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[{"type":"text","text":"Guy dresses up in bear suit to scare hapless friend...."}]

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

<title>Daily Darwin: Friday, March 22, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Guy dresses up in bear suit to scare hapless friend....

Daily Darwin: Friday, March 22, 2024

 Guy dresses up in bear suit to scare hapless friend....

Kolby fedore

Kolby Fedore

Wyoming Life

Crime & Courts

A Kinnear man has spent years helping people convicted of crimes figure out what comes next when they leave prison.

Clifford Fewel runs Stay Free Forever, providing courses for people involved in the criminal justice system in Wyoming and Colorado. 

Some are still incarcerated. Others are on probation or parole. Many are trying to find work, rebuild relationships and adjust to a life outside prison that's far more complicated than simply walking through the gates.

The name of his company comes from something Fewel used to tell inmates while working in corrections. When someone was preparing to leave prison, instead of saying, "Don't come back," he would offer a more positive sendoff: "Stay free forever."

His courses cover employment, financial skills, digital literacy, reentry and self-awareness, but Fewel said the work often goes much deeper than teaching someone how to write a résumé.

It can mean helping people understand why they keep making the same mistakes, how their upbringing shaped them and how to move past the shame that can follow incarceration.

"I'm not a therapist," Fewel said. "I'm just a coach. I'm just a mentor. I'm just a guy who provides classes."

Sometimes, he has found, the first step toward finding and keeping a job is getting someone to believe they are capable of doing it.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"An Unlikely Career"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Fewel did not plan on a career in corrections."}]

After losing a newspaper advertising job and moving to Arizona, he needed work with benefits and reluctantly applied to the state prison system.

He knew prison guards when he was bartending in Folsom, California, and they did not exactly sell on the profession. But the prison job offered health insurance from day one, so he took it.

He worked as a corrections officer, joined the training cadre, became a programs officer and eventually moved into parole. One of his strengths, he said, was being able to relate to inmates without feeling superior to them. 

"I just don't believe that any one of us is any better than the others, despite what we may have done wrong," he said.

Working inside a prison also changed his perception of incarceration. Most days, he said, aren't filled with the violence and chaos depicted on television. Corrections officers and inmates might spend part of a shift talking about football, movies or the job market.

Fewel came to see his role differently, too. The inmates had already been judged and sentenced. His job wasn't to punish them again.

Eventually, he became increasingly interested in programs aimed at helping people succeed after release. He later moved to Colorado to provide those courses and added Wyoming to his territory after marrying and settling in Fremont County.

Fewel remembers teaching classes inside prison and asking inmates to physically choose sides of a room based on their answers to different questions.

[{"type":"text","text":"Ford or Chevy? Xbox or PlayStation? Chocolate or vanilla?"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Then he'd ask: When I got sent to prison, did I abandon my family?"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Most chose yes."}]

Fewel would challenge them to consider whether abandonment was actually what they'd intended. They might have intended to sell drugs, steal or engage in whatever behavior ultimately landed them in prison, but he didn't believe most woke up that morning planning to abandon their children, spouses or parents.

Sometimes seven or eight out of 10 would eventually stand up and move to the other side of the room.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"Self-forgiveness is huge,\" Fewel said."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Job Is A Job"}]

The former tribal judge was convicted on federal drug charges and served six months in federal prison. When she was released in June 2021, she returned to Wyoming through a halfway house in Casper.

Her sister picked her up at the airport, helped her get clothes and supported her while she worked to get back on her feet.

[{"type":"text","text":"One of Smith's requirements after prison was taking a course from Fewel."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Another was finding a job."}]

Smith had bachelor's and law degrees, but her first job after prison was housekeeping at a Casper hotel. She remembers making about $10.25 an hour.

"It was very humbling," Smith said. "It was the hardest I've ever worked for a job for the least amount of pay, but it was great."

The experience now informs what she tells other people leaving prison: "A job is a job."

For people whose criminal behavior was connected to substance use, Smith said employment provides more than a paycheck. It provides structure.

"If you have all this time on your hands, you're gonna go start using or start doing things you used to do before," she said.

Having somewhere to be every day gives people money, responsibility and routine.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"'Tripwires All Over The Place'"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Leaving prison doesn't necessarily mean unrestricted freedom."}]

People on probation or parole may still have rules about where they can go, what they can do and whom they must report to.

"There's freedom, yes, but not freedom like you and I enjoy," Fewel said. "There are tripwires all over the place."

For people who have spent decades behind bars, another challenge can be simply learning how the modern world works.

Fewel has worked with people who went to prison when phones were still attached to landlines or when mobile phones were bulky devices with antennas, only to emerge into a world run through smartphones and apps.

"Now they're flat-screen mobile computing units with television and movies and sports 24/7," Fewel said.

Learning to navigate everyday technology is a big piece of reentry, which is why digital literacy is among the courses he offers.

Plenty of hurdles await in the real world, Fewel said, and even with preparation and support, not everyone is guaranteed success.

Fewel still thinks about a former inmate named Cody who worked as a porter in the programs office at the Arizona prison. He remembers him as clean-cut, hardworking and creative.

Cody once led a group of inmates in building a detailed three-quarter-scale replica of a 1936 Ford pickup entirely from cardboard, complete with a stick shift, working gas cap and removable dipstick. The truck went on to win first place in a Fourth of July parade.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"He was a dynamo,\" Fewel said."}]

When Cody left prison, he planned to work as a diesel mechanic, but Fewel said a local restriction prevented him from doing so because of his felony record. He took another mechanic job instead, got married and initially seemed to be doing well.

About a year later, Fewel called to check on him and learned Cody had started drinking again, left his wife and moved away. She didn't know where he was.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"It was heartbreaking,\" Fewel said. "}]

Fewel said many offenders benefit from the structure and "guardrails" of prison. Outside, "old instincts, old patterns" can take over. 

Smith has seen those setbacks, too, but she doesn't necessarily consider them the end.

One client she worked with returned to custody three times before joining her program and trying again. On his fourth attempt, Smith said, he began working and earned his commercial learner's permit.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Words Of Encouragement"}]

Today, Smith is the administrator of the Northern Arapaho Reentry Agency, a Wind River Reservation program that helps people returning from prison find employment, housing, treatment and other services needed to rebuild their lives.

She helps people find jobs, complete applications, prepare résumés and get to interviews.

[{"type":"text","text":"Her work has also brought her relationship with Fewel full circle."}]

Smith knew Fewel when she worked as a tribal judge. After prison, she became one of his students.

Now, some of Smith's clients on federal probation are required to take Stay Free Forever courses, and when they do, Smith may serve as their life coach.

[{"type":"text","text":"She now considers Fewel a friend."}]

Smith said her own experience is valuable when she's sitting across from someone who feels hopeless.

She can tell them she, too, has been to prison. She has struggled with addiction and had to rebuild her own working life from the bottom.

[{"type":"text","text":"Then she can point to others who have done it."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"\"I know you can get a job,\" she tells them."}]

That kind of encouragement may be something some of her clients have rarely received, she explains.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Staying Free"}]

Fewel wants people to find work, but he doesn't want them to stop dreaming once they get their first paycheck.

One man he worked with loved motorcycles and told Fewel he wanted to own a Harley-Davidson dealership.

Eventually, he landed an entry-level position polishing bikes, which led to mechanical work and, later, a position as an assistant general manager.

Another man developed landscaping skills in prison and later went into the landscaping business with his brother.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"They're light years from where they were when they were,\" Fewel said."}]

Fewel said what keeps him doing the work is seeing someone's attitude change.

Finding the first job is important, but so is learning how to manage money, rebuild relationships, and recognize old patterns before falling back into them.

The larger goal for Fewel is helping people realize they don't have to be the same person they were when they were sent to prison.

Felony jobs Browning kitchen inset 8 9 26

<title>From Prison To Paycheck: Wyoming Man Finds Jobs For Felons To 'Stay Free Forever' | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Finding a job after prison is hard, and keeping it is harder, says one Wyoming man who knows the corrections system and helps felons get jobs. Clifford Fewel says new freedom has a lot of tripwires and his goal is to help these people "stay free forever."

From Prison To Paycheck: Wyoming Man Finds Jobs For Felons To 'Stay Free Forever'

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's general assignment reporter, Clair McFarland.

Clair McFarland

Politics

The final days of Wyoming’s primary election season have gotten so negative, Sen. Eric Barlow is wearing a vet sleeve to check his mailbox. 

The Republican gubernatorial candidate is one of the state’s most targeted political candidates, as multiple groups have launched negative mailers and TV commercials against him this summer.

He also has a handy stock of vet gloves from his two decades working as a veterinarian; when he performed pregnancy tests on cattle.

[{"type":"text","text":"That’s a rectal procedure."}]

Checking the mail during election season is also a rectal procedure, Barlow joked in a 

In the video Barlow approaches a row of mailboxes and announces that he and his wife have been on the road for four or five days, and, “well, when you get home, you gotta check the mail.”

He references he numerous TV, text, and mail ads flooding the dog days of the primary election season, which ends Aug. 18. 

“It just doesn’t make any sense, folks, that’s not how we treat people in Wyoming,” says Barlow. 

“So here’s what I suggest,” he continues in the video, donning a vet glove up to his shoulder. “You glove up.”

He adds: “You open carefully. Step back. Yep, there’s some in there, I can see it right from here.” 

Barlow tells the viewers to reach into the mailbox, “pull it out carefully, turn that sleeve inside out.”

The gloved Barlow in the video extricates a fecal-looking lump from the mailbox. 

“There. You’ve got it contained,” says Barlow on the video, inverting the glove and confining the lump inside it by tying a knot. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Technically, Yak Poop"}]

Barlow, a yak rancher, told Cowboy State Daily later that he shot the video using his own mailbox - and real dung. 

“If you want to be really technical, it was yak crap,” said Barlow in a Saturday-evening phone interview. 

The vivid demonstration echoes his veterinary practice, during which his “bread and butter” was pregnancy checks of ranch animals, including cattle. 

A cow’s abdomen isn’t suited for a vet to detect early pregnancy in an abdominal examination, so the vet dons a long-sleeve polyethylene glove up to his shoulder and checks the cow through her rectum, Barlow said. 

“It’s generally pretty dirty,” he said. Shifting back to the metaphor he added, “I don’t think it needs to be that way, but others do. So when you approach your mailbox you gotta be careful.” 

Barlow said from watching Federal Election Commission numbers, his team anticipates he’ll weather as much as another $325,000 worth of negative advertising in the next 10 days. 

One group, Women for Responsible Government Action, derided Barlow for voting against a bill that sought to ban child sex-change treatments in 2023. That same year however, Barlow voted in favor of a different bill with the same goal. 

A similar paradox unfolded when the Wyoming’s Turn PAC launched ads attacking Barlow for voting against a sanctuary cities ban in 2025 - when Barlow had voted in favor of a different sanctuary cities ban that same year. 

The one he voted against was widely opposed by Wyoming sheriffs, and died with around two-thirds of Senate Republicans voting against it. 

Wyoming’s Turn PAC invoked multiple other Barlow votes. The group asserted that Barlow’s record shows him supporting illegal immigrants. He called that a mischaracterization and discussed each vote in an 

He said in his Saturday interview that some people he encounters at events have said they find his humorous take on the negativity refreshing. The preg-check video is the latest in a series. 

[{"type":"text","text":"The governor's race isn’t the only one that has gone negative. "}]

U.S. House candidates Steve Friess and Chuck Gray have both been targeted. So have numerous legislative candidates. 

Barlow said after being on the road for about five days, he found 15 campaign mailers in his mailbox. At least one posed an attack on him, he added. 

[{"type":"text","text":"It’s Almost Over"}]

Barlow faces Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder, retired Marine Corps Col. Brent Bien, and Centennial man Curt Blake in the Republican primary election Aug. 18.

[{"type":"text","text":"Barlow, Degenfelder and Bien all had partial victories in recent weeks. "}]

 - which Cowboy State Daily has reviewed - showing him leading the race. 

 of the Wyoming Republican Party's state central committee. 

Trump-endorsed Degenfelder garnered more statements of support, and a 

The winner of that contest will face Democrat Kenneth Casner and Constitution Party nominee Rebecca Bextel, though Bextel has indicated on Facebook that she will “happily stay home” if Bien or Degenfelder wins the primary election. 

Barlow yak crap 8 8 26

<title>Eric Barlow Jokes About Negative Mailers By Pulling ‘Yak Crap’ From Mailbox | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Highly targeted gubernatorial candidate Eric Barlow joked Saturday about all the negative campaign ads by donning a vet glove and pulling yak dung from his own mailbox. “That’s not how we treat people in Wyoming,” he said in a social media video.

Eric Barlow Jokes About Negative Mailers By Pulling ‘Yak Crap’ From Mailbox

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

He was a longtime cowboy and foreman on a noted cattle ranch, cattle inspector for a few months, and gained the respect of Laramie County while serving as undersheriff.

Frank Roach stepped into the top job when his predecessor died in 1912 of kidney disease.

After being elected in 1914 and serving his own term, the 42-year-old sheriff headed out to investigate the reported theft of three horses and gear from a cattle ranch 18 miles west of Cheyenne on Sunday morning, April 30, 1916. 

The ranch was owned by Hans Nielson, but ran by Niels Nielson, who was no relation to his boss.

Married two years, Roach and his wife had just become parents of a baby boy. His wife was a Scottish immigrant and daughter of a banker who invested in Swan Land & Cattle Company. The couple met while Roach worked for Swan as foreman.

His wife was still recovering from the birth.

Once at the ranch, the sheriff and one of the Nielsons tracked the thieves through light snow that had fallen the previous day to the Colorado line and lost the trail as the day wore on. They came to ranch on the Colorado side and the rancher contacted neighboring ranches to warn them about horse thieves in the area.

At the Webster ranch just to the south, the matron of the ranch had news Roach wanted to hear.

“Two men answering the description given by him were at that moment eating a meal she had given them in her home,” the Fort Collins Express reported on May 4, 1916. “She was requested to hold them at the ranch house if possible.”

However, the suspects, Clyde B. Pearson, 27, and Cornelius Gray, 21, known as “Pete Burns,” heard the conversation and told Webster they would not stay in her barn. Instead, the went into the ranch’s pasture, camped in a box canyon and started a fire.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Box Canyon Camp"}]

When Roach, Nielson and three other ranchers recruited as posse members arrived, they could see the fire but noted the box canyon gave them an advantage if they tried to arrest them there.

Roach decided to wait until morning and figured they would return to the ranch’s barn for fresh horses. Instead the pair came back in the early morning for ammunition. They were not afraid to use bullets they already possessed.

Before Monday’s dawn on May 1, Roach and Nielson were shot and killed. The horse thieves mounted and tried to get away.

“Sheriff Roach and Nels Nelson (sic) Murdered by Two Horse Thieves,” the Wyoming Tribune reported in its fifth edition of the day on May 1, 1916, as it provided hungry readers with new information on the killings. “Officer and Granite Canyon Ranchman Shot Down at Webster Ranch South of Granite Canyon.”

Now, 110 years later, that sacrifice received special recognition from the Laramie County Sheriff’s Office.

On the anniversary of Roach’s death and at his gravesite in Cheyenne’s Lakeview Cemetery,

the department recently honored Roach and other officers from the county who have given their lives in the line of duty. A special marker characterizing the significance of Roach’s service and sacrifice was installed at his grave site and the department also introduced a five-point ring and star badge similar to what Roach wore. 

Laramie County Sheriff Brian Kozak said he was “humbled” and thankful for department deputies “correcting” an oversight and making sure that Roach’s sacrifice is always remembered.

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

Kozak plans to incorporate Roach’s sacrifice into part of the process of training new deputies.

“As sheriff, I will personally take deputies to the grave site to emphasize the meaning of the badge which is modeled after the one that Sheriff Roach wore,” he said. “The five points of the star represent our values —  brave, resilient, accountable, no-nonsense, dedicated and completing our mission, which is ‘Riding for the Brand’ as one team to fight crime.”

By all accounts in newspapers of the day, Roach took his law-enforcement role seriously and had the respect of those who knew him.

Born in Sussex County, Delaware, in 1874, Roach arrived in Wyoming 20 years later and joined the young men arriving in the West to wrangle cattle. He became foreman at the Swan Land & Cattle Company from 1902 to 1905.

In 1909 he was a cattle inspector for the state and then from September 1909 to February 1910 for the U.S. government. In 1910, he joined the Laramie County Sheriff’s Office as undersheriff. When Sheriff Lewellen Hughes died in January 1912, he was appointed sheriff to serve out his term.

When Roach came into office, his brother Alonzo S. Roach was serving as the sheriff of Platte County. Alonzo Roach would go on to become warden at the Wyoming State Prison in Rawlins.

Newspaper accounts show Roach was busy the month before his death chasing train robber William Carlisle. In August 1915 he was searching for a man who entered a ranch house and assaulted the rancher’s 20-year-old wife and their child.

An earlier case in 1913 had Roach arresting a respected ex-Cheyenne police officer who had served as a first sergeant in the U.S. Army. The man was illegally rustling cattle from a rancher. Hides from the rancher were found in a well.

On the early morning of his death, Roach had sent Nielson to the Webster Ranch barn and Floyd Russell and Perry Williams to a cabin as he kept an outside watch. 

One of the posse members, Art Russell, reportedly crawled down to see if the pair were at the fire. He overheard them talking about needing ammunition and planning to bypass the ranch and going to a sheep camp to get it, according to the Wyoming Tribune on May 1, 1916.

The Tribune stated the information for its story came from Laramie County Attorney Sam Thompson. It was confirmed by those ranchmen at the scene who returned to Cheyenne.

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

Once reporting what he heard to Roach, Art Russell later crawled back out to the camp and found the pair gone. 

He followed what he thought was their trail and it led him away to another ranch. When he arrived he learned Roach and the others had been ambushed, the newspaper reported.

Meanwhile, at the ranch after alternating watch duties between the three, at 2 a.m. 

Roach entered the cabin, sent Williams out and relieved him at about 3:30 a.m. Williams told others that a few minutes later shots were fired and he opened the door to the cabin when a voice yelled “Git back in there” and a bullet flew by.

When Williams and Floyd Russell ventured out at dawn, they found both the sheriff and Nielson dead from gunshots.

The Fort Collins Express reported on May 4, 1916, that the gunmen, Pearson and Gray, were found later in the day riding the stolen horses on a road by the sheriff and a deputy from Larimer County. 

When the law officers in a vehicle passed the pair, they stopped and the sheriff leveled his rifle on Pearson. But the deputy found himself facing the barrel of Gray, who pulled the trigger but the revolver did not fire.

The sheriff quickly covered both as the deputy pulled out his weapon. They arrested and disarmed the pair.

Once in Fort Collins, a posse from Cheyenne that included the county attorney and Charles B. Irwin, the rodeo promoter, arrived to ensure a proper investigation and to interrogate the suspects.

An initial “confession” was debunked and a second was signed by Pearson, who told W. C. Thomas, a friend of Roach’s, that he and “Pete Burns,” who was really Gray, had met 10 days before the shooting.

The newspaper reported Thomas convinced Pearson that he “was a close friend and admirer of the prisoner” as he obtained the details of the shooting.

In the confession, Pearson told Thomas they stole the horses and saddles from Nielson because he had once worked for him and did not like him. 

Pearson claimed on the morning of the shooting he and Gray went to the barn and found Nielson and took him at gunpoint outside, and took his gun away from him. Pearson said he gave Nielson’s weapon to Gray, the Wyoming Tribune reported on May 2, 1916.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Gunman’s Story"}]

Pearson said he ordered Nielson to walk ahead of them and met Roach and told him to “throw up his hands and do it quick.”

Pearson told Thomas that the sheriff said he had to put his rifle down and stepped over to put it on the ground and then put his hands in his pockets and “took a hip shot at me and hit my horse under the chin.”

“Then we both commenced firing. I fired three shots. I shot Roach and Burns shot Nielson,” he said.

Laramie County Undersheriff Orrin Babbitt said the “confession” Pearson made still did not line up with the evidence in the case.

Babbitt told the Cheyenne State Leader on May 3, 1916, that the evidence showed there was no confrontation with the horse thieves by the sheriff and that he was ambushed from behind by an assassin he was unaware was there.

Babbitt said Roach when found by those at daylight still had his revolver in his holster and it had not been fired. 

His sweater and overcoat were buttoned over it. When his rifle was recovered from Pearson, it was loaded with four shells and not been fired.

“The bullet that ended the life of the courageous sheriff of Laramie County entered the back of his head,” the Leader reported. “He therefore was not facing his assassin. He could not have engaged in any conversation with him for he was looking the other way.”

Roach was walking toward the barn when he was ambushed and shot by one of the thieves.

Babbitt told the paper Nielson likely died because he was surprised by a thief as he came out of the barn and then saw the sheriff shot and broke away from the thief and was shot in the abdomen, but fell about 30 feet away near the sheriff’s body.

The story told by Pearson about Roach’s “hip shot” at him was to “make the crime less heinous," Thompson told the Leader.

“Pearson cannot bring himself to say that he shot at an unsuspecting man, and so he fabricates a story of a conversation in order to make it appear that Sheriff Roach opened fire upon him and shot him in the heat of battle,” the newspaper quoted Thompson.

Newspapers reported that if the two thieves had been brought back to Cheyenne, there likely would have been an immediate hanging by mob justice.

Roach’s funeral was held at their home next to the jail due to his wife’s physical condition. 

Undersheriff Babbitt had asked the prisoners, including the train robber William Carlisle, to be quiet so as not to disturb the widow in her grief who was on the other side of the wall from the jail. They agreed.

The Wyoming Tribune on May 2, 1916, reported Carlisle had respect for the sheriff whom he had gotten to know following his arrest.

“My hands are not clean, there’s lots of things I’d do, but I wouldn’t shed human blood, I wouldn’t kill a man for anything,” the Tribune quoted him. “These fellows ought to be hung, I hope they swing.”

People from Wheatland, Laramie and Colorado joined hundreds in Cheyenne to pay their respects for the fallen sheriff.

The Wheatland Times reported on May 3 that Roach’s brother and sheriff of Platte County  immediately headed for Cheyenne on hearing the news of his brother’s murder.

“The affair is of special local interest because of the wide acquaintance with Frank Roach (many) had throughout this section. 

In 1916, well-respected Laramie County Sheriff Frank Roach had three horses stolen by thieves and pursued them into Colorado. He was gunned down by the thieves — shot in the back of the head on a ranch a few miles across Wyoming's southern border.

Daily Darwin: Friday, March 22, 2024

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