Edwin Bartheld built his home on abandoned mining claims, so when Omar Richardson heard he was killed in an explosion, he thought the 92-year-old had fallen victim to old, unstable dynamite he found on the property.
But Bartheld was found in a crawl space under the Chaffee County home, near a cache of explosives and chemicals used in bomb-making.
The Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office, which investigated the explosion, said Bartheld apparently was killed when a bomb he was building accidentally detonated.
“He had done some surveying work and mining-type stuff up there — I thought some old dynamite from way back. Bomb-making doesn’t really fit my picture,” said Richardson, a real estate broker who once sold property in the ghost town of Turret, where Bartheld was one of the few full-time residents.
Investigators believe they know the retired electrical engineer’s motive for building bombs but have not yet made their conclusions public, said sheriff’s patrol Cmdr. Derek Bos.
The Chaffee County coroner completed an autopsy on Monday but is not releasing the results “because of the continuing investigation,” Bos said.
Friends found Bartheld’s body on Friday, when they went to check on him after not hearing from him for more than a week.
Investigators were returning to the scene with additional search warrants on Monday, Bos said.
Bartheld and his wife, Jean Therese Bartheld, lived adjacent to the ghost town about 12 miles north of Salida in a home they built in the 1970s, Richardson said.
Bartheld sold the property, built in 1973, in 2008 to Jennifer and Balder Saunders of Florida, according to Chaffee County property records. They didn’t return a call for comment.
A deed for the property states that the Barthelds could live in the home and on the property until death “or an agreed-upon time.”
Richardson sold properties in the area in the early 2000s.
Bartheld was a loner, Richardson said. His wife, who died in 2012, “was a little more friendly,” he said. “You could stop and visit with her, and I would see her going down to services in the Catholic church. She was quite the cross country skier, a tough little old lady.”
The pair lived off the grid, but Bartheld had built a green house and was self-sufficient. “It takes a certain personality type to move way out there on your own. He was a very intelligent, competent person,” Richardson said.
The couple owned the minerals under an estimated 269 acres of claimed land, according to the website “Who Owns the West.”
“There are actually six different mining claims he owned up there. They had quite the setup,” Richardson said.
Investigators don’t believe the explosion had anything to do with mining, Bos added.
Few people live year-round in the town, Richardson said. “It’s not a residential area. It is a recreational, get-away-from-it-all cabin type of place.
“I was shocked because he struck me as a very careful person,” he added.
