Yellow Bird

by Sierra Crane Murdoch

  * * *

  —

  LISSA WOULD TELL me there was something strange about Tiny’s trailer that night—that a spirit had been restless or angry, perhaps. Micah and Waylon noticed it too. But months later, when I mentioned the incident in the car to Lissa, she barely remembered it. I still thought of it often; it scared me; and now that it was obvious it meant nothing to her, I felt incredulous. Had she actually seen blood? Was it a trick of the light? Or had she been testing me, in the way—I was beginning to learn—she had tested Sarah?

  As I came to know many of her relatives that year, some would express a similar confusion about Lissa’s spiritual insights and beliefs. “Sometimes it’s like, ‘I don’t know about that one, Lisa. That’s maybe a stretch,’ ” Irene said. A cousin with whom Lissa was close, Tony, was even more skeptical: “I’ll be honest, sometimes I think those drugs destroyed her brain, man, because she’ll be saying some crazy shit where it doesn’t make sense.”

  Still, everyone in her family would admit there had been times when Lissa was right. Once, she told Tony about a wolf that appeared in her dreams. “She said, ‘This wolf come, and he jumped over the top of us, and he was running in your direction,’ ” Tony recalled. “She said, ‘I think something’s coming, little brother. It’s going to be bad, but you have to be strong.’ I was like, ‘Damn, that’s too much. You might have messed your brain up.’ I tell you, six or eight months later, my girlfriend miscarried our baby.”

  Her relatives listened whether they believed her or not. “I tease her about it,” Irene told me, “but everyone sees things differently.” Irene was quieter than Lissa about her spirituality but held many similar beliefs: “My grandmother, Nellie, when I was a little girl, told me that you could speak to the spirits and ask them questions. I trusted what she told me, so I would talk to the spirits. I grew up believing in it. Different things would appear to me. Sometimes, I would tell my mother when I would get scared, and my grandpa would stop by, and she’d say, ‘Tell your grandpa what you dreamt.’ And so I’d tell him. I told him once that somebody had died. There had been a burial. He said, ‘Well, it sounds like somebody is going to die.’ Here, his brother died.”

  Irene later suppressed the dreams, but sometimes certain feelings returned to her, and she knew they were spirits. One day, after her brother Chucky died, she had been washing dishes in Madeleine’s kitchen when she sensed someone behind her. “You know who that is, because your mind tells you,” she explained. “I think Chucky saw spirits, too. He always seemed to know something would happen before it happened. I think that’s why he drank. It bothered him. A lot in our family seem to have that ability.”

  * * *

  —

  I DID NOT have that ability, nor could I explain what came over me that night in Sanish. At the beginning of the next winter, Tiny Crows Heart died in his trailer, asphyxiated by a propane leak, Lissa was told. When she called me with the news, Lissa would mention the night we spent there and how the spirits had been angry.

  Only once more would I feel something similar, when, one morning, Lissa sent me a message: “You should smudge! I had a dream about you and woke up in tears.”

  “What was the dream?” I asked, but Lissa did not reply.

  I forgot about the dream. I did not smudge. I never smudged, unless I was with Lissa.

  The following week, I cried harder than I have ever cried. There was no reason for me to cry. It came suddenly, violently. I lost control of my body. When it was over, I went into my bedroom and found some sage a man had given me the year before in Browning, Montana. It was old and crumbled in my palms, but I put it on a plate and burned it anyway.

  * We were all a bit off. Sakakawea, or “Sacagawea,” was Lemhi Shoshone from present-day Idaho. She was captured by a Hidatsa war party when she was about twelve years old and sold to the trader Toussaint Charbonneau as his slave and wife. Two months after she gave birth to their son, Jean Baptiste, Sakakawea and Charbonneau joined the Lewis and Clark expedition, on which she served as an interpreter and communicated to tribes through her and her son’s presence that their party was peaceful.

  15

  Trial

  A DATE FOR THE TRIAL of James Henrikson was set, and moved, and moved again. James pled guilty and then retracted his plea, claiming he had misunderstood the terms. By the summer of 2015, it was becoming clear he had no interest in leading authorities to KC, which left only Timothy Suckow, the hit man, and George Dennis, who drove James and Suckow to the burial area, to locate KC’s body in time for trial.

  Darrik Trudell accompanied Suckow twice and George once into the badlands, but the men identified two different sites, roughly a mile apart. Trudell visited both sites dozens of times, accompanied by Steve Gutknecht and squads of officers. They brought dog teams and backhoes and marked spots with flags. “We had one spot where the canines hit,” Gutknecht later told me. “We dug the whole area by hand.” Trudell spotted a piece of paper and leapt excitedly into the hole—criminals often left trash behind—but it was only the label from his own shovel, worn off from all his digging.

  The longer they searched, the more baffled they became. No one appeared more frustrated than Suckow, who had been confident in the beginning that he would find KC. “He could walk all day long,” Gutknecht said. “We had to take shifts just to follow him around. You could see him trying to remember. He’d look at the horizon, this way and that way. You don’t realize how big that country is until you’re out there, in it.”

  On August 31, 2015, Aine Ahmed and Scott Jones, the assistant U.S. attorneys assigned to prosecute the case, met investigators to tour the area Suckow and George had identified. “We scoured it for everything,” Ahmed told me. “We found a sock. We found bones, a cow or something. It was a scary place. We got separated, and I was a little nervous, because you lose sense of direction.” Ahmed thought they might “get lucky and find a body” but soon realized how impossible this would be. The only other way they would find KC was now seeming to Ahmed equally impossible: “I wonder why James is such a cold-ass bastard that he won’t tell me where he buried him.”

  When the trial was at last set for January 2016, Ahmed still hoped James would plead guilty. But as the date approached, it became even clearer that James had no interest in acknowledging his guilt, let alone ingratiating himself to the court. One morning, staff at the Spokane County Jail, where James was being held, spotted a rope woven from bedsheets dangling from a top-floor window. James was trying to escape.

  * * *

  —

  THE AREA TO which Suckow and George led investigators was off the reservation, roughly twenty miles up the Little Missouri River from the spot Lissa had spent much of her time searching. Investigators refused to share the location with Lissa, but she figured it out anyway in the summer of 2015, when, one day, she was scrolling across the badlands on Google Earth and noticed an area that appeared to have once contained a pond. The pond had dried up, indicating that the soil would be easy to dig. Lissa realized she had once visited the area, after a man committed suicide there in 2013. It was a good place to not be found, she thought, carved by coulees and canyons and steep ravines. The following weekend, Lissa located the pond with some volunteers and, in the same area, noticed some freshly dug holes. Investigators had been searching there for KC.

  One day in September, Lissa was at work when she glanced at her phone and saw six missed calls from an unknown number. The phone rang again; Lissa answered. The caller had a stern, formal manner. He refused to identify himself. He ordered Lissa to open Google Earth and acted annoyed when she told him she could not. “I wanted to say, ‘Who is this?’ but I was like, I’m not going to be overexcited,” Lissa told me a couple of days later. “So I said, ‘I just got off work.’ He said, ‘Well, can you get it on your phone?’ ‘No, I can’t. I’m talking to you.’ And he said, ‘I want to pinpoint the location of a b
ody.’ I said, ‘You want to pinpoint the location of “a body”? Or do you want to pinpoint the location of KC’s body?’ I found it interesting that he would disconnect from KC as a human being. I wanted to make him say it. He said, ‘I want to pinpoint the location of KC’s body.’ I said, ‘Well if you let me dig in my car for a while, because I basically live out of my car and it’s a freaking mess, you could give me the GPS coordinates, and I’ll write the numbers down.” The man did not give her the coordinates, but he described the burial area to her over the phone. The next weekend, Lissa followed his directions with the help, again, of some volunteers. They located the spot the man spoke of and dug a hole. There was no sign of KC.

  On the Tuesday after she returned to Fargo, the man called her again. Lissa and I talked that night. “He said, ‘You guys are walking right over him,’ ” she told me. “I think he has someone watching us.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  Lissa didn’t know but had a feeling that whoever was calling was connected to George Dennis, the driver. Perhaps George had hired a private investigator to find KC so he could secure for himself a kinder sentence. “I said to him, ‘What if James had someone move the body? This guy’s not stupid. This is the only leverage Tim Suckow has for a plea deal. Tim’s only weapon is to lead him to the fucking body. So what if James took that away from him?’ It went back and forth. I said, ‘Who are you? What is your stake in the matter? If you really wanted him found, you would come out here and show me where he is.’ He said, ‘I can’t do that.’ ‘Why can’t you? Obviously you’ve been watching me, so you should know by now that I’m not going to tell who you are. That’s not what my interest is. I’m interested in recovering KC, so I can move on with my life.’ He said, ‘What do you need to know?’ I said, ‘Well, since you seem to know so much, people are stupid and always leave dirt right next to the burial spot. Am I looking for that as a landmark?’ That’s when I heard him talking to somebody. He said, ‘No. They scooped up the excess dirt, put it on a tarp, and threw it in the back of the truck.’ I kept asking questions, and I could tell he was turning his head. Either the person was there, or he was talking into another phone.”

  Lissa returned to the burial area once more that September. She found a bedroll containing a battery charger, a map of South Dakota, a peanut can packed with freeze-dried broccoli, a Veterans Administration card, and a set of dentures, the pearly molars hardly worn. She found no sign of KC, and when the man called again, he sounded frustrated. That was the last Lissa heard from him.

  I expected her to continue searching until winter, so I arranged to stay on the reservation through the fall. Lissa never came. She would not return my calls.

  In early October, I went to the burial area alone. I drove along a bluff past a set of steep ravines that cut to the south, and then I turned north through a stretch of pasture toward a shallow draw. It was evening, the light low. I parked by an ephemeral creek and followed the old watermark to the bottom of the draw, where I sat for a while in the grass. It was cooler here. I had scared a coyote, who kept stopping and running and stopping to look back.

  * * *

  —

  ONE NIGHT IN late October, I called Lissa, and she answered. Her life was a mess, she said. CJ and Micah had wrecked their cars, and then a man had backed into her own car, tore off the bumper, and fled. Lissa would have to miss work, but she had missed too much work already. She should have earned $37,000 that year, but she had taken off so much time to search that she would earn only $20,000. She owed $2,000 on a credit card and had bounced twelve checks in the same week. She longed for her grandchildren. Shauna had let Lissa see them again but still refused to speak to her. “I started thinking about all the birthdays I’ve missed,” Lissa told me. “How did I let it get this bad? I’m like, What am I going to do?” I said I wished I could think of something that would make her money fast. Lissa laughed. “I can think of some things, but I’m not going to do them.” After we hung up, I sent her a hundred dollars. She must have paid the debt, because she never mentioned it again.

  A few days later, Lissa received a call from Dennis Banks, an Ojibwe elder and a leader of the American Indian Movement. His granddaughter, Rose Downwind, had gone missing from her home in northern Minnesota. He asked Lissa to organize a search.

  The next weekend, I accompanied Lissa to Minnesota. She was doing better than when we had talked. She was spending more time with Obie, she said, who had moved back into the apartment. He had even joined her on a search in the late summer—they had camped at a state park not far from the burial area and spent most of their days walking the ridges above the ravine where the caller had insisted KC was buried. Lissa taught Obie how to identify the bones of deer and bighorn sheep. “He was more excited than Micah ever was,” Lissa told me. “He saw the beauty. I said, ‘Hey. Obie, this is where we’re from,’ because he’s always kind of denied his Native side. He seemed really impressed. He said, ‘Now I see why you do what you do.’ It was such a relief for me. I felt like crying, because I was like, It’s okay now.”

  I talked to Obie a few weeks later. He told me that living with another family had made him realize his was not the only one with problems. He had seen his girlfriend fight with her parents and decided he no longer wanted to fight with his mother. He had agreed to go on a search because he knew it would make Lissa happy. “It wasn’t really searching. It was more of a bonding experience,” he said. “On our way there, I played a few songs that kind of make me remember all the resentment I had, because I held a lot for my mom, but I always wanted to be in a good relationship. I was trying to show her my feelings.

  “When we got there my mom was making sure I had a good place to sleep. She kept asking, ‘Are you hungry? Are you thirsty?’ I said, ‘No, Mom, I’m fine. I’m just happy I’m here,’ and she’d be like, ‘I’m so happy you came.’ Then she started telling me everything about KC. We were walking, and I was sliding down all these hills. This one spot I slid into, when I moved these trees open, I swear to God it was the most amazing moment ever. It was a clear sky, and the sun was pointing at me, and so when I moved these trees, the sun came through. I said, ‘Mom, I feel so good. I feel like if we just kept doing this, we would get somewhere.’ I said, ‘What if we did find him? Are you going to stop?’ and she said, ‘No, I’m going to keep coming out.’ We talked about getting a place out on her land, building a microhome, farming and whatnot.”

  After they returned to Fargo, Obie told me, it had seemed his mother paid more attention to him. One weekend afternoon, when he still had not woken, she burst into his room with a drum, wailing an Indian song.

  * * *

  —

  THE TRIAL TESTIMONY began on January 29, 2016, in Richland, Washington, two hours south of Spokane. A flat, residential city with no downtown to speak of, Richland’s most defining feature was a seven-story concrete cube that served as the federal courthouse. The building had been secured for the occasion. The morning I arrived, before Suckow took the stand, officers searched the perimeter for bombs, and I passed two security checkpoints on my way to the courtroom, which was guarded by a U.S. marshal. The man, kindly but stone-faced, let me through into a bright, cavernous room where the judge presided from the far end. He was flanked on his left by the witness stand and on his right by the court reporter. The jurors were arranged in rows against a wall to his left, and facing the jury from a table in the center of the room were the assistant U.S. attorneys, Aine Ahmed and Scott Jones, dressed in similar black suits. At the end of the table sat Darrik Trudell and an FBI agent, Eric Barker, and at the table to their left was James Henrikson, his feet chained to the floor, hands and torso free. He was smaller than I had expected, pale but not sickly, with cropped hair and mild features that lent him the look of a cocky schoolboy. He had the gestures of one, too, twirling a pencil and taking notes, leaning casually toward his counsel to whisper in their ears. He was better dressed than
both his lawyers, in a lavender button-down shirt and a fitted gray jacket.

  Suckow entered the room, crossed from left to right, paused for a guard to undo his handcuffs. A deputy read the oath, and Suckow raised his right hand. Then he lowered himself to the witness stand, where the deputy poured him a glass of water. His head swayed back and forth. His gray hair was overgrown. He wore a white T-shirt, and loose jeans, and thick glasses with dark rims. He did not look at James, though James looked at him, eyes wide and hardly blinking.

  Suckow told the story from beginning to end as he had on the day of his confession, answering each question as if lifting a heavy weight, pausing before he spoke. The details of his story remained the same, but his emphasis had shifted. Ahmed was less interested in Suckow’s guilt than in James’s, and moved quickly to establish that the witness would not have acted alone. Suckow had no reason to kill KC, nor even Carlile. In fact, he had never intended to kill either man, and when he realized James wanted him to kill Steve Kelly, the rival tribal businessman, Suckow had tried to talk James out of it, suggesting they “take care of his problem legally.” But James had seemed intent on murder. It was only after Suckow arrived in North Dakota that James had mentioned KC. As James drove Suckow to the shop the morning after Suckow arrived from Spokane, he told Suckow he was “upset about somebody” who was leaving the company and taking Blackstone drivers with him. James spent much of their drive on the phone. “All I remember is when he got off the phone on the way to the shop, he was mad,” Suckow recalled for Ahmed. “We were talking about KC prior to that, and when he got off the phone, that’s when he was like, ‘I want you to kill the guy.’ You know how people get mad sometimes—‘I’m going to kill you.’ That’s what I thought it was. But I wasn’t sure, you know?”