Michele Wallace: A Free Spirit Taken

Roy Melanson Commits His Last Felony
(‘No Corpus Delicti,’ Forensic Files)

The episodes of Forensic Files featuring old black & white home movies remind us that depravity existed in so-called innocent times.

On the bright side, however, they give us hope that even vintage cold cases can be solved (Gerald Mason).

Such is the story of Michele Wallace’s disappearance in the Colorado mountains in 1974. Investigators identified a suspect early on and found traces of Michele’s presence but not her body. Without that, they couldn’t prove a murder had happened.

Style and substance. For this week, I looked for more details on the lives of Michele and her family and how investigators solved the case 18 years after she vanished. Along the way, I learned that Michele’s father, who viewers will remember from his appearance on Forensic Files, suffered another, final nightmare after the episode first aired in 2004.

So let’s get going on the recap of “No Corpus Delicti” along with extra information from internet research.

Michele Cecile Wallace was born on April 13, 1949, and grew up in the Chicago area. Although she became a rugged outdoorswoman, black-and-white home movies show her as a teenager with a simple elegance like Audrey Hepburn.

Sharing the thrill. Her father, George, worked in the food service business and eventually opened his own pizzeria. Michele was close to her father and even closer to her mother.

Maggie Wallace grew up during the depression and always wanted to travel but couldn’t afford it. When Michele turned into an adventurer, Maggie would help her plan her trips and enjoyed experiencing them vicariously, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Michele went skiing and skydiving and took solo backpacking trips. But wherever she traveled, she found a way to call her parents nearly every day. Michele and her mother ran up huge phone bills, according to the Evening Press.

In 1974, Michele was a 25-year-old college graduate, 5-foot-6 inches tall and slender with thick dark hair and a sweet face.

Missing ‘ring.’ She did some freelance photography and hoped to make it her full-time profession. Michele enjoyed using children as her subjects and also had begun branching out into landscape and nature photography. She funded her interests by working as a flag-woman for Colorado highway projects while she lived in the town of Gunnison.

In August of 1974, Michele headed for the mountains near Crested Butte in Colorado for a three-day hike on her own.

When she failed to check in with her parents, they alerted authorities.

A search effort mobilized to comb the mountain land “on foot, by truck, on horseback, and from the air,” according to the Copley News Service.

Dangerous cargo. No signs of Michele or her red Mazda station wagon turned up, but a ranch owner recalled seeing her dog. Okie had come down from the mountain and started chasing some of his cattle.

The rancher shot Okie, which is the first unforgivable crime to take place on this episode. What harm is a German shepherd to a 1,200-pound animal with horns? (On the bright side, this happened 50 years ago, so the dog killer is probably long gone.)

Next up, a ranch hand named Chuck Matthews told investigators that Michele gave him and a friend a ride on a country road near Gunnison. Chuck got out at the Columbine Bar. The friend, named Roy, asked Michele to drive him a little farther, to his pickup truck.

Hot tickets. The police managed to find a man who matched Roy’s description in Pueblo, Colorado. Roy Allan Melanson, born in Louisiana on February 13, 1937, was a drifter who had already served prison time for rape in Texas.

And yikes, Roy had Michele’s backpack, her driver’s license, and a pawn ticket for her Canon camera. He also pawned her sleeping bag, according to the Herald Scotland, and possibly other pieces of her camping gear.

All in all, Michele’s possessions brought him $73.75.

Sure you didn’t. Investigators developed film in Roy’s possession. It had pictures that Michele had taken of Okie wearing his dog hiking backpack. It also had a shot of Roy relaxing with a woman, not Michele, that he apparently had someone else take before selling the camera.

Roy, who was working for a sheep rancher, claimed that he and Michele had stopped for coffee. He sneaked away from the cafe and stole Michele’s car, he said, and then abandoned it in Amarillo, Texas — but he didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance (Diane Tilly).

Police tracked down Michele’s car but found no signs of violence inside.

They did, however, discover that Roy once had a missing landlady whose car disappeared in Texas.

As highly suspect as Roy was, police hadn’t located any sign of Michele Wallace’s body, so they couldn’t move forward.

Irish eye. Meanwhile, Michele’s father had another horrible tragedy on his hands. He awoke one morning to find that his wife — lying next to him — had killed herself by taking almost an entire bottle filled with assorted barbiturates.

Maggie, 54, couldn’t stand to live without her daughter. Her suicide note requested that Michele be buried next to her whenever her remains turned up.

A few years later, a hiker found a clump of braided hair in an isolated spot in the same mountain area where Michele had gone camping. Michele’s stolen camera held a photo of her with braided hair.

Although the investigation into Michele’s disappearance had been sporadic, people in Gunnison always “wondered out loud about the woman with the braids who went backpacking in the Watergate years and was still missing through the Carter years and Reaganomics and the Persian Gulf war,” reporter John Wilkens of the Copley News Service wrote.

Gratis help. In 1989, police investigator Kathy Ireland reopened the case. “The more I dug into it, the more I thought it was solvable,” Ireland told the Associated Press. She sent hair from Michele’s hairbrush to be compared to the clump of braided hair; they were similar.

In 1992, Ireland enlisted the help of NecroSearch international, a group of archaeologists and other scientists skilled in finding bodies and willing to work pro bono.

Signs of a struggle. Vegetation found in the clump of Michele’s hair suggested she had been on a stretch of land on the north slope of the mountain, 9,980 feet in the air. The Necro Search volunteers scoured the area. One of them, a geologist named Celia Armbrust who stepped away to relieve herself, caught sight of a glint of light. It came from a gold tooth attached to part of a skull.

Michele had a gold tooth.

The Necro Search crew also discovered remnants of her clothing, including jeans with a zipper that looked as though it had been “pulled apart violently.”

Already behind bars. Investigators believed that once Roy had Michele alone in the car, he forced her to stop and let the dog out. He attacked her — no one could tell exactly what he did to her — and killed her and threw her body down the mountain. With Michele dead, there was no one to report her car missing, so Roy used it as his own without worry.

Finding Roy was easy. He was serving time at a Kentucky prison for burglary. The authorities allowed his extradition to Colorado for a trial.

Roy told police that he sneaked away from a restaurant where he and Michele were having coffee and stole her car. Okie was left tied up outside, he said.

Accused a no-show. A former cellmate, John Paul Steele, told authorities that Roy had admitted that he once hid a body in the mountains. Other former inmates told Ireland that Roy bragged about killing an “unwilling woman.”

At the trial, the hair and bone evidence was displayed in glass cases. Melanson refused to attend because he didn’t want to wear a stun belt, which would prevent him from escaping

In 1993, a jury found Roy guilty of first-degree murder.

Run-on sentence. Roy appeared in person for the sentencing.”I don’t know what you expected your attorneys to do — work miracles?” District Court Judge Richard Brown told him. “You’re a waste of humanity.”

Michele’s father agreed. “These bastards, the devastation that they leave behind, nobody knows,” George Wallace told Forensic Files. “They think they killed an individual but they kill dozens of people.”

Roy received a life sentence to be served once he finished his 20 years of prison time for the Kentucky burglary.

A widower again. Michele was buried on her birthday, April 13, next to Maggie Wallace, in Woodlawn Cemetery in 1994.

George had retired to St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1977 and remarried. His second wife died in the early 2000s.

Sadly, on January 13, 2006, a new tragedy would befall the Wallace family, when two burglars broke into George’s house. Eugene Wesley, 17,  threw a blanket over George, who was then 85 years old, frail, and using a wheel chair. Then, Stephen M. Sterling, 21, beat him severely with a heavy object. The pair stole George’s car but not much else, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Son left alone. George Wallace died of his injuries in the hospital. The police quickly took Wesley and Sterling into custody.

“We are an unlucky family,” George’s his son, also named George, told the Tampa Bay Times. “Two murders so far apart and a suicide. It’s really hard to fathom. The arrest helps, at least a little bit.”

He also said that he hoped that Wesley and Sterling received the death penalty and that he would be the “first to flip the switch.”

Buddy rats on him. Sterling claimed that the reason police found his fingerprints at the murder scene was that he had visited George on previous occasions. The jury didn’t buy it.

Upon hearing the guilty verdict, Sterling sobbed and his grandmother fell to the floor and screamed, “You’re all liars.” The Wallace relatives present in the courtroom also cried, according to an account of the trial in the Tampa Bay Times in August 2008.

The judge gave Sterling a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Today, Sterling resides at the Suwannee Correctional Institution Annex. Eugene Wesley, who cooperated with authorities and turned against Sterling, got 25 years and is in Liberty Correctional Institution in Bristol, Florida for second-degree murder and dangerous act.

Roy Melanson died in prison on May 22, 2020 in Cañon City, Colorado. He had also been found guilty of the murder of Anita Andrews. He stabbed the 51-year-old mother of two repeatedly with a screw driver while sexually assaulting her in back of Fagiani’s Cocktail Lounge in 1974, just a month before he killed Michele.

The conviction for Anita Andrews’ homicide came in 2010, thanks to 36-year-old DNA evidence — another testament to the power of forensics in solving crimes that took place way back in innocent times that never really were.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

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Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube.