One Dung Heap From Murder

Dung Heap Gunnison, Colorado. Home of Western Colorado University. About 200 miles southwest of Denver. In 2020 the population of Gunnison was 6,560 people. Gunnison is the home of the 7-11 Ranch, a 700 acre property that was purchased in1964 by Marion Rudibaugh – who went by the name “Rudy”. He was a WWII veteran who lived there with his wife and 4 kids. The ranch had rental cabins, campsites, horseback riding, and hunting-guide services. After the Rudibaugh kids had grown and moved out and his wife passed away, Rudy hired Deborah Millison to help him manage the ranch. Deborah was originally from Ohio. As a kid, she and her family had visited Colorado on a family vacation and Deborah fell in love with the ranches and mountains & horses running freely. It was her dream to live there someday. Sometime in the early 90s, Deborah, her husband and their 2 young kids (Stephanie and Jacob – or Jake) made the move to Colorado. Deborah quickly became indispensable on the ranch and was Rudy’s right hand. Then in 1993, to everyone’s surprise, she divorced her husband and soon after married Rudy – who was almost 25 years older. At this time Stephanie was 7 and Jake was 6. The kids were expected to work on the ranch as well. Deborah started homeschooling them, so they’d have more time to help out. But they both seemed to enjoy living and working on the ranch. Stephanie was great with animals and Jake was very responsible and hard-working. I should mention that the brother and sister did not get along. At all. Like oil and water. In 2003 when Stephanie was 18, she fell in love with a 19-year-old guy named David Jackson. He had come to town with a travelling carnival. David was apparently smitten with Stephanie as well because when the carnival moved on after a few days, David stayed to be with Stephanie. After a few months the couple got married. Rudy, Stephanie’s stepfather, gave her $80,0000 out of what would have been her inheritance to purchase a house in Denver. With Stephanie gone, Jake was expected to take on more responsibilities at the ranch. Over the next few years, money became a huge issue between mother and son. He didn’t earn anything living and working on the ranch. His future inheritance was supposed to be enough for him. So he has to ask his mother, Deborah for money when he wanted to go out. 6 years later in November of 2009, Rudy passed away at the age of 85. Deborah fell into a deep depression and withdrew from everyone. And the ranch suffered. It was no longer the money maker it once was. Jake – who was still frustrated with his lack of income, got a part-time job. But even then, he ended up giving most of the money he made to his mother to help the failing ranch. Then a few years later in 2012, Stephanie and David – who now had a little boy - moved back to Gunnison and got an apartment in town. Davin took a job at Gunnison Vintage Auto, and Stephanie went back to work on the ranch in an effort to get it back to its former glory. Unfortunately, the sibling rivalry between Stephanie and Jake went into overdrive. They argued constantly over who was in charge and who would ultimately take over the ranch from their mother. Jake felt that the ranch was his – he was the one who never moved away, worked on it his entire life and because Rudy had already given Stephanie her inheritance to buy a house years before. In January of 2013 there during an argument between Jake and David (Stephanie’s husband), David pulled out a gun. After that Jake filed a restraining order again David, but never enacted it. On May 15th, 2015, Jake’s with friends Randy Martinez and Nate Lopez. They made plans for the next day, but Jake didn’t show up. That was very unlike him. And after 5 days of not hearing from him, Randy and Nate drove out to the 7-11 Ranch to check on him. But Jake wasn’t there. Instead, they spoke to his mother, Deborah who said he had gone to Reno for an MMA tournament or something she didn’t know when he’d be back. Jake’s friends found that very odd. They were close and they were sure he would have mentioned a trip. So, they went to Jake’s MMA gym, and no one there knew of anything going on in Reno. No one had seen Jake there in several days either. Also, Jake had injured himself recently and wasn’t able to train. In addition, just days before they had last seen Jake, he told his friends if anything ever happened to him, it was his family. After that Randy and Nate went to the police and filed a missing person’s report. Detectives went to the ranch to speak to Jake’s family. Deborah told them Jake was out of town, that he did that sometimes – just left for weeks at a time and eventually he’d come home. She also explained that he was unreachable because before he left, he had dropped his phone in a drainage ditch, and she showed the officers where she had Jake’s phone in a bag of rice in an attempt to dry it out. The detectives were satisfied at that point that Jake wasn’t “missing”. But when Jake’s friends heard what Deborah told the detectives, they were still skeptical. They kept pushing police to investigate further. They encouraged other friends of Jake to file missing person’s reports. Police interviewed Deborah again, this time she said Jake had come back from Reno, with a friend from out of town whose name she didn’t know. She said they argued over his living situation for a while and it was a pretty nasty fight, and Jake grabbed some camping gear, a gun, a wad of cash, and left. She had no idea where he had gone. Finally a month later, Deborah filed a missing person’s report for Jake. But she told detectives that Jake had fallen in with a bad crowd and was abusing cocaine and steroids. She thought he might be on the run. She even told them that he had taken a book from her called “How to Disappear Without a Trace”. The detectives found it odd that she didn’t seem worried. When detectives went back to Randy and Nate with the information from Deborah, they called “bullshit”. They had grown up with Jake. He was reliable, dependable. He didn’t use drugs, he didn’t even drink alcohol. He left his beloved dog behind and his prized Harley-Davidson Sportster motorcycle. None of this sounded like they Jake they knew. Frustrated, they started a group on Facebook called Where is Jake Millison and asked people to post tips. In October 2015, someone shared photos of David Jackson riding Jake’s prized motorcycle and that David claimed he was selling off Jake’s other motorcycles. That was a huge red flag. No one got to touch the Sportster, not even Jake’s friends. There was no way Jake would be ok with David riding it. They passed the info along to law enforcement, who agreed it didn’t fit with the family’s story of Jake being on a trip. Why would they be selling off Jake’s possessions if they expected him back? A few months later in early 2016, Deborah Rudibaugh was diagnosed with Stage 4 Breast Cancer. Over the next year Deborah’s health began to decline, Investigators worried their window was closing and obtained a search warrant for the ranch. They executed it in July of 2017 – 2 years after Jake went missing. As the search began, Deborah sat down with investigators and told them they would find Jake’s body in the corral under a heap of manure. She told detectives on night of May 15th, 2015 – after he came home from the movies with his friends, she had fought with Jake over who should inherit the ranch – which was estimated to be worth $3 million. She wanted to leave it to Stephanie for her grandson and she told him that she had just changed her will the previous month and listed Stephanie as the sole beneficiary. Jake was pissed and threatened her. She believed he might kill her, and it was either her or him. So in the middle of the night, she took her 357 and she shot him in the head while he slept. Then she dragged him out to the corral and buried him under manure. Then she thru the gun in a lake. Jake Millison’s decomposed body was found under the dung heap in the corral. Detectives had several issues with her story. Deborah was 68 years old, very petite – only 5 ft tall - and weighed maybe 90 lbs. and rather frail with her failing health. Jake, 29 years old, was about 190 lbs and fit due to his work on the ranch and his MMA training. But Deborah swore she acted alone. She told them she used “Yankee ingenuity” to pull him off the bed onto a tarp and drag him outside to an ATV and then dumped his body in the corral and buried it. During the search at the ranch, they found the gun Deborah said she tossed in a lake, under her bed. Investigators then interviewed Stephanie and David Jackson. They both denied having any knowledge of the murder and appeared surprised that Deborah confessed. Stephanie cried and insisted that although she and her brother didn’t get along, she’d never want him hurt. Then she asked how her mom got Jake out of the house. But at that point, detectives had not told her where Jake had been killed, only that Deborah had admitted to killing him. They were both given polygraphs and they both failed. Police then obtained David and Stephanie’s cell phone records. There was no cell service at the ranch, so the records couldn’t prove who was at the ranch that night. David however had an alibi for the night of the murder and police confirmed that he was in Denver. But Stephanie had sent a text message she sent at 3:17 a.m. on May 16, 2015 (the morning Deborah said she shot Jake) that read, “It’s time to play!” Stephanie deleted it 6 minutes later. Also, sometime after that she made a FB post that said “Have you ever been woken up with such awesome news you wanted to run outside screaming?" She had also posted comments to friends on social media about her mom altering her will so that she was the sole heir of the ranch. When Jake’s autopsy was completed, it confirmed that Jake was likely shot in the head while sleeping. The bullet had not exited his body and so they were able to match it to Deborah’s gun. During another interview in January 2018, David was adamant that he wasn’t involved in the murder or disposing of Jake’s body, but he finally admitted that he knew Jake was dead. In June of 2017 – just a month before the search was conducted on the ranch – he and his friend Jeremy McDonald were working in the corral. Jeremy had been hired as a ranch hand after Jake was gone. David had been on a skid loader moving manure, when he uncovered an upper torso and ribcage partially wrapped in plastic. When he suddenly stopped the loader, Jeremy and Stephanie went to investigate and Stephanie was screaming for him to cover it back up. Then she ran into the house for her mom. When Stephanie came back out a few minutes later, she told them that her mom said it was illegal wild game that Jake had shot, possibly a bear and it had buried it there. She said just cover it back up. And so that’s what David did. But he admitted to detectives that he and Jeremy were pretty sure it was Jake’s remains. David was quoted saying, “Honestly after this and all of that, I have a strong feeling it could have been Steph.” Jeremy McDonald was also interviewed, and he corroborated David’s story about finding Jake’s remains. He also believed Stephanie knew more than she was telling him and David. He also told detectives that since he had worked on the ranch Stephanie was the one in charge, not Deborah. That she would sit around and bark orders at everyone. And that she was very controlling. When asked why he didn’t go to police after discovering the body, Jeremy told them that shortly after Stephanie confronted him and said something like “you know you can never leave, right?” and he was unnerved. He admitted that both he and David were afraid of Stephanie. Prosecutors suspected it was Stephanie was behind the murder and ordered her mother to kill Jake. Then Deborah decided to take the fall for her daughter as she was terminally ill. She wouldn’t be prison long and then Stephanie, David and their son would have the ranch. In March 2018, Deborah Rudibaugh, Stephaine Jackson, and David Jackson were arrested for the murder of Jake Millison. Deborah was charged with first-degree murder, tampering with a deceased human body, abuse of a corpse, and destruction of evidence. Stephaine and David were charged with accessory to first-degree murder, abuse of a corpse, and destruction of evidence. All 3 agreed to plea deals. Deborah Rudibaugh pled guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 40 years in prison. She insisted her daughter had nothing to do with the murder. And she never said she was remorseful for killing her own son. She died in prison in November 2019. She was 70 years old. David Jackson entered and Alford plea for tampering with a human body. (that’s where you don’t admit guilt, but you admit that there’s enough evidence to prove you’re guilty). He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He will be eligible for parole in June 2023. Stephaine Jackson pled guilty to tampering with a deceased human body, the other charges were dropped. She received the maximum sentence of 24 years. She won’t be eligible for parole until 2029. Their son is being raised by David’s family. Sources: Oxygen .com The Denver post .com The cinemaholic .com Wikipedia Snapped season 29, episode 9