Welcome back to the Pathway Chili.
I'm Robin, I'm Jules, and I'm Ashley.
Let's dive right into this week's case.
November twenty one, nineteen seventy nine, Craig Colorado. After spending the evening at a dance, fifteen year old Marie Blee heads to a party but never returns home. Two days later, Marie's parents receive an anonymous phone call demanding a five thousand dollars ransom for her return. The caller turns out to be eighteen year old Monte Doolan, who originally drove Marie to the party, but he denized any involvement in
her disappearance. Over the next few decades, investigators received contradictory eyewitness accounts about what might have happened to Marie and eventually named three persons of interest, but she continues to remain a missing person.
After that, the path went chilly. So on this episode, we're going to be exploring a missing person's case which took place just over forty five years ago, the nineteen seventy nine disappearance of fifteen year old Marie Blee. This is a very complex but frustrating mystery because the victim in this story went missing after attending a party, but unfortunately, a proper investigation was not performed for nearly twenty years.
Many of the witnesses who attended that party were interviewed, but the problem is that their accounts of what happened often contradicted each other, so it's tough to work out a concrete timeline and pinpoint the exact moment when Marie Blee was last confirmed to be alive. Investigators would eventually name three persons of interest, and one of them, Monty Doolan, drove Marie to the party on the night she went missing and soon made an inexplicable attempt to extort money
from her family. This is one of those cold cases where it's been suspected that a number of people might know the truth but are reluctant to come forward. It seems apparent that something happened to Marie at that party, but all the pieces of the puzzle have yet to be put together.
I'm already frustrated.
You have a eighteen year old who drove Marie who's fifteen, to a party, so clearly we already know that there are multiple ages at this party. You have people who are a legal adult driving a fifteen year old to this party, And like you said, it's pretty clear that something must have happened there because she arrives at the party and then we know nothing about her whereabouts after that.
What is absolutely heartbreaking is that there's a family who's waiting for their fifteen year old little girl to come home and two days later they get a phone call for a ransom and it turns out to be the very kid that Marie trusted to take her to the party. It's, i don't know, inexplicable, Like you just said, it's despicable that someone could behave that way. I'm dying to know more about Monty Doolan, the eighteen year old, why and how he's a suspect and who these other people could be,
because already his behavior is it's just disgusting. You have a grieving family, a worried family, and then they have possibly a prank phone call for a ransom, or was it Monty really trying to get something because he knew where she was or what had happened to her, and then starts to recant that he has any involvement.
It's diabolical if he is involved with Marie's disappearance. But if he isn't as well, if he just does this prank phone call, the callous nature of doing something like that to parents who have no idea what happened to their daughter.
It's gross and you were responsible for her like she if the parents didn't know that Monty drove her, Marie trusted him to drive her, so to be in that position of trust and her alleged friendship with him, and then to manipulate and harm the family again when they're baby's missing, it's oh, it's bad.
Yeah. Monty Dulin has always maintained his innocence and claims he had nothing to do with Marie's disappearance. So when you hear the excuse he gives for why he decided to phone the family and try to extort money, you're
going to roll your eyes. So it's pretty obvious that even if he wasn't directly involved, these pretty terrible human being and that a lot of people did fail Marie that night because she was a fifteen year old girl going to one of her first grown up parties with a lot of older kids, and it doesn't seem like anyone was really watching over her.
Our story begins in Colorado in nineteen seventy nine. Our central figure is fifteen year old Marie Anne Blee, who lives with her parents, Paul and Monablee, and is the youngest of five children. The Blee family lives in Hayden, a small town of around seventeen hundred located in Route County. Marie is currently a sophomore at Hayden High School and is very active in the sewing program for the local
four h club. She enjoys a very close relationship with her parents and has gone on a trip to Germany and Switzerland with them. In September of this year, on the evening of Wednesday, November twenty first, which happened to be the day before Thanksgiving, Marie traveled seventeen miles to
the town of Craig, located in Moffat County. She was driven there by an eighteen year old friend of hers named Monty Doolan, who had recently graduated high school, and they would attend a four age dance being held at the Moffatt County Fairgrounds Pavilion. When the dance ended, Monty drove Marie to the Shadow Mountain Village Mobile home Park,
in order to attend a party. The party was hosted by an eighteen year old high school senior named Michael O'Brien, who would claim that he originally only intended to hold a small get together with his brother and their friends. However, once worred about the party spread, it wound up being crashed by somewhere between fifty to one hundred people, many of whom arrived there from the dance, and the mobile home became so overcrowded the people started spilling out into
the yard. Some of Marie's female friends joined her at the party, but they became uncomfortable once they saw there was a lot of drug usage going on and most of the people there were older males who they did not know. Marie's friends decided to leave, but they claimed that she insisted on staying and they were unable to change her mind. The following morning, Marie's mother, moanably, woke up at six a m. In order to start preparing
the turkey for the family's Thanksgiving dinner that night. She took a glance inside Marie's room and was surprised to discover that she was not there and her bed had not been slept in since Marie never missed her curfew, it was very uncharacteristic for her not to come home, and her parents soon became greatly concerned when they checked with her friends and learned that she had not spent
the night with any of them. Mona and her husband Paul attempted to report Marie missing, but the Hayden Police Department believed that Marie had simply ran away and would turn up soon. However, Marie's parents didn't buy this, as she was doing well in school and not experiencing any personal problems at that time, so they plan to organize their own search effort for her.
This is one of those cases that we've we've looked at many many times where you have a young individual who's doing what young people do and it's kind of caught up in that trap of manipulation and kind of insecurity and seeking approval from people. I wouldn't be surprised if Marie didn't have somebody at that party that she admired that she really wanted to be close to, that maybe she had a crush on, and she's seeing there's
older people there, They're showing me attention. I want to be here, and I guarantee many people who are listening. And I myself have done the thing where my friends say let's go, and I say I'm good, leave me be, I have a ride home, just let me be. And you're putting yourself in such a dangerous situation. But at fifteen years old, you don't know that you trust people.
You have this kind of hope that someone's gonna find you beautiful or funny and is gonna hang out with you and take care of you and maybe be interested in you. And so I wouldn't be shocked if that was the motivation for Marie fighting to stay at that party. Sounds like there's a lot of older people. It sounds like a lot of dangerous things were happening at that party,
like drug use and drinking. And you have a lot of people coming and going that might not actually have anything to do with Marie, but they were involved in let's say the drug use or the drinking, and they pass her path and they could put her at risk. And or it's the people she's truly trusting and wanting to get close to who end up hurting her. So there's two really big scenarios here going on. Is it someone she was staying at the party for who ended
up hurting her? Or is it someone who was watching her at the party and took an opportunity because they saw a young fifteen year old who was vulne and with fifty to one hundred people, good luck figuring out which one of them could have done it.
And this is far from the only case we've covered on the podcast. An old missing person's case from like the seventies or eighties, where even though they're under age, their parents tried to report the missing the police and they say, oh, they just ran away. They'll turn up eventually.
And this is one case where that turned out to be such a detriment because if they had gone to work right away and interviewed everyone at that party they when their memories were still fresh, we might have gotten a better idea of figuring out what happened to her.
But because they went interview these people into a long time later and just wrote off Marie's runaway as we're going to talk about, we got so many contradictory eyewitness statements about what Marie was doing and where she was that it was just so tough to get a handle on figuring out what happened to her.
I'm like you, Ash, I can't help but think of all the stupid things that I did when I was Marie's age, and how many parties that I went to and ones where my friends probably left me. I would say, like, just leave me behind. I'm with like this guy friend or this guy friend, and I'm so thankful that horrible things didn't happen. But every time that I did that, it opened myself up to like such a dangerous situation.
So to think back in retrospect, when you hear a story like Marie, it really makes you question your own decisions in your youth.
Oh yeah, And I know that Marie's friends, it would be easy to criticize them for leaving her behind at the party, but they said multiple times that we did what we could to try to convince her to leave with us, and she kept saying no, And ultimately our hands were kind of tied here. If she didn't want to leave, we couldn't make her leave, And unfortunately, this is one of those situations where she just was never
seen again. On November the twenty fourth, the case took an unsettling turn when the Bleeze received a phone call from an anonymous mail who demanded that they pay a five thousand dollars ransom for Marie's safe return. Since November the twenty fourth was a Saturday and the bank was closed, the Bleedes were forced to scrap together the five thousand
dollars by borrowing it from friends. This development finally caused the police to take Marie's disappearance more seriously, and they set up a tap on the bolic's phone, but the anonymous caller never phoned back to provide instructions about how to deliver the ransom money. However, within a few days, police would discover that the caller was none other than Monty Doolan, who had driven Marie to the dance and
the party on the night she went missing. Monty was subsequently arrested and charged with extortion, but maintained that he had no knowledge or involvement in Marie's disappearance. Monty claimed that he had no intention of ever collecting the five thousand dollars from Marie's parents and only decided to phone them up and impersonate a kidnapper in order to give
them the hope that Marie was still alive. According to Monty, he last saw Marie at the party sometime between one point thirty and two am on the morning of November twenty second. They did not leave together because Marie said she had arranged to get a ride with another guy at the party, though she never actually told Monty who it was. Monty ultimately wound up pleading guilty to telephone harassment and received a six month suspend a jail sentence along with two years probation.
His explanation stinks when you look at this is decades ago, and you're asking this family who's two days into their baby being missing, and you say, I need five thousand dollars. That's somewhere between I don't know, twenty and thirty five thousand dollars today. That's not something that I have sitting around. A lot of families would be scrambling and desperate and would do anything to get that money and try to
make sure that they got their daughter back. So you're asking a family in their most vulnerable state to then be stressed and traumatized by having to put together a large amount of money quickly, to think that their baby's life depends on your efforts and ability to reach this person. You're not able to remake contact with the person you're scrambling to get the money together. How much more trauma can a poor little family go through. Monty's explanation stinks.
It doesn't offer any hope, and anyone who has three brain cells would know that all that would do is add harm to the family. So I can't even begin to understand how anyone, including the police, could say, Okay, we understand.
But these are the same police that said, as soon as she went missing, even though she didn't fit the profile of a runaway, that she was a runaway. I think their investigation was just lacking on every level, and it seems like their investigation into certain individuals, they just wrote them off really easily, where they should have like dove a little bit deeper. Monty Doolan was known to have been with Marie, and so we're just to believe
and like to take his word at face value. I just I don't know if I can get behind that.
I mean, yeah, that is just such a terrible excuse to say that. Oh, I just wanted to give hope to the family that Marie was still alive, even though she'd only been missing for a few days at that point. And that is an incredibly cruel act if doing that to the pair when you don't know what's happened to her,
when she may very well be dead. And I have my doubt said he was legitimately trying to collect a five thousand dollars ransom, but I think there's a good chance he made this fake ransom call because he was trying to throw off the investigation and make the police think that something else happened to Marie rather than focusing their suspicion on him. But unfortunately Vermonty, he wound up getting caught.
Also, you got to remember what year was.
This, nineteen seventy nine, Okay.
Nineteen seventy nine, So you're still you're coming out of that like free love. Kids are still hitch hiking and doing all these things that are troublesome behaviors now when you look back. But they were very, very common that young kids would jump in a car with just about anybody, go just about anywhere, and you didn't have all the
communication and tracking devices that you have now. So I can see where police would be kind of lazy and ignorant to the idea of, oh, I bet she's a runaway because at the time, you really did have a lot of kids who were coming and going as they pleased, and they didn't always know who was taking them to different places. So I see at the time where there's a little bit more kind of assumption that the kids were going to come home. But still this kiddo, the
parents had a feeling this is not her. We know where she was, she was doing great in school. She had no reason to run and not tell us where she was. And so I think at the point where the family has a child who's acting out of character, the police should have been alerted. But I do know at that time it really was pretty common for, you know, a kid to disappear and then go oh, I'm back, and the.
Cases would be closed pretty quick.
But that hurts all the cases that were actually authentic and needed the police to respond immediately to hopefully help.
Anyway, it was now a parent that something likely happened to Marie while she was at the party, but the investigation into her disappearance went no way due largely to jurisdictional issues. The problem was that Marie lived in Route County, but technically went missing in MafA County, and it seemed like neither of the sheriff's office in those counties wanted to take the reins, and they both seemed like they
were trying to distance themselves from the case. As a result, key witnesses were never interviewed, and it was hard to pinpoint the exact time when Marie was last seen alive. Many rumors circulated throughout the community about what happened to Marie, including her dying of an accidental drug overdose or being killed to cover up a sexual assault, and it was speculated that her body was buried in a rural area somewhere.
There was even rumors that Marie's body had been dismembered and dumped in an abandoned mind shaft, or that she was encased in a concrete foundation of Craig's City Market, which was under construction at the time. Four months after Marie's disappearance, a sergeant with MafA County Sheriff's Office received an anonymous phone call from a man who said, quote, my two kids know who disposed of Marie Blee, but we're afraid to tell. Eleven people know, but they're afraid
end quote. Even though the caller was sobbing when he said this, he was never identified, and his story could not be substantiated. Marie's parents did their best to keep their daughter's case in the spotlight, but they would eventually find it too painful to remain in Hayden. They moved to Grand Junction in nineteen eighty four, but made sure to keep the same phone number in case Marie ever tried to call them.
That's pitiful when you sit there and you think about this idea. On both sides, you have parents who are saying that we'll do anything if we haven't.
Found our body. There's still hope.
If we haven't found our body, there's a chance that she is going to call us right and to the point where we'll stay in the home that we were in, and when that becomes too painful, we'll move, but we'll keep the same phone number and will continue to fight to keep awareness around her case so that you know she knows we're looking for You can just feel the devastation that that's taking on the family. And then you get that phone call, which in and of itself is
heartbreaking on a lot of different levels. The person sobbing and saying, listen, two of my kids know what happened to her, but were really scared. And there's a lot of people who know. In fact, what do they say?
Eleven yeah, eleven yeah, eleven.
People know, but they're too afraid to talk. Something happened and people witnessed it or and or heard about it. But there's somebody or something they're scared of that if this person that kills Marie could also then turn around and kill them.
They don't want to talk.
That's why cases like this are fascinating, because if there was any one of those eleven people alive today who says, maybe the suspect or the perpetrator, maybe they passed away, maybe they're so old, what are they going to do to me?
Now?
If they just came forward now there could be answers in this case, not for any kind of quote closure, it's not going to happen, but resolution to know what happened to her. This idea that I just want to know the details of what happened.
To somebody that we loved.
I do.
I feel sorry for the person calling too. There's a clear fear and to live with that kind of guilt and knowledge that can't do anything but tear you apart.
Yeah, I've always wondered about the caller because if they were sobbing, it sounds like they genuinely like we're fearful of something or we're guilt written about something, because I don't know if they would cry like that if it was just a prank phone call. But at the same time, I am kind of skeptical that eleven people know the full truth about what happened. I mean, I could think maybe like two or three possibly know the full truth,
but so much time has passed. I would like to think that one of those eleven people, if they did know what happened, would have come forward by now, especially years after the fact, when we would finally identify a couple of persons of interest. I mean.
The thing to me too, is when people say they're too scared to talk, I get it. But at some point, if the police are going to be to apprehend and convict them, what else are you? I mean, what are you scared of? Are you scared of their associates? And you know the repercussions of that, I suppose, but I don't know. Let's let's go hardcore and lock them up and then they can't hurt anybody else, including us.
Yeah, I would like to think that if you're younger, if you're a teenager, you would still be scared of something like that, But once you reached adulthood and no longer had to associate with these people, that your conscious would get the better of you when you would finally come forward and share what you know.
And even if they're like a criminal element, the landscape would change considerably in that timeframe. So you've got to wonder, like eleven people knowing nobody comes forward, Like eleven is a really specific number, Like you said, I could see a few, but eleven, and I just would have a hard time believing that somebody wouldn't crack unless they felt like there was some sort of threat that somebody would
go after them. And I get what you're saying, ash for sure that like if that is the case, then you know, go to life enforcement, tell them everything, and then that way they'll get locked up. But I guess there's always the fear that somebody like that could be
out on bail. I mean, I don't know how insidious somebody would have to be or how dangerous that you would keep quiet and you would be sobbing on the phone, like years later, it's if it's a prank call, like whatever would motivate somebody to do that, I have no idea. But if it is somebody who truly did know, it's just too bad that they never figured out who it was and got more information from them.
So and not be until nineteen ninety nine, nearly twenty years after Marie went missing, that a thorough investigation would finally be performed. This came about after Marie's case is featured in an extensive article in Frontier magazine, which was highly critical of how the various law enforcement agencies let
their jurisdictional disputes hamper the original investigation. In response, the Route County Sheriff's Office decided to reopen the case and organize a multi jurisdictional cold case task Force, which also consisted of the Moffatt County Sheriff's Office, the Hayden and Craig police departments, and the FBI. They acknowledged that the original investigation had been mishandled, but they now wanted to
make it right. Over the course of the next few years, the task force would organize a number of searches and excavations in areas where Marie's body was believed to be buried in order to make a positive identification in case they found any human remains. DNA was collected from an old orthodonic retainer Marie had owned and was still in the family's possession after two decades.
Yeah, you're just left holding this potential evidence of Hey, we have her DNA from one of her items, but we don't have her body recovered. We don't have her to actually say, is there any other evidence on her body? Are there any you know, hair pieces on her body, Was there any blood near her body?
None of that. So you're literally looking.
For a ghost right now, and you have a box of evidence that's just things from her family and from her room waiting to be tested if and when they ever discovered her body.
I think it's incredible that they still have her retainer after that many years, Like, thank god they held onto that because DNA wasn't as sophisticated as it is now, And I don't even know if they would have been able to take the parents' DNA and been able to compare that in the way that they can today.
It's true, and back in nineteen seventy nine, it's not like the Bleaves would have been thinking about DNA testing because it didn't exist back then. But I guess they were just one of those families who decided to hold on to all of their missing daughter's items and then never imagine that two decades later this would be useful for DNA testing.
Investigators finally tracked down and interviewed a number of witnesses who attended the party at Shadow Mountain Village on the night that Marie went missing, and many of them had never spoken to the police before. However, the big problem was at twenty years had passed and these witnesses memories were no longer fresh, so their statements often contradicted each other.
For instance, one witness would claim they saw Marie doing drugs inside the mobile home's bathroom, but another witness said that Marie never went inside the mobile home at all that evening because it was so crowded. Different witnesses would also place Marie at different locations throughout the night, including the fairground's pavilion and a completely different party being held
in Hayden. Marie was also seen at a Circle K convenience store with a man who may or may not have been Monte Doulin, but it was unclear if this was before, during, or after the party took place. Investigators were hoping that a grand jury would be called in order to help condense all the eyewitness statements into one coherent version of events with a clear timeline, but this
never came to fruition. Of course, rumors continued to circulate that Marie had been the victim of an accidental drug overdose, and some people disposed of her body because they feared an investigation might lead to their drug supply. Police announced that as long as a murder did not take place, no one would be prosecuted for any crimes related to the covering up of Marie's death, since the statute of
limitations had expired by this point. But in spite of this, no one ever provided any conclusive information about what happened, and the multiple searches for Marie's remains failed to turn up any evidence. After one unsuccessful search came to an end, pab Lee could be seen breaking out into tears and crying out, why won't someone just come forward and tell us what happened? I just don't understand.
Can you imagine sitting there watching a father go through a search for his daughter and just begging people, please tell me what happens. And then you think back to this phone call that happens years later where someone saying like, oh, yeah, eleven of us know what happened, we're just too scared to talk. His grief and his just it's pitiful begging people, please tell me what happened. I just want to know what happened. And it's pretty powerful that the police say, listen,
statute delimitations have run out. If you have any knowledge of something that happened to her. Let's say she fell and hit her head. Let's say she was you know, a drug overdose like they said, and then you just dispose of her body so that you didn't get in trouble. Just let us know, because that's different than first degree murder, right or second degree murder.
That's different.
So and no one still nobody came forward, which then makes me think with that kind of information out there, knowing the statute delimitations had passed, knowing that they're granting public permission to tell what happened, and if you weren't involved in her murder, that they were going to look away.
It is crazy.
If eleven people truly knew what happened, not one, not one of you broke.
Yeah, that's what's strange to me about it. It makes me wonder if perhaps only a handful of people know the exact truth about what happened. And like you said, if it was just an hour accidental drug overdose and disposing of her body because of the statute of limitations, they might not be charged. But the fact that everyone is still continuing to remain silent makes me wonder if something truly horrible happened, like a premeditated murderer, or maybe
she was killed during an attempted sexual assault. But you have to think that after a statement like that by the police, that so many people would still keep their mouths shut, it must be really bad.
And I mean, what if both things are true? What if she died from a drug overdose, but somewhere along the line of this drug overdose, somebody sexually assaulted her and that may be the reason that people haven't come forward. But I would think that if there was eleven people that were aware of a sexual assault, especially if some of those people were indeed women, that over time their opinions of the situation might change so that they would go to law enforcement, though.
I always think of the social stigma as well, that even if they didn't do anything wrong, they just remained silent. That if they came forward and finally revealed the truth after all these years, a lot of people would get mad at them, saying, why did you wait so long before saying anything? And I think that might be one reason why some people are still reluctant to reveal the truth.
That's true, like you didn't help when you could have stayed silence almost as bad as being involved, right, you had the ability to get justice or answers for that family, and you didn't help.
So in September of nineteen ninety nine, investigators tracked down Monty Doolan, who was living in Grand Junction by this point, in order to interview him. However, when they returned to Grand Junction a few months later in order to speak with them again, they were surprised to discover that Monty and his wife were no longer living at the residence, even though they had only moved in there one month
before Monty's first interview. For a while, investigators had trouble locating Manti again, but they finally tracked him down to another residence in grand junction. Over the years, Monty had been in trouble with the law on multiple occasions for such crimes as domestic violence and sexual assault. On the basis of all the new information they gathered during the investigation, the Cold Case Task Force publicly named three persons of interest.
One of them was Monty Doolan, and the other two were max Abel Garcia and Steven Skuffka, who were both nineteen years old at the time Marie went missing. Some of the witnesses who were interviewed seemed to think that Marie had left the party with three men, and Doolin, Garcia, and Skuffka had all been placed in her presence that night. Garcia was now living in Portland, Oregon, so investigators traveled
there to interview him. He maintained his innocence, but the task Force suspected that even if Garcia wasn't directly involved in Maurice's disappearance, he possibly had knowledge about what happened to her. Stephen Skuffka was still living in Craig at this point, and much like Monte Doulin, he had a
history of criminal activity. Skuffka popped up on the investigator's radar when witnesses shared stories about how he had allegedly made incriminating comments over the years about being involved in Marie's disappearance. However, Skuffka claimed that he never even attended the party or met Marie. His The story was that he attended the four h dance that night with his sister, but they both returned home early because they found it
boring and went to bed. Skuffka's alibi was backed up by his parents and Michael O'Brien, who hosted the party at the mobile home and claimed that Skuffka was never there. Hmm.
I mean, they always say that the worst alibi is someone that cares about you, even though they would definitely be the person most likely to.
Know the truth.
But I don't know, it makes a lot of sense that the three of these guys, Remember, she's fifteen. You have an eighteen and nineteen and a nineteen year old. She's vulnerable, She's I guarantee you, because we've all been a fifteen year old girl before.
She feels older than she is.
She feels attractive and smart and important because these older boys are paying attention to her, and yet on the flip side, through their eyes, she's vulnerable. She's someone that would be perceived as weak in their mind, and if the three of them manipulate her and get her away from the party, I could see something like a gang sexual assault happening, or you know, one of them hurting her and the rest of them covering for them.
So I think it's.
Very realistic to start to picture who left with her that night. Three older boys would not surprise me, and the two of them seem to have a pattern of behavior that would very much be in line with something that could escalate to a murder. You have sexual assaults, you have domestic violence, you have very suspicious behavior moving all about trying to elude perhaps the detectives.
But ah, it's just sad.
I mean, yes, Skufka has an alibi, but I'm not so sure I buy it. I could see it just being Monty, and I could see it being a group of three or even more. Remember the caller set eleven people knew it sounds crazy, but when you think about group of assaults, threes horrific. But there's no limit to how many people can participate in manipulate and hurting the little girl.
I think it's weird that Skufka went to the dance with his sister, that is true.
Yeah, they don't even specify how old the sister was, But I know most people in high school would not go to social events with their siblings like that.
No, they'd be like, I'm out piece ounds.
And Michael O'Brien like, I don't think he's intentionally lying. But they say that between fifty and one hundred people showed up at the party, and even he admits a lot of them were stragglers who came who he didn't even know. So after twenty years, how could he be certain that he did not see Steven Skoff at the party? I mean, he could have been there and he just didn't notice him.
Yeah, absolutely, one hundred people. That's like thinking about, you know, like a high school dance or something. How are you gonna see everybody for sure? To the point where you could testify on that It's very possible that they were hanging out at a bonfire behind the mobile home, and or that Michael was in the mobile home most of the time while they were outside, So I don't necessarily think.
That's much of a cover.
And then, like I said, his parents would obvious tried to support their son to get the heat off of him.
And when you add substances into the mix, everybody was likely inebriated or high on drugs. Then people's memories become more fallible. And I'm in total agreement with you Ash. The parents being his alibi, that's shaky at best, Like that is not a concrete alibi. They are going to say anything that they can likely to protect their son, because most parents do.
Well.
In September two thousand, only a few months after being named as a person of interest, Stephen Skyfka wound up in serious legal trouble after he was arrested for allegedly trying to run over a man with his car. Traces of methamphetamine, marijuana, and drug paraphernalia were found in Skyfka's possession, and at the time, he was also on probation for a witness tampering charge. He wound up being charged with forty seven different crimes and was facing a twelve year
prison sentence. Skufka was interviewed by a cold case task force and was offered a deal for a sentence if he was willing to provide new information about Marie's disappearance. Skuffka did not divulge anything, and wound up receiving the twelve year sentence, though he was paroled in two thousand and nine. Following his release, Skuffka went to live with his mother in Lakewood, but became the victim of a
fatal accident when he fell down his basement steps. In May of twenty twelve, Skiffka's mother stated that he was getting his life back together and had gotten engaged to be married. She continued to insist that he was falsely accused of his involvement in Marie's disappearance, and he had been home with her on the night Marie went missing.
I view this two different ways.
One, you have somebody who didn't do it, because he is offered this deal and says, hey, listen, you're already facing a heck of a lot of time.
Help us out.
We'll help you out with your charges because you're already going to have to serve time, and we can help one another.
And he says no.
He goes ahead and he gets the full sentence or whatever he was going to be facing for the multiple forty seven different crimes that he was So either he didn't do it, or you have somebody who is a careered criminal who has a unstable past with law enforcement and therefore is smart enough to keep his mouth shut
or refuses to cooperate and help law enforcement. So I could see it being either way he truly doesn't know anything, or he just happens to have a criminal lifestyle that says, yeah, I might know something, but I'm not dumb enough.
To tell you anything. It's not in it.
There's nothing in it for me to tell you. I'm going to face my charges and move on.
And Robin mentioned earlier like social stigma, I think that could explain potentially, even if he was already up on all of these other charges, being tied to a death is different. And also the social stigma can explain why the mother would back her son up so wholeheartedly saying that he was with me when there's likely a potential that he wasn't, because she doesn't want the idea that her son could be involved in the death of a young woman.
Oh yeah, Like most parents aren't just going to flat out say, like after they've lost a child, saying oh yeah, I believe that he did it. I believe he was a murderers. So it's understandable that she would continue to defend him to her dying breath. But of course the all their alternative is that the actual truth about what happened is so bad that Skuffit canoe that even if he confessed to it, he was going to receive a lot more than a twelve year sentence, because, like they said,
there's no statute of limitations on murder. Well. A few years after Skuffka's death, Monty Doolan would face some serious legal trouble of his own. In June of twenty fifteen, Doolan was arrested after a grand jury for Colorado's fourteenth Judicial District indicted him on one count of first degree kidnapping. At the time, Doolan was living in Souldotna, Alaska, but he was brought back to Route County to face the charge.
It turned out that in the year prior to Marie's disappearance, Dulan had allegedly kidnapped and sexually assaulted another teenage girl who lived in Route County. Doolan was accused of picking up this girl at the Elkhead Reservoir after offering her a ride home, but he soon pulled over at an isolated location and proceeded to sexually assault and choked the victim before letting her go. Shortly after Doulan's arrest, his brother also found himself in legal trouble when he was
charged with intimidating a witness. This person had testified against Monty during the grand jury proceeding, and his brother had allegedly threatened to quote unquote put a bullet in her head. However, in November of that year, District Court Judge Shelley Hill dismissed the first degree kidnapping charge against Dulan because she
did not believe the crime met that particular criteria. Judge Hill cited the definition of first degree kidnapping in the Colorado Criminal Code and ruled that Duelin did not have the intent to quote unquote force the victim or any other concession to give up anything of value in order
to secure the release of a person. This did not necessarily mean that the alleged sexual assault never happened, but Doolan was never actually charged with set actual assault since the statute of limitations for that particular offense had already expired. Judge Hill just felt there was insufficient evidence to show that Doulin had committed kidnapping, the actual offense he was
charged with. As a result, Doolin wound up being released, but he continues to maintain his innocence in Maurice's disappearance. Paul and Mona Blee continued to remain advocates for their missing daughter, and every year around Thanksgiving they would publish a notice in Route County's newspaper, The Steamboat Pilot in Today,
asking someone to come forward with information. The Blees have pretty much reached the point where they are no longer interested in prosecuting whoever was responsible for Maurice's disappearance, as they just want to find their daughter's remains and give her a proper burial. But after forty five years, the exact circumstances of what actually happened to Marie Blee continued to remain unknown. So I guess you could say the path went Chile Robin.
Are both of her parents still alive?
I haven't read any obituaries for them, so I think that they are. And I think it was twenty nineteen where I went to crime con in New Orleans and two people came up to my booth who actually said that they knew the Bleaze had said, they were very nice people who have done amazing work trying to spread
word to find their daughter. And they were still alive in twenty nineteen, and I haven't read anything about them having passed away since then, but they would probably now be in their eighties approaching their nineties.
Bless our hearts. That's exactly what I was thinking. Because she was fifteen, I was assuming her parents would at least be, you know, upper thirties or something to that nature.
Oh man, it's just so sad.
You have these ideas where you say, you know, yes, charges have been dropped against some of these people, but not because necessarily the crime didn't take place, but because there wasn't enough evidence. And like you said, we have these three people who are you people of interest, but once deceased, you have Doolan, who has you know, come and gone all over the place.
Right, he was the one that hid when he got asked questions.
Yes, where he moved out of his house even though he had moved in there only one month before he was questioned.
Yeah, it's just the potential of any of the suspects ever getting hold accountable is low.
But like the Bleas said, it's not even about that anymore.
Like if you could even probably blanket promise that there's no prosecution, someone just please tell me where she is. Like they said, let us have enough of peace and give her the dignity to bury her, to have her remains, to know what happened to her. I remember I was just talking to another homicides Drivor recently who said, I had to know the details. I had to know what happened, because as gruesome as it was, and as horrific as it was to see the finality and the pictures and
things like that, I had imagined so much worse. And she said, it's hard for people to look at, you know, crime scene photos of a loved one killed and think you thought something worse happened. And she said her imagination took over so much that by being able to see the facts, it allowed her to kind of close the wandering in her head, and that was peace in itself. So that's what I wish for the bleas you have these elderly individuals who are still advocating for their daughter,
they just want to know what happened to her. And above that, I want to have my hands on my baby and her casket and know where she is, know that she's safe, and just put that chapter of our lives to rest because we were able to give her the honor and the dignity and the.
Respect to bury her.
But it's pitiful to think in their last years, right, their whole lives have been dedicated to trying to figure out what happened to their baby instead of living life with her.
I remember Julie Murray saying something like it was much more important for her to be able to find out where her sister is and to bring more home than it was to get justice for whatever happened to her. And I think that's how Marie's parents felt, like, just please tell us where our baby is so that we can bury her. We can do whatever they choose to do.
They can honor her, they have somewhere to go. But I think you said, just not having that body and not having that ability to have that resolution, no matter how horrible the facts of the crime may be. If it was indeed a murder, then they know, and like you said, they're not envisioning all of these horrible scenarios. They know what happened, and then the healing can truly begin.
Yeah, this is far from the only missing person's case where it drags on for so long that the victim's family eventually says, I don't care about criminal prosecution, I don't care about justice. I just want my loved ones
remains back. And you would think that in these scenarios where even if you're afraid of coming forward because you don't want the social stigma or your fear for your life, then the least you could do is maybe make an anonymous phone call from a payphone or leave an anonymous note just giving the location of where Marie is and then just hope that once they find the remains they won't try to find out who killed her and stuff
like that. So, I mean, I can understand the perpetrators not doing that, but if there is anyone else out there who actually knows the truth they will not face criminal prosecution, then all they would really need to do was like make an anonymous call or leave some sort of anonymous tip.
I think, don't you guys think though, that that leans more towards this could have been a murder, because I think if this was an accident and a lot of people knew about it, and they knew that there would be no charges if they came forward and they shared what happened and they led law enforcement to where her body was, or like Robin just said, if they did
an anonymous tip, like why wouldn't you do that? But if you did indeed murder her and you were afraid, what would happen if the police or her family found the body, then that might be something that would hold you back from calling authorities.
Yep, that makes sense to me, and that's probably why Steven Skuffka wouldn't say anything when he was in prison facing all those charges, because he probably felt, well, if I reveal the truth, I'm going to go to prison for murder for the rest of my life. So I'm not getting a reduced sentence. So this would be a good time to bring an end to Part one. Join us next week as we present part two of our series about the disappearance of Marie Blee.
Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit about the Trail Went Cold Patreon?
Yes, the Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three years now, and we offer these standard bonus features like early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up with us on Patreon if you join our five dollars tier Tier two, we also offer monthly bonus episodes in which I talk about cases which are not featured on The Trail Went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to Patreon, and if you join our highest tier tier three, the
ten dollars tier. One of the features we offer is a audio commentary track over classic episodes of Unsolved Mysteries, where you can download an audio file and then boot up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids about the cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very first episode that I did a commentary track over was
the episode featuring this case. So if you want to download a commentary track in which I make more smart ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be sure to join Tier three.
So I want to let you know a little bit about the Jewels and Nashty patreons. So there's early ad free episodes of The Path Went Chili. We've got our Pathwent Chili mini's which are always over an hour, so they're not very mini, but they're just too short to turn into a series, and we're really enjoying doing those, so we hope you'll check out those patreons.
We'll link them in the show notes.
So I want to thank you all for listening, and any chance you have to share us on social media with a friend or to rate and review is greatly appreciate it. You can email us at the Pathwentchili at gmail dot com. You can reach us on Twitter at the Pathwin. So until next time, be sure to bundle up because cold trails and Chili pass call for warm clothing.
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Collors Comedy