Scandal Aspen, Part I
Every town has scandals and the “scandal sheets” to cover them. Small towns in particular tend to thrive on scandal, because most of their citizens know most of the players, and often many different versions of the story make the news. When you combine the wealth, character and celebrity of many of small-town Aspen’s residents and visitors, local scandals tend to take on even higher profiles.
It has been thus since Aspen’s earliest days, when mining magnates and robber barons were busy swindling each other, the general public and their miners. Scandal never really languishes, it just gets more attention depending on the notoriety of the subjects and the reach of the story. In Aspen today, almost anything, from politics to not paying your bills, can instantly erupt into brutal gossiping and rumor. But it usually takes something nastier, weirder and more headline-worthy to become a truly widespread sensation.
The Shooting Of Spider Sabich
On March 21, 1976, Spider Sabich was killed by a gunshot wound, and it seemed to much of the world that starlet and erstwhile singer Claudine Longet had fired the shot intentionally. The event became an almost instant case celebre all over the world.
On the television show “Saturday Night Live,” then at the peak of its popularity, the incident was immediately satirized by clips of ski racers coming down a course and falling disastrously, one after the other, as the announcer shouted each time, “Oh! Claudine Longet has accidentally shot and killed Spider Sabich again!”
No less a scandalmonger than Dominick Dunne did a television segment on it as recently as 2006, the same year the Denver Post’s highly respectable Charlie Meyers wrote about Sabich for Skiing Heritage magazine.
The Cliff's Notes version? A multiyear romance between one of American ski racing’s most glamorous and successful stars and Longet, the former wife of Andy Williams, was coming undone. It was widely known that Sabich had asked Longet to move out before he ended up shot by a .22 caliber Luger replica that she said he had been showing her how to use when it went off.
Sabich was in his bathroom standing at the sink, apparently preparing to shave when all of this supposedly occurred; he was shot in the back from up to 10 feet away. After a badly botched investigation and lots of money from Andy Williams for lawyers, Longet got off with 30 days for criminally negligent homicide. She then ran off to Mexico with her married local attorney; the couple still have a home in Aspen today.
Among those who knew Vladimir “Spider” Sabich well, there is a story that differs substantially from the official version. All of the parties involved were said to be regular recreational users of cocaine and alcohol. “And Claudine was hitting it pretty hard, going from white wine and a few toots to whiskey and grams,” recalls a close friend of Sabich’s brother, Steve.
The bullet that killed Spider Sabich was from a gun that had been given to Steve Sabich by their father. This source insists that Steve Sabich, who died several years ago of cancer, always believed that it was stolen from his house by Longet two weeks before Spider Sabich was killed, establishing the strong possibility of premeditated murder.
But because Steve Sabich was a convicted felon (he got caught flying in a large load of pot in 1971), it was illegal for him to possess a weapon at all. If he had copped to the gun, he could have gone back to prison. Instead, it was rumored that Andy Williams spread a million dollars liberally around the legal system and also gave Steve Sabich a sizable payoff to say that Spider Sabich had taken the gun from him prior to the shooting.
The murder case against Longet collapsed, and she was ultimately permitted to serve her manslaughter sentence at a time of her own choosing, to repaint her cell in yellow, green and blue and to have a cassette player. Locals expressed their dismay by largely shunning Longet after she was released, and one even went so far as to fill her car with charcoal and fertilizer and to splatter it with brown paint.
The Escape Of Ted Bundy
When “Terrible” Ted Bundy was roaming the country with apparent impunity, they were terrifying times for long, dark-haired young women in the West. Especially in this valley, where one of his victims, Caryn Campbell, was discovered after she was kidnapped from a Snowmass lodge, murdered and dumped alongside Owl Creek Road. Unfortunately, even once he was arrested and jailed, Bundy was no less a threat.
After being extradited from Salt Lake City to Pitkin County to stand trial for Campbell’s murder, Bundy escaped from the Pitkin County Courthouse. Left in a courtroom unaccompanied, he jumped out a second-floor window and fled up Aspen Mountain before anyone knew he was gone.
It was early June, and Bundy said later he was headed for Crested Butte. But he became disoriented, stole a car, drove back into town, got noticed, and was apprehended by Aspen police six days after his getaway. Meanwhile, one of the manhunt roadblocks busted an unwary driver with 500 pounds of pot, Bundy t-shirts appeared (“Ted Bundy Is A One-Night Stand”), a Bundy cocktail surfaced, and when you looked inside a Bundy Burger, there was nothing there.
When The Aspen Times asked random people in town, “What do you think of Bundy’s escape?” a Jim McNulty from Denver observed, “It seems like the kind of thing that always brings publicity to Aspen.” Dave Judy of Aspen replied, “I’m just wondering what’s going to happen to the jobs of the sheriff’s officers who guarded him.” The short answer there was that four members of the department resigned or were fired by Sheriff Dick Kienast.
The good news was Bundy hadn’t killed anyone else during his escape. The bad news was, he wasn’t through. When he was returned to the Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs, Bundy somehow acquired or smuggled in $500 in cash and a hacksaw blade. On the night of December 30 that year, he escaped again by sawing off a metal plate and squeezing through a crawl space in the ceiling. This time he wasn’t recaptured so quickly, and by the time he was he had savagely murdered more women in Florida.
Eventually, Terrible Ted, who later confessed to 30 murders, was caught and convicted in Florida and executed in January of 1989. He never became one of Aspen’s many repeat visitors, because authorities were disinclined to return him here for trial.
Dr. Feelgood Murders Michael Hernstadt
Michael Hernstadt, who was 42 when he died, moved to Aspen in 1965 with a lot of money and an affinity for politics and partying. Keith Porter, who was 37 when he shot Hernstadt, was a former sniper in Vietnam who ran a local sex and head shop called Dr. Feelgood’s. Both were known cocaine and alcohol abusers, as well as former friends who had been in trouble over the years with local police for various acts of assault and violence.
In December of 1983, they had come to blows in Porter’s apartment, and Hernstadt had gotten the best of it. A small, all-night party the following April 23 at the home of well-known host Flavy Davis was the scene of a proposed truce between the two men that had been brokered by local pianist and singer Bobby Harrison. By Tuesday morning, the truce had disintegrated in the wake of hours of booze and bumps. Porter left the house, returning soon in a rented Ford Bronco, carrying an AR-15 assault rifle.
Harrison and Hernstadt were driving away from the Davis home on Silver King Drive when Porter shot Hernstadt in the chest through the window of Harrison’s red Honda. Hernstadt reportedly asked Harrison to drive him to the hospital, but Harrison stopped the car and fled. Porter, who advanced on the car from his position 200 yards away on Red Butte, emptied two clips into both the car and Hernstadt, many of the shots coming at point-blank range. Mick Ireland, reporting for The Aspen Times, graphically described Hernstadt as being “literally blown to pieces.”
In subsequent statements, Porter claimed Hernstadt had tried to hire him to kill Hernstadt’s brother, Bill, a state senator in Nevada, and also local District Court Judge J.E. DeVilbiss, who had presided over Hernstadt’s recent divorce. Hernstadt’s temper and dislike of his brother and the judge were well enough known that many did not disbelieve Porter.
Bill Hernstadt, a Republican, blamed Aspen’s permissive drug culture and liberal Colorado politicians, including senator Gary Hart and the governor, for a climate that led to the shooting. He also criticized Aspen police for not responding to earlier threats of violence from Porter.
Some locals worried the killing was one more piece of bad press the community was getting because of rampant local cocaine use. The Times question that week was, “How do you think the publicity stemming from the shooting death of Michael Hernstadt will affect Aspen’s reputation?” Answered Aspenite Melinda Fengel, “It will affect it adversely. But it shouldn’t, really, because any place where there’s drugs and alcohol, there’s violence and death.”
After his crime was ruled one of passion, Porter was sentenced to 11 years for second- degree murder. In 1999, after being released and returning to Aspen, he was arrested again, this time for felony menacing after threatening to kill a man with a knife at the Rubey Park bus station.
Steve Grabow, Alleged Drug Kingpin, Blown Up By Pipe Bomb
If some of Aspen’s citizens feared Dr. Feelgood’s cocaine-fueled wasting of Michael Hernstadt might be bad for business, the pipe-bomb slaying of alleged local drug kingpin Steve Grabow a year later did nothing to reassure them.
With a tan to rival George Hamilton’s, Grabow had cut a flashy figure around town for years. Whether skiing in a different, expensive new one-piece suit every day, playing tennis at the Aspen Club near his stylish home where fresh new house plants were brought in weekly, or cruising the valley in his shiny black Porsche or customized Jeep, Grabow played the game like some yuppiefied mobster auditioning for “Miami Vice.”
In the end, not everyone believed he was just another south Florida trust-funder. In January of 1984, federal agents seized Grabow’s home, cars and $1.4 million in cash, alleging he had imported up to $35 million in coke every year to the Roaring Fork Valley. After nearly a year, eight people, including Grabow, were indicted by a federal grand jury. Everyone but Grabow pleaded out.
A month after the indictments, at about 9 p.m. on December 8, Grabow left the Aspen Club following a tennis match. He climbed in a borrowed Jeep and had just backed up abruptly when a pipe bomb placed under his seat was detonated by remote control. Authorities later said they thought the bomb may have shifted slightly when Grabow threw the Jeep in reverse. He wasn’t killed immediately, but died a particularly ugly death in Aspen Valley Hospital within the hour.
Speculation and rumors about who was behind the hit ranged from former partners, nervous Grabow was about to talk, to feds cranky that he wasn’t. Anyone who watched TV knew that federal investigations into these kinds of murders were rarely pursued with great zeal, and to no one’s particular surprise the case was never solved.
America’s drug wars and “The War on Drugs” had come home to roost in Aspen with a vengeance, and The Aspen Times previously editorialized concern that “Aspen will continue to be linked in the public mind with drugs and crime” seemed prescient. Though it certainly didn’t end the local fascination with the cocaine business, the Grabow affair, in the words of one later online writer, “sort of changed the mood.”
The Exculpatory Death Of Enron Founder Ken Lay
The surest sign of a big breaking story anywhere in today’s world is the gregarious flocking together of news-gathering satellite uplink trucks, hovering carrion-like near the wreckage of the latest major tragedy or scandal. Such was the case on July 6 of last year, when fleets of the dish-bearing rigs arrived in Aspen to cover the unexpected, but perhaps not so untimely, death of Enron founder, CEO and recently convicted defrauder, Kenneth “Kenny Boy” Lay.
The fact that the increasingly ridiculed Houston resident and his wife were frequent visitors to Aspen and owned several pieces of expensive property here was old news by the time he died. Not that it prevented those details from being mentioned every time some reporter was toting up the list of Lay’s sins and commissions. Nothing says criminally extravagant like looting your own company and relocating some of that wealth into notoriously expensive Aspen real estate.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Lay’s money also made its way into local nonprofits, where he and his wife were understandably well-regarded. But he was also liked by a number of other people in Aspen, who considered him smart, charming and just “a really good man,” in the words of one family friend. The Woody Creek Tavern hosted a sarcastic “Ken Lay Defense Fund” jar, but Lay and his wife still ate there and accepted the contents one day in good humor.
When Lay died of a massive heart attack in Old Snowmass, it was after being convicted on several counts of fraud and conspiracy relating to the much-publicized collapse of Enron and the subsequent loss of millions by its investors and employees. Because of the timing of his demise—before he had been sentenced or had a chance to appeal—his convictions were all voided.
This naturally engendered rampant speculation throughout the valley. One favorite theory was that the family had a hand in his death in order to keep from paying a $43.5 million judgment to the government. Others were persuaded that Lay had faked the whole thing and gone to join the $200 million he was rumored to have stashed offshore. An employee of a prominent local law firm told friends that the Lays had spent most of a day just before his death at the firm looking for ways to bury that 40-plus million.
A recent letter to one of the local newspapers read, in part, “Editor: I am not dead. Heart-attack shmart-attack. It takes more than that to kill an evil genius!” It went on from there and was signed, “Ken Lay, Remote Pacific Island.” The paper, of course, was The Aspen Daily Planet—the April Fool’s edition of the Aspen Daily News.
