14 DAY TRIAL // 57-year-old Nancy Pfister has been found murdered in her home in Aspen, and the entire local community is now outraged at this heinous crime being performed in the exclusive mountain resort, as well as saddened by the loss of a person who has been named as a “local blueblood.”
According to Page Six, Nancy's body was found late last month, on February 26, in one of the closets in her home and the main suspects in the case are the couple she was renting out her home to while she was traveling in Australia.
The victim had just returned from her trip for several days as several issues arose with her tenants that were supposed to watch her home while she was away, but failed to do their duties. The couple, made up of William Francis Styler II, 65, and wife Nancy Styler, 62, were arrested this Monday on suspicion of murder.
Other members of the Aspen community say she was a well-liked member of their town that, in her younger days, “she’d been one of the golden girls of Aspen, seriously into the party scene. She hung out with the Kennedys, Jack Nicholson, Cher, Michael Douglas.” In fact, she is reported to have been briefly engaged to Michael Douglas.
The daughter of Art Pfister, the man who developed the Buttermilk Mountain ski area in 1958 and the granddaughter of Robert Haas, a partner of Random House Publishing, Nancy was a graduate of the Brooklyn Pratt Institute and was a regular of the inner circle of writer Hunter S. Thompson and other Hollywood stars who came up to the ski resort.
Speaking on the incident, Pfister's daughter Juliana said, “How could someone just be so angry that they got kicked out of a house? There's got to be something more. It's hard to understand that.”
In January, Pfister wrote on her Facebook page that she had to cut her trip to Australia short “I’d like to stay in Australia but the people that were supposedly taking care of my house are not doing what they said they would do and they’re not paying rent and they haven’t paid utilities.”
William and Nancy Styler had reportedly fallen behind on payments to Pfister and battling to regain an almost one million dollar debt from an attorney they claimed had overcharged them. The lawyer, John Powell, eventually filed for bankruptcy and this led to their debt to be erased.
Local sheriff Joe DiSalvo told the press “This case has been hard from the beginning on all of us, because of the nature of it. First-degree murders don’t happen here too often. That’s good. When they do, we take it very seriously, and we storm it. We throw everything we’ve got at it.”
The Stylers have been charged with first-degree murder and have appeared in a Pitkin County District Court on Tuesday to see a judge rule that they continue to be held without bond. Their next scheduled court appearance has been settled on March 17.