Thirty-one years later, children still suffer from mother's murder
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Ruth Eby's purse smelled like Juicy Fruit.
The woman herself gave off the scent of roses, from the pink bottle of Avon Rose Milk.
She was the mower, gardener, shopper, banker, birthday party planner for her three children and husband on their place a few miles outside of Lexington.
She was also the favorite aunt. The spoiler of babies and fashioner of a bright and cheery home with everything in its place.
And man, could she cook.
"I remember her cheeseburgers, the best cheeseburgers around," her son Rick said recently. "She would fry the hamburgers up in a pan and she would spread the grease on the cheese and it would just perfectly melt the cheese.”
Some kids fantasize about such an idyllic childhood. Terri, Rick and Lisa Eby lived it.
Until lightning struck — twice. First, the 1977 murder of their mother and a little more than two years later the death of their father, Dick, from what some believed was a broken heart.
They became orphans, taken in by their mother’s parents in Colorado.
Thirty-one years later, they still suffer from one man’s act.
That man, Dennis Sell, drastically changed the paths of two families in 1977.
In February, he kidnapped and killed Judith Dangler.
In September, Ruth Eby.
Terri was 14. Rick was 12. Lisa, the family's baby, was 6. The loss of their parents set them back 15 years, they said, even though their grandparents tried to provide some normalcy.
Terri calls it the 15-year fog.
"We weren't truly living," she said. "We had no awareness of our life, because I think we really, truly thought our life was going to end early."
Ruth Hilty grew up in Lexington and Dick Eby in Overton. His brother Verlyn Eby recalled that Ruth worked at the Lexington A&W drive-in, and they met there. They married on Dec. 15, 1962, and started their family soon after.
They moved their children into the open space just outside Lexington, where Ruth could raise strawberries and can her own tomatoes.
On Sept. 23, 1977, she took her children to school in the morning, went grocery shopping in the afternoon and then returned home to put the groceries away.
When Lisa and Rick got home from school, she wasn't there.
The search began quickly. Four days after she disappeared, a maintenance worker found a blouse, skirt, panties and a bra scattered along a rural road. A mile away, Dick Eby, searching with others, was the first to come upon his wife’s body among some logs.
She had been beaten and raped. She bled to death from wounds caused by a pair of side cutter pliers the killer had taken from his job as a welder at Sperry-New Holland.
Dick Eby “didn't talk a whole lot about it," Verlyn Eby said. "It was just kind of a sad deal. He kept a lot of that inside him."
Doctors told his family the stress of the incident and its aftereffects hastened his death in 1980 from a genetic heart condition.
The words came out before Lisa Mares could stop them. She heard herself say them and gasped.
In talking about the consequences of her mother’s murder recently — the first time the three of them sat down together to share their feelings about those dark days — she disclosed a secret to her siblings and grandmother she had not revealed in 10 years.
She had a bad drug habit for a couple of years — cocaine and methamphetamine — before she got pregnant with her now 9-year-old son Dylan.
Lisa was 6 when her mother disappeared that day while her children were at school. Four days later, a minister came and took her and her brother out of class.
"She said, 'We found your mom and she's dead,'" Lisa said.
None of the three remembers much about the funeral, except to wonder why so many people they didn’t know were there.
For the next two years, the children’s lives felt unrecognizable. Their dad dated and broke up with a woman, then married someone else — a bad matchup for everyone, the siblings said.
Terri, 14, stepped in to do the cleaning and cooking, and to care for Rick, 12, and Lisa, even stuffing the stockings and playing Santa at Christmas.
"We lost our dad, too ... before his physical death. He was just going through the motions. He had to take care of us, but I think at the same time part of him had already died and he was just lost," said Terri, now Terri Adams.
When he died, they lost most of their family history, they said. Part of it was sold at auctions. His new wife took much of the rest — the silver that belonged to their father’s grandmother, Terri’s Barbie doll collection.
They moved to Colorado Springs to live with their grandparents.
It wasn’t easy for anyone.
“I kind of clammed up for the longest time,” Rick said.
Terri said they lived by trial and error.
“I didn’t do any drugs or alcohol, or anything like that, but I looked for love in all the wrong places a few times,” she said.
She got pregnant at 17 at a girlfriend’s wedding; she gave the baby up for adoption.
In their late teens, the Eby kids learned the details of what happened to their mom.
Before that, Terri said, "I can safely say that I just didn't want to know a lot about it. I had come to terms with that my mother was never going to come back, and that her life had ended in a violent way. And I knew I was never going to understand that."
Their grandparents took them to church, but as soon as they got out on their own, that stopped.
Lisa graduated from high school in 1988 and went to beauty school, but never pursued that career. She married in 1992, but divorced in less than a year. A son from that marriage lives with his father.
She married a second time, had another son, divorced and is raising Dylan as a single mom.
"I went through a lot of depression. Still kind of do, here and there,” she said. “If it wasn't for (Dylan) I don't know what I would have done. He's all I've got. … Without Dylan I wouldn't have had the strength. He's my rock."
The three feel they are just now getting some sort of vision for their lives.
“We’re living our lives now to the fullest, but I think we went through periods where we didn’t know what to do with ourselves,” Terri said.
She is 45 and a kindergarten teacher. She married three years ago for the first time. Once she gave up trying to control everything in her life, she said, she found God again — and the answers to a lot of her questions.
Rick, 43, spent eight years in the Navy and never married. He is working as a kitchen manager in Pueblo. He inherited his love of cooking from his mom, he said.
Lisa, 38, works in a hospital and is interested in pursuing a career in criminal justice or law.
After ignoring her mother’s murder most of her life, she now wants to know everything.
Dennis Sell, she said, will never know the dreams and experiences he stole from her.
“I would like to see, to read, all documents possible for closure,” she said. “I want to have my questions answered.”
Terri’s last words with her mom were an argument over a pair of shoes she wanted to wear to school.
"She wouldn't let me because she told me they were inappropriate."
The dressy black shoes had a heel and a strap around the ankle. They exposed her toes.
"I had those shoes up until a couple of years ago. I finally gave them to the Goodwill,” she said. “I was hanging onto them just for that reason, you know."
Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.
The woman herself gave off the scent of roses, from the pink bottle of Avon Rose Milk.
She was the mower, gardener, shopper, banker, birthday party planner for her three children and husband on their place a few miles outside of Lexington.
She was also the favorite aunt. The spoiler of babies and fashioner of a bright and cheery home with everything in its place.
And man, could she cook.
"I remember her cheeseburgers, the best cheeseburgers around," her son Rick said recently. "She would fry the hamburgers up in a pan and she would spread the grease on the cheese and it would just perfectly melt the cheese.”
Some kids fantasize about such an idyllic childhood. Terri, Rick and Lisa Eby lived it.
Until lightning struck — twice. First, the 1977 murder of their mother and a little more than two years later the death of their father, Dick, from what some believed was a broken heart.
They became orphans, taken in by their mother’s parents in Colorado.
Thirty-one years later, they still suffer from one man’s act.
That man, Dennis Sell, drastically changed the paths of two families in 1977.
In February, he kidnapped and killed Judith Dangler.
In September, Ruth Eby.
Terri was 14. Rick was 12. Lisa, the family's baby, was 6. The loss of their parents set them back 15 years, they said, even though their grandparents tried to provide some normalcy.
Terri calls it the 15-year fog.
"We weren't truly living," she said. "We had no awareness of our life, because I think we really, truly thought our life was going to end early."
Ruth Hilty grew up in Lexington and Dick Eby in Overton. His brother Verlyn Eby recalled that Ruth worked at the Lexington A&W drive-in, and they met there. They married on Dec. 15, 1962, and started their family soon after.
They moved their children into the open space just outside Lexington, where Ruth could raise strawberries and can her own tomatoes.
On Sept. 23, 1977, she took her children to school in the morning, went grocery shopping in the afternoon and then returned home to put the groceries away.
When Lisa and Rick got home from school, she wasn't there.
The search began quickly. Four days after she disappeared, a maintenance worker found a blouse, skirt, panties and a bra scattered along a rural road. A mile away, Dick Eby, searching with others, was the first to come upon his wife’s body among some logs.
She had been beaten and raped. She bled to death from wounds caused by a pair of side cutter pliers the killer had taken from his job as a welder at Sperry-New Holland.
Dick Eby “didn't talk a whole lot about it," Verlyn Eby said. "It was just kind of a sad deal. He kept a lot of that inside him."
Doctors told his family the stress of the incident and its aftereffects hastened his death in 1980 from a genetic heart condition.
The words came out before Lisa Mares could stop them. She heard herself say them and gasped.
In talking about the consequences of her mother’s murder recently — the first time the three of them sat down together to share their feelings about those dark days — she disclosed a secret to her siblings and grandmother she had not revealed in 10 years.
She had a bad drug habit for a couple of years — cocaine and methamphetamine — before she got pregnant with her now 9-year-old son Dylan.
Lisa was 6 when her mother disappeared that day while her children were at school. Four days later, a minister came and took her and her brother out of class.
"She said, 'We found your mom and she's dead,'" Lisa said.
None of the three remembers much about the funeral, except to wonder why so many people they didn’t know were there.
For the next two years, the children’s lives felt unrecognizable. Their dad dated and broke up with a woman, then married someone else — a bad matchup for everyone, the siblings said.
Terri, 14, stepped in to do the cleaning and cooking, and to care for Rick, 12, and Lisa, even stuffing the stockings and playing Santa at Christmas.
"We lost our dad, too ... before his physical death. He was just going through the motions. He had to take care of us, but I think at the same time part of him had already died and he was just lost," said Terri, now Terri Adams.
When he died, they lost most of their family history, they said. Part of it was sold at auctions. His new wife took much of the rest — the silver that belonged to their father’s grandmother, Terri’s Barbie doll collection.
They moved to Colorado Springs to live with their grandparents.
It wasn’t easy for anyone.
“I kind of clammed up for the longest time,” Rick said.
Terri said they lived by trial and error.
“I didn’t do any drugs or alcohol, or anything like that, but I looked for love in all the wrong places a few times,” she said.
She got pregnant at 17 at a girlfriend’s wedding; she gave the baby up for adoption.
In their late teens, the Eby kids learned the details of what happened to their mom.
Before that, Terri said, "I can safely say that I just didn't want to know a lot about it. I had come to terms with that my mother was never going to come back, and that her life had ended in a violent way. And I knew I was never going to understand that."
Their grandparents took them to church, but as soon as they got out on their own, that stopped.
Lisa graduated from high school in 1988 and went to beauty school, but never pursued that career. She married in 1992, but divorced in less than a year. A son from that marriage lives with his father.
She married a second time, had another son, divorced and is raising Dylan as a single mom.
"I went through a lot of depression. Still kind of do, here and there,” she said. “If it wasn't for (Dylan) I don't know what I would have done. He's all I've got. … Without Dylan I wouldn't have had the strength. He's my rock."
The three feel they are just now getting some sort of vision for their lives.
“We’re living our lives now to the fullest, but I think we went through periods where we didn’t know what to do with ourselves,” Terri said.
She is 45 and a kindergarten teacher. She married three years ago for the first time. Once she gave up trying to control everything in her life, she said, she found God again — and the answers to a lot of her questions.
Rick, 43, spent eight years in the Navy and never married. He is working as a kitchen manager in Pueblo. He inherited his love of cooking from his mom, he said.
Lisa, 38, works in a hospital and is interested in pursuing a career in criminal justice or law.
After ignoring her mother’s murder most of her life, she now wants to know everything.
Dennis Sell, she said, will never know the dreams and experiences he stole from her.
“I would like to see, to read, all documents possible for closure,” she said. “I want to have my questions answered.”
Terri’s last words with her mom were an argument over a pair of shoes she wanted to wear to school.
"She wouldn't let me because she told me they were inappropriate."
The dressy black shoes had a heel and a strap around the ankle. They exposed her toes.
"I had those shoes up until a couple of years ago. I finally gave them to the Goodwill,” she said. “I was hanging onto them just for that reason, you know."
Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.
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