Paige Birgfeld, 34, slain mother of three from Grand Junction, led a double life, also working for an escort service.
The soccer-mom/stripper murder investigation was a process of elimination and it took seven years.
Before the Mesa County Sheriff’s Department felt comfortable arresting Lester Ralph Jones in the death of Paige Birgfeld, they had to discount the possibility that many other men may have been culpable.
It was a time-consuming, meticulous process.
Key events happened along the way. The biggest was the discovery of Birgfeld’s remains by a hiker in the Wells Gulch area in Delta County on May 6, 2012.
But in the end what made the difference wasn’t new gotcha evidence like a fingerprint or a DNA link. The determining evidence was circumstantial and known by Mesa County Sheriff’s deputies since the beginning of the investigation.
“We believe at this point we have crossed off the list all the things we needed to do to make an arrest,” Mesa County Sheriff-elect Matt Lewis said in a news conference Friday. “There’s not a significant event as much as this is an exhaustive process we’ve been going through.”
Jones faces charges of first-degree murder, second-degree murder, second-degree kidnapping and second-degree arson.
Many of the clues that led to Jones’ arrest were known within days or weeks of Birgfeld’s disappearance on June 30, 2007.
When she vanished, Birgfeld was for many just a devoted mother holding down several different jobs to support her three young children and hold onto her upscale Grand Junction home. The twice-divorced Birgfeld sold Pampered Chef products and homemade baby slings from her home.
By day, the bubbly, friendly, outspoken woman was a doting mom, but by night she was a high-priced call girl who charged clients nearly $3,000 for a single evening. She had advertised in-call and out-call services under the alias of “Carrie” on a website called NaughtyNightlife.com and scheduled liaisons with other call girls.
