The Best American Sports Writing 2017

by Glenn Stout

  Eaton, however, failed to report to work on June 16, 1998, and a warrant was put out for his arrest. Police finally spotted his van more than a month later on a short dead-end spur road near Dubois in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. He was arrested at gunpoint, and told police he was about to commit suicide. A shotgun was found in his van, leading to his imprisonment on federal weapons charges.

  Four years later, those DNA samples taken while Eaton was incarcerated would be linked to unspeakable horrors.

  JULY 24, 1997, 2:30 p.m. She walks into the portrait studio on the second floor of the Camera Connection in downtown Lander, dressed for running.

  No, not like she’s already gone for a run, Lonnie Slack, who worked part-time at the studio back then, remembers in his mind’s eye. She’s not sweating. She looks like she’s about to go for a run.

  She drops off some pictures to get matted and framed. She’s excited, talking about her forthcoming entries in the Sinks Canyon Photo Contest.

  She’s there 15 minutes, maybe. Then she leaves out the back door.

  Well, it was after lunch. Maybe it was two o’clock.

  Would Amy have approved of the photo?

  I can remember the race T-shirt for the Amy Bechtel Hill Climb vividly. A large color photograph of smiling, blond-haired Amy had been hastily screen-printed on the front, along with the words HAVE YOU SEEN AMY? and a phone number: 1-800-867-5AMY. I remember that Amy’s photograph started to mute with the first wash, and that it wasn’t long until she faded to the white of the shirt, like a ghost.

  My wife and I were living in Kemmerer at the time, two and a half hours southwest of Lander, and when the race was announced, we put it on our calendar: September 28, 1997.

  Race morning was a sunny autumn day on the eastern shoulder of the Wind River Range, and 150 or so runners gathered for a bittersweet attempt to actualize the 10K course that Amy had been working on when she’d gone missing. The run was to be a steep, steady, warm, and dusty climb up the gravel switchbacks of the Loop Road that ended at Frye Lake, where divers had searched for a body. Most of the field had been involved in the search or were close to Amy through running or to Steve. There were NOLS employees and a posse of hard-core climbers who run to stay in shape but don’t consider themselves runners. Amy’s sister Jenny was there. As was Steve, who by this time had come under intense scrutiny from investigators and a sizable segment of the Wyoming public as the number-one suspect in the case.

  Steve was remarkably composed during a prerace talk. Amy had wanted to do this race for a couple of years, he said. She was told the only people who would show would be eight of her former track teammates. This brought cheers from the field. We’re in this together. We know Amy is alive.

  I remember trying to size up Steve Bechtel—is this a man who was capable of killing his wife and hiding the body? He didn’t carry himself like my idea of a sociopath. He had been, after all, the one manning the phones and computers at the recovery center in his and Amy’s garage and kitchen, responding to leads that poured in from all over the country, none fruitful. But then how are you supposed to act when your wife disappears? A 10K seemed like the best thing for exorcising anxiety, in part for lack of knowing what else to do—and because it was what she had wanted to do—and it got a little media coverage that kept the search alive.

  But after the local search fizzled out, Amy’s mom, dad, brother, and two sisters returned to their respective homes and tried to carry on with lives that would never be the same again. Their concerns about Steve grew a few weeks later when they were presented with previously undisclosed information about the search findings and Steve’s journal entries. Although each family member responded differently, their frustrations with Steve’s lack of overall cooperation and engagement with the investigators lingered. Amy’s father, Duane, told a news source years later, “I still feel angry, because if he’s not guilty of anything, the son-of-a-bitch should take the lie-detector test and give us some peace.” Her brother, Nels, was especially angry at Steve’s reluctance to take the test and cooperate fully with investigators. When her sisters, Casey Lee and Jenny Newton, appeared on The Geraldo Rivera Show with detective King, the host made a plea for Steve to be more cooperative with authorities.

  A year passed, then two, then four. Steve followed a new girlfriend to Salt Lake City, but found he missed Lander, so he moved—with the girl—back to town two years later. He still refused to take the polygraph, and many people in town continued to believe he was responsible for Amy’s disappearance. Steve’s girlfriend ended up leaving. More years slipped by. Eventually, Steve had Amy declared legally dead, and in 2004 he married Ellen Sissman, with whom he now has two children.

  All these years later, Nels Wroe has accepted that the family may never find closure, but remains frustrated with Steve’s refusal to take the polygraph. “I will not shy away from that,” Nels said to me when I visited him at a coffee shop near his home in Longmont, Colorado. “The one person who can help the most in possibly resolving what happened to Amy is the guy who for whatever reason—cowardice, selfishness, I don’t know—refuses to engage.

  “This stressed the family out. My father passed away a number of years ago. The whole situation with Steve not being cooperative, that really caused frustration for the family.”

  JULY 24, 1997, 10:30 a.m. “Boy, if it were me, I’d be running down the mountain,” Erle Osborne jokes out his window as he drives past the woman running up the Loop Road. The mechanic for the county slows down so as not to dust her, as he makes his way uphill to change the carburetor on an old fire truck that sat idle at a youth camp.

  The woman, blond, blue-eyed, and wearing a light-colored singlet, black shorts, and a fanny pack, smiles and waves at Osborne.

  Odd, he thinks, a runner on the third switchback of the Loop Road. It would be years before this would become a common sight. And yet authorities will later confirm that another witness, a road surveyor, independently described seeing the same woman on the Loop Road at around the same time of day.

  Osborne arrives at the fire truck and works with haste—he can feel a storm closing in. He gets back in his truck and rolls up the windows just in time for the rain and lightning to come down. A goose drowner. Raining so hard he can hardly see the road.

  He remembers the woman running uphill. If he sees her on his way down, he’ll offer a ride.

  But Osborne doesn’t see the runner again. He does, however, have to inch around an old blue-green vehicle—he’ll later strain to recall that it may have been a van—stopped in the road.

  It’s possible, if highly unlikely, that the surveyor and Osborne saw a different runner who just happened to look like Amy. Petite, pretty—Amy looked like a lot of women, like a lot of women who also vanished without a trace from the Great Basin region of Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming.

  Amy’s isn’t even the most famous case. A series of other murders between 1983 and 1997 have been suspected to have come at the hands of one Great Basin Serial Killer, but the case of only one of them has been resolved: Lil Miss.

  On March 25, 1988, 18-year-old Lisa Marie Kimmell was driving alone from Denver to visit a friend in Billings, Montana, in her black 1988 Honda CRX Si, which had a Montana vanity plate that read LIL MISS. She’d first planned to stop to see her boyfriend in Cody, Wyoming, but she never made it. Eight days later, two fishermen found her body tangled in the weeds along the North Platte River near Casper, and an autopsy showed that she had been repeatedly raped, bludgeoned, and methodically stabbed. After her family buried her, a strange note signed “Stringfellow Hawke” was found on Kimmell’s grave.

  Few answers emerged for the next 14 years, until July 2002, when investigators researching cold cases examined the seminal DNA from her rape kit and found a match for an inmate incarcerated on weapons charges since 1998: Dale Wayne Eaton. Eaton was due to stand trial that fall on a manslaughter charge after killing his cellmate with a lethal punch to the man’s vertebral artery—but he was
never convicted. He wouldn’t be so lucky this time.

  A handwriting analysis from the note left on Kimmell’s grave also matched Eaton. Then, following a tip from neighbors who recalled seeing Eaton digging in his desert-scrub yard, authorities found her car buried on his property in Moneta, just an hour-and-45-minute drive east from Lander. The sewer line from his decrepit trailer house had been run into it—he’d been using his victim’s car as a septic tank. A portion of the Montana vanity plate LIL MISS was found nearby. Inside his trailer, authorities also found women’s clothing and purses, and newspaper reports about other murdered women.

  In the ensuing investigation and trial, it was determined that Eaton had kidnapped Kimmell at a remote rest area in Waltman, then held her captive in a filthy converted school bus and repeatedly raped her before murdering her and tossing her body off a bridge. An FBI profiler who examined the case would note that this public display, the trophy-keeping of Kimmell’s car, and the known kidnapping attempt of the Breedens all fit the profile of a serial killer.

  In the Kimmell trial, Eaton was charged and found guilty of all counts, including first-degree murder, and sentenced to death by lethal injection in March 2004. Eaton’s lawyers won him a stay of execution in December 2009, arguing among other things that he was mentally unfit to stand trial and that he’d previously been given ineffective counsel by the Wyoming Public Defender’s Office. He remained Wyoming’s lone death row inmate until November 2014, when a U.S. district judge overturned his death sentence on similar grounds—though Eaton will never be released from prison, where he is serving a life sentence, plus 50 years. (My repeated attempts to reach Eaton and his brother were all rebuffed.)

  No one believes Kimmell is Eaton’s only kidnapping and murder victim. Sheila Kimmell, Lisa’s mother, mentions Amy’s case in her 2005 book The Murder of Lil Miss, and is very well versed in other disappearances and homicides connected with the Great Basin Murders. “The Utah Criminal Tracking Analysis Project suggested that the Great Basin murders stopped around 1997. That’s about the same time Dale Eaton went to prison,” Kimmell writes.

  That’s why, beyond closure for the Wroes and Bechtels, Amy’s case still matters, why Richard Eaton’s tip, delivered years before his brother was known to be a killer, still matters. A confession by Eaton may resolve not just Amy’s case but numerous other cold-case mysteries swirling in the abyss of the Great Basin.

  And yet, even after Eaton’s conviction, Steve Bechtel remained the prime “person of interest” in Amy’s disappearance. In July 2007, the 10-year anniversary of her disappearance, Roger Rizor, the detective who succeeded Dave King on the case, commented on the cold case to the Billings Gazette. “In my mind there is only one person that I want to talk to, only one person who has refused to talk to law enforcement,” he said, “and that’s her husband.”

  That thinking didn’t begin to change until 2010, when Detective Sergeant Zerga’s supervisor dropped Amy’s cold-case file on his desk, asking him to see if something would jump out at him. That something was a note about Richard Eaton’s tip. It was enough for Zerga to put other cases on hold in order to travel with an FBI agent to Colorado to try to interview a madman’s brother, and to Wyoming’s death row to interview the madman himself.

  “Dale’s brother and sister-in-law are absolutely convinced he was in the area at the time,” Zerga says about his summer 2012 meeting with them. “I told his brother that’s not a place to camp. The area is, like the name has it, a gulch—there are more picturesque camping spots close by.” But Richard Eaton described in detail the beaver ponds and a fire wheel and other specific geographical details of the area. “To me, once Richard said Dale was there when she went missing—and he has those capabilities—immediately that went up on top.”

  But Dale refused to speak with Zerga. And with the death penalty no longer hanging over Eaton’s head, Zerga doesn’t have any bargaining leverage.

  When I met with Nels Wroe, he brought up the subject before I could ask. “Are you familiar with Dale Eaton?” he asked me. “There are some things like that that have bubbled up. If it was to be a random occurrence, or some high-probability random occurrence that may have happened, Dale Eaton is one. But even though there’s no real compelling evidence at all that he may have anything to do with it, the circumstances that surround him, where he was, the way he operated, it certainly raises him as a high level of interest, maybe. What hasn’t changed, which drives me crazy, is Steve’s lack of involvement, and lack of cooperation.”

  I asked JoAnne Wroe, Amy’s mother, in an email, if the new focus on Eaton has affected her life. “Though I am constantly aware that he may be responsible for Amy’s disappearance,” she writes, “it’s very difficult to allow my mind to dwell on this, knowing what he has done to his victims. Not knowing what has happened to Amy or who is responsible is constantly in my thoughts, which makes me very frustrated and angry. It has taken me a long time to learn to live with this and there are days when it overwhelms me.”

  Periodically, cadaver dogs have been brought in from as far away as Montana. The dogs are so deft they will run straight across wildlife carcasses; they’re looking for human carcasses and know the difference. This happened a couple of years ago when they followed a scent down Burnt Gulch and stopped at a depression. “We were pretty stoked when we found that sunken bog,” Zerga says. “We thought it was what we’d been looking for for a long time.” They sifted through every ounce of dirt in the hole and found only a single bread tie.

  Zerga hasn’t officially ruled out Steve as a suspect. But he talks about Steve, who now runs a gym just a couple of blocks from Zerga’s office, in tones that imply respect, as if he were talking about a friend. Still, there are elements in the case that puzzle the detective. The fact that they had no log showing that Steve phoned the hospital when he said he did. A youth camp minister’s account of seeing a vehicle that matches the description of Steve’s truck being parked by itself on July 24 in the spot where Amy’s car was found.

  “The thing with Steve, and the shape he was in,” Zerga says, “is he could run a marathon in three and a half hours. He had that type of capability. He coulda run back to Lander.” Though it has to be in a list of scenarios, Zerga doesn’t buy it. “To me, why would he wait until she was running? It would be so much easier in the house.

  “I would really like to rule Steve out,” Zerga says. “My only way is to sit down with Steve. You know what, let’s do the polygraph. You’ll be able to choose who’s gonna do the polygraph. You’ll know the questions before they’re asked. And they’re not gonna be questions like, ‘Did you kill your wife?’ They’ll be questions like, ‘Is it true the last time you saw your wife, alive, was the morning you woke up and went to Dubois?’ ”

  I point out there’s not an attorney in the West who would advise a client to take the test, and Zerga agrees. “That’s exactly what attorneys do—the first thing they do is say, ‘Don’t take the polygraph.’ To me, I can understand it in a sense. But the way polygraphs are, if you really wanted to rule yourself out, you’d take one.”

  “This is a whole different generation,” Steve, now 46, says. I meet him at Elemental Performance and Fitness, his Lander gym, where he jokes with clients and checks in with his wife, Ellen. Steve—rarely seen without a baseball cap—has short gray blond hair and the modesty and forearms of Peter Parker. Now he’s taking me for a tour of his world in ’97. We drive to Lucky Lane—Climbers’ Row—in his 2006 Toyota Tundra pickup; there are kids’ car seats in the back. He shows me the garage, where he and friends ran the recovery effort. “After the initial search shut down,” he says, “as we started realizing we weren’t just looking out in the woods for her, we moved to a nationwide search the best we could.”

  According to Detective Zerga, authorities had been to Lucky Lane with a search warrant within the last five years. “We’ve actually done luminol searches with the FBI in that building,” Zerga told me. “We brought in cadaver dogs. A
nd luminol picks up any type of blood splatter, whether they paint over it or whatever.” The dogs found nothing and the luminol tests came out negative. Zerga even followed up on a rumor that Steve had buried Amy below the driveway of their would-be new home at 965 McDougal Drive before the concrete had set; he found nothing there either.

  “I’m impressed with him,” Steve says of Zerga, “because he’s taking, for all intents and purposes, this cold case and he’s really working on it. He got handed this really badly put-together case. Looking back on King now, he had drug problems, problems telling the truth. So what’s really fascinating and really sad was they were so cycloptically focused on ‘Let’s see if we can nail the husband,’ that they missed a lot.”

  Steve estimates he hasn’t talked to his attorney, Kent Spence, in 10 years. Spence is the son of the buckskin-wearing Wyoming native Gerry Spence, 87, who gained fame defending high-profile clients like whistleblower Karen Silkwood, Randy Weaver of Ruby Ridge standoff fame, and Earth First! eco-radical Dave Foreman. Many thought Kent Spence was suspiciously high-powered. “He pro-bonoed I don’t even know how many hours to us,” says Steve. “Just hiring those guys was controversial. But imagine having heart surgery and saying, ‘Well, I’ll just get a crappy doctor.’”

  Steve drives at a contemplative mosey. “Living is so fascinating. I have these two little kids and more than anything in my life, those two are what I was born for, to raise those kids. It means everything to you. And the thing that’s a really profound challenge emotionally for me is knowing that those two kids never would have existed if I would have been able to keep hold of Amy. You look through history and these tragedies happened in order for wonderful things to happen.”