The Long, Strange Trip of the U-Haul Family : L. S. Shoen Once Dreamed of Starting a Family Dynasty. But Now the Business Is Sliding, and the Family Has Been Rocked by Murder.

"She's sick?"

"She's dead on the staircase! There's blood, OK?"

"What is your name?"

"Bente Shoen. I live in the Ski Ranches--in a big log house. There was blood on the bed. Please send somebody."

"OK. You said she's not alive now?"

"I can't tell," the girl sobbed. "Please send somebody."

The call came into the red-brick courthouse in Telluride on Aug. 6, 1990, shortly after seven in the morning. It wasn't the sort of call the dispatcher had come to expect--not in Telluride, the most secluded of Colorado's mountain resorts. In the summer, the town's population drops to fewer than 1,200 people, and locals tend to leave their Victorian homes unlocked while they're out. It's not a place where a child is likely to wake up and find that her mother has met a violent, baffling death.

That was how Sheriff Bill Masters would come to describe what happened to Bente Shoen's mother: baffling, unlikely, outrageous. That morning he arrived at the Ski Ranches--an affluent development tucked among thick stands of aspen on a hillside above the town--to find a few neighbors and passersby gathered outside the $400,000 Shoen home. Inside, the body of 44-year-old Eva Berg Shoen lay at the top of the stairs leading to her bedroom. She had been dead for hours, shot in the back by a .25-caliber pistol.

There was no sign of forced entry, burglary or sexual assault. The family's six dogs had been confined to the basement that night after complaints about their obstreperous barking, and the three children staying in the house--Bente, 10, her brother, Esben, 7, and a visiting friend--hadn't heard a thing.

The bizarre nature of the circumstances wasn't lost on Masters, a short, sturdy Coast Guard veteran who had been Telluride's sheriff for 10 years. This was his first homicide investigation--and he was dealing with an intruder who had slipped past dogs and sleeping children, apparently used a weapon equipped with a silencer and escaped unseen. In Masters' eyes, the killing was beginning to look like a professional job.

But who would want to kill Eva Shoen? A native of Norway, she had arrived in Telluride from Phoenix two years earlier with her second husband and their children. By all accounts, she was a shy, athletic woman whose life revolved around her family and her collection of show dogs. She didn't appear to have any enemies.

Yet Masters didn't have to look far for a possible lead. Eva may not have had enemies, but she had married into a family feud of staggering proportions. Her husband, Samuel W. Shoen, 45, was the oldest son of L. S. Shoen, who had created a product as familiar to the American consumer as Coca-Cola and Kleenex--the U-Haul trailer. Trained as a physician, Sam Shoen had abandoned medicine after his first year of residency to help his father run the family business. He had abruptly resigned in 1987 and had since joined his father and several siblings in an acrimonious series of court battles seeking to wrest control of U-Haul International from two of his younger brothers, Edward J. (Joe) Shoen, 41, and Mark Shoen, 38.

Sam had left Telluride on a business trip only hours before Eva was shot. Contacted by phone at his Phoenix residence, he immediately flew back to Telluride, went into hiding with his children and offered a $250,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of his wife's killer.

Within days, a swarm of reporters had descended on Bill Masters' pantry-sized office, asking questions about the slaying and its possible connection to the Shoen feud. "We have no suspects and no motive," Masters told them. "We are not focusing on a particular individual or a particular corporation."

But Masters wasn't ruling anything out, either. In the next few weeks, he and his deputies made several trips to interview executives at U-Haul's corporate headquarters in Phoenix--too many trips to suit Joe and Mark Shoen, who soon hired their own investigators to look into the murder.

Masters didn't think he had to point a finger at anyone. The Shoens were already doing that themselves. And they were pointing at each other.

LEONARD SAMUEL Shoen picks his way through the blizzard of correspondence and legal briefs strewn across the makeshift office in his modest Las Vegas home. He props his bare feet on the edge of his cluttered desk, snatches up an oversized paperback and snorts as he thumbs through it.