A police chief in a small Colorado town is embroiled in a growing scandal after his teenage stepson was charged with violently raping a girl in the family home and a local newspaper that reported on the allegations was stolen from its shelves.
The Ouray County Plaindealer was first to report the arrest of Nate Dieffenderffer, the stepson of Ouray Police Chief Jeff Wood, along with co-defendants Gabriel Trujillo and Ashton Whittington.
The three teenagers were arrested last month on warrants on suspicion of sexual assault. This was based on allegations that they repeatedly forcibly raped a 17-year-old girl in Wood's home in May while the police chief and other family members slept.
After the Plaindealer published a cover story on the allegations on Thursday, nearly every copy was stolen from shelves in Ouray County, according to associate editor Mike Wiggins.
“If you hoped to silence or intimidate us, you have failed miserably. We'll find out who did this. And another edition is imminent,” Wiggins wrote on X.
The Ouray County Plaindealer was the first to report the arrests. Nearly every copy of the issue was stolen from shelves around Ouray County, according to the report
The Plaindealer report, written by Wiggins' wife and co-editor Erin McIntyre, extensively details the sexual assault allegations contained in the Colorado Bureau of Investigation's arrest affidavit in the case.
The 17-year-old accuser told investigators she screamed and fought as she was raped at least three times by two different people in a bedroom and bathroom on May 14, 2023.
At the time of the alleged assault, Wittington had just turned 18 and they were celebrating his birthday, while Trujillo was 19 and Dieffenderffer was just days away from his 18th birthday.
The accuser described coming to Dieffenderffer's three men's home and drinking some seltzer and gin before passing out on a bed in the house.
She said she passed out on a bed and when she woke up she found her clothes had been removed and Dieffenderffer was on top of her having sex with her. She said she tried to fight back but was held back.
She said one of the male suspects laughed, but another sat in a chair “horrified” but was unable to help her.
The accuser then said she was taken across the hall to a restroom and raped by two different people.
Hours after Colorado published an article about the alleged violent sexual assault of a teenage girl at the police chief's home, hundreds of copies of the newspaper were stolen from nearly every newsstand in the county. Pictured: Ouray County Plaindealer newspaper rack
“I remember really trying to scream so someone could hear me and screaming because it was so painful,” she told investigators.
She said she drifted in and out of consciousness and broke a tooth on the bathroom floor as her head was held down.
The accuser said when she regained consciousness, she fled the house around 4:30 a.m. but couldn't find her clothes and grabbed a sweatshirt from a pile of laundry.
The sweatshirt was later determined to belong to Police Chief Wood, who was not charged or accused of any wrongdoing in the case.
After contacting a friend, the accuser went to the hospital that same day for a sexual assault exam where evidence was collected.
An investigator with the Ouray County Sheriff's Office took an initial report at the hospital, but the case was later transferred to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, presumably to rule out any conflict of interest.
Investigators say DNA evidence from a vaginal swab involving Trujillo and Dieffenderffer matched genetic material recovered from a bite wound.
Trujillo spoke to investigators and said he and Dieffenderffer had previously had a consensual three-way sexual relationship, the affidavit said.
He claimed he was just a “witness” to the events of May 14, saying Dieffenderffer and the accuser went to the bathroom and came out 10 minutes later fully clothed, “and everything seemed fine.”
He also called the teen a “pathological liar” and someone who was attention seeking, according to the report.
Trujillo, Dieffenderffer and Whittington are free on bail and could not be reached for comment.
Wood, the police chief, did not immediately respond to questions from Friday afternoon.
In the meantime, the Plaindealer couple have vowed to continue pursuing the case.
On
Founded in 1877, the Plaindealer claims to be the second oldest continuously published newspaper on Colorado's Western Slope.
The weekly newspaper covers local news from rugged Ouray County, population 4,874, north of the Telluride ski slopes.
Wiggins and McIntyre, both former reporters for the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, bought the Plaindealer in 2019.
The couple not only runs the business, but also writes many articles that appear in the newspaper.
“We invested in the Plaindealer because we believe every community, even small ones, deserves good journalism,” the couple said in a 2021 interview.
“At a time when headlines are full of stories about newspapers being bought up by hedge funds and plundered for profit, newsrooms being gutted and printing presses going out of business, we have invested in a weekly publication and doubled down on journalism.”