 weeks before Morgan’s stalking had started.

To throw in another possibility, we leased our house (for over 6 years), and as houses like to do, at the most inopportune times, things break, ours had a microwave break.  The owner thought there was a match in an empty house that he also owned, and wanted to send us the keys to that house, so we could make the swap.  Only he wasn’t sure which was the right key, so he just sent us all of his keys under the theory that we would use the right one, and send them all back.  Steve feels that the original front door key, which we never had, most likely opened the back door, and the garage door.  We never tried at the time, but that pile of keys all went to one of the eight or ten homes he owned at one time, so I’m sure you’ll agree that this incident counts as possibility number three.  Another interesting aside…this same owner owned not only our house but the house James Harris and Brooke lived in and the house across the street that Elliott and his family lived in.

There was a time following Morgan’s death that Steve and I refused to believe anyone had been in her room, it was simply too painful to allow that thought to exist in our minds.  It also wasn’t necessary when she died of “natural causes.”  But when we finally received the autopsy results and toxicology results and read that she died from a disease she did not have and the only medication showing up she did not take, we started to wonder what was going on.  As more and more doctors reviewed her findings, they became quite convinced, and told us it was a homicide, I very reluctantly crossed that threshold, but still would rather think the possibility of someone being in our house just could not be.  I was very naive at that time about the true nature of stalkers…in most cases they do get in to the victims home and most of the time there is no evidence of a break-in.  Having confessed that feeling, early on in my acceptance of someone in Morgan’s room, I felt it happened like this…all of us were gone from the house the late afternoon of December 1, 2011. The dogs were in the laundry room (locked up because the puppy had just chewed up something in the living room), and would not be able to confront someone in the house.  A person who knew the front door code could enter the house, while we were all gone, and unlock the right hand sliding glass door that we never used, (it had heavy velvet drapes over it now from the inside), and then leave. I never checked that door because we always left it locked and never used it.  Now once we were all asleep the perpetrator could enter, and exit through that door silently. That is possibility number four.

To give a nod to many comments, and tips that have in one way or another asked if someone could have been hiding in the house when we came home, or in Morgan’s closet, or better yet out in the garage, and even in the study closet? Yes, absolutely and from there they would have been easily able to wait for the right time to enter Morgan’s room, and then exit the house silently and without a key, that is a big possibility number five…and it makes me sick to even think that someone was possibly hiding in our house when we arrived home that evening and laid in wait for everyone to go to sleep in order to attack.

So do I understand when I hear that Sheriff Vallario has correctly pointed out that they had officers at our house over 50 times, and never saw any sign of a stalker?  I’m still not sure what he meant by that, guess I should write a letter and ask.  Was this a play on words?  Yes, they had officers out at our house over 50 times, and yes they never saw the stalker…the stalker did not sit out on our lawn and wait till they got there to see him.  But sign of the stalker – that’s another story…of course they saw evidence of the stalker, trail in the berm, footprints, wildlife camera captures, video captures, lots of evidence.  Of course there was a stalker, it was a felony stalking case and his own detective met with Morgan once a week!  The stalker is seen in a picture leaning on Steve’s truck, and watching the sheriff’s drive away, he had no care about leaving  footprints during the period when they did not collect them.  He was captured on the video system more than once.  How about the tress crack in the gutter directly over Morgan’s room?  He left a unique blade on the ground outside the house. Silently presented himself to Morgan one morning, dressed in black from head to toe.  He wore distinct trails into the berm behind our house. They know she was followed and she told them the second time what the car looked like and who was driving the car.

He was definitely here, outside the house, and for the million dollar question, inside?  I can’t prove that, yet.  While they maintain no allowance for the possibility, he could have, and I also know the sheriff’s department will never try to prove it.  Someone was in the house on the night of December 1, 2011.  Things happened that night that required someone else to be in the house.  Was it the stalker?  If so, did he have help?  Was it a different person altogether knowing we would assume it was the stalker?

I am going somewhere with all this, and to recount the Amitriptyline post was the first and this is the second, and the third will be along shortly.  Also, yes I was completely overloaded with suggestions today, not another set of eyes, more like a town full of eyes.  No complaints here, this is just what Morgan’s case needs – people that question, people that care.