Chapter 1: What happened during the Tiede sisters' Christmas at the cabin?
My family owns a beautiful cabin in Oakley, Utah. The sound of the river, the horses that are down in the pasture, the birds, it's absolutely heaven on earth to me. My mom had given it a name, Tita's Tranquility, because of the serenity and peace
The cabin was an awesome place to go to. As a young child, I loved going up there, bringing aunts and uncles and cousins. The cabin was about two and a half miles off the road. You have to snowmobile in during the wintertime. It was an escape from the world for our family.
It was winter of 1990. I was 20 years old and my little sister was 16.
It was Christmas time. We were off for the holidays. There's a large Christmas tree with lots of gifts around it.
I have great memories of spending Christmas with my mom and dad. My mom even had our Christmas stockings hung under the fireplace mantel, ready for Santa to come. Three days before Christmas, our family had to finish up our Christmas shopping and head back up to our family cabin. My mom and Grams and I arrived at the cabin first and my hands were freezing. It was a bitter cold winter that year.
I asked my mom to hurry and unlock the door. I needed to run in and run my hands under some water and I would be right back down to help her. I got to the top of the stairs and saw a gray flash go behind the refrigerator. And the first thought that popped in my mind was, oh, a cousin's here already and was going to jump out and say boo. It didn't turn out that way.
Behind the refrigerator came a frizzy-headed man in a gray sweatshirt with his pistol pointed at me. I assumed that he would want to just rob us and be on his way. As soon as my mom came to the top of the stairs out from the back bedroom, another robber with thick Coke bottle glasses on was pointing a gun at my mother. My mom was saying to him, what is it you want? Why are you here?
I'll give you anything. Seconds after she had said that, gunfire started imploding, exploding, explosion from everywhere. I saw my mom go down. I turned at that point and looked over my shoulder to my grams and saw her get shot in the head and blood spray everywhere. I heard her gasp for some breath, and then it was just dead silence. I felt pretty certain that they were dead.
My thoughts were turned to knowing that within minutes my dad and sister would be coming. I can remember hearing snowmobiles coming in the distance and my heart sinking to my gut. Knowing that that was my dad and sister. It felt like slow motion and quick all at once. I can remember the screams and grams falling off the stool and my mom reaching over her chest saying, I've been shot.
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Chapter 2: How did the Tiede sisters react to the intruders?
Still trying to call out on the mobile. You know, and my mobile kicked in. I got 911. She says, tell me what direction they're going. We got police. We got people in the area. I go, well, they're turning on the road. They're heading towards Camas. I go, I need a helicopter. And the phone went dead. I pulled in the gas station, went over to the pay phone, and got 911 back on the phone again.
I go, guys, I need a helicopter now.
We noticed a cop car pass us and turn around and begin to follow us. Both men began to panic. I remember looking over. The speedometer was going over 90 miles an hour.
turned right down towards a canyon and went another mile or so and then fell. The car fell off an embankment.
I remember looking up, because the car was at an angle, and noticing the entire road above us that we came down was full of maybe a couple cops, but mostly people in common clothes, drawn down with pistols and shotguns and rifles at us. I just remember how amazed I was that there were so many people there so fast.
There was cops pointing guns at me, and my little sister says, no, no, that's my sister. And I don't think they'd received information that there was even hostages in the car. I reached back for my sister's hand and grabbed her hand and said, duck. And we both ducked, and we were praying and just squeezing each other's hand.
We've always had a connection, even as little children, a special connection where we can feel each other. She's always been a great comfort to me.
The suspects were taken from the vehicle. and then were secured by officers who'd arrived at the scene. These guys are obviously cowards. As long as they were in total control of a situation by use of fear and force, then they continued to function. When that control went away, that's when it stopped, and they surrendered to authorities.
The men were down on their knees with their arms behind their neck, and the cops were yelling at them to get down, get down, and surrender. And I started to yell at the cops to kill them. I said, kill them. They just killed my mom, my dad, and my grams. Kill them. Shoot them now. Kill them.
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Chapter 3: What led to the violent confrontation at the cabin?
of junctures in that film, I was saying, oh my God. Oh my God.
Hundreds of crime scenes later, it still rakes right up there. You know, it's still very vivid to me. Probably when I got about maybe 10 feet from the door, I picked up a faint smell. It was kind of like burnt hair and maybe burnt fabric, like clothes burning. As I entered the garage, there was maybe a 12 to 18 inch puddle of blood that was fresh. As I started up the stairwell,
I could see holes in the wall, bullet holes coming from one wall across the stairwell into the other wall. There was a blood smear on the wall. It looked like a bloody hand had wiped down the wall. And it almost looked like a mini war zone. There was two bodies. I checked for a pulse, but I knew in my mind they was deceased.
I actually walked into the smoke before I really realized that the top floor of that cabin was on fire. Then our mindset went to protecting the victim's property because we thought the cabin was going to burn down. On top of the coffee table, there was a VCR camera and some tapes.
There was a double funeral for my mother and grandmother. My grandmother's name's Beth Tidwell Potts. My mother's name is Kay Tidwell Tita. I remember just so many people and families that came to love us and help us build their love and support.
Aunt Claudia was my mom's older sister. When mom passed, Aunt Claudia stepped in letting us know that she was there and it gave us all a sense of that we weren't alone.
I wanted to be there as much as I possibly could because they needed support. This was a horribly traumatizing thing for them, and we were what they had left.
Graham's had a lot of energy. She was full of life.
She was a very fun, vivacious, energetic, happy grandma. She would give me permanence in my hair and make it curly, awful. I remember Mom called the aspen trees quakies. She loved the noise that the quaking aspen made in the wind. That was one of her fondest memories, and it is mine as well.
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Chapter 4: How did Rolf Tiede respond to the crisis?
I felt like they practically wanted me to be able to see the bullets coming out of the guns that they expected me to point the exact gun in the direction of every bullet and where it hit at any given moment.
I actually just had a whole epiphany of new thoughts come to that, that I don't think that that was helpful for a victim to have to put a weapon that they watched their family murdered with, to even have to touch it. What is the point? The weapons were already on the table. Why would I have to touch it?
Those trials are somewhat of a blur to me. I was 16 years old and I wanted to go back and live that life I loved and not having to relive a nightmare. Dele's lawyer argued that he didn't do any of the shooting. These men were guilty. They committed a crime. They needed to be punished, and we needed to move on.
Lene and Trish Tita were excellent witnesses. They were very sure about the things they had seen and very articulate, able to relate these very, very sensational things in an unemotional way. So they were extremely valuable witnesses. But we had another survivor of the case. Mr. Tita survived the assault and the attack. Incredible guy.
I remember sitting and watching the look on Deli's face as he came in seeing my father, and it was very apparent to me that he did not know my father had survived. And the look on his face was just priceless. Like he had been defeated. My dad survived. We won.
He's lucky that they used the wrong gun when they shot him. They used birdshot. Very ineffective. They didn't know that. You know, I think his odds of having made it and survived an incident like that are probably one in a thousand. He was kind of an ace in the hole, and he brought the prosecution together in an outstanding way. I expected Edward Delley to be convicted of first-degree murder.
The case had been thoroughly investigated, and the prosecutor's office had done an excellent job.
I heard the verdict came out, second-degree murder with life imprisonment, and I never really understood that. I said, something's wrong. It can only be them that did this. How can he be not sentenced to death?
Daly was not convicted of first-degree murder. He was convicted of second-degree murder, and a death sentence was no longer an option once that conviction came in.
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