It was Sunday, February 7, 1999, and 39-year-old divorcee Paul Skib was coming to the end of a rare weekend, special in that he was able to spend it in the company of his nine-year-old daughter, Sarah. Since he had his own business, he also worked on Sundays and took the girl with him. They were also accompanied by Skiba’s employee Lorenzo DeShawn Chivers. People last saw the trio in the evening in the village of Morrison. Then neither they nor their bodies appeared again.
Nine-year-old Sarah Skiba, her father Paul Skiba and her father’s employee Lorenzo Chivers, who disappeared on February 7, 1999 | Photo: Wikimedia Commons, author unknown, Colorado State Police, fair use
On Friday, February 5, 1999, Paul Skiba called from Westminster in the US Colorado to his mother Sharon and asked if she could come see him. They hung on to each other a lot – Sharon had been divorced since 1990, and Paul was also going through a marital crisis in the 90s. When he finally divorced in 1993, he and his mother first moved into an apartment and then into a house he had bought.
“Sharon helped him with his daughter when he got her from his ex-wife for the weekend or for the summer, and in return he took care of everything she needed,” magazine’s Jessica Centers described their family arrangement in 2008 Westword.
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Exactly in February 1999, however, Sharon was not at home because she had to Minnesota to settle the estate of his mother, who had died shortly before. Paul drove her to the airport and told her that he was breaking up with his current partner, Teresa Donovan. She gave birth to a son, Paul Roger, but Skiba doubted that the child was his and wanted to request paternity tests. However, if it was his, he intended to have the son entrusted to his care in court.
During the phone call on Friday, he told his mother that he had asked Teresa to move out of his place by Sunday evening. He then hung up and promised to get back to you on how the whole thing went. But he never called again.
Source: Youtube
Happiness at work, less in love
At the time, Paul Skiba was the owner of his own business, Tuff Movers, which he had bought from the previous owner, for whom he had previously worked. “He knew where he wanted to go, he had a vision. He’s come a long way in the 15 years I’ve known him,” his friend and aa employee Jerry Bybee said of him.
But Skiba was not happy in his family life. While still working as an employee at a moving company, he met Michelle Russell, after a few years they got married and in 1989 their daughter Sarah was born.
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However, their marriage failed and Michelle moved out from Paul. Three years lasting divorce he was full of mutual accusations and Skiba had to fight hard to be allowed to continue seeing his daughter. He ended up getting shared Wednesdays with her, every other weekend during the school year, and summer vacations.
According to his friends, the daughter was his whole world and they were happy together. On weekends, they went skiing together, went camping or played treasure hunters. Paul tried to make everything look like an adventure. “He was always thinking about her,” Bybee claimed.
In a new relationship
However, the daughter did not fulfill all of the father’s emotional life. Shortly after the divorce, he met Teresa Donovan, a disabled woman 10 years his junior arthritiswhich began to deteriorate over the years.
Unfortunately, this led to tension in the house. Due to her health, Teresa gradually stopped dating and began to get on Paul’s mother’s nerves.
“It bothered me that he was with her because I wanted to see him with a girl who would be a better match for him. I didn’t even like it when it revolved around Sarah,” Sharon Skib told Westword journalist.
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In 1997, Paul and Teresa broke up, but they did spend one more night together in early 1998. A few weeks later, she told him she was pregnant.
The man didn’t want her back in the house, but just before the due date he allowed her to return there. According to Centers, he wanted to have Teresa at home with the baby after the baby was born because he was worried she wouldn’t be able to take care of them.
In this situation, Sharon’s mother died, so the woman began to travel between Colorado and Minnesota, making funeral arrangements and handling the estate.
They all disappeared
Although he had promised, Skiba did not call his mother on the evening of Sunday, February 7, 1999. And when she called his house in the morning, Teresa picked up the phone and told her that Paul hadn’t come home.
Worried, Sharon contacted Sarah’s mother and learned from her that the little girl hadn’t turned up either – Paul hadn’t brought her, even though he had promised.
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Already really scared, she called him at work and heard the same answer there. What’s more, Paul’s employee Lorenzo Chivers, who lived with Teresa’s sister Bobbi Jo, was also absent from work and, according to his colleagues, spent Sundays with Paul because they had a job together.
Paul hadn’t originally planned – he didn’t like to work while he was taking care of his daughter – but Jerry Bybee asked him to stop in for him because he had a family memorial service planned for that day. And Paul nodded at that.
After receiving all this ominous-sounding information, Sharon contacted the police; but there they belittled her restlessness and convinced her that the father had probably only taken his daughter somewhere on a trip and had forgotten the time. But Sharon didn’t think so.
Empty parking lot
Bybee got drunk on Sunday and staggered into work late on Monday. He didn’t arrive at the Tuff Movers yard, where Paul’s company trucks were parked, until around ten in the morning.
He was surprised that there was no one in the yard – Paul and Lorenzo were supposed to be waiting for him there. And something else was strange: despite his hangover, Jerry, glancing through the gate, immediately noticed that the big moving truck that Paul always backed into a certain spot was standing completely different, and crooked. “It looked like someone drove it into the yard at eighty and slammed on the brakes,” Bybee later described it.
Where police found Skib’s parked truckSource: Wikimedia Commons, author unknown, Colorado State Police, free work
He tried to open the door, but found that his service key didn’t fit – someone had changed the lock. He thought that Paul must have fired someone and he didn’t want that person to cause him any harm. And he continued to wait for his boss. But he didn’t show up, not on Monday, not even a day later. And on Wednesday, an investigating police officer appeared in his place.
When Paul, Sarah and Lorenzo didn’t hear from anyone even on Monday, the police from Westminster began to look at least a little into their disappearance.
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They discovered that the father had taken his daughter with him to work, and they all drove with Lorenzo in the truck to Thornton, where they had an appointment for a move at 10:30, and returned with the truck to the Tuff Movers yard at a quarter to seven in the evening. At 6:22 p.m., Sarah called her mother again, but then she didn’t answer.
At first, the police logically assumed that Paul had decided to solve his own problem family problems by not returning the daughter to her mother and disappearing somewhere with her. But where did Lorenzo go in that case?
Lorenzo Chivers worked for Skiba for several months. They met through Teresa because Lorenzo lived with her sister. He had two children and resembled his boss in that he lived apart from their mother.
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Since Chivers was also missing, the police decided to check the yard. But she still assumed it was nothing serious.
Jerry Bybee welcomed the posted patrolman. The gate was still locked, so the men had to climb over the fence. In the yard, the ranger asked Bybee what was different since he left the property on Saturday. Jerry showed him a large pool of oil covered by a piece of plywood and also mentioned a strangely parked car. However, in his opinion, the policeman did not pay due attention to any of this. “There was nothing out of the ordinary for him. I was disgusted with him,” Bybee later recounted.
Scary tracks on the car
Frustrated that the police were underestimating the case, Sharon contacted another acquaintance of Paul’s, auto mechanic Rich Lesmeister, who had recently repaired the engine of one of Paul’s trucks. Both Lesmeister and his wife Carol offered to help with the search and agreed with Sharon that they would all meet at the Tuff Movers yard.
When they got there, Rich, like Jerry before, noticed a strangely parked truck. He told Sharon to wait outside and climbed the fence with Carol. A terrible discovery awaited them.
A truck belonging to Paul Skiba’s company that police found empty but shot through and with traces of blood Source: Wikimedia Commons, author unknown, Colorado State Police, fair use
“The truck that Rich was working on before was riddled with bullet holes. Underneath was a fresh oil slick. Carol noticed a large smear of blood on his door, as if someone had wiped it with a bloody sleeve. And by the windshield there was something that looked like a small piece of human scalp,” Centers said of the discovery.
The couple went back over the fence, told Sharon it didn’t look good and called Westminster Police again. She arrived, but instead of investigating the new leads, the police turned on Sharon and her husband and threatened to arrest them all if they did not leave immediately. “They said there was no crime and we should all go home. They were like the Keyston Policemen (an incompetent unit from an old silent slapstick – ed. note),” Rich later complained.
Probably murder
But Paul’s mother didn’t give in and eventually got the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to take over the case. He finally began to look more closely at the bloodstains in the car.
DNA analysis showed that Sarah and Paul were bleeding in the car. It was more than likely that they were both dead by now.
So investigators began looking for Chivers. His car was found parked in a Westminster apartment complex just blocks from the Tuff Movers yard on February 17th. 10 days later, Paul’s personal car was also discovered. And in a parking lot in Denver.
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Police also found a witness who heard a woman’s or girl’s voice screaming on the Tuff Movers property the night the trio disappeared, February 7-8. Other witnesses testified that the incriminating truck left the Tuff Movers yard seven to eight times and returned around midnight.
“It led the police to believe that all three were murdered and their bodies were taken in a truck to an unknown location,” he said Denver Post. That place could have been a lake, because reeds were found stuck to the car’s radiator. But even a search of all the lakes in the vicinity did not yield any results.
The trio was last seen on the evening of their disappearance in the small foothills community of Morrison, ColoradoSource: Wikimedia Commons, Joe Tempel, National Scenic Byways Program, free work
The perpetrator has not been caught until today. Teresa Donovan later confided in the press that the police probably suspected her, but she was never officially charged. She believed that Paul and his daughter and employees were killed by drug dealers who parked on the Tuff Movers lot and whose cars he had towed shortly before his death.
After eight years, the police pronounced Sarah and Paul dead. Sharon then sold Paul’s house, the money was awarded by the probate court to Teresa and her son. The case remains unsolved to this day.
2024-02-08 20:02:48
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