Although I’d spent some time in courtrooms in Billings as a journalist-I covered the infamous trial where the two Crow Indian brothers and their meth-addict girlfriends went on the weeklong crime spree across southern Montana and northern Wyoming and murdered a ranch couple along the way- Judge Moreland’s courtroom had a slick sense of process about it that probably came from the no-nonsense, clipped way he moved things along. He didn’t shout, or gesticulate, but when he spoke, everyone listened. He was charismatic and in total command. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him in the way one can’t keep one’s eyes off a great actor-Denzel Washington, say-even when he isn’t speaking or the focus of attention. I wasn’t the only one so afflicted. If Moreland raised an eyebrow while a lawyer asked a question, that lawyer got the vapors, and the opposing attorneys acted smug. Of course, I observed him to see if I could learn anything about him, to size him up, to find a weakness. If he saw me enter the room, he showed no sign of recognition. I was still buzzing from the events of the night before. There was a black ball of dread in my belly that seemed to be pushing upward into my lungs, leaving me short of breath.
I was seated next to a large and well-dressed black woman in a floral-print dress and with a fleshy wide face who seemed unrelated to the players. I continued to survey the courtroom. Cops, reporters I recognized from local television and cable news, plenty of observers attracted by the lurid nature of the case itself, including, I assumed, my new companion next to me. Then I found myself staring at the back of the head of Aubrey Coates himself, sitting at a table facing the judge.
“That there’s the Monster,” the woman next to me said, leaning my way. Her bare chocolate arm radiated heat as she pressed into me, and her breath smelled of mint and cigarettes. “He turns around and looks back every once in a while, seeing who is here,” she whispered. “I think he likes the attention because he is a sick, sick man. When he looked at me I gave him one of these…” She instantly sat back with attitude and gave me a wicked dead-eye glare. “That look usually freezes folks where they walk. But he just kind of smiled at me.”
I’d seen photos of Aubrey Coates in the newspaper. Of course, the photos were prior to his haircut and shave. Now he sat slumped, small, in an ill-fitting suit jacket. He had tufts of gray hair over large ears, and when he turned his head to whisper something to his lawyer, I saw a hawkish and heavily veined nose, protruding lips, and a pointy chin. When he turned back, his bald dome reflected the light from the walls in a checkerboard pattern on the side of his head. I thought of the nature of evil, how sometimes you could just see it and sense it.
“He did it,” she said, nodding. “No doubt in my mind. And he did a lot more, too.”
I held out my hand. “Jack.”
“Olive,” she said, her large hands enveloping mine. “Ask me anything. I know everybody in this room. This is what I do-observe trials.”
“Do you know Coates’s defense attorney?” I asked, looking at a rotund man sitting next to Coates with an easy smile and manner.
She nodded, and her eyes widened. “He’s got the best- Bertram Ludik. I don’t know how that little worm can afford him. I think if Charles Manson had hired Bertie Ludik, he’d be out there sticking forks into people to this day!”
“Come on,” I said.
“You watch,” she said. Then: “Luckily, Judge Moreland won’t allow Bertie to be Bertie.”
“That guy I know,” I said, chinning toward Cody, who was approaching the stand.
“Detective Hoyt,” she whispered sympathetically. “I’d like to take that man home and hug him and tell him everything will be all right.”
“Why?” I asked, perplexed.
“He’s a troubled soul,” she said. “Look at him. A great detective, but a troubled soul.”
He’s just hungover, I thought.
Cody was wearing a dark blue suit that gathered under his arms, a white shirt, and a solid but faded red tie. He looked courtroom savvy but disheveled at the same time. He shambled when he walked and raked his fingers back through his hair, messing it up. When he sat down in the witness chair, his eyes took in the room in a world-weary way that said “I’M A COP. JUST LET ME DO MY JOB.” I nodded at him, but I’m not sure he saw me.
Judge Moreland said, “The witness is reminded he is still under oath.”
“I understand, Your Honor.”
“Miss Blair,” Judge Moreland said to the Assistant U.S. Attorney, an attractive redhead who had been huddled in conference with the U.S. Attorney at the prosecution table, “you may continue to question the witness.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” she said, standing, holding the legal pad at her side as she approached the podium. “I have just a few more questions.”
Moreland gestured impatiently for her to begin.
“Detective Hoyt,” she said, flipping back the pages on her pad, “you said Friday before the weekend recess that when you apprehended the defendant on the morning of June 8 last summer, he was in the process of destroying evidence…”
HERE’S WHAT I KNEW about Aubrey Coates, the Monster of Desolation Canyon.
Every summer, children vanish. Over the last decade children had gone missing while on vacation with their families in the Mountain West.
It happens quite a lot in the mountains. Often, the families are having picnics and reunions and suddenly someone realizes that one of the kids didn’t show up for dinner. Sometimes the children got lost, sometimes they got washed into rivers, sometimes they got mad at their siblings and “ran away,” and sometimes they climbed into the wrong car. Most are found. I remember when my dad and I volunteered to search for a missing little boy who’d wandered away from a campsite near the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness north of Helena. We took horses, and I remember it as a great and serious adventure combing the trails and riverbanks calling out “Jarrod!” for two days. Until Jarrod was found less than a mile away from where he’d vanished and confessed he’d gotten turned around in the forest and fallen asleep. He admitted hiding from volunteer rescue people as they walked and rode by because they were strangers, and he had been taught not to talk to strangers-even those calling his name.
But in some isolated instances the children were never found. These children vanished from isolated locations in Colorado (Grand Junction, Pueblo, Trinidad), Utah (Wasatch, St. George), Wyoming (Rock Springs, Pinedale). Boys and girls, all under the age of twelve. In nearly every instance, the parents said the child was there one minute and gone the next. The places the children were last seen were playgrounds, near streams, on hiking trails. Then poof-they were gone.
In retrospect, when one looks at the instances of these particular missing children over the years, you can see a pattern, and the authorities are blamed for not seeing what should have been in plain sight. But that’s unfair, as Cody explained to me. The children went missing in three states over ten years. The only “pattern” was that they vanished from campsites or in undeveloped areas. There were no calling cards left, no evidence of where the children were taken, and nothing left behind. All occurred in different jurisdictions, with different sets of law-enforcement personnel. The FBI was never called in because linkage wasn’t discovered until after the fact. None of the parents were ever contacted for ransom or taunted. No one confessed or implicated others. And none of the bodies was ever found.