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On October 2, 2004, Loma rancher Jay Yount was rounding up cattle in the meadows below Douglas Pass, in a remote corner of Garfield County. As he rode his horse near a lonely road mostly traveled by pickup trucks motoring between northwest Colorado’s gas fields and cow pastures, the sun-bleached skull sitting alone near some brush caught his eye. Taking care to mark the spot with a ribbon, Yount picked up the skull and took it with him as he rode through the chiseled shale landscape. He figured he’d better remember where he found it, because while stumbling across an animal skull in Colorado’s wildlands isn’t unusual, finding a human skull is.
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Seven years earlier and about 70 miles north, in the badlands near the Colorado-Utah border, Marcus Bebb-Jones and his wife, Sabrina, went for a day hike at Dinosaur National Monument. The two would-be entrepreneurs had spent the previous several years struggling to resuscitate the Melrose Hotel in Grand Junction, a turn-of-the-century lodge reeling from its flophouse reputation. The area’s fellow hotel owners saw them—this burly British man with his slight wife usually standing, literally and figuratively, in his shadow—as unassuming but engaged in Grand Junction’s tourism industry. Their employees, British college girls on a work-study program, said the couple occasionally could be argumentative, partly due to the husband’s flirtatious nature with guests. Sabrina could get jealous, they said, but she was always devoted to their three-year-old son Daniel, and no one ever saw any fights between the couple turn violent. “They just seemed like nice, everyday business people trying to make a go of a local business,” says Lynne Sorlye, general manager of the Clarion Hotel in Grand Junction.
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This perception began to unravel after Marcus returned from the September 1997 day trip, alone and seemingly distraught. He told his employees the two had again quarreled over Sabrina’s jealousy. Once they arrived back in Grand Junction, he said, she stormed away and vanished. He had his employees call around to area hotels to see if anyone had seen Sabrina. When that turned up nothing, Bebb-Jones put Daniel in the family’s newly washed van the following evening and drove out of town, telling his employees that he was off to look for his wife in Las Vegas, where she had family and friends. (Police weren’t alerted to Sabrina’s disappearance for still another day, when a Melrose employee filed a missing person report.)
Police say Bebb-Jones did ask around about his wife in Vegas before going on a “playboy” spree, dropping thousands of dollars on prostitutes, designer clothes, and a rented Ferrari. After father and son had been in town for three days, a maid in the Flamingo Hilton Hotel found Daniel, left alone and half-naked in their room. The next day, after police took Daniel into protective custody, a maid in another hotel found Bebb-Jones alive but bloodied by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his jaw. Nearby was a note: “Sabrina, initially you may not think this is the best. I can’t change who I am. I understand your anger, but now as the years pass, that will diminish. This is the only way I can be without you or Daniel. Please don’t hate me. Marcus.”
Garfield County detectives were skeptical. In a 40-page affidavit that reads like a Hollywood screenplay, they wrote that during the hospital interviews Bebb-Jones “seemed more concerned about talking with a lawyer rather than helping find Sabrina,” and a friend of Bebb-Jones told police that he’d gone on the sports car and hookers spree because “he wanted to go out in style.” Investigators found evidence of blood in the van—according to the affidavit, DNA tests later pegged it as 99.99 percent likely that the blood came from a child of Sabrina’s parents—and a Melrose employee was quoted in the affidavit as saying that “everyone at the hotel thought that Marcus had killed Sabrina.” But, unable to find a body, Garfield County police still couldn’t charge Bebb-Jones with a crime.
A year later the suspect sold the Melrose Hotel and split the money with his wife’s estate. During that year he’d been seen frequently in Las Vegas, hitting gaming tables around town, often with a stripper on his arm. He moved in with a Golden Nugget blackjack dealer for a time but soon left Vegas for England, leaving no forwarding address.
In fall 2004, after dental records identified the skull Yount found as Sabrina’s, dozens of searchers combed the nearby meadows but found no more signs of her body, probably because animals had scattered the bones. Investigators have always acted under the assumption that Sabrina was killed on or near Douglas Pass, though they admit they’re not sure. She may have been killed elsewhere and her body was dumped there. Or she may have been dismembered and her body parts scattered.
By this time Bebb-Jones had turned to professional gambling, made a modest name for himself as a Texas Hold ’em player on the British poker circuit, and developed a reputation as a gentleman in the company of scoundrels. “Poker is full of low-life scum, basically,” says an official at the popular Nottingham poker club Dusk Till Dawn who asked not to be identified because of the club’s policy of not discussing its clients. “It used to be little gangsters playing poker in back rooms, but [Bebb-Jones] was the new age of poker.”
For professional players, losing a hand means losing a paycheck, and most pros have quick tempers and outsized egos, according to James Welch, a fellow poker player who knew Bebb-Jones from the Nottingham club. Welch says Bebb-Jones had a reputation as a “tight aggressive,” one who was conservative with bad hands, daring with good hands, and always even-tempered, win or lose. “Usually the better poker players are the more arrogant ones,” Welch says. “He was a real pleasure, a real nice gentleman, to be honest.”
What no one realized at first was that this apparently upstanding newcomer was being tracked by American police. The slow pace of the investigation—it was only after Yount found Sabrina’s skull in 2004 that it picked up again—allowed Bebb-Jones to remain a regular at Dusk Till Dawn until it leaked on British poker forums that police were scrutinizing him. Poker, of course, is all about disguising emotions and keeping hands hidden. Still, when rumors broke about the investigation, the Dusk Till Dawn official says the other players were stunned. “I never got the impression there was anything sinister in his body,” he says. “And I’ve rarely been wrong.”
On the other hand, the official notes, to play the mind-game of poker with a murder on your conscience would “take a lot of balls,” a quality that Bebb-Jones evidently possessed, at least at the tables. “He played [his hands] pretty normal,” Welch says, “but when he had the opportunity, he would go for the jugular.”
By last fall, American authorities had finally gathered enough evidence against Bebb-Jones, and one morning last November Scotland Yard officers arrested him at the home in central England where he lived with his mother and Daniel, now in his teens. Garfield County Sheriff Lou Vallario says he can’t remember a local case that required so much legwork, but he’s convinced they arrested the right man. “When we investigate a case, we go where the evidence takes us,” he says, “and the evidence took us to Marcus Bebb-Jones.”
Since then Bebb-Jones has been fighting extradition. Earlier this year a British judge cleared the way for the transfer after Garfield County prosecutors pledged to take the death penalty off the table. Bebb-Jones still has remaining appeals in England, where his attorneys have argued that it would be inhuman for him to stand trial in a country where, despite prosecutors’ promises, execution still couldn’t be ruled out. Even so, Vallario remains optimistic that judges will eventually hand the suspect over to Garfield County. And back home in England, the Dusk Till Dawn official says Bebb-Jones’ former poker associates are still trying to get their minds around the image of the soft-spoken gentleman gambler as a murderer. “If he is guilty,” he says, “I hope he gets what he deserves.”
David Frey is a freelance writer in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. His website is www.davidfrey.me. E-mail him at letters@5280.com.
How is the ordinary citizen or business owner supposed to know what’s legal and what’s not when it comes to Texas-holdem? In the wake of this weekend’s raid of two social clubs that netted 41 arrests, the Rocky Mountain News tries to clarify the law for readers. I’m still confused. It sounds easy: Poker is OK at games where (1) the people have an existing social relationhip and (2) the host doesn’t charge people to play or take a piece of the action. The News puts it this way:
- To constitute gambling, three factors must be present — consideration, chance and reward. These also can be described as “payment, luck and prize.”
- If an organization charges a donation, fee or other buy-in for a poker tournament or other event, it cannot legally distribute prizes based upon who wins or plays well in the tournament or event. Prizes must be randomly awarded.
- Even if the activity meets the legal definition of “gambling,” it still can be a legal activity if it meets the “social gambling” exception. This exception allows “gambling” that is incidental to a bona fide social relationship,which means the parties must have an established social relationship based upon some common interest other than the gambling activity.
Put into practice, here’s how the rules are enforced: In this weekend’s raids, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation believed the social clubs only served food and beer as a secondary activity.
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“The game here has nothing to do with selling food or drink and has everything to do with profiting from high-stakes poker,” said CBI agent Bob Brown. “This is a way of life. It’s a business. The bar and restaurant down there was secondary.”
But it’s OK for a bar or restaurant to advertise a game and then hold one, so long as it doesn’t charge. It just can’t require players to buy food or drink. It has to hope the players get hungry and thirsty and decide to order on their own. The social clubs raided this weekend say they didn’t charge players to play or take a piece of the action.
….a man identified only as Jonathan, who was not among those arrested and who described himself as a “trustee” of the Hop Sing Tong Club, said players donate money to help pay rent and other bills for the use of the building. The club does not charge anyone to play, he said. “We’re just a bunch of friends wanting to get together to play the game of poker,” he said. He gave a brief tour of the operation, which consisted of four tables, numerous chairs and two TV sets perched above. He called it “a dump.”
That brings us to the definition of “social relationship.”
The state law’s definition of friends gambling together is that the group must have “a bona fide social relationship.” That means each person playing poker has to have an established social relationship based upon some other common interest other than the gambling activity. Brown didn’t believe that was the case at the two places raided over the weekend.
When a bar or restaurant conducts citywide advertising of a game, what kind of “established” social relationship is there, other than playing poker, between those who show up to play? Yet CBI Agent Bob Brown sees no problem.
On the other hand, many restaurants advertising poker games on banners throughout the city aren’t charging players to play, Brown said. Many of those legal games are run by the Denver Poker Tour…..Brian Masters, the tour’s president, said….”The locations pay me to be there.”
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It seems to me that the neighborhood social club, which provides a place to play and some beer and snacks, for which players chip in to cover the cost, is more social and less profit-driven than the bar or restaurant which advertises for players and pays a professional poker tour person for his presence. The bottom line seems to be this: There are more poker games than the authorities have the manpower or inclination to bust. But when they feel like making a raid, they are the ones who get to determine what’s a profit, what’s a social relationship, what’s a primary motive for holding the game. That’s a little too arbitrary for my taste.
