48 Hours: An arrest 7 years in the making
Sara Ely Hulse is a "48 Hours" producer. She reflects on covering the disappearance of Colorado mom Paige Birgfeld. "48 Hours" reported on Birgfeld's case Saturday on CBS.
GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. -- I have been following the case of Paige Birgfeld for eight years. After this pretty mother of three went missing from her Colorado home on Thursday, June 28, 2007, all her friends and family knew they had a big problem on their hands. The single mother had left her children with a live-in babysitter while she went to go see a friend and she never came home.
Everyone who knew Paige described her as a woman who lived for her children and would have never left them for any reason, so this did not look good. On Sunday, July 1, around 10 p.m., Paige's red Ford Focus was found engulfed in flames in an empty parking lot about two miles from her home - things had just gone from bad to worse.
The community of Grand Junction, Colo., really rallied in response to this missing mom - volunteers got maps of the area, divided the land into quadrants and organized searches hoping to find some sign of Paige. It was really inspiring to see the outpouring of support from strangers. Paige's dad was incredibly touched and went to the command center every day to personally thank all the volunteers who went out hour after hour in the punishing summer heat.
Watch: "48 Hours": The Secret Life of Paige Birgfeld
It was an impressive effort - searches were done on foot, by ATV, on horseback, by divers, and in the air. We went out to search with Paige's family a couple of times - and you just have no idea how vast the territory is out there until you go out desperately hoping to find someone. It is hard to even know where to start looking. You really got the feeling that you were looking for a needle in a haystack.
While the civilian searches were ongoing, the Mesa County Sheriff's office was running its own investigation. They were using Paige's cellphone to pinpoint her last whereabouts. They knew the same day she disappeared that she had gone to Eagle, Colo. -- about two hours away from Grand Junction -- to meet an old friend.
At 8 p.m., she was back in town and her cellphone pinged a tower within five miles of her home - but after that she just vanished. Investigators made contact with her friends, family, and ex-spouses and were able to cross them all off the list.
But then they learned about something that Paige was doing that opened the investigation to a whole group of new possible suspects. After her second divorce, Paige was unable to pay the mortgage and the mounting bills on the family home - they owed more on it than the house was worth. So it appears she started an escort business called "Models Inc."
This was quite a shock to everyone - especially her parents.
Investigators were now in the strange position of having to clear her list of clients in order to figure out if there was a killer among them. They had about eight main persons of interest and were able to whittle it down to two men, George Coralluzzo and Lester Ralph Jones.
Coralluzzo was a 30-year-old house painter who called Paige 20 times the day she disappeared. He had a criminal history and left town in a hurry two days after Paige went missing. Jones was a 56-year-old mechanic who also had a criminal history.
Video was recovered that substantiated Coralluzzo's alibi and he was eventually cleared. Jones' house was searched on two separate occasions and he was officially named as a suspect by the Mesa County Sheriff's Office.
But after that, nothing happened... the case went cold.
The District Attorney's Office had their hands tied as Paige's escort business made it difficult for them to prosecute the case without a body - if Paige was able to keep her escort business a secret from her loved ones, the defense could argue, who's to say she didn't just start a whole new life somewhere?
Then, Paige's remains were found in March of 2012 by a hiker in the Wells Gulch area of Delta County, Colo. The case now took on a whole new life. Authorities could finally prove that Paige was actually dead. This development was heart-wrenching for her family - but it confirmed what they had known in their hearts for a long time.
Delta County is about 60 miles away from Grand Junction via Highway 50 - a stretch of highway where a motorist back in 2007 had found Paige's check book and a series of checks - and it was a place that Lester Ralph Jones used to live.
I was expecting an arrest right away. But days turned into weeks, and then into months, and years. No one knew what was happening and the District Attorney and the Sheriff's Office were being very tight-lipped.
Finally, in November of 2014, Lester Ralph Jones was arrested. But it begged the questions: Why now? What took them so long? And what did they have now that they didn't have in 2012 - or even 2007?
The case is slated to go to trial in 2016, and then, hopefully, those elusive questions will finally be answered.