51 years ago, a 19-year-old college student named Barbara Anne Kowalsik was found dead in a snowcovered clearing in the San Isabel National Forest outside Pueblo, Colorado on the morning of December 1st, 1972.
The cause of death was determined to be hypothermia compounded by a blunt force head injury consistent with a fall.
She had gone out alone on a cross-country ski trail the previous afternoon. A fast-moving snowstorm had closed the mountain by 3:00.
The case was classified as accidental death, and it would have remained classified that way for the 50 years that followed, except for one thing that a PBlo County deputy named Gerald Marsh noticed when he arrived at the scene at 7:40 in the morning before the rest of the search and rescue team, before anything had been disturbed.
In the snow on the lee side of Barbara’s body, protected from the overnight wind by the curve of her left shoulder, she had written something with her finger in the hours before she died.
The fresh snow had been deep enough, and the pressure sufficient to leave a clear impression in the white surface around her.
What she had written was a name, a five-letter first name traced in the snow by a 19-year-old woman who was dying of cold and injury in a clearing in the mountains and had decided to use the only tool she had left to tell someone what had happened.
The name was Tommy. Thomas Edward Briggs was 22 years old in November of 1972.
He was a fellow student at the University of Southern Colorado where Barbara was in her second year of an elementary education program.
He had been on the trail with her the previous afternoon. He provided an account that placed him off the mountain by 2:30, corroborated by witnesses at the trail head who had seen his car and seen him leave.
He was interviewed twice in December of 1972. He was not charged. The name in the snow was noted in the case file as an ambiguous piece of evidence that could not be definitively interpreted as an accusation.
The case was closed as accidental. 51 years later, Thomas Briggs died at the age of 73 in Denver, and his daughter found among his personal belongings a four-page handwritten document on yellow legal paper dated January 15th, 1973.
And the ambiguity of Tommy in the snow became at last unambiguous. This is the story of Barbara Anne Kowaltic and it begins as it must with a young woman who had the presence of mind in the last hours of her life to leave behind the only evidence she could.
Pueblo, Colorado in the fall of 1972 was a steel city with a university on its edge.
The University of Southern Colorado on Orman Avenue, a first generation college institution serving the children of working families who had not previously had access to higher education.
Barbara Kowaltic was one of those students. Her father had worked at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company for 22 years.
Her mother taught elementary school in Pueblo. Barbara was the first member of her immediate family to attend college, and she had chosen education because she wanted to come back to the kind of school her mother taught in and do the same work, which seemed to her one of the most useful things a person could do.
She was in her second year in the fall of 1972, majoring in elementary education, doing well by every academic measure and already asking her adviser about graduate school options, which her adviser described as a sign of a student who was thinking past the credential rather than merely toward it.
She had grown up in Pueblo and had skied the San Isabel trails since she was 8 years old, which was why she had not hesitated to go out on the afternoon of November 30th, even though the forecast was uncertain.
She knew those trails. She had skied them dozens of times. She knew how to read the mountain signals, and when necessary, how to turn back.
Thomas Briggs was from Grand Junction. He was athletic, outdoors oriented, and had been in Barbara’s cohort at UCO for two semesters by the fall of 1972.
He had made clear his interest in a relationship that Barbara had not elected to pursue, and he had continued to make it clear despite Barbara’s responses, which had been kind but not ambiguous.
She had told her roommate Gail Endicott in late October that she was trying to handle the situation carefully.
She used that word carefully and that she had decided to have a direct conversation with Thomas to close the matter clearly.
She told Gail on the morning of November 30th that Thomas had asked to come skiing with her and that she had agreed because she thought the trail would be a good place for the conversation she needed to have.
She was going to tell him plainly that she wasn’t interested in continuing and then they were going to ski back and that would be the end of it.
She was 19 years old and she was handling an unwanted situation with more care and directness than most people twice her age could manage.
She deserved the outcome that sensible adults in good faith trying to resolve a human problem deserve.
The afternoon of November 30th, 1972 brought a fastmoving stormfront off the Sanrato Mountains that reached the San Isabel Trail network by early afternoon.
Visibility dropped to near zero by 3:00. The search and rescue team that went out the following morning found Barbara in the clearing at 7:40 in the morning after an overnight search had been suspended due to conditions.
The blunt force injury to the right side of her head was consistent with a fall against a rock in low visibility.
The hypothermia had been the cause of death, but the fall had been the inciting event.
She had fallen, been unable to move effectively, and had died of exposure overnight in conditions that would have been lethal to anyone who could not reach shelter within an hour or two of injury.
Deputy Gerald Marsh’s decision to photograph the clearing before anyone else arrived was the decision that preserved everything.
He had been with the PBLO County Sheriff’s Department for 4 years and had attended a training workshop on crime scene documentation the previous spring in which the instructor had said with a specificity that had stayed with him.
When you are the first on a scene that might be anything, document everything before you decide what it is.
He documented the clearing. He documented the snow around Barbara’s body. He documented the name on the le side of her shoulder before anyone’s bootprint crossed the area.
Thomas Briggs was at the trail head when the evening search was called. Two separate skiers confirmed he had been at the trail head by midafter afternoon, that his car was in the lot, that he had driven away before the search got underway.
His account that he had turned back from the trail when the weather deteriorated, skied to the trail head, and driven home was confirmed by the witnesses.
There was nothing in December of 1972 to contradict it except the name written in the snow, which could not, without additional evidence, be definitively read as an accusation.
Gail Endicott gave investigators a full account of everything she knew about Thomas and Barbara’s situation.
She told them about the pattern of unwanted attention and about Barbara’s plan to have the conversation on the trail.
This information was documented in the case file. Investigators considered it. They also considered that Thomas had an alibi, that the death was consistent with accidental causes, that there was no physical evidence tying him to any crime, and that the name in the snow remained ambiguous.
The district attorney reviewed the file and declined to charge. Accidental death. Case closed. Gail Endicott had spent 51 years knowing what she knew.
She became a social worker in Pueblo, spent her career working with domestic violence survivors, and had thought many times across those years about the specific combination of what she had known in October 1972 and what had happened to Barbara in November.
She had mentioned it to her husband once in the 1980s and then let it go dormant because there was nothing to be done with it and it was not on most days something she could afford to think about too closely.
She had kept it as she kept other difficult things from her professional life in a compartment that was accessible but not front-facing.
When investigators called her in April 2023, she answered on the second ring. She provided the account of the morning of conversation without being specifically prompted.
She had been carrying that detail for 51 years, waiting for someone to ask the question that would make it the right thing to say.
Thomas Briggs had returned to Grand Junction after the 197273 school year ended, leaving the University of Southern Colorado without completing his degree.
A departure that at the time could be explained by any number of ordinary reasons and which he later attributed when the subject came up in the way the subject occasionally came up with people who had known him at UECO to a family situation that required him to return home.
He established himself as an electrician’s apprentice in Grand Junction, completed his licensing in 1976, and built a business that eventually employed four people, and had a solid regional reputation for commercial and residential work.
He married his first wife in 1978 and had two children before the marriage ended in 1989.
He married his second wife in 1992 and spent the following decades in what appeared to everyone around him to be a settled and productive middle age.
He was active in his church. He coached his children’s youth soccer teams for six years.
His employees described him as fair and demanding in the way of a man who held himself to a high standard and expected the same.
His neighbors described him as someone who helped when help was offered and did not impose when it wasn’t.
He was the person who shows up with a chainsaw after a windstorm takes a tree down across your driveway.
The person who brings a meal when someone on the block has surgery. He was unremarkable in the specific way that is not an absence of character but a deliberate cultivation of the appearance of decency.
He moved to Denver in 2011 after his second wife’s health began to require access to a larger medical infrastructure.
He downsized his business to a consulting role, then retired entirely in 2016. He spent his retirement years in the manner of active men who find themselves without a project.
He hiked, he fished, he built birdhouses in his garage workshop. He was in Denver exactly what he had been in Grand Junction and in the years at UCO before everything that had happened in November of 1972.
A man who appeared to be exactly what he appeared to be. His daughter Clare described him in a brief and carefully worded statement she released through an attorney after the document became public as someone she had loved as a father and still mourned as a father and who had done something that she could not excuse and also could not be the last person alive to know about.
She said finding the document had required her to simultaneously hold the person she had known and the person the document described and that she was not going to pretend that was anything other than what it was.
One of the hardest things she had done. She has not said publicly whether she believes her father had intended for the document to be found.
The envelope was unlabeled. It was in a box of personal items that any child would eventually open.
It was on yellow legal paper dated in his handwriting. He had kept it for 50 years.
Whether keeping it was a private unbburdening or a form of record he needed to exist or a document he intended to preserve for exactly the possibility his daughter eventually acted on.
Only Thomas Briggs could have said, and Thomas Briggs was gone. What Barbara Kowaltic had written in the snow in November of 1972 was finally confirmed as an accusation in the spring of 2023.
What she had known in that clearing, cold, injured, alone in the dark of a Colorado mountain night was that Thomas had been there and had not helped and had gone.
She had written the only word she could write. She had held it with the curve of her shoulder against the overnight wind.
She had done everything that was possible for a 19-year-old woman in those circumstances, which was to tell the truth one more time in the snow in the last hours before the cold finished what the fall had started.
Every case on this channel represents weeks of research, verifying facts, and honoring lives that deserved better.
If this work matters to you, please like and subscribe. Tell us in the comments where in the world you are watching from.
Now, let’s get back to Barbara. Thomas Briggs died in Denver in January of 2023 of congestive heart failure.
He was 73 years old and had spent 50 years working as an electrical contractor.
First in Grand Junction and then across the Denver metro area. He had married twice and had two adult children and had by all external measures lived the kind of long and ordinary life that Barbara Kowaltic had deserved and was not given.
His daughter Clare sorting through his Denver apartment two months after his death found a cardboard box labeled personal in his closet.
Inside the box were items of obvious sentiment, photographs, his military discharge papers, letters from his parents, and a sealed envelope unlabeled containing four pages of yellow legal paper covered in his handwriting dated January 15th, 1973.
She read it at the kitchen table of the apartment her father had lived in.
She read it once through quickly and then sat for a long time. Then she read it again.
Then she called her brother. The document described what had actually happened on the San Isabel Trail on November 30th, 1972.
Thomas had not left at 2:30. He had been present when Barbara fell. She had slipped on iced over rock in the near zero visibility of the storm.
And he had watched and not helped and not gone for assistance. And he had left her in the clearing injured and unable to rise and not able to move effectively and had skied to the trail head and established himself there as a witness could confirm and driven away.
He had made a decision in the minutes after Barbara fell and the decision had been to not be connected to what had happened and he had lived with that decision for 50 years.
He described in the document approaching her to try to erase the name she had written in the snow.
He said he had gotten close enough to see it and then could not go further because going further required passing her face and he had been unable to look at her face.
He had left the name. He had left the clearing. He had driven home. Claire and her brother brought the document to the PBLO County District Attorney’s Office in April of 2023.
They have not spoken publicly about what reading it cost them. The DAW’s office issued a formal statement reclassifying Barbara Kowalik’s death from accidental to homicide by criminal abandonment.
Thomas Briggs, deceased, faced no charge and no trial. Barbara’s brother, Michael, 66 years old in 2023, attended the press statement in Pueblo.
He told a reporter afterward that Barbara had written the name in the snow because that was who she was.
That she had always been someone who paid attention and did not miss things and did not leave the important things unsaid when she had a way to say them.
That in the last hours of her life, she had done the clearest, most specific thing available to her.
He said she knew. She always knew. She just needed someone to finally catch up.
Barbara Anne Kowalik was 19 years old. She was studying to be a teacher. She was already thinking about graduate school.
She had been skiing the San Isabel trails since she was 8 years old, and she knew the mountain, and she had gone out on a November afternoon with a plan to have a necessary conversation.
She wrote a man’s name in the snow in the last light of that afternoon, and she held it in the shelter of her shoulder through the night.
She deserved someone to read it correctly. It took 51 years, but it was read.
Before you go, do you think Clare Briggs made the right decision in bringing her father’s document to the district attorney?
And what do you think that decision cost her personally? What does the reclassification to criminal abandonment mean legally and morally when no charge can be filed?
And how many other accidental death rulings from the 1960s and 1970s do you think were something other than accidents?
Justice or as close to it as 51 years allows found Barbara Anne Kowalik through a document that a man could not throw away and a daughter who decided the truth was worth more than protecting her father’s legacy.
Stories like hers are why this channel exists. Subscribe if you believe truth is always worth pursuing.
More cases are in the description. Thank you for watching.
