He nodded.
"Not too long," she said, and rolled over. He knew about the crime in general. What he didn't know until he read the file were the specifics. He read over the incidentreports filed by the national park rangers, as well as clippingsfrom the West Yellowstone News, the Idaho Falls Post-Register, the Bozeman Chronicle, the Billings Gazette, the Casper Star-Tribune, and a long feature in the Wall Street Journalthat summarized them all. It was the worst crime ever committedin Yellowstone National Park. But that was only half the story.
On July 21, a West Yellowstone lawyer named Clay McCann parked his car at the Bechler River Ranger Station in the extremesouthwest corner of the park, checked in with the ranger at the desk of the visitor center, and hiked in along the trail that followed, and eventually crossed, Boundary Creek. Later that morning, he returned to the center and confessed to shooting and killing four people in a backcountry campsite.
Investigating rangers confirmed the crime.
The victims were found near the bank of Robinson Lake, two miles from the ranger station. All were pronounced dead at the scene, although the bodies were airlifted out to the Idaho Falls hospital.
Jim McCaleb, twenty-six, was a waiter in the Old Faithful Inn and a five-year employee of the park's concessionaire, Zephyr Corporation. Zephyr ran all the facilities and attractions in the park under contract to the government. McCaleb was shot four times in the torso and once in the back of the head with a large-caliber handgun. His body was found half-in and half-out of a dome tent.
Claudia Wade, twenty-four, managed the laundry facility near Lake Lodge. Wade's body was in the same tent as Mc-Caleb's. There were two shotgun blasts to her back, and she'd been shot once in the head with a handgun.
Caitlyn Williams, twenty-six, was a horse wrangler at Rooseveltfor Zephyr. Williams's body was sprawled over the campfire pit with a shotgun blast to her back and a single large-caliberwound to her head.
Rick Hoening, twenty-five, was a desk clerk at the Old FaithfulInn. His body was located twenty yards from the others in the campsite, near the trail. Investigators speculated that he'd been the first to encounter the gunman and the first one killed. He'd been shot three times with a handgun, twice with a shotgun, and, like the others, had an additional single shot to the head.
Wade, Williams, and Hoening were also Zephyr Corp. employees.All four victims listed their original home addresses in St. Paul, Minnesota-the Gopher State-although they lived in Gardiner, Montana, or within the park at the time of their murders.The forensic pathologist in Idaho Falls noted that while each had sustained enough wounds to be fatal, the single shots to the head were likely administered after the initial confrontation.
They were the coup de grace, fired close enough to leave powder burns and guarantee that no one survived the initial assault.
Joe thought, The Gopher State Five. But there were only four of them. He read on.
The scene was littered with.45 brass and fired twelve-gauge shotgun shells. The newspaper articles called the incident "overkill," a "senseless slaughter" with "the fury of a crime of passion." One of the rangers who found the bodies was quoted as saying, "He killed them and then he killed them again for good measure. He was a mad dog. There is nothing at the scene to suggest that the guy [McCann] didn't just lose it out there."
There was no question then, and no question now, who had killed them.
Clay McCann willingly handed over two SIG-Sauer P220.45 ACP semiautomatic handguns and a Browning BT-99 Micro twelve-gauge shotgun to the park rangers. Then he shocked the rangers by asking for them back. They refused.
When asked why he did it, McCann made the statement that became infamous, the words that became the subhead of every story written about the slaughter at the time:
"I did it because they made fun of me, and because I could."
At the time, no one imagined the possibility that Clay McCannwould be released from jail three months later to return to his home and law practice.
That he'd committed the perfect crime.
4
"Explain this to me again," nate romanowski said to Joe over coffee in the small dining room of Alisha Whiteplume's home on the Wind River Indian reservation.
"It's about jurisdiction and venue, and what they call 'vicinage,'" Joe said. "It's a hidden loophole in the federal law. Or at least it was hidden until recently."
A large-scale map of Yellowstone was spread out on the table between them with cups of coffee and the pot holding down the edges.
"Yellowstone was established as the first national park in the world in 1872 by an act of Congress. The boundaries were drawn before Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana were granted statehood," Joe said, pointing at the strips of national park land that extended beyond the square border of Wyoming-which contained more than ninety-two percent of the park-north into Montana and west into Idaho. "About two hundred and sixty square miles of Yellowstone is in Montana, and about fifty in Idaho. The law in Yellowstone is federal law, not state law. If a crime is committed there, the perp is bound over under federal statutes and tried eitherinside the park at a courthouse in Mammoth Hot Springs, or sent to federal district court in Cheyenne. The states have no jurisdictionat all."
Nate nodded while he traced the boundary of the park with his finger on the map. He was tall with wide shoulders and a blond ponytail bound with a falconer's leather jess. He had clear ice-blue eyes and a knife-blade nose set between twin shelves of cheekbones. A long scar he received two years beforefrom a surgical knife ran down the side of his face from his scalp to his jawbone.
Joe continued. "Because Congress wanted to keep Yellowstoneall in one judicial district, it overlaps a little bit into two other states, these strips of Montana and Idaho. Got that?"
"Got it," Nate said, a little impatiently.
"That's where the problem comes in with Clay McCann and the murders," Joe said. He'd read most of the file the night beforeand finished it before breakfast that morning before taking the girls to school and driving to the reservation. "Article Three of the Constitution says the accused is entitled to a 'local trial,' meaning a venue in the state, and a 'jury trial' but doesn't say where the jury has to come from. The Sixth Amendment of the Constitution specifies a 'local jury trial'-that's the vicinage. That means the jury would have to come from the state- Idaho-and the district-Wyoming-where the crime took place."
Nate stopped his finger on the thin strip of Idaho on the map. Boundary Creek separated Wyoming and Idaho within the park. "You mean the jury would have to come from here? Within these fifty miles?"
"Right. Except no one lives there. Not one person has a residencein that strip of the national park. So no jury can be drawn from a population of zero."
"Shit," Nate said.
"Clay McCann declined to be tried in Cheyenne, which was his right to decide. He demanded to be tried where the crime was committed, by a jury from the state and district, as the Constitutionstates. The federal prosecutors in charge of the case couldn't get around the loophole in the law, and still can't. It was never an issue before, and there is no precedent to bypass it. The only thing that can be done is to change the district or change the Constitution, and I guess there is going to be legislation to do that. But even if it's passed…"
Nate finished for Joe, "Clay McCann still walks. Because they can't create a law after the fact and then go back on the guy."
Joe nodded.
"The son of a bitch got away with it," Nate said. "Did he know what he was doing?"
Joe said, "That's not clear. He claims the campers insulted him and he lost his cool. He said in the deposition he'd never seen or heard of the people he killed before he killed them."
Nate shook his head slowly. "There has to be something to get him on. I mean, I couldn't just grab you right now and drive you up to the Idaho part of the park and put a bullet in your head, can I?"