Yellow Bird

by Sierra Crane Murdoch

  James did not have patience for their proselytizing. “You need to pull your weight. I will not carry you, Doug,” he texted one day.

  “Someday grasshopper you will learn that friendship is worth more than money,” Doug replied.

  “Nothing is worth more than money, only my relationship with God and my wife,” James wrote. “God, wife, money, friends.”

  The Carliles had one more option. Through a broker, Doug had found an investor in Dallas, Texas, who had a record of funding oil and gas production in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and the Appalachian Basin. The investor thought the lease looked promising. An Exxon subsidiary had successfully drilled land surrounding the lease, and from seismic data the investor estimated that if KDE drilled into the Bakken, as well as into a deeper formation called Three Forks, their wells would produce up to thirty-five million barrels of oil. In early December, the investor negotiated an agreement with Doug. When Doug shared the news, Elberta told Cestnik, “We were sitting on the couch holding hands. He said, ‘I will know by Sunday about the money.’ ” Doug also told Elberta that he believed James was involved in criminal activity. After he got the money, Doug planned to go to the FBI.

  “He never told you what he had on James?” Cestnik asked.

  “No,” Elberta said and began to cry. “We had a lot going for us, because we had God going for us, but we didn’t have the money, and in this world, you have to have the money.”

  * * *

  —

  A SNOWSTORM WHIPPED across the northern prairie on the day that the Spokane detectives, Mark Burbridge and Brian Cestnik, arrived in North Dakota. It was fifty degrees below zero with wind chill. They had stayed the night at a hotel in Montana, where, by morning, their tires had frozen, thumping loudly for the first hour of their drive. The wind blew so hard that everything became white. Twice they had to stop in the road to wait for the snowy curtains to part, and when they came to Watford City, night had fallen, gas flares casting everything in orange.

  The next morning, they ate eggs in the lobby of the hotel, empty but for an eighteen-year-old with a bad windburn who had worked his first shift in the oil fields that night. Then they drove north on the main street. “There were guys everywhere,” Cestnik would recall. “All the mom-and-pop stores were shut down, sold, and every business had to do with the oil field.” Wherever the detectives stopped, they asked after James and Sarah. Many people claimed to have heard of them, including a bartender who said when Cestnik mentioned Sarah, “Oh, you mean ‘Bentley’?” The woman knew Sarah from the gym and often spotted her driving an expensive car around town.

  When they arrived at James and Sarah’s house at the north end of Watford City, they noted it was larger than other houses in the neighborhood, with gray siding and a wide porch with a view of the road. Cestnik knocked; a woman answered. Delao was inside, mildly surprised to see them. James and Sarah were not home, Delao said, but would return to the house in an hour. The detectives chatted briefly with Delao, and indeed, when they returned, two matching pickup trucks were parked side by side in the driveway.

  Burbridge later described the encounter: “We went in the breezeway area, through the garage. I saw the Bentley sitting on flat tires. That’s one way to treat a car that beautiful. We knocked, and Sarah came to the door. She knew that we had been there already. She snarled at us, gave me the dirtiest look. She said, ‘You want my husband. I’m not going to talk to you,’ and stormed off. Didn’t even say, ‘Wait here.’ Nothing polite. I’d never met her before. She was extremely aggressive. It didn’t surprise me. I’m used to dealing with major, major bad guys. You don’t give her anything, because you don’t want her to read you. So it’s thirty seconds, forty seconds, and James comes to the door. It’s a screen door, and the inner door’s cracked. He was a big son of a bitch. I’m a big guy. I used to be a major weight lifter in college, and it was clear to me that he can move some weight. He benches five plus, probably. And he leaned out the door, and I introduced myself, and he slapped me on the shoulder. He said, ‘Hey, too bad you drove all that way. My attorney told me not to talk to you.’ That was the end of it. He shut the door in my face. I grew werewolf fangs. I wanted to rip that arm off that shoulder so bad. It was very clear to me at that point that he was my number one suspect.”

  * * *

  —

  IF IT OCCURRED to Burbridge to connect the murder of Carlile with the disappearance of Kristopher Clarke, he soon forgot about it. He did not remember Darrik Trudell, the young Homeland Security agent, calling the morning after the murder, though Trudell insisted he did. Burbridge did remember Lissa’s calls—and remembered ignoring them. He would claim the first time he heard of Clarke was a week after Carlile was murdered, when Cestnik discovered the flyer. In any case, it was after Burbridge saw the flyer that he phoned the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigations. Steve Gutknecht was out of the office; Burbridge was told to call Trudell. He called but would not remember what they spoke about. Neither Burbridge nor Cestnik told Trudell when they went to Watford City. Clarke was not his case, Burbridge said—“We’re not searching for his evidence.”

  None of the evidence Burbridge gathered pointed clearly at James. It was only a hunch, a mass of accusations, that placed James at the top of his suspect list—hardly a sure bet, since on January 10, 2014, new evidence pointed at someone else.

  Detectives had submitted the welding glove found in the Carlile’s backyard for DNA analysis, and got a match: Timothy Suckow, a white male, fifty years old, with a record of burglary and assault. Burbridge had never heard of Suckow before. In a records search, he learned that Suckow lived with his wife on the east side of Spokane. Burbridge assigned officers to surveil the suspect’s house, and on the thirteenth of January, officers followed Suckow to the offices of a company that cleaned up hazardous waste, where Suckow worked, and arrested him in the parking lot. While Suckow was detained at the police station, officers searched his house, where they found twenty guns, several black balaclavas, and a single welding glove. Meanwhile, the detective whom Burbridge had assigned to locate the van learned it belonged to the same company for which Suckow worked. Detectives searched the van and, in a center console, found a handwritten list on college-ruled paper:

  glove?

  badge

  trenchcoat

  2 boots

  led lite

  radios w

  The appearance of a new suspect baffled Burbridge. In a month of interviews, no one had mentioned Suckow. None of the Carliles, nor Doug’s partners, nor Tex had heard of or recognized him. In photos taken upon his arrest, Suckow’s skin looked pale, his eyes sunken and dark. He had a shaved head and wide, muscular shoulders. Reporters suggested he was mentally ill, that he believed the world was coming to an imminent end, but no one could make sense of his involvement in the murder. Only one thing connected Suckow to the other suspects: James’s number was listed in his phone.

  Now Burbridge faced the same dilemma Gutknecht and Trudell had encountered before. While it seemed obvious that James was connected to Carlile’s murder, the detective had hardly enough evidence to gain a warrant for James’s arrest, let alone charge him with a violent crime. In the middle of January, Burbridge called Trudell, who offered an idea: Federal agents could use the evidence they had gathered while investigating James for fraud to obtain a warrant to search James’s house. In December, a Blackstone employee had told Trudell that James had a gun safe, even though James’s prior felony convictions prohibited him from keeping firearms. Burbridge accepted Trudell’s offer, and on January 14, 2014, Trudell and his fellow agents executed the search warrant. As Sarah and James made their way home from Denver, officers raided their house, confiscating three handguns, two shotguns, and an AR-15. Over the following days, authorities monitored James, who fled to a Bismarck suburb where he stayed with Peyton Martin. On January 18, Trudell arrested him.

&n
bsp; James did not “puke his guts on the table” as Burbridge had suggested to Delao he would. Rather, on the day of his arrest, James evaded Trudell’s questions. In a video recording of the interrogation, he would appear stiff, his voice a strange, bending whisper as if he were letting air out of a balloon. “I guess nothing really happened,” James offered. “There’s something on the Internet, and then everybody starts to hate you.” He changed the subject to Sarah.

  “Let’s talk about Washington, how you hired someone to have a guy killed,” Trudell said.

  James laughed. “No,” he said. He mentioned Sarah again.

  “What are we talking about there?” asked Trudell.

  “Murder. They’re going to take her out.”

  Trudell sounded annoyed. “Tell me what you want, and let’s start there. You can’t say that the boogeyman is going to get her, and we call witness protection. You give us something actionable. Why would someone want to kill Sarah?”

  James did not answer the question.

  It did not take long for investigators to realize that the case depended on Robert Delao and Timothy Suckow, the suspect whose DNA had been found on the welding glove. In January, Suckow was assigned a public defender, and by early March, he agreed to meet prosecutors for a “free talk” in which he would tell the whole story of the Carlile murder. Unless he lied, nothing he said could be used against him in court.

  Trudell flew to Spokane for the talk, but almost as soon as he arrived, the deal fell apart. State and federal prosecutors were jockeying for jurisdiction in the case. In the meantime, Suckow had asked if he could get a better deal if he confessed to another murder. For the first time, it occurred to investigators that perhaps Suckow had also killed Kristopher Clarke.

  The day after the talk fell through, Burbridge and Cestnik visited Delao at his house in Spokane. They told him he still had a chance to “beat Suckow to the table” and offered to find him an attorney. Delao agreed, and on March 2, 2014, he met with federal agents and an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Washington.

  The story Delao told on that day diverged from the one he had previously shared with Burbridge: In January 2012, when he called James looking for work, James had not, in fact, offered a job but rather asked Delao if he knew anyone who could beat a person up. Delao told James he would think about it. “The last thing I was trying to do is call my old friends, because I’d done this cooperation,” Delao explained to prosecutors. He worried his friends would kill him, but he wanted the job, so he called a former cellmate who suggested Suckow. Delao once had worked for Suckow, stripping asbestos from buildings, and gave him a call. Suckow sounded interested. James bought him a train ticket to Williston.

  In March 2012, a few weeks after Suckow returned from North Dakota, Delao met him at a bar in Spokane: “I said, ‘So what did you think of North Dakota?’ What I wanted was, ‘Does James really have all the money he was talking about, and am I really going to be able to get a job out there?’ ” Suckow acted cagey with Delao and said he had done “more than he signed up for.”

  That same March, James told Delao he had more work, so Delao took a train to Williston. The work was not what Delao had hoped. James asked him to locate a kilo of heroin, which they would press into pills imitating the prescription opiate Oxycontin. A kilo of heroin could produce twenty thousand pills, which could sell for more than a hundred dollars apiece. Delao struggled to find a source, and after two weeks, James “fired” him. But that June, James asked Delao to return. Ryan Olness, the Blackstone investor from Arizona, met Delao in Williston. George Dennis and Justin Beeson, two truck drivers for the company, joined them. They drove to a drilling site serviced by Trustland, the rival trucking company owned by the tribe’s former lawyer, Steve Kelly. On James’s orders, they vandalized storage tanks and opened valves, letting hundreds of barrels of oil spill out.

  James never mentioned KC to Delao, though he often talked about wanting to kill other people—Steve Kelly, Ryan Olness, and Jed McClure, the investor who was suing James and Sarah. In July 2012, James made Delao a full-time employee at Blackstone. Delao’s primary task—locating a source of heroin—remained the same, and he reached out to a friend in Spokane, Todd Bates, who said he had a hookup in Chicago. Meanwhile, James was having problems with a truck driver and solicited Bates to kill him. That November, Bates traveled to Watford City four times, and each time he failed to kill the driver, James grew more frustrated with Delao. Finally, in January 2013, Delao, Bates, James, and Peyton Martin, Tex Hall’s stepdaughter, traveled to Chicago, where James purchased $20,000 worth of heroin. Their dealer was a former Vice Lord called “the Wiz.” James asked Bates to ask the Wiz to murder Jed McClure. The Wiz agreed to do it for $25,000. In February, he met Bates at the Chicago airport, where Bates gave him a down payment of $9,500. The Wiz took the money and ran.

  Around the same time, oil companies began dropping contracts with Blackstone. As BEWARE flyers appeared on the reservation, drivers went to work for other water haulers. Tex was losing confidence in James and Sarah, but after he ended their business partnership, he allowed Delao to remain at Maheshu. Some believed Delao was James’s spy, but it was Peyton who “would tell James everything,” Delao explained. “Peyton was James’s inside guy. Anything that ever happens at Tex’s house, Peyton reports to James, so James is always one step ahead of Tex.” In fact, Delao rarely spoke to James, he said. “Tiffiany told me I wasn’t allowed to talk to him. It was because of the whole affair. She would constantly go through my phone to be sure I wasn’t talking to James or her daughter. When Homeland Security”—Darrik Trudell—“and Mr. Gutknecht came to Tex’s office to talk about the KC situation, I was rehearsed by Tiffiany Johnson. She said, ‘When law enforcement comes, one, you cannot mention my daughter. Two, anything negative about Tex, clam up.’ ” Without telling Tiffiany, Delao still met James now and then at the gym in Watford City, where they conferred about Peyton, Suckow, and eventually Carlile.

  Delao told the story eagerly, betraying none of his earlier reluctance, and so, in April 2014, when Suckow made his own confession, prosecutors were struck by the difference in the two witnesses’ tones. In a recording of the confession, more than four hours long, it would be difficult to make out the hit man’s words, which conveyed an immeasurable sadness. Suckow appeared unusually small in the video, sunken into his red jumpsuit. He spoke slowly, rocking back and forth, rattling his stomach chains, and when he cried, he cast his eyes toward the ceiling, his bottom lip quivering uncontrollably.

  Before Suckow had gone to North Dakota in 2012, he had never killed anyone, he explained. As he understood it, James had hired him to “take care of” Steve Kelly, the owner of the rival trucking company, so that “he could have the whole rez to himself.” Suckow had decided he would simply beat Kelly up. On February 21, 2012, he had taken the train to Williston, where James met him. They slept that night in Watford City. The next morning, James drove Suckow to Maheshu, and that was when James’s request changed. “He started telling me about KC,” Suckow said, “how he was threatening to leave the company and take some of the truckers with him. That’s when he asked me to kill him. I didn’t even think he was serious. When we got to the shop, he wanted to introduce me to everybody. I was like, I don’t know about that shit.

  “It was the morning,” Suckow continued. “When we went into the shop it was empty except some garbage, some cans, recycling in the corner. He was telling me, ‘I’ll bring KC back here, and you just put a choke hold on him.’ Even though I was a big guy, I didn’t feel very comfortable about—I’m not a fighter. I’m not very confident about my strength. And he told me he carries a gun. I said, ‘I’m not going to choke him out if he’s going to carry a gun.’ He said I could hit him with something. I looked around the shop, and all I could see was those floor jacks.”

  Suckow looked up. His lip quivered. His chin furrowed. His voice ros
e and began to shake. “I went back over by the door. I still remember. I didn’t believe it was real. There was a part of me that just didn’t believe it. And I stood by the door.” Suckow began to cry. “I shook KC’s hand. I didn’t think—I didn’t think—” He stopped, looked around the table. “I’m really not violent,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  PROSECUTORS SHARED THE story with Jill, leaving little out, and when Jill repeated the story to Lissa, they cried together on the phone. Suckow had known that KC was dead when his last hit “went soft,” he said. He had emptied a garbage can and removed a plastic bag, which he wrapped around his victim’s head, and pulled KC into a bathroom, where he left him while he mopped up the blood. When Suckow finished, he drove KC’s truck to Watford City and returned to Maheshu with James and George Dennis, the truck driver with whom James seemed close. They stuffed KC into a cardboard box, which Suckow sealed with masking tape, while George backed up his truck to the garage. They drove, again, to Watford City and south into the badlands, turning west on a dirt road. George parked at the head of a ravine, and James and Suckow continued on foot. The ground was wet and soft. Suckow dug a hole as deep as his chest. It had begun to snow when he returned to the truck, and the box, damp, broke when he lifted it. He carried KC like a child, cradled in his arms.

  Lissa sensed relief in Jill, but it was tempered by the fact that her son’s body was still missing. The only evidence linking James to the first murder was circumstantial, one man’s word against another, and without proof that KC was dead, the likelihood that they could prosecute James for KC’s murder was alarmingly low.