THE GUEST OF HONOR sat in front of the room, next to his wife, surrounded by more than a hundred admirers, friends, and curious acquaintances. On his ninetieth birthday, Clyde Ralstin was the toast of Saint Ignatius. Judging by the turnout, it did not seem to matter that he was the lead suspect in a first-degree murder case, or that news about the discovery of a rusty handgun had joined his name to murder and spread the word to cities half a world away from Montana. To many of those gathered inside the senior center, all the evidence they needed was before them: entering his tenth decade, Ralstin still had his legs and his arms, his sight and his hearing, most of his hair, some of his teeth, and could raise his hand-carved willow cane high enough to threaten a much younger man. Would God preserve a killer for so long, in such mint condition? In the fight against time, as with most other struggles, people love a winner. And so on this evening in mid-September, the cottonwoods of the Mission Valley showing a blush of color, fifty-four years to the week after George Conniff had his life taken from him, the man said to be his executioner was hailed for his perseverance and applauded for his fine life.
Beyond the usual accolades that come with reaching a certain age, what Clyde Ralstin heard on his birthday was a strain of congratulations not unlike the kind he and Virgil Burch used to share with each other at Mother’s Kitchen after a particularly successful butter heist. Several men of varying ages approached Ralstin, bellowed “Happy birthday,” and then whispered into one of his flappy ears. “The bastards didn’t lay a hand on you,” one man was heard to say as he walked away. “You did it,” said another. “You goddamn well pulled it off.”
They chuckled, slapped his back, poked his ribs, raised a glass. He attempted a smile, but the old confidence wasn’t there; the eyes were dimmed.
Few people mentioned, to his face, the name Conniff or the word “killer,” or brought up the gun that had been resurrected from the bottom of the river. Bamonte’s name was heard once, tailing on a snarl. “Vindictive,” he was called—which was progress of sorts: no longer did the people of Saint Ignatius say the sheriff from the Pend Oreille was making it up. Too many things were falling in place. Now they said, so what? Let it rest. What more do you want to do to the guy?
Clyde’s wife, Marie, was her husband’s best defender. She tried to keep quiet, but it grated on her. She could see how the investigation was draining life from her husband. “Even if he did do it—which I don’t think he did—what difference does it make?” she said. “I was only eleven years old when that happened. It’s done. It’s dead. Let it stay dead.”
Her friends had urged her not to get too worked up.
“It’s not fair!” Marie said, angered. “That man the sheriff is talking about—that’s not the man I know. I love Clyde for the man he is today, not for what he may have done before.”
A woman stirred the crowd. “Let’s go, everybody! Gather round. One, two, three—‘Happy birthday to you.…’ ”
AFTER FINDING THE GUN, Bamonte sent it to the Washington State Crime Laboratory in Seattle. Because rust had penetrated the pistol, the only way to determine the make was to examine its shape and compare it with similar weapons. A serial number, usually stamped on the side of the frame under the grip, was long gone. The barrel was sealed, foreclosing any examination of the groovings in comparison to bullet size. Still, there was no mistaking that the L-shaped piece of decomposed metal was a .32-caliber handgun, from a vintage of fifty to a hundred years ago. Frank Lee, the crime lab’s firearms supervisor, concluded that the gun was likely an Iver Johnson .32-caliber Smith & Wesson, a pistol introduced around the turn of the century. Conniff was killed with a .32. At the time, most police detectives in Spokane carried the same kind of gun—a breast-pocket special, easily concealed. Bamonte already knew from a previous document that Ralstin, when he was forced out of the police department in 1937, had reported his .32 missing. Closing out nine years of demotions, suspensions, and warnings, Ralstin said at the time that he wasn’t sure what had become of his gun, but he thought it was stolen. There was a grain of truth in the assertion, Bamonte felt, if you considered who did the stealing.
As corroded and ancient as the gun was, it gave credence to the sheriff’s long investigation, an artifact to back the tiers of the tale. Doubters at the Spokane Police Department all but disappeared—at least in public—grousing less about the cop who was bad-mouthing their shop and more about the need to get on with other things. The odds against finding the weapon had been great; the odds against finding in the exact spot pointed to by Mangan a gun other than the one dumped by the pair of Spokane policemen were enormous. Ralstin’s old buddy, the spy who stood atop the bridge, had spread a story that Bamonte had planted the gun. But he knew as well as anybody that the sheriff’s search of the river was conducted in public, in front of numerous witnesses and a television camera.
Rusted shank and lab report in hand, Bamonte went back to his prosecutor, Tom Metzger. He wondered what more he would have to do before an arrest warrant would be issued. Metzger was cautious, but the sheriff pressed his case. Any fair-minded person, he said, could not doubt that he had found the gun disposed of by Spokane police. Fine. Next question: What were the police doing burying a murder weapon in the falls? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the People call Dan Mangan.
“Ralstin’s in trouble,” the old sergeant recalls being told as he’s handed a loose-wrapped package by his superior. “Get rid of this.”
Follow that with Pearl Keogh, her testimony of Virgil Burch and his boast about Clyde’s performance on the night of September 14, 1935—“Ralstin just blowed his brains out. Said ‘It was us or him.’ ”
Hearsay, strike it.
All right. Then enter into evidence the police reports from 1955 and 1957, the summaries of two visits with Detective Sonnabend, who told of arresting Acie Logan in 1935, and Logan spilling his guts, after three days of interrogation, about the black-market butter gang, naming Detective Ralstin as the leader and the shooter. Charley Sonnabend, whose integrity had never been questioned, twice summoned a passel of lawmen to his bedside to recount this confession. His life at ebb, he insisted that one fact be passed on before he died: the Conniff killer was a cop named Ralstin.
“Well,” the defense attorney and a skeptical juror might ask, “is this man Ralstin—the chief of security at the place where America made plutonium for the first nuclear bomb, the judge of Lapwai, the civil servant, everybody’s favorite neighbor, the father of a fine young son, grandfather by marriage to five, great-grandfather of six—really the kind of man who would kill another human—not to mention another cop?”
He is indeed. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, he killed a fifteen-year-old boy two years after he gunned down the marshal. Shot the kid in the back.
Objection. Inadmissable. The kid killing was not part of the court record.
Back and forth went Metzger and Bamonte, kicking around what they had. The prosecutor had been down the lane of long odds before with his hyperactive sheriff, a man who once had helped to spring a felon convicted on evidence gathered by his own men, because new information pointed the other way; a man who had written Attorney General Edwin Meese that “justice was not served” and actually expected Meese, who spent most of his official years fending off personal ethics charges, to investigate the Forest Service for its role in the accidental death of a convict killed in a fire (a con!). Metzger looked at Pend Oreille County’s best-known windmill chaser and shook his head. As dramatic, compelling, and thorough as Bamonte’s investigation had been, helped by luck and fate, a convergence of mildewed guilt and quirky river currents, the prosecutor still was not satisfied with the package.
“Not quite there yet, Tony.”
“But the witnesses, the statements, the gun …”
“Not enough. Sorry.”
What was needed before Ralstin could be charged with murder in the nation’s oldest active homicide investigation, Metzger said, was somebody who had heard him confess. His wife. A best friend. A relative. A neighbor. Somebody who could come forth, point to the old man in court, and say, “He did it. I know because he told me.”
Even then, there was another problem, Metzger explained. Ralstin might insist on calling certain people to his defense—acquaintances, say, who could provide alibis. But the most significant ones were dead. Thus, while there was no statute of limitations on murder, the law also provided that if a person could not get a fair trial because key witnesses were missing or dead, the case could be dismissed. Such a situation was sometimes known as the passage-of-time defense.
“You’ve done a hell of a job,” Metzger told the sheriff. “I don’t think anybody expected you to get this far. I know I didn’t.”
For Bamonte, it was not enough. Yes, he had gone back to the past, erased one set of facts about a man and an institution and replaced them with something else. To change the content of years laid to rest—that in itself was a sensation even the best historians rarely experience. In those last days of a drawn and dry summer, Bamonte knew the exhilaration of resuscitating a long-buried personal history, but he also knew the grief. His own family had fallen apart. After failing to find some sign that her husband was ready to change, Betty left for good. They filed for divorce; nearly a quarter-century of marriage was handed over to the lawyers.
IT WAS EASIER to roust demons from the other man’s closet. After the prosecutor poured water on his case, Bamonte talked to George Conniff.
“I imagine you’re going to fold the tent,” George said.
No, he would not quit. He had worked on a dozen murder cases in his entire career as a cop; every case had been solved. He would chase Ralstin until the sheriff’s voice was many voices—the Conniffs’, Pearl Keogh’s, the Lapwai police chief’s, those of the family of the murdered fifteen-year-old and the doubters in Saint Ignatius—whispering, then speaking aloud: You can’t hide. We know what you did. We know.
LATE ONE NIGHT, Bamonte emptied out his files, panning for a last break. Sonnabend, Logan, Burch, Cox, Hinton, Black, Ralstin—say something! Going back through the scraps of paper, the jottings on side margins and familiar reports, he found the name of one retired Spokane policeman with whom he had yet to speak—Bill Parsons. The top brass, committed to preserving a flattering view of the institution they represented, had generally been the least helpful to Bamonte, and he did not expect much from Parsons, now approaching his eightieth birthday. From police records, the sheriff knew Parsons had been around the Stone Fortress in 1935, his rookie year. In 1966, when Bamonte joined the Spokane Police Department, Parsons was its chief.
The sheriff phoned Parsons, who said he did not remember Bamonte from his days at the department, but he knew all about him. Parsons had been following every step of the investigation. After the gun was found, Parsons figured it was inevitable his name would come up; the pistol had forced his past to the surface. The only question left was whether Bamonte would make it out to see him before he died. Bamonte explained that he wanted to talk about the gun, the police cover-up, Ralstin, and Mangan. They arranged to meet at Parsons’s home.
Before he hung up, Parsons startled the sheriff. “You know Mangan’s lying about that gun.”
“What?”
“Says his partner, Cox, threw it off the bridge. Cox wasn’t his partner that day.”
“Me.”
ON THE MORNING of September 5, Bamonte sat in the kitchen of Parsons’s home, facing his former boss. Parsons still had his bush of silver hair, the creaseless face, but he seemed to have very little life left in him. Emphysema was wearing him down. He was barely able to sit, sucking oxygen from a container.
The key to understanding why Ralstin was never questioned or arrested for the killing was with the department itself, Parsons said.
“Was Dan Mangan an honest person?” Bamonte asked.
“No.”
“What kind of stuff was he into, Bill?”
“Anything he could get his hands on.”
“Was Ralstin an honest man at that time? Do you remember him being honest?”
“Any story I heard was just the opposite,” Parsons said.
“What kind of stuff did you hear about him, Bill?”
“Chippy … burglary …”
“What kind of burglaries?”
“I have forgotten what kind they were. There is … Some of the guys called him Slippery Dick.”
Parsons had not seen or spoken to Ralstin since 1937, five years before Bamonte was born. The last time he encountered Mangan was in the late 1940s, when he used to go to his annual summer bash at the bar in Hungry Horse. Mangan, now living in a nursing home in north Spokane, had just been through another stroke—his third.
“What do you remember about Dan Mangan dropping this pistol off?” Bamonte asked Parsons.
“Dan and me were riding in the car, and in the station, Dan said, ‘C’mon.’ Went up to the Hacker Cox house and got a package and come back down to the bridge. Dan got out and tossed it over the side.”
“Who was driving, Bill?”
“Dan was.”
“Did you guys take turns driving?”
“Yeah.”
“Where did he live?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Did you have radios in your cars then?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Did you get a call over the radio to go up and get it?”
“No. In the station the captain told Dan to destroy it.”
“What captain was that?”
“Captain Hinton. He’s dead now.”
“Do you remember what the date was on that? Was it one or two days after the murder?”
“It was shortly after. I wouldn’t say it was one or two days.… I know it was shortly after because the next day I heard something that Captain Hinton was talking about a cover-up.”
“What did he say about that, Bill?”
“I don’t know. Just double-talk.…”
“Where did Cox live?”
“Mainly northwest. That’s all I can tell you.”
“And then Dan Mangan drove to his house?”
“Yeah.”
At Cox’s house, they received a package, wrapped in newspaper. Parsons asked what it was, but Mangan wouldn’t answer him. They drove to the bridge.
“He threw it,” Parsons said. “I never got to see the damn thing good till he threw it.”
“Did he throw it or drop it?”
“No, he threw it.”
“Do you remember how far he threw it?”
“He just threw it over the side of the bridge … a short distance.”
“What did he say after he threw it?”
“He wouldn’t answer me for a while.” Later, Parsons said, Mangan told him they were tossing the gun to help Ralstin—a departmental favor.
Parsons added that he’d heard of another courtesy done for Clyde, during a roadblock on the night of the killing. Ralstin had appeared in a car, running hot, on the road out of Newport leading into Spokane, and two Spokane police officers let him by. Parsons knew because one of the officers at the roadblock, now dead, had told him.
This was the third account Bamonte had heard of the roadblock. The first had come from the Sonnabend memo, the second was from Pearl Keogh, who said Virgil Burch had bragged that Logan, Clyde, and he—under a tarp in the back—had breezed through a roadblock set up by Spokane police.
Parsons’s story differed significantly from Mangan’s on the question of who actually disposed of the gun. Mangan had pinned it on Cox, his long-dead former partner. Parsons was sure Mangan had it wrong. The image he held—the rookie watching the veteran dump a pistol in a murder case—was clear.
“Why do you think Mangan is not telling the truth right now?” Bamonte asked.
“Mangan’s getting pretty feeble-minded,” he said.
If the sheriff was ever to get these old cops in court, he needed to have their stories converge. Somebody was lying. They would have to decide who. Bamonte explained his dilemma to Parsons. The chief said nothing. Bamonte left him with a choice: do nothing, or help out the law.
A few days later, Bamonte called Rosemary Miller, Dan Mangan’s daughter. She wasn’t surprised that her father might have misled Bamonte about a key detail. His whole life had been a dodge from responsibility. So, he was lying to protect himself, putting the sin on a dead man while painting himself as a passive participant. What else was new?
Was it possible, Bamonte wondered, to get the old boys together? As it turned out, Jerie Parsons had called with the same request; in recent days, her husband had started talking about the case, sharing details with his wife. He wanted to make up for his role in a crime he had concealed for half a century. He wanted to help the sheriff—“to settle it,” as he said.
* * *
MOST PEOPLE check into the Regency Plaza knowing it will likely be the last place they will ever call home. Sprawling over a plateau that used to hold bunchgrass and fields of camas bulbs, it has a vaguely colonial look, with its white columns and faded brick facade. But the Plaza is new, and its facade came from a factory. Faces, pale from too many days indoors, stare out windows that look at the parking lot and beyond, at the bald top of Mount Spokane. The Plaza is surrounded by warehouse shopping outlets and new apartments, a dormitory for the dying amidst the urgency of young adults busy with their first years away from home.
Dan Mangan was waiting for the chief on a couch in the sitting room just off the Plaza’s entrance doors. He wore the prosthesis, and it itched, as usual. Parsons arrived, with his wife, and sat down next to Mangan. Jerie joined Rosemary Miller on a couch. No pleasantries were exchanged. The chief didn’t like Mangan; never cared for him. The two men were drawn together now by the events of a single shift. It was only when Parsons came to shed himself of the event he shared with Mangan that he found company—that of a man he considered a liar and a thief. And so for this one afternoon in the last days of his life, Bill Parsons did not feel the loneliness.
“Dad,” Rose said in a very loud voice, “you remember Bill Parsons?”
Mangan leaned over and whispered something into the other man’s ear. Neither woman heard what was said. Then the soft voices fell away and the two old men looked at each other in silence, slowly gathering memories, forcing themselves to think of a time they had tried to forget.
“Who did throw that gun off the bridge?” Mangan asked abruptly.
“You did,” Parsons replied. “I was your partner that afternoon. It was you and me that got called in to get rid of the gun. And it was you—” he coughed, raised a finger, and pointed at Mangan—“who threw that gun in the river.”
He started another sentence, but couldn’t force the words out with his deflated lungs. He took a long pull of oxygen.
“The hell!” Mangan replied, a burst of acknowledgment. He searched the couch for the eyes of his daughter. “I’ll be damned.”
Parsons motioned for Jerie. It was done. The record was clear. She helped him up, and they walked down the corridor of the Regency Plaza to a restroom.
Rose went up to her father. She wanted to be sure. “Dad … do you realize what you just said?”
She had never seen her father, the brute, so broken and helpless, an eighty-six-year-old man shorn of a major deception. He started crying.
“Yeah,” he said to Rosemary. “I realize.”
“Can you actually say to yourself that you did it?” she asked him.
“Yes. I can.”
PARSONS AND MANGAN never spoke again. Mangan suffered another stroke, which left him unable to talk. Parsons died one month later, in his wife’s arms. The funeral drew a large crowd of policemen, in uniform.
THE MEETING at the Regency Plaza probably helped both men more than it helped Bamonte. Yes, they got their stories straight. But Bamonte was still without the one person, or detail, he needed to convince his prosecutor that a ninety-year-old man should be dragged over the mountains to face a crime from 1935. He was running out of time, and the bank of potential witnesses was empty. It was down to Bamonte and Ralstin, the accuser and the accused.
Bamonte did not have any strong desire to see Ralstin in jail. In practical terms, a life sentence for a man his age could amount to no more than a few months. Clyde had lived a life since the killing. What would it accomplish to take away his last days on earth and put him behind bars? The medical expenses alone would be enough of a drain on Pend Oreille County’s paltry finances to make incarceration unpopular. Justice would have to be extracted in some fashion other than the courts and jail. There had to be some way to take from Ralstin what Ralstin had taken from others.
Since Clyde had refused to answer any questions from Bamonte, the sheriff thought of using a surrogate. Bill Morlin, the Spokane newspaperman, came to mind. The reporter was already thinking of paying a visit to Ralstin’s house when Bamonte suggested it. Morlin would get a story, Bamonte would get a few more answers.
Ten days after Bamonte found the gun, Morlin arrived in Saint Ignatius, camera and notebook in hand, and knocked on the door at 365 First Avenue. A woman in her early sixties answered the door. His strategy was to be low-key and homey, a neighborly visit. Morlin’s twelve-year-old boy, Jeff, was waiting for him in the car. The reporter introduced himself—“just came by to say hello, that’s all.”
“We’re not talking to reporters.”
“I know, I know,” Morlin replied. “My boy and I—that’s him in the car, Jeff—we were in the neighborhood. Just wanted to say hi.”
Peeking inside the house, Morlin saw an old framed picture of a younger Clyde Ralstin and his bride, Marie.
“Nice picture,” he said. “Would you mind if I took a picture of it myself? Just for the record, you know. We want something that shows you at your best.”
“Well … I guess.”
“Is Clyde around?”
“He’s inside. You can’t disturb him. He’s not feeling well. The stress of all this is … killing him.”
“I understand. He’s quite an energetic guy, from everything I’ve heard. Built a house not far from here?”
“Yes.”
He handed the picture back to Mrs. Ralstin. Looked inside again.
“Uh … would you like to meet my son, Jeff? Yeah? Hold on a minute.” He called out for his boy. “Jeeeeeff!”
Jeff emerged from the car, holding his skateboard.
“Meet Mrs. Clyde Ralstin, son. This is Jeff.”
They exchanged polite words. Mrs. Ralstin would not let the reporter and his son go any further.
“Guess I better be going now,” Morlin said. “Nice meeting you.” He turned, walked away, then stopped halfway.
“Say, would you mind if I just shake your husband’s hand?”
“Before I leave, I’d just like to shake his hand.”
“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt anything.… But don’t you get him riled up. He has a terrible heart problem.”
Morlin followed her past the threshold, into a small house stuffed with guns and animal skins and knickknacks from nearly 160 combined years of living. In a corner, embedded in a chair, was a chalk-faced man, shoeless, with sunken cheeks and clamshell ears. He had on a string tie, suspenders, and he clutched his willow cane. Morlin introduced himself.
“I’m from Spokane,” he said. “Just wanted to say hi.” His notebook, and small portable tape recorder, were concealed. Ralstin said he had a lot of friends in Spokane. Morlin let him ramble for a few minutes. On the advice of his attorney, Ralstin had turned down all interview requests from reporters. Clyde said he had nothing to say about the Conniff case.
“I understand,” Morlin said. “But you know what the sheriff says.…” He went through Bamonte’s accusations in rapid-fire bursts, trying to goad Ralstin into responding. Ralstin snapped a few answers back—Clyde speaks!—and Morlin had his story.
“Let me just turn this on for a second, so I don’t misquote you,” he said, showing the tape recorder.
Ralstin talked for about eight minutes. Then Morlin asked him if he could step out into the daylight for a picture. Just one shot. Clutching his cane, snarling in defiance, Ralstin moved slowly to his doorstep and faced the world.
THE REPORTER’S STORY ran on page one of the September 4 edition of the Spokesman-Review, under the headline EX-OFFICER DENIES ROLE IN MURDER.
Not only did Ralstin deny killing Conniff, but he said he could not remember the crime and had never been to the town of Newport.
“It’s all hogwash,” he said. “This whole thing is just hearsay from guys that stray from the truth so easy.”
On a few points he was adamant. “The Lord and I know that I never was ever in that town of Newport, that I never set foot there,” he said.
Why did he leave the police department?
“I had woman trouble,” Ralstin explained. The Conniff killing, and the shooting of the fifteen-year-old boy, had nothing to do with his resignation. “The pay was so low it was pitiful,” he said.
But he could not deny his friendship with Burch and Logan, a pair of cons, whose roles in the Conniff killing and the creamery heists seemed beyond doubt, detailed in the public record, newspaper accounts, police reports.
“They criticize me mainly for, they say, hobnobbing with crooks. How do they think I found out who all these crooks were that I sent to the penitentiary?”
He would not be more specific. Then he repeated an earlier statement. “I never set foot in that town, and the Lord knows it,” he said. “Twixt him and I, why, I’m not worried too much about it.”
While the interview produced no jackpot for Bamonte, the sheriff was encouraged, and found several useful bits in Morlin’s account. For one thing, Ralstin’s answers showed him to be a liar. Woman trouble? By his own boasts, as well as the accounts of those who knew him well, Ralstin was an incurable skirt chaser. But there was no evidence that his resignation, three months after he shot the kid, a month after he missed days of work without explanation, had anything to do with his philandering. Couldn’t remember the Conniff case? That claim also jarred with the facts: he was suspended for six days without pay, directly after the Conniff killing, for leaking information about the murder investigation to his cronies at Mother’s Kitchen. Then he was demoted from detective to a lowly foot patrolman. Two career-busting actions because of his role in the killing—and he couldn’t remember the case? As for his claim that he’d never set foot in Newport, three men who knew him well had said otherwise. There was a whorehouse just across the Idaho border in Priest River—a favorite destination of Clyde’s, his friends said. The most direct way to Priest River, from Spokane, was through Newport. Finally, he said he hung out with crooks as a way to send them to the penitentiary.
If so he certainly never acted against his buddy Virgil Burch, a man with a lengthy criminal record, or Acie Logan, a career convict. When both men were arrested for stealing and fencing creamery products, it wasn’t Clyde Ralstin who came forth to testify. In fact, Ralstin was nearly charged along with them. What protected him was his own leverage within the department.
“… HAPPY BIRTHDAY, dear Cliiiiiiyde … Happy birthday to you!”
The Saint Ignatius Senior Center filled with applause, a sound that spilled out the door. The guest of honor acknowledged the crowd with a wave of his hand, and then most everyone went back to talking, laughing, and sharing stories. But amid the good cheer was an undercurrent of harsh gossip and whispered innuendos.
“He knows that I know,” Bamonte had said, and so, now, did a lot of other people.
Some guests came to the party not to fete Clyde Ralstin but to judge him, to look him in the eyes and see for themselves if he had the face of a killer, to try and size up the man who had lived many lives, and every day of the twentieth century. The spy from the Post Street bridge, Ralstin’s buddy since 1929, could taste the poison in the air. He told Clyde he never should have talked to that reporter, Morlin. “That’s the worst mistake you made,” he said. “You shouldn’t have told him anything, Clyde.”
At least one longtime friend of Ralstin’s had made up his mind after reading Clyde’s comments in the newspaper. Keith Hendrick, the Lapwai police chief, had been at Ralstin’s eightieth birthday party, and he was invited to his ninetieth. But he did not show up. Hendrick’s doubts about his mentor had been growing all summer. He was particularly bothered that Ralstin—“a cop to his dying day,” he always called him—would not talk to Bamonte. It looked like he was hiding something. Still, he wasn’t sure one way or the other until Clyde told Morlin he could not even remember the Conniff case. “I don’t buy that,” Hendrick said. “Clyde has a mind like a steel trap. He wouldn’t say something like that unless he was lying.”
Something else had helped to turn Hendrick. Clyde had come back to the Nez Percé country late that summer. He visited a few relatives, old friends, and his brother Chub. Later, when a visitor asked Chub about the killing, he conceded that Clyde may have helped organize the creamery robbery, but he could not have been the one who shot Conniff because he was pheasant hunting with him in the fields around Lapwai. A check of the 1935 records showed that the season for shooting pheasant in Idaho, Washington, and Oregon did not begin until October—at least two weeks after the killing. That Chub, in his last days, would cover for his brother with a story that wouldn’t hold up did not surprise Hendrick. Blood, of course, was thicker than loyalty to the law.
But what bothered Hendrick more than that was that Clyde never came to see him. “He couldn’t face me,” the chief said. “If he was innocent, he would have come and talked to me, and told me his story.”
So while Hendrick, Mangan, Parsons, Pearl Keogh, the Conniffs, and Bamonte were not at the party, their collective presence was felt in the senior center at Saint Ignatius. Under the big sky of Montana, Clyde Ralstin was without shelter from his past.
“That sheriff is killing him,” said Marie. “Why doesn’t he just let him alone? Why? Why?”
Despite his outward appearance of vigor, Ralstin was dying, the internal bleeding worse than ever, the joints inflamed, the stomach, most of which was ulcerated and then cut out in surgery, tight and queasy. He was in pain all day, and, more recently, at night as well. No longer could he take refuge in sleep; the sheriff had robbed him of this last hideout.
In his day, Ralstin could break bodies and intimidate those around him. He could live by his own laws. He was enforcer and judge. Over time, he could hide in the folds of the Bitterroot Mountains, or blend among relatives in the high plateau above the Snake River, or tuck himself into the crease of the Mission Valley. But the land could no longer swallow people in the last days of the twentieth century, and its great bounty was disappearing. In 1989, only a single sockeye salmon returned to spawn in the upper reaches of the Salmon River, in the Nez Percé country over which Ralstin once ruled. The land kicked back more than it took in; a rusted pistol was more likely to come from a river than a fish that had spawned there for more than ten thousand years.
OVER THE AUTUMN, Bamonte worked on the finishing touches of his master’s thesis. He was alone, his marriage heading toward dissolution in court, his son living in an apartment. He wanted to finish his small history of the Pend Oreille, and then put the graduate project to rest. But he was full of doubt, as usual, about whether his five hundred pages on crime and punishment in the wilderness of northeastern Washington added up to anything worthwhile. Would the professor laugh at the final product, poke fun at his writing, ridicule his thesis? At the same time, a television producer from an NBC network show on crime “Unsolved Mysteries,” contacted him. He wanted to do a piece on the Conniff case. At first, Bamonte wasn’t sure. But then he saw it as a chance to throw the net out one last time, and to send another psychic blast across the mountains at Clyde.
In December, with the ground covered with snow and the edge of the Spokane River iced up, Bamonte went to Gonzaga University to orally present his master’s thesis to Professor Carey and four students. It was not a give-and-take academic session; instead, Bamonte told a story. In the eye blink of time since Pend Oreille had been a county, people had been murdered for silver and for butter, for a few hundred dollars, over wives and pickup trucks, in fits of rage and patterns of cool calculation. The men charged with tracking down those killers were not great detectives or skilled investigators; they were somebody’s neighbor, a George Conniff or an Elmer Black, who had been handed a badge and a gun and told to seek justice. Sometimes, as in the Conniff case, the bad guys wore a uniform.
Carey was impressed by Bamonte’s passion and his sincerity. “He truly believes,” Carey said later, “that a policeman should be somebody special, that they should live up to something like a code of chivalry. What he found out, of course, was that policemen have a feudal loyalty to each other.”
The professor gave the sheriff high marks for his thesis; listening to Bamonte’s presentation was one of the most fascinating experiences he has had as a teacher. He urged his student to avoid bitterness, to learn from his project, to expand his world view.
A few days later, NBC broadcast the segment on the Ralstin case. Clyde’s friends called the sheriff “a jackal” for cooperating with the television crew. How could he deprive Ralstin of peace during his final days? After the broadcast, dozens of tips came into the sheriff’s office. It seemed that American cities were full of people who believed their neighbors could be killers. None of the tips panned out, though.
Ralstin was so upset by the broadcast that he could not eat. He coughed at night, brooded in the day, and cursed the sheriff for bringing this upon him. He would sit alone in his chair, the window shades closed, the snow piling up outside, sobbing to himself. The days were short, less than eight hours of light, and they seemed so dark to Clyde, like he was in a cave.
“Why won’t he let me alone?” he said to Marie. “Everybody in that damn police department was crooked! All the way to the top! Why single me out? I don’t deserve this.”
She wiped the tears away from his eyes. “You’ve got to put this out of your mind, Dad,” she told her husband.
“I can’t,” he said, weeping like an infant, choking between words. “He’s killing me.”
She would not let him answer the phone. It could be a reporter, or somebody calling to scold him. Try as Marie did to shield him, her husband was surrounded.
The internal bleeding became so bad Clyde entered the hospital. One of his veins was cracked, leaking like a hose with a slit. On the nineteenth of January, 1990, one day after Tony and Betty Bamonte filed for divorce, Clyde came down with a severe chill, his body trembling, his hands clammy, his breathing short. He was put under intensive care at the Community Medical Center in Missoula, a town that got its start as a hideout for outlaws on the lam. Four days later, he died—of natural causes, the doctors said. His wife said he never mentioned the Conniff killing in his final hours. After his body was cremated, and the ashes scattered over the Mission Valley, the sheriff of Pend Oreille County said the murder investigation of George Conniff was over, the case closed with the death of the only living suspect.
Marie thought her husband could have lived another five years if Bamonte had not hung the noose from 1935 around his neck. Clyde’s attorney felt the same way. He said the stress from the sheriff’s investigation had squeezed the last bit of life out of Ralstin. The assertion did not bother Bamonte; some people, he pointed out, dig their own graves.