Five years ago local filmmaker Allen Ross seemed to drop off the face of the earth. He called his father in Naperville from Saint Louis on October 16, 1995, while he was shooting a documentary on the Mississippi River for Christian Bauer, a German filmmaker who had frequently employed Ross as a cameraman. About a month later someone in Bauer’s office had a brief phone conversation with Ross and arranged to wire his final paycheck.
Now all the speculation about Ross’s whereabouts may have reached an unhappy conclusion. In late July the Cheyenne Police Department held a press conference to announce that a body had been found buried in the crawl space of a house at 303 E. 17th, the Samaritan Foundation’s last known address. “We are treating this as a case of homicide,” Lieutenant Bill Stanford told the local press. He refused to provide the name of the victim, pending a positive ID, but admitted he had already contacted the Ross family.
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Around the time Denis Greene contacted the Cheyenne police, someone identifying herself as Linda Greene faxed the police in Guthrie, Oklahoma. In her writings, Linda Greene referred to zombies, vampires, and the Antichrist. She warned her followers not to talk on the telephone because vampires would steal their souls through the phone lines. That’s why she always preferred to fax. “She was claiming that people were out to get her and set her up for killing Allen Ross,” said Guthrie police officer Rex Smith, who told me he’d last talked to Ross in May of 1995, when the Samaritan Foundation was first relocating. “We got that fax in the latter part of 1996. . . . She had made accusations that Denis Greene and somebody else had killed Allen Ross. That she had nothing to do with it. That it had happened in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in November of 1995. That’s where they’d find the body. It was really off the wall. . . . Our hands were tied because we had no proof.”
Why the police chose to resume their search after five years is an easier story to tell—attribute it to the power of television.
Early on they interviewed Denis Greene, who was happy to cooperate but less than happy about being filmed. The pair encouraged him to go back to the police, but Emerzian describes their dealings as a “comedy of errors”: “He would call Lieutenant Stanford and leave a message or the police would call him back and he wouldn’t be available.”
MSNBC wanted to film Allen Ross’s story for a new show, Missing Persons, to be aired this fall. The call to Bauer at first looked to be a godsend—they were running low on money, and the cable network suggested pooling resources. “We were in a difficult spot,” Bauer recalls.
