Original subtitles

[music]

For a long time, I was very angry.

I'm not a cop. I'm not a coroner.

I'm not the D.A.,

but I had to actually step into their role and do their job.

Didn't even want to look into it.

It's almost as though she wasn't even a person.

I had no idea what I was getting into.

And I really went into this absolutely naive.

It's been a never-ending saw blade

of witnesses' documents and searching for answers.

And the truth behind my mother's murder.

I did what needed to be done.

If I wouldn't have done it, nobody would have done it.

[music]

This bus has a name.

Her name is Sissy Hankshaw from the book,

Even Cowgirls Get The Blues.

I love the peace signs that we get driving down the road.

There are certain things that make me happy,

keep me light.

Remind me to get out of my head.

Because you have to live life.

My name is Lisa Coppel and I live in Arvada, Colorado.

My mother was born Carmina Coppel.

In Oakland, California, August 14 of 1930

to a well-to-do family in Berkeley.

My mom was always searching for love.

And never quite found the right love.

My mom had several different marriages,

resulting in a total of seven of us children.

But eventually it was just my mom,

my sister, Paula, and myself.

In 1970, Mom moved an

8 foot wide by 24 foot long

mobile home

up to Stratton Park, Colorado.

Where we lived was very rural, very rustic.

We had no indoor plumbing. And virtually off grid.

In 1972, Mom noticed a pickup truck across the field

and spotted a man named Chuck,

Charles Leroy Anderson.

Mom and Chuck had a whirlwind romance.

And on February 12 of 1973,

they went and got married.

They were only married nine days, but Chuck was...

A bad influence on Mom.

They drank a lot during the week, weekends.

It didn't matter.

February 21st of 1973,

Mom and Chuck had been at the bar drinking,

and they came home pretty drunk.

I laid in my bunk and listened to them fight.

And I remember him yelling at her,

"Look at what[bleep] you made me do,"

and screaming at her, calling her dirty and nasty names.

Then I went to sleep because it got quiet.

A little while later,

I'm awakened by one of the neighbors,

shaking me gently saying, "Girls, you have to get up.

Something's happened and you need to get dressed

and we need to go."

I was guided down the hallway

where I had to step over a sheet.

That was my mom's legs.

I knew what death was, but

I didn't quite register

the darkness that I'd just experienced.

We were put into an emergency vehicle, an ambulance.

I was 10 years old,

so I couldn't really process what was going on.

I'm up in-between the driver and Chuck

asking "What happened to my mom? What happened to my mom?

Will somebody tell me what happened to my mom?"

And they wouldn't answer me.

I overheard them call in that there was a 42-year-old woman,

Caucasian, with a gunshot wound to her head.

Chuck had suffered a bullet wound to his hand.

Chuck's explanation of what happened was they were showing

the gun to each other. And my mother, she got startled

and flipped it in the air and caught it with her thumb.

And it just went off in her forehead.

When we got to the hospital, we're unloaded

and Chuck is taken into an emergency area.

And my sister Paula and I were set on a gurney

and told to be big girls about this.

They said, "Your mom has died."

And asked if we had any living relatives around

that we could contact.

Chuck and I didn't speak until the funeral.

And he insisted that he didn't kill my mom.

It was just an accident.

But I couldn't stop thinking about all of the nasty things

that I heard him say. It left a lot of doubt and questions.

I remember not being happy with certain answers

that I was given.

Even though the 10-year-old Lisa saw and knew what she knew,

the police didn't really talk to me.

[music]

My mom's death was ruled an accident.

And it was case closed.

My mom's belongings were put into probate,

along with the livestock from our land.

Apparently, Chuck was the one who bought my horses.

We became orphans and wards of the court.

My sister and I both were in the foster care system,

going through foster homes.

It was a very hard transition.

And that's how we started the next part of our lives.

[Renee] I remember people used to say,

"Why do you hang out with her?

She gets so crazy and angry."

And I said, "Well, she has a reason to be angry.

Imagine if your life was the way that hers was."

Foster homes and group homes, and being flipped around

to here to there.

And sleeping in your car, sleeping in the park.

I remember when you started looking--

Looking for your family.

[music]

[Lisa] In 1994, I was trying to find family.

I wanted to know where I came from.

And I made contact with the father

listed on my birth certificate.

And he wrote me a 15-page letter

telling me the details of

his relationship with my mom.

At the end of his 15-page letter,

he had written something to the effect of,

"Am I sure that my mom died the way I think she did?"

And I started questioning, do I really know?

I remembered being asleep in the bed with the covers over my head

and listening to them argue and them fight.

I don't recall all of the details of

what happened that night,

but I do remember Chuck screaming at Mom,

telling her, "See what you [bleep] made me do?"

"Look what you made me do!"

Calling her a bitch.

I wanted to find out what the police report had to say

about how my mom died.

I'm not a trained detective. I'm not a P.I. by trade,

but I'm kind of like a pit bull.

Once I get on it and I latch onto it,

I'll hang on until the bitter end--

True.

And I find all of what I'm after.

[music]

The end of his 15-page letter sparked something in me.

I needed to find out the truth to what happened to my mom.

I started by getting the police report.

It was a three-inch thick file with tape on it.

Red tape. Case-closed tape.

And they cut the tape right there in front of me.

And took the police report out. And they made me my copies.

I had to take several days to read it through the first time,

to start making notes.

So this is the first version that Chuck gave

regarding how my mom died.

How does this make sense to an officer,

somebody that knows firearms? It doesn't make sense.

In the police report there were three versions

of what Chuck told the police.

In the first one, she was drunk, so he had to take the gun away

from her and he had grabbed the barrel of the gun.

And the gun went off accidentally.

In the second version, she got startled and dropped the gun

and it just went off from the floor to her forehead.

And then the third explanation was that he had to go to the

bathroom and went outside. And when he came back in,

she was posed with the gun in her hand.

And Chuck alluded to my mother committing suicide.

I was at my wit's end and

felt I had no direction to go.

It disgusted me to know that Chuck was living his

best life in the bars with no accountability.

I tried to block it out, but Fort Collins was a small town.

There were a couple of times where our paths would cross,

and I chose to look the other way.

I chose a different avenue.

I thought maybe I should go ahead

and do some actual investigation.

And so I began contacting people.

I broke down a list of

witnesses, sheriffs, DAs.

And I set forth to contact almost everybody on those lists.

I started with the coroners.

One of the people I contacted was Dr. Agura.

And he was very engaging

and said he remembered my mom's case.

He said that he remembered

having to do a second autopsy on my mom.

There was disagreement on the angle of the gun

and whether or not it was her hand on the gun

at the time it was fired.

And he said the second autopsy

was a considerable difference in opinion from the first autopsy.

The angle of the first autopsy was not even plausible with

Charlie's versions of the story.

He was adamant that the first one had been botched.

But a panel of six professionals decided that the differences

in angles wasn't something that needed additional investigation.

They were going to rule mom's death as an accident.

Case closed and they thought everything was done

until I came around asking questions.

I wanted to know what was in that second autopsy.

So I called the coroner's office

and I asked for them to take a look at this file again.

They couldn't even find the file.

There was nothing.

It was referenced to a miscellaneous file.

But the file was empty.

And had been for years.

And it felt like they just covered it up.

There was no headway there.

After the coroner's office, I stopped at Old Chicago

and thought, you know, I'm gonna have a drink

and it's a bartender's job to listen to my woes.

[laughs]

I was just pissed. You know, I left the coroner's office,

and they don't show any records, you know?

"Oh, well, we don't have any. We don't even show we--

We did this case."

My name is Dianne Fairman. In 1995, I was bartending.

And Lisa came into the bar and sat down

kind of at the end of the bar, and just seemed

a little distraught and upset.

I began to tell her a brief rundown of my mom's homicide.

I needed to find the truth and the answers.

Sometimes people come into bars and they have tall tales.

There was just something about you.

I just listened and got more and more intrigued.

And then when you said it was all in Larimer County,

I'm like, "Oh."

[laughing]

I said, "Well, strangely enough, I just happen to know the person

you need to talk to because I'm interning

at the coroner's office in Larimer County."

[Lisa] Here I am looking to get some questions answered,

and here she's an intern at the coroner's office.

I couldn't believe it. Look at it how you will.

I have no doubt that Mom sent me to Old Chicago that day.

I went back and I just said,

"Her story sounds very plausible.

And I don't see, even as an intern,

that this case doesn't deserve a second look.

It just doesn't sound like it could have happened,

you know, the way they're saying it happened."

I realized who she needed to talk to.

It would be the chief deputy coroner of Larimer County.

When I went back to the office, I told him that I had met

this woman, and she seemed very compelling and very honest.

And had some interesting facts to tell him,

and that he needed to listen to her. And he did.

The Larimer County coroner called me back

and said that they found the documents,

which included the second autopsy.

I was hoping maybe the second autopsy

would have the truth and the answers.

Lo and behold, it changed everything.

[music]

[Lisa] Once they found the second autopsy,

I made contact with Fred Rosenberg.

Fred Rosenberg was an investigator

for the Larimer County Coroner's Office.

He compared both autopsies

and did a skull diagram showing the bullet path.

Fred said that the first autopsy

wasn't as accurate as Dr. Agura's.

It left a lot of doubt and questions.

Fred wanted to go over this with me and asked if I could come in.

So I went to Fred Rosenberg's office...

Where he gave me copies of all notes,

all reports, all of the photos.

He went through all of them with me.

It was very difficult initially,

to view the death pictures.

I was saddened that that's now

how I'm gonna remember her.

But I needed to step out of the 10-year-old Lisa

and step into the investigator Lisa.

It's all the same person,

but it's two completely different roles.

That's the only way I've gotten through this.

[music]

Fred took the paperwork and all of his sketches

and his analysis, and he took it to Dr. Allen,

who was the chief medical examiner at the time.

Dr. Allen looked at it and agreed wholeheartedly with Fred

that this could not have happened the way

the first autopsy says it happened.

That it definitely was an investigation

that needed new ballistics.

The chief coroner reviewed all of the documents that

Fred had showed me. However, they did not have the gun

because the sheriff's office purged evidence

from their evidence room in 1978.

Back then, the case wasn't a homicide,

so they sold the gun in a big gun auction.

So I set out to find a similar gun.

I wanted to know the length of the barrel,

the length of the handle with the cylinder,

and how big the gun was.

I had gone to local pawnshops and traced

an H&R single action ...22 revolver.

And this is what I got.

I had to disprove all of Chuck Anderson's stories.

In the beginning, Chuck was saying that

the gun went off accidentally.

Well, the angle of entry in that second autopsy was

above her ear and kind of to the back of her head,

which couldn't have happened unless the gun was behind her.

So I looked in the mirror and I held the paper gun up.

And I'm like, there's no way her hand could have been on the gun

with a six-inch barrel.

Her wrist would have been broken.

The angle disproved almost all of his versions.

The gun falling to the floor

or him taking the gun away from her by the barrel.

And it wasn't suicide.

Her hand could not have been on the gun

at the time it was fired. Period.

I went in and role played to prove that Mom's hand

could not have been on the gun at that angle. It couldn't be.

I showed Dr. Allen and he agreed with me.

Her hand could not have been on the gun

without her hand being contorted.

[Dianne] Fred and Dr. Allen and Lisa had, I think,

several meetings. And Dr. Allen ultimately had enough evidence

in front of him that he was able to say,

"This isn't an accident."

[Lisa] Within a couple of days, Patrick Allen had signed

the death certificate to read suspicious for homicide,

which is huge, huge, huge.

Nobody gets the death certificate changed.

It's terribly hard to get a death certificate changed.

Finally, there's acknowledgment that I'm not the only one

who believes that he killed her.

And it's in writing.

It's official.

What a feat.

What a feat.

Now, is the sheriff's office

gonna work on opening the investigation?

[music]

[Lisa] When the coroner signed the death certificate,

I'm thinking, all right. They'll reopen the investigation.

It'll go to trial, and then I'll have justice.

And there'll be justice for my mother.

Absolutely, I thought that they would see what the coroner saw.

But they didn't.

When I spoke to the sheriff's investigator,

he told me that he had interviewed Chuck Anderson

recently and that he believed Chuck's explanation

in the original police report.

And he told me the case was going to be open,

but inactive until there's new evidence.

He wasn't going to work the file anymore.

Another brick wall.

I couldn't come in and do it for them,

but I could get some more answers on my end.

I continued to talk to people.

[music]

I was up near Horsetooth.

And I stopped to buy a lighter.

And I go in.

And who's standing next to me, but Chuck,

counting pennies for a pack of cigarettes.

I hadn't seen him.

Didn't want to.

But there he was ruining my day.

He didn't see me.

So I got my lighter, and I got in my little minivan,

and I sat in the parking lot and I shook.

Oh, my God, did I shake.

Do I [bleep] run him over?

What do I do? Do I follow him?

What do I do?

I watched him go into a bar.

And so I walked in. I walked right up to him.

And then he announces to the bar that I'm his long lost daughter.

Haven't seen me for years. And this and this.

And I said, "There is an empty table back there. You and I,

back there now." And he came and sat down with me.

I listened to his story of where he put my mom's ashes.

And I knew it was a lie because Chuck bragged at the bars

that he took my mom's ashes and threw them into a garbage pit

next to his pigpen.

Eventually, I told Chuck

I wanted something of my mother's, anything.

And so we went back to his house.

It was chilling.

But I know he's not going to kill me.

I'm too friggin' mean.

We sat down and he opened his little file drawer,

and pulled out the deed to Mom's land.

He held on to it like a frickin' trophy.

Of course, it had been sold in probate. You know, no value

other than that was a piece of paper that was in her purse.

And I got it back.

And he didn't get to keep the trophy.

After seeing the deed to the land, I started questioning

if Chuck's motive was a monetary value.

I don't know. Maybe he wanted to try and get her livestock,

her land, and it was all about the money

because they weren't together for love.

That's for sure.

Several people had made mention that Chuck

wanted to take a life insurance policy out on her,

which started the big fight in the bar

because he wanted to be the beneficiary.

And Mom wanted Paula and I to be the beneficiary.

They were only married nine days,

so she really got uncomfortable

and really regretted marrying him.

And really wanted out, and wanted him to go away.

But he would not go.

I had Chuck Anderson's motive, but it felt like

it didn't matter. We can never hit the D.A.

if the police don't do their portion. That's it.

That's as far as we go.

I'm questioning will we ever see whatever justice is.

Chuck Anderson took everything from me

and took everything from my sister, Paula.

All the things that Paula endured in her years of

placement and my mom's death,

it even went as far as Paula committing suicide.

She was a very troubled person and saw no other way out.

I will always think Chuck's responsible for that.

In 2001, I was working for a gun scope company

and somebody made mention that they had seen an article

written about my mom's death.

And in it they too, alluded to suicide.

And that was one of my biggest peeves.

So I called the Longmont Daily Times,

and I asked for them to do a retraction.

And I wait seven months before I just had, had it.

And I went in to the Longmont Daily Times,

and I ran into DeeDee Correll.

There are certain details that I do remember very well.

Like you storming into the paper wanting to--

For me, it was...

I'm dialing direct.

It's not uncommon for a newspaper to get

people coming in who are unhappy with something.

And sometimes there is not much to their claims.

And in this case, Lisa was fired up,

but she also had all the documentation to support

her grievance that the word suicide had been used.

I don't mind you doing an article on my mom.

Just make it factual.

Because if I die, somebody is gonna look at this and say,

-"It was suicide." - I would feel the same way.

[DeeDee] I went through all the reports

and corrected some mistakes made in the coverage.

And actually in looking back at my notes,

I noticed there were a number of contradictions in

Charles Anderson's statements against what I knew

was in the police reports.

The story would not be complete without his version.

We had to make the effort to try to talk to him.

I remember you were gonna go up there.

I said, "Don't go out there alone."

[DeeDee] I didn't have anyone available at the paper

that day to go with me, so I got my dad to go with me.

When I arrived, we had some concerns about Mr. Anderson.

He had stickers on the outside of his door,

making sure that everyone knew that he had weapons inside,

but we had to make the effort.

Mr. Anderson was drinking a beer and watching a show on TV.

I think it was the Golden Girls.

He invited me in. He was friendly.

And he seemed willing to talk. And so I started off

by asking him just some questions about the case.

Immediately, he began to say things that contradicted

what was in the police reports.

And finally, at some point just said, "What happened?

How did she die? How did she get shot?"

And that was where he looked up. He looked at me and he said,

"Well, she didn't shoot herself."

[music]

I remember you calling me back,

"Lisa, you'll never believe it. He said that her hand

wasn't on the gun at the time it was fired

and that she didn't shoot herself."

It was very chilling to me. It was just very direct.

What he was saying to me was that he had shot her.

It was, to me, a stunning admission.

As soon as I left, I called up the sheriff's office and I said,

"Listen, here's what he said to me. And what's your comment?"

And the lieutenant said, "Well, I'm not gonna tell you my

comment based on what you just said. I'm reopening the case."

[Andy] It's not appropriate for me to, to judge

maybe what wasn't done in the past.

I wasn't around in 1973 as far as police work.

But in the 2000s when it came up again

with DeeDee Carroll from the Longmont Times call.

I was surprised and maybe a little skeptical at first,

you know.

Okay, this is the media calling to tell me something.

I was intrigued by what DeeDee had to say

because he was making a statement

he had never made before. And that changed everything.

Here's the evidence to explain the inconsistencies

with the story that Nina had pulled the trigger herself,

that seemed at the time that he was a bit brazen.

And he'd gotten away with it all these years.

He bragged in the bars all these years,

but nobody ever--

- Came forward. - Reported it.

Right, right.

We had information that might finally make a difference.

So we were able to put an investigation together.

And I assigned the case to Investigator Robert Coleman.

And he began to look at the case again with fresh eyes.

My hopes were very high that Bob Coleman was

gonna be able to do this.

So I met with him and I got his file back up to speed.

And I was really for the first time in years

feeling that I would get justice.

Robert Coleman was pretty renowned as a

very good interviewer.

He was the best interviewer we had.

So the key in this case was

for Investigator Coleman to bring

Chuck Anderson into the office, into an interview room

that we could control...

To prove that his story, his narrative wasn't right.

[Andy] Because this case had so many different versions,

it was important to start broad

and narrow down to those facts that were disputed.

And ultimately the fact of who had their finger on the trigger.

In the course of the interview, there is a point where

Undersheriff Hudson explained it couldn't have occurred

in the ways that you had described in the past.

And here's the evidence, and here's the evidence.

[Lisa] The detectives told me that Bob Coleman

had spent five hours interviewing Chuck Anderson.

They had put up a whiteboard outside the room,

and every time they got him to disprove

a version of one of his stories.

[Lisa] They would go outside and check it off the whiteboard.

[Andy] There is only one truth, clearly.

And that made the ultimate difference in this case.

There is only one truth, and he had to come to it.

Leading him to a point where he quietly says, "You're right."

He finally admitted that he shot Nina.

[music]

[Lisa] Chuck Anderson had spent years

lying about what he had done,

but I felt for the first time, vindicated.

It was actually the 30th anniversary of my mom's murder.

The DA's office said that they had enough

to go forward with an arrest warrant.

And I never thought I'd see that.

[music]

[Lisa] I remember the detectives called me to let me know that

right now, as we are speaking, they're placing the handcuffs

on Charles Anderson for the murder of my mother.

I could hear the sound of the cuffs clicking

and I cannot tell you how elated that made me.

He didn't get away with it.

And that was the most beautiful thing.

After all those years, it was actually gonna make it to court.

We went into court and Chuck actually had three lawyers

that went into court with him.

I knew that he would fight to get it dismissed.

And I just want him to spend some time in jail.

[Andy] It was almost like this was the last shot

at a successful conclusion.

But I knew we had evidence that he couldn't run away from.

Justice needed to be served regardless of

the time that had gone by.

[Lisa] I'm feeling that this is really gonna go somewhere.

And the next day the whole bottom drops out.

I got a call from the district attorney's office

saying that they were going to offer him a plea bargain.

They charged him with second-degree murder.

And they were going to allow him plea bargain to manslaughter.

The law's applicable in '73

were not the same as in 2003.

So they had to use the laws that were applicable in 1973,

which gave a lot more good time credit.

They were less restrictive in the sentencing.

And they were telling me that they were going to offer him

a one-year sentence.

[Andy] Because the case was now decades old for the

district attorney's office. They didn't have what you need

to get a good, strong long sentence.

Then they just end up settling for what you can get.

[Lisa] There was a possibility that it would be thrown out of

court and we would have never been able to take it back.

So I had to be thankful for what I got.

It sickened me.

But it's what we had.

I think in the end I wanted him to say he was guilty.

I wanted him for the first [bleep] time in his life

to own that he killed my mom in an open courtroom

to the judge and me in the courtroom.

August 14th was my mom's birthday.

The next day, we went in the courtroom for his sentencing,

where Chuck was supposed to say guilty,

in order to get the one-year sentence.

But he stood there and he said, "Nolo contendere."

I couldn't believe it.

Nolo contendere means no contest.

And everybody in the courtroom gasped.

The judge said, "I'm gonna take that plea

as a guilty plea based on the agreement that

you reached with the district attorney's office."

But it was just insulting.

With time served while we were waiting to go to court,

by the time they actually got him down to

Four Mile Correctional Facility,

he only spent five weeks imprisoned.

After Chuck got out of prison, the people in his hometown

didn't want him around.

He had difficulties finding people that accepted him.

And a few years ago, he died.

And it was a relief to know that Chuck's no longer on the streets

and he can no longer hurt anybody.

[Andy] Quite frankly, you presenting your evidence

to them the way you did was a key component.

You were the driver all that time.

You're a hell of an investigator.

Thank you.

You're a hell of an investigator.

You were my ally.

I am so glad to hear that. Thank you.

I dislike the word closure

because there's so many open wounds. There is answers.

There is time that passes that helps make things

a little easier.

But there's no closure.

There's still the gaping hole of missing

the person that you loved.

It never changes. It doesn't go away.

I am--I'm glad that I got done what I got done.

It's huge, really.

It's monumental.

I had the truth on my side.

I had my mom on my side.

I felt she was there.

And I got to say what she couldn't say.

It was the gift that I could give her.

And I believe that she watched it all.

And I know she's proud of me.

Which makes the 10-year-old Lisa

happy to know...

Mom's proud.

[music]

[music]

There is something excruciatingly terrifying

about 50 victims.

On the season finale of

"True Crime Story: Citizen Detective"...

We have this killer and at least eight victims

who have never been identified.

Families don't know what happened to their loved ones.

Nothing's going to stop me from further investigating.

Maybe I can find something the FBI couldn't.

"True Crime Story: Citizen Detective."

♪