It had been a generation—twenty-one years—since a St. Paul police officer had been murdered in the line of duty, and the city, waking to the news, was stunned.
Because of its modest size, its ethnic and religious composition, and the sentimental self-regard of its neighborhoods and parishes, St. Paul felt a close kinship with its cops. Until the late sixties, police officers and firefighters had been required to live within city limits, and, especially in its heavily Irish, Italian, and German Catholic precincts, many extended families boasted a cop, a priest, or several of both. Sons followed fathers into the department, and brothers, cousins, nephews, and in-laws were common at roll call. Many had been encouraged by older officers they had grown up admiring in their neighborhoods and congregations. The St. Paul Police Department (officially, until New Year’s Day 1971, the St. Paul Bureau of Police), in the eyes of most citizens, provided an admirable way to make a decent living. So for many reasons, even at a time of nationwide disorder, news of Patrolman James Sackett’s murder coursed through the city’s arteries and organs like an electric shock.
The fact that Sackett’s shooting had not been collateral damage—the by-product of an armed robbery, for example, or an instance of an officer getting caught in the middle of a domestic scrap (the call that officers feared more than any other)—made it all the more outrageous and difficult to comprehend. This was against the “rules,” such as they were, that had long obtained between the police and criminals, who, out of fear of furious reprisal if not a weird sense of gamesmanship, were loath to attack cops with lethal intent if their freedom wasn’t at stake. That day’s papers, on the streets beginning at sunup, quoted police sources pronouncing the shooting “deliberate and cold-blooded” and described the phony O.B. call that drew the squad into the sniper’s sights. The shot, according to the paper, was believed to have been fired from somewhere across the street, but so far, several hours after the shooting, no suspect, weapon, or eyewitness to the act had been found.
Few St. Paulites were more shaken by the murder than Sackett’s contemporaries in the department, whether they were closely acquainted with him or not. The young cops of Sackett’s cohort had not been in the department—most were not even out of knee pants—the last time a St. Paul officer had been shot to death. That had been Sergeant Allan Lee in 1949. Unlike more senior officers such as homicide commander Ernest Williams and veteran sergeant Paul Paulos, the young men who joined the force in the 1960s had not been hardened by combat in Europe, the Pacific, or Korea. Some of the younger cops had been in the “peacetime” military (the U.S. presence in Vietnam had begun to expand only in the mid-sixties), and a few had served as military policemen, but most had come to the academy from civilian jobs where the greatest occupational hazard was dropping a case of soda bottles on your foot. As recruits, they laughed nervously, probably not quite believing it, when told by an academy instructor that the odds were good that one of them would be killed in action. A St. Paul officer had been shot and killed on the job, on average, once every seven years since the first victim fell in the late nineteenth century, and it had been more than two decades since Sergeant Lee’s death.
The young cops had been attracted by the promise of adventure—more adventure at any rate than they were likely to encounter driving a truck or peddling life insurance—and the idealistic if somewhat nebulous notion of making the community a better place to live. But the greatest appeal to the greatest number of them was the certain prospect of steady work starting at about six hundred dollars a month and the opportunity to retire in twenty-five years with a generous pension. Their parents had struggled through the Great Depression, and they were brought up with a near-religious appreciation of a dependable job with solid benefits. The possibility of serious injury or death was not yet a preoccupation. “I don’t think any of us were especially worried about our personal safety,” Stuart Montbriand, who entered the academy with Jim Sackett in the fall of 1968, said much later.
There were, of course, the mundane yet often painful hazards of the job: the broken noses, slipped disks, dislocated shoulders, and lacerations a cop brought home after breaking up a bar fight or wrestling a 250-pound drunk into the back of a squad car. There were car wrecks during high-speed pursuits and tumbles from icy ledges during rescue attempts and nonlethal wounds from deadly weapons. Paul Paulos, who spent most of his forty years in the department on the street, was shot at on several occasions, grazed by a bullet while struggling over a .30-.30 with a berserk husband during a domestic call, and cut “quite a few times,” most notably when he was slashed by a rapist wielding a butcher’s knife in an alley off Victoria. A supremely fit and confident man who said he witnessed far more sanguinary situations fighting the Germans during World War II, he insisted the injuries were part of the job.
Even the supervisors such as Jerry Dexter and Dan Bostrom weren’t that much older—most of them scarcely thirty—when Sackett was shot. Also still young were experienced patrolmen like Ed Steenberg, John LaBossiere, and Joe Corcoran, whose lives and careers would be indelibly marked by the murder. For many of those cops, including the men who had been around when Allan Lee was killed, the Sackett case was something special, a cop-killing that was unique in the city’s history. Since May 18, 1882, when Patrolman Daniel O’Connell was fatally shot while investigating a burglary, twenty-five St. Paul officers had been killed on the job. Twelve had died of gunshot wounds. Ten had succumbed to injuries sustained in traffic-related incidents. One had been thrown from a horse, one had been fatally hurt in a fall, one had been accidentally electrocuted. Most died during or following contact with an apparent lawbreaker, say during the course of a robbery or while the suspect attempted to escape. Only one, James Sackett, had been assassinated.
Assassinated is a chilling term. It denotes the premeditated murder of someone because of what, at least as much as who, the victim is. John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were targeted because of their positions (president, civil rights leader) rather than for strictly personal reasons. St. Paul’s cops quickly realized the shooter waiting in the shadows of Hague Avenue could not possibly have known who would answer that call for assistance. The shooter (and his or her accomplice or accomplices) could not have known that Kothe and Sackett would be directed there by the dispatcher. Indeed, patrolmen Kothe and Sackett, in their gaudy Plymouth traffic car, were accidental responders, filling in, as it happened, for the stretcher car that would ordinarily be sent to a medical emergency. If the outcome had not been deadly, it might have been amusing to imagine the sniper’s confusion when the burnt-orange 440 rumbled up at the curb. But there was nothing funny about the inevitable conclusion drawn from the few facts at hand: the sniper wanted to kill a cop, and seemingly any cop would do.
That apparent reality, compounded by the fact that Sackett and Kothe were on what department spokesmen described as a “mission of mercy,” cut St. Paul’s cops to the quick and would haunt the case for the next forty years and maybe for as long as anyone remembered it.
Montbriand, who had gone off duty only moments before his friend was killed, was one of several officers who could have been excused for thinking There but for the grace of God go I that night. Decades later, Montbriand said the last time he saw Sackett was at the Dairy Queen at Sycamore and Rice, a few blocks north of the Capitol, where he and his partner swapped the Plymouth for the decidedly less flashy unmarked Chevrolet that Sackett and Kothe had been assigned, not long before Montbriand went home. The discrepancy between Montbriand’s recollection and Jerry Dexter’s version of how Kothe and Sackett happened to be driving the 440 was only one of many of the conflicted memories that would accrue around this case and perhaps says something about the lasting trauma of the event.
For officers such as Montbriand, Sackett’s assassination was a deeply personal loss as well as a professional affront. “The last thing I heard Jim say that night was something like, ‘Hey, you and me and the wives gotta get together for dinner.’ The next thing I knew I started getting calls at home—first that Jim had been shot, then that he had died.
“The Sackett case had a dramatic effect on St. Paul’s cops,” Montbriand, who retired in 1992, continued. “There was anger, of course, but also a changed mentality, a sense of danger and vulnerability that hadn’t been there before, or at least not for a long time. The idea that there had been a sniper, that it could be that sudden and unprovoked, how quick it could happen to you.…” His voice trailed off, his statement unfinished.
“Without a doubt, the Sackett murder was the defining moment of my career,” Dan Bostrom told a journalist years later. Bostrom, who became a school-board member and city councilman after more than twenty-five years in the department, still lived on the East Side a few blocks from the Sackett bungalow. Sackett had worked under Bostrom for about six months and had impressed the older man both personally and professionally. “The way he handled himself—I considered him an extremely trustworthy, honorable, and hardworking fellow. Then he was gone. I don’t know if the manner of his death would have made a difference to me or not—he would have been gone no matter what. Still”—and here Bostrom, like many of Sackett’s contemporaries when recalling the case four decades later, looked back with a thousand-yard stare—“if you’re in a shootout during a bank robbery, at least you have an opportunity to defend yourself. In Sackett’s case, he was on a mission of mercy and didn’t have a chance.” Bostrom occasionally drove past 859 Hague and could see the young officer lying in that scrubby front yard as though the murder were yesterday.
Bostrom and Dexter, as power shift sergeants, were probably in harm’s way more than the average St. Paul cop in 1970. The shift comprised mostly volunteers, and most of the volunteers were younger officers and supervisors. “We wanted to get into the thick of things,” Dexter explained, “but I don’t think we thought much about getting killed. We were cautious, but I don’t recall being really frightened. We’d be prepared, but not afraid.” Sackett’s murder changed that. “This sort of thing had been going on around the country—officers being sniped at—and all of a sudden it happened in St. Paul. Before Sackett, we’d get word now and then to be particularly careful—people would be talking about the possibility of snipers. Our supervisors would say, ‘We got word there are some people in town.…’ But until Sackett, we weren’t really on high alert.” High alert equaled, among many of the young patrolmen, high anxiety, ratcheted up by the unmistakable sound of a bullet being chambered in a rifle as a squad car crept along a dark street late on a hot night on the Hill.
For Steenberg and Corcoran, stubborn idealists who were constitutionally inclined to believe the best about their city, Sackett’s assassination was the end of a kind of innocence. “Not St. Paul,” Steenberg—a large, courtly, well-spoken native who, well into his seventies, was pleased to don the department’s 1880s-era tunic, silver star, and bobby’s headgear at ceremonial functions—said to himself in the immediate aftermath of the murder. For Corcoran, the murder would forever be recalled as a “slap in the face.”
Like most of that night’s survivors, Corcoran was now also in his seventies, long retired and enjoying the robust pension that was part of the job’s attraction. Some of the details of that period had grown hazy, but the emotion of the time burned bright. Whatever the glowering young men on the corners thought of them, few St. Paul cops at the time thought of themselves as “enemy soldiers.” Shaking his head, Corcoran said, “I just couldn’t believe that people in this town would kill us.”
At the memorial services that took place over the next forty years, it was sometimes said from the podium that “Patrolman Sackett was a hero because of how he lived, not because of how he died.” In truth, it’s unlikely that Sackett, a modest man according to those who knew him best, would have thought of himself as a hero in death or life. A typical cop, he was at his core an ordinary guy, a working man from a working-class family, a husband and a father, a taxpayer, homeowner, and congenial neighbor, a guy who loved his job until the moment he died doing it.
Sackett was the youngest of three siblings and attended Johnson High School on Arcade Street. He grew up eating his mother’s big breakfasts, and as an adult loved steak any way his wife prepared it. He drank beer when that’s what he could afford at the air base enlisted men’s club but preferred Scotch when he could afford it as a civilian. He smoked Camel cigarettes and was in the habit of field-stripping the butts long after he had left the service. He had a panther encircled by a snake tattooed above the elbow of his left arm.
He was an enthusiastic archer, proud of the double recurve bow he had purchased during a trip to Europe while in the Air Force, and he taught Jeanette how to shoot at the Keller Park range near their house. He liked to play golf and to hunt—deer with a rifle and grouse with a shotgun—though he did less of that as his young family grew. He loved tinkering with cars and carefully maintained the Chevy Impala that he and Jeanette bought not long after they moved into their house. He and several of his police buddies—Kothe, Montbriand, Winger, and Pelton—were dedicated weightlifters. He worked out in the basement of his house and was said by friends to be able to bench-press 250 pounds. He was a well-developed man who measured about five-eight and weighed approximately two hundred pounds when he died—“a young muscular adult male,” according to his autopsy report. “One strong dude,” according to his pal Montbriand.
“Jim was a funny guy,” Jeanette told a journalist. “He loved life and was the life of the party. It didn’t matter where he went—people were drawn to him and would want to talk to him. He liked parties. He was a very good dancer. He had a gift for gab. He had done some sales work while working at Pepsi. His boss told me that he could sell you anything.”
“He was an extrovert,” Montbriand said, “a guy who would organize things and take the initiative. He was ambitious, a go-getter.” Montbriand could not recall his friend expressing either the objective of becoming police chief or the premonition of an early death—perhaps no one except Jeanette could—but then, as Kothe observed, neither idea was something a young cop was likely to tell his partner on the power shift. Montbriand did say, “He definitely had a future in the department. No doubt he would have been a lieutenant or captain some day.”
“His family was the biggest thing in his life,” said Winger. He spent a great deal of time with his kids. “Sometimes he would go off with them and give me a break—he was considerate that way,” Jeanette said. “But he was no disciplinarian. He thought everything the kids did was cute. I was the tough cop in the family. He would never spank them, would never lay a hand on them. Jim Jr. and Jennifer remember wrestling on the floor with him, but Julie was only fifteen months when he was killed and Jerel was twenty days old. That breaks my heart, their never knowing firsthand what a good father they had.”
“He was a fanatical family man who insisted on rounding up and kissing each of his kids before he went off to work,” said Montbriand. “‘You never know,’ he used to say.”
Sackett was easygoing and loved to joke. If he got uptight about anything, his friends say, it was his uniform. You wouldn’t want to step on his spit-shined shoes or smudge the patent-leather brim of his cap. One of his partners told Jeanette about the time a guy Jim had arrested knocked the cap off his head. Jim picked the guy up, slammed him against the wall, and told him, “You never touch my cap.” Jeanette said that despite his generally relaxed personality, the moment he put on that blue uniform he was “a different man.”
“All cop” was the way Montbriand put it.
After nearly a year and a half on the job, Sackett was considered by his superiors hard-working, dependable, and productive. Besides responding to calls and working traffic details, he and Kothe were often given outstanding warrants to serve. Of course, they had to find the person before they could serve the warrant, and that, for the two of them, became a sport they relished.
“At the time we were on the power shift, which started at seven or eight in the evening and went till three or four the next morning,” Kothe recalled decades later. “But there were all these old warrants—for burglary, fraud, forgery, robbery, stuff like that, some of them two or three years old. We decided to see how many of those guys we could find. We did it on our own time. During the day sometimes Jim and I would go around in our street clothes and badge our way into places looking for names on the list. We’d go to the driver’s license office, insurance commission, and Selective Service board, looking for addresses. We found one guy who’d gone into the Navy, another guy who was living in Kansas. Once we went down to St. Paul–Ramsey [Hospital], went through their records, and found out that a guy we were looking for had an appointment the next morning. We showed up in the morning, waited for them to call his name, and arrested him. We ended up making about eighteen arrests off that list.
“You couldn’t do that sort of thing today, what with the data-privacy laws and so forth, but in those days you could. Bostrom and Dexter put us in for commendations for all the extra warrant work we did. But we weren’t trying to make names for ourselves. It was just fun. It was police work, and police work was fun.”
“Jim loved being a cop,” Winger said. “There were very few of us back then who didn’t.”
James Sackett was buried on Monday, May 25, three days after his murder. A thousand officers, representing jurisdictions around the country—Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Kansas City—filed past his open casket at Wolff Crestwood Park Chapel, then stood in ranks outside and listened via loudspeakers to the Reverend George Voeks conduct the Lutheran rites for the dead. Family, friends, and dignitaries that included former Vice President Hubert Humphrey and St. Paul’s incoming mayor, Charles McCarty, filled the room.
It was a brisk, breezy spring afternoon with dry but tempestuous skies that turned sunny when the coffin was carried from the chapel to the hearse, then driven through the heart of the East Side toward downtown and the freeway and the rest of the ten-mile route to Fort Snelling National Cemetery on the southwest edge of town. The hearse was followed by nearly two hundred squad cars and more than fifty private vehicles that created a procession almost two miles long. Six-year-old James Sackett Jr. would remember little about that day except, he said much later, “the cars, the cars, the cars.”
“There were school kids lined up along the curb, holding flags and saluting as the procession worked its way down White Bear Avenue,” Stuart Montbriand recalled. Decades later, Fred Kaphingst, another young patrolman at the time, could still picture the flag outside the public library at White Bear and Arlington snapping in the breeze. “When the procession passed the old fire station at Seventh and Flandreau, the fire rig was out on the apron and the firefighters were standing at attention,” Kaphingst, who had been a Johnson High School classmate of Jim Sackett, said. “When we got into downtown, at Wacouta or Sibley, I saw an elderly black man standing on the corner, and I wondered how he was going to react. The man took off his cap and held it over his heart as we passed.”
Kothe, Winger, Pelton, and Bostrom, joined by fellow officers Dennis Wilkes and Jon Markuson, bore the flag-draped coffin between the lines of saluting officers to the grave site on the west side of the sprawling burial ground. Aircraft taking off and landing at Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, which abuts the cemetery, drowned out some of what Pastor Voeks said by way of comfort and benediction, but the short, sad ceremony was familiar even to those who had never witnessed a police officer’s interment. An honor guard fired three volleys into the noisy sky, a bugler played “Taps,” and the tightly folded flag from the coffin was presented to the devastated widow.
Forty years later, Kothe said a police officer’s funeral was intended to send a message to the greater community. “All the cars and red lights and ceremony—it’s like we’re telling everybody, ‘One of ours went down, but the rest of us are still here. And we will never forget.’”