Roger John Ellison was the fourth child of Earnest and Evelyn Ellison. He had three brothers – Bill, Bob, and Roy – and a sister, Becky. Earnest retired after open-heart surgery and a stroke, and the family later settled in Eckert, Orchard City, Colorado, about 300 miles southwest of Denver.
The Ellison children shared a passion for skiing. Becky was the closest in age to Roger. She was on the verge of making the Olympic Ski Team when she walked away from the sport to get married.
At 17 years of age, Roger Ellison was an avid skier and honor student at Cedaredge High School in Cedaredge, Colorado. He was finishing up his senior year and planned to attend Western State College in nearby Gunnison for fall 1981. He had recently paid the first-semester dormitory fee.
Those who knew him described him as intelligent, shy, well-liked, but a bit of a loner because of his massive interest in skiing; he always talked about it. He often wore colorful ski sweaters and white turtlenecks.
During the first weekend in February 1981, Roger competed in Telluride, hoping to earn a spot on the U.S. Olympic “B” team. However, he did not make the team.
Roger was a bit depressed but looked forward to competing in Aspen the following weekend and had already paid the entry fee.
Unfortunately, Roger never made it to Aspen.
On the morning of February 10, 1981, Roger Ellison looked out the kitchen window and commented to his mother that it looked like it might snow, a good sign for his upcoming ski race in Aspen.
Roger put on his coat, picked up his books and yellow backpack, and boarded the bus for the six-mile ride to Cedaredge High School.
When Roger arrived at school, he headed to the basement to locker number 191 and caught his locker mate, Mitch Coleman, preparing to shut the door. Roger yelled at Mitch to hold it open because he needed to get some books for his first-hour class.
Roger promised to catch up with him later, and Mitch ran down the hallway toward class.
Shortly after 8 am, Roger Ellison vanished without a trace. He never attended any classes that day.
When he did not return home after school, Roger’s parents assumed he would call. Earnest and Evelyn waited up all night, but when their son did not return home by morning, they called the Delta County sheriff.
The sheriff told the Ellisons they had to wait 48 hours before reporting their son missing, even though they stressed Roger would never run away.
Roger left home that day carrying only $3 – enough to buy the school lunch – and no personal belongings. He left without his skis, car, clothing, and $1,000 in his savings account.
Earnest and Evelyn searched for many hours for their son.
“We drove down backroads, we combed the woods, we walked ditches. Gradually it dawned on us that something terrible had happened to Roger, and was happening to us,” Evelyn said shortly after Roger’s disappearance.
When Roger’s class graduated in May 1981, fellow student Shawna Peterson Axtell accepted his diploma in his absence. She recalled years later that his parents were sitting in a car overlooking the ceremony on the football field.
“His mother was so distraught, she just sat there crying.”
Delta County Sheriff Keith Waibel did not take Roger Ellison’s disappearance seriously at first; he suspected Roger might have gone to a ski resort in search of a job. However, Roger never missed a day of school.
Waibel eventually fed the facts of Roger’s disappearance into the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s computer.
The FBI could not get involved because there was no evidence of foul play or that Roger had crossed the state lines.
Waibel also put Roger’s photos and description of the teen in local newspapers and alerted nearby law enforcement agencies to the case.
Ellison’s offered an $8,000 reward for information leading to the whereabouts of their son.
All attempts to locate Roger Ellison had failed, and authorities had virtually no evidence in his case.
A few short months after Roger disappeared, his father passed away. The school bus driver later said Earnest was at his son’s bus stop every afternoon, scanning the students exiting the bus. Each day, Earnest would hang his head down and cry because Roger was never among the students.
Evelyn Ellison pressed the authorities to look into John Pash, a psychology teacher and wrestling coach at Cedaredge High School. He started working there in 1979 and lived next door to the school. He was also one of Roger’s teachers.
According to Evelyn, for Roger to get out of class to go skiing, he had to turn in his homework at Pash’s home instead of school.
After Roger’s disappearance, Pash told Evelyn he counseled Roger at his home and that Roger was suicidal. Evelyn did not believe him because Roger strongly disliked Pash and was not unhappy.
Evelyn reasoned that a person who would take his own life would not plan for his future or leave everything behind, including cash.
In 1992, Evelyn Ellison, who suffered from a bad heart and depression after her son went missing, passed away, never knowing what happened to her son.
Up until her death, Evelyn suspected John Pash’s involvement in Roger’s case. She believed Roger saw something in Telluride he should not have seen and someone killed him over it. It is unclear if John Pash was in Telluride.
John Pash resigned from Cedaredge in 1984 and relocated to northern California where he still resides today.
In 1994, Delta County Sheriff, Bill Blair believed Roger Ellison never left Cedaredge.
Acting on a tip from a former classmate of Roger Ellison’s, Delta County Sheriff’s Department investigators, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and a statewide grave-investigation team called NecroSearch dug up a section of the yard of the Taylor Mortuary 20 feet by 12 feet by 2 1/2 feet deep (Lofholm 1994).
At the time of Roger’s disapparance, the mortuary was the private home of John Pash.
NecroSearch found six spots where land below the surface had been disturbed. Two of them were under the funeral home’s concrete garage floor and four others in the mortuary yard.
The radar showed depressions, expansions, or subsurface anomalies (Lofholm). Officials dug in those spots and found a bone, but it turned out to be non-human. They did not find Roger Ellison’s remains.
In 1998-1999 (one source said 1998, another 1999), authorities consulted with Claudia Waterman, a psychic, on Roger’s disappearance in a desperate attempt to uncover what happened to the teen.
Claudia said she saw Roger buried on the south side of the Grand Mesa not far from Cedaredge. She saw a dirt road lined with tall aspen trees projecting off to the left while a creek formed a path to the right.
Claudia said the killer did not go all the way to the top because he was in a hurry.
Sheriff Bill Blair said they searched the area, but found nothing. He also briefly mentioned John Pash.
Regarding John Pash, Blair said:
“I don’t have anything (evidence) that ties him in with anything, I’ve always been concerned with him (Roger) having to go to Pash’s to turn in his homework so he could get off to go skiing.”
In the February 8, 1998 issue of The Daily Sentinel, Roy Ellison spoke about the last time he saw his younger brother.
“The last time I saw him, he came to Golden. We were by ourselves and I tried to talk to him, but he sat on the couch with his head dropped down like he had 15,000 things on his mind.
“For the first 10 years, I had no idea what happened to him. About the time of our reunion, for the first time, I believed in my heart that he was dead.”
In September 1998, an unidentified man, who claimed he was dying and needed to get something off his chest, told the police he and a friend spotted a man believed to be Roger Ellison in the woods northwest of Cedaredge shortly after his disappearance. Roger was tied up and being held at gunpoint by another man over a bad drug deal.
The informant and his friend were poaching in the area but took off after observing the disturbing scene. He said that after they ran off, they heard two gunshots a few minutes later.
The two men agreed to never talk about the incident.
The dying man passed a polygraph test. His friend came forward and corroborated his story to the police.
A team of 12 from the Delta County Sheriff’s Department, the District Attorney’s Office, Colorado Bureau of Investigation, FBI, and anthropology students from Western State College, extensively searched the wooded area but found nothing.
In 2005, Delta County Sheriff Fred McKee told the Delta County Independent newspaper that he believes Roger was killed shortly after his disappearance. His body has never been found. McKee said he believes they’ve talked to people who know what happened but theorizes that some of the witnesses are reluctant to speak out due to their own involvement in illegal activity which may or may not be connected to Roger’s disappearance (Cumpston Harrison, 2009).
During fall 2009, school officials announced an extensive renovation of the old high school with an $11.4 million budget. Some people hoped Roger’s remains would be found during the 2010 renovation, but that did not happen.
There have been several sightings of Roger Ellison since his disappearance.
After high school, Shawna Axtell attended Mesa State College. She had seen a young man “painted in white” working as a mascot for Snowmass Magazine in fall 1981.
Shawna told The Daily Sentinal in 1998:
“He resembled Roger so much and when I walked towards him, he got up and left. I got upset, because he looked like Rog. The same height, even though he was painted up, it looked like him and when I tried to go near him he left.”
In 1982, an informant contacted investigators and said he had seen Roger Ellison alive in April at a tree nursery in Gulf Port, Mississippi. The call turned out to be a hoax.
In 1988, a woman claimed she had an affair with a drifter named Roger J. Ellis, who fit Roger Ellison’s description – thick blond hair, blue eyes, 6 feet, and 145 pounds. The woman said she bore the man a child.
In June 1989, a person in Bath, New York believed a man named Andy Young was Roger Ellison.
There were many more sightings but they either turned out to be someone else or people looking to cash in on the reward money.
True Crime Diva’s Thoughts
Someone at Cedaredge High School had to see Roger after Mitch Coleman that morning. There’s no way this kid could completely disappear without anyone seeing him. School had not yet started so there would have been many kids and teachers in the hallways.
I don’t necessarily believe John Pash had anything to do with Roger’s disappearance. Police could easily have verified whether Pash was at school that day or if he had left around the time Roger disappeared.
It just seems too easy that it’s Pash, but who knows?
Before her death in 2011, reporter Lori Cumpston Harrison wrote several articles on Roger’s disappearance for Grand Junction’s newspaper, The Daily Sentinel. She also devoted a blog to his case. On her blog, she inserted super long comments allegedly from John Pash from Roger’s Websleuths thread. He posted these in 2009. You can read them here.
They’re too long to put here, but basically, Pash was extremely upset because people in the forum thought he killed Roger, so he was defending himself against the users.
At one point, he talked about the homework deal. He said Roger only did that a time or two, and other students had turned theirs in at his home, too.
I don’t think this is a big deal because he lived next to the school, but obviously, Pash should have had his students turn in their homework at school.
Pash talked about someone in the forum thinking a John Doe found in Colorado in 1981 was Roger, yet the Doe was several inches shorter than Roger. Lori also wrote about the John Doe.
The victim’s estimated date of death was FIVE years before, which would put his death year as 1976.
A dental comparison of Roger Ellison to the John Doe was not a match. Lori wrote in August 2009 that authorities were going to test DNA but I have no idea if they did.
I encourage you to read through Lori’s posts on her site. She has some info – including sexual allegations against Pash – that I did not put here because it was either rumors or theories or nothing I could verify. Also, this post is long enough!
I think Roger, for whatever reason, left school with his killer that day for unknown reasons. Which students or teachers were not at school that day or had left early?
I believe more than one person was involved in his murder, and people in Cedaredge know exactly what happened to Roger Ellison. It’s a very small town, and people talk. I don’t believe he was killed in a bad drug deal. Roger had money to pay for drugs, but maybe he knew or saw something about others.
Do I believe the dying man’s account? I do, but not 100%. He and his friend must have seen the killer. So, what did he look like? What about a composite sketch? A name or description?
Did Roger leave voluntarily? Maybe, but why? He had a good home life, and he left all of his personal belongings behind. His bank account remained untouched, and he only had $3 on him the day he vanished.
I believe it’s possible he could have secretly stashed cash somewhere and used that money to leave town on.
What gets me is Shawna Axtell’s sighting of him at Mesa State College. The man painted in white took off after she approached him. If it wasn’t Roger, why did the guy take off? If it WAS Roger, why the hell did he leave home without ever telling his parents? Where is he now?
Personally, I don’t think it was Roger, but I do think it was the most legitimate sighting of him. I believe Roger left school and someone murdered him. I just don’t have any idea who or why. If his mother was correct, what did he see in Telluride? How many people from Cedaredge were there?
Sources
Cumpston, Lori. “Tip Renews 18-year-old Search for Teenager.” The Daily Sentinel. September 11, 1998.
Cumpston, Lori. “Clairvoyant Looks Into Case of Missing Cedaredge Teen.” The Daily Sentinel. February 10, 1999.
Cumpston, Lori. “17 Years of Questions: West Slope teen’s ’81 disappearance still baffles town.” The Daily Sentinel. February 8, 1998.
Cumpston Harrison, Lori. Find Roger Ellison (blog). Accessed September 5, 2020. https://findrogerellison.wordpress.com/
Kawamura, Katherine. “No Clues in Disappearance of Eckert Youth.” The Daily Sentinel. February 25, 1981.
Lofholm, Nancy. “Faith Vigil: Mother still awaiting word on missing son.” The Daily Sentinel. October 23, 1989.
Lofholm, Nancy. “Dig at Mortuary Yields No Signs of Long-Missing Cedaredge Boy.” The Daily Sentinel. March 19, 1994.
“Missing – The Story of Two Children.” The Journal News (White Plains, NY). May 30, 1982.
Quiton, Stacie. “Search for Teenager Continues on Grounds of Mortuary.” The Daily Sentinel. April 19, 1994.
Silbernagel, Bob. “Missing Eckert Teen Spotted by Co-Worker.” The Daily Sentinel. June 28, 1982.