“In a new job, I don’t think I can ask for time off for a funeral for someone I never met. The family has my condolences. Let them know that we’ll both pray for their son and for his family.”
Mike was in his office in Flagstaff when he received the call from the main entrance guard at the law enforcement building. “Captain, we just admitted a man named Jesse Baldwin who showed an Alaska driver’s license. Mr. Baldwin checked three firearms before being allowed into the building. One of his weapons was a Bushmaster Carbon-15. I asked him why he needed that much firepower and he said that northern Arizona was an extremely dangerous place. By now he should be nearly at your office. Do you know why he thinks it’s so dangerous here?”
Arizona had among the most permissive gun laws in the country. Mr. Baldwin’s weapons were legal without a permit, and could be carried openly. “Eric, thanks for letting me know about the weapons. Mr. Baldwin is the father of Jarod Baldwin, the man who was killed by dragging him behind a vehicle. It was certainly a dangerous place for Mr. Baldwin’s only son.”
Mike walked out into the hall to greet Jesse Baldwin. What Mike saw was a man who no one would ever forget. Jesse Baldwin was about six feet and a hundred and eighty pounds. He had a fair complexion and thinning blond hair, but he was unforgettable because of the dramatic scars that slashed across his face from above his right ear to his chin on the left side. The four lines crossed his eyebrows and distorted his mouth where two of the scars crossed it. It was not a new wound, and Mike assumed that Mr. Baldwin had plastic surgery to reduce the scarring, but his face was still unforgettable. He wore a flannel shirt, blue jeans, and hiking boots. He fit Mike’s image of a rugged outdoor adventurer, but there was only hatred behind those gloomy blue eyes.
“Mr. Baldwin, I’m Mike Damson. I’m very sorry for your loss. Please come into my office, and I’ll fill you in on the case.”
“Everyone asks, so I might start by explaining that I had a run in with a grizzly while I was hunting caribou. I hear you arrested another man, a guy named Biggs, for another homicide in the county. I’ve also heard that you’re a very competent detective. Was the man you arrested for the earlier homicide also involved in my son’s death?”
“He was arrested for the homicide of a hiker named Paul McFarlane in the same area of the Coconino National Forest. There was a person who was with Donald Aryan and who drove the vehicle when your son was murdered, but so far we have no evidence that Biggs was with Donald Aryan when your son was killed. We do have an excellent eyewitness that Aryan was involved since he got out of the vehicle to disconnect the chain, but so far, we have no witness or evidence that identifies the van’s driver. Let me give you a full briefing on what we know. The prosecutors are convinced we can get the death penalty for all three men involved in the McFarlane murder. We have strong DNA evidence.”
“Do you think the driver was a part of the Verde Valley Pure Bloods?”
Mike was surprised by the question because he’d said nothing to Mr. Baldwin about them, and nothing he and the sheriff had said at the press conference mentioned the VVPB militia.
“To be frank, Mr. Baldwin, I have no direct evidence of that; however, the information that the FBI provided indicates that all three suspects in the McFarlane homicide have attended meetings of that group. The FBI dropped their investigation because they found no criminal conduct by the group. We don’t think these two homicides are part of some complex conspiracy. Three men were stealing artifacts worth tens of thousands of dollars from an ancient burial site in the Coconino National Forest. They killed a witness to their looting, and Donald Aryan probably killed your son in retaliation for his pointing us at him as one of the culprits. The motive behind these crimes was individual greed, not something done by a larger group or with a political motivation.”
Mike spent half an hour going over all the evidence about the homicide of Jarod Baldwin. He only withheld the name of the witness. He was careful not to provide the names of other people who might have been involved in the case like Robert Dohi. He mentioned the evidence of the suspicious payments to Sedona Premium ATV rentals, which had led them to the arrest of Andy Biggs, and finding looted artifacts at his house. Mr. Baldwin had made some threats against whoever was involved when they first spoke on the phone. In this meeting, Mr. Baldwin said nothing similar. He made no threats, but paid extremely close attention to every word Mike spoke. When Mr. Baldwin asked to see the autopsy report, Mike hesitated.
“Mr. Baldwin, I’m not certain those details would be helpful. You probably don’t want those photos to be your last memory of your son.”
“You’re right of course, but I think it’s my obligation as a father to learn all I can about his final hours.”
After reviewing the autopsy file including over thirty photos, Mr. Baldwin left for his son’s funeral in Cottonwood. There were tears in his eyes. It had been a painful meeting for Mike too because he felt a sense of guilt at not protecting the young man who had pointed him in the right direction to solve Paul McFarlane’s homicide.
Chapter 29
After Mr. Baldwin left, Sean Mark and June Rosetta came to Mike’s office. June showed Mike the update on the financial transactions between Robert Dohi and Andy Biggs. Nine payments had occurred over the past year. Mike assumed there were more looted sites that had not yet been discovered. They decided that they had enough to get search warrants issued for Mr. Dohi’s home and business. June was especially interested in Robert Dohi’s financial records to review the reverse side of the transactions booked at Sedona Premium ATV rentals. Sean committed to getting the search warrants issued in Maricopa County while Mike went to Jarod Baldwin’s funeral in Cottonwood. Both Mr. Dohi’s condo and store were in the City of Scottsdale. The Scottsdale PD would be the unit that executed the warrants with Sean and Mike present as observers and to take possession of the financial records and artifacts that needed further examination.
“Mike, I suggest that we invite Dr. Whittier to go down to Scottsdale with us. She might be able to tell which artifacts need to be tested. Without an expert, it would be difficult for us to tell the Sinagua artifacts from the other items for sale in his store.”
“Excellent idea Sean. Mr. Dohi must have thousands of items in his small cluttered store and still more in the storage room behind the public space. If she’s willing, please bring Dr. Whittier with you. Text me when you get the warrants and let me know when the Scottsdale police will serve them. I’m going to Jarod Baldwin’s funeral in Cottonwood. If you can get the warrants this morning, I’ll head to Scottsdale immediately after the funeral.”
The large Baptist church was full. Jarod Baldwin had graduated from high school in Cottonwood and attended Yavapai College’s local viniculture program. Hundreds of young people in his age group were present. There were also many older people who were probably friends of his parents as well as regulars at the Baptist church, which he’d attended his whole life. In addition, every person who worked at the Poole Vineyards including Jim Poole and Giuseppe Sordi were sitting together near the front.
As the funeral ended, Mike noticed that two of the pallbearers wore the dress uniforms of the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. Mike assumed they had been classmates of Jarod in high school. As they left the church, Mike shook hands with Jarod’s mother, stepfather, and father offering his condolences. It is terrible to lose your only child, and all three had tears in their eyes. However, Jesse Baldwin’s eyes also made Mike suspect that his desire for vengeance against Donald Aryan was stronger than ever. Jesse had read the detailed autopsy report and knew the horrors of the tortures of Jarod’s final hours.
As Mike was walking toward his vehicle, Jim Poole approached him to ask about the investigation of Jarod’s murder. Mike gave him the update on the search for Donald Aryan, but had to admit that they had no leads on the driver of the vehicle. The witness who had seen Aryan had not seen the driver because he had stayed in the vehicle when the body was dumped. Mr. Poole said he
would offer a $10,000 reward for anyone who could identify the driver, and another $10,000 to anyone who would turn in Donald Aryan. Mike didn’t normally believe in offering rewards because they generated too many false leads, but in this case, a reward offer might attract more media attention and get the Aryan image back in the nightly news. Mike agreed that the reward would be made public with a press release from the Sheriff’s Department. Jim Poole asked that the Poole family should not be mentioned in the press release. The funds were from an anonymous friend of Jarod’s.
During the funeral, Mike had received a text that indicated the Scottsdale police would serve the two search warrants for the Dohi condo and store at 2:00 that afternoon. He stopped for lunch at a local burger place before driving down to Scottsdale. He got there about 1:15 and went directly to the police station near city hall that would execute the search warrants. The Scottsdale police knew the search warrant was issued in connection to the two homicides in Coconino County. Most had seen at least part of Mike’s press conference. When they learned of the connection of Robert Dohi to the homicides, they seemed quite anxious to help.
Sean and Dr. Amber Whittier arrived about 1:45, and the local police executed the search warrant on the store at exactly 2:00. The three customers in the store left as soon as the four uniformed Scottsdale police officer, Sean Mark, Dr. Whittier, and Mike Damson entered. Mike handed the search warrant to Robert Dohi, and they asked him to stand aside while they searched.
Michael had noticed during his previous visit that Mr. Dohi did not lock his safe while the business was open. That was the first place they looked. Dr. Whittier pointed out three objects that were clearly ancient artifacts from the Sinagua culture. The Scottsdale criminal unit bagged the items, and they continued the search. Mike was skeptical that they would help his investigation since none matched the drawings of artifacts that would have been buried with the Kinnickinick shaman. While they might be from another looted location, there would probably be no DNA evidence to tie them to the crime scene.
An expert also from the Scottsdale Police Department duplicated the hard drive of the Dohi business computer onto a laptop that June Rosetta had sent down for that purpose. The store’s records showed all sales and where the items were shipped if they’d been mailed. The computer sales record also included a photo of each artifact. They examined the storeroom behind the sales area, which had mostly large items that could not easily be displayed in the small customer area of the store. None of the items in the backroom were authentic pre-Columbian antiquities.
Mike was not optimistic about the artifacts proving a connection to the looting, but he was hopeful that the financial records would connect Dohi to the pillage of ancient artifacts from federal land. He also had hope that the list of items shipped outside of Scottsdale might lead to some artifacts from the Kinnickinick crime scene. It would take time to track all of the artifacts that had been sold in the two weeks since the murder because about a third of Mr. Dohi’s mail delivered sales went outside of the United States, mostly to Germany and Great Britain.
The search of Mr. Dohi’s condo produced no Sinagua artifacts and nothing incriminating. Mike was disappointed that no quick proof of the connection was found, but he was hopeful that with enough legwork they would find what happened to some of the Kinnickinick artifacts. He knew that Dohi had paid Andy Biggs for them three days after the homicide. There was a trail somewhere in Dohi’s records that they needed to follow.
Mike decided not to question Mr. Dohi until they had a chance to examine his records and test the artifacts for DNA. He thought an interrogation might give Mr. Dohi too much information about their case. Since he was a business owner who could hire an excellent attorney, Mike thought there was almost no chance he would flee the area, abandoning his business and lifelong hometown.
The next day was a Friday, and Mike and Margaret had plans to attend the traveling company of The Book of Mormon at the ASU Gammage Auditorium on Saturday Evening. They would do some shopping in Scottsdale and spent the night in Tempe. Margaret wanted to buy Easter outfits for their twin granddaughters and a new Easter dress for herself. On Sunday morning they planned to attend mass in Saint Mary’s Basilica in downtown Phoenix. The Palm Sunday service would include the blessing of the palms and an outdoor procession.
Although the tickets for the play had been purchased a month earlier, the trip to the Phoenix area would have the added advantage of their being absent from the services at the local Sedona Catholic church. Frieda Biggs had many friends who would not be happy with her treatment. She had told everyone she knew that she’d been slammed to the floor and rudely handcuffed before spending a terrible night in jail with drunkards, criminal perverts, and drug addicts. It was also nice that they would not be present at the high mass on Palm Sunday when Andy Biggs, the usual choir leader and the deacon who would have normally read the scripture for the day, was in the Coconino County Jail as a direct result of Mike arresting him.
The research department was busy trying to trace the artifacts sold by Robert Dohi using the copy of his hard drive they had secured using the search warrant. Mike was not surprised, but he was still disappointed when none of the Sinagua artifacts from Dohi’s store could be tied to their crime scene. Without more evidence, the artifacts would be returned to Mr. Dohi. In an afternoon meeting, they showed all the evidence to the county prosecutor. She was not prepared to issue an indictment on their evidence because Robert Dohi would simply claim that he believed all of the Sinagua artifacts came from digs on private land and were therefore legal. They had found no evidence to the contrary.
There had been a small notice in the Arizona Republic about a warrant served against a Scottsdale business that might be connected to the homicide of Paul McFarlane and Jarod Baldwin. The legal notice did not name the business or its owner. It was only two sentences on a page full of other legal actions, but it worried Mike because Donald Aryan might see it and decided that he needed to eliminate a witness. Mike called the Scottsdale police after he saw the notice to warn them so that they could keep an eye on Dohi and watch for Aryan. Donald Aryan would certainly know to whom they had sold the looted artifacts.
Friday morning the rewards for Aryan and the van’s driver had been made public. They had received coverage of his image again in the Arizona press but not nationally. There had been no further sightings of Donald Aryan, and every day that went past, fewer people who had seen his image on television would remember it. Mike assumed the killer had gone into hiding until the heat was off and was probably not in Arizona. It would take a lucky break or a witness with an excellent memory for faces to find him.
That afternoon, the Flagstaff police called to let him know that a van had been impounded from an underground lot in downtown Flagstaff. The police found it matched the description of a van stolen from a motel in Cottonwood the same day as Jarod Baldwin was abducted from the Poole Vineyard in Page Springs. Since they knew that there was a van involved in the Jarod Baldwin murder, they gave Mike a heads up. He sent Jimmy Hendrix to the impound lot to process the stolen blue van. Since they didn’t know the make or color of the van, any abandoned van might have been involved.
The prosecutors were preparing cases against Andy Biggs and Matthew Waldrop that they believed would lead to homicide convictions. The Arizona state crime lab and the FBI lab had agreed that the recovered artifacts had the DNA signature of the ancient shaman buried at Kinnickinick Pueblo. The prosecution would seek the death penalty in both cases and not negotiate for a reduced sentence with either man. They thought any such deal would taint any testimony it might produce. Although they knew that Andy Biggs was not the actual shooter because of the blood spatter on the pants they’d recovered from his trash, a murder committed during a felony was a homicide for everyone involved.
Mike felt it was time to update Mr. and Mrs. McFarlane and he called them in Minnesota before he left for the day. They both got on the line. The McFarlanes were pleased to hear him confirm t
hat homicide charges were proceeding against the two men in custody and that a nationwide manhunt was pursuing the third man involved in their son’s murder. Mike spent twenty minutes on the phone with them, and they told him about the funeral parade. The streets had been lined with locals and sympathetic people from other parts of Minnesota. There had been far too many residents to fit into any local building, but people who could not get into the Lutheran church viewed the service at the high school gym where Paul’s hockey jersey hung from the rafters. Mr. McFarlane asked Mike if he was willing to be interviewed by local weekly newspaper. Everyone in Warroad wanted to know about the case. Of course, he agreed.
As Mike was preparing to leave for the weekend, he received a call from Jimmy Hendrix. “Mike, this 2015 Blue Ford Transit van has been wiped cleaner than a hospital operating room. Someone went over the thing with a bleach solution. I had hopes for the gas cap, but even it had been cleaned. Sorry. This is unquestionably the van used in the murder of Jarod Baldwin. I matched the tires to the impressions I took where the body was dumped. There are scratches on the rear bumper where a chain was attached, but no other useful physical evidence. I have the chain used to drag Baldwin in the evidence room, and I can probably match its hook to these scratches to give us further proof. Unfortunately, there is not a damn fingerprint in this whole vehicle.”
Mike knew that Sean had been investigating the white plastic wrap that had concealed the original color, but no manufacturer in nearby states had made a plain white one. Mike had concluded that they must have ordered the wrap by phone or on the Internet. Now that they knew the make of the vehicle, he might have better luck on a nationwide search. He updated Sean with the make of the van.
The Mauling at Kinnickinick Pueblo Page 21
