1Coincidentally or not, Councilwoman Butler and Governor LeVander were neighbors on Summit Avenue.
The torrent of calls, letters, and tips on the street during the first few weeks following Sackett’s murder thinned during the summer of 1970. In the wake of even spectacular crimes such as this one, both the quantity and quality of information almost always fall off within a week or two of the event, and weeks had become months without a breakthrough or arrest in the Sackett case. Many if not most of the leads the St. Paul police were picking up were not, in any event, coming from sources on the Hill, where people were keeping their mouths shut, and what the investigators were hearing was not very helpful. Typical was the call, in late September, from the Holy Spirit Catholic School on Randolph Avenue, where a “boastful” young teacher reportedly told his students he was tight with the Black Panthers and knew who killed Sackett. When questioned by Earl Miels, however, the teacher conceded that while he did believe certain (unnamed) Panthers had been involved, he personally knew nothing about the shooting.
Meantime, tensions remained high in the area. Flashing red lights drew unfriendly crowds. Squads responding to calls in Summit-University made quick work of their responses, getting in and out in a hurry, often with a second squad backing them up. Ed Steenberg and John LaBossiere, back walking a beat on the Hill (foot patrols had been suspended for a couple of weeks after the Sackett murder), were told that certain individuals had gotten their hands on a number of cut-down .30-caliber carbines and that officers “should be careful” in the area of Cotton’s pool hall and the apartment buildings between St. Albans and Grotto. Informants told their police and FBI contacts about late-night gatherings at which “black nationalist activities” were discussed and about “informal meetings” where “individuals discussed how to make bombs.” Ronald Reed, Eddie Garrett, and Kelly Day, another young man well known to police at the time, were among those mentioned in the reports.
Then, just before suppertime on Saturday, August 22, a two-pound stick of dynamite planted in a wastebasket and activated by a timer blew the door off a women’s restroom on the main floor of the Dayton’s department store in downtown St. Paul. The restroom’s sole occupant at that moment was a forty-seven-year-old high school English teacher and Democratic Party activist named Mary Peek, who was combing her hair when the dynamite exploded and who was critically injured in the blast. Police and firefighters responding to the explosion discovered, moreover, a timer and twenty pounds of dynamite in a coin-operated locker outside the restroom; the second, much more powerful bomb, if it had exploded, would doubtless have caused dozens of casualties, mostly among the cops and firefighters. Witnesses reported seeing an African American boy or young man, wearing a woman’s wig and dress, running from a door near the restroom and locker area shortly before the explosion.
Within the next two weeks St. Paul police and local FBI agents responded to bombings or attempted bombings at a Union 76 storage tank, the Midway National Bank, the Burlington Northern Railroad Building, and a Gulf Oil facility. Near the Wabasha Street Bridge, a small, soft-spoken fifteen-year-old Central High School student was slightly injured in a small explosion. His name was Gary Hogan. A wig, woman’s dress, and bomb-making instructions were reportedly found in his possession, and, despite his age, he was reported to have ties with the Panthers and other militant groups. He was soon charged with attempted first-degree murder in the Dayton’s bombing.
On September 12, acting on an informant’s tip, police found a dozen cases of dynamite in a car parked in a garage behind a Dayton Avenue apartment rented by Kelly Day.
The bombings were part of a wave of terroristic explosions throughout the United States and Europe at the time. Two days before the St. Paul Dayton’s explosion, a bomb caused a half-million dollars in damages (but no serious injuries) at the Federal Building in downtown Minneapolis. Two days after the Dayton’s blast, a massive bomb detonated in the early hours of the morning killed a graduate student at the Army Mathematics Research Center on the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus. Antiwar activists were blamed for both the Minneapolis and the Madison blasts.
No one had forgotten about Sackett during the stretch of explosions, but the bombs reminded edgy cops and nervous civilians alike that snipers were not the only threat in those perilous times.
Considering the level of mayhem in their own backyard, it’s unlikely the St. Paul police noticed or paid much immediate attention to a botched bank robbery 380 miles away, in an Omaha, Nebraska, strip mall, on the evening of October 20.
According to witnesses, about five minutes before the eight o’clock closing time, three young men wearing military attire entered the Ames Plaza Bank and pulled weapons from under their coats and jackets. One of the robbers, a teller told a reporter, shouted, “Hit the floor, this is for real!” Everybody, with the exception of bank guard William Tate, a middle-aged off-duty sergeant with the Omaha Police Department, complied. Tate drew his revolver and exchanged fire with the robbers. He was hit in the shoulder but believed he had shot one of the gunmen before the trio bolted out the door and into the parking lot, where at least two of the three reportedly got into a waiting car and sped away. No money had been taken. And amazingly, in light of the dozen-plus bullets and shotgun blasts that gouged the bank’s walls and floor, no one besides the moonlighting cop and possibly one of the frustrated robbers had been injured in the fray.
Omaha police told the media they were looking for “three Negro men in their early 20s. One is short and the other two [are] of average height.” Witnesses said a fourth person drove the getaway car, described as a white 1962 Chevrolet, but they couldn’t agree whether the driver was a man or a woman.
Within a week, however, police and FBI agents in the Twin Cities were looking with intense interest at the Omaha incident. At the request of their Omaha counterparts who were acting on tips from informants, St. Paul detectives sent mug shots and background information regarding thirteen local robbery suspects to Nebraska. Sergeant Tate and Ames Plaza Bank employees and customers subsequently identified two men from the photos: Reed, Ronald Lesley, Negro/male, DOB 31 Aug 50 as “being similar to the party that entered the bank armed with a carbine … covered by a trench coat,” and Clark, Larry Larue, Negro/male, DOB 9 Feb 51. Additional witnesses looking at the photos identified both men as two of the three would-be robbers.
Investigators had quickly gotten their hands on a receipt for the aforementioned trench coat, which one of the robbers had dropped on the bank floor. According to the receipt, the coat—Glen Eagle brand, size thirty-six—had been purchased at Liemandt’s clothing store in Minneapolis three days before the robbery by a Ronald L. Reed of Fuller Avenue in St. Paul. The FBI also determined that Reed had purchased, in St. Paul, two .30-caliber carbines similar to the guns used at the Ames Plaza Bank. University of Minnesota records indicated, moreover, that Reed had been issued a size thirty-six Army uniform when he was briefly a cadet in the school’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.
Omaha police reports noted Reed’s arrest in St. Paul the previous June on charges of possession of a dangerous weapon, illegal transportation of a firearm, and suspicion of robbery, though the robbery charge had been almost immediately dismissed because of insufficient evidence and the other two charges had been dropped within a month. The only other arrests on Reed’s record—for aggravated assault and burglary—had occurred in 1966, when he was fifteen and sixteen, with no disposition. Larry Clark’s rap sheet, according to the Omaha reports, revealed arrests for theft and burglary in 1966 and 1967, with no disposition. Both Reed and Clark, however, were suspected of having participated, along with a third man, in the September 4, 1970, robbery of the First Grand Avenue State Bank in St. Paul. Confidential informants said Reed had “planned and engineered” that job. The reports went on to say, apparently based on additional confidential information, that both Reed and Clark were “known as militants” who “have caused much trouble and refer to teachers and police as fascists and pigs.”
According to the reports, both men were wanted for questioning in the murder of St. Paul patrolman James Sackett.
All of a sudden, or so it must have seemed to frustrated investigators as the dangerous summer of 1970 melted into an uncertain fall, the Sackett case was about to break.
On September 29, Michigan State Police voice-print specialist Ernest Nash sent a brief message to homicide commander Ernest Williams in St. Paul: “After comparing spectrograms of the voice of Connie Trimble with spectrograms of the unknown [May 22] caller … it is the opinion of the undersigned that Connie Trimble’s voice and the voice of the unknown caller are one and the same.”
Why it took a month for St. Paul investigators to act on Nash’s report is not part of the record; presumably investigators were digging for additional information to tie Trimble to the murder. But by the last week of October her fugitive boyfriend was a suspect in two attempted armed robberies, and they no doubt figured they had better move before Trimble went on the lam as well.
Late in the afternoon of October 30, homicide unit and LEAU detectives, following the issuance of a first-degree murder warrant by municipal court judge J. Clifford Janes, converged on Fuller Avenue near Oxford Street. Trimble and her baby were living at the time in a duplex at 1027 Fuller. Detectives Leroy Thielen and Russell Bovee, in an unmarked car, spotted a woman walking in their direction on Fuller, carrying a child. The woman fit Trimble’s description so they turned the car around and watched her enter a house up the block. They knew the house: Ronald Reed’s parents lived there. When Lillian Reed, Ronald’s mother, answered the detectives’ knock, they could see Trimble sitting on a sofa in the living room. Then Reed’s father, Walter, appeared and blocked the door. Unwilling to force the issue, the detectives directed a squad to watch the back door, then called for the officers who carried the actual warrant. When detectives arrived a few minutes later with the paperwork, Walter Reed went back inside the house and spoke to Trimble. Moments later, Trimble appeared at the door, and the detectives arrested her. Earl Miels read Trimble her Miranda rights against self-incrimination, and Trimble asked Lillian Reed to call an attorney. Then, with ten-month-old Cherra in her arms, the teenage mother left for downtown with her escort of detectives.
An hour later, Bovee and Thielen saw Larry Clark driving a blue Mustang on Hague Avenue. When Clark got out of his car in front of 882 Hague—a half-block west of the Sackett murder scene—the detectives identified themselves and arrested him on an outstanding illegitimacy warrant. Strangely enough, Miels and the other detectives looking for Trimble had stopped Clark in the Mustang that afternoon and inquired whether one of the two young women in the car with him was Trimble. Those detectives must have either been unaware of the outstanding warrant or believed their first priority was apprehending Trimble. In any event, it was not until the following day that the St. Paul police learned Omaha authorities had filed three felony charges against Clark: entering a bank with unlawful intent, use of firearms in commission of a felony, and shooting with intent to kill, wound, or maim.
The same charges had been filed against Ronald Reed, but his whereabouts (as well as the whereabouts of the third alleged Ames Plaza Bank gunman, Horace Myles) remained unknown, at least to the authorities. The communication prepared by the Omaha police on November 2 included Reed’s correct middle name—it was Lindsey, not Lesley—and noted that he was “usually neat in appearance and well dressed,” “has used drugs in the past,” and should be considered “armed and dangerous.” The accompanying mug shot—taken following Reed’s June 22 arrest in St. Paul—showed a lean young man in a rugby-style shirt, with a moderate Afro haircut and a Fu Manchu mustache. He looked bored, or perhaps disdainful, more than dangerous.
At 5:45 PM on the day she was arrested, Constance Louise Trimble was shown to a chair in Ernest Williams’s office at police headquarters. Williams, too, read Trimble her Miranda rights, then asked her to read them herself on a printed form and sign it. She read the information and told Williams she understood what she had read but refused to sign the piece of paper.
Williams’s impressions of the composed young woman were not recorded or, if they were, have not survived. He would have known, or learned eventually, thanks to his investigators’ research, that Trimble had been born on March 4, 1952, in Denver, that her father, Sherman, was a welder at American Hoist and Derrick in St. Paul, and that she had three brothers, two of whom were older and one of whom was serving time in Colorado. Connie had lived in two different apartments in St. Paul before renting half of the duplex on Fuller, where the landlord knew her and her boyfriend as “Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Reed.” A Ramsey County case worker told Carolen Bailey she had seen anti-police posters (“‘Kill the pigs!’ et cetera”) hanging in one of Trimble’s apartments. Trimble had graduated from Central High School only the previous June. Her high school record revealed both an indifferent student who was twice suspended for smoking in the lavatory and missed a lot of class (blaming her attendance problems on the need to help care for a sickly mother) and a lively girl who typed sixty words a minute, held a summer job as a clerk-typist at a federal government office downtown, and liked to sew, cook, dance, and hang out at the Inner City Youth League. Trimble was said to have tried unspecified “narcotics.”
That evening in his office, Williams wanted to know if Trimble had called the police on May 22, seeking help for a pregnant woman at 859 Hague. Trimble at first denied making the call, then moments later admitted that she had. According to Williams (and other detectives in the room at the time), Trimble proceeded to tell a long story by way of explanation. She said she had been following a set of unsigned instructions she had found in her mailbox in order to get a man named Gerald Starling in trouble with the police. Starling was supposedly having a “pot party” at the Hague address that night; the officers arriving there on the bogus O.B. call would discover the illegal activity and arrest Starling, against whom, Trimble said, she held a grudge because he had threatened members of her family. She had no idea, she told Williams, that an officer was going to be killed and she felt terrible when she heard about the murder the next day. She insisted she didn’t know who had instructed her to make the call.
When Williams asked why she hadn’t come to the police with her story, Trimble replied, “Who would believe it?”
When asked what she did with the letter, Trimble said she tore it up and burned the scraps.
While Williams was out of the office for a few minutes, other members of the homicide unit chatted with Trimble. One of the detectives eventually left the room and told his boss Trimble wanted to tell him “the whole truth on this murder.” But when Williams returned, Trimble said she wanted to speak to her lawyer, a Twin Cities criminal attorney named Neil Dieterich, who arrived a short time later and conferred with her privately. After talking to Dieterich, Trimble told Williams she didn’t want to resume their conversation and from that point forward she would not to talk to investigators unless Dieterich was present. During a restroom break, however, Trimble told Bailey she was afraid of reprisals against her and her baby by “those involved in the killing” (Bailey’s words). She did not say who she thought those persons were but “volunteered that they were not related to her or her baby.”
Trimble was fingerprinted, booked, and assigned a cell in the Ramsey County jail adjacent to police headquarters. Her baby was sent, at her request, to the home of Walter and Lillian Reed, whom she described as the child’s natural grandparents.
The next day, Trimble talked to homicide detectives Thomas Opheim and Edward Fitzgerald; Dieterich apparently wasn’t in the building. She told them that Ronald Reed was baby Cherra’s father but that she didn’t know where he was. She expressed concern about Cherra and said she hoped the child was getting enough to eat. Opheim asked if she wanted to discuss anything else with them, and she told him she only wished they would believe what she told Williams the previous evening. Opheim said he didn’t think anyone was going to believe the story about the unsigned instructions. He also said it would be in her best interest to tell them the “whole story.” She then asked them, Opheim wrote in his report, “what would happen if she told us what we wanted to know.” Opheim replied that the police would tell the “proper authorities” she was cooperating with the investigation and, when the case went to trial, a jury would likely “show leniency in her particular situation.” But at that point, according to Opheim, she asked to speak to her lawyer and their conversation ended. Opheim and Fitzgerald later that day tracked down Gerald Starling at an apartment on Carroll Avenue, but Starling refused to answer their questions.
Trimble was charged with first-degree murder on November 2. Bail was set at fifty thousand dollars, a very large amount at the time. On November 12, she was indicted by a Ramsey County grand jury following the testimony of seven witnesses, most of whom were police officers. The indictment was the first definitive step in a long and tortuous legal journey, the actual length and tortuousness of which no one could have possibly imagined.
Ronald Reed, meanwhile, had finally been found. The circumstances of which he was instantly at the center could hardly have been more spectacular, at least on paper.
On November 12, St. Paul detectives were told by Kelly Day—who was, it turned out, both a closely watched suspect in a number of local cases (including the discovery of that automobile trunk full of dynamite behind his apartment) and a “reliable” confidential informant—that he, Reed, and another man were planning to hijack an airliner at Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport. The hijackers, Day told the cops, would kidnap city councilwoman Rosalie Butler and hold her hostage, fly the commandeered airplane to Canada, and there demand the release of Larry Clark, Connie Trimble, and Gary Hogan, the accused Dayton’s department store bomber. The hijacking, originally scheduled for that day, had for some reason been rescheduled for the next.
Preposterous as it seemed, Day’s report was taken seriously. Security at the airport was placed on high alert. In addition to law enforcement agencies representing state and local jurisdictions, the FBI, Secret Service, and Federal Aviation Administration sprang into action. Everybody was looking for Ronald Reed, the peripatetic fugitive whose apprehension now seemed to be a matter of national security.
Additional tips to the police the afternoon and evening of November 12 placed Reed at two different addresses on Franklin Avenue in south Minneapolis. At the second site, a fourth-floor apartment at 402 West Franklin, officers appeared to be only minutes behind him—the door was unlocked and the TV was on when they arrived. Then an informant told St. Paul police that Reed had holed up in a second-floor apartment on Washington Avenue in southeast Minneapolis, near the University of Minnesota’s football stadium. (The informant said he had just left the apartment and could vouch for Reed’s presence.) Shortly before 4 AM on Friday, November 13, shotgun-toting raiders from the St. Paul, Minneapolis, and university police departments as well as the FBI were poised to take a prisoner.
Accounts differ as to the details of the raid. Three young women (one on crutches, nursing a broken leg, and at least one of them a U of M student) either lived or were staying at the Washington Avenue address, and the officers either knocked on the door and were admitted by one of the occupants or they barged in, waving their guns and terrifying the women. Not in dispute was the fact that Reed was on the premises and neither resisted arrest nor attempted to flee. He was, according to police reports, wearing a red sleeveless T-shirt and brown corduroy pants when the police arrived and seemed to have been sleeping.
Decades later, lawyers would argue about whether the police had the proper paperwork in hand and whether the women consented to a search of the apartment, which consisted of several small rooms. That search turned up, under a mattress in one room, a loaded .38-caliber snub-nose revolver. A sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun, a handful of shotgun shells, a red safety flare that could have been mistaken for a stick of dynamite, and a pair of walkie-talkies “still in the box” were discovered in another. On the suspect himself police found, according to their reports, a Social Security card, a Nebraska driver’s license, and a Braniff Youth Air Fare ID all bearing the name “Dana W. Hudson.” Also confiscated was a black leather bag containing a shirt, a pair of bell-bottom jeans, and other articles of clothing, a North Central Airlines ticket dated October 7, 1970, for Flight 744 to Omaha, a matchbook from the Imperial Hotel in Omaha, a small book comprising the quotations of Mao Tse-tung, and twenty-three dollars in cash.
At least as significant given the immediate threat were several pieces of paper that seemed to belong to Reed. One, which the raiders said was removed from Reed’s pants pocket, was a handwritten note, laced with crossed-out words, misspellings, and eccentric punctuation, addressed to “control tower to be relayed to Governor [Harold] LeVander, police, FBI or any agents of the government concern.”
The note began, “We our revolutionary, take heed to our first and last warning. If there is any attempt to interfere or stop us, we will blow this airplane up and everybody on it.
“We our well arm and we our carrying explosives. The plane & hostages will be held until our demand our met.” The demands included the release of Clark, Trimble, and Hogan, (“brought to the airport and allow to bored the plane unescorted”), fifty thousand dollars in gold, and national television time for the Black Panthers.
“The fate of these hostages will be determined by the United States government,” the note continued. “Will they live or die?
“We will not hesitate to kill or die for our freedom. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
“For the benifit, comfort & safety of the hostage, it would be best for you to be exspeedeant.”
The note was signed, “All power to the people. Seize the times.” Instead of a period or exclamation point, the last sentence ended with a colon.
Besides the note, police confiscated a to-do list that included the notations “kidnap governor”1 and “liberate prisoner” as well as reminders to “contact United [Airlines]—make reservation—purchase tickets:” Another scrap bore the names Angeles (presumably meaning Angela) Davis, Bobby Seale, and other “revolutionaries” in custody. Yet another was a short grocery list that specified Dutch cleanser, milk, bread, soap, and toilet tissue. There was also a three-page letter addressed to Connie Trimble. The letter, which was more carefully written than the notes but similarly distinguished by the peculiar use of colons in place of periods, acknowledged Trimble’s legal bind (“the trick bag that you’re in”), the writer’s own difficulties with the “pigs” (“they our trying to murder me or railroad me off to jail for the rest of my life”), and the need for her to remain patient and steadfast. “I love you and miss you and I will be waiting for you. Please remain beautiful and I will write you everyday:” Undated and containing no mention of the supposedly imminent airplane hijacking, the letter closed with “All power to the people” and was signed “Ronnie Reed.”
The front-page story in the November 13 Dispatch quoted Minneapolis’s deputy chief Joseph Rusinko saying that an informant had told police that Reed had “planned to board the plane disguised as a woman at about 8:45” that morning, though there was nothing in the confiscated papers, Reed’s travel bag, or relevant police reports that indicated a disguise or a specific boarding time. There was no mention in the confiscated notes, for that matter, of any conspirators or other “revolutionary” action.
So, nearly six months after James Sackett’s murder, St. Paul investigators finally had their men—or the persons they believed to be their men—in addition to their woman. But from a prosecutor’s point of view on that chilly autumn morning, the case against Reed in both the Sackett murder and the alleged hijacking plot would seem problematic at best: no eyewitnesses or physical evidence in the first instance, no actual crime committed (with the possible exception of weapons violations) in the second. Thus, when Reed appeared in front of St. Paul municipal judge James Lynch later on November 13, he, like Clark, would be arraigned on charges relating to the Omaha bank case, in which there were eyewitnesses and evidence (Reed’s trench coat, the Liemandt’s receipt, shell casings, et cetera). Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Paul Lindholm asked that Reed’s bond be set at $150,000, the highest to date in Minnesota history.
Reed said little during the formalities and admitted nothing. With no hope of making bail, he joined Clark and Trimble in separate cells at the Ramsey County jail.
The Disptach’s headline trumpeting Reed’s arrest that day said an “Alleged ‘Panther’” had been seized. But at the end of its top-of-the-front-page story that jumped to page four a smaller headline read, “Panthers Disclaim Connection.”
The story that followed quoted a spokesman for a Black Panther Party delegation that happened to be in the Twin Cities for a series of college lectures saying the group had “no knowledge” of Ronald Reed.
Emory Douglass, described in the story as the Panthers’ “culture minister,” who headed the touring group, was not available for further comment.
1Coincidentally or not, Councilwoman Butler and Governor LeVander were neighbors on Summit Avenue.