1According to an acquaintance, Clark was living in the Twin Cities after his release. He had a job and a wife and attended services at his north Minneapolis mosque.
Actually, it wasn’t over for everybody. While Larry Clark bided his time until his January 2010 release, Ronald Reed, from his seven-by-eleven-foot, single-occupancy cell at Oak Park Heights—the state’s modern, maximum-security correctional facility outside of Stillwater—continued to struggle for his freedom.
On August 12, 2009, Reed petitioned the district court for post-conviction relief. Represented by a well-known local criminal attorney named Howard Bass, Reed argued four points: his prosecution was precluded by the statute of limitations, his right to defend himself at trial had been denied, his court-appointed counsel both at trial and on direct appeal was ineffective, and “newly discovered evidence” revealed that Connie Trimble Smith had given false testimony, which entitled him to a new trial.
Three months later, Judge Johnson, concluding that Reed had “failed to allege sufficient facts,” denied the petition without an evidentiary hearing.
On January 8, 2010, Reed, again represented by Bass, appealed for the second time to the Minnesota Supreme Court, arguing points regarding his right to represent himself, the statute of limitations, the adequacy of counsel, the liability for aiding and abetting, and Trimble Smith’s trial testimony. After another long wait, the supreme court, on December 29, 2010, affirmed the lower court’s ruling.
On March 28, 2011, Reed, now serving as his own lawyer, petitioned the United States Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari. He asked the court to review his case and to be allowed to “proceed in forma pauperis,” that is, with the court covering the cost of the petition. It was, legally speaking, his last resort, and it was a long shot. Every year the court receives thousands of so-called cert petitions and denies all but about a hundred of them.
The following June, the court denied Reed’s.
Tom Dunaski and Scott Duff formally retired after thirty-seven years on the job. The department’s celebration for its 2009 retirees, at the Prom Ballroom in suburban Oakdale in May, drew dozens of family members, friends, and colleagues. Among those wishing Dunaski and Duff well that evening were Jeanette and Jim Sackett Jr., Simon Monteon, Jeff Paulsen, Susan Hudson, and other members of the Sackett task force. Along with Jane Mead, Paulsen, and Hudson, Dunaski and Duff had been honored in 2007 by the International Homicide Investigators Association during the group’s annual gathering in Las Vegas for the Cold Case Investigation of the Year. In 2006 Dunaski had received the U.S. Attorney’s annual Law Enforcement Recognition Award for his work on the Sackett case.
True to form, neither Dunaski nor Duff actually retired. As the decade expired, each was taking on special projects for the department and other agencies.
Duff joined fifteen other erstwhile homicide investigators hired with the help of an eighteen-month federal grant to revisit more than 150 cold cases dating back several decades. Among other cases, Duff drew the 1965 robbery-murder of an African American businessman named Royal Gooden, which had gone unsolved for lack of credible information. “The good folks didn’t know who did it, and the bad folks weren’t about to share what they knew,” said one longtime Summit-University resident, neatly summing up the ageless problem. As it turned out, all three of the prime suspects were dead when Duff reviewed the case almost forty-five years later.
In the spring of 2010, Dunaski was asked by then Ramsey County sheriff Bob Fletcher to help with the investigation of yet another cold case—the triple murder, in March 2007, of a St. Paul man, his girlfriend, and the woman’s teenaged daughter in an apparently drug-related bloodbath. In January 2010, a Ramsey County grand jury had indicted two men, Tyvarus Lindsey and Rashad Raleigh, who were already in prison following their convictions on different murder charges, and Dunaski—now known to colleagues as “the Closer”—was brought aboard to help build the case against them for trial. (Lindsey and Raleigh were convicted in federal court in June 2011 and sentenced to concurrent life sentences the following November. And, again, the small world of local law enforcement was apparent. Jeff Paulsen prosecuted the case, and before its conclusion Fletcher had been replaced as county sheriff by Matthew Bostrom, the son of Dan Bostrom, one of James Sackett’s supervisors in 1970.)
Dunaski was working on that case when, on May 1, a police sergeant from Maplewood, on St. Paul’s northern border, was shot and killed while taking part in a manhunt for a pair of carjackers near Lake Phalen. Joseph Bergeron’s killer, who was killed himself a short time later during a brief but ferocious struggle with David Longbehn, a city patrolman, turned out to be a twenty-one-year-old local man identified as Jason Jones.
In a polo shirt and cargo pants, full of bluster and banter and talkative as always, Dunaski could have been mistaken for a senior drill sergeant in civvies, though the .40-caliber Glock on his hip and the sheriff’s department star on his belt made his line of work apparent. Because this was St. Paul and because he was Tom Dunaski, he knew all three of the principals in the latest homicide: the fallen officer, the killer, and the cop who killed the killer. “I knew him when he was a little kid,” he said of Jones. “His mom was a juvenile prostitute, an informant of mine. I remember she’d drag the kid along with her, wet from the rain, snot smeared all over his face. He didn’t have a whole lot of chances growing up.”
The Sackett case was old news, over and done with for the cops who, even in “retirement,” had fresher crimes to preoccupy them. Still, for everybody who worked on it, the Sackett case was and would always be something special and, for many among its large cast of characters, unforgettable. For some, the case might never truly end. Ronald Reed, for example, as Dunaski reminisced, was waiting for a response to his latest appeal. “He was a smart kid, with a lot going for him,” Dunaski said, drawing an implicit comparison with Jason Jones. “He was popular back at Central High. He had some talents—it just depended on how he wanted to use them. He was a leader. He had visions of being something special in his community. And he was from a good family, very good people. I don’t know what happened. People you talked to from back then would say, ‘There was a change in him.’ He went somewhere, to a rally or something, and it was like a light went on. He was different after that. He seemed to have this mandate when he came back.”
Clark was “just a soldier,” Dunaski said. “He carried the baggage. So he got five years in jail where he got three square meals a day. Now he’s out. Maybe he’s back in Nebraska.1 I don’t know. We haven’t followed him. He was just a flat line, never got anything going on his own. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I never saw any sign of it.”
Dunaski had kind words for the late Eddie Garrett and for John Griffin, who had in fact been granted an early parole from federal prison after his testimony in the Reed trial and was living out of state.
“I came to really like the guy,” Dunaski said of Griffin, “and not just because he went to bat for us. Here’s this guy who was really an asshole back in the day. He was a real Black Panther, supposedly the only guy from around here who was actually initiated into the organization while the other guys were just wannabes. Then he got into heroin and was a real gangster. When we first went back to him [in federal prison], he was content with where he was. But then we finally broke through the shell and got to him. It’s not like we did such a great job—he just decided that this was it. He wasn’t promised anything. But we found we liked each other, these two opposites, oil and water, ending up having some respect for each other, having some things in common to talk about. Now he’s out and working at a business, and I can’t give him enough credit. He’s kind of a success story after all those years.”
Nothing had happened since the trials ended to create any doubts about the detectives’ conclusions. Dunaski believed the original investigators had it right from the beginning. Though they never told him as much, Dunaski said he felt the frustration among the earlier detectives because they did not close the case in the weeks and months following Sackett’s murder. “They were good, nose-to-the-ground detectives,” he said. “They were old-school homicide—you know, fedora kind of guys. It had to be frustrating for them.” In a courthouse hallway after the Reed verdict, Earl Miels had hugged Dunaski. “Nice job, kid,” Miels told him.
Still, questions remained—some unanswered and some unanswerable, attached like barnacles to the ancient case. Whatever happened to the rifle? Dunaski and Duff were certain they would find the weapon in the house on Concordia. As it turned out, they could only be confident that it had been there at one time, hidden in the basement ductwork. Had there been other witnesses? Was there a neighbor coming home from work or a night on the town who might have seen a couple of young men with a rifle a few minutes after midnight? What became of the person who supposedly lived down the block or across the alley from Clark, who was rumored to have heard the shot and seen someone with a gun running either toward or away from Clark’s house? If such a person existed, neither the detectives who wore the fedoras nor their hatless successors found him.
But because the case was closed, Dunaski no longer lost sleep over those questions. One of the last things he saw before turning off the light at night was a small, rectangular plaque that hung on a bedroom wall. The plaque, designed by Jane Mead and presented to every member of the task force, was inscribed To the Team and bore a reproduction of Sackett’s shield, Badge 450, above the words Never Forgotten and We Stand as One on the Thin Blue Line.
Almost a dozen years younger than Dunaski, Mead was still on the job in 2010, a senior member of a seven-person St. Paul homicide squad that was investigating upward of a dozen murders a year. Her children had grown up and married, and since the Sackett investigation she had become a grandmother. Like her task force partners, Mead looked back at Sackett as the case of a lifetime, the most memorable experience of a long, productive career.
Mead believed the case had changed her. Even though she had been a St. Paul cop for almost twenty years when the team began looking into the Sackett files, she was surprised to learn there was so much she didn’t know about the city. The middle-aged men and women the task force talked to on the Hill would say, “You don’t know what it was like back then.” One older man spoke passionately about the sewer-construction project that he and other African Americans picketed in 1969 because the contractor refused to hire blacks. The protest was a big deal at the time, front-page news and a cause célèbre among the growing numbers of politically active residents that included Milt Williams (later Mahmoud El-Kati) and Katie McWatt; several protesters, both black and white, were arrested for defying orders to disperse. Other black people told Mead and her partners about being harassed and roughed up by cops who were accustomed to having their way in the “ghetto.” Many of the retired officers she talked to said the same thing—“You don’t know what it was like back then”—though they recalled the experience from a different point of view, describing an inner-city landscape that had grown dangerous for law-abiding citizens and the police alike. Raised in a white community, surrounded by white law enforcement officers and firefighters, Mead had been fully aware of only the latter side of the gaping divide.
By the time she was working the streets as a St. Paul cop, times had not necessarily improved but they had definitely changed. She had dozens of African American, Hispanic, and Asian colleagues as the department began to better reflect the multicolored demographics of the city, and the drug culture tended to direct most of the violence toward rival gang members rather than the police. The idea of a revolutionary assassination of an officer seemed weirdly old-fashioned.
Like Dunaski, Mead had grown fond of several of the Sackett witnesses, even though many of them were distrustful and contemptuous of the police, at least at the beginning. “We really liked Eddie Garrett, and felt really bad when he died,” she said. Mead also liked and felt sorry for Connie Trimble, and said so during the trials, though she knew that offended Jeanette Sackett, to whom she had grown close. “They were older now,” she told a reporter, speaking of those witnesses. “They were not what they were in the day.”
“You live and breathe with these people, and you hear about their struggles,” Mead explained. “People do horrible things, but you learn they have good parts, too. I guess it’s that empathy thing, where you can almost always get a better idea of why people are the way they are if you look at the world from their point of view.”
Among many of the officers who were in the department on May 22, 1970, the Sackett murder held the kind of mnemonic power that the Kennedy and King assassinations and the 9/11 attacks held for most Americans. Everybody remembered where he or she was when the startling bulletin, like a thunderbolt, shattered the calm of an ordinary day or evening. As the Sackett case made clear, however, memory was not always reliable. Some of the cops who later said they were on duty that night were not. Others who suggested they would have been the ones responding to Trimble’s O.B. call if this or that had not diverted them were similarly mistaken. It was not the least of the ironies surrounding the Sackett case that, as Dunaski pointed out, the one squad that shouldn’t have caught that fateful call—a traffic car with neither the capacity nor the equipment to handle a medical emergency—was the one that did.
Ed Steenberg, who with his partner John LaBossiere was in the first car to arrive at 859 Hague after the ambush, not only thought about what happened that night but wondered what might have gone down differently. He and LaBossiere walked the Selby Avenue beat until the department decided it was safer to put all patrolmen in cars. They knew and were known by many of the young people who lived in the neighborhood. So what would have happened, Steenberg asked himself, if he and LaBossiere had reached the Hague address ahead of Sackett and Kothe? The idea of the sniper lowering his rifle and saying, “Oh, wait—I know those guys!” was a stretch, and Steenberg, a man with a hearty sense of humor who rose to the rank of deputy chief, answered his own question with a chuckle. It’s unlikely familiar faces would have made a difference. And even if they had, he mused, “I would imagine that the next night, or the night after that, it would have happened—they would have killed someone else.”
Bill Finney was quite sure the killer or killers would not have fired at James Griffin or Jimmy Mann. They were even better known in the neighborhood than Steenberg and LaBossiere, and, more to the point, they were two of the four black officers in the department at the time. Beyond that consideration, Finney believed the target’s identity would not have mattered so long as the target was dressed in blue.
A few years ago, Glen Kothe, now in his middle sixties, had grown tired of going to the funerals of old friends. Three retired cops that he knew had died on the same day. They were not falling in the line of duty but succumbing to illness and age. As an antidote to the lengthening fatality list, Kothe began hosting what he called a “celebration of life”—an annual potluck dinner for local law enforcement retirees and their spouses. Once a year he set up a couple dozen folding tables in the big, barn-like building where his wife trained dogs, and for the better part of three hours he worked the crowd like the proprietor of a Munich Biergarten—shaking hands, slapping backs, and reminiscing with a hundred other survivors. Beer was indeed available to wash down the homemade chili and lasagna, but this was a celebration, not a wake, so the old cops stayed sober.
Kothe didn’t drink anymore himself. For a long time after his partner’s death he drank enough “for a dozen guys,” and then he finally had enough. There were other changes, too. After decades of avoidance, he and Jeanette Sackett, while waiting to testify at Reed’s trial, started talking again. But tormenting memories of that long-ago night still crept into his consciousness. Something he would see on TV or read in the paper would trigger a flashback. He tried not to think about it, but once a year, no matter what, not thinking about it was impossible.
“May 22 is never a good day for me,” he told his friends.
James Sackett Jr. spent less time thinking about the case after the guilty verdicts were handed down. “Occasionally I do,” he said three years later, “but not as much.”
Sometimes people recognized him. They would notice the resemblance he bore to his father and say something. At the hospital where he worked, his identification badge revealed only his first name, yet every once in a while someone would look at him and then look at the badge and then ask, “Is your last name Sackett?” Sometimes the curious individual was an elderly cop who had served with his father. Once it was a nurse, now retired, who had been working in the Ramsey County emergency room the night his father was brought in.
“A couple times a year I’ll run into somebody,” he said quietly. Such an encounter was always difficult, but there was a positive side to it as well. “It’s good that they remember. It’s good that the story hasn’t been entirely forgotten.”
1According to an acquaintance, Clark was living in the Twin Cities after his release. He had a job and a wife and attended services at his north Minneapolis mosque.