Yellow Bird

by Sierra Crane Murdoch

  After I said goodbye to Ed, I drove to the casino. There, in the parking lot, I came across two white men cooking chicken on a charcoal grill. They were in their forties—mechanics, they said. They wondered if I wanted to sit and offered me the metal steps that folded from the doorway of a camper. The shorter man lived in the camper. He had come from Washington State, where he lost his house to foreclosure and where his wife now lived in a rented apartment. The taller one also lived on Fort Berthold, in a backyard shed with no windows or heat. He paid $300 a month—a good deal, he said—and when I asked how he liked the reservation, he grinned: “It’s crazy. You run a truck for fifty-four hours straight, and no one here will stop you.”

  The shorter man nodded. “I got taillights out. I seen guys with no seatbelt, no mud flaps, just rolling through stop signs.”

  “Keep your eyes open with toothpicks, and you’re making money.”

  “A cup of coffee, you’re making money.”

  The taller one laughed, paused. He looked at me, and his eyes widened. “You can do anything you want short of killing somebody,” he said.

  I remember thinking that they were nice men and that they needed something to laugh about and so they did.

  Eventually I left them and went inside the casino and ordered a drink. The bar was thick with smoke and the singsong of slot machines. Women with their hair pulled in tight, dark buns dealt cards to sunburnt men. A Leonardo DiCaprio movie was playing on the television, and a white woman in a feather boa was flirting with some oil workers. I took my drink and sat beside a man who introduced himself as “Pancho the Bull Rider.” Pancho was from Texas but lived in a man camp twenty-five miles to the north, where “all there is to do is drink,” he said. We talked until the music got too loud. A man and a woman rose to the dance floor, laughing so hard their eyes shut. Then, clasped in each other’s arms, they spun around, and around, and around.

  4

  The Great Mystery

  THE DETECTIVES ASSIGNED TO THE Kristopher Clarke case worked in a three-story brick building on the edge of downtown Williston, seventy miles west of the reservation. On the bottom floor was the Williston Police Department; on the top, the McKenzie County Sheriff and the state Bureau of Criminal Investigations; and in the basement was a coffee room where officials from all departments met at eight-thirty each morning. They gathered at a table and passed around a stack of pawn tickets—computers, guns, watches, gold. If a ticket matched a theft, they had a case, and then they moved on to what had happened overnight. A man shot a urinal in a strip club. A woman had been raped. The calls came at all times of day. In 2012, the police department would field almost triple the calls it had received three years earlier, while detectives’ caseloads would double. Among these cases were some that languished for months: front-end loaders missing, the thieves long gone across state lines; city parks overtaken by roughnecks who, like wasps, constructed shelters under the bridges; sex workers insisting they were there on their own, though they seemed to have misplaced their IDs and the rooms they rented were in men’s names; and the case that had gone unsolved longest of them all: the disappearance of Clarke.

  After the truck had been found in Williston in June, the case was assigned to a city detective, Ryan Zimmerman. He was the same age as Clarke, twenty-nine, bald, earnest, and relatively new to his job. From a storage closet repurposed as an office, Zimmerman phoned Clarke’s acquaintances. “KC is always out to have fun, but not the type of person to walk away from everything,” he noted in an interview with a childhood friend of KC’s. The detective paraphrased:

  KC is a very private, very outgoing person.

  KC break up with his ex-girlfriend was not the best, but it was not the worst.

  KC never got in trouble unless it was racing his bike on the street.

  KC Grandfather was his best friend.

  KC walking away from his pickup would not happen, let alone leaving it unlocked. That kid does not leave anything unlocked.

  He does know James HENDRICKSON and James is not good news.

  By the middle of June, it became clear to Zimmerman that the city did not have jurisdiction in the case, so he passed it on to Steve Gutknecht, a Bureau of Criminal Investigations special agent. Gutknecht was older than Zimmerman by more than a decade—a serious man reputed among his colleagues for being a dogged investigator. Gutknecht had served long enough in the position to know how the oil boom was changing North Dakota. Prior to the boom, he had investigated five murder cases over his lifetime; since the boom arrived, in 2008, he had worked an average of one homicide every year.

  Gutknecht approached the Clarke case as he had each one before it, sorting every shred of rumor, following every lead. The report he released in July contained thirty-nine points. “On June 15, 2012, S/A Gutknecht interviewed a confidential informant from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation who had some theories as to what may have happened to CLARKE,” one point read. The informant told Gutknecht “it was possible that Blackstone Trucking, because of its political affiliation with Maheshu Trucking, which is run by the Tribal Chairman Tex Hall who has strong political power on the Fort Berthold Indian reservation, may have ordered the killing of CLARKE because of his attempt to take business away.” This same informant theorized, alternatively, that Tesha Fredericks, who owned Running Horse, had an ex-boyfriend who murdered KC out of jealousy. Gutknecht ruled this out quickly; querying the boyfriend’s name, he learned the man had been in jail at the time KC disappeared, having beaten another man nearly to death.

  Among the tips Gutknecht collected in the report, a majority pointed at James Henrikson. This did not make James a “suspect”—as Gutknecht explained to Jill, they lacked evidence to prove a crime had been committed—but it did make James a “person of interest.” So, that July, Gutknecht called James, and on the first of August, James appeared at the police department for a voluntary interview.

  Zimmerman watched a live recording of the interview from an office down the hall. Gutknecht and James entered a small, carpeted room furnished with a wastebasket, a table, and two chairs. “I’m just closing the door for privacy,” Gutknecht said. “You can leave anytime you want.”

  James sat down on the front of a chair, his legs splayed as if ready to spring out of it. His eyes were shaded under the bill of a hat, his skin tan, his hair neatly cut. He wore new jeans and a T-shirt fitted tightly across his bulging chest. His voice was high and nasal, incongruous with his body, and he had a giddy, confident manner that seemed especially odd given the occasion.

  “He was fun,” James said when Gutknecht asked about KC. “Always happy. He worked pretty hard. We had him go on vacation, because he was pretty tired. We were like, ‘Hey, you’ve got to go on vacation, catch up on some rest, because you look like shit.’ But he did awesome with our company guys. Everyone loved him.” It wasn’t until after KC disappeared, James explained, that James heard KC had been planning to leave Blackstone. He heard it from a “company man”—a foreman who lived on drilling sites and oversaw the operations—who told him that Rick Arey had been approaching other company men to steal contracts from Blackstone for Running Horse. “I guess Rick and maybe KC had been trying to work for Running Horse for like four weeks,” James told Gutknecht. “We’ve been friends forever. I don’t see him doing that to me. I’ve given that kid probably fifty grand, easily. Meals and stuff like that.”

  Gutknecht asked James about the day KC disappeared. The agent had heard that on the morning of February 22, KC had dropped by the Maheshu shop to turn in a company credit card. Had KC given this card to James?

  “No, not to me,” James said.

  “Sarah?”

  “I don’t know.” James was talking faster now. “He didn’t tell me, not once, that he was leaving. I was always asking him if he was all right, and he was, like, so tired. He didn’t look good. I don’t kno
w if he was drinking hard, partying.” Recently, James told Gutknecht, he had been talking to a guy named Johnny about it. Johnny thought maybe KC had gotten into drugs.

  Had James any idea where KC’s gun had gone? Gutknecht asked.

  James folded his arms, thought for a moment. “He always had it with him,” he said. “I don’t know what that was about.”

  “So you don’t have anything to do with his disappearance?”

  “No,” James said, laughing as if the question were preposterous.

  “You guys never had a physical altercation?”

  “No, never.”

  “Because I think something bad happened to him,” Gutknecht said.

  “What if he shacked up with some girl?” James said. He had been talking to Johnny about this possibility, as well.

  “Who is this Johnny you’ve been talking to?” Gutknecht asked.

  “He’s out in Washington,” James replied. He couldn’t remember Johnny’s last name. “Johnny Donkey,” James always called him.

  Gutknecht changed the subject. “When I talked to Rick, he said he had concocted a plan with KC to ‘bring Blackstone to its knees.’ ”

  “What?” James said. “I don’t believe that for a second. KC would never do that to me. I love KC to death. There’s no way KC would do that to me. I’m probably one of his best friends, so I don’t see that happening.”

  * * *

  —

  GUTKNECHT TOLD JILL Williams very little about his interview with James. He did not tell her, for example, that although James looked nothing like criminals Gutknecht typically encountered, James had bragged like a criminal, extolling his past crimes while denying the one now in question. Once, James told the agent, he had lost millions of dollars in a marijuana bust. “I felt like he was making stuff up as he went along,” Gutknecht later would recall. One thing remained clear to the agent: “Henrikson was the only one with a motive. In my career, as soon as you see a guy with a motive, that’s usually who it turns out to be. It’s not like storybooks or movies where there’s some type of surprise.”

  Among the few things the agent shared with Jill was the fact that both James and his wife, Sarah Creveling, refused to take a polygraph test. Their refusal confounded Jill. Sarah had been eager to help in the beginning, and her distress at KC’s disappearance had seemed genuine, but since then, Sarah’s attention had waned. She wrote less often to Jill, and in this silence, Jill had grown suspicious.

  The tips Jill received on Facebook hardened her suspicion, as did her and Lissa’s conversations with Rick Arey. Rick said that when he first met James, he was “fucking charmed by the guy.” James did not look like any man Rick had known in the oil fields before. His hair was carefully combed, and instead of canvas pants and old sweatshirts, which most men wore on the job, James worked in T-shirts and a puffy vest no matter the weather. “I’m not gay,” Rick said, “but this guy is a pretty good-looking dude. He makes you feel good when you’re around him. He’s somebody you want to like you.”

  Rick’s impression changed on the day James interviewed him for a job with Blackstone in the late fall of 2011. They met at Better B’s, a busy café on the main street of New Town, where James chose a table in the center of the room. “He was loud, like he wanted everyone to see him,” Rick recalled. “The waitress comes up, and he says, ‘Rick, get whatever you want,’ and he orders steak and eggs, three pancakes, a glass of water, and a cup of coffee. I’m watching him eat, and he’s cutting big chunks up and piling them into his mouth, and he’s chewing with his mouth open. He was a fucking slob. He had that vest on, and he was flexing his muscles. He didn’t eat half of his meal. He had four bites out of three pancakes. He might have finished the coffee. I’ll never forget it. Them pancakes were as big as dinner plates.”

  The job James had offered Rick paid $1,500 a week, a bit more than roughnecking on oil rigs, which paid $28 an hour. For never having to climb a rig again, Rick thought the deal sounded good. In January 2012, not long after they moved into the Maheshu shop, Blackstone received a contract from the tribe to spray water on a road to suppress dust. Rick dispatched trucks for weeks, until a worker for another company spun out on the road and died. “Nobody got in trouble for it,” Rick said, “but we looked like jackasses, because every swinging dick knew who was watering the road. We were the ones making an ice rink.” Rick ordered the trucks off the job, but James ordered Rick to send the trucks back. “He wanted the image that Blackstone was successful, that we put people to work,” Rick said.

  James was ruthless with money. Drillers paid truckers by the load, so the faster truckers hauled, the more money Blackstone made. It was not uncommon for truckers carrying contaminated water to open the valves of their tanks as they drove, letting fluid pour out, or to dump in remote corners of Fort Berthold to avoid having to drive to waste disposal sites located beyond the borders of the reservation. James encouraged this, and it bothered Rick, who had started his career as a roughneck in Wamsutter, Wyoming. BP, the company he worked for, had trained him not to spill. “I know they fucked up the Gulf of Mexico,” he said, “but in Wamsutter, a fucking drop of antifreeze was a spill. On the reservation, people don’t understand that. Hey, this is dirty Indian land. Fuck it. That’s the mentality. That’s James’s mentality.”

  By the time Rick left Blackstone, he had been glad to never see James again. But was James capable of physical violence? Rick was not sure. He was even less sure about Sarah. Rick believed James relied on Sarah more than James let on. Sarah kept the books, made payments, and rode to drilling sites with James, who rarely went anywhere without her. If James seemed out of place in the oil fields, the impression they made together was even more startling. Sarah was tall, lithe, blond, with bleach-white teeth. It was her teeth that had made Rick distrust her: Sarah drank coffee through a straw.

  Jill also had trouble believing that James or Sarah had killed KC, but their silence suggested to her that there was something they were not saying. One day in October 2012, Jill posted a public message naming James and Sarah on her Facebook page: Why wouldn’t they take a polygraph test? Why didn’t they write to her anymore or donate to her fund to find KC? Why didn’t they spread the word about his disappearance?

  Neither James nor Sarah responded. A few days later, Jill asked her followers to send letters to the tribal council requesting a public hearing about Blackstone and their “refusal to cooperate” with investigators. She had heard the next year was an election year, she noted. “I’m sure that Tex, being a tribal bigwig, would certainly want to use his power to do good and wouldn’t want to dirty his good name covering for a piece of crap like James.” Tex did not respond, either. When Jill made a poster for her supporters to hang around North Dakota, at the bottom, she wrote, “As if the horror of my son being missing is not enough, I have had to deal with the fear of there being a possible danger to my own life from the people who are involved with the disappearance of my son.”

  On October 19, Jill was served with a lawsuit. She had just left her house in a suburb south of Seattle when the papers landed in her yard. The complaint was brief, six pages in all. Jill photographed the pages and sent them to Lissa, who called Jill and read them aloud: “The defendant…regularly posts defaming statements….Defendant has accused the plaintiffs for causing or contributing to the disappearance of Kristopher D. Clarke….The Plaintiffs have cooperated with the police….[James Henrikson and Sarah Creveling] are not connected with the disappearance of Kristopher D. Clarke and have no knowledge of his whereabouts.”

  * * *

  —

  LISSA ENCOURAGED THE comments Jill posted and, in some cases, drafted them herself. After they met on the reservation, Jill had made Lissa an administrator of the Facebook page, and Lissa often spent nights culling the messages, which had become too numerous for Jill to respond to on her own. Among them was an assortment of condolences a
nd tips, many hopeful if far-fetched. A hotel clerk writing from Brownwood, Texas, said she had checked in a man who bore a resemblance to KC and later noticed he had registered under the name Christopher Clark. “Please note that I don’t know if it was for sure him,” she wrote. “I felt very odd telling you this because I don’t want to bring your hopes up. Also I am not supposed to release any guest info because I can get in trouble & lose my job. So please keep me anonymous!” Others speculated that KC was alive. An oil worker who had known him wrote, “It makes me sick to think something might have happened, and [I] pray he just needed to get away from it all, as he was very stressed and burnt out from the work the last time I saw him. I wish you and your family the best.”

  Among the messages from people familiar with Blackstone, Lissa noticed a common thread. The worker who knew KC claimed to have stopped using the company’s services “due to various issues that made me question their integrity.” Others noted more specifically that Blackstone had underpaid them or that workers in the company had a history of making threats. One man had been working for a shop that serviced Blackstone trucks when a mechanic in the shop overheard a Blackstone employee brag “they were going to get someone to beat a guy up.” Another man writing under the name “John Doe” offered, “There is a lot of hearsay on the reservation and rumors are created out of thin air. So for what it’s worth…I heard that when KC went out to Blackstone that he was wanting to get paid for some work. The situation had gotten out of control and KC got beat up pretty bad.”

  It occurred to Lissa, KC’s disappearance aside, that among workers at Blackstone there was an undercurrent of violence. She sensed it not only in the theories they shared but also in the fear their messages expressed. Everyone who wrote to the page asked to remain anonymous—afraid, it seemed, of some vague retribution.