Growing up in the south east Utah desert was like seeing the world through a soda straw. I knew the world was there. I just didn’t know much about it. My dad was a great rockhound and since his jobs as a construction carpenter were on and off affairs, during the off days I did get to see some of the West – where there were rocks. But two weeks in the hills above the Yellowstone River wasn’t enough to tell a kid much about what else was there besides Montana Agate.
There was one event that stands out in my memory. The outside world sometimes penetrated even the desert isolation of south east Utah. A murder-kidnapping-suicide happened out in that same desert where my dad and I hunted dinosaur bone. A local man shot a tourist in the head, murdered his wife, and kidnapped the wife’s young daughter. Every lawman in south east Utah was looking for them. The local man was finally found at a desert crossroad, FBI agents confronted him and he committed suicide. But the girl wasn’t with him. I heard my dad comment, “I know that country. They’ll never find that girl.” They never did.
If CNN had existed back then, it would have dominated air time for at least a week. The shock to south east Utah was like a sudden earthquake. Everyone knew someone who was connected to what had happened. That included me. I was in the eighth grade and the son of the murderer was a classmate.
I didn’t know him very much … just enough to recognize him in the hallways. In those days when computers were far away curiosities, you learned about things by hearing them from your neighbor more often than even the radio news. When the shock wave of what happened traveled through town, my classmate, “Abe”, simply wasn’t there anymore. No one knew what happened to him. Students in middle school were not “counseled” back then.
I was talking to my wife recently over coffee and something triggered the old memory. She couldn’t remember anything like that happening at all. To make sure I was retelling the story correctly, I consulted the hive memory of the human race – the Internet – and found an amazingly detailed account. I learned that a few things I remembered weren’t quite right. But the main thing was that the memory of what it was like on the desert back then came rushing back like a tidal wave.
If you’re interested in the whole story, you can find Part One here:
July 4, 1961: Murder & the Enduring Mystery at Dead Horse Point (Part One)…by Jim Stiles
Part Two is linked in the story and it is detailed! It got tiresome for me when the victims, a family from Connecticut, was covered and I skipped past a lot of that. But I learned one new thing I didn’t know before. The local man was not just a murderer, he was a decorated hero of WW II in the Pacific. He was also unemployed and desperate for a job to feed his family. That part of the story wasn’t being passed around town.
About two weeks after that, the story ended for me when I was walking back home from classes at school and I stopped to look at the magazines at Sampino’s store. There was my classmate Abe, sitting at the end of the lunch counter, eating a bowl of soup. He didn’t look up. He wasn’t a close friend and I didn’t have any idea what I would say to him – even if I wanted to – and right then, I didn’t want to. So, I left again. I have always wondered what the rest of his life was like. I’m not sure I actually want to know.
In other news, the coyotes have been serenading us at night for the past couple of weeks. One of the two fawns of the deer family that has been showing up for breakfast didn’t seem to be there this morning. There’s another mass shooting being mentioned on CNN. There’s an average of more than one every day. Ukraine has been at war with Russia for over two years. And a jury certified sex offender is running for President again.
Ain’t life grand!
Kinesava the Trickster 
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