A few days before Christmas, Ronald Reed and Larry Clark appeared in front of a police line-up in St. Paul and were identified by William Tate, the wounded Omaha police officer, as two of the three men who attempted to rob the Ames Plaza Bank in October. At the request of Nebraska governor Norbert Tiemann, and with the subsequent approval of Governor LeVander, the two suspects were formally extradited to the Cornhusker State to stand trial on three felony charges related to the Omaha case. Their joint trial, in Omaha’s Douglas County district court, began on August 9, 1971.
Despite the evidence and eyewitnesses, there were enough inconsistencies in the testimony to make the outcome not quite the sure thing that local authorities might have hoped. The most interesting discrepancy was the testimony of Sergeant Tate, who said that during the brief shootout with the would-be robbers he had fired his .38-caliber revolver at one of the gunmen from six inches away and was sure he had wounded the man, whom he and other witnesses had identified as Reed. Reed, however, bore no signs of a “penetrating-type wound.” Prosecutor Sam Cooper conceded that Tate had not in fact shot Reed, though Tate “very honestly believed” that he had, but whether he did or did not was irrelevant in any event and did not lessen Tate’s credibility as a witness. Cooper also dismissed the testimony of Alex King, identified as an acquaintance of Reed’s from St. Paul, who testified that he had purchased the trench coat dropped at the bank using Reed’s identification and that the coat had later been stolen.
And in a statement that would echo in another courtroom thirty-five years later, Cooper acknowledged there was “more evidence pointing at Reed than at Clark”—but there was enough, he added, to place the latter in the Ames Plaza Bank with Reed and Horace Myles. The sole witness speaking on Clark’s defense, according to the Omaha World-Telegram, was his mother, Alma Porter of St. Paul, who told the jury her son had never been charged with a felony until the Omaha case.
After five hours of deliberation, the jury of seven women and five men—one of whom was an African American—voted to convict Reed and Clark on all three counts: entering a bank with unlawful intent, use of firearms in commission of a felony, and shooting with intent to kill, wound, or maim. Judge C. Thomas White sentenced both men to ten to twenty-five years in prison. (Myles was tried separately and convicted.) Reed and Clark were transferred to the Nebraska Penal Complex in Lincoln on September 11, 1971, to begin serving their terms.
Investigators in the Twin Cities no doubt felt some satisfaction knowing the men they believed had been involved in James Sackett’s murder were behind bars for a substantial stretch of time. If they thought they had the Sackett suspects by the short hairs, however, and could leverage those long sentences into accusations and confessions, they were seriously mistaken. Indeed, the mixed emotions that arose from “knowing” who murdered Jim Sackett but not being able to prove it would gnaw at the case’s original investigators for years to come. In a brief 1972 report, Earl Miels wrote a melancholy postmortem: “The arrest and conviction of Ronald Reed and Larry Clark in Omaha … are to the benefit of society even though they apparently cannot be tried here for their part in the murder of Officer Sackett.”
During visits to their Nebraska prison by St. Paul detectives over the next several years, neither Reed nor Clark was willing to listen to offers of reduced hard time in exchange for information implicating themselves, one another, or others, or to appeals to conscience and common sense. Decades later, Russ Bovee recalled observing the two men through a window in the penitentiary at Lincoln. Informed they had a visitor from Minnesota, the inmates literally turned their backs on the detective. The code of silence that had frustrated the police at home extended beyond state lines. (Myles, too, refused to have anything to do with the Sackett investigators. After serving his time he changed his name and reportedly relocated in the Pacific Northwest.)
Neither Reed nor any of his alleged co-conspirators was ever charged in connection with the hijack scheme. Reed’s conviction in Omaha may have been deemed sufficient by prosecutors in the Twin Cities, or perhaps they didn’t believe they had a case, since the plot existed only in Kelly Day’s statement to police and in the note seized by police during their November 13 raid. Reed, for his part, denied any knowledge of a plot. When his November 13 arrest was brought up during the Omaha trial, he said the pants in which the note was found belonged to another man, whose full name and current whereabouts he didn’t know.
But, of course, Reed and Clark were only two of the three Sackett suspects in custody. Connie Trimble was in the Ramsey County jail awaiting trial for first-degree murder. Beginning in November 1970, she and her counsel—Neil Dieterich, Donald Wiese, and eventually Douglas Thomson, one of the Twin Cities’ best-known defense attorneys—proceeded through a series of pretrial hearings, focused on matters ranging from the admissibility of her statements to the conduct of investigators Williams, Bailey, and Opheim following her arrest to the credibility of the voice-print technology that led to her arrest in the first place. Prosecutors stood by their witnesses and evidence.
On December 16, for instance, Ernest Nash, who compared Trimble’s voice print with the May 22 caller’s, was questioned in St. Paul by Wiese and Paul Lindholm, the assistant county attorney, before a Ramsey County judge.
“In my opinion,” Nash said, “the voice of Connie Trimble and the voice that made the call … are one and the same and could be no other.”
“What is your degree of certainty in your expression of this opinion?” Lindholm asked Nash for the record.
“Beyond any doubt,” Nash replied.
But, no matter how assured expert opinion may be in court, citizens have their own—not necessarily expert but definitely assured. Not long after Trimble’s arrest, a series of broadsides appeared in the neighborhood. One, typed, mimeographed, and unsigned, bore the headline “Sister Connie Kidnapped!” and urged not only Trimble’s release but the release of “all political prisoners.” Crackling with the overheated rhetoric of the time, it began by accusing the St. Paul “pig department” of attempting to “railroad” Trimble “for the revolutionary justice which was dealt to a pig policeman last Spring.” It dismissed the spectrogram evidence, insisting there was “no accurate way” to compare voices, and described the process under way in the courts as a “legal lynching” consistent with the government’s “fascist actions against the people.” Complicit in those actions were “the racist news media of St. Paul and Minneapolis.”
Another notice, this one printed and signed by the Minneapolis-based Women’s Action Committee, challenged the credibility of voice-print evidence, called out Carolen Bailey for her welfare-office ruse, and declared the police action part of a concerted attempt to “target … a group of people working for human liberation.” It was no coincidence, according to the committee, that Ronald Reed and Gary Hogan had also been arrested in recent months, “nor … that the charges should be similar to those being brought against others in other parts of the country.”
At least one local organization began a grassroots effort to raise funds on the defendants’ behalf. The Black Legal Defense Committee, whose rather more temperate appeal listed eighteen community residents, including the Reverend Denzil Carty, rector of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, Robert Hickman, director of the Inner City Youth League, and Connie Trimble’s brother Herman, soberly referred to “the very serious situation involving several of our young people.” The appeal’s language was calm and measured, and, though it did not name names nor cite the specifics of the “situation,” the objective was clear. “The young people presently in trouble are ours, whether we know them personally or not.… They need the help of the total community.”
In the winter of 1970–71, Free Connie Trimble! became a rallying cry in the black community. If it didn’t have the nationwide appeal of Free Angela Davis!, it was very much in tune with the angry, insistent times in the Twin Cities, and it reminded locals that there were not only varying opinions on matters of crime and justice but divergent realities as well.
During the protracted wait for Connie Trimble’s trial to begin, there were no more arrests in the Sackett case. Unable to make her fifty thousand–dollar bail (even with the community’s help), Trimble bided her time in the Ramsey County jail, reading and writing letters and chatting with a series of female cellmates. She saw her daughter, who remained in the care of family and friends, at least once a week. Well coached by her lawyers, she did not speak about the Sackett case with investigators, not even to the personable and persistent Carolen Bailey.
Officers patrolling the Hill occasionally reported gunshots fired in their direction. Tensions remained high, and officers exercised a caution that had not been thought necessary until Sackett’s murder, and that caution further inflamed many residents, more and more of whom were by this time referring to the cops with their four-man squads, riot gear, and military-style, semi-automatic rifles as an occupying force.
The officers’ major concern, at least for the time being, was less gunfire than explosives, in part because bombs were jangling nerves, damaging property, and sometimes killing people around the country and in part because Gary Hogan’s trial began, in January 1971, in Ramsey County district court. That trial, which centered on graphic testimony about the bomb blast that nearly killed Mary Peek in the Dayton’s restroom, ran seven weeks. At least as chilling as the description of the first bomb and its victim was the potential horror of the second charge, found in the locker outside the restroom door. Prosecution witnesses said the second bomb would have killed “everyone there.” Tried as an adult, Hogan, now sixteen, was convicted in March of attempted first-degree murder and aggravated arson and sentenced to twenty years in prison. At the time, and for the rest of his life, Hogan denied any involvement in the crime.
But St. Paul had not experienced the last of the bombs.
At 5:10 PM on July 27, 1971, more than five pounds of dynamite blew off doors, shattered windows, and damaged cars behind a shuttered bar at Selby and Dale. Immediately adjacent to the erstwhile Frank’s Regal Lounge was a house that at the time served as the police department’s recently opened Summit-University community-relations office. No one was injured in the blast, but the three officers who happened to be inside the house were knocked off their chairs. One of them, James Mann, told reporters he didn’t think the bomb was intended to injure any cops—if it were, it would have been placed directly behind their office, not behind the vacant building next door—but was probably intended as a “scare tactic.” Mann was one of the department’s four black officers at the time. Though popular in the African American community, he was distrusted by many white cops, and his comment reminded some of them of remarks attributed to him following the Sackett murder. At that time, he was quoted by the Minneapolis Tribune saying, “If we get emotional and sympathetic when an officer gets hurt, we must also get emotional and sympathetic when anyone gets hurt”—which, though reasonable enough on the face of it, did not endear him to fellow officers who believed themselves targeted for assassination. No one was arrested in the community-relations office bombing, but police had several familiar suspects under surveillance—among them the ubiquitous Kelly Day and a friend of Day’s named John Griffin.
On the legal front, the case against Trimble moved slowly forward. Her attorneys’ challenge of the voice-print evidence as the basis of her arrest and its admissibility during the upcoming trial was knocked down, in February 1971, by a Ramsey County district court judge and then, the following November, by the state supreme court. The high court also ruled that while Carolen Bailey’s voice-print deception may have been ethically questionable, it had not violated Trimble’s constitutional rights.
Two months later, Trimble’s lawyers petitioned the court for a change of venue, arguing that the extensive publicity as well as a local fund-raising campaign on behalf of the Sackett family jeopardized the defendant’s ability to get a fair trial in St. Paul. The venue-change request was duly granted, but the case was transferred only across the river, to the Hennepin County Courthouse in downtown Minneapolis. Considering that the Minneapolis papers covered the case almost as closely as their St. Paul counterparts and that local radio and television stations saturated the entire metro area, the change seemed inconsequential if not laughable. The trial, scheduled to begin February 7, was then again re-sited, this time to Rochester, about eighty miles away, which made more sense. Ramsey County judge David Marsden, who would preside wherever the trial took place, ordered the change at least in part because of the sale in the Twin Cities of large lapel buttons reading Connie Trimble Not Guilty. Reportedly, the Inner City Youth League had ordered 2,500 buttons (or 5,000, depending on the report), to be sold for a dollar apiece. Nobody could remember when a venue change had been granted twice in Minnesota.
On Friday afternoon, February 18, a large explosion tore through a wall of the State Office Building across the street from the Capitol, injuring a half-dozen employees and causing extensive damage. The blast was described by investigators as “well planned [and] very strong.” Despite investigators’ interest in the usual suspects, no one was ever charged in the case.
When her trial got under way on February 22, 1972, a year and nine months since Sackett’s murder, Trimble had been incarcerated for sixteen months. Even so, seated at the defense table in the Olmsted County Courthouse in downtown Rochester, the defendant, in her carefully coiffed Afro and modish miniskirts, struck observers as remarkably poised and self-possessed. The same could hardly be said for Olmsted County authorities, who installed metal detectors and assigned sheriff’s deputies to pat down everybody passing through the courtroom doors. At the prosecution’s request, nobody wearing a Connie Trimble Not Guilty button would be admitted. Nevertheless, the courtroom’s 110-seat gallery was full of Trimble supporters, almost all of them African American and some of them, in the opinion of prosecutor Theodore Collins, willfully intimidating in their oversized hairdos, leather jackets, and almost tangible solidarity. (Collins later referred to the men as the “drill team” and said their intent was to frighten both the jury and the defendant. Collins asked the judge to restrict the men’s access to the courtroom, but his request was denied. He would later concede that fearsome as they might have appeared, the men did not disrupt the trial proceedings.) Jury selection, true to expectations, moved slowly, going through forty-six of the fifty-four prospective jurors before six men and six women—one of them black—were seated on February 29.
On March 2, Collins outlined the state’s case before the Rochester jury. An experienced St. Paul lawyer who had been hired to run the prosecution for an understaffed Ramsey County Attorney’s office, Collins had successfully prosecuted Gary Hogan the previous year. He said the testimony would show that Trimble made the call that lured Patrolman Sackett into the ambush and that Trimble knew the officer would be murdered. In chambers, the famously aggressive Doug Thomson, now Trimble’s lead attorney, argued that the prosecution could not prove first-degree murder and asked Judge Marsden for a directed verdict of not guilty. But Marsden denied Thomson’s motion—the first of several before the trial’s end—and, back in front of the jury, the testimony began. The prosecution’s initial witnesses included six residents of 859 Hague Avenue as well as Glen Kothe and five other police officers, all of whom testified about the events of May 22, 1970. The next day, Saturday, March 4, there was no trial, and Connie Trimble celebrated her twentieth birthday in her Olmsted County jail cell.
When the trial resumed on Monday, a prosecution witness named Vera Washington described hearing voices and footsteps moments after being awakened by a loud noise on the night of the Sackett murder. Sitting up in her first-floor bedroom, she told the court, she heard “someone running—it sounded like boys running” between her house and the house immediately to the east. “I didn’t see anything, but just heard their voices.” (The woman, who lived at 878 Hague, said she told officers what she had heard when they came down the street looking for information shortly after the shooting. She apparently had not told homicide investigators her story until they spoke with her in December, almost seven months later; the reason for the delay was not given.)
Later that day, Jeanette Sackett, who had been present in the Rochester courtroom from the beginning, took the stand and described her family life before and after her husband’s murder. Jim Sackett’s father and mother listened intently from the gallery.
Collins asked the widow if she knew anyone who had reason to kill her husband.
She said she did not.
Was she aware of any threats against her husband?
She was not.
“Did he ever tell you he had any fear for his safety?”
“No,” she said.
Thomson chose not to cross-examine.
After testimony regarding the path of the sniper’s bullet and other crime-scene matters—criminalist Harold Alfultis described the fatal bullet as a steel-core copper jacketed projectile fired from a .30-caliber or larger rifle, most likely from between the third and fourth houses on the south side of Hague west of the Hague-Victoria intersection—jurors listened to the single piece of evidence that linked Connie Trimble to the shooting: the fifty-nine-second telephone conversation with police operator John Kinderman. The jury actually heard two recordings, the first one almost incomprehensible owing to background noise and the second filtered free of most of the extraneous racket. A third tape was also played. On this one Trimble, taking Carolen Bailey’s call in the welfare office, repeated many of the words on the May 22 recording. Analyst Ernest Nash then repeated his opinion that Trimble and the May 22 caller were one and the same. Nash was followed by Dr. Oscar Tosi, a professor of audiology and speech sciences at Michigan State University, who spent more than two hours explaining voice-print technology itself and testified to Nash’s expertise in the nascent field.
Collins called still more witnesses, including two women in their early twenties, Sandra Webb and Diane Hutchinson, who were acquaintances of Trimble’s. Webb said that during the summer of 1970 Trimble told her she had made the May 22 phone call but “had no idea what was going to happen.” Hutchinson, who lived at 882 Hague, said Trimble had never said anything to her about the call, nor had she (Hutchinson) witnessed the shooting, nor did she know the identity of the shooter. When queried by Collins, however, Webb said she knew Ronald Reed; Hutchinson said she knew both Reed and Larry Clark. (Hutchinson was living with Clark at the Hague address in May 1970.) It was the first time the two men, who had begun serving their time in Nebraska, were mentioned during the trial.
Detectives Williams, Opheim, and Bailey recounted Trimble’s statements about the mysterious written instructions she described during her first evening in custody and her stated fear of reprisals if she told investigators the “whole truth.” But the state was foiled when a secret witness, whose name—Kelly Day—had been kept off Collins’s witness list for “reasons of personal safety,” according to Collins, failed to appear. When St. Paul officers brought the fugitive witness into court the next day, he told Judge Marsden that he had changed his mind and did not want to testify. Collins asked that Day be cited for contempt and his bail be increased (Day was facing an aggravated forgery charge in Ramsey County), requests that Marsden, no doubt as frustrated as Collins, took under advisement.
Thomson began the defense’s case by calling to the stand, to nearly everyone’s surprise, the defendant herself. No longer able to challenge the voice-print evidence, the defense would argue that while Trimble did in fact make the May 22 phone call, she did not know or anticipate the outcome. And while Trimble could not credibly deny knowing who told her to make the call, she could refuse to name him. Now, on the stand, she denied a social worker’s allegations that she was a militant “Black Muslim” with Black Panther posters festooning her apartment walls—she was a Baptist, she said, who had been studying the Muslim religion. She reiterated her fear of reprisal against her and her baby.
Under Collins’s ninety-minute cross-examination, the witness described her personal history and her relationship with Ronald Reed. She coolly conceded that she had lied to Williams and his detectives about the anonymous letter she said directed her to make the call but insisted that she believed the intent of the call was to sic the police on Gerald Starling.
“There is no doubt that you made the call, is there?” Collins said, in an exchange reported by the Pioneer Press.
“No. I made it,” she agreed.
“Where did you make it from?”
“From a telephone booth at Selby and Victoria.”
“How did you get there?”
“In a car.”
“Whose car was it?”
“I do not wish to answer.”
When Trimble continued to refuse to answer questions about her companion that night, Marsden told her she had to reply. After a pause, however, she said, “I refuse to answer that question.”
Following a recess, she was asked the same question, which she again refused to answer, despite Marsden’s insistence.
“It is a proper question and I order you to answer it,” the judge told her.
“I’m afraid to answer it,” she said.
Trying a new tack, Collins asked her about Reed’s whereabouts the night of the murder. Trimble said she did not know where he was when she made the call, but when she returned to their apartment at about half-past midnight, she found him there, asleep.
“Do you tell lies whenever it suits you?” Collins asked her.
“I’m not a habitual liar, if that’s what you mean,” the witness replied with her customary aplomb.
Whereupon the prosecutor produced St. Paul patrolman Laverne Lee, who testified that he saw Reed—supposedly at home in bed—among the crowd that had gathered at Hague and Victoria shortly after the murder.
Late on March 15, the case finally went to the jury, which was charged by Judge Marsden with deciding whether the defendant was guilty of first-degree murder and nothing less, meaning a guilty verdict would result in a mandatory life sentence. After only three ballots and six hours of deliberation the jurors, on March 16, decided the defendant was not guilty. Trimble’s friends in the courtroom erupted, her mother, Dorothy, fell to her knees and loudly praised God, and the defendant, according to the Pioneer Press, “threw herself into the arms” of attorney Neil Dieterich, sobbing.
“It’s a victory, that’s all,” the paper quoted her as saying. “I can only thank God.”
Reporters quoted jurors saying the state hadn’t proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Trimble had intended to commit murder.
Trimble was not yet, though, a free woman. Before the verdict, Marsden had cited her for contempt and imposed a thirty-day sentence to be served in St. Paul. Theoretically, if she continued to refuse to name the person who directed her to make the May 22 phone call, she could have been jailed indefinitely. But after thirty days Ramsey County Attorney William Randall decided enough was enough, and early in the morning of April 7, 1972, a cool spring day, she was for the first time in more than seventeen months free to enjoy the fresh air.
Perhaps because of the fury manifested by the calls and letters that followed the verdict, or as a continuing show of solidarity by her supporters, or for other reasons possibly unfathomable to the city’s white majority, a group of six young African Americans, at least one of whom wore a Connie Trimble Not Guilty button on his leather jacket, formed a tight human shield around her when she emerged from the county jail and walked her to a waiting car.
Then, at least as far as that white majority was concerned, Connie Trimble disappeared.
One night during the spring of 1972, about the time of Trimble’s acquittal or possibly a few weeks later, a squad car drew up in front of 859 Hague. The driver, Patrolman Glen Kothe, turned off the car’s engine, pointed at the two-story frame house with the enclosed front porch and short front sidewalk, and said simply, “Right there.”
Kothe’s partner that night, William Scott Duff, was a tall, skinny, twenty-one-year-old rookie from the Minneapolis suburb of Robbinsdale. Duff had enrolled at the University of Minnesota intending to be a wildlife biologist, then taken the St. Paul Police Department exam on a whim. He was a member of the department’s class of 1971, which also included a hot-shot East Sider named Thomas Dunaski, and was a few months ahead of a brash product of the Summit-University community, William Finney; all three would have illustrious careers as St. Paul cops. Though Duff was too new on the job to have known James Sackett, he knew Sackett’s story, or at least the terrible end of it, and he knew this was where it happened and it happened on a spring night possibly not much different from this one.
“It was late,” Duff would remember almost forty years later. “The streetlights were on, but it was foggy. There was mist in the air. Kothe said, ‘Right there’ and explained the whole thing—where he walked around to the back of the house and where Jim was, where the flash occurred, and where he believed the shot came from.” Sackett’s story had been discussed at length in the academy, a powerful cautionary tale for young officers preparing to work in a dangerous environment. But that night in the misty dark of Hague Avenue the murder seemed real in a way that it hadn’t in class. “It was emotional,” Duff recalled. “You could hear it in Kothe’s voice. Only two years had passed, and you could tell he was still hurting.”
Kothe had returned to work after taking three or four days off to collect himself, which was all that was believed necessary in those days, even after an officer’s partner had been killed and even though the fatal bullet, or a second one, might have killed him. St. Paul cops weren’t used to being shot at—certainly weren’t used to one of their own getting killed—and post-trauma therapy, support groups, and grief counselors were still, in the early 1970s, several years away. So within a few days of his partner’s murder Kothe went out on patrol and with a new partner responded to a call about a car sitting in a vacant lot. Approaching the car, he felt the hairs standing up on the back of his neck. He called for backup, and three or four squads raced to the site. But the abandoned car turned out to be nothing more than an abandoned car, and Kothe felt like a fool.
Then and for years to come Kothe spent a lot of time second-guessing himself. I virtually witnessed a friend of mine, my partner, get murdered, he would think. Did I do something wrong? Should I have done something differently to prevent it? Maybe I shouldn’t have gone around to the back. All of that was running through his mind, and he was afraid he was driving himself nuts. And, as if the self-interrogations weren’t bad enough, there were the dreams. For many years after the murder he would dream about walking into a robbery and being unable to pull the gun out of his holster or about seeing a bullet coming at him and not being able to move.
Later in 1972 Kothe got himself transferred to the department’s K-9 unit, where his partner was a dog. He preferred that to working with another human being. He had reached the point where he didn’t want to work with anybody. He didn’t want to feel responsible.
Kothe’s brief stop there with Patrolman Duff was not his first visit to 859 Hague since the murder. That had occurred three months after Jim Sackett’s assassination. Kothe drove there with Jeanette Sackett, at her request and in her car. It was warm and sticky, a typical late-August day. When they reached the site, Jeanette took photographs of the house and the intersection and then turned on a small tape recorder. She told Kothe she wanted to be able to explain to her kids, as truthfully and completely as possible, when they were old enough to understand and started asking questions, what had happened to their dad at that spot on May 22, 1970.
The intersection was quiet, and the house on the northeast corner looked like dozens of others in the neighborhood, except for the broken glass in the front door. Jeanette could tell it was difficult for Kothe to go back there. But she told him, “You’re the only one who can answer my questions. Please explain things to me.” Kothe answered her questions but was careful about what he told her. He didn’t tell her about Jim’s scream or the blood staining the sidewalk, figuring neither she nor her kids needed to know that, or if they did, they could find it out on their own, when they were ready. And that would be the last time Jim Sackett’s widow and his final patrol partner would speak for thirty-five years.
Kothe would come to believe that Jeanette blamed him for Jim’s death.
Jeanette denied that, blaming Kothe’s “survivor’s guilt” for the subsequent lack of contact and communication while acknowledging her own struggle following her husband’s death. For several days, she recalled decades later, she could hardly move. “I couldn’t nurse my baby, couldn’t even give him a bottle. I was so distraught I don’t think I was all there. I just couldn’t accept that Jim was gone. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and think I heard a car door close and expect him to come walking in. For a long time I’d be in a crowd and expect to see him. Or I’d be driving to the grocery store and look into the car next to mine and think, What if it was Jim?”
The police department wasn’t any better prepared to deal with a murdered officer’s widow than it was to deal with a murdered officer’s partner, offering neither psychiatric care nor financial or legal counseling to help cope in the aftermath. For the first couple of weeks, officers’ wives would come by the house with hot dishes and other food. But that stopped after a while, and it seemed to Jeanette that many of the cops and their wives and some of their other friends didn’t know what to say or do so they kept their distance. Jim’s parents and siblings did their best to help, but they were struggling with their own grief. Jeanette’s blood kin had returned to Louisiana after the funeral, and though she went back for a few days herself and briefly wondered if she should relocate, she decided St. Paul was the only home her kids knew, so St. Paul was where they were going to stay.
Money was a problem, then and for years to come. She received Social Security payments for herself and the kids as well as Jim’s police department pension (if memory served, less than four hundred dollars a month), but that and the proceeds from a trust fund established for the family at a downtown bank barely covered the family’s needs. She would eventually go back to work, but for a few years, while the kids were little, she stayed at home and made do with what she had. There was more to deal with, after all, than the mortgage. The two oldest children, Jim Jr. and Jennifer, were old enough to have an inchoate sense of what had happened to their father, and they were not only heartbroken, they were terrified, knowing before they had the means to deal with such knowledge that there were people in the world who might hurt them. That fear eventually solidified into a wariness and mistrust of others that would last a lifetime. For the children’s sake as well as her own, when Jeanette went somewhere, whether it was to the supermarket or the doctor’s office, she took all four along.
At least once a week for the first several months, she would pile her kids into the car and drive to the cemetery at Fort Snelling. “I would look at the long lines of graves and think, What do I have here? I have this headstone,” she said. “But it would give me peace, going to the cemetery and saying my prayers. I’d buy flowers on the way or take them from our yard, and we’d put them on Jim’s grave.”
Sometimes, though, the challenges of everyday life seemed too much to bear alone. Almost forty years later she recalled an incident in the parking lot of a Woolworth’s five-and-dime store near their home. She had tears in her eyes when she mentioned it, yet she was laughing at herself, too, embarrassed by the memory.
“It was the first Christmas Jim was gone,” she said. “I’d taken the kids to the store because the older two wanted to buy me a present. Well, when we came out of the store, the car had a flat tire. Jim had taught me how to change a tire, but that day I thought, I can’t do this. So, if you can believe it, I called the police. They sent out a squad, and the guys changed my tire while I sat there with my children and cried.”