This time there was no middle-of-the-night call for assistance, no counterfeit concern expressed about a sick child or a pregnant woman, no apparent need to hurry. Not at first.
Rookie St. Paul officer Ronald Ryan Jr. was responding to a call about a “slumper”—in police lingo somebody sleeping or passed out in a car—in this instance a red Plymouth Sundance parked outside the Sacred Heart Church at East Sixth and Hope streets. It was seven o’clock on August 26, 1994, a bright, late-summer morning with a high blue sky, for tens of thousands of Minnesotans a perfect day for the state fair situated only a few miles away. According to one witness, who happened to be looking out her apartment window across the street at the time, Ryan spoke to the car’s occupant, then walked back to his squad car, at which point the other man got out of his car and shot him multiple times. All at once there were several urgent calls, from witnesses to the shooting or the immediate aftermath, to the 911 emergency-response number, which the public in St. Paul and virtually everywhere else in the United States had been using for more than a decade to summon help in a crisis.
On this day the calls would continue all morning, as Twin Citians watched live television coverage of the manhunt that swept across St. Paul’s East Side and called to report sightings of the fugitive shooter. By about ten o’clock, the focus had shifted three-quarters of a mile to the southeast of Sacred Heart Church, to a nondescript house on Conway Street, where Ryan’s killer—the twenty-six-year-old patrolman had been pronounced dead two hours earlier—was holed up in a backyard fish house and where he shot and mortally wounded K-9 unit officer Timothy Jones and Jones’s German shepherd, Laser. In another two hours, heavily armed and armored teams from several jurisdictions finally ran the killer to ground, dressed in camouflage and cowering beneath a sheet of plywood outside a house on Euclid Street, a block from the Conway address. The pistol apparently used in both shootings, as well as the service weapons taken off the fallen officers, were found nearby.
The killer, who suffered only bruises and a dog bite, was identified as Guy Harvey Baker, a twenty-six-year-old Persian Gulf War veteran from Mason City, Iowa, who was wanted for a parole violation following his conviction on illegal firearms possession charges. His reason for firing on Jones and the dog was apparent—he was trying to avoid capture. Why he shot Ryan was not immediately clear.
Not that it mattered, at least at the moment. The city was shocked and sickened, the horror of the first killing compounded by the horror of the second. The beauty of the summer morning and the homely ordinariness of the crime scenes made the event seem especially surreal. Within the department, the rage and grief were beyond words. Ryan was not only a husband and father, he was the much-loved son of a longtime St. Paul cop, Ron Ryan Sr. Jones, also a husband and father, was a popular sixteen-year veteran who, with Laser and another dog, had won several national K-9 honors. Their funerals, on successive days the following week, were attended by thousands of cops from around the country and observed, in person or via live TV, by tens of thousands of citizens.
St. Paul had not suffered a cop-killing since James Sackett’s, twenty-four years earlier. In 1974, Patrolman John Larson died following a traffic accident while responding to an emergency call, and, seven years later, Patrolman John O’Brien was fatally injured when a driver fleeing police collided with his squad car, but none since Sackett had been murdered in the capital city. Minneapolis had experienced a more recent atrocity. Shortly after midnight on September 25, 1992, a veteran Minneapolis officer, fifty-three-year-old Jerome Haaf, was shot in the back while he sipped coffee in an East Lake Street pizza joint by a pair of Vice Lord members during a particularly volatile stretch between police and mainly black gangs. The Haaf murder was clearly an assassination: a cop was the designated target. Four men were later arrested, tried, and convicted on charges connected with the crime.
Haaf’s murder may or may not have been “political,” depending on a citizen’s definition of the term and maybe on which side of the color line he or she stood. But, unlike Sackett’s, the case did not have the opportunity to grow cold.
More than twenty-two years had passed since Connie Trimble’s acquittal in Sackett’s death. Ronald Reed and Larry Clark had each served more than ten years in Nebraska following their conviction in the Ames Plaza Bank case, had been paroled, then discharged from parole several years earlier, and, like Trimble, had fallen off the St. Paul department’s radar.
Times had changed. Weakened by government prosecutions, internecine feuds, and violent death, the Black Panther Party, whose hard-core membership may never have exceeded a few thousand persons nationwide, was in terminal decline by the mid-1970s. (The Panthers’ self-declared archenemy, J. Edgar Hoover, had himself died, of natural causes, in 1972.) But America’s inner cities, if they had changed at all, had grown more desolate, desperate, and dangerous. Street gangs had replaced revolutionaries, semi-automatic weapons had supplanted bolt-action rifles and homemade bombs, and crack cocaine and other illicit drugs, not radical ideologies, fueled most of the carnage. Murder rates soared in many American cities, including St. Paul and Minneapolis (“Murderapolis” in the national media during the middle nineties), mainly attributable to power struggles and turf wars between the gangs. Homicide investigators struggled to keep up with the fresh corpses.
Though there had been no arrests or significant developments in the Sackett case since the Trimble trial, the case had not been forgotten. Jeanette Sackett had never stopped thinking about it, nor had Glen Kothe and his contemporaries who patrolled the Hill during the early seventies, nor had former investigators such as Earl Miels and Carolen Bailey, who had retired without having shared the satisfaction of closing the notorious case.
Joe Corcoran, who spent his first night with the department’s crime lab at the Sackett murder site, would be forever haunted by the memory of the young officer’s blood on the Hague Avenue sidewalk. Rising through departmental ranks and seeing his share of brutality, he would never shake the sense of wonder and despair he experienced in the murder’s immediate aftermath, realizing, first, that some citizens hated the police so much they were willing to kill them and, second, that even greater numbers either hated the police or were so frightened of their neighbors that they would not tell the authorities what they knew about Sackett’s killers.
As it happened, in the late summer of 1994, Lieutenant Joe Corcoran was running the department’s overtaxed homicide unit. When he took the job in 1990, the case load was already bulging, with almost twenty murders a year. Gang violence had erupted. Heavily armed drug dealers were moving in from Chicago, Detroit, and Gary, and in 1992 the number of homicides in St. Paul—thirty-three—hit an all-time high. On February 28, 1994, in a case that should probably not be called typical of that or any other period, yet could surely stand as a marker of the viciousness of criminal activity in the city at the time, five children between the ages of two and eleven perished in an East Side house fire set by gang members striking back at the kids’ older brother, whom the gangsters believed (erroneously, it turned out) had broken their version of omerta. The Coppage murders, and the murders of officers Ryan and Jones six months later, accounted for seven of the city’s twenty-nine homicides that year.
In the two days following the Ryan and Jones murders, two of Corcoran’s investigators, Neil Nelson and Gerard Bohlig, extracted a detailed, videotaped confession from Guy Harvey Baker (who claimed to be suffering from Gulf War syndrome) that guaranteed a double life sentence without the chance for parole. But the case, not surprisingly, drained the homicide squad and the rest of the department emotionally. Years later, Corcoran would remember August 26, 1994, as “the day from hell—for me, for my unit, for everyone.” The cops wept and hugged each other at the funerals and then, as was their primal custom, sang, caroused, and drank themselves blind at the wakes that followed the services.
After Ron Ryan’s funeral, Russ Bovee, one of the original Sackett investigators and more recently the homicide unit’s commander, approached Corcoran, his successor.
“Joe, you got yours,” Bovee told him, referring to Baker. “I didn’t get mine.” There was no need for Bovee to explain who he meant by “mine.”
“We’re going to get yours, too, Russ,” Corcoran said.
Corcoran made the same promise to Jeanette Sackett.
How Corcoran’s team would make good on that promise remained to be seen. They didn’t know the whereabouts of their suspects, much less the availability of possible witnesses. There was still no sign of the murder weapon, and no one besides the persons interviewed during the nearly two years between Sackett’s murder and Trimble’s acquittal had come forward or been identified.
Then, three months after the Ryan and Jones murders, Corcoran got a call from a reporter at KSTP-TV, the local ABC affiliate. Tom Hauser was one of the several local journalists whom Corcoran had made a point to befriend when he became St. Paul’s homicide commander, believing that a well-informed media would give him much-needed allies in the struggle against the rising murder numbers. (“Joe, you’re using us,” a Minneapolis newspaperman complained at the time. To which Corcoran replied, “We’re using each other.”)
“Joe,” Hauser said, “do you have twenty minutes to look at something?” He didn’t say to look at what, but Corcoran, who had learned to trust the young, baby-faced journalist, drove the few miles to the Channel Five studios on the St. Paul–Minneapolis border anyway.
“We found Connie Trimble,” Hauser told Corcoran when he arrived. Hauser declined to say where they had found the woman, only that she was driving a bus for a living. “We found her and interviewed her, and I thought you might want to see the video.”
Corcoran sat down and watched a pretty, cigarette-smoking, sometimes tearful, middle-aged woman wearing what appeared to be a municipal transit company uniform respond to a half-hour’s worth of questions from Hauser, sitting on the other side of her kitchen table. Sometimes succinct, sometimes rambling, and occasionally getting up to answer her telephone, Trimble expressed surprise at the appearance of someone asking questions about her past. She nonetheless reiterated her story about making the May 22 phone call as part of a plan to exact revenge on an individual who had abused her family, spoke of her sympathy for the Sackett family (“May God be with them and bless them all of the time”), and described her fear then and now of the people “behind” the officer’s murder, though she insisted she didn’t know who they were. She said she had been thinking about writing a book recounting her experience—“a real ordeal in my life, you know.”
When Hauser asked what she would tell the police if they came to her door and posed the same questions, she replied, “I don’t know. I need to talk to my Maker about this, you know. Maybe it’s time. I don’t know, you know. Maybe it’s time.”
When Hauser brought up Ronald Reed and Larry Clark, Trimble denied that the men had been involved in the murder. She said she had not seen or talked to Reed since her mother died three years earlier and couldn’t remember the last time she had seen Clark.
Hauser pressed on.
—Do you believe in your heart that [Reed] had nothing to do with this?
—Yes, I do.… I know he didn’t kill the police. I know that. I do know that. It’s impossible to be in two places at one time.
—Where was he?
—He was with me, you know. Right there when I made the call.…
—So he was with you when you made the call, and then you both went home?
—Yeah. Both went home. It was raining. I’ll never forget that night. It was real bad.
Trimble said Reed was with her, in Hauser’s words, “when the shooting happened, but he was also there when the phone call was made.”
“That’s right,” she said. “He was right there.”
A few moments later, Trimble said she couldn’t remember word for word her message to the police operator—“something about my sister, Mrs. Brown, or something, is having a baby”—but said again that “Ron was at the phone booth with me,” that he “knew what I knew” about the call’s intent (“like we were trying to get even with this creep”), and that neither she nor Reed knew that an officer was going to be shot.
“Holy Christ!” Corcoran exclaimed, watching Hauser’s video. The tape continued for another few minutes, but he had already heard an earful. For the first time, Trimble had publicly acknowledged Reed’s presence with her at the phone booth on the night of the murder.
Corcoran again asked where Hauser had located Trimble, but Hauser wouldn’t say. Hauser did give the investigator a copy of the interview tape—a tightly edited version of which aired on Channel Five’s 10 PM newscast on November 18. Most of the dramatic, ten-minute-long report was devoted to a graphic reprise of the murder and the initial, 1970 investigation. Jeanette Sackett was shown turning the pages of a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings, and Sergeant Glen Kothe, silver-haired and thicker around the middle than he had been twenty-four years earlier, appeared with Hauser at the Hague Avenue site. Then Hauser confronted a surprised Connie Trimble as she stood alongside a black-and-white SUV in a parking lot, and excerpts of their subsequent conversation, taped in her apartment, followed. (There was snow on the ground, but Hauser offered viewers no clue as to the location, presumably to keep a source to himself in his highly competitive industry.) Finally, Corcoran appeared on camera, telling the reporter the investigation was still open.
Corcoran quickly received Chief William Finney’s approval to pursue the Trimble lead. Finney, the department’s first African American leader, had grown up on the Hill, attended Central High, and knew many of the people whose names had appeared during the first Sackett investigation. A large, powerful man now in his middle forties, he was still known throughout the black community as “Corky,” his childhood nickname. Finney had been a student at nearby Mankato State College—and president of MSC’s Black Student Union—when Sackett was murdered. Inspired by the few black officers who patrolled the neighborhood when he was a kid, he had already decided to become a cop himself. Because of a chesty self-confidence and career ambitions that he didn’t bother to conceal, he had enemies among his colleagues from the beginning. As chief, Finney was disliked by many of the department’s ranking officers because of an alleged inclination to play favorites and no doubt by some because of his color. He enjoyed, however, Corcoran’s confidence—and vice-versa. The chief insisted that Corcoran brief him on every new homicide and that he call him, day or night, when a homicide arrest had been made.
Corcoran assigned Neil Nelson and Gerry Bohlig to find and interview Trimble. Both men were seasoned investigators known for their ability to pry information out of reluctant sources. They had gotten Baker to confess to the Ryan and Jones murders after convincing the intelligent but egotistical gunman he would be starring in a police training video. (The tape was a highly charged topic within the department; a rumor made the rounds that Baker’s vainglorious account would indeed be used as a training video and officers would be required to watch it. Finney kept the tape in a safe, and it was seen by few people. One person who saw it, according to Corcoran, was Baker’s court-appointed attorney, who consequently decided that a guilty plea was Baker’s only practical option.)
Nelson had joined the department in 1977, after working in sales for a vending-machine company. He was a buttoned-down erstwhile narcotics division detective who was becoming a nationally recognized expert on criminal interview technique. Recently transferred to homicide, he had been enjoying a precious day off, en route with his wife and kids to the state fairgrounds, when he heard the news about Ryan’s murder on the car radio. Bohlig, a twenty-seven-year department veteran who had worked in a suburban Mendota bar and dug graves at Resurrection Cemetery before becoming a cop, was a notorious eccentric and sharp-tongued loner in a group of detectives known for eccentrics and lone wolves, respected more than loved by his colleagues. (“Every one of my guys was an individual,” Corcoran once acknowledged. “Trying to pair them up was like herding cats.”) After splitting ten years between vice and narcotics investigations—“That’s where I learned how to work with assholes,” he said later—Bohlig had been a homicide investigator for four years. Neither he nor Nelson had known Jim Sackett personally, nor had they ever spoken to Jeanette Sackett about the case. They were familiar, nonetheless, with the Sackett story and eager to have a chance to talk to Connie Trimble.
First they had to find her. The detectives went back to KSTP-TV and watched the unedited tape, but they were no more successful than their boss in getting Hauser to divulge Trimble’s location. They could not see her SUV’s license plate on the tape or read the logo on her ball cap. The only visible clue was the snow in the outside pictures. Back at headquarters, Bohlig called the department’s communications center and asked a staffer to run a driver’s license check on Trimble in every state where there was likely to be snow on the ground. Fifteen minutes later, the woman called back and said, “Here’s the address. It’s in Wheat Ridge, Colorado.” The information made sense, considering the fact that Trimble had spent her childhood in Denver.
When Bohlig told his boss, Corcoran said, “You gotta get out there right away.”
The detectives knew there were three means by which to solve a homicide: physical evidence that connected the killer with the crime, witnesses who were able and willing to provide the same connection, and/or a confession by the killer or killers.
Reviewing their prospects for solving the Sackett case in November 1994, Corcoran, Bohlig, and Nelson were reasonably certain the possibility of claiming either the first or third of those necessities was slim to none. The rifle used to kill the officer was not likely to magically reappear almost twenty-five years after the fact. Nor were Reed and Clark—still presumed to be the killers—likely to speak to investigators, much less confess to the crime; they hadn’t talked in any meaningful way as teenagers in 1970, and, as middle-aged men hardened by lengthy prison time, they weren’t going to talk now. Nelson believed this was a “witness case” the day it happened and a “witness case” still. Given the political environment and the animosity toward the police at the time of the crime, the possibility of witnesses coming forward was remote. In the intervening years, somebody had to get religion or somehow be motivated to share what he or she knew.
One obvious “somebody” was, of course, Connie Trimble.
After contacting a local detective to make sure Trimble still resided at the Wheat Ridge address, Bohlig and Nelson, with special funds approved by Finney, flew to Denver in early December. They didn’t call first. They would confront Trimble unannounced, lest she try to avoid them or seek outside counsel who would probably tell her to keep quiet. They knew from long experience it was almost always advantageous to catch a potential witness unawares, before she or he had a chance to prepare, rehearse, or duck out of sight.
Trimble was living in a second-floor unit of her building, accessible by an exterior stairway. At the top of the steps a small landing provided barely enough space for two people to stand. As they were knocking on the door, Bohlig muttered to Nelson, “Boy, if this turns bad, we’re both dead.”
Trimble eventually responded. From behind the closed door, she shouted, “Who is it?”
Bohlig shouted back, “Police! We’re from St. Paul, and we’d like to talk to you.”
“Go away!” Trimble replied. “I don’t want to talk to the police!”
“She knew right away we were there about Sackett,” Bohlig said several years later. “We said that yes, we were looking at that homicide, but we only wanted to talk. We told her we had seen her on TV. We stood there at her door for maybe twenty minutes. I don’t remember everything we said—it was the stuff we often said to a witness, knock ‘n’ talk stuff, tricks of the detective’s trade, trying to make her feel good, getting her to believe we had her best interests at heart. Well, pretty soon we were sitting on her couch and she was making us coffee.”
The apartment building was in a working-class section of metropolitan Denver. “The place is a mess,” Trimble complained, blaming a pair of rambunctious grandchildren as she let the detectives inside. Nelson said, “I got three kids, Gerry’s got three kids—this place looks just like ours.” Everybody laughed.
Trimble, approaching her forty-third birthday, was not the sleek, modishly done-up teen she had been in 1970. She seemed to have difficulty breathing, and she told the detectives about a series of medical issues and surgeries, including a struggle with cancer, as well as “problems” with drugs and alcohol.
The detectives decided to move slowly, allowing her to warm up to them, putting her at ease, trying as hard as two white cops could to identify common ground. Nelson told her that he, too, was a Central High alum—he was, he said, the only white guy on the school’s track team one year. When she asked if she was in trouble, they quickly said no, that she’d already been tried and acquitted in the Sackett case, and “legally there’s nothing anybody can do to you.” Neither cop was armed. Nelson had switched on a tiny tape recorder in his jacket, but after about an hour of small talk, he went into the bathroom and turned off the device. “I figured she’d have to be in for a penny, in for a pound,” he explained years later, meaning it wouldn’t matter what she told them in Colorado if she wouldn’t be willing to say the same thing to a jury in Minnesota. “She had to want to help.” Furthermore, he was quite sure that if she had gotten wise to the surreptitious taping, she would have stopped talking then and there. Wary of spooking their witness, the cops didn’t even take notes.
The detectives spent three days courting Trimble in Denver. They would visit her for two or three hours, then excuse themselves and return the next day. Most of the conversations took place at Trimble’s kitchen table, where she kept her Bible and photos of her deceased mother and the two grandsons she helped care for. She said she had lived in Texas for a while with her husband, a man named Smith, who was not around at the time, then moved back to Denver, where she was employed by the municipal bus company. She was currently on sick leave, she said, and was drawing disability payments for a back injury she had suffered on the job. Cherra, her now twenty-four-year-old daughter by Ronald Reed, stopped by, as did her grandsons and one of her brothers. Trimble politely introduced the detectives to each of the family members, who did not come across as either helpful or hostile. As her kin came and went, Trimble—a good cook—prepared food for the cops.
“We tried hard to get her to talk about a lot of things, but all she would do is basically acknowledge what she told Hauser in the video—that Reed had been with her at the phone booth,” Nelson said. Curiously, she seemed to believe that was old news. “She was extremely surprised when we told her that she hadn’t said that during her trial or told anybody else about it before telling Hauser. She seemed absolutely convinced she had said it before.”
“I think she enjoyed talking about the past—except she wouldn’t go to that one spot,” said Bohlig. “We figured it out the first day: she had a child by Ronnie Reed, and it’s tough to get a woman to give up the father of her child.”
On and off for those three days, the detectives nevertheless worked the obvious angles. “We tried to portray her as a victim, but a victim with some responsibility,” Nelson said. “We tried to convince her that Reed had victimized her as well, and she needed to set this right. We harped on honor, pride, reputation. We talked about the Sackett family, and how this wasn’t about politics but about the death of a husband and father and about bringing some closure to a mother like herself. We tried to make it very much a personal thing and about doing the right thing. I think we were close a couple of times. But then she’d back away. I can’t recall how often she said she just couldn’t do it, on account of her daughter or Ronnie’s mother, whom she said she was still very close to.
“We tried to steer her toward a religious reason to put this away when she talked about her cancer, like, ‘You don’t want to die with this on you.’ Another time, we suggested that her mother would want her to tell us what she knew—but that backfired. She straightened up and said, ‘If my mother was here right now, she’d tell me to keep my mouth shut!’”
The detectives arranged to have Finney call her from St. Paul. Trimble was one of the few neighborhood people Finney did not know personally, but the fact that the chief was an African American only a few years older than she, had also attended Central, and was familiar with many people she knew would be enough to get her talking. “We thought, whatever St. Paul was like back then, and whatever deep-seated hatred of the police remained, talking to a black police chief might convince her that we were different now, that times had changed,” said Nelson. “My guess, though, was that she wasn’t a true believer back in 1970. She was at the phone booth because her boyfriend was there, and she was doing what he asked her to.” At any rate, Finney and Trimble chatted on the phone for almost an hour, reminiscing about the neighborhood and the folks they knew back in the day, but when they had finished, she had told him no more than she had told his detectives.
Bohlig and Nelson decided they had to get Trimble out of the apartment, away from the kitchen table with her mother’s portrait and away from the family members coming in and out and, in the detectives’ opinion, verbally or otherwise dissuading her from telling what she knew. They had gleaned from their conversation that Trimble enjoyed listening to jazz and told her they would like to take her to a downtown jazz club they had heard about and have dinner, just the three of them. She said dinner out sounded good and agreed to go.
“We were psyched,” Nelson said later. “We figured we’re finally going to get her away from that kitchen table and out where we could forge a stronger relationship. So that evening Gerry and I are in the car going to pick her up when she calls us on a cell phone we’d rented at the airport and says, ‘I fixed you guys dinner. We don’t have to go out.’ We hang up and we’re like, ‘Son of a bitch!’ We couldn’t believe it. She would not leave that apartment.”
“We’d have had her if we’d gotten her out of the house,” Bohlig grumbled.
As they were leaving her apartment for the last time, they asked Trimble if she needed money for medications and other expenses, which they strongly believed she did, but she declined to accept anything from them.
The investigators departed Denver convinced that Trimble knew far more than she had divulged. They believed that she had not only been following Reed’s instructions at the phone booth but that she knew the real purpose of the call—to draw a police officer into an ambush. But in terms of testimony that could someday put Reed and whomever else might be involved behind bars for good, they returned to St. Paul with no more in hand than Trimble’s assertion on Tom Hauser’s videotape, plus an uncertain relationship with a dubious witness.
“That had been our goal—getting to Connie,” Joe Corcoran said. “That would be the starting point for reinvestigating that case. We wanted to see what kind of pressure we could put on her, and to see what might have changed. Because things do change. Relationships change. Maybe she wasn’t so loyal anymore. Maybe she would be willing to talk to us now.”
Corcoran, with Finney’s continued encouragement, told the investigators to call Trimble once a week. “I told them to go back to the religious side of things, to tell her she needs to get her life together before she goes. Her cancer, if that’s really what she had, could go quick. Like, ‘Now’s the time to come clean with it so you won’t have to worry when you get upstairs.’ Well, they made the calls, but by that time her daughter and maybe other people were putting pressure on her not to talk. Then it got hard to get hold of her.”
When they did speak on the phone, Trimble seemed uncertain and confused. She complained of various ailments. Nelson or Bohlig—or both at the same time, though for some reason she seemed to prefer talking to Bohlig—listened sympathetically and assured her she was in their thoughts and prayers. When she would muse about maybe getting out of Denver and “starting all over,” they made commensurately vague offers of support—always on the condition of her continuing cooperation. Telling them what she knew would not be enough, they reminded her. She would have to be willing to tell her story to a jury.
“You’re the only hope for us now, Constance,” Bohlig told her at one point. “We’re up against a wall.”
Trimble agreed only to stay in touch.
One Monday morning in August 1995, returning to work after a rare weekend away, Bohlig found a call slip on his desk. Trimble had phoned from a hospital in Denver the previous Friday night. “I think she thought she was dying,” he said later. “I called back right away, but it’s Monday now and she’s clearly feeling better. I thought, Shit! She was willing to tell all then, but she wasn’t now. When they rang her room, I got one of the kids, and I could hear him say, ‘Oh, it’s that cop.’ I knew I didn’t have a chance.” That would be the last contact either Bohlig or Nelson had with her. They sent her birthday cards over the next few years, and at one point asked Jeanette Sackett to write her directly, mother to mother, urging her cooperation, which the widow did—but the communication moved in only one direction. For a while, the investigators lost track of her entirely.
The detectives had other cases to work. St. Paul’s homicide unit was dealing with the city’s peak murder years during the mid- and late 1990s. Corcoran’s crew—who, despite their individual idiosyncrasies and personal rivalries, were required to share information at the commander’s frequent “murder meetings”—worked hard and were remarkably successful; they boasted one of the best rates in the nation, closing, in that especially deadly year of 1994, all twenty-nine of their cases. But, operating with tight budgets and hiring constraints, the investigators often worked seven days a week for weeks at a stretch. Investigations were only part of the job; many additional hours were spent preparing for and appearing in court. There were no cold-case specialists and nobody who could be spared to work full-time on a cold case, even if the case involved the murder of one of their own.
When Bohlig retired in July 1999, Nelson was the lone investigator working on Sackett, and he worked on Sackett only when he could take time from his current case load, which wasn’t often. After the short-lived excitement following Hauser’s discovery of Trimble in Colorado, the investigators found themselves, for all intents and purposes, back at square one. Neither Bohlig nor Nelson believed there was much they could do to get more information out of Trimble under the prevailing circumstances. And they didn’t like their odds of bearding either Reed or Clark. “If we were going to confront a guy who had everything to lose, I needed to have more than Connie saying he put her up to making the call,” Nelson explained. “We had no reason to arrest Reed and nothing new to offer him. If we’d have had something to bluff with, or some new information we could ask him to respond to—but we didn’t. We might have even lost ground, hurting our chances for a more substantive interview in the future. It’s sometimes better to stir the pot from the outside.”
Tom Hauser did speak to Reed. He contacted him at his home in Chicago, invited him to stop by the station the next time he was in town (several of Reed’s family members, including his mother, still lived in the Twin Cities), and offered to show him the interview with Trimble. Reed eventually met with Hauser and watched the video, but he didn’t make a statement or submit to an interview with Hauser or with anyone else.
As time allowed, Nelson returned to the Sackett files and tried to track down other witnesses who, in his words, “might be motivated to talk to us after all these years.” After Reed, Clark, and Trimble, the name that jumped out of the reports most frequently was Kelly Day.
Kelly Fernando Day was last seen in connection with the Sackett case in March 1972, when St. Paul detectives escorted him into a Rochester courtroom as the prosecution’s secret—but suddenly uncooperative—witness. The files showed that up until then he had been willing to share information with both the police and the FBI, including, in November 1970, the intelligence that his pal Ronald Reed was planning to hijack an airliner. Day and another man had been arrested but never charged in connection with the alleged hijack plot.
In February 1972, Day, who was twenty-one at the time, sat down with homicide detective Cecil Westphall and, in a nine-page signed statement, said that the morning after the Sackett murder Reed told him confidentially, while standing outside the Inner City Youth League a block from the crime scene, that Larry Clark had shot the officer. According to Day, Reed let him in on the secret because Reed thought Day might know if the police could trace phone calls and match recorded voices. When Day asked who made the O.B. call the night before, Reed indicated Trimble. Day said Reed also asked him if he knew how to “cut up a gun.” Day told Westphall he himself knew nothing about the murder plan but had “first-hand knowledge of it after it occurred,” and he assured the detective he would be willing to testify in court. His unwillingness to tell his story in front of the Trimble jury the following month, however, was blamed by many for the subsequent not-guilty verdict. Still, Day’s relationships with the Sackett suspects and his knowledge of their activities in 1970 made him a source with tantalizing potential thirty years later.
“Reading the files,” Nelson said later, “I figured the two people who, if they ever got religion, could solve that case were Connie Trimble and Kelly Day.”
Day had had several run-ins with the police and was reported to have both used and sold narcotics, though when Nelson tracked him down he was gainfully employed as a counselor of some kind at a YMCA branch in south Minneapolis. Nelson showed up there around lunchtime one day in 2000.
Day was now a heavyset, middle-aged man with a calm and confident manner. Though Nelson had appeared unannounced, Day, sitting behind a desk in an office, did not seem surprised to see him. Day was no doubt aware of Trimble’s appearance on the evening news and had probably heard about the cops’ visit to her apartment in Colorado. More than five years had passed, but he likely figured it would be only a matter of time before a detective showed up on his doorstep, too.
Leading with a bluff, Nelson told Day the Sackett case had been retooled and was moving forward and Day would be either a witness or a suspect in the new investigation. If Day was rattled by Nelson’s statement, he didn’t show it. “He just sat back and listened to me make my pitch and then said without hesitation, ‘Yeah, I know what happened, but I’m never going to testify about it.’” When Nelson raised the possibility of a sizable reward (which did not yet exist), Day held his hand over the top of his desk and said, “You can stack the money to the ceiling, but I’m never going to testify.”
“He was a street-savvy guy,” Nelson said. “A cop could bluff all he wanted. He wasn’t going to play the game, and he knew it wasn’t going to cost him anything.”
A few months later, Nelson called Day and told him the case was gathering steam. But Day was no more impressed than he’d been the first time they talked.
“Basically, he blew me off,” said Nelson. “He wasn’t rude, but he made it very clear he wasn’t going to talk to me.”
Neil Nelson returned to the Sackett files every so often, seeking both fresh information and renewed enthusiasm for a case that seemed frozen as a Minnesota lake in deep winter. Trimble had slipped out of touch, and Day wasn’t interested in speaking with him further. He worked a few other, more tenuous connections that led nowhere. In 2003 he produced a short local-access television spot about the case, standing in front of 859 Hague, displaying photos of James Sackett and his family, and pleading for new information. But there was no meaningful public response.
Bill Finney was still running the department, but Joe Corcoran, the Sackett case’s in-house champion, had retired in 1998 and was succeeded by a younger man, John Vomastek. Before he transferred out of homicide in 2004, Nelson told Nancy DiPerna—who in turn succeeded Vomastek and became St. Paul’s first female homicide commander—that despite the fact that the Sackett case was now more than thirty years old, “I think this is solvable, I really do.” But, he added, “it’s going to take a full-time commitment.”