The Jerry Story
by David Barth
written December 2001
This is a true story about a man who lived a life that could be made into a movie script.
We'll call this man Jerry. Carol and I first met him when we were attending night classes at Metropolitan State College of Denver during the mid-1970s. Jerry was
the instructor for Carol's Accounting 101 class. His lectures were interesting because he was enthusiastic, dynamic, charismatic, and provided real-life examples to
accounting lessons. Jerry kept the students spellbound with a subject that would have bored those of us who weren't accounting-oriented, were it taught by someone
else. He often described how, using accepted accounting knowledge and principles, a person could leverage a small investment in land into a fortune by building
condos on it.
One evening Carol came home from her class and said that Jerry had invited both of us to his home on the following Saturday to have lunch. When we arrived, we
saw that he lived with his wife and two children, a boy and a girl, in a modest, three-bedroom home in a middle-class neighborhood. After eating lunch, we went out
back of his home where he pointed to some condos being constructed down the block. He said that he was putting his accounting knowledge to work, proving the
principles he taught that you can make a lot of money in real estate. In the ensuing years, we lost track of Jerry until one day, we noticed that two large office
buildings a couple of miles away, had his name on them. We realized that he had, indeed, become wealthy.
Then the oil boom busted in the early 1980s. Our next door neighbor, a small, home builder, went bankrupt, got divorced, and left town. Around the mid-1980s our former
instructor and acquaintance, Jerry, turned up in the newspaper. He had been found shot in the back of the head, gangland style. The papers said that he had been
in great financial difficulty, unable to pay his debts that ran into the millions of dollars. Carol and I presumed that he had borrowed money from the "wrong" people, and
their method for resolving the situation was not like that of the traditional lending company or bank. Perhaps the bad guys told Jerry that it was either going to be him
or his children. It appeared that he was taken into a large field, without a struggle, where he kneeled down and was shot in the back of the head.