The Rocky Mountain Mortician Murder (2025) s01e01 Episode Script

Marker.
Everything.
Like, if you wrote it on paper,
nobody would believe it.
This story
it's a whodunnit.
It involves sex and power.
You've got wealth and intrigue,
and hiding one's identity.
There's two types of funeral directors.
Some want to help people,
and some are in this
to take advantage of people.
OK
Who could do something like that?
This woman came up to me and said
So now we had another dead body
on our hands.
The things that came to light,
I was just as shocked as everybody else.
What the is happening?
When you move to a small town,
there's things that
you learn really fast, like
anything that
you might want hidden
doesn't stay hidden.
1994
is when Charles and I
moved to Colorado
from Salt Lake City.
We wanted to be in the funeral business.
Charles and Tony were brothers.
They shared a mother.
And they were great funeral directors,
just willing to help anybody with anything.
I had a cat. He was dying.
It was terrible.
So they came and they got him for me.
And they took him and they
took care of him for me.
And they cremated him for me.
They were wonderful guys.
If you talk to any mortician,
death does not weigh heavy
on their hearts.
They're morticians, man.
They deal with death all the time,
and they have the means
to deal with death.
Morticians, that's kind of
a unusual profession.
Morticians make a lot of money,
especially on coffins and caskets.
It's very lucrative very lucrative.
A lot of people see the money
that you can make,
and that's their driving force.
I wasn't like that.
Becoming a funeral director is
almost more of a calling.
A lot of it isn't pleasant,
but with funeral homes
in small towns,
you're pretty much like family.
For us, it was more than just a job.
Byron Griffy was the same way.
Byron was a funeral director, too.
He was a really good funeral director.
He knew what he was doing.
He'd been doing it for a long time.
He was a very generous person.
He helped us with some equipment
when we first got started.
And after that,
we just became good friends.
On October 12th
Charles and I went to Fowler
to meet Byron for lunch.
It's usually about an hour's
drive from Florence to Fowler.
We were meeting Byron at his farm.
When we pulled up to the gate,
it was locked.
Charles tried calling him
and didn't get an answer.
That was a little strange.
We finally just
decided to leave.
My dad took care of everybody.
When I moved back home
with three kids,
he bought a house for us
which had some land,
and he said it would be fun for
the kids to grow up on a farm.
And then, at that point,
I met Gina, my wife.
My dad was my biggest support system.
When I told my dad I was gay,
he said, "Well,
you know, you're not alone.
There's a lot of people that are."
So, when Linette and I
decided to get married,
Byron was extremely supportive.
He took my kids all of my kids
just like they were his own grandkids.
Whether I was his favorite
or not, he was my favorite.
He was my favorite person
in the whole world.
The morning of Byron's death,
which was a day before his birthday,
he was planning
to meet Charles and Anthony
out at the farm and go to lunch.
We were sitting down for dinner,
and Byron never showed up.
He wasn't answering his phone.
My dad always answered the phone.
Always.
So, I called Charles.
I said, "Is my dad still with you?"
Charles told her,
"We never even saw him."
He never showed up.
We started to get worried about him.
So we drove out to the farm.
Gina said, "I'll check the house."
Then I was yelling for him, you know.
He didn't answer.
And I heard Gina say
"I found him."
I said, "Is he OK?"
She said, "No."
We received a call
of a male that was down.
The address I knew
as Byron Griffy's farm.
When I got on scene, EMS was there.
We went in.
We found Byron Griffy
laid out on the floor
in the middle of a bedroom
that was empty.
He was just off the wall,
probably about 2 1/2 feet.
Crime scene was very clean.
I mean, there was nothing there.
The family had moved out
of the farmhouse,
so the farmhouse was empty.
There was no forced entry
or sign of struggle
of any kind.
No defensive marks on him.
There was very little blood.
I think my words were
"It's weird."
There was no weapon readily available.
The blood splattering
on the wall was not consistent
with what I'm used to.
This was very strange.
Byron is laid out
almost like body in a casket.
And he's laying flat on the floor, face up.
He was staged.
Byron Griffy was a pillar
of the community.
Pretty much everybody knew
who Byron Griffy was.
So, at this point in the investigation,
everybody's a suspect.
And then, as we began to dig deeper,
we learned some of these people
were hiding some deep, dark secrets.
If one of them killed him
who was it?
When we found out
that Byron was dead
of course, my first reaction is,
"What the hell happened?"
I was shocked.
Charles actually got
pretty emotional about it.
The thing that was going
through my mind is
we were right there.
After Byron died, Charles and I
thought we could help,
so we offered to go in
to CBI the very next day.
Byron Griffy was a really good friend.
He would help people in need.
Kind of the same theory we had.
Charles and Anthony were very
intertwined with the community.
Everybody knew them.
Everybody has a story.
Charles became mayor.
He was president of
the Chamber of Commerce.
He even started a church
down the street.
Charles was the bishop.
I actually became a deacon.
We were there just about
every Sunday for church.
The sermons that Charles would
give were very inclusive,
very, you know, peace and love.
And my son, Eric, worked for them.
So they own several businesses in town.
The funeral home
they own Smashing Good Guitars,
which was the guitar shop
that I worked at.
They own the Main Street Grill.
And they're huge collectors.
They collect everything.
I started collecting guitars, guns
dogs, cats, birds, horses.
If I saw an animal that needed help,
I took it. I even had a squirrel.
There were 37 vehicles.
I had a big bowl of keys on the table.
I would just walk by and pick
something out and walk out
front and go, "yeah,
that's what I'm driving today."
My brother, like, introduced them,
got them super close into our family.
But at first, it was just like,
dinner with Charles and Anthony.
"You're going to concert
with Charles and Anthony."
And then we're spending
holidays together.
Charles liked to talk about his kids.
He would tell us
how successful they were,
and he was proud of them.
But then he had sadness
because they weren't in his life.
You know, something must have
happened that that made them
estranged to him.
Charles was the brains
and kind of the mouth,
the charismatic one.
He's doing the business deals.
But the person who like,
actually made the things happen
that was Tony.
When we were able to retrieve
Byron's phone,
we could see two calls.
One was about 12:43-ish.
The other one was a little after,
that were made from
Charles' phone to Byron's,
that were missed calls.
Before we left town,
we drove around Fowler
because I knew that
Byron had a little house
that he had moved into downtown.
But I couldn't remember where that was,
so just kind of
drove around looking for it.
And then finally just decided to leave.
The autopsy on Byron indicated
was shot from the back.
And it was just a single
back-to-front gunshot wound to the neck.
There was soot right on
the entrance wound, which means
it's basically a contact wound.
So you couldn't really shoot yourself
the way he was shot,
unless somebody was
holding a gun at his neck
on the backside.
I was in shock.
I thought, "Who could do
something like that?"
I didn't view that people
would want to hurt Byron at all.
Definitely, it was not a robbery.
There was a watch on Byron.
He had his wallet.
His phone was with him.
But obviously, there had to be
some kind of motive.
When we talked to his family members,
we began to realize what it was.
Byron was a huge collector.
He collected stamps, coins,
old money, antiques.
My dad had a secret room
in the back of the garage.
Only a few people knew that
the room was there, and he had,
I don't even know
how many safes in there.
Byron bought a lot
of silver and gold coins.
It was probably pretty close to
a million dollars.
Prior to Byron being murdered,
there was multiple calls,
and somebody trying to break in
to take his safes.
They tried to rob him,
but they didn't get nothing.
They made more of a mess
than anything.
I have no idea who did it.
But then there was a noose
that was hung in the barn.
It was scary.
After the noose was found in the barn,
I just felt like my family
wasn't safe out there
at the farm where there
wasn't really any neighbors.
So we all just decided to
just move back to Fowler.
Byron was very scared.
He was very adamant that
somebody was trying to
steal his money.
When we found out my dad was shot
even before anybody said,
"Do you know anybody
who would want to hurt him?"
the first person
I thought of was Cory Higgs.
When we lived out at the farm,
we called the cops many times on Cory.
I was scared of Cory every day.
It was hard to think
that it could have been Cory, because
Cory is my son.
Right after Byron's death,
Gina and Linette were
very quick to point fingers
that Cory Higgs was the one
that had murdered Byron.
Gina is my wife,
and Cory is her son.
I really have trouble saying it.
I love our other two kids to death.
Saying Cory is my stepson,
makes me want to barf.
There was a lot of things going on
in the Griffy household
before Byron's murder.
When they were at the farm,
they were all living there.
Linette and Gina and the kids
with Cory and Byron
and Gina's mom.
I believed Cory to be
very dangerous on a few
multiple levels.
Stories I heard from other people,
his own family, in fact.
Life with Cory was not easy from
ever.
He was extremely intelligent,
but also violent and manipulating.
Cory pulled a knife on his siblings.
When he was younger,
he grabbed me by the neck
and choked me out.
When he was 16, 17,
Cory went into foster care,
and the court said,
"Least contact with us, the better."
But for some reason,
the foster system here
decided that it was good for him
to spend time with my dad.
So, Cory always seemed like
he needed a father figure,
until Cory met Byron.
Cory told my dad he wanted
to be a funeral director.
My dad always wanted somebody
to take over his business.
So Cory was this
ray of hope for him.
They were really inseparable.
Byron would take him on funeral calls.
So, when they would do
funeral business,
Cory was dressed just like Byron.
Things started going south
between Cory and Byron
when Cory attacked me.
He was in trouble for something,
got up, went running for a gun,
which I stepped in front of him
and stopped him.
He turned violent, broke my shoulder.
After that, Byron was very hard on him.
I think Cory felt that
Byron looked at him different,
which he did.
When Cory aged out of foster care,
he moved right across
the street from our farm.
So Cory could have known that
Byron was at the farm that day.
I think Cory's motivation
for Byron's murder
would just be that that thought was just
another way to hurt us.
I had known Cory
from previous incidents
where I'd been to the farm.
And so I interviewed Cory.
At the time of the murder, Cory told me
that he was watching TV at home.
At that time, Cory was living
about a mile and a half
down the road.
He could have walked to the farm
and murdered Byron and walked back.
Cory was sad.
I think Cory truly loved Byron.
Carol Coates, she's a good cop,
but he's a master manipulator
and controls every situation.
He played her just like he does
everybody else.
I feel guilty being his mom
and feeling the way that I feel
but I know he did it.
Or had something to do with it.
I 100% believe that.
There were a lot
of people at Byron's funeral.
Pretty much the whole town.
It was beautiful.
We asked Charles to do the eulogy.
He got up there and told
how he met my dad,
and what a great guy
he was to help them out
when they were trying to get started.
Charles and Anthony did a good job.
Handling a service for
another funeral director is
the ultimate way of learning
you did your job right.
If another funeral director or their family
would trust you to do it, that's
a good sign in my opinion.
CBI told us sometimes
the killer shows up
at the funeral,
so keep your eyes and ears
open as to what might be going on.
After the funeral, we were
all eating and socializing,
and this woman came up to me and said,
"You know, Tommy did it."
She said, "Tommy came home
the other night",
"and he was covered in blood.
Tommy did it."
So Tommy Tomlin was
Harry Tomlin's brother.
They are complete polar opposites.
I would trust Harry with my life.
Tommy Tomlin is scary.
My brother, Tommy Tomlin,
did have a drug problem,
meth, heroin,
whatever drug was out there.
Tommy was violent.
He was capable of doing anything.
Tommy had been doing odd jobs
for Byron, so Tommy was
obviously on the suspect list.
We were able to call Tommy in.
Colorado Bureau of Investigation did
most of the interview.
Byron was like family to me.
Byron Griffy took care of a lot of funerals
for my family.
He was a good man.
When I heard the news,
there was a lot of stuff
going through my mind.
And then stories are
going around of who did it.
One was my baby brother,
Tommy Tomlin.
Tommy Tomlin never had
a steady job, so when my dad
needed help doing anything at the farm,
he just got Tommy.
Tommy was around when he needed
money, which was all the time.
When you do drugs,
you do things that you really
shouldn't be doing.
He went to a party and was
supposedly had blood all over him,
and told everybody,
"Did you know Byron Giffy
got murdered?"
The rumors of Tommy Tomlin
showing up to a party and being
covered in blood were false.
We had heard that the day after
Byron's murder, Tommy was
flashing around $100 bills
that he normally didn't have.
So we were questioning where
Tommy had gotten this money.
And so we did set Tommy up
for a polygraph.
Thank you very much.
This test is not complete.
Yeah, I'm serious.
And we're gonna get your story
At this point in the investigation,
we did pull DNA
from everybody involved.
But the crime scene was very clean.
Whomever killed Byron was very
meticulous on making sure that
there wasn't much left behind.
So the results came in
that there was no DNA matches
for anybody.
We didn't have a murder weapon.
We didn't have any real DNA
that could tell us
who was there with Byron.
We were back at square one.
So, without physical evidence,
you start looking at circumstantial.
We start looking at timelines.
The last person that saw
Byron Griffy alive
was Harry Tomlin.
They met at the bank
in downtown Fowler,
and that was about 12:10.
Byron handed me my check,
and he goes, "I'm gonna go to lunch."
He specifically told me
he was gonna meet up
with Anthony and his brother.
We believe that Byron probably
arrived back at the farm
approximately 12:15 to meet
with Charles and Anthony.
Byron's phone showed two missed calls
from Charles's cell phone number.
Since Byron had his cell phone
on him, Byron probably didn't
answer the call at 12:43,
because he was probably dead.
The body wasn't discovered
until approximately 8:00 PM
by Gina and Linette.
So, from the time that Byron was
last seen in Fowler
and the first call being missed at 12:43,
that's how long it would have
taken to murder him.
Tommy said that he was
at an abandoned house
with a friend during the time
Byron was murdered.
Cory Higgs, he was home alone,
but he was living down the road
from the farm.
Everybody's a suspect
until you can rule them out,
but trying to definitively rule
them out was very, very hard.
It was something that
we just continued to pursue.
I think many people in town
started to wonder,
what happened to all of Byron's gold?
Where did it all go?
Now, that's the million-dollar question.
So, after my dad's murder,
Gina and I were trying to find
my dad's money.
A year before my dad was
murdered, he was really worried
that whoever had broke in
before was gonna come back
and take all of his coins,
or somehow Cory knew
it was there, and so Cory was
going to take it.
And there was no way that
he could take that to
a safety deposit box
or something like that.
And so my dad called
Charles and Anthony.
Byron asked if we could
watch some coins for him.
I had a gun room,
is what everybody called it,
in the basement of my house.
My dad wanted to make sure
that his money was in
a secure place.
They talked about
a secret room in their house,
to where nobody would ever see it.
And so Charles and Anthony agreed.
They had called me
at like 10 o'clock at night.
Charles and Tony, they're like,
"Hey, come over and give us a hand."
It was just boxes on boxes of quarters.
$500 boxes of quarters from each state.
I mean, I'm talking a whole truck bed.
I was like, why is this all in coins?
Like, this is ridiculous.
Charles explained to me,
"Well, if you put all
"your money into quarters,
then it's technically
a coin collection, so it can't be taxed."
Byron did not keep a full
record of what he sent to
Charles and Anthony.
He called them several times
after they took the coins
and said, "Hey, can I come up?
I need to document what I gave you."
Charles and Anthony were always busy.
They always had
a funeral, or something.
It begins to paint the picture
that Charles and Anthony
might be hiding something.
Charles and Anthony drove
an hour to take Byron
for a birthday lunch.
The fact that they didn't even
walk up to the house,
it was a little strange.
Charles and Anthony said,
"This is where we're gonna meet."
It's odd to me that that's where they met,
because we didn't live
at the farm anymore.
Charles and Anthony
had been out to the farm
at least three times.
The only entrance ever accessible was
the back entrance.
And that's the only entrance
they used when they came to
get the coins.
That's the only entrance
they used to leave.
I told him no, because a polygraph
it doesn't prove or disprove anything.
And then he asked,
"Would you give a DNA sample?"
I said, absolutely. That's not subjective.
That's actual.
So we did give DNA samples.
And soon it became pretty clear
that maybe I was
considered a suspect.
CBI had reached out to me
a couple of times asking,
"What did I know
about Charles and Tony?"
I was shocked.
I couldn't imagine that
either one of those brothers
would do anything to Byron.
My family they were always like,
"You know, we had nothing to do
with the murder."
Yeah, I don't know.
Honestly, I'm kind of surprised
we didn't talk about it more.
We'd known these brothers for years.
We were really close
to Charles and Anthony,
and Anthony was so kind,
and he really inspired me
to be kinder and more patient,
not so jaded, because my job
was a little dark.
Laura was a probation officer.
I was talking with her
about how I can deal
with being a suspect.
We started talking more.
I gave her my phone number,
which I'd never done before,
so we could text,
and we just began texting.
And at some point,
I was starting to have feelings for her,
but that's how it started.
I was away at college,
and I could tell that something
was up with my mom.
She wasn't acting like herself anymore.
The first week of the semester,
I had missed a call from
my mom's good friend, Mandy.
I remember checking the voicemail.
I knew something horrible
had happened.
I'm just getting information
really slowly.
And I'm trying to talk to my mom,
and she won't pick up my calls.
I got a surprise phone call
from one of my mom's friends.
And my mom's friend, she's like,
"Eric, your mom is hysterical.
"She's just like, screaming and crying,
'He's gonna kill himself.'"
Like, you know, "I never meant
for this to happen."
And I'm like,
"What are you talking about?"
I'm going down the street
looking for my mother.
She got like even more hysterical, crazy,
to where like they're trying
to get her into an ambulance.
They didn't take her to the hospital.
They took her to the jail
to question her.
Yeah.
Charles and Tony are not brothers.
They're together.
They're lovers.
Ooh.