Daily Smile

[{"type":"text","text":"Now let's all watch a puppy hanging out with a duckling..."}]

Smile 10 28 23

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

<title>Daily Smile: Saturday, October 28, 2023 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Now let's all watch a puppy hanging out with a duckling...

Daily Smile: Saturday, October 28, 2023

 Now let's all watch a puppy hanging out with a duckling...

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

Wyoming Life

He was a “G-Man” who arrested the FBI’s most-wanted man in 1936 and later served as the special agent in charge in Detroit helping take down a Nazi spy ring and communicating with J. Edgar Hoover about Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford.

John Bugas would go on to be recruited by Henry Ford in 1944 and help oust the man Ford hired to be the corporation’s thug-like enforcer in what he later in life told a reporter was an encounter with an angry armed man.

“I didn’t know if whether I was going to get something between the shoulders or not,” he said.

Bugas retired as a vice president and consultant to the company in 1978.

But before any of that, Bugas was a Wamsutter ranch kid who played basketball for the University of Wyoming, starred on its stage in dramatic productions, and worked at Yellowstone National Park during his some of his collegiate summers. 

He also was noted for his stories about ranch life. Bugas spun a favorite tale to a Detroit Free Press reporter for a June 30, 1940, profile on him as he led the FBI office in the Motor City.

“When I was a kid, I never wore shoes or ate candy until I was 14," he told the reporter. "Finally, my dad told me he would get me some on his trip to town. So, 10 days later, I ran out a mile from the ranch house to meet him and he tossed me a couple of packages. 

"When he found me under the bed at the house, I had chewed halfway through one of the hob-nailed boots because I thought it was candy.”

Bugas was born in 1908 to Andrew and Helena Bugas in Rock Springs. A year later, the family moved to Wamsutter, where his father started a ranch and operated businesses, including a road construction company.

He attended the University of Wyoming’s preparatory high school graduating at 16 and obtained a scholarship to the university but because of his dad’s needs, took two years off before college to run a road construction crew.

Once in college, Bugas’ name appeared in the Casper Tribune-Herald on April 19, 1931, as a member of The University of Wyoming Players, a traveling theater troupe putting on a play, “The Poor Nut.”

On the university’s basketball team he was a forward. He also played baseball and ran track.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Park Ranger"}]

The school newspaper on April 20, 1933, wrote that Bugas was the law scholarship winner for 1933. He was in the Casper Tribune Herald’s July 27, 1933, edition as a Yellowstone Park ranger investigating a robbery that occurred where thieves took off with $1,000 from a store safe.

After graduation from the university’s law school, he passed the state’s bar exam, worked for a short time for a law firm and then joined the FBI.

Before his role leading the Detroit office in May 1938, he served in assignments in Los Angeles, Omaha, Washington, Alaska, and Birmingham, Alabama.

It was in Los Angeles that he made a name for himself when he and another agent interviewed a woman who said she knew where Thomas H. Robinson Jr. was living. Robinson topped the bureau’s “Most Wanted” list after the arrest of noted mobster Alvin Karpis in 1936. 

Robinson had evaded capture since the Oct. 10, 1934, national headline kidnapping of Alice Speed Stoll, a Louisville, Kentucky, socialite and wife of an oil executive.

Robinson, who had served time in an insane asylum, successfully made off with a $50,000 ransom after the kidnapping, though his wife and father were arrested in the plot.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Arresting The Most Wanted"}]

As a young agent in Los Angeles, Bugas met with a woman who contacted the FBI office and claimed to be Robinson’s lover and who wanted to turn him in. 

That led to Bugas and other agents going to Robinson’s home and taking him at gunpoint. 

“The arrest was made with the same speed and silence that has characterized more of the G-men raids,” The Los Angeles Daily News reported on May 12, 1936. “It was learned that Robinson was taken in Glendale around 8:30 p.m. and that the government chartered a transport plane at Grand Central Terminal shortly after 9 p.m.”

Robinson was sent to Louisville immediately.

A serialized story reprinted across the country by his lover and her description of her conversation with Bugas at a Los Angeles restaurant and the conduct of the FBI in the case put Bugas’ name on front pages across the nation.

Once in Detroit, Bugas was involved in several more high-profile cases. FBI files from the Bureau’s “The Vault” — that contains the documents released to the public — have several with Bugas as the author.

The FBI had an extensive file on aviator Charles Lindbergh during World War II as a Nazi sympathizer. 

Bugas sent J. Edgar Hoover a memo on Oct. 20, 1941, and a copy of a handwritten letter from Lindbergh to Henry Ford. In it Lindbergh deplored the “misinformation and propaganda that fills our press, our radio, and our motion picture theaters each day.”

The document blacked out the name of the person who provided the letter to Bugas.

“He gave me a photo static copy of a letter that Mr. Henry Ford, Sr. had received from Charles A. Lindbergh in which Lindbergh in the latter part mentions his sentiments in connection with the international policy of the United States Government,” Bugas wrote. “For your information, as of possible interest, I am transmitting herewith a photostatic copy of this letter.”

A memo from Bugas to a New York FBI official in June 1939 outlined the status of the city as it related to organized crime, the conduct of the Detroit Police Department, and part of the history of the Purple Gang in Detroit and how the gang was no longer functioning but two members had allegedly murdered another former member.

Another memo Bugas wrote on Oct. 13, 1942, related to Henry Ford. 

At that point in the U.S. due to the war, rationing of rubber and tires was in place. Bugas informed Hoover that an informant provided information that Ford told someone that he had enough tires to last his employees 18 years.

Bugas also led efforts to protect Detroit industries from espionage during the start of the war and in August 1943 announced the arrest of five persons, including a female spy dubbed “The Countess” who were all tied to Hitler’s regime.

But before the war was over, Bugas was recruited by Ford himself in 1944 to protect his grandchildren and other family members from kidnapping. Bugas initially worked in the office of Harry Bennett, the man hired by Ford years earlier to be a union buster and his personal fixer. 

Bennett was known to hire thugs, allegedly kept his pistol in his office, and in the 1940s had, because of his influence with the senior Ford, become a power at the automaker.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Showdown"}]

When Henry Ford II convinced his family to be given the lead role at the automaker in 1945 after his return from the U.S. Navy in 1943 due to the death of his father, he wanted Bennett gone and Bugas to replace him. Bugas was given the assignment to tell Bennett the news.

Bugas retold the story of his encounter with Bennett in a newspaper series on Henry Ford II published in 1978. The San Antonio Express-News carried the account in its March 18, 1978, edition.

Bugas told the reporter that Bennett had taken himself and Henry Ford II for a ride around the River Rouge plant after Ford told Bennett he “ought to retire.” Ford then returned to his office.

“I’m sitting over to the right of Bennett and from the desk, the drawer, he pulls out a gun,” Bugas said. “He slams it down on on the desk … jumps up and comes over to where I am sitting.”

Bugas said that he had a snub-nosed pistol in his belt. He told the reporter Bennett had probably been drinking whiskey heavily the previous night. Bennett then accused him of being behind the plot to oust him.

“He cursed me and he was very, very threatening. And I figured, ‘Oh my God, something is going to happen,” Bugas said. “It didn’t. He finally backed over to his chair and sat down completely exhausted.”

Bugas said he sat down in a chair beside Bennett and tried to convince him that it would be in his best interest to leave the organization. He said after about 20 minutes of conversation, Bennett calmed down.

“I didn’t want to get beat up, number one. I didn’t want to get shot, number two, and I didn’t want to shoot anybody, number three,” Bugas said. “So, I got up and walked out of that … room, never knowing whether I was going to get something between the shoulders or not.”

Henry Ford II initially made Bugas his main negotiator with unions, and he was elevated to a vice president role. Before leaving the company in 1968, Bugas helped the company grow internationally and he had become a known and respected player in the auto world.

Bugas became a wealthy man at Ford and had purchased a working Wyoming ranch near Cody. There is a photo of him on his ranch with Henry Ford II and industrialist Max Fischer to join him experiencing the West.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"University Benefactor"}]

He used his wealth to benefit the University of Wyoming by giving the university stock valued at $823,449 during a 10-year period, the Casper Star-Tribune reported on Jan. 9, 1973. Bugas said his donations reflected his “great affection for and deep interest in the state of Wyoming and its people and in a real sense, my gratitude for what the university and the state have done for me and my family.”

After his Ford career, Bugas became a director for several companies, including Standard Oil of Indiana and One Williams Street Fund and Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb. He joined the Buffalo Bill Historical Center’s board in 1962 and was credited with raising funds to build the Plains Indian Museum.

Bugas died Dec. 2, 1982, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, of complications after heart bypass surgery. He and his first wife, Margaret Stowe McCarty, who died in 1972, had three daughters and a son. He was remarried in 1975 to Joan Murphy.

His obituary in the Casper Star-Tribune on Dec. 4, 1982, stated his cremated remains were to be brought back to Wyoming for burial.

Henry Ford II was quoted in several newspapers about the loss of his friend.

“John Bugas was one of my closest and dearest friends,” he said. “His death is a tremendous loss to me personally. I will miss him very much.”

FBI agent and Wamsutter 7 4 26

<title>Wyoming History: Remarkable Life Of Wamsutter's John Bugas — FBI Star, Busted Nazis | Cowboy State Daily</title>

John Bugas was a Wamsutter ranch kid who became an FBI agent and caught the nation's most-wanted man in 1936. Then, as the special agent in charge in Detroit, he took down a Nazi spy ring. He went on to protect the Henry Ford family from kidnappers.

Wyoming History: Remarkable Life Of Wamsutter's John Bugas — FBI Star, Busted Nazis

ALTA — Seeing the sun rise over Grand Teton and the lesser peaks in the national park definitely is a perk for those in Alta.

They live on the back side of the mountains photographed and inundated by summer tourists in Jackson Hole.

The 429-resident community sits in the Teton Valley along the road to Grand Targhee Resort ski area. There are no bumper-to-bumper traffic lines that back up as tourists vie for views of a bison in Grand Teton National Park or the mountain scenes around Jackson Hole.

“It’s always been interesting living in a part of Wyoming where you couldn’t get to any other part of Wyoming unless you drove through Idaho,” said Jim Wilson, a fourth-generation farmer on the north side of Teton Creek. “Unless you hike or ride horses over the mountain, which many of us have done, you have to drive through Idaho to get to us.”

That hike over the Tetons involves 21 miles and 4,000 feet of elevation from Teton Canyon to Jenny Lake in Jackson Hole. Make sure to bring bear spray.

As a resident of Teton County, Wilson, along with fellow residents Steve Green and Hunter Christensen, knows that to get his license plates or go to the county clerk’s office involves at least a 40-mile drive with 20 miles through Idaho before re-entering the state over Teton Pass. 

And shopping — well, you do what you need to do.

“I’ve always claimed Wyoming,” said Green, a fourth-generation farmer on a 160-acre homestead in Alta. “(But) the only thing we do in Wyoming is pay taxes and license vehicles.”

Green, 70, who grows barley and hay on his farm south of Teton Creek and a few other leased properties, understands that having a view of the Tetons in his backyard is something to appreciate. But it’s also all he has ever known.

He characterizes his community and view as “the better side of Idaho.”

Christensen, 36, senior vice president at Hughes Foundation based in Jackson, grew up in Alta and went to school in the little elementary building that still serves students off of Ski Hill Road and then spent his middle school and high school years in Driggs, Idaho.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Driving Teton Pass"}]

Unlike Green and Wilson, he drives Teton Pass most work days in his front-wheel drive Toyota Camry through all of its seasons, and characterizes the commute as just the way of life for many who live in Alta.

“It’s a beautiful drive every day,” he said. “You never go over that pass and think, ‘Oh, this is terrible.’”

Christensen said there are days when traffic backs up entering Jackson in the morning or leaving in the afternoons. Commuters plan for it. The winter weather in recent years has not been as heavy as when he was growing up, but there are days when he might have to work from home.

Christensen said he knows Alta residents who work in Wyoming and others who work in Idaho. But their identity, though a border community, remains rooted in Wyoming.

“Sometimes they call it ‘Wydaho',” he said. “We have a lot of wonderful neighbors in Idaho, a lot of good heritage and community with our neighbors across the border, and then we still get to be part of Wyoming.”

Christensen, Wilson, and Green all agree that shopping for the vast majority of people who live in Alta takes place in Idaho. Driggs offers a well-stocked supermarket and gas stations as well as a few other services.

To find the box stores, such as Walmart or Costco, residents travel to Rexburg or Idaho Falls, rather than pay the “resort town” prices at stores in Jackson, Christensen said.

Green, who worked at a lumberyard in Driggs for several years in addition to farming, said he contracts with Great Western Malting in Blackfoot, Idaho, to sell his barley. Much of his hay is sold to livestock owners in the Teton Valley and some to horse ranches in Jackson.

The farm he works was homesteaded by his great-grandfather and he has a son who might take it over as a sideline when Green is done. Making money off the farm is more difficult than ever due to the costs of fertilizer and the taxes on his home and barns as part of Teton County, Wyoming.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Paying Taxes"}]

“I suspect there is always some kind of benefit to living in Wyoming versus Idaho, or Idaho versus Wyoming,” Green said. “For years, our property taxes and stuff were quite a bit higher than Idaho. Now Idaho, about 10 years ago, caught up. They kind of figured out they could charge more money, just like they do here.”

Green said he sold his cow herd about 25 years ago, but in recent years has purchased a steer or two in the spring to fatten up the family freezers. Predators have not been a problem.

Wilson works on the family farm run by his brother. They have the 160-acre homestead and have leased several properties to farm 1,500 acres of alfalfa, grass hay, barley, and a heritage wheat that has unaltered seed genetics from the wheat planted in the 1800s.

“We sell the wheat online or at farmer’s markets,” he said. The barley is sold in Idaho and the hay in Jackson and Teton Valley.

Wilson said he's often asked if he resents people moving into the community from other areas of the country to enjoy the scenery, skiing, hiking, or just walking their dog up the canyon.

He tells them he’s enjoyed the valley and the view for his entire life and certainly is willing to share it.

“I would describe it as heaven,” he said. “What I do resent is if they come in and try to change it to be like where they came from.”

Christensen said the community has elk on the outskirts, an occasional moose wandering through, and many black bears in recent years. During the winter, the traffic on Ski Hill Road to Grand Targhee picks up on the weekends.

On a recent weekday, Grand Targhee was hosting a mountain bike gathering that had cars going up and down the mountain and past an off-duty 

 Teton County Sheriff’s patrol car parked at the end of a driveway as if waiting for speeders to exceed the 25 mph limit.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Deputies In Community"}]

Teton County Sheriff’s Office Operations Lt. Mark Priest said he has two deputies who live in Alta, and other deputies live in Idaho. They typically drive through the community as part of their shifts before heading over the pass to do law enforcement in the more populated Jackson Hole region and other parts of the county.

In addition to Alta, the department is responsible for covering the popular hiking destination in nearby Darby Canyon as well as other remote spots on the west side of the Tetons. Those require deputies to traverse the pass and drive Idaho roads before crossing back into Wyoming and the county to respond to any issues.

Priest said his department has strong relations with the Idaho counties. If needed they sometimes secure a scene or provide an initial response to an incident if his department can’t get there immediately.

“Recently we have asked them less and less because of the fact we have two guys living (in Alta) and then our guys in Idaho who are able to respond from home as well,” he said.

Wilson said residents receive good service from the county and even in the winter the roads will be plowed while Idaho communities experience closures due to snow.

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

All three of the Alta residents spoke of a community that looks out for one another and helps in time of need.

“The people who live here are by far salt-of-the-earth-good people that have a lot of love for their neighbors,” Christensen said. “That’s what makes living in Alta, for sure, and Wyoming in general, wonderful for me.”

Wilson said he recalled a time in the 1960s when an Idaho senator wanted to annex Alta.

A story in the Casper Morning Star on Feb. 13, 1965, stated that the senator had advocated that “many residents of Wyoming’s Teton Valley would like to be come Idahoans because the mountains cut their communication with Wyoming business centers.”

It apparently was more fancy than fact. Residents voted it down, the newspaper reported.

Wilson said there is no other place on Earth that he would rather be and made clear there is no identity crisis in the community. In the 1990s, Alta successfully lobbied to get its own ZIP code to distinguish it from the Driggs-based rural route that defined the community for years.

Now the Driggs Post Office serves two ZIP codes: 83422 for the Idaho side and 83414 on mail that carriers deliver across the state line.

“We have considered ourselves citizens of Wyoming since the day I was born, and my dad was born, and my grandpa was born and my great-grandpa homesteaded up there,” Wilson said.

Steve Green 1 7 4 26

<title>Alta, Wyoming: The Town Cut Off From The Rest Of The State By Idaho & Mountains | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Residents of remote Alta, Wyoming, say they don't feel disconnected even though the only way to get to the rest of Wyoming (outside of riding a horse or hiking over the mountain) is a 20-mile drive through Idaho and over Teton Pass.

Alta, Wyoming: The Town Cut Off From The Rest Of The State By Idaho & Mountains

Jen kocher

Jen Kocher

Crime & Courts

Belynda May Grantham was a 20-year-old single mother still finding her footing when her partially clothed body was recovered from the bottom of the North Platte River outside of Glenrock, a rock tied to her neck, in August 1982. 

Grantham had been strangled. She lay submerged for days before a passing bicyclist spotted her.

It would take nearly a month and a newspaper sketch before anyone could identify her.

[{"type":"text","text":"Her murder has never been solved."}]

For her only remaining sibling, Rebecca Grantham, her sister’s death remains a source of pain. At 67 and in ailing health, she’d like to see someone brought to justice.

“She was a really good, smart girl who could have literally done anything with her life if given the chance,” Rebecca said of her younger sister.

[{"type":"text","text":"Her hope is to get answers before she dies."}]

The investigation remains active and ongoing, according to Ryan Cox, a commander with the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation who also oversees the agency’s cold-case team.

Cox, too, said he believes it’s not too late to finally solve this crime and asks anyone with information to come forward.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Push For Answers"}]

The murder has never stopped haunting her. Now living in Sacramento, California, Rebecca has teamed with Amanda Patterson in her quest for answers.

Patterson is the daughter of Bonnie Jones, Grantham’s best friend from their teenage years in Casper.

The two women were each carrying their own unresolved grief when they first connected on Facebook. Patterson had been helping her ailing mother type messages online and, through that, formed a bond with Rebecca.

After Jones passed away in February, they remained in touch. In early June, the two created 

the Facebook page “Justice for Belinda May Grantham

At some point during her teens, Grantham began spelling her first name “Belinda,” though never had it legally changed. For this reason, her name appears both ways in news stories about her murder.

The page shares news articles about the murder and the long-unidentified body, along with pleas for anyone with information to reach out to authorities.

Their hope was to renew interest in Grantham’s case and to invite people who knew her to share their memories and photographs — something Rebecca is especially eager for, as she has only one of her sister from childhood.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Putting Together Pieces"}]

Much like her death, the details of Grantham’s life in her final years remain a mystery to those who loved her. 

She was born in Washington state and her family moved through the Pacific Northwest before settling in Casper in 1963.

When Grantham and her siblings were teenagers, their mother, Jeanette, died, upending their lives. According to her obituary, Jeanette died after a lengthy illness at age 36 in November 1974.

Before her mother’s death, Grantham had been a straight-A student. She competed in the Future Farmers of America and took home ribbons for her homemade clothing at the 1977 Central Wyoming Fair. She made the honor roll at East Junior High School.

After losing her mother, Grantham struggled to find her bearings and ran away from time to time.

Their father remarried quickly, and the children, unable to get along with their new stepmother, scattered to relatives’ homes. They drifted in and out of group homes and foster care.

[{"type":"text","text":"There she met a tight group of friends, including Bonnie Jones."}]

Grantham and Jones had an instant connection, Patterson said. In fact, they were so close that Jones gave Grantham a friendship ring, which would be used to help identify her later.

Somewhere around 1978 and 1979, Grantham left Casper to work with a traveling carnival headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She did that for two years before returning to Wyoming.

 By then, Jones had moved to Wichita, Kansas, and the best friends stayed in touch through letters and phone calls.

In April 1981, Grantham gave birth to a baby girl, according to a birth announcement in the Casper-Star Tribune, which listed her address as Mills, Wyoming. It’s unclear if the father of the child was in her life at the time.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Piecing Together Mystery"}]

More than 40 years later, Belinda’s final days continue to baffle her family.

Just as mysterious as her murder is what Grantham’s life was like during that time. This was the era before cell phones, social media and surveillance cameras and the modern trappings that log peoples’ every move and help them stay connected to friends and family.

In 1980s, people communicated with landline telephones in their home and through letters.

Because Grantham tended to move around a lot, her loved ones didn’t piece together that she was missing.

“Because of this established pattern, her absence did not immediately alarm her family and friends,” Cox said.

Then they saw the sketch of the unidentified dead women in the paper and reality hit them hard.

Writing about that moment years later, the girls’ aunt, Jean Henry Mead, spoke of the shock of seeing the drawing in the paper.

“I gasped when I noticed the drawing of a murder victim in the newspaper one morning ...,” Mead 

Not long after, she received a frantic call from her mother-in-law, Grantham’s grandmother.

“No, it can’t be Belinda,” she wrote.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"What Happened That Night?"}]

Her friends and family scrambled to sort out the mystery of Grantham’s last steps.

In July, Grantham and a male friend took a trip to Kansas to see Jones but were unable to connect with her because she wasn’t home when they arrived, Patterson said.

For this reason, many of her friends had assumed Grantham was still in Kansas at the time of her disappearance.

Her living situation was fluid at that point, Cox said, but Grantham was reported to have been staying on and off with a family in Mills in the months leading up to her death.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Also unclear are her final moments."}]

Multiple witnesses report seeing her at the Husky Truck Stop and, later, at the Central Wyoming Fair, he said.

[{"type":"text","text":"Her last sighting was at about 8:30 p.m. Aug. 2 at the fair."}]

Cox further stated that records indicate Grantham was unemployed, but given the nature of carnival work could not rule out that she might have been at the fair working that night.

[{"type":"text","text":"Rebecca told Cox that it was highly possible she may have been."}]

Cox declined to say who reported spotting her and who she was seen with that night out of fear of jeopardizing the investigation.

Also unclear is when she was killed. Her body had likely been in the rushing water for anywhere from two to five days before being discovered by the bicyclist at about 10 a.m. the morning of Aug. 6.

Her body was recovered from the North Platte near a bridge and road that once connected Glenrock to the adjacent community of Rolling Hills before it was rerouted in the 1990s.

The Natrona County Coroner’s Office recorded her cause of death as asphyxia, the manner of death as homicide, according to the Verdict and Case Docket provided by the office.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Delayed Response"}]

News articles at the time reported the discovery of the body and a plea for help in identifying her.

An Aug. 11 article reports that the Converse County Sheriff’s Office was seeking the public’s help in identifying a partially clothed white female found in the North Platte River near Glenrock.

Grantham went unidentified for more than three weeks until a sketch was finally released to the media.

Grantham’s family has no clear answer as to why the sheriff’s office waited so long to release a sketch, but once itappeared in local media on Aug. 27, friends and family identified her immediately.

An Aug. 31 article in the Casper Star-Tribune confirmed Grantham had been named.

Rebecca said the early coverage was painful for her family, who felt it reduced her sister to her circumstances.

The Star-Tribune, reporting on Aug. 31, quoted former Converse County Sheriff Chuck Widick, who had characterized Grantham as “a known runaway from an early age” and a ward of the state “several times.”

He also called it running away to join a carnival, Rebecca noted — rather than moving to New Mexico to take a job.

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

That Grantham’s body had remained in the water for several days in a rushing river complicated the investigation. 

In March 1983, five unnamed pieces of evidence collected from Grantham were submitted to the DCI’s crime lab, but the biological volume of trace evidence was insufficient to produce a DNA profile, according to a source within the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office familiar with the case who asked not to be named.

Whether Grantham was sexually assaulted cannot be shared under state statute that prevents releasing the identities of these victims, though investigators did confirm the absence of a semen sample for DNA testing.

The source said this left investigators with little to go on. 

When short tandem repeat DNA analysis emerged in the 1990s — a technique using short, repeating sequences of DNA to generate a genetic profile — the evidence was resubmitted for testing in 2006, again without result.

Investigators remain hopeful that future developments in forensic technology might yet yield answers, but in the meantime they are counting on someone with knowledge of what happened to Grantham to finally step forward.

“We would welcome them with open arms quietly and get them to the right place very quickly,” one source said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Rumors Abound"}]

In the absence of answers, rumors abounded about who was responsible for her murder.

According to Mead’s blog entry in 2008, she heard stories about Grantham’s boyfriend strangling her and dumping her body in a bathtub filled with water.

“But why hadn’t the police arrested him?” she asked.

Rebecca also heard these same rumors and said several people in Grantham’s circle of friends were questioned, as were family members. She recalled one of her male cousins being questioned and asked to give a sample of DNA.

It’s been 44 years since a young Casper woman was found dead in the North Platte River with a rock tied around her neck. The murder has never stopped haunting her older sister Rebecca. In failing health, Rebecca is hoping to find answers before she dies.

Daily Smile: Saturday, October 28, 2023

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