“May Bob help to understand it all,” wrote Jim Blanning on the note he dropped off at The Aspen Times on New Year’s Eve between 7:02 p.m. and 7:45 p.m., about seven hours before shooting himself in the head.
Blanning was referring to Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis. His scrawled note was written on a copy of a letter he had presented to bank employees earlier that afternoon threatening “mass death” and demanding $60,000 from each bank.
Braudis said Thursday he was still pondering what Blanning meant by the note left at the Times, although he said he had known Blanning for 40 years and had had plenty of experiences with him.
Blanning, who was 72, moved to Aspen when he was a young boy and grew up exploring the local mountains. He developed an extensive knowledge in the geology of the Aspen area, which was once one of the largest silver-producing areas in Colorado history.
“He was an encyclopedia of the mineral and geological reality here as far as silver and gold mining,” Braudis said. “Mineral extraction was a big part of his avocation and occupation.”
In the late 1980s, Blanning was convinced that Aspen Mountain was about to slide into town. After many meetings with city officials explaining the geology of the mountain, the city and county agreed to place monitors on Aspen Mountain to track any movement.
Movement was indeed found but experts noted the mountain had also been moving slightly for many, many years.
Blanning also mastered the arcane world of mining claims dating back to the 1880s. The claims are typically rectangular pieces of property. On maps, the claims present a patchwork quilt of ownership of both the land on the surface and the minerals underneath.
“He was always looking for the mother lode,” Braudis said.
At one point, Aspen Skiing Co. built Ruthie’s restaurant at the bottom of Ruthie’s Run on Aspen Mountain. It turned out that a tiny corner of the restaurant was on a mining claim that Blanning owned. He forced the company to settle with him by giving him two lifetime ski passes and a new snowcat, Braudis said.
Braudis said Blanning had the new snowcat parked one night outside of the J-Bar and took him for a ride in it.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Braudis said Blanning began to focus on getting rich by selling the surface of his mining claims for real estate development.
“That was the genesis of a lot of his problems,” Braudis said. “Instead of trying to get rich by hard rock mining he decided that real estate was the route to take. And that led to his mining claim scam and his sentencing to 16 years in the Colorado State Penitentiary.”
According to the Denver Post, Blanning was sentenced in Rio Blanco District Court in 1996 to 16 years in prison for racketeering and a series of white-collar crimes. According to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the crimes included forgery of deeds and wills, fraudulent security sales and forged money, the Post reported.
Jim Blanning
Braudis said that some people felt that Blanning’s conviction for fraudulent sales of mining claims was unduly harsh because he was prosecuted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, and his conviction by a jury in Meeker resulted in a mandatory minimum sentence of 16 years.
And because Blanning had once also been convicted of indecent exposure — for confronting a group of local elected officials while apparantly wearing only a dildo — he was also treated as a sexual offender by prison authorities — and other prisoners — when he arrived at Canon City.
Blanning was out on parole and had been living in Denver for the last three years, according to the Post.
In September 2005, he was in Aspen and had a contact with the Aspen Police Department, whose records indicate he was trying to reclaim goods left here while he was in prison.
His parole was scheduled to end in Oct., 2009.
Whether Blanning could have fashioned a return to a “normal” life after parole will now forever be an open question.
Despite his obvious flaws, Braudis and others remembered him as a good man.
“He could be the life of a party,” Braudis said. “He was a witty and intelligent man. He was a womanizer — he had six or seven ex-wives. He was fun. And if you needed help, he would be there.”
Joanie Klar Bruce, who was married to Blanning for about eight months in the early 1970s, remembers every rowdy cowboy and colorful character in the valley seemed to be at their wedding at T-Lazy 7.
“It’s so sad,” Bruce said Thursday. ”Frustration on land use, that is what all this comes out of.”
Bruce said she would help organize a memorial to Blanning so that people could show him the “friendship he deserves.”
Anyone working at either Wells Fargo or Vectra banks on Wednesday may not feel Blanning deserves much sympathy, however.
“He traumatized a lot of people with the potential of explosions,” Braudis said. “But I don’t think he would have ever wished actual harm to other people.”
Officials say the bombs and the notes that Blanning left in Aspen on New Year’s Eve amounted to “attempted bank robbery and extortion,” but the incident was also perhaps Blanning’s last stand and some sort of twisted message to Aspen and Pitkin County.
“I think last night had some dramatic component to it and that was the plan for whatever reason,” Braudis said. “I can’t project what the goal was. I don’t think he ever had anything against the guys who own restaurants and nightclubs.”
Braudis said he had seen Blanning in Denver in both February and October of this year and that Blanning was working on several new projects and trying to attract investors, but was struggling to do so because of his history.
“He was promising large returns,” Braudis said.
Blanning was showing Braudis rock samples and maps and pointing out where all the silver was in Aspen.
“He still always believed there were millions of tons of high-grade sliver ore in the Roaring Fork Valley,” Braudis said. “He held onto that dream until it slipped out of his fingers last night.”
bgs@aspendailynews.com
