The Independent from London, Greater London, England • 96

10 THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 23 DECEMBER 1990 WMOHLLEB EVA BERG SHOEN? Part one of a murder story $250,000.00 THE SKI RESORT of Telluride in the Colorado Rockies is not the sort of place where people kill each other, and when the sheriff of San Miguel County got the call about the dead woman up the valley, he thought it must be suicide. The victim was a 44-year-old Norwegian with long blonde hair, who had been found by her two children and a schoolfriend of theirs. She was lying outside her bedroom, shot in the back. Her husband was away. Nothing had been stolen, and neighbours say the six dogs in the house didn't bark.

The dead woman's name was Eva Berg Shoen. THeJhends of Eva Berg Shorn an offering the sum of $250,000 (two hundred Jfty thousand dollars) jar Information leading to the arrest and coniMctkm of the person or persons responsible Jar her brutal murder. On the morning of August 6, 1990. Eva's 10-year-old daughter auxteandjbund her slain mother's body tnanupstoJrs bedixxmof their home near TeUurlde. Colorado.

Eva and her husband Sam had moved to this small oom-munitu In southwest Colorado tun yean ago Jrom Phoenix, Arizona. Eva had been shot with a 25 cat handgun by an unknown assailant whOe her children slept No motive has been determined. However, the murder may have been committed by a contract Utter. Authorities an exploring any and all possible motives and persons. Eva Berg Shoen Victim Eva was a happily devoted mother and wife, a lover of the outdoors and of animals, especially.

Her constant good cheer and gentleness wltt be miss Eva Shoen 's husband Sam is one of the family that owns U-HauL a rental company that runs the largest trucking business in America and is the flagship company of a group called Amerco. In the year to 31 March 1990, Amerco posted pre-tax profits of $2L5m on a turnover of $677m. Sam is a tense man in his mid-forties whose emotions are never far from the surface. He speaks in short, sharp bursts. "If it weren't for our family feud," he says, "my wife would be alive today." There is no evidence and there have been no arrests, but this is the sentiment inspired by a pitiable family battle.

The story of U-Haul is about the perils of business when colliding generations are consumed by greed and recrimination. In the past four years the various Shoens have spent nearly S20m on legal fees to service the glut of lawsuits they have begun against each other. The murder is a tragic turn in a feud that seems to draw heavily on Twin Peaks, and bears a resemblance to King Lear. PLEASE CONTACT San Miguel County Sheriff P.O. Box 455 24 hours: (303)728-3081 Crime Stoppers (weekdays) (303) 728-4128 TeUurlde.

CO 81435 Or your local police of Crime Stoppers Persons with Information need not Identify themselves started out as hippies. Having made their money, they have retired early to breathe the dean air, raise their kids and get away from overcrowding and urban crime. In order to conform to the requirements of community democracy, Telluride's town council broadcasts its weekly meetings live on the radio every Tuesday afternoon. One council member is a Rastafarian, and the former mayor is a part-time lighting technician who works on Telluride's summer theatre festivals. This Christmas, nearly five months after the killing, the posters with Eva Shoen's face, offering a $250,000 reward for information about her murder, have all come down, perhaps to avoid scaring away the tourists who flock to the slopes now the ski season has opened.

However, the town still buzzes with speculation about the killing. The few details are carefully repeated. Eva Shoen was shot in the back, about halfway down on the right. The bullet, from a .25 automatic, made a small hole, so there wasn't a lot of blood, and her children tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the way they had been taught at school. But the bullet had travelled up through her lungs and heart, and Eva Shoen was already dead, of internal bleeding.

What has frightened the townsfolk most is not that Eva Shoen's killer is still at large and may strike again, but that a senseless violent crime, the very badge of urban America and the reason many people moved to Telluride has followed them to their mountain hideaway. No wonder many in Telluride, including Eva's husband, Sam Shoen, take the view that the murder was a professional hit by a paid assassin. Telluride needs to believe this is no random incident, and Sam Shoen wants someone to point the finger at. As for the young sheriff charged with catching Eva Shoen's killer, he wants desperately to beat the formidable opponent who watches his every move: Jon Sellers, an investigator hired by Sam's enemies within the family. Sellers flies in the face of the idea that private detectives are discreet.

He wears a black cowboy hat and nail varnish. "I like to keep my hands pretty," he says. illustrates the troubles that beset family-run businesses when generations collide. One young Shoen calls her family's saga "The Young, The Restless and The For LS's seven sons and five daughters have split into warring camps, miring the company in a morass of lawsuits, plots and purges. Already, the feuding has forced LS out of the business, and, who knows, may have led to the murder of Eva Shoen in Telluride.

of business, for Americans are a mobile people, and don't hesitate to move from state to state, changing careers four or five times in the course of a lifetime. Operating under the slogan, "Making moving U-Haul caters to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who move house every year but cannot afford professional movers. Its orange trucks are as well-known as police cars. The sad characters in Raymond Carver's essential American stories leave their miseries behind by loading up a U-Haul and moving on. The company was founded in 1945 by Leonard Samuel Shoen, a tough but friendly old rogue who looks like Mickey Rooney and dresses as if heading for a Las Vegas cabaret.

as he is known by friends and family alike, has turned U-Haul into the biggest trucking business in America, with a network reaching from New York to Los Angeles. Ever since he began assembling trailers in his father-in-law's backyard, LS has wanted U- In the 10 years that Bill Masters has been sheriff of Telluride, he has dealt mostly with avalanches, lost dogs and stolen skis, so he vividly recalls the August morning last summer when he first heard about the incident on his radio pager. "It was my first real murder and I still had my cycling gear on." The 39-year-old sheriff keeps in shape in the summer by cycling up the steep mountain roads in the early morning. There had not been a murder on his beat for 11 years. Indeed, a generation of Americans had moved to Telluride to get away from all that.

Situated about 500 miles south-west of Denver, in the heart of the Rockies, Telluride is an old mining town at the end of a box canyon. The town is less than half a mile long, but its main street boasts no less than 14 estate agents. Telluride flourishes today as it did at the turn of the century, when gold was discovered in the surrounding hills. As the train from the mines rushed down the valley, the driver shouted into the wind, 'To hell you ride!" That is how Telluride got its name. Unlike the more famous Colorado resorts, such as Aspen, with its ritzy clientele, or even the fake Alpine village of Vail, Telluride has created a personality of homespun authenticity.

The brochures entreat you to share in "the Telluride meaning that obliging locals will stop visitors in the street for a chat. It may be a little forced, but that is because most of the people who live there year-round The son of an Oregon farmer ruined by the Depression, Shoen picked fruit, butchered cattle and pitched his way through three years of medical school before being expelled, for answering for a friend who was absent from class. Driven by a deep-seated fear of going broke, Shoen opened four barber shops while he was an undergraduate at Oregon State University. But the man once called "Slick" by his friends for his ability to make a quick buck always knew he would only make it big when he found one good idea to follow. That idea came to him when, as a young naval officer during the Second World War, he was unable to hire a self-drive van to haul his family's belongings from base to base in the north-western US.

Starting in 1945 at the age of 29 with $4,000 in cash and $1,000 of barber's equipment, LS began building trailers on his father-in-law's farm up in Washington state. The young woman he had married a year earlier, Anna Mary Carry, took rums helping out in the business Haul to be the centrepiece of a business empire that would endure in the family for generations. Instead, the 74-year-old patriarch is watching his American dream fizzle out before his eyes, as the 12 Shoen children squander their wealth in a struggle for control. Their feud is a tragic example of what can The business empire at the centre of this storm recalls the waggoners who opened up the wild West. Virtually unknown in Britain, U-Haul is an institution in the United States.

Indeed, it is a peculiarly American kind happen when a man ignores his family in pursuit of making his business grow, and it vividly By Fiammetta Rocco.