Same Guys Dancing

[{"type":"text","text":"Judas Priest -- Green Manalishi"}]

Same guys dancing 9 19 22

Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Friday Morning Dance Party: Judas Priest -- Green Manalishi | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Judas Priest -- Green Manalishi

Friday Morning Dance Party: Judas Priest -- Green Manalishi

Jen kocher

Jen Kocher

Crime & Courts

Law Enforcement

Lt. Doug Fisher had been about a week away from flying to Wisconsin to arrest Roger Durkee when he got the news: Durkee was dead.

The cat-and-mouse game Durkee had been playing with Elko County Sheriff’s Office (ECSO) detectives for the past few years was officially over.

[{"type":"text","text":"Fisher called the news bittersweet."}]

He and ECSO Det. Alex Cox had been looking forward to finally putting the cuffs on Durkee, who had spent 32 years eluding authorities after allegedly murdering an unidentified woman and dumping her nude body at a remote desert exit off Interstate 80 in Nevada.

but both officers agree that identifying Durkee’s victim 

For decades, she was known only as “Shafter Jane Doe,” named for the highway exit where she was found in November 1993.

detectives finally identified her as Marion Hertha Alexander

, a 25-year-old German immigrant who had been living in Salt Lake City, Utah, when she crossed paths with Durkee.

The woman also had spent seven months in Afton, Wyoming, shortly before she was killed, which was determined in 2010 via a breakthrough isotope testing procedure. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Family Devastated"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Alexander’s mother was devastated, Fisher said."}]

He and Cox had driven to her California home in January to tell her in person. She had met her husband, a

She married him and returned to California with him and her children in 1972.

Alexander left home in her late teens — a free spirit, her mother told detectives, who drifted and grew distant from the family.

They had not known she was missing and were devastated 

Her mother is now working with the sheriff’s office to finalize the inscription on a new headstone 

 paid for by the Elko County Commissioners.

[{"type":"text","text":"After more than three decades, they finally has the answer."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"“We want to make sure we finally get Mary laid to rest,” Fisher said."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Little To Go On At First"}]

Many detectives have worked on Alexander’s case over the years. It was not their only cold case, Fisher said.

Along with Alexander, there are five other unidentified people in Elko County dating back to 1972, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs).

[{"type":"text","text":"At first, they had little to go on."}]

When Alexander’s body was discovered about a week after she was killed, it was already badly decomposed.  

She’d been shot in the chest and the back with a small

caliber firearm and had been severely beaten in the face.

There was little to no evidence left at the scene, leaving authorities to believe she’d been killed elsewhere and dumped afterward.

Apart from a partial right thumbprint that had no match in federal databases, detectives had little to go on. The only other identifiers were a tooth that was in the process of getting a root canal and a 2-by-4-inch burn scar or birthmark on her right calf.

To draw attention to the case, detectives reached out to the national media and also held a funeral for her.

Her story initially gained traction after it was picked up by the 

news program “Hard Copy.” but it ultimately yielded no results.

The sheriff’s office took advantage of technological advancements over the years, including having a forensic facial reconstruction done as well as stable isotope ratio analysis of a hair follicle that linked her to Afton, Wyoming, where it was suspected she’d spent the last seven months of her life.

Oddly, this was one detail that the detectives couldn’t track down upon finally learning her identity.

They found addresses for her in California, Oregon, Utah and southern Nevada, but nothing in Wyoming.

In fact, at the time of her murder, she had been living in downtown Salt Lake City near Durkee, Fisher said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Overlooked Evidence"}]

The biggest break in the case happened in April 2019 when detectives took a new look at existing evidence and realized they had DNA on a vaginal swab for both the victim and perpetrator.

It’s not clear how this evidence went overlooked for so long, Fisher said, but it appears to have been the result of a miscommunication between detectives and the crime lab.

still needed to figure out to whom they belonged.

Neither was found in the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) or on genetic DNA databases, still leaving them with no answers, so they kept pulling threads, Fisher said.

approved a $10,000 expenditure that allowed the sheriff’s office to contract with Identifiers International for a forensic genetic 

This led investigators to Durkee in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who reached out to the FBI for help identifying him.

The FBI agents procured some items from Durkee’s trash and determined that profile could not be excluded from the one taken from the swab.

“Not being excluded” is as close as law enforcement and science can legally get to saying it’s a likely match.

[{"type":"text","text":"“That was a good indication that this is our guy,” Fisher said."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Still, Alexander’s identity remained a mystery at that point."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Closing In On A Killer"}]

Even with Durkee’s identity as Alexander’s killer likely confirmed, it was not enough to collar him for the murder.

All it proved, Cox noted, is that the two had been intimate, but not that he killed her.

[{"type":"text","text":"So they kept digging, Fisher said."}]

In doing so, they learned Durkee moved quite a bit during the 1990s and early 2000s while working 

. This included stints in Nevada, Idaho and Colorado and Salt Lake City.

They also learned he’d been arrested for third-degree sexual assault in Wisconsin in 1978.

Along with moving frequently during this period, Durkee also changed his name, assuming aliases of James W. Kenedy and Carrol T. Hiel.

why he changed his name, he told detectives it was during a time in which he’d made bad decisions in his life and didn’t care to be known by his real name.

Then Fisher and Cox flew out to Wisconsin for the first of three interviews with Durkee in Milwaukee beginning in August 2024.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Pulling Out Teeth"}]

A couple things struck the detectives about Durkee during that first meeting. For starters, he was toothless.

This is because he’d pulled out all of his teeth over the years by himself, Durkee told them. With pliers.

[{"type":"text","text":"“That was a first for me,” Cox said."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Fisher agreed."}]

“We’ve done thousands of interviews, and I can tell you that is the first time I ever heard anybody tell me they pulled out their own teeth,” Fisher said, wondering if it would have been 27 or 28 total 

Another thing that struck the detectives as odd is that Durkee had a collection of Faraday bags and cages, which are used to block electromagnetic fields and wireless signals.

“They’re used by law enforcement primarily when we take a suspect’s phone, so it can be protected for forensic analysis, but you don’t normally see these types of things in someone’s home,” Fisher said. “It was shocking.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"More Conversations With Durkee"}]

During this initial conversation, when asked about his potential connection to the still unknown Jane Doe who’d been murdered 

in Elko, Durkee shared that he remembered giving a .380 pistol to a woman named “Mary.”

the caliber of the pistol used to kill her.

During his second meeting with detectives 

pistol, Durkee recalled having “intimate relations” with a woman named “Mary Alexander” or “Mary Washington” on Halloween.

Later, when detectives learned Alexander’s name, they’d wondered if that was guilt talking or if Durkee was trying to give them a clue.

He didn’t kill “Mary” that night, however, Durkee told detectives, claiming to have instead dropped her off at a blue house in Salt Lake City and never 

“He sure knew a lot of obscure details about the case, though,” Cox said.

Durkee knew both about Alexander’s tooth that had been in the process of having a root canal as well as the isotopes in her hair that had traced her to Wyoming.

He claimed this was because he was a true crime buff, Fisher said, which forensic evidence would prove turned out not to be true.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Catching A Killer"}]

It was their third conversation with Durkee that convinced both detectives they had the right guy.

Prior to their trip out, they wanted to stir Durkee up and asked local Milwaukee detectives to pay him a visit under the ruse of questioning him about a local missing woman.

Durkee knew about the woman and also knew that she had already been found. He found that odd, he later told the Elko detectives, and wondered why the local cops weren’t better at their jobs.

[{"type":"text","text":"“He always had to be the smartest guy in the room,” Fisher said."}]

But the ruse worked in that it clearly worried Durkee that investigators were closing in on him, prompting him to do 90 internet searches of some derivative of “Shafter Jane Doe” over the course of two days as they later discovered when they procured warrants for his digital devices.

For Fisher, that was the final piece of the puzzle in a rapidly 

He figured they had enough — along with the DNA — to make 

“I don’t think you would be able to explain 90 spontaneous searches after two detectives are asking about a completely unrelated missing woman,” Fisher said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Too Late"}]

However, as Fisher, Cox and Det. Sgt. Crystal Cox made their travel plans to go to Wisconsin to arrest Durkee, they learned he was already dead.

Durkee died at age 77 after having multiple strokes over a period of days that led to cardiac arrest.

Due to some glitch in the Wisconsin Vital Statistics Department, Durkee’s death was not immediately reported, so it took months for the news to make it to Elko County.

This shocked investigators because every indication in their databases showed he was still alive.

And though their seven-year investigation did not ultimately lead to an arrest, the detectives were happy to finally identify both Alexander and her probable killer.

“That was our first goal to finally answer the question ‘Who Am I?,’” Fisher said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Identifying Alexander"}]

It took about a month to track down Alexander’s family after learning her name.

She was initially identified through enhanced FBI latent fingerprint comparisons that led the detectives to her birth certificate that listed her as a "white American."

Fisher had never seen that distinction and learned it was because Alexander had been born in Germany.

Her mother married a serviceman who adopted Alexander before moving them to the United States in the early 1970s.

Alexander had been issued a Consular Report of Birth Abroad, which a person receives when one of their parents is a U.S. citizen.

With the help of a genealogist, Fisher and Cox were able to track down Alexander’s mother in California, who learned that her daughter was dead.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"“She was devastated,” Fisher said."}]

Alexander had been estranged from her family, who had no idea she’d been unidentified for all these decades. A DNA test confirmed Alexander was indeed her daughter.

There was a lot of emotion, Fisher recalled, when they were finally able to give her a name and finally put her to rest.

Cold case 6 14 26

<title>After 32 Years, Suspected ‘Shafter Jane Doe’ Killer Avoided Justice By Dying | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A detective was about to fly to Wisconsin to arrest the lead suspect in the 32-year cold case of a woman whose nude body was dumped along I-80 when he got the news the suspect was dead. The woman's time in Wyoming led to the breakthrough in the case.

After 32 Years, Suspected ‘Shafter Jane Doe’ Killer Avoided Justice By Dying

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Jackie Dorothy.

Jackie Dorothy

Wyoming Life

Around Wyoming

Oliver Perry “O.P” Hanna — pioneer, Indian fighter, frontiersman and first settler in Sheridan County — was 30 years old when law and order came to Buffalo, Wyoming. 

He related just what these changes meant for the future state of Wyoming in his memoir, “An Old-Timer’s Story of the Old Wild West.” 

Hanna had gone West when he was just 16 and had seen many changes over his lifetime. 

One notable change came in 1881 when the new Johnson County was formed in the Powder River and Bighorn country. 

An organizational election had been held April 19, 1881, and the new county government formed on May 10 of that year, Hanna’s birthday. 

Buffalo was named the county seat and Johnson County originally included all of today’s Johnson County, Sheridan County and portions of Big Horn and Washakie counties east of the Big Horn River. 

Judges, lawyers and others were appointed to maintain the peace and court was soon called to session.

Hanna’s name was drawn as one of 16 men to serve on the county’s first grand jury, and he had to go to Buffalo to sit on the backlog of court trials. 

To illustrate the changes the new law and order was bringing to Buffalo was the fact that the new county courthouse had originally been a dance hall. 

The new county commission bought the building, transforming it to a place, they hoped, of decorum and respect. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Feuding Neighbors"}]

During the two weeks that Hanna was in Buffalo learning how to be a proper law-abiding citizen, trouble was brewing with his neighbors on Little Goose Creek. 

The town of Big Horn had a council, a cemetery and a vigilante committee, according to Sally Springer, author of “Big Horn City Tidbits of History.” 

It was this latter committee that had sprung into action, led by Elder Benton, who was the Baptist minister, resident doctor, dentist and veterinarian. 

“They condemned Buck Martin, who had settled on a ranch up the creek near Elder Benton, as an undesirable citizen,” Hanna wrote. 

Old “Buck” Martin, according to Springer, was a trapper, mountain man and miner who had built a “cabin of sorts” on what was later known as Kemp Creek. 

It is now the Bar 13 Ranch south of Big Horn.

“Buck was a loner who had an intense dislike for people and a mean streak to boot,” Stringer wrote. “Those who found it neighborly to stop by his cabin found a mountain lion chained to one of the interior cabin walls.” 

These visitors rarely came back for a second visit. 

Martin had put in a garden but did not fence it properly, and the horses and cattle got to it and destroyed some of the vegetables according to Hanna. 

Martin used his shotgun on the stock, filling their hides with fine shot. After a while, he began using coarser shot until one of Benton's mules got such a big dose that he died the next day. 

Benton rode up and down the creek, called the brethren together, and related his outrage. 

The vigilante committee decided that justice was needed for the murder of the mule and that Martin should hang.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"New Law & Order"}]

Unaware of what his neighbors were planning, Hanna was learning what it meant to be on the first grand jury in Buffalo. 

Judge Blair was the first judge to hold court in northern Wyoming, and when the 16 men of the jury appeared before him, he looked them over.

 Blair then promptly appointed Hanna as foreman. 

Hanna said that gave him a shock and after a few moments, he jumped to his feet in protest.

“Judge, you've made a very poor selection,” Hanna said. “I have never had anything to do with court or law in my life, and I don't know any more about it than a Crow Indian.”

Blair was not to be swayed and told Hanna, “Well, you can't learn any younger.”

Blair gave Hanna some instructions, an armful of documents, and the grand jury filed out to a little log cabin that was situated near the old dance hall, now converted into the courthouse. 

Hanna said he dropped his armload of documents on the table and shouted, "Boys, if you know what to do with those papers, come on and go to it. I don't.”

Fortunately for Hanna, jury member Ed Chapman was experienced in the legal business and explained what to do, and before long the new grand jury had things running smoothly. 

“We were in session about two weeks and made many indictments, as the country was full of thieves, crooks and murderers,” Hanna said. 

It was also full of lawyers ready to defend all the accused. 

Hanna was not the only one who was learning the ropes of law and order. The new justice of the peace for Buffalo was G.E.A. Moeller and he was not experienced in regulating law and order. 

According to Hanna, Moeller was presiding at his first case that had long, drawn-out arguments by the lawyers, objections to questions put to the witnesses, and they were not making any headway. 

All at once Moeller jumped up and shouted, “Stop the evidence! Stop the evidence! My mind is made up!” 

Moeller turned to the prisoner and said, “I fine you $100 and 60 days in jail.”

A lawyer started to protest, but Moeller threatened to put him in jail for contempt of court. The case was thus settled. 

“I am not sure, but that plan would work very effectively in many cases at the present time,” Hanna later wrote. 

As for  Moeller, he became one of the prominent citizens of Buffalo in later years.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"An Old-Fashioned Hanging "}]

Armed with his new knowledge of the law, Hanna returned home to Big Horn to discover that all his neighbors had gone up to Benton’s ranch to hang Buck Martin. 

He immediately grabbed his fastest horse, Buster, and rushed up to the ranch. 

“When I arrived, they were all greatly excited,” Hanna wrote. “Bill Davis was telling them the way the Vigilante Committee used to attend to men like Martin in ‘California.'” 

Davis had a new rope and was showing the men how to tie a hangman's knot. The Big Horn residents “were all excited,” and many of them were ready to take part in the hanging. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Hanna understood their motivation. "}]

“In those days, horses and mules were at a premium and it was a serious thing to lose one,” Hanna said. 

However, after spending two weeks on the county’s first grand jury, Hanna said he “felt differently about the hanging matter.”  

He got up on a wagon and made a talk to the people gathered around. 

Hanna said he told them that they now had a court to try criminals, and if they hung Martin they would be the first to break the law, and there would be some very sorry men. 

“I told them how that scene of a hanging man would be before them always,” Hanna said. “They began to cool off and, after talking it over, decided to escort Buck out of the country.”

The committee went to Martin’s cabin and told him of their decision. He was told very plainly that if he ever came back, he was doomed for the gallows.

The men hitched his team to the wagon, put all his belongings in it, told him to get in and drive, which he did. T

wo men were detailed to guide him to the Montana line 30 miles north. That was the last the townfolk ever heard of Buck Martin. 

“I was told by the good citizens that had I not arrived just when I did and made that talk about the grand jury and the law, they surely would have hung him,” Hanna said.

OP Hanna inset 3 Buffalo 1883 Early bridge over Clear Creek and Occidental Hotel Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum 6 6 26

<title>When Frontiersman OP Hanna Stopped A Lynch Squad From Hanging A Man For A Killing A Mule | Cowboy State Daily</title>

After serving on Johnson County’s first grand jury in 1881, OP Hanna suddenly developed a respect for the law, talking a lynch squad out of hanging a man for killing a mule. “Had I not arrived just when I did ... they surely would have hung him,” he said.

When Frontiersman OP Hanna Stopped A Lynch Squad From Hanging A Man For A Killing A Mule

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

The snowmelt from a long, strong winter 50 years ago seemed to mean a new eastern Idaho dam and reservoir on the Teton River to supply private canals and enhance the region’s agricultural base would be filled more quickly than anticipated.

By June 3, 1976, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Teton Dam project was considered completed, but contractors still needed to apply an anti-corrosion coating to its “water conveyance features in the outlet tunnel,” said Erika Lopez, a Bureau of Reclamation spokesperson.

The reservoir contained 234,259 acre-feet of water when the dam failed, sending a deluge downriver.

Those who lived through that flood a half-century ago still remember it as “one of the scariest days” of their lives.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"It Broke Fast"}]

A 1996 Bureau of Reclamation report on the project 20 years after the historic flood caused by that failure states that on June 3, 1976, two small springs were discovered below the 305-foot-high dam. 

One was 600 feet and the other 900 feet away. They were considered “normal” for an embankment dam, an engineer reported.

Two days later, a construction worker inspecting the dam around 7:30 a.m. found muddy water flowing out of the dam’s right abutment, 15 feet above the stream bed. 

The flow increased, and then another leak was discovered. 

A whirlpool developed in the reservoir indicating water quickly escaping through the dam, the report states.

Warnings were issued downstream telling people to evacuate.

Heroic efforts by bulldozer operators on top of the dam failed to plug the leak and by 11:57 a.m., the potential disaster became a real one.

“Unfinished Teton Dam Collapses,” The Idaho Statesman reported on June 6, 1976. “Floods Sweep East Idaho Towns.”

The surging water hit Wilford, Sugar City, and Rexburg. 

Before the day was over, 11 people were dead, 112,000 acres of farmland under water, 20,000 livestock lost, 32 miles of railroad track destroyed, 4,000 homes flooded, 250 businesses impacted, 3,500 farm and ranch buildings damaged, and 65 canal systems for irrigation disrupted.

Those who were in the water’s path that day remember it well.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Scary Day"}]

Barbara Smith, 70, of Archer, Idaho, was a 19-year-old newlywed of three weeks and living in Rexburg. 

It was June 5, 1976, whe a dam on the Teton River collapsed, sending a torrent of water into the Idaho towns below. “It was one of scariest days of my entire life,” said a survivor, adding that 50 years later, the memories of the disaster are still vivid.

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