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After police were summoned to the home of Alan & Miriam Helmick on Tuesday afternoon, June 10, 2008, 51-year-old Miriam told investigators that when she left her home that morning to go shopping, her 62-year-old husband of two years, Alan Helmick, was heading off to jump into the shower. The couple planned to meet up for lunch later that morning in Grand Junction, Colorado; Miriam wanted to meet at the Chinese buffet at 11 am. Miriam said goodbye, walked out the door & that was the last time she saw Alan alive.
Alan met Miriam when he began taking ballroom dancing classes in January 2005 at his friend’s suggestion. He was trying to do something light & fun as a way to pull himself out of the immense grief of losing his wife of 36 years, Sharon, from a sudden heart attack on New Years Eve 2003. The couple raised their four children together while Alan ran the local savings & loan & eventually moved onto owning his own mortgage & title companies.
Alan & Sharon had been together since the tender age of 14 & after the love of his life’s sudden death, Alan found his world shattered around him, lost with Sharon no longer by his side.
Meanwhile, Miriam was dealing with her own loss after her 23-year-old daughter, Amy, died of a drug overdose in 2000 & her husband Jack committed suicide only two years later.
With Alan’s persistence, he & Miriam eventually found solace in one another & one year later, they were married in June 2006. Alan was a knight in shining armor in Miriam’s world; he bought her her own dance studio & nine months later, he purchased the horse farm she’d always dreamt of.
Meanwhile, those that loved Alan saw the light & optimism returning to his life, something that had been missing since Sharon’s untimely death.
When Alan failed to arrive for their lunch date & Miriam’s phone calls to her husband went unanswered, she headed back to their 3,200 square foot home at 34999 Siminoe Road that was situated on 40 acres south of Grand Junction in Whitewater where they raised horses.
When she entered their home just before noon, Miriam found the house ransacked while Alan lay motionless on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood. She frantically dialed 911 & told dispatchers that her husband was a victim of a robbery.
As investigators arrived on the scene, they found Miriam distraught, crouched above her husband’s deceased body. It appeared he had been shot in the head while a .25-caliber shell casing was lying on the floor next to him alongside his wallet & his cellphone.
When officers did a sweep of the home, they found drawers pulled out & the trash can in Alan’s office tipped over. They couldn’t help noticing that kitchen drawers, which would rarely hold valuables, were also strewn open, meanwhile, guns, jewelry & other valuables were untouched, leaving investigators to believe that the house had been staged to look like a robbery.
Following investigative protocol, officers began talking to Miriam in order to establish her movements that day prior to Alan’s murder. Her clothes were swabbed for blood & she was tested for the presence of gunshot residue, both of which came back negative.
Miriam explained that before she left the house at around 8:15-8:30 am, Alan had given her a wad of cash that morning in preparation for her shopping trip as he said one of his signature lines, Have fun like hell.
She provided investigators with the printed receipts from the stores she visited & her movements were able to be tracked using both receipts as well as her cell phone’s location & investigators saw that she’d moved from one end of the valley to the other that morning.
It wasn’t long before investigators discovered that both the dance studio & the horse farm that the couple owned were hemorrhaging the bank accounts dry & Alan began to struggle financially.
By April 2008, two months before Alan’s murder, things had gone from bad to worse & Alan had no choice but to sell his company in order to stay afloat. On April 30, only 41 days before his murder, Miriam & Alan drove out to Delta, Colorado, a thirty minute drive from their home, to collect a $125,000 check from his interest in the title company.
After their meeting, Miriam stopped off to use the restroom & while Alan sat in a car waiting, he began to smell the odor of smoke. When he glanced back, he was stunned to see that the back of his car was ablaze.
When Delta authorities responded, they found a piece of burned rope coming out of the gas tank at the trunk of the car which resembled a wick which made this a clear case of arson. Alan was asked if Miriam could be responsible, but he was adamant that she would never have done such a thing & requested that the investigation be stopped.
With Alan now murdered, investigators couldn’t help but wonder if the two incidents were connected.
Miriam described her relationship with her husband & spoke of his generosity & the fact that he spent much of his time trying to make her happy. He would do countless little things such as taking her car & filling it with gas without asking.
As days went by after Alan’s murder, no suspects were taken into custody. Meanwhile, Miriam claimed that strange things had been happening around her house that made her feel uneasy. She told investigators she would come home to find doors unlocked, lights on & drawers open & she was convinced that she was being watched.
When Miriam & her friend Penny returned to her home on Thursday, June 26, they approached the front door & noticed a canary yellow envelope tucked under the welcome mat. The front had a handwritten message that read, To the grieving widow. When she opened the card, there was another handwritten message that read, ALLEN WAS FIRST YOUR NEXT RUN RUN RUN
After Miriam contacted police about the incident, an investigator with the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office began looking into the incident. Police contacted the manufacturer of the card & learned that it was sold at a chain of City Market grocery stores & when they checked the surveillance from a store near Penny’s house, they saw none other than Miriam making the purchase on June 22, four days before she discovered the card on her porch.
When confronted with this information, she argued that she’d written the card because she felt police weren’t taking her reports of suspicious cars driving around her neighborhood seriously enough. She hoped the threatening message would increase their investigation.
Investigators also came to learn that despite the fact that Alan had always been an attentive father to his grown children, in the months before his death, he had begun to isolate himself from family, friends & concerned business associates. It seemed that since he married Miriam his health had taken a downward turn; he was sick more often & spending more time in bed. Crime scene investigators found nine different prescriptions in his medicine cabinet which suggested that Alan had been in poor health.
When technicians examined Miriam’s computer, they found some alarming searches that had been done in the weeks before Alan’s murder. Ambien overdose, buy purple foxglove (a toxic species of flowering plant) & Viagra overdose.
Alan’s children suspected that Miram may have been poisoning their father, but the medical examiner found no traces of poison in his body. He had, however, suffered from severe heart disease which may have explained why he’d been so fatigued.
When speaking with Alan’s family, they described Miriam as an exceptionally controlling woman who kept his cellphone in her purse. His children said he’d been basically unreachable in the weeks before his death & when they would call his phone, it would be Miriam who answered. She always had a slew of excuses as to why Alan couldn’t pick up his phone.
There had been suspicious activity from Alan’s account & investigators believed that Miriam had forged multiple checks that totaled $40,000. When confronted with this information, she indicated that Alan had been aware that she was writing the checks since she was responsible for payroll & other business expenses for the dance studio & horse farm.
In the months before his death, the bank had been unsuccessfully trying to get ahold of Alan to discuss the fact that he was in serious financial trouble & nearly $140,000 had been transferred from his personal checking`account to cover two outstanding loans.
Authorities also learned that earlier in the year, before Alan’s death, she unsuccessfully tried to get a $2 million insurance policy on Alan without ever telling him.
Investigators were convinced that Miriam was solely responsible for her husband’s murder & believed that money was at the root of it all. They discovered that she had a nefarious past & in 2004, her boss at the dance studio where she worked accused her of petty theft & embezzlement although she was found not guilty of those charges. Earlier that year when she was living in Jacksonville, Florida, she tried to cash nearly $7,000 worth of counterfeit checks, something she admitted to & spent three days in jail.
After Alan’s death, Miriam returned to Florida to live with her son & was back out on the prowl for a new man. She told a friend that she found a dating website & that her new suitor would have to make at least $500,000 a year.
Six months after Alan Helmick’s murder, Miriam was arrested in Florida on November 8, 2008 & charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder for the car fire incident as well as forgery. She was held at the Duval County jail on a $2 million bond until she could be extradited back to Grand Junction.
At the time of her arrest, authorities found a driver’s license, paycheck stub & credit cards, all under the name of Sharon Helmick. It was clear Miriam was trying to assume Alan’s late wife’s identity though she claimed it was because she didn’t have her own ID after Colorado investigators confiscated them.
A group from the D.A’s office had only recently watched No Country For Old Men & they immediately thought of the scene where the villain blows up a car that resulted in a massive explosion & wondered if Miriam got the idea to set Alan’s car on fire from that movie. Lo & behold, only a few days before Alan’s murder, someone at the Helmick house had rented that movie.
The evidence of this case was circumstantial as the murder weapon has never been found, there was no blood, fingerprints or DNA to incriminate Miriam. The prosecution discussed gaps of time in Miriam’s shopping trip that would have allowed her to be out on surveillance, establishing an alibi & theorized that Alan had been shot sometime after 8:15 am before she set off. She would have left the house, tossed the gun & gone shopping as if nothing was amiss.
In December 2009, after five hours of deliberation, a jury found Miriam Helmick guilty of first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder & forgery & she was sentenced to life in prison plus 108 years.
Miriam continues to maintain that she is an innocent woman who is determined to clear her name & won’t stop until she succeeds. Her numerous appeals have all been rejected.
Meanwhile, Alan’s loved ones try to focus more on what a wonderful person he was rather than the way that he died. He was described as a good friend who was a lot of fun & someone you could always have a laugh with.
Coincidentally, Miriam’s first husband, Jack Giles, died from a bullet wound at their South Landmark Circle Jacksonville home six years earlier on April 15, 2002, one day after his 46th birthday. However, one month later the case was ruled a suicide. After learning she was a suspect in Alan’s murder, Jacksonville detectives began reviewing the case again.
At the time of his death, Jack had been asleep in bed beside Miriam when a bullet entered the right side of his head despite the fact that the man was strictly left-handed & when detectives responded to their home, they found the gun in Jack’s right hand. Miriam told responding officers that her husband had been suicidal after the death of their 23-year-old daughter, Amy. The couple also had a son together, Chris.
According to Jack’s brother, Tim, he never believed Miriam’s story & said that Jack was not that depressed. He described his brother as a workaholic & said that his marriage had been far from perfect. According to Tim, they were never really together & only tolerated each other for the sake of the kids. At one point they separated & during that time, Miriam went to live with another man.
Investigators learned that not only was Miriam the beneficiary for her daughter, Amy, but also for Jack. After their deaths, she collected on both, quickly blowing through her daughter’s & then Jack’s. Six months after Jack’s death the court ordered Miriam to give half of his insurance money to his child from a previous relationship, but by then, all of the money was gone. She decided to leave Florida at this poing & headed west to Colorado in early 2005 when a friend told her about a job opportunity at a dance studio there.
Police tried to charge Miriam for the murders of Jack Giles as well as their daughter, but the case wasn’t strong enough & their causes of death remain suicide by gunshot & drug overdose.
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