Death in the Snow.

That late winter day in 1980 was a continuation of the long Wyoming winter and I began my patrol of the two lane roads in my jurisdiction, vacant of traffic at that early hour. I later traveled back to town after an initial patrol of the area, to get something to eat at Mitchelson's Cafe and visit with the proprietor Mitch Mitchelson, but then in the middle of breakfast I received a telephone call from my sergeant.

He advised that he was enroute to Farson and that he had received information from an oil field crew of a multiple murder scene they had stumbled upon while traveling back from work on an oil derrick north of Farson, in Sublette county; in an area that was technically out of my judicial baliwick.

Gary arrived at my location a short time later and he and I in his car, following the informant who found the bodies in his car, began traveling north towards the location. We turned off of the main highway about fifteen miles north of Farson onto a dirt cow trail and began wending our way northeast towards the foothills of the Windriver mountains, whose mighty peaks dominated the horizon in the distance.

We traveled but a few miles off of the main roadway and into a small barren valley and suddenly we saw in the distance buzzards by the dozen circling objects on the ground, while some birds on the ground were fighting over what appeared to be carcasses of what we found out later were five murdered human beings.

As a side note, when I saw the movie No Country for Old Men recently, it caused me to have flash backs to the killing field I am describing that happened in Wyoming so many years ago.

As we approached the location of the bodies, we were carefull not to destroy any tracks, or evidence at the scene, so we parked the car and walking up to the scene in single file avoiding anything that remotely resembled possible evidence. What we found when we arrived was five hispanic featured men, with their hands tied behind them each possessing large gaping wounds in the back of their heads, each appearing to have been murdered execution style with a large caliber handgun. Their bodies spread out randomly over an area of about twenty five yards.

Their bodies were still in deep rigor, exhibiting blood pooling in the body areas making contact with the ground. We had contacted the Sublette County Sheriff's Office on our way to the scene, and after we completed a preliminary examination of the bodies to determine whether anyone was alive, we secured the scene and then turned it over to the Sheriff of Sublette County in whose jurisdiction the murders had occured, upon his arrival on the scene.

They began one of the most incompetent murder investigations I have ever seen, lacking any kind of investigative protocol, destroyed most of the tire track and foot print evidence that the Sarge and I had been so diligent to preserve before it could be properly recovered.

The Sarge and I gave statements to the investigative officer, and then left in disgust. It was later determined that the five men were illegal aliens from Mexico who had secured a ride with a stranger from where they were working in Idaho intending to make it back to Mexico and that and unkown person had murdered them for the money they were taking back to their families in Mexico.

The Sublette County Sheriff's Office subsequently arrested the wrong man, and Gary and I both testified at his trial as to our involvement in the initial phase of the case. The case was so badly botched that the jury acquitted the man they accused of the crime and to my knowledge no one was ever convicted of this terrible crime.

Five poor little Mexican campesinos, no one but their fatherless families and I remember, and justice was never served.