Toddler’s burial site rends families

TWIN FALLS, Idaho – Nearly 150 miles of highway separate the Sunset Memorial Park on the edge of this Snake River farm town from the Mt. McCaleb Cemetery in Mackay, beneath the tall peaks of central Idaho’s Big Lost River Valley. That highway keeps Leslie Olsen’s children apart.

In May 2004, her 21-month-old son Ian Michael Nice wandered off and drowned in one of Twin Falls’ many irrigation ditches. He’s buried at Sunset Memorial.

Four days before Christmas 2005, Olsen’s estranged husband, Jim Junior Nice, killed their three remaining children – 6-year-old twins, Justin and Spencer, and 2-year-old Raquel – by poisoning their pudding and hot chocolate. In his words, he “didn’t want the kids to suffer through the divorce.”

The three are buried in Mackay, Olsen’s ancestral home where her paternal grandfather also lies.

Now, Olsen is suing to exhume Ian’s body and have it laid next to his siblings. Though Jimmy and Claire Nice, Jim Junior Nice’s parents, own the plot in Twin Falls where Ian is buried, Olsen argues she has custody of the child’s body. A state court has given the Nices until Wednesday to challenge the plan.

“I’d like to be able to have a conversation with all four of my children at once,” Olsen said recently. “And catch up with them on everything their mom has been up to, and to look around at the mountains and to see what God has created. And it will be like they’re here with me.”

Jim Junior Nice, 34, pleaded guilty last September to three counts of first-degree murder, to avoid a possible death sentence. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Jimmy and Claire Nice said Friday they’re uncertain if they’ll fight Olsen, but they want Ian to stay at Sunset Memorial.

It’s just a few miles from their small home near downtown Twin Falls, out past the Motor-Vu Drive Inn theater. Jimmy’s parents are buried next to Ian; so is Jimmy’s long-dead brother, who died at 18 months.

“He’s our one bright spot,” Claire Nice says, of visits to Ian. “I don’t know why they just can’t leave him in peace.”

Family friction

Even before the deaths of the children, there was friction between the Nice and Olsen families, the families say.

When Ian drowned May 9, 2004, tensions escalated.

Olsen, then a 25-year-old mother of four, was at home at the time.

Fingers were pointed, both families said.

She separated from Jim Junior Nice, then sought divorce three months later.

The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare took Justin, Spencer and Raquel and gave temporary guardianship to Olsen’s parents in Hagerman, Idaho. Today, she concedes neither she nor her former husband had the skills to raise four children. They were “worse than paycheck-to-paycheck” poor, frustrated, overmatched.

Eventually, an agreement was reached: Living with her parents, Olsen would be the main custodian during the school year, while Jim Junior Nice would have the children summers and some holidays. By then, he was working at the Idaho Department of Juvenile Corrections; she was a student at College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls.

Jim Junior Nice didn’t respond to requests for an interview from prison.

Olsen’s parents also declined to comment for this story.

But Claire Nice, who treasures the Japanese origami foldings her son now sends her from the North Idaho Correctional Institution in Orofino, says she’s still trying to understand what happened the day he decided to kill his own three kids. She does know this: Jim Junior Nice wanted his former wife back.

In 2006, a doctor concluded Jim Junior Nice killed his children, then attempted suicide because he thought it was the best way “to move to an ‘after life,’ where they would be together and not have to return the children to the (maternal) grandparents,” according to court documents reviewed by the Associated Press.

Olsen believes her former husband killed the three children out of spite. He was angry at her for not reconciling – he had trailed her on the college campus – and he’d failed to overcome his son’s drowning.

Waiting, hoping

Olsen is awaiting the court’s decision in the case before she can transport her son’s remains to Mackay. She’s already received a disinterment permit from the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare and has found a funeral home to do the work.

She keeps a framed picture of Justin, Spencer and Raquel – taken by a professional portrait photographer – on the back seat of the two-door Chevrolet that she drives between home in Hagerman and classes in Twin Falls. The problem is, Ian isn’t in it; it was taken after he died.

“I’m so sorry to start to lose what my kids look like when they were all together,” said Olsen. “That’s the toughest thing.”