Most people would think this story has a sad ending. They would be wrong. I think.
It goes back to the early 1980s when Michael Reichel’s ex-wife dropped off their son and all his belongings at Michael’s Greeley home. She was never seen again.
“I fell in love with him the minute I saw him,” Lori Reichel, who was married to Michael at the time, says of the boy, Sjon, not quite 2 years old then. “He just wanted to be loved. He was a great child.”
Michael and Lori divorced in late 1984.
There were custody battles over the years, ones Lori always lost. What she would not know for two decades was Michael eventually lost custody of Sjon, who was raised in Evergreen by a foster couple.
She wrote social-service agencies over the years, seeking information on the boy. They disclosed nothing. She wrote to TV hosts with her story. They never responded.
The boy had gotten to her, Lori Reichel said. She had raised him until he was 4. And then there was Leah, her daughter with Michael, who asked about Sjon. So she kept at it, even cold-calling every Reichel in every telephone book in Colorado. Nothing.
And then four years ago, Lori Reichel got her first computer.
She posted notes everywhere she could think of. Nothing came back. And then she began posting her story on . Six months ago, the telephone rang.
It was a woman named Judy. She was, she said, Sjon’s ex-fiancee. But before she would say anything more, she wanted Lori to know that Sjon is not a bad person, that what happened wasn’t his fault.
Sjon Reichel Elmgreen — he had been adopted years ago by the foster family — was serving 35 years in prison in Limon for second- degree murder. He had gotten into a fight with three men in Grand Junction. He stabbed one of them to death.
Twenty-eight years old now, Sjon Elmgreen has been imprisoned for the past 10 years.
“I was disappointed at first,” Lori Reichel recalled, “and a little scared.” She did the first thing that came to mind: She got out a pen and paper.
“But how do I in writing tell this man he has a family out here that loves him very much and has for years been searching for him?” she said.
Finally, she picked up the telephone and called him.
“I know now,” she said, “that he really isn’t a bad person, that the whole thing really wasn’t his fault.”
Leah has been to the prison four time to visit Sjon. With good behavior, the two women say, he could be eligible for parole in six years.
Lori Reichel is 46 now, a former nurse living on disability payments. She lives in Orange, Texas, on 2½ acres. The house, the land, her truck and all of her belongings she has willed to Sjon Elmgreen.
“I always hoped I would find him,” she says. “Finding him was my main goal in life.”
She will arrive in Colorado at the end of the month to see the man for the first time since 1984. She will visit him over three days, for five hours each day.
“I will take all five hours each day,” she says. “I am sure the first day all I’ll do is cry.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
