Dark Side Of The Mesa

(CBS News)  This broadcast originally aired on Oct. 9, 2004.

In the high desert, on the Rockies western slope, the Mesas tower over the town of Grand Junction, Colo., protected from the outside world.

But on June 4, 2002, Grand Junction saw the unearthing of a shocking secret at the local landfill.

The decomposed body of 34-year-old Jennifer Blagg was found wrapped in a red and black plastic tent.

Jennifer and her six-year-old daughter, Abby, had been missing for seven months.

Correspondent Susan Spencer reports.

What happened inside the walls of the Blagg family house still haunts the town of Grand Junction. The Blaggs – Michael, Jennifer and Abby – seemed so happy together.

"Two years ago, I had everything," says Michael Blagg, Jennifer's husband. "I had a great job, wonderful family, incredible wife and daughter. Everything was going perfect for me."

"They're kind of a poster-child sort of a family," recalls Rev. Art Blankenship, who got to know the Blaggs in 2000 through their small, evangelical church. "They just looked like an ideal couple. They were friendly, open, and people seemed to like them a lot."

Both Michael and Jennifer were enthusiastic born-again Christians, and organized personal prayer groups for the congregation. The couple had met 10 years before in California, when he was in the Navy and she was in college. He was a decorated Gulf War veteran, a helicopter pilot.

Jennifer stayed close to her mother, Marilyn, even after she married Michael in 1993. "I liked Michael from the beginning," recalls Marilyn Conway. "He was a very personable young man. They seemed happy. I thought they were happy."

Michael's mother, Betsy Blagg, also agreed that the two were a fairy-tale couple: "In every letter, she'd [Jennifer] tell me how much she loved Michael. Everything was marvelous. They couldn't be more happy, and he was absolutely in love with her."

Their daughter, Abby, was born three years after the Blaggs married and Michael and Jennifer seemed to dote on her.

When Michael went out the door at 6 a.m. on Nov. 13, 2001, the day his family vanished, he says his wife and daughter were still asleep.

He headed off to his job as an operations manager at the Ametek Dixson Company, a local manufacturing plant. He says he called around 7 a.m., called again mid-morning, and then again at noon. No one answered.

"Now I'm getting a little worried. I haven't heard from her. She hasn't called me back on any of these calls," says Michael, who called her again that afternoon.

Michael says he left for home around 4 p.m. He later told the police that he sensed something was wrong the second he walked in and saw the back door open. But he says nothing prepared him for the horror of what he saw in the bedroom.

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[tariakpodiete]

- as the story started, if wondered if he could be innocent, especially since the spouse is the one who is looked at first, but here's what sealed his guilt for me:
1. they found the wife's body in the landfill, not just by accident and looking here and there willy nilly, but by consulting dumping logs showing where the giant garbage bins from his workplace were emptied
2. the small amounts of his wife's blood in the family van, especially since they were in the sorts of places where a wrapped body being put into a vehicle might come in contact with, and wrapped would explain how there was no blood trail from the bedroom even though a massive amount of blood was left in the bed
3. when the reporter asked him if he was going to testify in his own defense, and he said "we'll have to see" - not exactly that he said that (as it is his constitutional right not to take the stand), BUT that a second or two after he said it, he gave a tiny smirk (a lot like the smirk that preacher's wife gave right after she heard she was acquitted of killing him)
- nice for his sister and mom to stick by him, but sorry, your beloved brother and son is a cold-blooded murdering scumbag, and not the sweet seeming little kid you once knew.
- i didn't give a lot of weight to the video of his interrogation, although it did bother me a bit that he put his hands behind his head and leaned back as if he hadn't a care in the world. frankly, many people don't act as some think they should when they're under duress (including people later found to be innocent),
- let's not forget that this guy was a helicopter pilot in the military; in other words, he's been trained to be cool under terrible stress, and so could come off cold and unfeeling when all he's really done is revert to his training, something that often kicks in automatically