II
On October 5, 1992, Fish and Game Warden Rick Banko heard from one of his reliable informants that a well known outlaw, Cliff Rhodes, had recently killed three elk and obtained transportation tags from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to transport them to his home in Crescent City.
Rhodes looked like a typical Caucasian—light skin and short brown hair—but apparently had enough Native American blood flowing through his veins to qualify for the Yurok Tribal Rolls. As a member of the Yurok Tribe, Rhodes could legally hunt and kill deer and elk on the reservation, despite statewide hunting regulations.
Warden Banko had a degree in wildlife management and kept a pretty close eye on his district’s elk herds. He knew where these majestic animals generally hung out, and it wasn’t on the local Indian reservation. Most of the elk herds stayed on private land holdings or within the safe confines of the state and national parks. Rick had received this type of information about Cliff Rhodes before. With no witnesses or physical evidence, he would be unable to prove that the three elk had not been killed on the reservation.
Late on the afternoon of October 7, Warden Banko got the break he had been hoping for: Simpson Timber Company employees had discovered fresh elk remains on the Simpson Timber Company’s S-300 road, over two miles from the Reservation.
The following morning Banko went to investigate, accompanied by Simpson Timber Company Patrolman Gene Fuller. Banko discovered three separate gut piles, each with large quantities of dried blood, rumen contents, and elk hair. The culprits had been so confident no one would come by that they had taken the time to field-dress and section the animals on the spot—an indication that the elk may have been spotlighted late at night or during the early morning hours.
“You go one way and I’ll go the other,” said Banko. Let me know if you find anything suspicious.”
Warden Banko began walking the dirt road and the immediate area around the gut piles, looking for clues. After about seventy yards he noticed the sun reflecting off a small, brass-colored object lying at the north edge of the road. So as not to alter any fingerprints, Banko used a pen from his shirt pocket to reach down and pick up a high powered rifle casing. Stamped into the base were the symbols 7mm REM MAG (7 millimeter Remington Magnum). Within eighteen inches of the first casing were two more high-powered rifle casings, also 7mm Remington Magnum. “Three dead elk, three casings,” said Banko. This vantage point looked very much like the one from which the three elk had been shot.
After documenting his find, Warden Banko walked back to the three gut piles. Gene Fuller pointed out a .22 caliber rim-fire casing lying on the ground next to what Banko had identified as gut pile number one. On the ground next to gut pile number three were two more .22 caliber rim-fire casings. Banko contemplated the three gut piles and the .22 casings, imagining what might have taken place.
“It looks like they knocked the three elk down with a seven millimeter and finished ’em off with a .22,” said Banko, thinking aloud.
Fuller added, “These elk had to be either standing in the road or crossing it when they were shot.”
“How far would you say we are from the boundary of the reservation?” asked Banko.
“This is definitely Timber Company property,” Fuller said. “I’d say we’re at least two miles from the reservation. I’ll get an exact figure for you.”
Warden Banko strongly suspected that these were the same three elk that Cliff Rhodes had killed a few days earlier. After photographing the crime scene and collecting a significant amount of physical evidence, he drove to the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Klamath. Warden Banko was greeted by BIA Investigator Bruce Carney, who confirmed that Rhodes had brought three elk into the office three days earlier. He gave Banko a copy of the transportation permit Rhodes had been issued on October 4, for two cow elk and one spike bull.
“He came in about 9:30 in the morning with two cows and a bull in the bed of his pickup,” said Carney.
“Was anybody with him?” asked Banko.
“No, he was by himself. He said he killed ’em up off the S-10 Road, inside the reservation. All that information and his address are on the copy of the permit I gave you.”
Warden Banko thanked Carney, went back to his headquarters and began working on a probable cause statement for the search warrant affidavit he would prepare during the next few days. Banko would need to make the case in his affidavit that any reasonable person, based on the totality of circumstances, would conclude that the elk remains found two miles from the reservation came from the three elk that Cliff Rhodes killed on October 4. Rhodes would likely have in his possession a seven millimeter rifle used to take the elk, a .22 caliber weapon used to administer the final kills and meat from the three unlawfully taken elk.
On October 10, 1992, at 2:30 p.m., armed with a search warrant, the following officers arrived at the Crescent City home of Clifford Rhodes: Warden Rick Banko, Warden Nick Albert, Warden Paul Weldon, Captain Steve Conger and Del Norte County Sheriff’s Sergeant Larry Graben. Warden Banko’s search warrant authorized the officers to search the residence, vehicle and person of Clifford Charles Rhodes.
When the officers arrived, thirty-nine-year-old Rhodes was outside doing bench presses. Muscle-bound and covered with tattoos, the five-foot-eight-inch, one-hundred-ninety-pound weight lifter had weights, bars and dumbbells spread all over the carport.
“What’s this all about?” said an angry Rhodes, as the officers walked up.
“We have a search warrant for your residence, vehicle and person,” said Banko. “Is anyone else here?”
“Susan,” shouted Rhodes.
“Whaddaya want?” came a raspy female voice from inside the house.
“Get your ass out here,” shouted Rhodes. “We got company.”
A painfully thin, five-foot-two-inch woman with a cigarette in her mouth came storming out the side door of the house in her bare feet. She had blondish hair, with dark-colored roots, and a small tattoo on the side of her neck.
“Is this your wife?” asked Banko.
“No I ain’t,” announced the woman. “None o’ your damn business who I am.”
Warden Banko handed a smug Rhodes a copy of the search warrant and began asking a series of questions. The other officers secured the area and kept a close eye on the woman, identified as Susan Frank, Rhodes’s live-in girlfriend.
“Mr. Rhodes, you obtained elk transportation tags on October 4, for three elk. Did you shoot and kill all three of those elk?”
“Yeah, I shot ’em,” mumbled Rhodes.
“Where did you kill the three elk?”
“Up off the S-10 Road.”
“Were the elk in the road when you shot them?”
“No, we were way up on the hill. We gutted ’em up there, then we dragged ’em back to my truck.”
“Who was with you?”
“Scotty Pringle.”
“Were you inside the reservation when you shot the elk?”
“Yes.”
“Where are the three elk now?”
“Most of it is right here in the carport.”
Based on Rhodes’s statement, the first place the search team looked was the carport. They found two elk hindquarters and a front half hanging inside a burlap sack. Two ice chests, also located in the carport, yielded boned-out elk meat. More boned-out elk meat was found inside the kitchen refrigerator. All of the elk meat discovered during the search was seized into evidence.
When Warden Banko entered the dining room, he immediately spotted what he had been looking for. Leaning against the wall was a Remington Model 700, 7mm Magnum, bolt action rife, with a Simmons scope attached. After documenting the rifle’s serial number and describing the weapon on the evidence log, the rifle and scope were seized into evidence. Banko knew that Rhodes spent much of his time hunting and was likely to have a stock pile of ammunition somewhere in the house. It wasn’t until the search team reached the master bedroom closet that Banko’s suspicions were proven cor
rect. The closet contained five boxes of 7mm Remington Magnum ammunition and several boxes of .22 rimfire cartridges. The search team also found and seized into evidence a Browning .22 semi-automatic rifle and a Sterling .22 semi-automatic pistol. One of those weapons had no doubt been used to finish off the three elk that Rhodes and Pringle had taken.
Cliff Rhodes’s Ford pickup turned out to be a jackpot of incriminating evidence. In fact, it seemed to be Rhodes’s primary place of business. Inside the cab, the search team found sixteen 7mm Remington magnum cartridges, two elk bugles, several .22 rimfire cartridges, two hunting knives covered with blood, a Simpson Timber Company S-10 road key, two game transportation tags and three spotlights. Two of the spotlights were behind the seat and one was sitting on the front seat—as if it had recently been used. The transportation tags—for one cow elk and one bull elk—had been issued on October 4, 1992, by BIA Investigator Bruce Carney. The third tag was conspicuously missing. All of the items discovered inside the cab of Rhodes’s pickup were seized into evidence. As expected, the bed of the pickup was splattered with dried blood and hair. The search team gathered samples of each.
Halfway through the search of Rhodes’s residence, one of the officers discovered a cache of illegal drugs. Sergeant Graben arrested Rhodes and his girlfriend. They were immediately transported to the Del Norte County Jail.
Based upon the extensive amount of evidence found at Rhodes’s residence—particularly the three spotlights in his truck—investigators suspected that Rhodes had been killing deer and elk for commercial purposes and not simply for his own consumption. A considerable amount of meat seemed to be missing, along with one of the transportation tags that Bruce Carney had issued on October 4.
“This guy is bad news!” commented one of the wardens, as Banko signed the evidence receipt and placed it on Rhodes’s dining room table.
“We have a lot more work to do before this investigation is over,” replied Banko.
On October 12, 1992, at 12:10 p.m., Fish and Game Wardens Rick Banko and Paul Weldon contacted Cliff Rhodes’s hunting companion, Scott Pringle, at Pringle’s mobile home in Crescent City. Pringle was on parole at the time. Tall and thin, with pockmarks all over his face, thirty-five-year-old Pringle was pleasant enough to talk to, but lacked self confidence and common sense. While most people avoided trouble, he seemed to welcome it at every turn.
“We’re here to investigate the three elk killed by Cliff Rhodes on October 4,” said Banko. “Cliff said you were with him when it happened?”
It was obvious that Pringle knew Fish and Game would be calling and had rehearsed his statement: “I was fishing on the Klamath River, near Cliff’s father’s cabin,” said Pringle. “Cliff came by to check out his boat. He was giving me a ride to Crescent City when we saw three elk standing in the road. Cliff stopped the pickup and shot all three of ’em. They dropped dead right in the road.”
Banko found it curious that Pringle had made a point of saying that all three elk had “dropped dead in the road.” He asked Pringle about the weapons inside Rhodes’spickup at the time of the elk killings. Pringle said the only weapons he saw were a bolt action, high powered rifle and a shotgun. He admitted to helping Rhodes field dress and section the elk.
“I asked Cliff if we were on the reservation,” said Pringle, jittery and well aware of his predicament. “He told me they were legal kills.”
“So the elk were in the road when he shot them?” asked Banko.
“Yeah, they were standing in the middle of the road. I helped Cliff load the elk into the pickup and we drove directly to the BIA office, where Cliff got the transportation tags.”
“Then whaddya do?” asked Banko.
“Then we drove to Cliff’s house.”
Pringle’s account of the elk falling dead on the road did not match up with the .22 caliber casings found near the gut piles. It was also unlikely that three elk had just stood there while Rhodes took careful aim from seventy yards away and shot them dead. More likely, Rhodes took three quick shots—probably gut shots—and wounded each of the animals enough so they couldn’t run away.
By making a point of saying that the elk had fallen dead, Pringle had actually drawn attention to himself. As a parolee, Pringle could not be in possession of a firearm.
Why would Pringle be so concerned about this issue, thought Banko, unless it was he who had administered the coup de grâce with the .22?
Pringle had also lied about the number of weapons in Rhodes’s truck and about being with Rhodes at the BIA office in Klamath. BIA Investigator Carney, who had inspected the elk in the bed of Rhodes’s pickup, said Rhodes had been by himself. Warden Banko suspected that the elk might have been spotlighted during the hours of darkness, but since there was no way to prove it, he did not press Pringle on that issue.
Anticipating a visit from Fish and Game, Scott Pringle was smart enough not to have disposed of the elk meat Rhodes had given him. He gave Banko and Weldon permission to search his place and told them they would find two cut-up front shoulders inside his kitchen refrigerator. In addition to the meat, which was seized into evidence, Warden Banko found two elk teeth sitting on the kitchen counter.
Later that week, Banko again dropped by Pringle’s residence. Pringle stepped outside to meet him.
“I have something I want you to look at,” said Banko. “Do you recognize this rifle?” Warden Banko held up the 7mm rifle seized from Rhodes’s residence.
“Yeah, that’s Cliff’s rifle, the one he used to kill the elk.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
It was an established fact that three elk had been unlawfully killed on the S-300 road, two miles off the Yurok Indian Reservation. Three gut piles, three 7mm Remington Magnum casings and three .22 rimfire casings had been found at the kill site. It was also a fact that Clifford Rhodes and Scott Pringle had killed and possessed three elk within two days of the three gut piles being discovered. Scott Pringle had identified the rifle that Rhodes used to kill the three elk as a 7mm Remington Magnum. He also stated that the three elk were standing in the road when Rhodes shot them and not up the hill, as Rhodes had said.
Any reasonable person would put two and two together and conclude that Rhodes and Pringle had unlawfully taken three elk off the reservation. Nevertheless, before the district attorney would approve criminal complaints against Rhodes and Pringle, Warden Banko would need to further connect the dots—tying the evidence found at the kill site with evidence found at Rhodes and Pringle’s residences.
On October 15, 1992, Warden Banko hand-delivered blood samples from the elk kill sites on the S-300 road, blood samples from the bed of Clifford Rhodes’s pickup and meat samples from Rhodes’s and Pringle’s residences to pathologist Jim Banks, at the California Department of Fish and Game Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Sacramento.
On October 16, 1992, Banko hand-delivered all of the weapons seized at Clifford Rhodes’s residence and all of the empty shell casings found at the kill sites to the California Department of Justice Ballistics Laboratory in Eureka.
Jim Banks identified the blood and tissue samples taken from the kill site as elk, but that’s all he could do; it would be another year before Banks’s laboratory was fully qualified to analyze DNA. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon, performed DNA analysis and clearly matched blood samples taken from the kill site with elk seized at Clifford Rhodes’s residence.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) Laboratory in Eureka matched the three 7mm casings found near the kill site with Clifford Rhodes’s 7mm rifle. They also matched the three .22 casings found at the kill site with Clifford Rhodes’s .22 caliber Sterling Arms pistol.
Clifford Rhodes and Scott Pringle were prosecuted and eventually found guilty of unlawful take and possession of elk. Rhodes was ordered to pay a fine of $2,000 and serve thirty days in the Del Norte County Jail. Pringle had violated the conditions of his parole and was sent back to prison.
Twenty
-five years later, now-retired North Coast Patrol Captain Nick Albert told me, “Rick Banko has undoubtedly made more elk poaching cases than any warden in the history of the Department of Fish and Game.” Banko has remained in Del Norte County throughout his successful career, eventually promoting to patrol lieutenant and more recently to patrol captain. For twenty-five years, he has been a constant thorn in the side of area poachers and has earned the title respectfully bestowed upon him by fellow Fish and Game officers—Sentinel of the North Coast.
Chapter Twenty-One
Banko’s Bait Pile
I
Nothing motivates a California black bear like food. Being an omnivore, a bear’s limited natural menu includes insects, rodents, fish, frogs, nuts, berries, grass, honey and carrion. Unnatural sources, on the other hand, are virtually limitless: meat, bones, vegetables, fruit, pastries, wheat, cereals, bread, flour, milk products, chocolate, beer and soda—anything that is or has ever been edible. What better place to find these voracious eating machines than a garbage dump? Like giant open-air buffets, garbage dumps have attracted bears for centuries. Today, California law prohibits the take or pursuit of any bear within a four hundred yard radius of a garbage dump. Hunters are also prohibited from placing any food, bait or attractant in a feeding area for the purpose of taking or pursuing bears.
Badges, Bears, and Eagles Page 20
