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Michael P. Ramirez

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

<title>Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, October 22, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Zakary Sonntag

Wyoming Life

Around Wyoming

Hunter Rushing and his father Matt were on their way to Jamestown, Wyoming, on an afternoon errand last Aug. 23 when something unusual caught their attention at an intersection in Green River.

A chain-link fence had been knocked flat. Beyond it in the side yard of a mobile home, a three-wheeled motorcycle lay overturned. 

Then they saw the driver lying on his back in the grass.

They rushed to assist and found the man, later identified as 72-year-old Henry Voelz, conscious but disoriented, and bleeding badly.

“Holy crap,” said Hunter, recalling his initial reaction to the sight. 

The man didn’t appear to know what had happened nor how badly he was hurt, but the wound was significant.

The inside seam of Voelz’s jeans had been torn open from the groin to his knee, revealing a deep laceration wide enough that part of his leg sagged under its own weight.

“It was one of the deepest cuts I’ve ever seen,” Matt said, a statement that carries weight coming from a former first responder.

For Hunter, a 17-year-old Eagle Scout, it was the first life-threatening crash he’d encountered, but that didn’t cross his mind at the time.

“Instinct kind of kicked in,” he said, describing how he leapt into action.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"‘Just Stay With Us’"}]

Hunter pulled off his leather belt and handed it to his father, who started to make a tourniquet, then Hunter rushed to find a “twist-stick,” an improvised tightening device.

Together, they worked quickly, looping the belt high on the leg and twisting it tight enough to slow the bleeding.

“We did the best we could with what we had,” Matt said.

Matt went to coordinate with the property owner, and Hunter stayed at the man’s side, trying to keep him alert and awake as Voelz asked the same questions over again — where was he and what had happened, the man asked, unable to remember the crash.

“Just stay with us,” Hunter recalled telling him. “Help’s coming.”

The fire department was only a few blocks away, but even so, the first engine initially drove right past the scene.

Hunter took off running down the road to flag them down — one hand waving, the other holding up his belt-less pants. Soon, responders flooded in, and the Rushings pulled the fence back so they could get Voelz out on a gurney.

The incident shows ordinary people can step into extraordinary moments. Though the Rushings were not as ordinary as they appeared — they were Scouts.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Scouting In Decline"}]

Matt and Hunter said they were able to jump into action because of their training with the Boy Scouts of America, recently rebranded as Scouting America.

In Scouting, preparedness goes beyond tying knots or starting fires. It includes first-aid training and the expectation that when something goes wrong, you step in.

“I think it was just the way I was raised,” Hunter said. “One of the Scout laws is to be helpful, and it stuck with me.”

However, participation in Scouting has declined sharply in recent decades — from millions of members at its peak in the 1970s to fewer than 1 million today — meaning fewer young people receive that kind of training.

“Part of our oath is to help other people at all times,” said Matt, who leads Green River’s last remaining Scout troop. “That’s why we do this — so they’re ready for things you don’t expect.”

Their commitment to the oath made the difference that day.

“There were a bunch of grown adults just standing on the sideline while Hunter was in the thick of it,” Matt said. “One guy had his phone out. That’s something I’ve never understood; when you’ve got the ability to help, and you don’t.”

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

The crash wasn’t the first time Hunter stepped in to help in an emergency.

In junior high, a friend started choking on Goldfish crackers after laughing at a joke. Hunter tried back blows first. When that didn’t work, he switched to the Heimlich maneuver, which cleared his friend’s airway.

A few years later, he used the Heimlich, learned as a Scout, to help another choking classmate.

“In the moment it’s scary,” he said. “But I stayed calm.”

His father saw the same calm under pressure during the tourniquet incident.

“There was probably a storm going on inside,” Matt said. “But from the outside, he was calm and collected.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Hero Holding Up His Pants"}]

For helping save Voelz, Hunter was awarded the Boy Scouts of America’s National Certificate of Merit, which recognizes unusual acts of service.

At the awards ceremony in Utah, he briefly became something of a local celebrity.

“One leader referred to me as the ‘Hero Holding Up His Pants,’ because of how I was holding up my pants while I ran after the fire chief,” Hunter said.

For Matt, the moment lingers for another reason.

As a Scout leader, he’s spent years teaching young people to be prepared, and that afternoon, without warning, he watched his own son prove he was teaching them right.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"“I couldn’t be prouder,” he said."}]

Hunter was proud too, but not because of an award.

“It was really cool, getting the award. But I wouldn't have cared if I didn't get it. I was just proud of myself for being able to help," Hunter said.

Voelz could not be reached for comment on this story.

Scouts and Henry Voelz Flaming Gorge Harley Davidson via Facebook 6 14 26

<title>Green River Father And Son Credit Scout Training In Saving Injured Motorcyclist | Cowboy State Daily</title>

When a motorcyclist suffered life threatening injuries after a crash in Green River, 17-year-old Eagle Scout Hunter Rushing didn't hesitate. “Instinct kind of kicked in,” he said. He and his father credit Boy Scouts for knowing what to do.

Green River Father And Son Credit Scout Training In Saving Injured Motorcyclist

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's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Business

CHEYENNE — Two years ago, Ranch Eats food truck owner Troy Strand thought he’d finally solved his hiring problems. He decided to offer his food-service workers not just health insurance, but a 401(k) retirement benefit with a 4% match on top of that.

Wages at Ranch Eats start around $18 an hour and can climb to $40, plus gratuities and tips. 

“For the health insurance, we cover the costs for the employee 100%, and then they have the option to add on their family,” he said. “And if they want dental and vision, they have the option to add that on as well.”

Strand has been layering on more perks to keep workers, recently starting an employee of the quarter program, which includes a special outing with a limo ride and a $250 bonus.

Those measures have helped Strand with retention, but haven’t solved his hiring crunch.

“I keep banging my head against the wall,” he said. “I think we’re at about 24 employees right now, but we could easily hire another six full-time, and they’re just not there.”

Jobs range from cashiers to caterers with cooks and prep cooks in between. Experience isn’t required.

“We have a really good management team to teach everyone what they need to know,” he said. “We tell everyone we live by three principles, and we can teach the rest. 

"Like, we don’t expect people to have cooking experience or know how to drive a food truck or any of that. We tell them if you can be honest, if you can be on time, and a person of your word, and don’t lie or steal, if you can just do that, we’ll teach you everything else.”

Even that isn’t enough. In the last month, Strand hired roughly a dozen people. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Just one is still there. "}]

Strand isn’t alone. Across Wyoming, windows and billboards are sending out the same message — “We’re hiring” — for everything from cafés on up to medical clinics. 

With too few workers to go around, businesses have been quietly curtailing their hours on what seem like odd days — Tuesday and Wednesday — and billing that as “new summer hours.”

That structure lets them focus on high-traffic days while trying to avoid burning out the limited staff they do have.

In downtown Laramie, 2nd Street Deli co-owner Chrissy Matthews has watched the hiring crunch hollow out her schedule board.

Her deli needs about 15 people to comfortably cover roughly 20 shifts. But the applicants she’s been able to hire, who are mostly young, college-age workers, want to keep their shifts on one or two very specific days.

“We’ll have four people on vacation at once,” she said. “And then I’m scrambling, because everyone only wants two shifts, at best.”

That’s forced her to cut back hours. The deli used to stay open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., but now it adjusts hours to match what her patchwork staff can handle.

Back-of-the-house applications, meanwhile, have been even more difficult to fill. She hasn’t seen an application for that in more than a year, even though that’s really where 2nd Street Deli has the biggest need.

The staffing crunch turned personal a couple of months ago when her father died. There was no one she could rely upon to pick up the slack while she was trying to manage arrangements and take the time to grieve.

“We were only able to take two days off,” she said. “It was very heartbreaking.”

If restaurants and food trucks struggle to hire people at $18 an hour, it might be tempting to think the solution is just a matter of paying people more.

But Wyoming’s hiring crunch doesn’t disappear at higher income levels. 

Kyle Brost, chief executive officer for Gottsche Rehabilitation and Wellness, leads eight clinics across rural Wyoming. He would hire 10 people yesterday if he could, positions that range from paying $60,000 to $120,000 per year.

“We could have mental and behavioral health in every single one of our clinics,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “We have it in one clinic. Speech and language, we can have in every clinic. 

"Right now we have no speech and language therapists, and we’re understaffed in really three clinics in terms of occupational therapy, physical therapy.”

Despite offering above-median pay, hiring medical professionals to Wyoming has been challenging for the past 20 years, Brost added, but the pandemic seemed to make things significantly worse.

“A lot of people in the industry switched over to being travelers,” he said, referencing transient contract workers. “Travelers, while I appreciate them, they’re not joining the community. They’re not getting infused into our towns and contributing to where the town is going and what the lifestyle and the community engagement is.”

Brost hopes that will soon turn a corner, but said other challenges remain.

“Spending six to eight years to get a degree in physical or occupational therapy is expensive,” he said. “And then the Department of Education reclassified quite a few professions as not professional degrees, which limits the amount of student loans people can get.

"There’s just a lot of more broad macro-level things, like people leaving rural communities and not coming back.”

Wyoming business owners say they are leaving a lot of money on the table because they can’t fill open jobs, forcing them to turn away customers and reduce hours. “I keep banging my head against the wall,” said one owner.

Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Michael P. Ramirez

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Michael P. Ramirez

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