He Felt Threatened

On a Saturday morning in 1984, a jogger heading out in rural El Paso County, Colorado spotted something on the side of the road. It was an unfamiliar sight on their usual route. As they drew near, they discovered the body of a teenage girl. She had been shot in the head.

Seventeen-year-old Shawna Webb had been missing for only a few hours. The night before, she’d ended her shift at a local movie theater in Colorado Springs before heading home for the night. She’d never arrive.

Within hours, a suspect was arrested: Robert Storm, 18.

Shawna and Robert had worked together at the movie theater and he’d been persistent in his pursuit of her, asking her out multiple times. She’d refused. Then he asked her to attend to the Ellicott High School prom with him. Again, she turned him down.

Robert was fired from his job at the theater. Although it’s unclear if this had anything to do with his pursuit of Shawna, his absence must have felt like a respite. But that doesn’t mean he was out of Shawna’s life completely. In late April he called one of her friends and told her that he planned to sacrifice Shawna to the devil. Within a week, Shawna was dead. Shot in the left temple from less than a foot away and left on a desolate road ten miles from her home.

During the preliminary trial held two months later, one of Robert’s friends said that Robert had told him that he had shot her, but hadn’t meant to hurt her.

Robert claimed that he had picked her up after work that Friday night and the two had driven around, drinking a 12-pack of beer. They’d parked on the rural road in El Paso where Shawna’s body would be found hours later.

Once they stopped, he said, Shawna opened the glove box and found a gun inside. Shawna got out of the car and shot it once into the ground. That’s when, he claimed, she pointed the gun at him. He grabbed the gun from her. And then he shot her. He felt threatened, he told his friend.

Shawna’s autopsy revealed no other wounds to her body. Only the single gunshot wound to the head, shot at close range.

Robert would end up taking a deal, pleading guilty to second-degree murder instead of facing trial for first-degree. Meanwhile, Shawna’s life and murder received little coverage, and what we know about her last night of life is shaped by the man who killed her. The survivor of their encounter controlled the narrative, allowing him to cast Shawna as the aggressor even after months of harassment and threats.

Elizabeth Miller was a 14-year-old girl who had just been accepted onto the varsity basketball team at her high school. As a new recruit, she was eager to show off her abilities and had been spending the summer jogging so that she was ready for the fall season. Usually she went with friends, or one of her siblings, but on August 16, 1983 she went alone.

When her mother finished work, Elizabeth wasn’t home. Soon, a massive search was conducted throughout Idaho Springs, Colorado and the surrounding area. Despite these efforts, there were few clues. The weekend before, though, her friends and sister had been with Elizabeth when a man in a pickup truck had tried talking to her. Elizabeth ignored his advances and the man quickly became angry. Many wondered if Elizabeth’s disappearance was connected to this encounter, but no one knew who the man was.

Months passed without any sign of Elizabeth or the man who had approached her. That is until a potential clue was found at a Colorado Springs car wash.

Someone at the car wash found a note penciled onto the metal partition of the car washing station. The writer said that Beth Miller had been murdered and that her body could be found near a King Sooper. He intended to kill another woman next: Shawna Webb of Colorado Springs.

It was an eerie discovery. Two teens separated by nearly 100 miles. One murdered. One missing. Their names side by side on a metal wall.

Was it possible that Robert Storm was responsible for Elizabeth Miller’s disappearance?

Robert was questioned in Elizabeth’s disappearance. Little was published about how deeply this was investigated, but he told investigators that it wasn’t the same Beth Miller. Police seemed ready to write off the similarity in names as simply coincidence and seemed to never pursue this angle.

In 2006, the Clear Creek County District Attorney Mark Hulbert filed a grand jury petition. The hope was that it would lead to charges against a woman named Viola Moya. Viola had previously claimed that her ex-boyfriend, Edward Apodaca, had kidnapped and killed Elizabeth Miller in 1983. She said she’d helped dismember and bury Elizabeth. Many believed that Edward had been the man in the truck Elizabeth encountered the weekend before and that he’d come back for her, waiting until she was alone.

By the time the Grand Jury convened in 2006, Edward Apodaca had been dead for years, murdered by his wife Ann in 1990. Viola was the only one alive to charge. But the Grand Jury declined to bring charges against her. Instead, they came back with a scathing statement saying there had been a clear lack of a meaningful investigation into Elizabeth’s case from the start.

We can’t know for certain what happened to Elizabeth, but like Shawna, it’s clear in the days before they were taken both encountered men who hated to be told no.

What we know about Shawna's last night comes from the man who killed her. What we know about Elizabeth's last days comes from witnesses who glimpsed her at a distance. Neither girl gets to tell us what happened. Neither gets to say no one final time to the people who took them. This isn’t just a tragedy, it’s a pattern in the stories I share here. And it's worth asking what we lose, as a culture, every time we let the perpetrator be the one who shapes the story.