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<title>Daily Darwin: Monday, April 8, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Daily Darwin: Monday, April 8, 2024

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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.

The initial investigation focused on Grantham’s immediate circle, Cox confirmed, but he declined to provide any names of those questioned or potentially still on the suspect list.

“The investigation turned up numerous potential suspects,” he said in an email. “The certainty of the early suspects' involvement definitely wavered as time passed. Initially, the investigation focused on Belinda's immediate circle. However, as the investigation of those persons progressed it failed to definitively link any of them to the physical evidence at the scene.”

One of the names linked with Grantham’s murder by amateur sleuths and psychology researchers at Radford University in Virginia is Dale Wayne Eaton.

 of Lisa Marie Kimmell, also known as “Lil Miss” from her personalized license plate.

Kimmell disappeared while driving from Denver to her family’s home in Billings, Montana, and remained missing for eight days before her body was found floating in the North Platte near Casper, about 25 miles east of where Grantham’s body was found.

Her murder went unsolved for 14 years until DNA profiling linked Eaton to her kidnapping, rape and murder in 2002.

Kimmel’s Honda CR-X was later found buried on Eaton’s property. He was convicted in 2004 and faced the death penalty, which was later overturned.

Along with Grantham’s murder, Eaton is also a suspect in 

, who was found nude and strangled to death on a remote Natrona County ranch in September 1982.

The 18-year-old single mother had been working in an oilfield in Rawlins at the time and disappeared on June 29, 1982, while hitchhiking home to Buffalo to see her daughter. Her murder also remains unsolved.

Eaton is also suspected in the death of another young woman, 

, whose nude body was discovered partially buried in a shallow grave off remote road in Shoshoni in March 1983.

Johnson had been hitchhiking from Rawlins to Riverton to attend modeling school when she was killed. Her murder also remains unsolved.

Eaton also is considered a person of interest in the disappearance of long-distance runner Amy Wroe Bechtel, who vanished while running in the Shoshone National Forest, about 15 miles southwest of Lander, on July 24, 1997.

Eaton’s name resurfaced again in October 

when authorities took a second look at evidence

 found on a property in Waltman, in rural Natrona County, where Eaton had lived in his camper during that summer that might link him to Bechtel’s disappearance.

Eaton, today 81, is currently serving a life sentence at the Wyoming Medium Correctional Facility in Torrington.

He did not respond to Cowboy State Daily’s letter asking if he was involved in Grantham’s murder.

Cox was lukewarm on Eaton’s potential involvement in Grantham’s death.

“Due to the timeline and circumstances surrounding Belinda's case, Eaton is naturally someone who warrants examination,” Cox said. “However, at this stage, it is more accurate to view him as a person of interest rather than a formal suspect.”

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

Rebecca’s voice still catches when she talks about her early years with her little sister and all the milestones she’s missed.

She remembers a “kind heart,” and how close the two of them were in the years before their mother died — a loss that hit them both while they were still young.

Her sister was brilliant and gentle, Rebecca said. The weight of losing her has never gone away, and she wants, finally, to have justice.

Grantham’s cousin, Deb Anderson, had few specific memories of Grantham from around the time of her death. Anderson had moved away from Casper by then, absorbed in her own life.

Still, her memories of her cousin are warm. Anderson described Grantham as “just so sweet,” with “blonde hair and big blue eyes.”

Her clearest memory is of piling into Jean’s Corvair — Grantham’s mom’s car — with she and their other cousins, pretending they were headed somewhere exciting.

“I just remember how she was always happy, smiling,” Anderson said. “There was never any drama with her, you know, and that’s why it just shocked me when I even heard about what happened.”

[{"type":"text","text":"She, too, wants answers."}]

For Patterson, returning to these memories of Grantham is also a way of feeling close to her own mother, who was dear friends with Grantham.

Grantham wasn’t the only person in Jones’ life who had been murdered. Her brother, 

, had also been killed — in Denver, in 1974. That case, too, remains unsolved.

She recalled the story of her mother sliding a pinky ring onto Grantham’s finger and joking that it meant they were married. She spoke frequently of her friend in the days and months leading up to her death, Patterson said. The friendship had defined her. It is through moments like this that Patterson stays connected to both of them.

Patterson hopes that telling Grantham’s story might move someone, after all these years, to finally come forward.

Casper cold case North Platte River near casper David R Frazier via Alamy 7 4 26

<title>Sister Still Seeks Justice 44 Years After Casper Woman Found Dead In North Platte | Cowboy State Daily</title>

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.

Sister Still Seeks Justice 44 Years After Casper Woman Found Dead In North Platte

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Wyoming Life

Around Wyoming

DUBOIS — It was a scene straight out of a Mad Max movie. Two tanks met like gargantuan beasts on a dusty field of battle tucked behind the National Museum of Military Vehicles on Friday. 

The tanks were heralded first by the echoing rat-a-tat-tat of artillery over the hills of Dubois, thrilling a crowd of hundreds that gathered to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary by watching these rumbling 42-ton tanks show off. 

“Our thinking was this doesn’t have to just be solemn,” National Museum of Military Vehicles founder Dan Starks told Cowboy State Daily. “It can also be fun. And what’s more American than machine guns and tanks crushing cars?”

Starks didn’t get any disagreement from the huge crowds turning out for the daylong event devoted to America. More than 500 people showed up in the first hour, which offered two chances to see the tanks in action. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Starks couldn’t contain his grin."}]

“You see the crowd we’ve attracted with this kind of family fun,” he said. “So, because of that, the messages we’re delivering about the genius of our founding fathers is going to reach more ears, because we created a fun event, instead of just saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to be giving some lectures.'”

The star of the show was what Starks cheerfully calls the “Car Crusher.” It’s an 80-year-old M4 Sherman tank, which was the primary medium battle tank used by the United States and its Western allies during World War II. 

It’s a tank that’s practically purpose-built for exactly this kind of spectacle, Starks said.

“We call it the car crusher tank for two reasons,” he said. “One, it has steel tracks, and so those tracks are quite a bit less likely to be damaged driving over a car — driving over steel with the potential of sharp edges.”

In fact, the Sherman’s steel tracks is one of the reasons it can’t be used in the annual Fourth of July parade in Dubois, which features around 25 tanks and other military vehicles from the museum to celebrate Independence Day. 

“It would tear up the road,” Starks said. “But that’s exactly the kind of track to crush a car with. That particular tank also does not have fenders on the tracks, so there’s less that can get hung up from the car. 

"So it’s really a good configuration to just have the ridiculous fun of crushing your car with it.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Co-Starring The Leopard"}]

The M4’s co-star in this Mad Max approach to history was a 1981 German Leopard tank, one in a series of premier main battle tanks (MBTs) developed by Krauss-Maffei, now KNDS Deutschland GmbH & Co.

The original Leopard 1 MBTs revolutionized armored warfare in 1965, bringing superior mobility and a 105 mm gun to bear. Its successor, the Leopard 2, debuted in 1979 and is still one of the world’s most widely deployed advanced main battle tanks. 

Leopards weren’t designed to go head-to-head with other tanks, said Tom Hartman, who drove a tank on Friday. Theirs was more of a “scoot-and-shoot” strategy. 

“You’d see a target of opportunity, shoot it, and the second you shoot it, hit the reverse and speed away,” Hartman said. “Then you’d go another way and try to hit it from another angle.”

If the tank was spotted, it has a row of smoke grenades to deploy to put down instant cover in which to escape. 

“You’re supposed to be able to create a massive smoke screen a few hundred feet wide,” Hartman said. 

Canada was the first large purchaser of the vehicles, which are still in use by a number of countries, including Greece, Italy and Brazil. 

For a while, they were readily available for around $100,000. 

“Right now they cost anywhere between a quarter million dollars to $750,000,” Hartman said. “They made just a ton of these, I forget the exact figure, but a little country called Russia invaded its little neighbor friend called Ukraine, which doesn’t have a lot of Western tanks.”

Overnight, every available Leopard tank was suddenly headed to Ukraine.

From a distance, it looks like something of a feat when a tank rolls right over a car. 

People in the crowd cheered, kids squealed, and smartphones everywhere were rolling, getting video of cars being smashed flat.

For the tank crews, though, the real surprise was just how smooth the ride was.

“You can kind of feel it go like this,” Hartman said, demonstrating with his body leaning from one side to another. “But it’s not like one solid piece. You can feel it start to crush underneath you.”

That’s unlike the cinderblock wall, 2 feet high, that was part of the warmup obstacle course set up to demonstrate the tanks' capabilities before the cars were crushed. 

“It was really fun,” added Jared Radison, another driver. “But it’s honestly surprising how smooth it is. We came down pretty healthy, but other than that, going on these cars, you almost don’t feel it.”

For Casey Ladelle driving the M4 tank for the first time, he wasn’t sure how fast he should really go in the historical 80-year-old antique. 

“Like, how fast is too fast?” he wondered. “It’s an 80-year-old tank, and today was my first day hitting any obstacles with it.”

His first time rolling over the car, he hit it almost too slow. 

“The second time, I knew what was going to happen,” he added.

So he let the car have it, and it felt “really cool.”

All three drivers, however, were cognizant that the power the tanks gave them also meant awesome responsibility as well. 

“It’s a 42-ton machine that can go up to 45 mph,” Hartman said. “You do not want that going through anything out here, because you’re not going to feel it if you hit something.”

That had all three scanning the field, making sure they weren’t gong to run into each other or anything else. 

If the spectacle sounds one-of-a-kind, that’s not too far off. 

Starks and his crew can rattle off a short list of places on the planet where tanks might be smashing cars.

“There’s one in Bovington, England, which is probably the most famous one,” Hartman said. “There’s one in Canada, the Oshawa Tank Museum, which is a phenomenal museum.”

There are also a couple of high-end commercial “experiences” in Texas and Las Vegas.

“I mean, no museums, where their whole thing is like education, do this, like, ‘We’re going to crush your car,'” Hartman said.

At the for-profit tank experiences, the cost is typically $1,000 to $1,500 per person to crush a car. 

By contrast, spectators in Dubois got to watch the mayhem for $20, the price of regular admission, which also came with free rides and family-friendly demonstrations woven throughout the day.

For all the roar and spectacle, though, Starks is clear that the point of the event wasn’t just entertainment. 

He paired the fun with new exhibits as well as with a few lectures, including a reflective talk from Starks on what he called — to a round of applause and cheers — the “genius” of America's Founding Fathers.

Knocking down a bad government, Starks told the crowd that was enjoying hamburgers and sandwiches from the museum’s canteen, had been the easy part. 

The hard part is what came next — dreaming up a system that would be better than tyranny from a monarchy, or the equally bad: tyranny by a majority. 

“Just think about all the examples of genocide throughout history, modern and ancient history,” Starks said. “That’s majority rule. That’s the majority saying, ‘I’m going to wipe you out, you’re a minority.’ 

"Think of all the examples of, ‘My religion is such and such, and your religion isn’t, so I’m going to turn you into a fugitive.’” 

Majority rule sounds appealing on the surface, Starks said, but is really no better than tyranny by a minority. He said it overlooks the single most important premise of the U.S. Constitution, that all men are created equal.

The idea that all men are created equal was the “most radical, most compelling inspiration in all of history,” Starks said. 

There were no examples at the time of the kind of government the Founding Fathers wanted. 

It was something they had to invent themselves — a group of disparate men who had extremely different views on all sorts of issues, ranging from the role of the federal government to the issue of slavery. 

The differences between these 50-some men were at times so intense, friendships were destroyed, and the country itself all but torn apart, Starks said. 

What these men came up with, then, was not crafted in trust. They distrusted each other, and crafted America’s systems accordingly, he said. Some were in the majority, for now, others in the minority. But they recognized that could change, and realized they had to create a system that would protect the rights of each. 

“That’s where the genius of the Founding Fathers comes in,” Starks said. “They invented something that hadn’t existed before, and it’s called a constitutional republic.”

That republic is designed to put limits on majority rule, by separating the powers of the government into three branches, each one of which had powers that could check the other two, he said. They also added levers that could serve as emergency brakes — the filibuster, for example, and the electoral college. 

“You’ve got people saying, ‘Well the filibuster is anti-democratic,’” Starks said. “‘We should get rid of it. It should just be majority rule.’ No, we’re not majority rule. We’ve got checks against majority rule.”

Getting rid of the electoral college would be a similar mistake, Starks added. It would allow the states with the largest populations to determine national elections and make decisions without any deference at all to the minority.

“Yes, it is terribly frustrating and messy,” Starks said. “But it’s also ingenious. And it’s the best government anybody has ever devised and we’ve now gotten the benefit of it for 250 years.”

Tank crush car 7 4 26

<title>Dubois Military Museum Celebrates 250th By Crushing Cars With Tanks | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Military tanks spent an hour crushing cars Friday as an enthusiastic crowd cheered to celebrate America’s 250th at the National Museum of Military Vehicles in Dubois. “What’s more American than machine guns and tanks crushing cars?” owner Dan Starks said.

Dubois Military Museum Celebrates 250th By Crushing Cars With Tanks

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

Andrew Rossi

The Cody Stampede Parade made a big impression from the start Friday with Miss Rodeo America, Olivia Favero of Taylor, Utah, riding “Clyde McBuffalo,” 

 from the Mortenson Ranch in New Mexico.

What better way than a buffalo to kick off a parade celebrating 250 years of America in Buffalo Bill’s town?

Thousands of people packed along the route of the Cody Stampede Parade on Friday to kick off America’s 250th birthday. There were six George Washingtons, five grand marshals and a restored 40-foot Winchester that made its parade debut 50 years ago.

Daily Darwin: Monday, April 8, 2024

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