For nearly four decades, Chaffee County sheriff’s deputies took infrequent sojourns along a winding road up the side of Mount Shavano in search of the skeleton of a woman involved in a bitter love triangle who vanished in 1980.
This week, more than 30 law enforcement and scientific specialists returned to a location on the mountain kept secret by law enforcement. They are sweeping an area, about 10 miles northwest of Salida, where a few of Beverly England’s bones were discovered in 1992 during one of the prior searches.
FBI agents, anthropologists, Salida police officers, Chaffee County deputies and cadaver dogs are all scanning the area in hopes of finding larger parts of her skeleton and skull, which might reveal new clues to confirm how she died.
“The FBI has a team to recover bones,” Chaffee County Sheriff John Spezze said Tuesday. “It’s taken a long time to get them up here.”
In 1980, England dropped her two small children off at the home of a fellow member of the Temple Baptist Church so that she could meet a pregnant woman at Riverside Park, according to a previous interview with Leonard Post, who was at the time the chief of the Salida Police Department.
The woman England was to meet with was the wife of a man who was having an affair with England, Post had said.
England, 32, was married to school teacher Dale England and worked at the Homestake Mine. She parked a few hundred feet from the Arkansas River, which was flowing above flood levels. It was the morning of June 12, 1980. She left her shoes and purse in her car.
“There was a meeting between these two ladies about this affair,” Post has said.
After the meeting at Riverside Park, England was never seen alive again. A police officer went to speak with the woman England was supposed to meet that day and she had injuries, Post has said. But the woman declined to speak with the officer. She requested legal counsel, he said.
“The case was always suspicious. We presumed there was foul play right from the beginning,” Post has said.
No one believed that England would leave town and abandon her two children. The circumstances were suspicious, Post said. Many searches up and down the river were conducted over the next several months.
Dale England was cleared of any suspicion. The pregnant woman who met with England moved out of town.
“Without evidence of foul play there was nothing we could do,” Post said. “All we had was a missing person. At the time nobody knew where her remains were.”
Twelve years later in 1992, the remains of a dead person were found on the side of Mount Shavano, about 10 miles northwest of Salida, along a winding road. An anthropologist concluded the human bones were likely those of a pioneer and no connection was made to England. Spezze declined to describe which bones were found or how many.
The bones were transported to Colorado Springs, where they were kept at a college in storage, Spezze said. In 2015, Spezze reopened the case. New interest was focused on the bones found in 1992.
Sheriff’s investigators retrieved the bones in 2015 and sent them to the University of Northern Texas for possible identification. DNA from the remains was linked to DNA provided by England’s children.
Spezze said persons of interest long have been identified, but he declined to identify them.
One thing the identification of England’s bones proved conclusively was that she hadn’t accidentally fallen into the river and drowned.
“There was nothing new that jump-started this,” Spezze said referring to possible leads. “It’s just taken this long to get them here.”
The FBI body search team is in great demand and it took more than a year to get its members scheduled to come to Colorado, he said.