1Reed later told the author he had in fact paid his respects at the funeral home.
After several years as an investigator (sex crimes, homicide, special investigations, and the joint task force), Jane Mead was familiar enough with large boxes full of paper but not so sure about the Dictabelt. When she checked with the department’s communications center, she confirmed it was the recording medium for a machine called the Dictaphone, which was once as common as typewriters and rotary telephones in American offices. “That’s what we used to record our [radio] calls on,” she was told. “Be careful with it. It’s probably pretty fragile.” She was given the name of a man who could transfer data from brittle Dictabelts to twenty-first-century audio disks.
Mead, who was fourteen years old when James Sackett was murdered, had been a St. Paul police officer since 1986, so she knew the broad outline of the case. She knew that Neil Nelson and Gerry Bohlig had spent time on it. She knew that there had been a trial and an acquittal more than thirty years earlier and that her predecessors “pretty much knew who the killers were—though that was true in a lot of cases,” she said later. “You believe you know, but you can’t prove it.” Her experience working with Tom Dunaski on the Davisha Gillum homicide reinforced that point, only in that case they were able to prove the persons they suspected were in fact the killers. It just took a lot of time and effort. As for cop-killings, she had some personal experience with that as well, having been among the heavily armed officers closing in on Guy Baker after Ron Ryan’s murder. She was close enough to have heard the shots that killed Tim Jones and Laser.
Mead had succeeded her close friend Sergeant Nancy Smolik on the task force after Smolik was diagnosed with breast cancer. Smolik’s illness and eventual death were hard on both Mead and Dunaski, for whom partners and colleagues were, like his street people and confidential informants, branches of a large family. Physically, Mead was the unlikeliest of cops. Pretty and petite (she stood five-three), with reddish-blonde hair, delicate features, and a friendly smile, she could have passed for everybody’s favorite third-grade teacher. When she was a patrol officer, she was hard put to sit down for a quick meal at Burger King without strangers sitting down beside her and pouring out their problems. That easy approachability helped make her an effective investigator, especially when she was paired with a tough-looking mug like Dunaski. More than once during an investigation, when the two of them walked into a room, a potential witness would tell her, “I ain’t talking to him. But I will talk to you.” Among her other qualifications, Mead was one of the best pistol shots, male or female, in the department.
The third of five children, Mead grew up with two older brothers, one of whom served as an undersheriff of Ramsey County, and her father was a volunteer firefighter whose friends included several cops who frequently visited their Falcon Heights home—all of which helped explain her confidence operating in a predominantly male environment. She was an athletic kid, skating for the fun of it and cheerleading for the glory of Alexander Ramsey High School. A dozen years later, when her two children were old enough to go to school, she entered St. Paul’s police academy, class of 1986.
Though the Gillum case was still inching toward trial in late 2002, Mead began to dig into the Sackett files. She would pore over them at her desk in the cramped task force conference room at the FBI’s St. Paul headquarters and review documents when riding with Dunaski to a meeting. Every once in a while she would say, “Tom, you gotta listen to this!” And she would read something out loud. Much of the files consisted of reports by the case’s original investigators, all of whom had retired and some of whom—including Ernest Williams, the homicide unit boss in 1970—had died. “They had interviewed tons of people,” Mead said. She knew she and Dunaski would have to track down and reinterview as many of the same people as they could find nearly thirty-five years after the fact, and hope the memory of at least a few of them was still reasonably sound.
Missing from the hundreds of documents was the transcript of Connie Trimble’s Rochester trial, which would have laid out the state’s case in 1972 and identified dozens of witnesses. To their great disappointment, Mead and Dunaski soon learned that the trial’s court reporter had destroyed her notes without ever transcribing them; because the case had ended in acquittal, there would be no appeal so there was no need to produce an expensive transcript. The case’s latter-day investigators would have to rely on newspaper accounts of the trial, which fortunately were extensive, as well as the memories of surviving participants such as retired prosecutor Theodore Collins.
Mead took the reel-to-reel tapes she had found in the boxes to the Minnesota History Center, which owned equipment that could play them, and listened for the first time to Trimble’s midnight phone call requesting help for her “sister.” She listened to Carolen Bailey’s voice as Bailey prompted an unsuspecting Trimble to repeat the key words of that call at the welfare office. Later, after the Dictabelt messages had been transferred to a disk, she and her colleagues listened for the first time to Glen Kothe’s distress call moments after the shooting.
“Hair-raising” was how Mead described the scratchy reprise of the patrolman’s voice that night.
Jeff Paulsen first learned about the Sackett murder when he was a twelve-year-old newspaper carrier, delivering the Minneapolis Star in that city’s affluent Kenwood neighborhood on the afternoon of May 22, 1970. Little did he imagine that more than thirty years later he would see the same shocking headlines in a stack of reports and clippings that Tom Dunaski asked him to read. It was late 2002 or early 2003. The Gillum case was finally concluded, and Dunaski had called the U.S. Attorney’s office to see if Paulsen might be interested in another, even colder case.
“I’ve got this new project I’m working on,” Dunaski said innocently enough. “Do you want to get involved?”
Dunaski and Mead struck people as an odd couple, but Dunaski and Paulsen may have been an odder pairing yet. The prosecutor was a businessman’s son who had grown up across the street from an esteemed Hennepin County district court judge named Lindsay Arthur, his first professional role model. He earned degrees from prestigious Carleton College and Stanford University’s law school, then clerked for federal judge Harry McLaughlin before spending several years with the U.S. Justice Department in Washington. He had been an Assistant U.S. Attorney in his hometown since 1988. He was a trim, middle-aged man with a full head of neatly combed dark hair who favored well-fitted dark suits, crisp white shirts, and conservative neckties. He was a husband and father and, in his free time, a collector of antique furniture, several pieces of which graced his immaculate office looking out on the downtown skyline. But those were matters of background and appearances. Measured by resourcefulness and tenaciousness while making a case, not to mention a passion for professional autonomy and a needling sense of humor, the prosecutor and the cop actually had a great deal in common.
Paulsen knew as well as any homicide detective that the time to solve a murder was right after it happened. He knew that there had been earlier attempts to solve Sackett that had sputtered and run out of gas. He knew that a case without hard evidence or reliable witnesses wasn’t likely to grow more solvable in thirty-plus years. When he told a colleague he was taking a look at the Sackett murder, the colleague laughed and said, “Good luck with that”—meaning, “You’re never going to solve that one.” On the other hand, Paulsen was as energized by a challenge as Dunaski was, and the fact that nobody expected them to solve Sackett would be part of its appeal. Still, if Sackett had been the first cold case Dunaski had brought to him, Paulsen, who was not wanting for business, might have passed. But there was that rich recent history: Jones-Barnes, Coppage, and Gillum—“unsolvable” cases all, and they had solved them.
“Count me in,” he told Dunaski.
Paulsen drove across the river and sat by himself in the task force conference room, reading what Mead and Dunaski had read. The yellowed paper and quaint typewriter fonts reminded him they were dealing with a very cold case. The absence of a Trimble trial transcript was unfortunate to say the least, but there were plenty of other intriguing items, beginning with Trimble’s recorded call for help and including photocopies of the hijack notes found on Ronald Reed when he was arrested in November 1970. Mead had indexed the entire collection.
Also reviewing the original Sackett files for the first time in 2003 was Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Susan Hudson, who had been introduced to the case by Neil Nelson, with whom she had worked on several narcotics and homicide prosecutions, following the Ryan and Jones murders. A plainspoken fifty-year-old woman with short gray hair and an animated, irreverent manner, Hudson had grown up in Aitkin, Minnesota, the daughter of a lawyer and district court judge. She graduated from the University of Minnesota’s law school in 1982, served as an assistant county attorney in Crow Wing County near her hometown, then joined the Ramsey County Attorney’s staff in 1989. Because most homicide prosecutions fall to the state courts and because the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension had come forward with a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for information pertaining to Sackett and needed a prosecutor’s name attached to the case, Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner tapped Hudson, by then one of her most experienced lawyers, for the job. Though the objective all along was to get the case tried in federal court, Ramsey County (which had prosecuted Trimble) would be an active participant from the beginning.
“At the time I was assigned,” Hudson said later, “I’m not sure anyone knew the case would actually go anywhere.” She had learned enough going through those old files, however, to suspect that the case would be, if nothing else, “interesting and intellectually challenging.”
In late March 2003, in a six-page report to Commander DiPerna, Dunaski and his team presented what amounted to a précis of the Sackett case history, a list of basic assumptions about the suspected perpetrators and their motivation, and a preliminary action plan for bringing them to justice. For all intents and purposes, the report answered DiPerna’s question about the solvability of Sackett’s murder with a definite yes.
Granted, the newly reopened investigation had already suffered a major setback. Kelly Day’s name had been as obvious a red flag for Dunaski and Mead as it had been for Neil Nelson when he reviewed the original files. Indeed, it was Day’s vivid 1972 Q & A with Cecil Westphall that most clearly and unequivocally linked Connie Trimble with Ronald Reed and Larry Clark and connected all three to Sackett’s murder. Dunaski and Mead also had Nelson’s report quoting Day saying he knew “everything” about the murder, though he vowed he would never tell. Ted Collins, Trimble’s prosecutor, had told Dunaski and Mead about Day’s agreement and then his refusal to testify in Rochester.
Thus, in the fall of 2002, in one of their first initiatives after reopening the case, the task force tracked down Day on the East Side. They staked out his Third Street residence, placed a pen register on his home phone to track the numbers of outgoing calls, and surreptitiously pawed through his trash. Informants had led them to believe that although Day had been in poor health in recent years—reportedly a diabetic, “he looked terrible,” Mead recalled—he was still using illicit drugs and possibly selling them. If that was true, the detectives figured they could leverage narcotics charges against him to encourage his cooperation, as they had done with potential witnesses in the earlier cold cases.
Then one Sunday morning in December 2002 Mead was skimming the obituaries in the Pioneer Press when a familiar name caught her eye. Kelly Day was dead at fifty-two. Mead called Dunaski. “Are you sitting down?” she asked him.
“You gotta be shittin’ me!” he roared when she told him the news. “Well, that knocks our solvability factor down to about 4 percent.”
“We were blown away,” Mead recalled. “We’d been told he was sick, but no one told us he was that sick.”
Dunaski’s people pulled surveillance at Day’s funeral a few days later, videotaping mourners arriving at and departing from the Willwerscheid and Peters mortuary on Grand Avenue and jotting down license-plate numbers. But the effort yielded nothing of value—not even a sighting of Ronald Reed, one of Day’s oldest friends, whom the detectives expected to be there.1 Kelly Day was no more helpful to the investigators deceased than he had been to them alive, at least in his later years.
Still, as their report to DiPerna made clear, the detectives were optimistic about their chances. That is to say they were confident they knew who was responsible for Sackett’s death: Reed, Clark, and Trimble, all of whom “were either members of the Black Panther organization or sympathetic to [its] revolutionary cause.” That was what the original investigation led detectives to believe, the report said, and there was no reason to believe otherwise almost thirty-five years later. “It should be noted,” the report said, that much of the information implicating Reed, Clark, and Trimble “came from Kelly Day, who was a close associate” and “a possible co-conspirator … who would later become a paid informant of the police.” Among the questions that remained—besides, of course, how to prove the first assertion—were: who else might have conspired with the suspects, and who might the suspects have confided in after the fact?
The report went on to enumerate the steps taken so far to advance the new investigation. Those steps included, besides updating the locations of the three suspects, reviewing old police and FBI records, interviews with law enforcement officers “originally involved with this case,” locating and interviewing when possible the “original confidential informants involved in this case,” the identification of a “number of individuals” believed to have made up the suspects’ “inner circle of friends and associates” in 1970 (who “will be interviewed when located”), contacting authorities in Nebraska regarding Reed’s and Clark’s prison records and associates, and “continuing surveillance” of pertinent characters.
Dunaski may not have taken kindly to superiors’ queries about his investigations, but he worked hard to keep them informed of his team’s activities. Over the next three years he would provide periodic written updates to his St. Paul and federal bosses.
In June 2003, for instance, in a detailed memo to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Minneapolis, he reported that through police contacts around the country the three primary suspects had all been located. Reed was living in Chicago “and is an unemployed sprinkler fitter.” Clark had recently returned to St. Paul (presumably from the Omaha area), had “no visible form of income,” was “heavily addicted to crack cocaine,” and talked “about wanting to rob banks.” (“Larry was right here, but under the radar,” Dunaski said later. “It took us a long time to find him.”) Trimble was still living in suburban Denver, where she was on “medical retirement” from the bus company and “has had recent involvement with law enforcement for shoplifting.” Having located the three suspects, Dunaski wrote, investigators were concentrating on finding “past friends and associates” who “may have information related to the Sackett murder.” As always, the identity of the three core suspects was never in serious doubt. The issue was not who, but who else?
Over time, however, the reports occasionally reflected a revision of the case’s history and context, or at least the investigators’ understanding of it.
In a November 2003 memo, Dunaski wrote that the suspects’ associates during the late sixties and early seventies, like the suspects themselves, had been “influenced by the Black Panther movement”—which was not the same as identifying them as Black Panthers. (Dunaski later referred to “aspiring” Panthers “fueled” by Panther philosophy, but that’s not quite the same either, which may not have been especially relevant to the ultimate issue of innocence or guilt but would certainly be a point of discussion if the case returned to court.) In the same report, it was noted that, according to their sources in recent interviews, some of the property damage that was “blamed on the protests and riots related to the civil rights movement” was “in reality” criminal activity commissioned by unnamed “local businessmen to collect on insurance claims.” “Whether fire or criminal damage,” the report said, “crimes of opportunity were staged that … would be automatically blamed on civil rights activists.”
That report reiterated earlier police beliefs that the 1968 Stem Hall disturbance was likely the “flash point” for the unrest and disorder of the following few years and that the Panthers’ “influence” spread to groups such as the Inner City Youth League, where, “whether or not by chance … many criminal acts were planned.”
Then, in an acknowledgment surprising in tone if not in content, Dunaski wrote: “Coming away from these interviews we were left with the knowledge that the violent memories from over thirty years ago have left an indelible mark on the lives of many who lived it. In speaking with some of these individuals, we saw in their eyes the hatred and lack of trust they had for police officers during that time, which has continued to live with them. It is troubling to hear that there were others besides Reed and Clark who either tried or planned to shoot police officers.”
By the fall of 2003—roughly the first anniversary of the start of the latest Sackett investigation—Dunaski and Mead had identified about fifteen members of their suspects’ “inner circle” in May 1970. About ten of them had been located and two had given statements “regarding admissions that were made by either Larry Clark or Ronald Reed that they killed the officer.” The November 13 memo added, “No specifics, but we hope it is a start.”
The task force’s strategy was clear and not particularly subtle. It was based on the assumption that (a) Reed, Clark, and Trimble were complicit in Sackett’s murder, though maybe as part of a larger conspiracy, (b) judging by more than thirty years of denial, silence, and noncooperation, Reed and Clark were neither going to confess nor implicate each other, and (c) while Trimble was far more likely than Reed or Clark to open up, for a number of reasons (health problems and addictions, family pressure, whatever influence Reed himself might still have with her) she couldn’t be counted on. Therefore, the investigators would work from the outside in, speaking to as many family members, friends, and erstwhile associates as they could track down, appealing to middle-aged sensibilities and consciences, and using whatever leverage any criminal activity still actionable within the statutes of limitations might provide them. The outside-in approach, complemented by the muscular application of federal drug laws, had worked in the previous cold cases.
With his admitted inside knowledge, apparently failing health, and alleged drug-dealing activity, Kelly Day would have been the ideal candidate to squeeze: an ailing man in his fifties would presumably opt for cooperation over the prospect of ten years in prison. Without Day, and until other candidates could be identified, the investigation would require, as Dunaski put it, “old-fashioned, hit-the-bricks police work, where you go out and talk to a lot of people and see if you can get them to come over to your side.”
The task force had added a third full-time detective, Sergeant Scott Duff, who, as a rookie patrolman, had memorably visited the crime scene with Glen Kothe two years after the murder. Duff and Dunaski had sat next to each other in the academy and become pals, their common interest in hunting and fishing trumping the differences in age and family status. (Dunaski, six-plus years Duff’s senior, was a husband and father when Duff was still single.) The two had occasionally worked together—Duff had also been a member of the special-weapons squad that ran Guy Baker to ground and, more recently, pitched in on Coppage and Gillum—and Dunaski counted Duff among the smartest, hardest-working investigators he knew. When Dunaski looked at the daunting list of names and incidents he and Mead had pulled out of the old case files and their recent interviews, he knew they needed help and knew the person he believed could best help them.
To either Finney or DiPerna or maybe both, Dunaski said, “You got Jane and me, so now give us Scotty and we’ll do this thing.” Duff, who was with the department’s Special Investigations Unit at the time, happily joined the team.
Duff brought an amalgam of skills and interests to the effort. He knew guns and ballistics, which would be important whether they ever located the Sackett murder weapon or not. (They still had only the mangled slug from the rifle.) More important, he combined a Jeopardy! contestant’s knowledge range with an extraordinary memory that Dunaski believed would be equal to the data-intensive task at hand. Duff, moreover, had an earnest boyishness that encouraged people to trust him. If Mead could have passed for an elementary teacher, Duff might have been a high school baseball coach. Together, Dunaski, Mead, and Duff formed a congenial trio. Though Dunaski had not a day’s more seniority than Duff, he was, in Duff’s words, “our de facto leader and the lead investigator. He was a great interviewer—that’s what he did.” Mead, whose partners dubbed her the “Angel of Death” after two different individuals happened to die not long after speaking with her, was the easy-to-talk-to “unDunaski” (Duff’s term), especially effective dealing with other women, of whom there were many on their list of potential sources. Duff’s strength was prizing information out of old files, obscure archives, and scattered databases, the way a miner gouges precious metal out of rock.
“I wanted Scotty because I knew he would lose sleep at night about this, like we did, and that he would go to the wall with us because that’s what was going to make it happen,” Dunaski said later. “We had to have people who were totally dedicated and weren’t just worried about what they were going to get paid for overtime.”
The trio did not devote every hour of every day to the Sackett case, but large parts of most days were allotted to it, beginning in mid-2003. Given the obsessive nature of good detectives, even when they weren’t actively working on the case, the case was working on them. “It was always on our mind,” Dunaski said later. Other St. Paul detectives, including Thomas Quinlan, Robert Merrill, and Timothy McCarty, as well as FBI special agent Matthew Parker, helped out with surveillance, “trash pulls,” and other tasks as needed. By the time the case could properly be called closed more than seven years later, hundreds of city, county, state, and federal law enforcement officers from dozens of jurisdictions in Minnesota, Nebraska, Colorado, Illinois, and elsewhere would touch at least a piece of it.
The original investigators were more than happy to lend a hand. All told, Dunaski’s team was able to confer with about a half-dozen of them.
“Every one of them was the lead investigator, when you talked to them,” Dunaski said later with a laugh. Ernest Williams presumably had the best overview of the case as it originally unfolded, but he had died in 1998. As they did with other deceased investigators, Dunaski’s crew sought out Williams’s widow and children, asking about any notes and other documents the detective might have stashed in a closet after retiring. “We all take our notes home with us,” Dunaski explained. “Someday they might come in handy. Ernie did, too, but his family said they destroyed them after he died.” Carolen Bailey and Earl Miels were able to put their hands on important material, and while Ted Collins could not produce a court reporter’s transcript (because it never existed), his wife brought out a nearly complete set of newspaper clippings she had saved from the Trimble trial.
Tom Opheim was eighty years old when Dunaski’s crew contacted him, but he was sharp and quick. He told them Trimble had confessed to him—had told him everything—during her first evening in jail. “I went in and told Captain Williams, ‘She just told me the whole story,’” Opheim told Mead. “A few minutes later she said, ‘I’m not saying anything. I want a lawyer.’ You’ve got to have my report in there somewhere.” But Mead did not have Opheim’s report. There was a report recounting their conversation the day after Trimble’s arrest, when she retold the story of the mysterious written instructions and the ploy to bust Gerald Starling, but nothing that would qualify, then or later, as the “whole story.”
“Opheim swore up and down, ‘There’s got to be that report in there—she confessed to me,’” Mead said later. “Opheim wasn’t the type of guy who was going to say it unless he thought it was a fact. I think she might have admitted to some things, and with the passing of time he misremembered it. She no doubt did say, ‘I made the phone call.’ But the question was: did she know what the phone call was for? Maybe that’s what Opheim remembered and brought to the captain. Who knows?”
Opheim died a short time after meeting with the task force detectives, fatally injured while riding his motorcycle in Florida.
Criminal investigations—especially large ones such as Sackett—are messy, chaotic, maddening affairs that almost never come together like the tidy jigsaw puzzles cops assemble on TV. Sometimes dragging on for years, they are marked by tedium and frustration, bum steers and dead ends. Potential witnesses die, leave town, and change their names. Sources lie, misremember, make things up, or inadvertently get their facts wrong. Paperwork is mislabeled, filed in the wrong drawer, or destroyed. Evidence disappears or was not there in the first place. Different jurisdictions have different agendas. Priorities and protocols diverge, egos clash, phone calls and e-mails are not returned in a timely fashion or not returned at all. Multiply such difficulties by a large number if you’re talking about a case that is more than three decades old.
Duff, the task force’s new guy, spent “literally weeks, maybe months” poring over the historical files, those in the boxes and those in the department’s microfiche room. Sometimes he and Mead went in on the weekend so they wouldn’t get in the way of the records staff’s normal weekday activity.
“We’d develop a list of names and then go back and pull up the old police reports the individuals may have been mentioned in and put people together,” Duff explained. When the police stopped a car on Selby Avenue, for example, their report would usually indicate who was in the car besides the driver. Duff would jot down those associations, as dated as they were, and when calling on one of the names mentioned in the report the detectives would have the other names in their pocket. “‘I don’t remember anything,’ some guy would tell us,” Duff said, “and we would say, ‘Well, you used to hang out with So-and-So.’ And if the guy said, ‘No, I didn’t know him,’ we’d say, ‘Well, back in 1969 you guys were together during a DUI stop. Your friend was driving and didn’t have a license.’ And the guy would say, ‘Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.’ It was tedious, digging up that information, but sometimes it paid off.”
Some sources, of course, were more promising than others. In those instances, the detectives might take the individual out for coffee or lunch. “Often we’d just sit and talk about nothing,” Duff recalled. Over time and additional contacts the source might develop some trust and confidence in their hosts and begin remembering interesting people and events from back in the day that he or she had forgotten or neglected to mention.
Many of the persons the team members spoke to had personal histories they didn’t care to share with the police, unaware of or forgetting about the statute of limitations in Minnesota for most crimes except murder. “Look,” an investigator would tell a stonewalling source whose police record the investigator had reviewed only minutes before his visit, “we’re trying to solve a homicide. We don’t care about those burglaries when you were a kid.” That assurance, coupled with a reminder of the limitations statute, would often—though not always—be enough to loosen the person’s tongue. Interestingly, albeit irrelevant to the Sackett investigation, by the time they had finished their probe the detectives figured they had effectively solved two dozen thirty-year-old bank robberies, scores of burglaries and gun thefts, and numerous arsons-for-hire—“stuff,” as Duff would describe it, “that just came up in those conversations.”
Shortly after joining the team, Duff received the go-ahead from Dunaski to check out a handful of individuals beyond the circle of presumed suspects, “so we could say we touched base with everybody and to see if any of the earlier stories had changed,” Duff said. These included persons who might have had reason to hold a grudge against Jim Sackett, setting aside, for the sake of thoroughness, the virtual impossibility of the assassin knowing that Sackett would be the officer responding to the phony call. Duff tracked down and talked to the burglar that Sackett had shot and wounded in March 1970. The man—whom Duff found lucid but in questionable health in a state hospital—was quickly crossed off the list of dubious possibilities. A couple of other persons, whose names had been collected by the original investigators, had supposedly talked about Sackett roughing up or otherwise harassing African Americans on the street, but the allegations were vague and seemed to have been second- or third-person hearsay even at the time.
Duff also made contact with one of the brothers of Keith Barnes, who had been killed by a plainclothes officer in February 1970. But the man had nothing to say. “I could respect that,” Duff said later. “The guy didn’t want to talk to a white cop about another white cop killing his brother.” Such attempts had to be made nonetheless, Duff said, “because you had to figure that down the road the defense attorneys would be looking at these people, too.”
Most of the task force interviews took place on the Hill or with persons who lived there in 1970. Word of the reopened investigation had spread quickly, reinforced by Nelson’s cable television spot and other public statements. Neighborhood reaction was predictably mixed, though mainly ranging from a resigned “Here we go again” to a weary “Why can’t they let sleeping dogs lie?” The code of silence that thirty years earlier kept many residents from talking to police may not have been as strong and pervasive, but, much to the frustration of the latter-day investigators, it still was in force. Now, however, it wasn’t young people in pool halls telling other young people to keep quiet. Mature men and women, grandparents in many instances, were talking in supermarkets and coffee shops, cautioning each other about discussing certain events of the past. When they did speak to investigators, they often brought up old grievances.
“Some of the people we talked to had been teenagers who got pushed around during the Stem Hall riots and were still on us about that,” Dunaski said. “Then there were people who remembered Barnes and Massie. You could see it in people’s eyes. They might look at us and think, ‘They’re not like that, but some cops back then were.’ Some of the people we talked to told us about being kids, watching on TV and seeing Angela Davis getting arrested and Martin Luther King getting shot. You could understand why black people were angry.”
The bitter memories went back a long way and often revealed parallel realities—one white and one black. When St. Paul civic leaders, police, and their families gathered to honor their fallen officers in May, Sergeant Allan Lee, killed in the 1949 shootout with Oliver Crutcher, was among the names for whom the memorial bell tolled. For many of the hundreds of neighborhood residents who had watched the six-hour drama that long-ago September day, however, Lee was not the only victim. In the minds of many of those citizens—and their children and grandchildren, who grew up hearing the story—Crutcher had been executed by the police, an example of “street justice” that black people believed was all too common in their neighborhood. Some blacks still said, for that matter, that Paul Paulos “didn’t have to kill” Wayne Massie when Massie and Byrd Douglas emerged from the stereo shop in 1970, never mind the official version of events that night that had Paulos returning Massie’s fire. In both cases (and many others), the black reaction of skepticism, doubt, and distrust of official accounts of deadly confrontations would resonate the length of the long Sackett narrative.
Would an African American investigator have made a difference, in 1970 or later?
There were no blacks in St. Paul’s homicide unit in either 1970 or 2003, but there were sworn black officers in the department and black investigators in nearby jurisdictions whom the task force could have utilized. Finney was, of course, an African American and from the neighborhood to boot—as was the late James Griffin, who, long after the Lee-Crutcher case, became St. Paul’s first black sergeant, captain, and deputy chief. John Harrington, who succeeded Finney in 2004, was also black. Black officers, including Griffin and Finney, who worked in the neighborhood experienced, in any event, a mixed reaction from many of the people they policed, perceived by some of their neighbors as sellouts and lackeys of the white establishment. The feeling among both whites and blacks, police and civilians, seemed to be that during the Sackett investigation the ethnicity of the investigator didn’t matter much. If you subscribed to the code of silence, you didn’t talk to cops regardless of the color of their skin.
Nearly as detrimental to the investigation as the racial divide was the passage of time. Gone were potentially important witnesses, evidence, documents, and the memories of countless persons who once may have had material information about the events immediately before and after Sackett’s murder. “We’d tell potential witnesses, ‘Just think about it—we know it’s been a long time.’” Mead said. “Then we’d call them in a month or so and sometimes they’d say, ‘You know, I remember something else.’ We’d read them what they told us the last time, and they’d sometimes add to that or make corrections. With some people we did that four or five times. I mean, it was more than thirty years ago.”
“The most unfortunate fact in this case,” Dunaski groused, “is that it should have been reviewed many years ago.”
Whether the man was honoring the code of silence or merely acknowledging a failing memory, the reaction of a middle-aged Summit-University resident was typical of the responses the task force was hearing in 2003. The man had been identified as a childhood friend of both Reed and Clark, but, when told by Dunaski why he and his partner were standing at his door, he was visibly conflicted. The man took a deep breath, stared at his feet, then exhaled. “I can’t help you,” he said at last. “I don’t know anything.”
Like Kelly Day, Eddie Garrett was high on the list of long-ago associates of Ronald Reed and Larry Clark that the task force detectives were eager to contact. Garrett, after all, had told the police to “watch the rooftops” a week before Sackett’s murder and had been interviewed at the scene within an hour of the shooting. If Garrett had been vetted later by one of Williams’s investigators, there was no record of it in the surviving files. He was not called to testify during the Trimble trial (though he was available), nor was there any indication that he had ever been a serious suspect in the Sackett case. But in 1970 he was clearly one of the Hill’s angry young men.
Unlike Day, Garrett was still alive in the spring of 2003 and apparently innocent of any illicit activity that might provide the police with leverage in their quest for helpful testimony. He was not difficult to find, because for the past several years his had been a euphonious voice on KBEM-FM jazz radio, broadcasting from studios in north Minneapolis. He was, as Dunaski and his partners would quickly discover, an easy person to like. It would, however, take Garrett more than a year to get comfortable with them.
Garrett was a large man with a commanding presence. Now in his middle fifties, he was a father and grandfather with many family members, friends, and jazz-radio fans in the Twin Cities. Born in Iowa, he grew up in St. Paul. He graduated from Monroe High School in 1966 and then, like a lot of young men without better prospects, enlisted in the Army. He spent a year in Vietnam—an infantry marksman with an “expert” rating—before returning home in late 1968. He got to know Reed, Clark, Day, and others who had organized themselves in a small group called the United Black Front, hung out at the Inner City Youth League and other sites around the neighborhood, and espoused the revolutionary, anti-imperialist philosophy of the Black Panthers and Mao Tse-tung. Quick-witted and self-confident, Reed was the group’s leader, and Garrett was, at least for a time, its “minister of information.” At their meetings, which rarely included more than a handful of participants, they would discuss everything from armed resistance to the police to the kind of community programs for kids and the elderly that Black Panther chapters had established in other cities. Later, Garrett studied radio broadcasting at a local trade school, then held jobs at several different stations in the area, apparently helping make ends meet when necessary by driving a bus or a limousine.
The first time Dunaski and Mead contacted him, Garrett correctly supposed they wanted to talk about his “rooftops” comment. According to the detectives’ report, he told them he had made the remark out of anger after his car was stopped by patrolmen Jerylo and Lee and a pistol he kept in the car’s glove box was confiscated. The “rooftops” language, he acknowledged, was standard Panther rhetoric. The night of Sackett’s murder, Jerylo and Lee briefly detained him again. While he sat in the back seat of their squad car, Reed and Day stood on the sidewalk and glared at him—under the circumstances, he said, a frightening experience. At that moment, he said, “he had a gut feeling that [Reed and Day] did it,” if for no other reason than that they had been advocating attacks on police at their meetings.
The way Dunaski remembered that May 2003 conversation, Garrett did a “little song and dance” for them, conceding a relationship with Reed, Clark, Day, and others but not telling them much more than they already knew. Still, wittingly or not, Garrett said enough about what the investigators understood to have gone on and who was doing what back in the day to believe he had indeed been part of Reed’s circle and could be a credible source. “This guy knows more than he’s telling us,” Dunaski said to Mead after that initial meeting.
Obviously, the fact that Garrett had been an expert marksman in the service made the investigators wonder if he might have killed Sackett. Neither Dunaski nor Mead—dead shots themselves—believed the Sackett shooting had required a great amount of skill. They had heard from other sources that Reed and his pals took target practice at various sites, including in the ICYL’s basement, but, for all they knew, Sackett’s assassin had been dumb lucky (Dunaski’s opinion), striking his target “center mass.” Nevertheless, Garrett had had military training and combat experience. “Sure, we were thinking Eddie could have done it,” Dunaski said later. “This could have been the guy they talked into pulling the trigger. There was that crew, and for a while Eddie was part of it.”
It’s not clear when the investigators put the question to Garrett directly, but it probably wasn’t long into their relationship. Dunaski was not the sort who beat around the bush.
“You didn’t do it—didja, Eddie?” he asked him.
“No, I didn’t,” Garrett replied.
“You sure you didn’t do it?”
Garrett said he was sure, and, pending further revelations, Dunaski was inclined to believe him.
The detectives would maintain contact for as long as necessary, knowing it would take time to establish a bond. Like most of their sources, Garrett was plainly wary of the police. He didn’t like cops when he was twenty, and he didn’t like them much more when he was fifty-five. In addition, he had become a known quantity, if not exactly a celebrity, in the Twin Cities’ black community. Why would he want to risk his standing by talking to detectives? Dunaski and Mead decided they would play it easy, staying in touch but not applying any pressure. They would spring for lunch and, on one occasion, buy gas for Garrett’s car. They would be there when he had something to tell them.
Jeanette Sackett was skeptical when she first heard from Tom Dunaski—whom she knew of only from seeing his name in the paper—telling her the task force had reopened Jim’s case. She and her now grown children had heard little after the initial burst of optimism that followed Tom Hauser’s discovery of Connie Trimble in Colorado a decade earlier. She and Chief Finney didn’t get along, Glen Kothe was keeping his distance, and Nelson and Bohlig were no longer working the case. She and her children wondered if there would ever be an end to the story.
Not long after taking the case, Dunaski and Mead invited Jeanette to meet them at a Bakers Square restaurant near her home. As it happened, Jim’s siblings, David and Corrine, were available that afternoon, so there were three Sacketts who sat down for lunch and talked about their common history. It turned out that, in classic St. Paul fashion, Dunaski was related by marriage to Jim Sackett’s niece.
Dunaski, as was his practice, did most of the talking. He told the family about the cold cases that he and Mead had closed and said they were now going full throttle on the Sackett case. He said they were going to work it as hard as they could and they were going to get results. Jeanette rolled her eyes. She thought, Yeah, I’ve heard that before. “But he kept talking, and I kept listening, thinking, It would be so nice to get this done.” The presumption, apparently among everyone at the table, was that Reed and Clark were the killers; the task at hand would be proving as much. At any rate, by the time the investigators picked up the tab and Dunaski stopped talking, Jeanette was beginning to believe that could happen.
Afterward, David Sackett told her, “They’ll never do anything with that case. It’s too old.”
But Jeanette shook her head. “You know,” she said, “I think they will. I like them. I think they’re for real. Something tells me they’re going to find those answers.”
1Reed later told the author he had in fact paid his respects at the funeral home.