Daily Smile

Now for another terrifying edition of "If ghosts aren't real, explain this..."

NOTE: Some may find this footage disturbing. Watch at your own peril. 

Smile 2 22 24

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

<title>Daily Smile: Thursday, February 22, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Daily Smile: Thursday, February 22, 2024

 Now for another terrifying edition of "If ghosts aren't real, explain this..." NOTE: Some may find this footage disturbing. Watch at your own peril. 

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, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

Wyoming Life

Around Wyoming

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. 

She had gone to a construction site to pick up her husband at noon. The day before, he had enlisted in the U.S. Army.

“It was one of scariest days of my entire life,” she said. “Certainly the people who lived through it, it is the turning point of their life. 

"Even my little sisters, who thought it was such an adventure, have stated that they did not know that their lives would change irreversibly that day.”

Smith said when she picked up her husband, he told her about the dam collapse and the evacuation orders.

The couple then drove to her parents home in Rexburg. 

They also had heard the news, but while her mother advocated for moving their vehicles to the top of a hill and taking stuff out of the basement, her dad thought there would only be a few inches of water.

He also shrugged off the various orders coming from law enforcement about evacuation.

“When we’d say, ‘Dad, dad are we going to leave?’ He’d say, ‘They cannot make us evacuate, but they can keep us from coming back — and we’re not leaving,’” she said. “He had a business on his property with a lot of machinery and equipment.”

Within two hours, Smith and the others watched the waters coming down the street where her parents lived, covering the gutters and then taking down a fence that surrounded the property. 

By the time it reached into their home they had witnessed logs, cows, machinery and tires floating past the house.

Smith said her parents’ home stood on a stone foundation while waters rose to be about 2.5 feet deep inside and about 5 feet deep on the outside, she said. 

They lost their vehicles. Her dad lost some of the equipment he rented as part of his business.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Canoe Ride"}]

Smith and her husband later that day took a canoe ride to the basement apartment in town where they were living. 

The water reached to the shelf in their closet a couple of feet from the ceiling. Everything had to be washed and cleaned repeatedly as they tried to salvage what they could.

“Here it is 50 years later and I have a bookcase that still has flood mud on the back of it even though it has been washed and scrubbed,” she said. “It was really fine and silty and it is just a reminder.”

Smith said the empty lots created after the flood washed away homes are fewer now in Rexburg, but some remain.

Jacob Haeberle, dean of General and Transfer Education at the College of Eastern Idaho in Idaho Falls, said he was a 4-year-old with his family trying to get back to their home in Rexburg when they were stopped by state police at a roadblock.

“We were coming back from a wedding in California, and we’d heard some stuff on the radio as we were coming into Idaho but nothing concrete,” he said. “We got stopped in Idaho Falls by the state police at a roadblock and the officer asked us where we were going and we told him we were going to Rexburg. 

"And he said, ‘It’s not there anymore.’”

Haeberle said the officer was mistaken, but they learned two other towns were destroyed. Rexburg was hit hard, but because some of the town was up on a hill it “wasn’t fully wiped off the map,” he said.

Haeberle said when his family got into town, they found their home that stood on a little hill was untouched, though floodwaters claimed their garage. A car the family owned and had at a repair facility in town also became a casualty.

“It was found two days later underneath two pickups,” he said.

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

Lopez said for the 50th anniversary of the flood, the Bureau of Reclamation’s Columbia-Pacific Northwest Region Snake Field Office on June 5 sponsored a commemoration ceremony in collaboration with Teton Recreation Coalition partners.

“The overlook site got a brand new look,” she said. “It’s really beautiful.”

Interpretive panels placed by the Bureau of Reclamation now tell the story of the dam collapse and the cost to the communities below. 

The site also includes a new vault toilet, picnic area, and designated vehicle turnaround.

Fifty years after the disaster, Haeberle agrees that the impact and stories of the flood remain alive in the local region.

“The closer you are to Fremont County and Madison County in Idaho the bigger a deal it is,” he said. “But even in Idaho Falls there will be ‘before the flood’ and ‘after the flood’ dates in a person's life.”

Haeberle said the flood gets referenced often, and “every once in a while” there is talk about rebuilding the dam, but that “gets shouted down pretty quickly from people who remember what it was like.”

In some of older buildings and homes in Rexburg, the smell of the flood still remains and it “takes you right back to that time,” he said.

Smith said that while growing up, her parents often would mention “when they move back to Wyoming” because they had roots in Casper and had come to Idaho “by a turn of events.”  

The flood for them became the trigger to make the move, and her father sold his business and other properties. With her mom and younger sisters, they bought a ranch in the Cody area.

“My mom said that my dad never worked a day in his life after that because farming and ranching was such a joy,” she said. “He was a happy man and it was all because of the flood.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Another Dam"}]

Smith agrees that any talk about rebuilding a dam in that area remains a sensitive topic, though it has come up occasionally over the years. 

She said the volcanic rock that contributed to the dam failure in the Teton River gorge is still there and that any new ideas for a dam site are not going to work in any second attempt.

Lopez said the dam collapse led to the Bureau of Reclamation pushing for “The Safety of Dams Act” that became law on Nov. 2, 1978. 

The law authorized the Secretary of the Interior to “construct, restore, operate and maintain new or modified features” at federal dams to “protect lives and property and to ensure the physical integrity of Reclamation dams.”

She said any “future consideration of rebuilding Teton Dam” would require technical and environmental studies as well as “congressional involvement.”

The bureau’s 1996 report on the dam and its collapse stated that federal lawyers in 1976 concluded the government was not liable for damages. 

However, President Gerald Ford believed the government had a “moral responsibility” to pay restitution and asked Congress for money.

In the end, the government paid $322 million for the 7,563 claims it ruled valid.

California’s Rep. Leo Ryan, who would be assassinated in Guyana two years later, led a congressional investigation during the summer of 1976 into the dam’s collapse and was widely quoted in the nation’s newspapers — including the Turlock, California, Daily Journal — about its failure.

“The exact cause of the dam’s collapse is (still) not known, but it certainly was not an act of God,” he said in a UPI article published in the Journal’s Sept. 28, 1976 edition. “It was a man-made disaster that should be prevented from ever happening again at any other place in the future.”

Teton Dam 90 6 13 26

<title>‘Scariest Day Of My Entire Life': 50 Years After Living Through Teton River Flood | Cowboy State Daily</title>

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.

‘Scariest Day Of My Entire Life': 50 Years After Living Through Teton River Flood

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's Feature Reporter, Andrew Rossi.

Andrew Rossi

[{"type":"text","text":"American artist Edward T. Grigware is renowned for his murals. "}]

By the time he died in Cody in 1960, his work was featured in banks, hospitals, and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) chapels from Chicago to Los Angeles and as far as Hawaii.

Grigware’s most celebrated Wyoming mural depicting the history of the LDS church is on display in the Historic Cody Mural and Museum. 

It’s an excellent example of the painter’s commitment to realism in an age when the trendiest art was increasingly abstract.

However, there’s one painting in Grigware’s portfolio that’s full of realism — but a lot cheekier than anything else he ever did.

“Bottoms Up,” his 1940s painting of four curvaceous cowgirls wearing nothing by chaps from the waist down showing their bare bottoms, is Grigware’s only nude.

“It certainly made going into the lounge at the Holiday Inn worthwhile,” said Mack Frost, digital technician at the McCracken Research Library at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. “It was quite the topic of conversation.”

The painting is no longer hanging in the Holiday Inn and hasn’t been seen in years, which now has turned the conversation to whatever happened to “Bottoms Up?"

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Accomplished Artist"}]

Whatever happened to the racy painting titled “Bottoms Up" that hung for decades in the Cody Holiday Inn hotel? "The number of rumors, stories, and lies about that painting is unbelievable,” said its owner, adding it’s “where nobody will know where it's at.”

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