3

For a week after James Sackett’s murder, the department blanketed the Hill with rolling patrols—often four officers armed with shotguns to a car and sometimes a patrol car shadowed by an unmarked squad as backup. “Think about a bee hive that got hit with a stick” was how a young man who lived in the neighborhood described the police activity at the time.

On May 28, six days after the shooting, deputy chief Richard Rowan told the St. Paul Dispatch the department was attempting “to verify every call for police aid in the Summit-University area before officers actually arrived at the scene.” Two squad cars were directed to respond to every call “whenever possible.” On the positive side, Rowan (who would be sworn in as chief the following month) said his officers were reporting a “noticeable decrease” in burglaries, robberies, and other crimes in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, in the same story, homicide commander Ernest Williams reported no new leads in the Sackett investigation, much less the identity of a suspect or suspects and an imminent arrest.

Williams’s investigators had begun talking to Hague Avenue residents and other sources on the Hill within minutes of the shooting. The city’s street cops, especially those who regularly patrolled the Hill, talked to their “friendlies” and kept their eyes and ears open. The uniformed officers watched their backs and the backs of their comrades. There had been no specific threat of another assassination attempt, but then there hadn’t been a specific threat preceding Sackett’s murder, either. There was, though, a near-unanimous sense within the department that they were facing a heightened danger—possibly from outsiders, meaning people they didn’t know, but in any case from shooters who, if they weren’t professionals, were proficient enough to kill from a distance.

The department’s homicide detectives, now in charge of the investigation, had all but eliminated as suspects the residents of 859 Hague: seventy-year-old Frank Lopez; his daughters Bridget Wyzykowski, twenty-two, and Christine, seventeen; Christine’s nineteen-year-old husband, Roger Egge (the young man who called the police immediately after the shooting); and Lopez’s son Ernesto, who was fourteen. Christine, who said she had been sleeping in the basement, was the pregnant woman Sergeant Dexter nearly fired on when the officers charged through the Lopezes’ back door. Frank Lopez’s wife, Mary, was working the midnight shift at a home for mentally handicapped children when the shooting took place.

Egge, who was probably in the best position to see what happened when the shooting started and had a chance to calm down after he was grilled by the first responders, told the St. Paul Pioneer Press on Saturday that he and Ernesto Lopez had been watching TV in the darkened living room when they heard someone rattling the aluminum porch door out front. (The door had been wired shut, he explained, because the porch was used for storage. The family entered and exited the house via the back door.) When he went to investigate, Egge said, he heard a shot and “saw the officer fall” in front of the stoop. Stepping onto the porch, he saw through the glass in the front door the officer lying on his “back or side,” bleeding profusely and weakly calling for help. Egge said he saw another officer in a “red” car parked at the curb talking into his radio. When he spotted Egge, the second officer ran back toward the house with his pistol drawn. “He looked angry and very frightened,” Egge told the reporter. The cop fired his gun twice, but Egge had run back into the living room, dropped to the floor, and called the police. Before he could hang up, other cops burst through the back door.

When Earl Miels interviewed Egge on June 5, the young man said that he heard Sackett yell “God help me!” as he fell, that he did not know Kothe had actually fired at him, and that he had no idea who might have wanted to use their house as a “setup,” though because he and his wife spent a lot of time in the yard, people in the neighborhood would have known she was pregnant. Egge, who had lived his entire life on the Hill, said he knew of (in Miels’s words) “any number of young militant Negroes that would be mentally capable [of shooting] a policeman” and mentioned a half-dozen names.

Egge’s account as recorded by Miels differed from other early reports in certain details—the young man’s position when the police burst into the house, for instance. Kothe had stated, and would continue to state, that he fired his gun toward the movement in the house before running to the car and calling for assistance; Kothe, for that matter, always mentioned the “flash” that accompanied the sniper’s shot and did not recall Sackett saying anything when he was on the ground. But none of those points, which probably only reflected the confusion typical of witnesses to traumatic events, was deemed crucial to the investigation. Then, and again decades later, Egge was considered a credible witness. In August, he agreed at Captain Williams’s request to take a polygraph examination, though there is no record in the case files that he ever did.

Meantime, law enforcement agencies and media outlets throughout the Twin Cities received hundreds of calls and letters. The proffered information ranged from a mere nickname or two to interminable shaggy-dog stories—most of which, if remotely credible and sometimes even if not, were followed up by investigators.

An anonymous caller contacted the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in St. Paul, revealing both the identity of Sackett’s killer and the immediate disposition of the murder weapon. Neither half of the tip proved helpful. The same day, police in Minneapolis were contacted by a nameless caller who said he had heard a man in a North Side pool hall either boasting of or confessing to the Sackett murder. The caller provided not only the man’s name and home address but his race, height, weight, hair color, make and color of car, and its license-plate number. When checked out, the man was revealed to be a prisoner in the Hennepin County jail, awaiting trial on simple assault charges. He was summarily dismissed as a suspect in the Sackett case.

A woman having her hair done at a local salon was heard talking about her ex-husband, who she said had been talking about two men known as “Big Bruce” and “Calvin” who had in turn been talking about “how they got someone from Detroit to kill Sackett and how they got [the killer] on the freeway and out of town fast and [how] they were planning something else.” A neighborhood restaurateur told Cecil Westphall that he had heard one young man tell another that he had killed Sackett. According to the detective’s report, the speaker “went on to say that he made a living killing policemen” and had killed “one or two” in Illinois and the Dakotas since killing Sackett. The young man said he lured his victims with an emergency call regarding a woman about to deliver a baby and used a “collapsible rifle” for the hit. Unfortunately, the restaurateur would probably not be able to identify the killer because he had not personally seen him but only heard his comments through a vent in the wall.

There were the so-called “copy-cat” situations that invariably follow a high-profile crime. The Minneapolis Police Department received a spate of calls, all of them anonymous, in which snipers were reported waiting to shoot a policeman at the corner of Thirteenth Street and Hennepin Avenue. (The caller sounded like a young man, “possibly drinking.”) Twenty minutes later, a caller told the Hennepin County sheriff’s office that he was going to shoot a cop either at the Dutchman’s Bar or in the parking lot of the Chestnut Tree Tavern. A third caller informed the local FBI office of his intention to shoot an officer at the White Castle at Grant and Nicollet in downtown Minneapolis. The caller said he was an escapee from a nearby state hospital for the insane and had killed the cop in St. Paul.

Detective Carolen Bailey listened patiently to the theories of a decidedly unconventional middle-aged St. Paul couple who told her, “We don’t actually know anything, but we got some ideas.” Their suspicions fell on “militants,” “Commies,” “drug addicts,” and “the policeman’s teenage sons.” While they were at it, the couple expressed their displeasure with recently retired Chief Justice Earl Warren and the local Veterans Administration hospital.

A caller to the FBI said he had talked to a man who said Sackett’s killer was a “Negro man who lives on Hague Avenue in a white house with pink shutters.” A pair of St. Paul detectives dutifully cruised the nine-block length of Hague between Lexington and Dale, only to report that while there were many white houses on that street, none had pink shutters.

Then, as in most investigations, there were reports of odd occurrences and unexplained sightings that may—or may not—have been related to the main event.

A city bus traveling west on Selby was struck by a light-blue sedan entering the intersection at Victoria at 12:22 AM on May 22—roughly ten minutes after the Sackett ambush. According to the bus company’s records, the car, which was coming from the south (from the direction of Hague Avenue), failed to stop after the collision, despite sustaining what a witness described as significant damage. (Curiously, the bus was not damaged, according to the police report, and no one aboard was injured.) The bus driver, who believed the car was a Mercury, Ford, or Plymouth of mid-sixties vintage, said he saw two white men in the front seat. The bus driver had seen the busy police presence at Hague and Victoria, but apparently none of those officers noticed or paid any attention to the bus stopped at the intersection a short block away. In any event, the blue sedan was never located, nor were its driver and passenger ever identified.

There were, inevitably, callers suggesting that Sackett had been the assassin’s target all along. Someone posited that the killer had been having “a love affair” with Sackett’s wife. Another source, without providing substantiation, described Sackett as a “thumper” and said his murder was payback for rough treatment he had meted out on the street. One said the shooter was the brother of a man killed by Sackett during a burglary. Sackett had in fact shot a burglar, but the man had been wounded, not killed. Police department files revealed, moreover, that Sackett had not been involved in the shooting described by the tipster.

The fact that Sackett was not—could not have been, given the known circumstances of the setup and shooting—the sniper’s intended victim did not rule out revenge as a possible motive. But the revenge would have been directed against the police, not a specific officer.

The problem was, a lot of people were angry at the police and the “establishment” or “power structure” for whom the cops, in their eyes, did the dirty work. Citizens have always had grievances against the police, and those grievances have often been justified, but the historical anger had by the late 1960s risen to the level of rage. America’s military involvement in Vietnam had much to do with that rage, because it was the cops who were called out first to deal with the protesters in the streets and the “radicals” who took over the administration buildings on college campuses. As for the African Americans, American Indians, and Latinos marching, sitting in, and sometimes setting their neighborhoods ablaze, it was the police who turned dogs and fire hoses on marchers, clubbed and dragged demonstrators out of lunchrooms, and opened fire on rioters. The discontent and response that lit up America during the late sixties and early seventies cast a harsh light on the fault lines separating generations, the sexes, social and economic classes, and races.

On May 4, eighteen days before Sackett was murdered, Ohio national guardsmen shot and killed four students during antiwar skirmishes at Kent State University. A week before Sackett’s murder, police shot and killed two black students and injured a dozen others at Jackson State College in Mississippi. In St. Paul, black citizens were talking about a pair of separate incidents that took place three months earlier.

Shortly before midnight on February 7, a white officer named Ronald Olson shot and killed Keith Barnes, a twenty-year-old black man, during a scuffle outside the Factory, a popular lounge at University near Lexington. Olson said he was attacked by Barnes while he and his partner checked the bar for suspects in another matter. Barnes’s family and friends insisted the victim was trying to defend himself and his brothers against the officers, who they said had initiated the altercation. The shooting quickly drew a crowd, and several squad cars, including one manned by Kothe and Sackett, responded to the urgent call for backup. Three days later a Ramsey County grand jury declined to return an indictment against Olson, declaring, according to the Pioneer Press, the officer had acted “reasonably under the circumstances.” A small crowd protesting police brutality at a Concordia Avenue playground burned an effigy of a police officer.

Then, on the evening of February 25, two young men walked into the Muntz stereo shop on University Avenue between Victoria and Milton, pulled out guns, and demanded cash from the store’s clerk and customers. But St. Paul’s intelligence unit had been tipped off about a possible robbery attempt at the store, and four plainclothes officers had staked out the site. When the robbers emerged, the cops were waiting.

According to police reports, Sergeant Paul Paulos stood up behind a retaining wall and shouted, “Stop! Police!”

“Fuck you!” one of the young men shouted back, and fired his pistol at Paulos.

Unhurt, Paulos took down both men with three blasts from his shotgun.

Wayne Massie, who was three months shy of his twentieth birthday, died of his wounds a short time later. Eighteen-year-old Byrd Douglas was hospitalized with buckshot wounds in both legs.

The news of the Muntz shooting electrified the neighborhood. Minutes later, a black man walked up to one of the patrolmen protecting the crime scene and said he’d heard a “nigger” had been shot. “You killed my brother last week,” the man went on, and identified his brother as Keith Barnes. “You guys are in for it now,” he told the officer before walking away.

Massie and Barnes were sons of well-known local families, and their funerals were attended by hundreds of friends and neighbors. Both incidents, neighborhood residents argued, exposed the readiness of white cops to use deadly force against blacks. In the Massie case, they asked why, if the police knew in advance of the robbery, the robbers weren’t stopped on the way in, reducing at least the potential threat to the store’s employees and customers. If the department officially responded to that question, the response was not recorded. Some citizens believed the two youths had been set up.

In fact, the consensus among St. Paul cops was from the beginning that Sackett’s killer and whoever helped him were black. That’s because the shooting took place on the Hill, where most of the city’s African Americans lived, and because an unknown number of young black men had sporadically though ineffectually exchanged gunfire with officers over the past couple of years. In the wake of the Barnes and Massie shootings, officers had to be aware that there were blacks on the Hill who were angry enough to want to kill them.

Few if any in the department expected a blowup such as they had seen in Detroit, Chicago, Newark, Washington, DC, and other cities during the previous few years. They could tell themselves that St. Paul’s black population, though it had grown substantially during the previous decade with the influx of newcomers from Chicago, Gary, and the Deep South, was still small and “manageable”—scarcely more than 3 percent of the city’s total. St. Paul, moreover, had a hundred-year tradition of law-abiding middle-class African Americans who made respectable livings as railroad porters, stockyard workers, and entrepreneurs, who owned barbershops and beauty parlors, small law offices, insurance agencies, and other storefront businesses, who maintained comfortable homes, and who attended services at one of several vibrant churches. People watched out for each other and for each other’s children, and with a few notable exceptions kept the neighborhood’s kids on the straight and narrow. St. Paul’s blacks had been energized by the civil rights movement that had taken root in the South after World War II and spread northward during the 1960s. There was reason for them to believe that with the wider equality and expanded opportunity promised by the movement and the politicians who belatedly supported it, the lives of African Americans everywhere would improve.

But nobody with even a passing familiarity with the neighborhood could overlook the devastation wrought by the imposition of Interstate 94 during the previous decade. Hundreds of homes had been removed and families displaced during the freeway’s construction, and many of the small businesses owned by African Americans were shuttered or torn down. Selby Avenue and other Summit-University thoroughfares had grown seedy, pocked with vacant lots, boarded-up storefronts, and a slew of bars, pool halls, after-hour drinking and gambling establishments, and other sites that both the police and law-abiding residents—always the vast majority on the Hill—considered problems. The local black population was younger and poorer than it had been a few years earlier, less rooted in the community’s historic values and less likely to have a good job or any job at all. Street crime frightened everyone except the muggers and car thieves themselves. African Americans from bigger cities with larger black populations scoffed when they heard the area described as a “ghetto,” but there were few persons who would deny the fact that stretches of Summit-University had become slums.

Life in the black community could be—and often was—dangerous, especially for young men who “might get caught up in something,” said Nathaniel (“Nick”) Abdul Khaliq, who was Nick Davis back in the day, got in trouble with the police himself, and much later became president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s St. Paul chapter. Khaliq, who also served the community as a firefighter, added that the rest of the city did not seem to mind what was happening in the neighborhood so long as it was only blacks getting shot, stabbed, and robbed.

“Those were wayward times,” an elderly African American who lived in the area recalled forty years later.

Relations between the neighborhood and the police, meanwhile, were historically uneven. Though St. Paul had hired its first black police officer, Louis Thomas, in 1881, there were, by the late 1960s, only four black officers in the department. Few white cops lived on the Hill anymore, even if, like Glen Kothe, they had grown up there. Local blacks spoke affectionately of Patrolman William Skally, a gangly Ichabod Crane lookalike who, for much of his thirty-two-year career, walked the neighborhood beat, knew everybody black and white, and was renowned for providing winter boots for chilly school patrols and for returning errant teens to grateful parents before the kids could get into serious trouble. Skally was “a true community policeman before community policing had a name,” said one African American admirer, Deborah Gilbreath Montgomery, who as a child had been a beneficiary of Skally’s kindness. But Skally, who retired in 1973, was considered an exception among the white cops who patrolled the area, and even the department’s few black cops were often viewed suspiciously by residents as “spies” or, worse, traitors to their kind. They were called, in the parlance of the times, “Oreos”—black on the outside but white inside.

Most African Americans on the Hill had been as shocked by Sackett’s murder as their white neighbors, and some had been shamed as well, suspecting, or maybe knowing, that the killer was one of their own. “We were upset about a lot of things,” one longtime resident recalled, “but we weren’t about to kill anybody over it.” William Finney, who lived on Rondo Avenue as a kid during the fifties and sixties and decades later became St. Paul’s first African American chief of police, pointed out that St. Paul’s black middle class was in many ways, including their view of law and order, as conservative as their white counterparts. At the same time, African Americans were fed up with justice unequally applied, which, in the eyes of many citizens and police officers alike, was all too common in Summit-University. Indeed, it was a rare black family anywhere in America that didn’t have stories of mistreatment at the hands of the police and/or the courts dating back to the end of slavery. Black Americans in St. Paul and elsewhere grew up distrusting and fearing the police, while most whites did not and have had difficulty understanding, much less sympathizing with, the black perspective on the issue. As the African American writer James Baldwin noted at the time, “[W]hite people seem affronted by the black distrust of white policemen, and appear to be astonished that a black man, woman, or child can have any reason to fear a white cop.” Too many white people were either ignorant of or indifferent to the history of blacks in America.

While even black cops could insist the Sackett case was about a murdered police officer, not about race, for many Summit-University residents race was always part of the conversation when the police were involved. Just a year earlier, a thirty-five-year-old African American, Luther Fulford, was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of a white St. Paul officer named Richard Younghans. The veteran cop had been off duty and, according to Fulford’s trial testimony, had badgered Fulford with racial and sexual slurs before the two of them tangled in a downtown hotel and Younghans was fatally stabbed. Local blacks insisted that Younghans had a history of race-baiting and that Fulford, who was reportedly about sixty pounds lighter than the burly officer, had only been defending himself. Whatever the truth, many African Americans were convinced that if Fulford were white and Younghans black, Fulford would never have been arrested in the case, let alone tried and convicted.¹ Thus, when the Sackett investigators came knocking on their doors in 1970—and would again decades later—it was for many African Americans a matter of choosing sides. You were either with the white cops or you were with the black suspects—either with “the man” or with “the brothers.” For many African Americans it was and would forever be a troubling but certain choice.

In 1970 African Americans complained about frequent harassment at the hands of police. One white officer was known to break the taillights of black persons’ cars to give him a pretext to stop the drivers and nose around in their cars. Others groused about cops planting dope and other contraband in their cars during traffic stops. Some citizens considered the police department’s purchase of AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifles during the late 1960s a blatant provocation. The use of the word “nigger” was common among police addressing blacks long before cops were called “pigs.” Cops, meanwhile, were frequently “rough with their hands,” in the words of an African American man who came of age during the sixties. “The cops could do whatever they wanted” when dealing with blacks they suspected of violating “white rules,” he said, his youthful anger still simmering decades later.

Many residents recalled the shooting death of Oliver Crutcher, a thirty-year-old African American, on September 10, 1949, if not necessarily the shooting death of Allan Lee, a white St. Paul detective, that immediately preceded it. Shortly after four o’clock that Saturday afternoon, Crutcher held up Janssen’s Liquor Store on University Avenue just west of the Capitol. Two uniformed officers responded and exchanged shots with Crutcher, who ran south on Virginia Street in the direction of Rondo Avenue. Sergeant Lee was one of dozens of cops who flooded the area and joined in the manhunt, which, a couple of hours later, centered on a house on St. Anthony. According to police and news reports, Lee confronted the fugitive near the front door and was fatally shot in the head and stomach. Crutcher leapt over Lee’s body and escaped.

Three hours later, police converged on a small apartment building at Rondo and Louis. This time a young African American officer named James Griffin, who lived nearby, and two white officers caught up with Crutcher hiding under a bed in an upstairs room. The officers opened fire. Crutcher was killed—reportedly struck by a dozen bullets without firing a shot himself. Some African Americans insisted the police were out for blood that evening, had declared “martial law” in the neighborhood, and were determined to kill Crutcher. Passing time, failing memories, and the vagaries of urban mythology sometimes garbled later recountings—confusing Lee, for instance, with the officers who killed Crutcher. But what the neighborhood knew for certain was that a black man had been shot to death by the police.

Paul Paulos, a Greek immigrant’s son who had lived in the neighborhood since the early 1950s, conceded the point decades later. There was a great deal of racial resentment among the blacks on the Hill, he said. “They felt the cops were picking on them—and, it was true, some of them were. Traffic stops, harassment, all kinds of things. Some cops went overboard.” Paulos himself maintained a stable of informants, people for whom he would tear up a traffic ticket and who would be encouraged to call him at home if they had something important to share, but he admitted that he had enemies in the neighborhood, too. It’s not a coincidence that in the aftermath of the Barnes and Massie killings, both he and Ronald Olson had been rumored to be on a hit list.

Some cops looked back beyond the Barnes and Massie incidents to what they believed might be the true harbinger of the Sackett assassination—the so-called Stem Hall riots that took place during the Labor Day weekend of 1968, when young African Americans clashed with police following a concert and dance downtown. The police say the crowd became unruly after an officer confronted a young man armed with a gun in a restroom. Community sources said the cops locked the crowd inside the hall, then tossed in tear gas. At any rate, the melee spilled into the street and expanded into a ragged running battle back up to the Hill. Police and civilians exchanged gunshots, and passersby and reporters were roughed up. Businesses were torched, cars trashed, and countless windows broken, resulting in thousands of dollars in property damage. According to a report produced by the St. Paul Urban Coalition, four policemen had been shot (none fatally) and twenty more suffered non-gunshot injuries; hundreds of young persons were “tear gassed,” and twenty-six persons were arrested. (How many civilians suffered minor injuries—luckily, there were no fatalities—was not recorded.) Mayor Thomas Byrne told reporters he saw “neither rhyme nor reason” for the violence. But, in the eyes of the coalition and others, the riots revealed an understaffed and inadequately funded police department ill-prepared to handle a major disturbance of this kind and insufficient black representation on the police force as well as a plethora of larger, societal problems, ranging from lack of living-wage jobs and affordable housing to a heritage of bigotry and discrimination.

To many unnerved St. Paul citizens, the coalition’s assessment, which was controversial, echoed the federal Kerner Commission report, issued in early 1968, that warned of worsening, apartheid-like conditions in many American communities and future racial violence if “separate and unequal” conditions were not addressed and improved. “A new mood has sprung up among Negroes,” the Kerner report noted, “particularly among the young, in which self-esteem and enhanced racial pride are replacing apathy and submission to ‘the system.’ The police are not merely a ‘spark’ factor. To some Negroes, police have come to symbolize white power, white racism, and white repression.” To St. Paul’s cops, the Stem Hall eruption demonstrated that significant numbers of young blacks were willing to take them on in the streets.

St. Paul was hardly unique. By late 1968, police officers in cities from New York to Oakland had been fired upon, sometimes lethally, by both individual blacks and members of defiantly armed organizations such as the Black Panthers. In those cities, cops and many blacks alike were convinced the other side was out to kill them. In early 1970, however, St. Paul cops were still leading a charmed life. In the year and a half since the riots, neither conditions in Summit-University nor relations between police and the black community had improved—if anything, they had worsened. Yet the fact that since Stem Hall it was the police who had done most of the shooting—all of the deadly shooting on the Hill—had doubtless stoked the anger among many blacks while possibly lessening the sense of danger in the minds of many officers.

In the three months between the Barnes and Massie shootings and the Sackett ambush, there had in fact been sundry rumors and at least one outright warning. Olson’s and Paulos’s names came up in the chatter, but not Sackett’s or Kothe’s—at least nothing that survives in the department’s files. Most of the noise was coming from the streets, overheard in bars and pool halls and passed along by confidential informants or disclosed in exchange for a pass on some minor offense. Much of it had to do with the Oakland, California, based Black Panther Party—“those fearsome, frightening, arms-bearing black men, with their paratroop berets, and swagger, and revolutionary rhetoric,” in the words of journalist Michael Arlen—which, since its founding in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, had achieved mythic status among young African Americans. A large part of the organization’s appeal lay in the members’ ability, as black men with guns, to scare the wits out of white people, especially white governors, mayors, and law enforcement officials. Ever since FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared, in late 1968, that the Panthers were the single greatest threat to the nation’s internal security, authorities everywhere had been intently—in some places obsessively—monitoring Panther activity.

A few days before Sackett’s murder, for instance, Captain Williams received word that a group of Twin Cities youths had traveled to Des Moines and then to Kansas City where, in Williams’s notes, “they are alleged to have formed a group to be called the Sons of Malcombs [sic].” The youths’ contact was a man “alleged to be with the Black Panthers,” and the “Sons of Malcomb are believed to be assigned to the Midwestern states with the intent of creating terror.” By “Malcomb,” Williams’s informants were presumably referring to Malcolm X, the charismatic black leader who had been assassinated in New York in 1965. At any rate, no further mention of the group can be found in the department’s files.

In retrospect, one comment proved decidedly significant and would resonate for decades to come.

Exactly one week before Sackett was murdered, patrolmen James Jerylo and Laverne Lee stopped a blue Cadillac driven by a young Vietnam War veteran named Joseph Edward Garrett, known in the neighborhood as “Eddie.” The officers, according to Jerylo’s report, didn’t specify why they stopped Garrett but said that while checking his car they “turned up” a .22-caliber revolver locked in the glove compartment. Jerylo and Lee confiscated the pistol but chose not to arrest Garrett on a firearms charge. By way of returning “the favor”—that was Jerylo’s interpretation—Garrett, “in an unsolicited statement,” told them to “watch the rooftops.” Garrett would say no more on the subject, but the cops, who in recent days had heard their share of angry blather and vaguely worded threats in the dives along Selby Avenue, took Garrett’s comment as a warning and passed it along to their superiors.

Garrett’s words were surely on the officers’ minds seven days later when they arrived at 859 Hague, saw Sackett’s blood on the sidewalk, and within minutes spotted Garrett approaching the gathering crowd. Even before they saw Garrett, in fact, Lee had called headquarters and requested a “pick up” order for the young man (“male negro about 22 yrs”), albeit “for information only.” When, a few minutes later, Lee and Jerylo spotted Garrett standing around near the crime scene with “other young negroes,” they hustled him into the back seat of their squad car. Lee asked him, as they had asked him a week earlier, where he had gotten the “rooftops” information. This time Garrett was slightly more forthcoming. He said he’d heard talk at Cotton’s, a pool hall on Selby. Pressed for further detail, he said the “threats” had been voiced by several of the pool hall’s patrons, none of whom he could, or would, name. He also said he had seen several “new faces” in the neighborhood—individuals from other parts of the country (Los Angeles, Chicago, Milwaukee) who might have been Black Panthers operating “under cover.”

“Again we pressured [Garrett] for some names,” Lee wrote in a subsequent report, “but again he stated that was just what he had overheard in the area. When asked if he knew of any persons who he thought might have done the [Sackett] shooting, he stated no.”

Eddie Garrett’s was not the only familiar face among the rubberneckers standing under the street lamps at Hague and Victoria that night. Lee, Jerylo, and other officers jotted down the names of several other young men with whom they had some experience, including one Kelly Day and a youth whose name was mistakenly recorded as “Randal Reed.”

On June 3, Sergeant James Hedman, while knocking on doors in the neighborhood, talked to a woman who lived in a fourplex at 869 Hague, across Victoria and three houses west of the crime scene. Edith Carroll told Hedman that the night before the shooting two policemen had come to the back door of her apartment and said they were responding to a call about a sick child. Carroll said she told the officers she knew nothing about a sick child and had not made the call.

Back at headquarters, Hedman checked the records and discovered that the sick-child call, phoned in by a man who identified himself as “John Anderson,” had actually been received two minutes before midnight on May 19 and that a car had been dispatched moments after midnight on May 20. Squad 315—patrolmen Thomas Owens and Tony Bennett—responded to the location and reported back that the call was “unfounded.” Like the bogus O.B. call two nights later, the May 19 call had been recorded.

Hedman’s report raised several questions. Presuming this wasn’t a coincidence, had the sniper intended the first call to be a test of the police response and serve as a dry run for the assassination? Or had the call been the real thing, and the sniper for some reason did not like his chances or lost his nerve? Or, as seemed most likely, had the call been for real, but foiled by Squad 315’s decision to park in the alley, out of the sniper’s sight? There were other questions as well. False alarms and prank calls to the police and fire departments were common and quickly forgotten; still, given the rumors and tensions in the neighborhood, why had no one mentioned the May 19 call at subsequent roll calls? (Apparently, if the memories of a few long-retired officers could be trusted, there had been some roll-call chatter about Eddie Garrett’s warning to Jerylo and Lee in the days prior to Sackett’s murder.) Why had the “unfounded” sick-child call not been brought to investigators’ attention until Edith Carroll mentioned it to Hedman nearly two weeks after Sackett’s murder?

No certain answers survive, but it has become an article of faith among two generations of St. Paul cops that Owens and Bennett had almost literally dodged a bullet because, unable to find space to park in front of Carroll’s fourplex, they pulled into the alley behind it. A corollary holds that 859 Hague was chosen two nights later because there was no alley on that block, so whether the responding squad parked in front or on the side of that house, the officers would be in the sniper’s field of fire.

The thought and planning implied by the last conclusion pointed to a particularly dangerous assailant, not merely someone with a grudge or an impulsive nature and a high-powered rifle. Just as vexing, Ernest Williams’s detectives believed from the beginning of their investigation that people on the Hill knew who was involved in Sackett’s murder. Even if an outsider had pulled the trigger, someone in the neighborhood knew the shooter’s name and the names of others involved. But paradoxically in light of the deluge of calls and letters, few of the people who might actually know something were talking to the police. St. Paul’s investigators were dealing with a hard reality built on the fear and distrust of the police among many young people and persons of color. It was a new era in the neighborhood. Many of its citizens believed the police were there not to serve and protect the community but to oppress it. “It wasn’t like the old days when people felt obligated to tell us things,” a veteran cop lamented. “Now there was a code of silence. You do not talk to the pigs.”

The police had to deal with internal communication problems as well. A wall built of status and tradition separated the detectives from the uniformed cops, and that wall often impeded the sharing of important information. The detectives, who had come up through the ranks, were what most street cops aspired to be, and homicide investigators were the elite of the elite. Tough, demanding, and fastidious, a handsome fashion plate with a curious mind and varied interests, Williams personified the superior image of his small, select unit. For fear of jeopardizing a developing case or exposing a confidential informant, or simply because information was the gold they mined and hoarded, his detectives were ill disposed to share what they knew. A callow patrolman, at the entry level of the departmental hierarchy, wouldn’t think of approaching a homicide investigator and asking him or her for an update on a case, even when it was a case in which they both had a life-and-death stake.

At that time, moreover, another crew—the small, innocuously named Law Enforcement Aid Unit, under the command of a flamboyant lieutenant, Jack O’Neill—was busily gathering intelligence, mainly from their own informants as well as via surveillance of neighborhood hot spots (“hiding in plain sight,” in the words of the omnipresent Paul Paulos, who, as part of the LEAU, was legendary for his ability to sit silent and immobile for hours at a time while on a stakeout, like a cat watching a mouse hole). On paper, the LEAU provided information to the homicide squad and other units, but, according to several officers who were active in 1970, the group operated with a great deal of autonomy. “The LEAU had contacts, snitches, all this information, but they kept it to themselves,” said Glen Kothe, from the perspective of the street cop he was at the time.

Even before the Sackett shooting, the LEAU and other local law enforcement groups had been keeping an eye on an organization called the Inner City Youth League, which was located in an inconspicuous, two-story brick building at the corner of Selby and Victoria. Established in 1968, the ICYL was one of a handful of storefront organizations in St. Paul and Minneapolis whose self-proclaimed objective was to provide educational and recreational opportunities not otherwise available to kids in poorer neighborhoods. Like other groups at the time, the ICYL was funded at least in part by local philanthropies such as the Hill Family and Amherst Wilder foundations and corporate grants from the likes of the 3M Company. It reportedly paid one dollar rent to the building’s owner, Edward Hamm, scion of a local brewing family. Despite the high-minded mission and well-known underwriters, however, the police believed the ICYL was doing more than offering film-making classes and boxing instruction; they had come to view it as a gathering spot for “radicals,” “militants,” and “Panther wannabes” as well as for petty criminals and other bad actors. At some point, a rumor began circulating that armed men were taking target practice in the ICYL’s basement.

Following the Sackett murder—which, coincidentally or not, occurred only a short block away—the St. Paul police and the FBI watched the ICYL more closely than ever. People were photographed coming and going, and a multitasking businessman named Harold Mordh provided a form of freelance electronic surveillance. (The owner of several nursing homes and the longtime director of the Union Gospel Mission downtown, Mordh, who had connections in both the police department and city hall, was listed on FBI rolls as a “ghetto informant.” He had provided agents with confidential information about several young African Americans at least since the beginning of 1970.) Detectives interviewed, without much enlightenment, the organization’s leaders, at the time the brothers Robert and Jackie Hickman, and duly noted the names of many of the regulars, including a pair of recent Central High School classmates named Ronald Reed and Larry Clark. If not officially Panthers, Reed and Clark were said to be talking the Panther line during meetings at the ICYL and in other venues in the neighborhood.

Reed was becoming important to investigators working the Sackett case. The code of silence was very much in effect on the Hill. No eyewitnesses to the murder had come forward, and despite a dragnet of the neighborhood and beyond no one had come up with anything that might link Reed (or anyone else) to the murder. Reed had been in minor trouble with the law and had spent a few months at Totem Town, a reformatory for boys. In January 1969, he was one of a group of mostly African American students who occupied offices in the administration building at the University of Minnesota, demanding a black studies program, greater opportunities for black students (of approximately forty thousand persons enrolled at the university, fewer than a hundred were African Americans), and other reforms. Reed was a member of a well-known, church-going Summit-University family. Now nineteen, he had a steady girlfriend and a baby daughter.

But Ronnie Reed apparently liked to talk, and what he talked about, investigators were hearing, was revolution and striking back against “police repression,” violently if necessary—the kind of incendiary rhetoric favored by the Black Panthers. It was the kind of talk that made the authorities nervous and, in the wake of Sackett’s assassination, highly suspicious as well.

As far as homicide detective Carolen Bailey was concerned, Ronald Reed was a suspect almost from the start of the Sackett investigation. Reports from the period indicate his name was among those of a dozen or so young men the police and FBI were keeping tabs on beginning in 1969. St. Paul detectives did not know that Reed was involved in Sackett’s assassination, but early in the investigation many of them began having reasons to believe that he might have been.

On the night of June 22, 1970, Jim Jerylo and another officer, Dennis Klinge, spotted a blue 1960 Chevrolet parked on Kent Street near Iglehart. Two young men were sitting in the front seat. The patrolmen had been on the lookout for such a car after a blue Chevy was reportedly involved in the robbery of a Clark service station on West Seventh Street early that morning. While talking to the car’s driver, who identified himself as Ronald Reed, Jerylo noticed a baby-food jar containing, oddly enough, pennies and bullets, as well as a length of cable wrapped with tape on one end. After putting Reed in the back seat of their squad car, Jerylo found a nine-millimeter automatic pistol in the Chevrolet’s glove compartment. In the car’s trunk, besides several articles of clothing and a rubber glove whose twin had been found in the front seat, was a .22-caliber rifle equipped with a scope. Reed, who wouldn’t admit to owning the car or even having a Minnesota driver’s license, was taken downtown, where he finally produced a driver’s license and was booked on charges of possession of a dangerous weapon and illegal transportation of a firearm.

Jerylo’s report included nothing to suggest that he, Klinge, or anyone downtown asked Reed about the Sackett shooting on that occasion, which happened to be a month to the day after the murder. In fact, if surviving records and the memories of elderly cops can be trusted, Reed was questioned about Sackett’s murder only once that summer. In surely one of the unlikeliest confrontations during the forty-year Sackett narrative, Carolen Bailey called on Reed at a Summit-University residence where he was hanging out with friends. A county social worker before she became a cop and the department’s first female homicide investigator, Bailey was an attractive, self-assured white woman in her middle thirties who was comfortable walking into illegal Selby Avenue establishments or portraying a hooker in a blond wig and red miniskirt on the corner of Selby and Western at two in the morning. “I had a huge advantage being a woman,” she said of her experience. “I was still fairly young at the time, and I didn’t threaten people.” Though she didn’t have backup when she approached Reed that summer afternoon, she carried both her service revolver and a two-way radio. She said that she and Captain Williams, who had asked her to try to talk to Reed, simply figured she would have a better chance of getting information than her male colleagues and would be perceived as less a threat if she was by herself.

“There were five young guys in the living room, and three of them were sitting on a long sofa against the wall,” Bailey recalled decades later. “There were posters on the wall behind the sofa—Panther stuff, ‘Kill the pigs!’—and they were smoking pot, which I could smell when I walked in the door. I didn’t know any of them, so I showed them my badge and said I wanted to talk to Ronnie Reed. Reed was sitting on the sofa. He stood up, held his hands out like he was going to be handcuffed, and said, ‘Hey, baby, you can arrest me anytime.’”

Bailey didn’t arrest Reed but asked him to step outside. “We just chatted,” as she remembered the conversation. “He wasn’t nasty or cocky. He was flirtatious—and I was a young chick back then. I asked him what he knew about Sackett. I asked him if he killed Sackett. Though I was pretty confident he had, I didn’t expect him to confess to it, and he didn’t. Mainly, I wanted to find out something about his girlfriend. I wanted to know if Connie Trimble was his old lady.” And that much, Bailey said, Reed confirmed that afternoon.

It was no secret among their friends that Reed and Trimble were a couple. They had been going together for several years and had a daughter named Cherra who, in the early summer of 1970, was about six months old. Connie was a slender, attractive girl in her late teens, with mocha-colored skin and thick dark hair that she liked to pile high on her head or wear in an Afro. Some people in the neighborhood said she fancied herself looking like Angela Davis, the telegenic California radical who was often on the evening news. Trimble had moved to St. Paul from Denver with her family when she was fourteen and met Reed while hanging out at the Oxford playground near the high school.

But Trimble was of interest to investigators because they thought there was a chance she herself was involved in the Sackett murder—specifically, that she might have made the O.B. call on May 22. That fifty-nine-second call, recorded on magnetic tape, was, besides the misshapen piece of lead that had passed through Sackett’s body, the only meaningful evidence the police had been able to collect after the murder. They believed, though, that that brief recording could be the key that provided entrée to the plot. The caller and the shooter, if not one and the same person, most certainly knew each other.

Unlike DNA analysis, voice-print technology was available to investigators in 1970. It was new enough, however, that even major-city detectives such as Williams, Miels, and Bailey had not yet used it. One of the recognized experts in the emerging field was a Michigan State Police detective named Ernest Nash. On June 1, St. Paul investigators mailed Nash, in East Lansing, the tape of the May 22 call, followed within the week by reels containing the voice of the May 19 “sick-child” caller who had identified himself as “John Anderson” and the voices of six individuals (“possible suspects”) recorded by the police for purposes of comparison. Four of the voices belonged to residents of 859 Hague and two were those of neighborhood women, one of whom was named Brown. On June 15, Nash wrote back: “After comparing the spectrograms of the voice of the unknown caller with spectrograms of the suspects’ voices it is the opinion of the undersigned that none of them made the call for assistance.” Furthermore, Nash’s analysis showed, not surprisingly, that the May 19 and May 22 calls had not been made by the same person.

Because Ronald Reed was by that time a prominent blip on the detectives’ radar, Connie Trimble’s voice print was of interest. The problem was, the apartment where Trimble and Reed were living at the time had no phone. Bailey felt the nature of the crime justified subterfuge. Trimble, she learned, was enrolled in a government program known as Aid for Dependent Children, and Bailey asked a supervisor from her former job in the county welfare department to bring Trimble on an unrelated pretext into his office, where Bailey would call and record her voice.

The report that Bailey made at the time was lost, and four decades later she couldn’t recall how she identified herself—“I’m sure I told her I was a police officer,” she said—and what exactly she induced Trimble to say, though the words, per Ernest Nash’s instructions, included much if not all of the language from the May 22 call. Bailey managed to get her to use the specific words she wanted.

Bailey’s ploy, when it became part of the public story, infuriated civil libertarians and welfare-rights activists and resulted in someone printing up “Wanted” posters with a price on the detective’s head. It was not the only time Bailey was threatened, and she would always insist that the posters didn’t faze her. She could not recall if any attempt was ever made to record Ronald Reed’s voice and compare it with “John Anderson’s.” At any rate, she had managed to record Connie Trimble and presently sent the tape off to Michigan for analysis.

¹Younghans has not been included among the fallen officers honored during the St. Paul department’s annual Memorial Day Service.