Black White Blue: The Assassination of Patrolman Sackett

Courtroom 840, on the eighth floor of the Ramsey County Courthouse in downtown St. Paul, was not Judge Johnson’s first choice for the trial of Ronald Reed. Despite the fact that 840 had been part of an extensive 1990s renovation of the twenty-one-story, seventy-four-year-old Zigzag Moderne masterpiece, one of the city’s architectural glories, the judge preferred to do business in the more familiar and convenient confines of his own courtroom four floors above, where the Sackett case’s pretrial hearings had been held.

But Reed’s trial was, by all indications, going to draw a large crowd, and 840, with a gallery capacity of about two hundred, was the largest of the building’s twenty-five courtrooms. Court officials, moreover, believed they could provide more effective security in 840 than they could upstairs, and there was reason to believe security would be a concern. Johnson would not reveal whether the county had received specific threats, but he quietly authorized certain precautions, such as special parking spaces for the attorneys for the duration of the proceedings. The visible police presence was increased throughout the building, reflecting what several visitors and courthouse regulars described as a pervasive tension.

The courtroom itself—paneled in Cuban mahogany over a red Italian marble base, with its rosewood bench, jury box, and gallery seating, and original Art Deco light fixtures, bronze railings, wall clock, and window grates—had been the site of earlier trials of major community interest. Scarcely a week before the Reed trial began, Evans was found guilty of Vick’s murder there. But Reed’s trial (and Clark’s to follow) would revolve around a homicide case unlike any other in the city’s history. It would revisit a brutal moment in the distant past and stir up agonizing memories. While attempting to determine whether one man (and then a second) was responsible for murdering another man in cold blood, it would call up a dire and complicated context that was both ancient history and all too current. It would rely on aging men and women recounting events and conversations from their youth. Individually and in the aggregate, it would pit black against white or, more precisely, black against blue, which then as now was mostly white—and which then as now was America’s most combustible, destructive dynamic. A large number in the gallery would believe that justice in the nearly thirty-six-year-old assassination of Patrolman Sackett was long overdue. Another large number would believe that justice in a “white court” such as this was impossible for an African American.

And sure enough, when the standing-room-only crowd filed into Courtroom 840 on the morning of February 6, 2006, they split the difference—the family, friends, and supporters of James Sackett, mostly white, gathered on the right side of the gallery’s center aisle facing the bench, while the family, friends, and supporters of Ronald Reed, almost all of them black, took seats on the left. Other interested parties—the task force detectives, retired law enforcement officers, courthouse staffers, Central High alumni and other citizens who remembered the Sackett murder “like it was yesterday,” and no small number of plainclothes sheriff’s deputies—filled the rest of the large gallery. (Uniformed deputies were stationed around the courtroom as well.) There was no obvious hostility between the two sides. There was no interaction at all, which some observers thought was depressing in its own right.

Like regulars in church, the Reeds and the Sacketts sat in the same place on the pew-like benches for every session. The defendant’s mother, Lillian Reed, as proper and impeccably attired as though she were in fact at Sunday worship, sat with son Duane and other relatives. Across the aisle sat Jeanette Sackett, still girlish and likewise carefully dressed for the occasion, bearing an expression that seemed at once sad, defiant, and proud. Sitting beside her was her husband, Simon Monteon, and at least two of her four children: forty-two-year-old Jim Jr., taking time off from his job as a registered nurse, and Julie, now thirty-eight, a college computer technician who took meticulous notes during the proceedings. (Son Jerel came when he could. Daughter Jennifer chose not to attend.) The families were advised to avoid contact with the “other side” and were ushered in and out slightly ahead of or behind the other. During breaks, the two groups would gather at opposite ends of the ornate hallway outside Courtroom 840 or in separate rooms provided by the court.

Jim Sackett Jr. didn’t think he and his family would ever be sitting there. “Each year that passed I thought the chance of going to trial was less and less,” he said afterward. “People seemed to be less interested. People were getting old and memories were fading. We waited and waited. Mom was skeptical at the beginning of the most recent investigation. I was, too. Another false start, we thought. But then came the grand jury and the arrests, and then, finally, we were in court.”

One of the curiosities of the Ramsey County courtrooms is the fact that the prosecutors and defense counsel sit on opposite sides of the same table, facing each other across four feet of polished walnut. The prosecutors sit on the right side of the table, with the judge and the witness stand to their right, the gallery to their left, and the jury seated in two rows of commodious swivel chairs a few feet behind them. The defendant and his counsel sit on the left side of the table; the judge and the witness stand are on their left, the gallery on the right, and the jurors face them behind the prosecutors. During the examination of witnesses, unless the judge grants them permission to approach the bench or the witness stand, the lawyers must stay close to the table. Counsel usually remain seated in their own comfortable swivel chairs while questioning the witnesses, lending the proceedings a certain relaxed appearance even when the proceedings are decidedly not.

Reed’s lead attorney, John Pecchia, was familiar with the drill. He was a methodical, low-key public defender with almost thirty years of legal experience. The second chair was occupied by Marcus Almon, a young African American who had clerked for Kathleen Gearin. He also had been appointed by the court to this case and was definitely working in the brightest light of his three-year career. Because of the differences in experience, Pecchia (pronounced PEE-cha) would perform the lion’s share of the courtroom duties during the trial ahead.

On the other side of the table, Jeff Paulsen and Susan Hudson each brought more than twenty years of courtroom history to the trial. This was the first case, however, that they had worked together and for Paulsen a rare instance in which he shared a prosecution with anyone. Because this was a state case and because Paulsen, a federal prosecutor headquartered in Minneapolis, was on temporary duty with Ramsey County, Hudson could have claimed home-field advantage. But, in actual practice, she would say later, “we were co-equals.”

Despite obvious differences in temperament, style, and courtroom strengths—this was yet another odd pairing in a narrative full of them—they seemed to have little difficulty dividing responsibilities. “It was not a matter of first and second chair,” Paulsen said. Hudson would handle the jury selection and what Paulsen called the “CSI-type testimony”—the medical examiner, ballistics experts, et cetera. He would examine most of the neighborhood acquaintances, police officers, and other non-technical witnesses. The wisecracking Hudson referred to her colleague as a “control freak who always had to get in the last word” but said their disputes tended to be “tactical, not strategic, differences.” Both believed there was much at stake. Both felt the additional pressure of prosecuting an accused cop-killer in a case that had the city’s rapt attention. Both believed this might be the most challenging case of their careers.

It remained to be seen, though, who among the officers of the court would face the greatest challenge from Ronald Reed. Before Johnson had a chance to bring in prospective jurors for the voir dire on Monday, Reed’s lawyers asked the judge to recuse himself. In the defense motion Almon said, “The judge is biased against the defendant.” Reed’s counsel also moved once more to dismiss the murder and conspiracy charges against him. (A separate motion, filed in U.S. District Court, sought federal intervention to stop the trial, arguing, among other points, that several of the state’s witnesses had been bribed to lie to the grand jury. The motion was denied.) Johnson refused to disqualify himself and began the jury-selection process, which was expected to consume the better part of the opening week.

On Tuesday Reed decided he was not interested in going any further under the current arrangement. He told Johnson he wanted to fire Pecchia and Almon, declaring them incompetent. Then, after several interruptions of the voir dire, he told the judge he no longer wanted to be part of the courtroom proceedings. Johnson replied that the trial would continue whether Reed was in the courtroom or not. He said that Pecchia and Almon were adequately prepared and competent and that, at any rate, the defendant did not have an “unbridled right” to choose his public defenders.

Reed’s motion, which his brother Duane (who was not a lawyer but was in almost daily contact) had written at his request, was sealed by the judge after Reed attempted to read it out loud. The motion stated that Pecchia had met with him six times at the most¹ during the previous several months and had “not partnered with me in preparing my defense.” As a result, “I am in the dark as to the strategy to be used in my case.” Despite offers of family and friends to make “resources and individuals within the community available to John,” the lawyer had “not pursued such opportunities.” Almon, Reed continued, was cocounsel “in name only,” and “Marcus can not adequately advise me or assist me in preparing my defense because there is no substantive communication” between the two attorneys. By contrast, Reed praised Larry Clark’s lawyers, whom he had observed during the lengthy pretrial run-up, for their “attentiveness to detail and perseverance.” “Counsel for Mr. Clark,” he said, “is clearly prepared to take on the prosecution in proceeding to trial.”

Meanwhile, there were certainly several persons on the premises who flashed back to Judge Julius Hoffman’s federal courtroom during the chaotic Chicago conspiracy trial of late 1969 and early 1970, when a profanely contemptuous Bobby Seale, the only African American among the antic caucus of “anarchists” accused of riot and other crimes during the 1968 Democratic Convention, was handcuffed and gagged on Hoffman’s orders. Reed himself would have known about the episode; perhaps Seale was his inspiration. Ronnie Reed, however, was not Bobby Seale, and Judge Johnson, who remembered the Chicago debacle and prayed he wouldn’t have to deal with a similar situation, maintained a cooler head than Judge Hoffman. At Johnson’s direction, Reed was peaceably escorted to a small, secured anteroom, where, thanks to quick work by courthouse technicians, he could monitor the ongoing jury selection via closed-circuit TV. The next day he was back at the counsel table, seated between Pecchia and Almon. Pecchia promptly told the judge that the media’s coverage of Reed’s first two days in court had made a fair trial in Ramsey County impossible and asked for a change of venue, which Johnson just as promptly denied. Resigned or merely catching his breath, the defendant sat quietly while jury selection went on.

Sympathetic observers said Reed had been acting out his frustration with the system. Cynics believed he was continuing a yearlong strategy of distraction and delay, hoping key prosecution witnesses would disappear or die before having the opportunity to testify. Some suggested that Reed had tried to provoke Johnson into an ill-considered response such as Hoffman’s, with an eye toward a later appeal. Reed, for his part, said he was asking for new counsel only to make sure he received a fair trial.

The Sacketts, seated up front and to the right of the center aisle, had a roughly three-quarters view of the defendant’s face during the proceedings. Jeanette Sackett said later, “We could see him, and he could see us.” The trial was the first time family members had seen Reed in person. As children, hearing only the name and making the mental connection with the murder of their father, they had imagined a monster. As adults, they pictured a young terrorist with a rifle. Now, in the crowded courtroom, they saw, in Jim Jr.’s words, “just a little old man with salt-and-pepper hair.” There wasn’t much eye contact between them, Jim would recall, but “he knew we were there.”

Because it was a first-degree murder trial, more than the usual number of citizens were polled for the jury. The prosecution, as usual, was looking for “law-and-order types,” said Hudson afterward. “Obviously, we didn’t want jurors who’d had unpleasant contacts with the police. We wanted people who remembered the era. Not necessarily the crime, but the era.” The defense was seeking people of color and a certain age, though the pools of prospective jurors are drawn randomly from county voter-registration rolls, and, as it happened, there weren’t many African Americans in their fifties and sixties in the pool. What there were, curiously, were several convicted felons whose civil rights had been restored and were thus eligible for jury duty. “Jeff was appalled,” Hudson recalled. “He said, ‘We don’t have convicted felons in federal jury cases.’ I said, ‘Welcome to the real world!’”

It took the two sides six days to select the all-white, seven-man, five-woman jury, plus three alternates (one of them an African American woman), but that included the time required to deal with Reed’s interruptions. All things considered, six days didn’t seem very long.

At nine-thirty-five on Tuesday morning, February 21, Jeff Paulsen rose from the counsel table and began the prosecution’s opening statement. Using the oversized mockup of the neighborhood as a visual aid, he walked the jury through the familiar landscape and events—familiar to most of the spectators in the gallery if not to every member of the jury—culminating with the gunshot that killed James Sackett. “He was twenty-seven years old, Officer Sackett was, when he was murdered,” Paulsen said. “He left behind a wife and four young children. The youngest child was only three weeks old. In fact, this was Officer Sackett’s first night back on the job after the birth of his child.”

“One of the men who planned and carried out this cold-blooded assassination thirty-six years ago is in the courtroom today. And it is the defendant, Ronald Reed. You see, it was his girlfriend at the time, Constance Trimble, who made the call to the police about a woman in labor. He, Mr. Reed, tricked her into doing it. He didn’t tell her it was a setup for an ambush to kill a policeman. He just told her to make the call. Mr. Reed was with her at this phone booth a block and a half away when she made the call. He told her what to say. He knew what was going to happen because Mr. Reed planned the entire event and he helped carry it out.”

The specific charges against Reed and Larry Clark, Paulsen pointed out, were aiding and abetting and conspiracy to commit murder. The conspiracy charge alleged that Reed directed Trimble to make the phone call that drew the victim into the ambush. He said the evidence would show that Reed was the shooter, Sackett’s literal killer—but, whether he was or not, he was guilty of aiding and abetting the murder as well as of conspiracy. “People who help carry out a crime are just as criminally liable as those who commit the crime.”

As for motive, Paulsen continued, the evidence would show that Sackett was “killed not for who he was, but for what he was. He was a police officer, and Ronald Reed hated police officers. And he wanted to make a statement by killing a police officer.” Paulsen described Reed as a “member of an organization” that was “basically … affiliated with the Black Panther Party.” While there was no Panther chapter in St. Paul at the time, he said Reed could be described as a Panther “organizer.”

At that point, John Pecchia raised the first of what would be several objections. Paulsen accordingly refined his description: “These were people who were interested in the Black Panther philosophy, interested in that movement, and were seeking to get a Black Panther type of organization established here in Minnesota.”

Paulsen continued to lay out the state’s case, implanting in the jury’s consciousness the names Eddie Garrett, Connie Trimble, and John Griffin. He conceded that “some of these witnesses you are not going to like” and that the state had provided about $3,700 in “financial assistance” to help Trimble through tough times during the past year and had agreed to help Griffin seek a reduction in his federal prison sentence. Though a hundred-thousand-dollar reward had been offered for information in the case, he added, no one had received, nor had anyone been promised, “a penny of any reward.” “The key witnesses in this case all gave their statements before they even knew about the existence of any reward,” he said.

Pecchia, rising to counter with the defense’s opening, quickly set about questioning the motivation and credibility of the state’s witnesses:

“John Griffin is looking for a ticket out [of prison]. John Griffin wants to get back on the street.…

“Eddie Garrett … is a military veteran, trained in firearms, and a shooter.… [O]n May 22, 1970, within an hour or so after Officer Sackett was murdered, Eddie Garrett was in the back seat of a police car.…

“Constance Trimble … has told more than one different story.…” He would later tell the jurors that Trimble had problems with drugs and alcohol.

The state’s witnesses, Pecchia said, had received or been promised “inducements” for their testimony, either money or the “chance to get out of jail.” It was those inducements, he said, that brought the state’s witnesses forward at this time. “Where were they in 1972? Where were they—pick any year along the way? Where were these witnesses who knew what this was about? Why didn’t they come forward? Why only now?”

Pecchia also raised questions about the state’s competence and credibility. Where was the transcript from Trimble’s trial? Where were the guns and the alleged hijack notes—the prosecution had only photocopies of the original documents on its list of exhibits—seized during Reed’s November 1970 arrest? “Gone. And whose possession [were they] in? The state’s.” The state, Pecchia concluded, would not be able to meet the burden of proof in this case.

The prosecution’s first five witnesses were Jeanette Sackett Monteon, Glen Kothe, Jerry Dexter, Harold Alfultis, and Joe Corcoran. Each answered counsel’s questions as anyone familiar with the case would have expected: Sackett Monteon with a somber recitation of her husband’s brief police career, their truncated family life, and the events of May 21 and 22, 1970; Kothe describing the call from dispatch sending Squad 327 to 859 Hague, their arrival at that address, the barking dog, the flash and explosion, and his partner’s body on the sidewalk in front of the house—Kothe’s testimony augmented by scratchy recordings of both the dispatch and his distress call moments later; Dexter, Alfultis, and Corcoran about their respective experiences at the crime scene after the shooting.

Alfultis, in charge of the department’s crime lab at the time, said a preliminary examination of the site and recovered slug fragments suggested the shot came from somewhere south of Hague and west of Victoria and was probably fired from a bolt-action rifle. With the exception of a dusty black cap, a shoe-print cast, and the phone booth at the corner of Selby and Victoria (its telephone and batwing door were removed after the shooting and taken to the crime lab), there was nothing else by way of evidence retrieved at or near the scene. The cap, shoe print, and phone-booth surfaces all proved to be worthless. There were no usable fingerprints, nor was there yet the DNA technology that might have been employed if there had been meaningful evidence left behind.

Alfultis’s frustration was still apparent when asked about the evidence search in the moments following the shooting.²

Corcoran had assisted Alfultis on May 22. Almost thirty-five years later, long retired to the north woods but back in St. Paul for Reed’s trial, he had driven from his downtown hotel to 859 Hague the night before he was scheduled to testify. His experience as a sex-crimes cop investigating pedophiles and their protectors had long ago put him off the Catholic Church, but he still believed in the power of prayer. That night, in front of the house where Sackett had been murdered, he sat alone in his car and beseeched God for justice. Then, addressing the dead officer, he whispered, “Jim, I’m sorry we couldn’t solve this case sooner. But we’re going to get them now.”

The next day Corcoran’s testimony left a vivid image hanging in the hushed courtroom air.

A: Well, we spent quite a bit of time there and then just as we were getting ready to leave the skies opened up and it began to rain real heavy. And I never forgot that night because I could watch Officer Sackett’s blood run down the sidewalk into the street.

Before they were finished four days later, the prosecutors called a total of twenty-three witnesses, including the Ramsey County medical examiner, a ballistics expert, and another ten law enforcement officers past and present. Thomas Owens re-created his and Tony Bennett’s false medical-assistance call to another, nearby Hague Avenue address on May 20, 1970. James Jerylo described his and Laverne Lee’s May 15 encounter with Eddie Garrett and Garrett’s admonition to “watch the rooftops.” Minneapolis officer Dennis Bernstrom and retired Minneapolis cops Douglas Danielson, John Locke, Phillip Bishman, and William Chaplin recounted Reed’s November 1970 arrest. Retired Ramsey County jailer Gregory LaRock said he overheard Reed tell Gerald Starling after Reed’s 1970 arrest that he had instructed Trimble “to not say anything to the pigs” if she were picked up. Former St. Paul investigator Russ Bovee also told of overhearing Reed’s conversations when he was in the county lockup, mainly to the effect that Reed was confident that, in Bovee’s words, “his people would not talk to the police about anything.” Scott Duff talked about sniper rifles and a rifle’s “killing range” (“you can actually kill out to a thousand yards”), driving times between the Capitol and the crime scene, and other forensic matters. Jane Mead described the detectives’ Memorial Day weekend visit to Trimble’s apartment in Colorado.

But five individuals from the old days on the Hill would provide the heavy artillery of the state’s attack.

Donald Walker, who described himself as a fifty-five-year-old artist currently working as an employment counselor, talked about participating in Black Panther meetings (“That’s what we called them”) with Reed, Clark, Trimble, and others. The meetings, usually led by Reed and Clark, were the site of “hate talk about the government, the police, and the white establishment.”

Walker could not, at Paulsen’s invitation, recollect anything specifically hateful that was said at the meetings, nor could he recall when exactly during the summer of 1969 Reed and Clark placed a “wrapped-up” single-shot, bolt-action rifle in the trunk of his white Chevrolet and he drove them and the rifle to a house “mid-block just west of 859 Hague” (Paulsen’s words). He did say he transported the rifle on a second occasion after a meeting, this time with only Clark in the car. At some point, he said, Clark “felt I was going to get stopped by the police. So he got out of the car and took the rifle,” his destination unknown.

When Paulsen asked if his testimony had been motivated by news of a reward in the paper, Walker said no.

A: A lot of reasons. It was the right thing to do. The community was now looking for the people responsible for [Sackett’s] murder and it just—it is human nature. A human being got killed and if you know something about it, you should come forward.

Paulsen then led Joseph Edward Garrett through the familiar terrain: the organization headed by Reed, which met at the ICYL and nearby Dayton Presbyterian Church, also the location of its Panther-inspired breakfast program for kids, his own role as “information minister,” and Reed’s relationship with Connie Trimble. As for the group, Garrett said, “we mostly talked about protecting and providing for the community.… We would talk about patrolling, keeping an eye out, and protecting ourselves, our children, and our property.

Q: And there was talk at these meetings about, you said, protecting the black community from the police?

After discussing the glut of guns in the neighborhood at the time, Paulsen and Garrett returned to the talk of violence.

Q: At the meetings … was there ever a specific plan articulated by anyone to kill a particular policeman?

A: In the meetings there was never a mention of a specific plan. It was just generally stated that we should protect ourselves, we should protect our community.

Q: Did there ever come a time when you had a conversation with Mr. Reed about a specific plan?

Garrett said the conversation took place a “few weeks” prior to Sackett’s murder. Reed had approached Garrett, who was “chilling, so to speak” in his blue Cadillac parked in front of the Celebrity nightclub on Selby Avenue. Garrett said Reed climbed in and, after some general discussion, asked, “Do you want to be involved in getting our first pig?”

Garrett said Reed’s statement, while it didn’t surprise him given the group’s rhetoric, left him shaken. He said that while he bore similar feelings toward the police, after his tour of duty in Vietnam—“experiencing human death firsthand”—a cop-killing “wasn’t something I wanted to be involved in.” He said he never discussed the matter with Reed again and “avoided contact” with his friend. He also said that by his “watch the rooftops” comment to Jerylo and Lee a few days after his conversation with Reed, he “may have subconsciously been warning them.”

A: About … if you are going to start using your sticks, Mace, and guns if necessary, to watch yourself.

A week later, at the scene of the Sackett shooting, Garrett said, Reed and Day saw him sitting in the back seat of Jerylo’s squad car.

Q: Did that affect your willingness to tell the police what you knew about the offense?

In his cross, Pecchia asked Garrett about his familiarity with rifles and brought up an episode that Garrett had mentioned to task force detectives early in their discussions. Garrett and another man were “patrolling” the neighborhood with rifles one night, and when they spotted a uniformed security guard sitting in his car outside Marshall Junior High School, they briefly debated whether they should shoot the man. They decided against it and left the guard apparently unaware that he had nearly been in somebody’s gunsight.

Garrett’s imposing presence and mellifluous voice made his testimony compelling even beyond the riveting content. At fifty-seven, he seemed to be at peace with himself and his past and at least outwardly unruffled by defense counsel’s insinuations that he might have been Sackett’s killer. On his way out of the courtroom following his testimony, someone on the Reed side of the aisle said something to him sotto voce. He stopped, leaned down, and, according to spectators sitting nearby, asked, “You got something to say to me?” The other man apparently did not, because Garrett said, “I didn’t think so,” and walked on.

At two o’clock on the same day, February 22, Connie Trimble took the stand. Some observers referred to her as the state’s star witness, though the state’s lawyers applied the term ironically. The truth is, despite the investigators’ trips to Colorado, the multiple heart-to-heart conversations dating back to the Nelson-Bohlig initiative more than a decade earlier, her grand jury testimony in the summer of 2004, and the task force’s “babysitting” of the woman since then—the prosecutors didn’t know for certain what she was going to say in court.

On the night before her scheduled testimony in State v. Reed, the prosecution knew only one thing for sure: she went bowling with the Reeds.

Dunaski’s crew was aware that she had been talking to Reed over the previous several weeks. Prisoners’ phone calls are monitored and recorded (the prisoners know they are being eavesdropped; there are signs on the jail walls), and the task force had listened to the former Central High sweethearts chat about the forthcoming trial. They were careful what they said, but it seemed clear to the cops listening in that Trimble was doing her best to assure Reed that she wasn’t going to hurt him in court. She had been close to the Reed family for a long time. Lillian Reed had taken care of Cherra while Connie had been in jail awaiting trial. More recently, Connie reportedly spoke on the phone to Lillian as often as once a week. So it could not be surprising that she would connect with family members when she returned to the Twin Cities. There was nothing illegal about a reunion. Trimble was a witness, not the defendant. She could come and go as she pleased, so long as she showed up in court as directed. So, for the two evenings prior to her scheduled testimony, her minders—members of the police department’s Special Investigations Unit—dutifully followed her out of her downtown hotel to dinner and bowling with the Reeds, then back to the hotel, her temporary home in St. Paul.

The state, of course, had her grand jury testimony to compare and contrast. If the testimonies diverged, Reed’s jury would decide which version to believe.

Trimble Smith (as she was called for the court record) did not exhibit the confident glow that she had worn for her grand jury appearance a year and a half earlier. She looked sick and weary and worn down. On the stand, she described herself, when Paulsen asked if she was currently employed, as “disabled.” At the prosecutor’s invitation, she then spoke for several minutes about her medical history, which was woeful and extensive, the result of on-the-job accidents and illnesses exacerbated by alcohol and cocaine. She said her marriage had been “pretty difficult” and she had spent time in a shelter for battered women.

Paulsen directed Trimble Smith back to 1969 and 1970, when she lived with Reed and hung out at the Inner City Youth League. She readily admitted making the phone call to police on the night of May 22 and repeated her account of setting up Starling. She eventually conceded that Reed had asked her to make the call and sat in the car with their baby while she called from the phone booth.

Paulsen played the recording of her call. The jury listened attentively to the young woman’s unexcited request for help and Officer Kinderman’s businesslike response.

—Uh, my sister’s getting ready to have a baby, and we have no transportation.

She insisted, though, that she believed what Reed had told her—that “Gerald would be busted for dealing drugs” when the police arrived at the house.

Trimble Smith next described driving with Reed and the baby from the phone booth to Clark’s house at 882 Hague, a little more than a block away.

She said that she and Reed took the baby inside, where Larry’s girlfriend, Diane Hutchinson, was asleep with her kids. They were in the house “not more than five, seven minutes,” she said. “I was sitting in the dining area holding the baby and waiting for Ron to say, ‘Come on, let’s go,’ and go home.” After which “we left and went home.” They returned to their Fuller Avenue apartment in a storm, she said—“it was thundering and lightning and raining real bad.” She said she first heard about the shooting of the police officer the next day, while watching the news on TV. She described her confusion and fear and the anonymous note warning her not to go to the police. Even after she was arrested and charged with murder, she said she believed—“not knowing what was going on and who was behind it”—that both she and Reed “were still in danger.” She said she believed Reed had not known an officer was going to be killed and had been “set up like me.”

At Paulsen’s request, Trimble Smith recalled the visits to Colorado of newsman Tom Hauser and the two teams of St. Paul detectives ten years apart. Paulsen then directed her attention to her grand jury testimony in 2004. “And there are a couple of differences from what you are testifying to today, aren’t there?” Paulsen said. She agreed that there were, but, considering the passing of thirty-five years, not to mention the “different medications” she’d been taking and even the interference of her subconscious (“I dream a lot”), the difficulty she experienced remembering details was understandable. “It is a long time, and it is very confusing,” she said, for once not having to fear contradiction.

Paulsen took her back yet again over the couple’s actions beginning at the phone booth and proceeding to the house at 882 Hague.

Q: And do you remember going inside or going up to the door and seeing Larry Clark waiting for you?

Q: And is it your testimony today that Mr. Reed and Mr. Clark did not leave the house during those five to seven minutes?

Q: Because this is one of the things that you said differently in the grand jury. Do you remember?

A: Well, no, I don’t think I did. I think they got that wrong. Because I have always said they did not leave the house and we were there only a short period of time.

Q: Do you remember saying in the grand jury that when you first went into Mr. Clark’s house … you had to use the restroom?

A: Yeah. The restroom, it was by the—you know, I don’t even remember that. That was just brought to my attention today. I don’t even remember that. I really don’t.…

Paulsen referred to the grand jury transcript that he had shown her before court that morning. She replied that “anybody could have wrote anything in there.”

Q: And I showed you the transcript where you said four different times that you used the restroom at Larry Clark’s house?

Q: In the grand jury, you were asked whether it was possible that Ronnie Reed or Larry Clark left the house during that five to seven minutes. And do you remember what your answer was?

A: Oh, well, I was mixed up on that one, because I know they didn’t leave the house because we were not there that long for them to leave the house.

Paulsen was not surprised by the testimony. Trimble Smith would not be the first witness to revise her grand jury narrative when the case reached trial. It was one thing to testify in a grand jury’s cloistered, almost conversational setting—quite another in open court, with the entire community watching and listening. There was also, for Trimble Smith, the pressing bonds of kith and kin, which had to be impossible to ignore as she looked out from the witness stand and saw the defendant, family members, and old friends staring back at her.

At that juncture, Paulsen pointed out for the jury’s sake Trimble Smith’s continuing relationship with the Reeds—which she was quite willing to affirm.

“They are still family to me,” she said. Ronald Reed “will always be a part of my life. I had a child by him, an only child.”

Q: Even though the thing that he asked you to do that night, to make that phone call, led to all these problems for you in your life?

A: Well, I don’t really feel that he was responsible. I really don’t. I think he was just an innocent agent, like I was on this matter.

After almost an hour of direct examination and a short recess, Pecchia began a brief cross. He walked Trimble Smith back through her testimony about the Dunaski team’s visit to Colorado. She had said the detectives had found her lying on the couch—“sick, going through withdrawals”—and had given her a hundred dollars, supposedly to be used for pain medication. Instead, while they were gone for a few hours, she used the money to buy crack cocaine. She’d said she used the crack and consumed part of a bottle of wine before they returned to the apartment.

Q: And so you would say you were pretty much under the influence at the time you were talking to them that first time that they met with you?

She also mentioned that she had taken morphine for pain prior to testifying before the grand jury.

A: Pretty much, I guess. Yeah, because I don’t remember saying a lot of things that I said.…

In his even briefer redirect examination, Paulsen reminded Trimble Smith of a statement she had given an investigator employed by the defense, covering much of the same ground as her grand jury testimony.

Q: And then there was a question that came up about whether Ronald Reed knew that a policeman was going to be killed. And do you remember your answer?

Q: I will read it to you. “I don’t know if he knew what was going to happen.” Is that a true statement you made when you said that?

Q: So you don’t know whether Ronald Reed knew that a policeman was going to be killed as a result of that phone call?

Paulsen pressed the point, but the witness insisted she didn’t remember saying that, even after Paulsen showed her the line in the transcript of the defense investigator’s interview.

Afterward, it was difficult to determine whose side had been better served by Trimble Smith’s messy testimony. Her earlier statements, especially those made under oath before the grand jury, were surely more credible than her contradictory trial iterations, and her memory lapses, while plausible given her chemical history and the passage of time, often seemed pathetically transparent. Her most genuine statement may have been the acknowledgment of her continuing relationship with the Reeds.

At least one observer on the prosecution side of the aisle was sympathetic. “I think for the first time Connie felt she was an important part of their family,” Jane Mead said later. “That’s just my opinion, but I’ve thought about it a lot—about the way she back-pedaled on the stand. It was maddening. The evidence was there. The truth was there. But that was still her family, and Ronnie Reed still meant a lot to her. She’d probably loved him all that time.”

Anthony Foster, in his middle fifties, told the court he had done cabinet-assembly work until he was laid off after being subpoenaed in this case. He, too, recalled the racial tension of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the meetings in the neighborhood that discussed the need to establish a Black Panther chapter in St. Paul. “There weren’t a whole lot of black people in St. Paul,” he said. “And we did have our share of problems. And they”—Reed, Clark, Kelly Day, and others—“felt that the only way that they could get national recognition was to do something very drastic.”

Foster brought up the shooting of Wayne Massie by the police in February 1970. “Wayne was my cousin,” Foster testified, and Massie’s death, he said, was one of several incidents that Reed and others were referring to when they said, “They are killing us, so we have to kill them.” Foster referred to the abundance of guns—“all different types”—that were available to the group as well as target practice in the ICYL basement and at a farm “somewhere up north.”

Then Paulsen led Foster through an “encounter” he’d had with Reed a few days after Sackett’s murder. Foster said they were at his apartment. He was drinking wine with Reed, Arthur Harper, and Arling Reese; all but Reed were also smoking marijuana. Paulsen asked if Reed was acting unusual that day. Foster said Reed wasn’t wearing “his Army fatigues and everything.… Usually he did.” When Foster mentioned the Sackett shooting, Reed said nothing.

A: Well, you know, seeing as it was such a big thing, yes. But I just let it go.

Foster also acknowledged that after his name appeared in the paper on a list of possible witnesses, he had been given “about $1,300” by the state to relocate and an additional amount for the first month’s rent at the new location.

John Pecchia, on cross-examination, asked Foster if he had taken notes at the time or if he was relying on his memory of “what someone said or may have said thirty-five years ago.” Foster acknowledged he was relying on his memory.

Q: And it would be fair to say that sometimes your memory may not be perfect—correct?

Pecchia also brought up some of the other characters on the scene at the time, including the ex-Army marksman Eddie Garrett.

On redirect, Paulsen said, “Mr. Pecchia asked you why you didn’t go to the police back in 1970 or 1972.” Foster replied, “Well, they never came and questioned me.… And there was a code of silence. We don’t talk. That’s just the code. And it is something that is very hard to break. It is hard to break today. Because we don’t talk.”

Q: Do you feel you might suffer repercussions from being in this courtroom today?

Q: Why did you agree to talk to the police when they sought you out in 2004, 2005?

A: Well, a lot of things have changed. A lot of things have changed in my life. So, you know, they asked me the questions and … I could only tell them the truth, what I know of.

The final recollections from the old neighborhood were provided by the federal prisoner John Henry Griffin, currently in the middle of a thirty-year sentence for possession of and conspiracy to sell heroin. Following Paulsen’s lead, Griffin explained his extensive criminal history, his hope to have his sentence reduced after testifying for the prosecution in this trial, and the fact that the government had paid him approximately $1,200 for a new pair of glasses, phone calls, and other, “miscellaneous things.” “The state hasn’t offered to do anything specific other than let [my] sentencing judge know that I did cooperate in this case,” he told the court. He said he understood the procedure as explained by the prosecutors and that, even though a motion would be filed with the federal judge who had sentenced him, there were neither promises nor a guarantee of a reduced sentence.

Griffin described his introduction to the Black Panthers while visiting the Bay Area to cut a drug deal in 1969. He said the Panthers were “looking for members and … nationalizing” at the time. And while the organization expressed interest in St. Paul (“the place that snows all the time,” he said he had to tell the Californians, who seemed unsure of the city’s location), he wasn’t authorized to set up a local chapter or “make somebody else a Panther.” The “little group” led by Ronald Reed in St. Paul followed the Panther philosophy and articulated the Panther program, he said, but they were never, strictly speaking, Black Panthers.

When asked about the group’s activities, Griffin mentioned the breakfast program for kids and a “senior citizens program that we were thinking about doing.” Unfortunately, he said, the group didn’t have the funds to meet the need. “So we did other things for money.”

Griffin described the group’s desire to become a Panther chapter and how it was generally agreed that something sensational would be necessary to impress the national leadership. Cops had been attacked in other parts of the country, and Reed seemed interested in that approach, Griffin said.

A: Well, we all had a negative attitude toward the police at that particular time. His attitude was like all of ours. You know, we called them “pigs”—[for] police in the ghetto. We felt that they were coming in and, you know—well, they were coming in and beating people up and all of that at the time.

Despite his own animosity toward the police, Griffin said, he believed that killing a cop “would create a lot of problems” for the St. Paul organization. He said he didn’t think it would ever happen.

Griffin was in prison following a robbery conviction when Sackett was murdered and didn’t return to St. Paul until early 1971, by which time Reed and Clark were awaiting trial for the Omaha bank job. He next saw Reed sometime in the 1980s (he couldn’t be more specific), when they sat in a West St. Paul supermarket parking lot and talked about old times. Griffin was following, almost verbatim, his testimony before the grand jury in 2004. Again, the recounting of his conversation with Reed was startling. Connie Trimble didn’t know what had gone down, he said, but she still could have caused problems for Reed (“she could have put him there”—at the crime scene), so Reed thanked Griffin for helping prevent Kelly Day from testifying for the state at her trial. During that conversation, Griffin continued, Reed suddenly described the shooting itself, telling him “that when he put a bead on that officer, on that cop … he felt powerful, he felt strong.… [B]ut when he seen the bullet hitting him … he never felt more fucked up in his life.”

Paulsen, who of course had heard the story before, was struck by how quiet the courtroom had become. “Griffin was the only witness who came right out and said Reed shot Sackett,” the prosecutor said later.

Pecchia tried to counter by pounding on Griffin’s desire to reduce his sentence. Griffin responded directly about his wife and his five children, none of whom he saw very often, and his offer to Tom Dunaski two years earlier to provide “information that would solve the Sackett case” (Pecchia’s words) in exchange for a shortened term. Counsel also reiterated Griffin’s behind-the-scenes role on behalf of the defense (actually, on behalf of Reed) during the Trimble trial and his lifelong “problem” with heroin. But nothing then or the next day, when Pecchia concluded his cross-examination, seemed strong enough to diminish the force of the convict’s testimony.

On Friday morning Jeff Paulsen told the court that the state rested. Several individuals who had been included on the prosecution’s witness list—long-ago acquaintances of Ronald Reed for the most part, with clouded histories of their own—were no doubt relieved to not have been called. The state’s lawyers believed they had made their case, and with additional testimony they risked muddying the already not-exactly-crystalline waters. At any rate, it would be difficult to improve on the revelations of Garrett and Griffin.

More surprising was John Pecchia’s announcement, following the weekend recess, that the defense also rested. The defense had not called a single witness.

Counsel’s decision followed a certain logic. If Pecchia had called witnesses to testify on Reed’s behalf, the state could have challenged the character evidence by introducing other crimes in which Reed had been involved, most notably the Omaha bank robbery attempt, which had been off-limits. Discussing the point out of the jury’s earshot, Paulsen said that, if given an opening, the prosecution would bring up the Nebraska crime to show the defendant’s willingness to use a gun to harm a police officer (the moonlighting security guard). The prosecutors had in fact spent the weekend preparing cross-examinations of the several potential witnesses listed by the defense. They were as surprised as the rest of the courtroom when, on Monday, the defense announced that it would call no one.

Once again, though, the defendant was determined to speak for himself. Prior to resting, Pecchia had asked him if he wished to take the stand. Reed said he didn’t. “Under extreme duress, I am inclined to waive my right to testify in my behalf,” he explained to the court.

Judge Johnson, as might be expected, responded quickly to the “extreme duress” assertion. “I want to make it clear that this is a decision that you are making of your own accord,” he told Reed.

Reed said, “Yes, sir.… Under extreme duress, I am inclined to waive my right to testify in my own behalf.”

Pecchia asked to speak, but Reed was on his feet, calling for the judge’s attention. After a short, off-the-record conversation at the bench, Johnson gave Reed permission to address the court.

“Your honor,” Reed said, “it is my understanding that it is the position of the court that if I were to proceed with my defense … and if I attested or any of my witnesses would attest to my good character, that this court would allow the prosecution to then impeach my testimony by introducing into evidence a twenty-five- or thirty-five-year-old conviction.… So the court, I feel, is placing an albatross around my neck.”

“And that is the only reason that I am inclined to forego my rights to testify in my own behalf and to present a defense,” Reed concluded.

The following morning, both sides offered their closing arguments. Susan Hudson played the recording of Trimble’s phone call, reprised the subsequent events of May 22, 1970, and reviewed the evidence against Reed. “The state does not have to prove that Reed himself actually fired the shot which killed Officer Sackett, although you could so find because there is evidence from which you can conclude that he did…,” she told the jury. “What you do have to find, however, is that this defendant knowingly aided and abetted someone in the shooting of Officer Sackett.” The second count of the indictment required the jurors to find the defendant guilty of conspiring with at least one other person to commit murder.

Pecchia attacked the quality of the investigation that followed Sackett’s murder, the lack of a precise determination of the fatal bullet’s origin, the paucity of tangible evidence, and even the accuracy of the scale-model reproduction of the neighborhood that sat at the foot of the jury box. He again challenged the motivation and credibility of the state’s witnesses and the reliability of grand jury testimony without the presence of a judge or the cross-examination of witnesses. He reminded the jurors that Connie Trimble had been acquitted in the same case.

At 4 PM the next day they returned their verdict: Ronald Lindsey Reed was guilty of aiding and abetting murder in the first degree and guilty of conspiracy to commit murder in the first degree.

The defendant remained seated and silent, his hands clasped in front of him, while the judge read the verdicts. In the gallery, family members and supporters on both sides of the aisle stirred, cried, and offered each other congratulations or consolation, though the response was generally restrained. Several of the old cops who were there for the finale squeezed each other’s hands. St. Paul’s mayor, Chris Coleman, who was eight years old when Sackett was murdered, stood next to councilmember Dan Bostrom, who had been Sackett’s supervisor. Chief John Harrington, a formidable physical presence in his dark blue uniform, stood alongside the Sacketts.

Before Johnson handed down the sentence, Jeanette Sackett Monteon, her second son, Jerel, and daughter Julie offered brief statements. Jerel, who was the three-week-old infant his father had reluctantly left behind when he went off to work that night, told Reed, “Hopefully, you and your family will now have a chance to experience the loss that I have had for the past thirty-five years.” In a letter read by Susan Hudson, Julie enumerated the several personal milestones—her high school graduation, her wedding day, the birth of her children, and others—for which her father had been absent. Jeanette, after briefly describing the family’s loss, said, “Today, I feel content. I have waited for this day. And I hope that with Ron Reed being incarcerated, he will know the pain and the suffering that I have gone through and will go through the rest of my life.”

A moment later, Reed rose and addressed the court. “Your honor, and to Mrs. Sackett and her family and to the Minnesota community at large,” he said, “if my unjust conviction brings consolation and closure to Officer Sackett’s legacy and to his beloved family, then I accept the consequences gladly and without malice toward anyone.

“Also, your honor, I beg the court’s indulgence if it has perceived that I have disrespected it in any way. That was not my intention.”

Johnson, who seemed surprised by the apparent apology if not by the weirdly self-exonerating statement of acceptance, told Reed he hadn’t felt disrespected. He then sentenced him to life in prison. Under the rules of 1970, by which the case was tried, that meant Reed would serve at least seventeen and a half years before becoming eligible for parole.

Johnson then offered his customary benediction before Reed was led out of the courtroom. “Good luck to you, sir,” he said.

A juror told the Pioneer Press that shortly after beginning their deliberations seven members of the panel had voted for Reed’s conviction and five were undecided. The group debated the case the rest of Tuesday afternoon, then took another vote first thing Wednesday morning. That vote was ten for conviction and two undecided. The jury eventually passed word to the judge that they wanted to listen again to the recording of Trimble’s phone call. They did, and then cast a unanimous vote: guilty on both counts.

“The remaining two people thought that call from Connie was rehearsed,” the juror, who asked to remain anonymous, explained to reporter Bill Gardner. “She rehearsed it. She was aware of what she needed to tell the police.”

Still, according to the paper, the decision had been difficult and emotional. Everyone was sad. A few of the jurors cried. They had reached the verdicts by noon on March 1 but wanted some “quiet time to reflect.” So the twelve of them shared pizza in the jury room before telling the court what they had decided.

¹Paulsen later noted for the record that, according to the county jail visitors log, Pecchia and defense team investigator Pat Robinson had seen Reed on twenty-two occasions and that Almon had visited ten times.

²Unlike Trimble’s 1972 trial, the trials of Reed and Clark were documented in complete transcripts, which are quoted here and on the following pages.