Dark Side Of The Mesa

Did Michael Blagg Murder His Wife And Daughter?

(CBS) 
Now, even Michael's mother-in-law, Marilyn Conway, was beginning to have questions. She agreed to help investigators by leaving Michael a series of phone messages. Michael never responded, but investigator King was sure Michael was capable of murdering his wife and daughter.

Five months after Jennifer and Abby disappeared, volunteer searchers fanned out over the highlands and rivers around Grand Junction.

King says that over a period of 11 days, 200 volunteers searched 45 miles around the Blagg residence.

But Michael wasn't among the volunteers who looked for his family.

He says that officers told him not to go on the search. "They said as a potential suspect, they just thought that it would be bad for me to be out there. And so, I was barred from being able to search for my daughter and wife," Michael explains.

By the spring of 2002, no bodies had been found, but Michael was now a suspect.

And King had a working theory: "He shoots his wife. My belief is that he went upstairs and suffocated his daughter, got the tent out of the garage, put Jennifer in that tent, put them both in the van and went to Ametek Dixson, and put both of them in the trash receptacle there."

But if Michael had put Jennifer's body in his company's dumpster, then her remains should have ended up in the county landfill. Using global positioning technology and landfill logs, a grid system was set up, zeroing in on quadrants where investigators believed they would find trash from Michael's company.

Finally, after 16 days of searching, they found Jennifer's body. Authorities wasted no time, and arrested Michael two days later, at his mother's home in Georgia.