By 2009, the Uden and Holtz cases had blended into one big case without a case.
SA Lonnie TeBeest still worked it between his other cases, on evenings and weekends as he could. He continued to harvest tidbits of information about Gerald and Alice, Virginia and her boys, and Ronnie Holtz—little pieces that added color to their edges without completing the whole puzzle—but he focused on the Remount Ranch's old gold mine. He made a hundred phone calls to cover all his bases, from landowner agreements to heavy equipment rentals to forensic archaeologists. He even studied whether a county bridge between Cheyenne and the ranch would be strong enough for heavy equipment.
His gut couldn't tell him for sure, and he wasn't clairvoyant, but thirty years of rabbit trails all led to one spot. Anybody with a lick of sense—an academy recruit, a dropout from any Law Enforcement 101 class, even a serious viewer of crime dramas—knew it. It was imperative to explore that abandoned gold mine for the single piece of evidence he needed to break this bewildering puzzle wide open: Ronnie Holtz.
And he couldn't be sure that he wouldn't find Virginia, Richard, and Reagan down there too. Was it beyond the realm of possibility that Gerald would repeat Alice's “perfect” crime? Why mess with his beloved wife's macabre success? It was certainly possible that Alice had dictated to her pliant husband exactly how to do it.
TeBeest had all the permissions he needed to excavate on the ranch…except his own bosses’. To him, they resisted every big idea. The more TeBeest protested, the more they seemed to dig in. It was starting to feel personal.
But every Wyoming winter has its thaw. Spring finally came, and the DCI bosses gave their tepid approval to explore the Remount mine. Not a full-on excavation—there was no money in the budget for a $50,000 fishing expedition, no desire to indulge a bellyaching agent, and no trust of TeBeest's gut—but they approved a couple shovels and a little travel money. Yeah, that might shut him up. One catch: TeBeest wouldn't lead the team. The director himself would be there to supervise, but his crime lab chief, Steve Holloway, would be in charge.
In exchange for their help (or protection), some of TeBeest's fellow agents made him promise to be good and not say or do anything that might hurt himself…or their bosses. He agreed.
So in late May 2009, with the consent of the weather and the ranch owners, DCI's three top administrators led a team of twelve agents, seven top-notch crime lab technicians, Dr. Rick Weathermon, and a couple of his UW grad students to find what might have been hidden under a secluded hillside in Wyoming's high plains.
In fact, they were about to burrow into three distinct holes—three different aborted nineteenth-century pits of varying depths—that lay very close to each other on the same hill. Two of them were just modest indentations where some long-dead prospector scooped some dirt and rocks but quickly abandoned them for more promising pay dirt. The bigger, deeper McLaughlin Shaft was the centerpiece, but the diggers couldn't ignore the two shallower depressions that might be deep enough to be Ronnie Holtz's grave.
The motley team split up. The crime lab specialists and the DCI executives focused on the main shaft, while most of their agents scratched and scraped in the smaller depressions.
The shallower holes, which had apparently also been used as the ranch's trash dumps over the years, yielded the first booty when an agent found a discarded earring. A young DCI agent named Tina Trimble, one of the few female agents since Lynne Callaghan broke the gender barrier almost twenty years before, found a few clothing scraps, including a zipper and two clothing snaps that might have been from a Western shirt. Over the next few hours, the team sifted a ton of Wyoming dirt through Weathermon's special screens and found other garbage: various cartridge casings, a metal watchband, some old bottles, a belt buckle, a scrap of a sock, and older artifacts that couldn't possibly be related to this case.
Down about six feet into one hole, the agents found some Depression-era car parts, distinctive bottles, and other items that suggested they had hit a layer of junk that had been discarded long before any mid-1970s murder victim. He wasn't there.
The other hole was even more trivial, and it was also abandoned after lunch when they found artifacts in a junk layer dating to 1964. Ronnie Holtz wasn't there either.
Ah, but the big hole, already about twenty-five feet deep, was different. It was corked like a wine bottle with four or five feet of snow, which acted as natural refrigeration for whatever lay below. It wouldn't thaw on its own until July, when the sun rose higher in the sky, but they couldn't wait. They'd have to dig it out before they could see what was down there.
TeBeest didn't know exactly what they'd find, but the McLaughlin Shaft held a lot of hope and promise…and more ghosts than he imagined.
TeBeest was told it might also contain the remains of a filly named Misty, great-grandfoal of the horse that supposedly inspired author Mary O'Hara's famous Flicka. The colt died around the time of Ronnie Holtz's disappearance and was chucked in the hole with other dead livestock.
Then there was Jefe, a pet German shepherd/husky mix that Ted recalled tossing in the mine in the early 1970s. Jefe had tangled with a wild coyote in broad daylight while Alice and toddler Ted watched from the porch. The coyote was killed and hauled away. Fearing the odd-acting coyote might be rabid, Don Prunty shot the dog and dumped him in the mine. The county's veterinarian later determined the coyote had a brain tumor, not rabies. The protective Jefe died for nothing.
But if the diggers found the bones of a good-sized dog and a colt close together, they might find Holtz nearby.
One agent started digging, inches at a time. First snow, then dirt. Only it wasn't so much dirt as hard-packed carrion, decay, and death dreck.
Every bone—and there were plenty—was closely inspected by Weathermon. A small herd of animal carcasses had been dropped to rot in that morbid maw. Here was a small white box containing a pet's cremains that the ranch manager identified as a favorite dog that had died only eight years before, in 2001. Here was a plastic bag full of fermented animal guts that almost made everybody vomit when it suddenly burst and spilled rotten slop on the ground. Here was a dead calf's white plastic ear tag that identified it as the offspring of a prize cow named Mistiq; it had been dead about twelve years. Here were bowling-ball-sized clumps of adipocere, a greasy-gooey soap known as “grave wax” that sometimes congeals like putrid cottage cheese from a decomposing body's soft tissues—all probably from fairly recently dead animals.
Up on the lip, Weathermon—who really wanted desperately to be down in that prodigious hole, digging—soon amassed the biggest collection of cow bones he'd ever seen.
But it wasn't without risk. Once the snow had been removed, the walls of the shaft tapered inward, cramping the digging area. It was a crisp forty degrees deep inside; the surface temperature was more than twenty degrees higher. An agent questioned whether the rancid air down there might carry poisonous chemicals or bacteria. Worse, somebody worried aloud that the diggers might be standing on a false floor of frozen carcasses; if they punched through, anybody in the hole might plunge sixty feet to the black, frozen bottom.
They'd scraped down only about two feet when the digging was abruptly halted.
In midafternoon, Holloway, an ex-cop who had experience in technical rock climbing and mountain rescues, declared the risk of a cave-in greater than the chances of finding any murder victims. He closed down the whole dirty business and told everybody to load up.
Game over.
They hadn't gone deep at all, but in all that disgusting muck, no sign of Ronnie Holtz. Nor the famous Flicka's great-grandfoal or heroic Jefe, for that matter. They found nothing important, then stopped looking.
Weathermon, the sidelined bone collector, was disgusted. TeBeest could barely contain his rage. They came to dig. We barely started and now we're done? He suspected that the hasty shutdown had more to do with stink than safety. They were nowhere near deep enough to find Ron Holtz, much less their own asses. The director and his two jackass toadies didn't want to solve this case, he thought, they only wanted to appear to care. Or maybe they just wanted to stick it to him. This wasn't cop work. It was just bullshit political theater.
On the long drive home, TeBeest felt it again, that nagging sensation that another chance to close this case had been squandered.
And he thought about how he'd tell Claire that smaller hearts and minds had failed her again.
For some, that was the end of it, but TeBeest didn't stand down. He wasn't going to let a beef with his bosses stop him.
He kept seeking witnesses, talking to anybody who'd ever known the key players, suggesting to his bosses new ways to get into that awful hole, to rethink the case…anything. His team leader, Tim Hill, was in his corner and tried to keep him calm (and employed), but it wasn't Lonnie TeBeest's nature to just shut the hell up when he knew something was wrong.
And he always tried to keep the Uden cold case from freezing solid.
TeBeest interviewed a Cheyenne realtor named Joe Prunty, the son of Alice's second husband, Don Prunty. Joe told a sordid story.
Don Prunty had grown up poor in a small Illinois farm town and married before he went off to war as an army quartermaster during the Second World War. He came home to his authoritarian schoolteacher wife and new son to run his family's Illinois grain elevator. Farmers liked Don because he was one of them, and he was a smart businessman. But he also had a weakness for women and booze.
Most mornings started with a highball at the County Seat Tavern or the VFW. He drank all day, although he seldom appeared drunk.
Don's first wife divorced him when she caught him with his secretary, literally with his pants down. She kept the grain elevator and sent him packing. To his credit, he married the secretary and bought a new grain elevator, but when he took ill suddenly and went to the hospital, she sold all his grain and money, then took off. He declared bankruptcy.
It was all too much for Don Prunty. He'd lost everything, including his sanity. In 1970, he had a mental breakdown and committed himself to a psychiatric hospital for electroshock therapy. One of his nurses was a big-bosomed, raven-haired, recently divorced gal named Alice Scott. Apparently his mental collapse hadn't affected his wandering eye or his libido. They quickly fell into bed.
They were married less than a year later.
Son Joe remembered Alice as a controlling woman, always looking for something to own or take advantage of.
On their honeymoon in Wyoming—the farm boy Don Prunty was obsessed with the romance of the West—they saw a classified ad in the Cheyenne Tribune. The absentee owners of the Remount Ranch, a historic horse and cattle spread between Cheyenne and Laramie, were looking for a caretaker. Without a moment's hesitation, Don applied.
John Ostlund, a politically connected businessman from Wyoming's coal country, interviewed Don for the job and liked him a lot. Don was friendly, outgoing, pleasant, and eventually proved honest, to boot. The caretaker search ended almost before it began.
In October 1971, Don and a pregnant Alice loaded up a U-Haul—including, inexplicably, a live pony—and drove cross-country with three of her kids to the sprawling Remount Ranch on Wyoming's windswept High Plains, their new home.
Don and Alice lived in an old bunkhouse. The work wasn't back-breaking. In summer, the Pruntys kept an eye on a few dozen steers whose job was mainly to keep the grass down before they were sold in the fall. Otherwise, Don and Alice only mowed lawns around the main house, fixed fences, maintained the outbuildings, cleared the roads, and tidied up after the Ostlunds’ frequent weekend visits.
Four months after they arrived, Eliza was born. In the depths of a howling Wyoming winter, with a new baby, snow blindness, and suffocating cabin fever, Don sunk even deeper into his cups. Worse, Don became abusive when he drank, and he sloughed off his ranch work.
Spring and summer came. Life returned to something that passed for normal, but nothing was really normal out there. The Pruntys never socialized much with the Ostlunds, mostly because Alice felt like “the hired help.” Don was getting worse, the work began to slip, and then they were fired in the depths of the next winter.
Alice and Don quickly found work as caretakers of the Lincoln Summit turnout on Interstate 80, shoveling snow, picking up litter, cleaning public bathrooms, and answering tourists’ questions. Don moonlighted as a school bus driver so they could afford a brand-new mobile home, which they parked in the rest area.
But Don was suddenly in bad physical shape. He was only forty-six, but his chronic alcoholism and high blood pressure were taking a rapid and vicious toll on his body. Within a few weeks of moving off the Remount Ranch, he became lethargic, increasingly confused, and physically weak. By the time Alice rushed him to the hospital in Laramie—where she had recently gotten a nursing job—his heart and kidneys were failing, his normally high blood pressure had skyrocketed, and his brain functioned only foggily. His electrolytes were way out of whack, and he was showing signs of kidney failure. He grew less and less responsive.
Once he was admitted, Laramie doctors controlled his blood pressure, but he remained seriously confused.
Two days later, on July 23, 1973, a relatively young Don Prunty died, and Alice prepared for a funeral.
He'd been a good man whose demons ultimately killed him. The Albany County coroner ruled the cause of his death to be natural. His malfunctioning brain had been damaged by excessively high blood pressure, while other alcoholic symptoms had banjaxed his heart, kidneys, and eyesight. No autopsy was done.
When Alice discovered Don's $5,000 life insurance policy was paid to his son Joe and Joe's sister, she was furious. But Don had also bought mortgage insurance on his brand-new trailer, so Alice inherited the shiny mobile home free and clear. It was the only sure thing in her life.
Donald Prunty came to a cheap ending.
His half-hour funeral was in the mortuary's little chapel. Mourners were few: his brother, two sisters, his first wife, and his daughter Rachel traveled from the East; Joe and his family drove over from Cheyenne; and Alice brought Eliza and two of her other kids.
Don wasn't big on church, so the prayers by an on-call pastor were perfunctory.
Just a week or so before he died unexpectedly, Rachel rode the train from Illinois to see her dad, not knowing it'd be the last time. They talked about a lot of things, including his wish—should anything ever happen to him—to be buried with his first wife's family in the small township of St. Mary's, Illinois.
Alice had other plans.
Nobody said goodbye at the graveside. A few days after he died at Laramie's Ivinson Memorial Hospital, Don Prunty was lowered into a bargain-basement eighteen-gauge steel casket and vault near the back fence of Laramie's Greenhill Cemetery, forever a part of the Old West landscape he romanticized. Only the gravedigger attended.
Don's plot was in a row of “singles,” where lone graves were dug as needed, because Alice never expected to be buried with him. Alice spent nothing on the whole funeral. Don's brother paid for most of it, and military burial benefits paid a little. Much later, when Joe discovered Alice hadn't even bought a headstone, he ordered one.
Joe Prunty recalled an especially ugly argument with Alice during a low-rent trailer-house wake on the day of his father's funeral. Alice offered him Don's wallet as a memento. Joe responded that he wanted the wallet plus a shotgun Don had owned all his life plus a hunting rifle that Joe had given his dad at the Remount Ranch. Alice refused, saying she needed all those things. Joe told Alice to kiss his ass and stormed out. They never talked again.
That was about all Joe could tell TeBeest for sure. Over the years, he'd lost track of Eliza. She'd only called once, to ask him for money.
TeBeest had been nursing a nagging feeling about Prunty for a couple years, but he felt there were more immediate incriminating, haunting questions to be answered. And his bosses were clearly not eager to spend money on wild hairs. But…might Alice have murdered Don Prunty too?
At TeBeest's request, an independent Casper doctor evaluated the county coroner's causes of Don Prunty's death. Most of the symptoms, he said, suggested a possibility that he'd died of complications from diabetes, but one thing bothered him. Encephalopathy, or brain dysfunction, rarely caused death on its own. Prunty's medical records, which had never been shared outside of DCI, might reveal more, the doctor said.
In October 2009, just a few months after the aborted dig at the Remount mine, crime lab director Steve Holloway claimed he'd contacted a private group of trained forensic volunteers, the Colorado-based NecroSearch International. NecroSearch specialized in helping cops find clandestine graves with a wide variety of modern forensic sciences, from ground-penetrating radar, cadaver dogs, and old-fashioned human tracking to sophisticated geophysics, entomology, and computerized analysis of the search area. And they'd do it for free.
But bad weather set in, and the safety of the old mine was still an open question. The NecroSearch visit was canceled. Holloway told TeBeest it would be rescheduled, but somehow it fell through the cracks. It never happened, and TeBeest wondered if it was ever arranged at all.
Around this time, Deputy Director Kebin Haller took a close look at TeBeest's caseload and ruled that it was far too light. He was wasting too much time on the Uden case. The deputy director issued an official reprimand. TeBeest accepted his scolding but responded with an ill-advised email…which earned him a second reprimand for insubordination.
Yeah, I probably was insubordinate, TeBeest had to admit. It made him smile.
Two formal rebukes were the price of his principles. Maybe he could have been more measured in his words, but he didn't play games. Their games.
In cop work, every problem had a solution. But every time TeBeest proposed a solution, his bosses only saw problems…the biggest of which became TeBeest himself. They turned down almost every request, sometimes not for defensible reasons but just because they wanted TeBeest to quit. They disliked him and his attitude. They didn't think he was a team player.
Then, just before Thanksgiving, TeBeest and his team leader, Tim Hill, were summoned to a high-level meeting at DCI's Cheyenne headquarters. The three top administrators—including the crime lab's Holloway, who wasn't in TeBeest's chain of command—were there, looking stern. They'd determined that a serious excavation at the Remount mine would cost as much as $50,000. DCI's budget didn't have it. In a budget-cutting administration, they could “guarantee” neither the governor nor the attorney general would find the money for them. This case simply wasn't worth the political capital it would cost.
But the real reason they wanted to sit down with TeBeest was his bad attitude. They didn't like the way he talked to them. He was bad at communicating, and he had the temperament of a junkyard dog. He knew that they'd rather be done with him.
Hill asked Lonnie to leave the room briefly so Hill could talk to their bosses privately and frankly. Once they were alone, he spoke bluntly about the appearance that TeBeest was being unfairly targeted for vague reasons. If the Gang of Three had been contemplating a suspension or a firing, they backed off. In state government, no rhetorical skill spoke like the threat of a scandal, as minor as it might be. Hill might have saved TeBeest's ass, and the old agent knew it.
But the day still ended at an impasse. The director and his top lieutenants had to reblock this drama, and TeBeest had to collect his wits and refocus on his work.
A month later, the director raised the scant chance of a grant from an outside confederation of police agencies, maybe five thousand bucks, to pay somebody else to excavate the mine. TeBeest's hopes were raised, even though the amount was a fraction of the estimated cost. He just sensed that there could finally be movement if the director was seeking solutions too.
But TeBeest never heard another word about it. Communication wasn't his bosses’ strong suit either.
TeBeest was tired of being jacked around. He hated especially that they were keeping two killers on the street and doing nothing to get justice for four Wyoming citizens who desperately needed it—and an old grandmother who just wanted answers before she died. It didn't take a good detective to know they didn't think much of him.
To be fair, TeBeest didn't think much of them either. He was tired of their bullshit, tired of bashing his head against a brick wall, tired of caring more about Claire Martin than anybody else did, tired of dead ends…just tired.
He'd become cynical. He thought about the South Dakota kid who first put on a cop's uniform in a small town in Wyoming, and he knew he'd changed. He still wanted to solve crimes and give people justice, but the uphill fight against bad guys—some of whom were supposed to be good guys—had taken its toll.
Two months later, SA Lonnie TeBeest put in his retirement paperwork. He was fifty-five years old—ancient for a cop. His hearing was deteriorating from three decades on police shooting ranges (where sometimes his only protection had been empty shell casings he used as earplugs). He'd been bumping up against bad guys on both sides of the thin blue line for more than thirty years, too. The Uden case itself had consumed him for almost ten years—on slow days, weekends, vacations, sleepless nights—and the only argument against his retirement was staying long enough to close it.
But while his retirement paperwork worked its painfully slow way through the state of Wyoming's bureaucratic bowels, he continued to work the case.
A state forensic analyst reported the scraps of duct tape found in the pigpen area couldn't possibly be from a roll of tape found in Virginia's car back in 1980. Dead end.
Another technician reported the hairs found by TeBeest and Wachsmuth in Pavillion were animal, not human. Another dead end.
Nothing else panned out. Over the years, multiple investigators had collected almost everything they could…except bodies, weapons, and confessions. The investigations hadn't been perfect, but they hadn't been awful either. Now, other current cases needed attention. TeBeest was preparing to hand thirty years of investigation over to another agent—although nobody had yet been assigned by the bosses—and he worried that nobody was left to care about solving it. Or about Claire, who was almost ninety years old and had outlasted all of them.
On the last page of the Uden case file—now a couple inches thick, at more than 250 pages—TeBeest noted that he had gone back to Fremont County, where it all began, to return copies of all the reports, transcripts, tapes, and photos to the sheriff's department there. The originals and all the physical evidence were stored safely in DCI's Cheyenne vaults. He knew it'd be assigned to a new caretaker, but it'd probably get lost in the day-to-day shuffle and the bosses’ political machinations.
In the “Status” box at the bottom of the page, he typed one final word that felt more to him like surrender than a status report.
“Open.”
A year after he put in his papers, SA Lonnie TeBeest was a civilian again. It didn't mean he didn't care about the Uden case anymore. It just meant he couldn't do much about it any longer.
Just before he left for good, he checked his personnel file. His letters of reprimand were missing. In fact, they'd never been filed at all. He was told there had been procedural errors in the whole mess, but he didn't care to pursue it further. He'd be going out clean.
Even though he was no longer an agent, he still telephoned Claire Martin occasionally, but he had fallen out of the loop. At first, he'd hear tidbits about the investigation, maybe get a couple calls every so often, but it trailed off after a while. He heard the expectation in Claire's voice when he called, and it broke his heart that he never had any good news to share.
Claire was failing. The outsized hope that kept her alive was flagging. Her profound light was going out, and it saddened Lonnie that he couldn't give her the comfort of knowing how the story ended. He blamed himself, nobody else. He never lied to her, although he never interrupted her prayers either. She believed the boys were alive, and Lonnie knew they weren't. She liked Gerald and couldn't fathom that he might be involved, while Lonnie hated him for doing what everybody but Claire knew he'd done.
For her, Special Agent Lonnie TeBeest (retired) had put his full heart into his part-time case but did little more than add a thousand extra dots that he couldn't connect. In the end, he came up empty.
He reckoned the key—a skeleton key—was very likely lying in that noxious prairie hole that would probably never be excavated. He couldn't be sure, of course, but he knew the Remount mine was the next best place to look for clues. They had to find the bottom or find a body, but they had to dig. He even thought about paying for an excavation himself, but he didn't have that kind of cash. It pissed him off to suspect where the smoking gun was hidden but be utterly powerless to grab it.
He never knew that someone else had been watching him the whole time, taking notes.
Directors of the Wyoming DCI were like county sheriffs: they came and went with the wind.
Less than two years after Lonnie TeBeest retired, Director Forrest Bright took a new job on the Wyoming governor's security detail. In a state once described as a small town with very long streets, almost everybody felt they really knew the governor by his first name, his poker tells, and how he took his steaks, and when the governor ceased being everyone's buddy, he didn't last long. That made his security detail, a cowboy version of the Secret Service, either the hardest or the easiest cop job in Cheyenne.
Either way, there was a new sheriff in town.
Steve Woodson was an investigator's investigator. A personable, small-town Missouri kid with more than thirty years’ experience, he knew his way around casework.
In fact, there was never a time in his life when he wanted to be anything else but a cop. His mother told anybody who'd listen that a five-year-old Stevie once wrote a letter to the colonel of the Missouri state police to find out if he might already qualify for the force.
When he graduated from high school, this ambitious son of a trucker and a homemaker would have gone straight to police work—except he wasn't yet twenty-one. So his mother convinced him to take some college classes in law enforcement, and he chose Central Missouri State University in Warrensburg for its police program.
In college, he became “Woody.” His dad had been known as Woody when Steve was growing up, so he especially liked it. It was friendly and unpretentious, like him. Titles could be barriers, and he always felt a little uncomfortable being called “officer,” “detective,” “agent,” or (eventually) “director.” Woody was just easier. It became so natural that it stood out when anybody called him Steve.
As soon as he was old enough, Woody was hired by the Warrensburg Police Department as a patrol officer, even though he was still a college student. He went to class during the day, protected and served at night. He loved it.
And from the start, his favorite part of the job was going after people who didn't think they could be caught.
The Warrensburg PD only had one detective, so it occasionally assigned uniformed beat cops to investigations, everything from gas drive-offs to the rare homicide. Woodson distinguished himself as a perceptive, diligent sleuth. His college graduation gift was a promotion to the Major Case Squad, a kind of multijurisdictional task force, when a lot of young cops were still rookies on probation.
Then a chance to join a big-time force came along. After a six-year stint at Wyoming's DCI doing mostly drug cases, Woodson got his shot at the big league, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency. The DEA had only two agents in Wyoming, so they worked closely with the state agents at DCI, which occupied the same office, just to keep their heads above water.
That's where he met SA Lonnie TeBeest, worked with him, and first learned the good, bad, and ugly about the Uden case. He'd hear about it in the joint Monday briefings, and he sometimes asked TeBeest the latest developments at the watercooler. Once, when TeBeest had spread his case on a not-big-enough conference room table, Woodson came in to ask about it. Secretly, that stuck in TeBeest's impression of the guy.
And what stuck with Woodson was TeBeest's passion for that old case and his commitment to Claire Martin. TeBeest was old-school, not the kind who'd ever sit down with anybody, much less a cop from an outside agency, to bitch about the internecine political problems. But, frankly, nobody in the squad room needed big ears to hear TeBeest's frequent frustrations with the bosses in Cheyenne.
In 2012, when the governor asked Forrest Bright to turn in his keys, Woodson was the guy they recruited to replace him. He jumped at the chance because he knew DCI agents were some of the best.
But he'd leave no doubt who was the boss. It wasn't megalomania; it was efficiency and protection. One guy would decide, one guy would take the heat, one guy would be fired when the governor finally got pissed: Steve Woodson. Nobody had to guess who was in charge.
Woodson moved into the DCI director's office on September 4, 2012, with a few boxes and a new way of doing things. This was the Division of Criminal Investigation, and that's exactly where the emphasis was now going to be. Every case was going to get their best damn effort, even the cold ones.
Woodson knew well how cops had long passed their dirty bucks: an outgoing investigator handed his cold-case folders to the new guy, who would often hold them until the next new guy.
He also knew internal politics caused internal strife. He didn't want or need the drama. And it should never interfere with catching bad guys.
No more. Not in this house.
With all the twenty-first century's new investigative tools that never existed when most of these unsolved mysteries happened, Woodson believed it would be a sin—maybe even a firing offense—if DCI agents didn't take an honest, fresh look at all of them.
With the first stroke of his pen, Woodson created DCI's first Cold Case Team, comprising ten agents from the intelligence unit, the crime lab, investigations, and the FBI—some of the best investigative minds in Cheyenne.
Up until now, cold cases were make-work. DCI agents worked them only when they had a special interest and when time allowed (which was practically never). Now, Woodson made them a higher priority—not more important than the new cases that happened every day, or than ongoing investigations, but certainly not less important when justice might still be served.
He handed it all to a hardworking, enterprising agent named Tina Trimble. A month later, before he'd even gotten comfortable in his new chair, he gathered them in one room with a single purpose: Look at every unsolved case and start solving them.
Now.
Claire Martin died on a Thursday, when spring repaid years of her faithfulness with a warm day, clear skies, and a gentle goodbye kiss of breeze.
On April 4, 2013, the number of Claire's days was 33,703—ninety-two years, three months, and ten days. One of those days, an awful one, had posed a question she spent the rest of her days trying to answer. She never did, but maybe wanting to know kept her alive longer.
Claire's overtaxed heart had been giving out long before her death. She was angry that she had been taken out of her apartment and moved into a nursing home where people fussed over her. Her Social Security check was now mailed directly to the main office, so she had no control over her money anymore. On her best days, she couldn't understand why; on her worst days, it just confused her, if she remembered at all.
A few months before she died, she signed over the title of her old 1973 Country Squire station wagon to the Fremont County Sheriff's Office. Over the years, she'd borrowed a few thousand dollars against it to pay for her search. Now, she reckoned that as-yet-unimagined future science might reveal untold clues. But even if it didn't, she couldn't bring herself to junk the car. Better that it sit forever in the sheriff's impound lot than be scrapped.
Toward the end, Claire still showed love for her friends and their children, but every now and then, a shadow fell over her, as if a dark cloud were passing. She struggled to see good in people, but her demons were bigger. Her world had shattered in a million tiny pieces years before, and she never really had any hope of putting it back together.
In her last weeks, she broke her hip in a fall. She was not robust enough to survive a surgical repair and couldn't take painkillers, so she suffered a constant ache. It shriveled her physically and emotionally. Bedridden in her sterile hospital room, away from her few treasures, she hated when visitors left. She resented the decisions being made for her at the end, and she just wanted to be in her own home, living her own life.
When she stopped eating altogether, her doctors moved her to the county's hospice in Riverton.
She couldn't speak at the end, either. A few close friends like Marie Roskowske visited her, but Claire was already empty. No words, no energy, no tears…no more of the hope that had once filled her. Her hope was broken. At the end, Claire had made a silent peace with the likelihood Virginia, Richard, and Reagan had all been dead since the day they vanished.
Tracy Morrin, a poor thirtysomething mom when she met Claire just after the disappearance, spent as much time at the hospice as she could in those last days. For years, they'd hiked together, shared long road trips, talked late into the night. In other circumstances, Morrin might have become a surrogate daughter to Claire, but they were close friends, that's all. As a friend, Morrin never walked on eggshells and escaped being judged and guided.
She knew this day would come, but it didn't make it easier to say goodbye.
Now, she spoke to Claire quietly as she hovered near death, awake but failing. Morrin reassured Claire that soon she'd see Virginia, Richard, and Reagan, and she'd learn the answers that had eluded her here.
Claire's face was thin and her mouth was slightly open, but her eyes seemed to brighten through her tears. She squeezed Morrin's hand feebly.
“Claire, it's OK to go,” Morrin whispered before she left. “I love you so much. Go be with Virginia. Go be with Richard and Reagan. It's OK.”
Claire died the next morning. The hospice nurse had called Morrin and told her that death was at hand, but Claire was gone before Morrin arrived. Her old friend's passing was peaceful, although her face had frozen in a gasping, pained look. When Morrin looked down upon Claire just minutes after her death, she imagined it wasn't a willing passing but somebody still trying to hold on.
According to her wishes, Claire was cremated, although she had long ago spent some insurance money to buy cemetery plots in Glendo—where she raised Virginia in a little cabin, with an outhouse—for her daughter and grandsons if their bodies were ever found.
The local paper's obituary noted she was born on Christmas Day in 1920. It recorded her time as a Rosie the Riveter–type factory worker during World War II and her cross-country move to Wyoming as a single, divorced mother in 1962. It listed her many menial jobs and forgettable towns. The requisite list of her joys—the outdoors, gardening, hiking, pets, camping, sculling on mountain lakes, motorcycles, and long road trips—was far longer than the list of her survivors. And, of course, it described the moment when her life changed forever.
But the obituary didn't say she'd once been happy and funny. That she yearned to sleep through the night just once. That she believed in the healing power of stars and moving water. That God never answered her. That at the end, all she had were memories, and they weren't enough.
Morrin organized a low-key memorial service for Claire ten days later in the community room at Claire's assisted living complex. Maybe forty people came to say a last goodbye. Most knew her story and the empty space it left in her. The beloved antique doll with a friend's real hair was there with a couple of pictures and finger food. A few words were said, prayers were offered, and Morrin read a poignant poem she'd written for Claire.
After a few weeks, Morrin took her last walk with Claire. She hiked up the switchbacks on a stone path to an old fire lookout tower on Blue Ridge in the Wind River Mountains above Lander. Claire always liked the long view. There, she scattered some of the ashes.
But Morrin kept some of Claire's ashes so they could be buried with Virginia and the boys someday. For all the natural beauty that lay before her now and forever, that's where Claire truly wanted to be.
If there was anything Claire had taught her friend over the years, it was that life goes on, even in the face of very bad stuff. She never said it out loud that way, but she lived it out loud.
All part of the journey, she would have said. None of us gets out alive.
By the time word reached Lonnie TeBeest, it was too late to say goodbye to Claire Martin.
After he retired, he and Sandra moved back to South Dakota, their heart-earth. At first, except for occasional calls from old cop buddies, he might as well have been a thousand miles and a hundred years out of the loop. At one point, the Wyoming Attorney General specifically warned that because he was no longer an agent, information about the Uden case could not be shared. The cop life had moved on without him, but he was happy to be home in South Dakota.
So it was several days before another agent called him in Spearfish with the old news that Claire had died. He missed her memorial service, too.
At first, TeBeest was a little sad, mostly because she'd died without knowing what happened to Richard and Reagan. He was very disappointed in himself that he'd retired and effectively given up on the case when he'd promised her he wouldn't—not just once, but several times.
The last time he saw Claire was when he went to her austere little apartment to tell her in person that he was retiring and a new detective—what, the fifth or sixth?—would soon contact her. Her face slumped. She'd heard it all before.
He didn't cry, then or now. That was Lonnie TeBeest. It was personal, not sappy or sentimental. He'd never been very emotional about witnesses and survivors. It got in the way. Death happens. It lurks in the background, biding its time, watching. He wasn't suddenly going all mushy.
Ah, but anger was different.
Most of the time, TeBeest saw himself as pretty levelheaded, but when he got angry and knew he was right, he stayed angry. He'd heard once that the measure of a good man is how long he can hold a grudge. By that standard, he'd been a very good man, even if he was mellowing.
Yes, he felt cheated out of a solution. He felt a pang that he never helped Claire feel safe and warm. He regretted that answers were always just beyond his grasp. He was sorry he let too much time pass and hated that he couldn't do anything about it now. He lamented that the mystery might have kept her alive longer, but that that might only have meant more sleepless nights. And he was relieved he hadn't seen her at the end, plugged into a wall.
But emotion? He didn't do anguish. The most he'd felt in Claire's case—besides being angry at his bosses—was when he realized Richard and Reagan were about the same age as his own two sons. He wanted to know what happened to them because if it had been his boys, he would have never given up until he keeled over dead.
In that, he felt Claire's pain, intensely and intimately. He just couldn't cry about it. It wasn't the absence of feelings. He felt something. He'd only worry when he felt nothing.
Claire's suffering was over now, anyway. It had been a long life. Some good days, more bad. She'd been a prisoner of her agony and grief, not living the free life she once dreamed. Now, she was past caring forever. She had her answers.
All part of the journey, he thought. None of us gets out alive.