Daily Darwin

[{"type":"text","text":"Some people shouldn't be allowed to grill...."}]

Darwin 4 25 25

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

<title>Daily Darwin: Friday, April 25, 2025 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Some people shouldn't be allowed to grill....

Daily Darwin: Friday, April 25, 2025

 Some people shouldn't be allowed to grill....

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

Wyoming Life

Around Wyoming

CHEYENNE — A dad who once traded a black powder rifle for a rusted Model T decades ago left his four daughters and son with a lot of memories, and a lot of antique cars and parts.

That Model T acquired in the late 1950s began a hobby and series of antique cars that over nearly 70 years kept Alex Connell, who died on May 1, 2025 — and sometimes his kids — digging into Wyoming dirt for rusted treasure. 

They once scoured a national park as part of their dad’s effort to uncover car frames and find parts that would be transformed by the self-taught craftsman.

Now Connell’s legacy fills two garages and a barn on the north side of Cheyenne that contains three Packards mostly restored and nearly all the parts for an extremely rare 1907 American Underslung Roadster.

There also are scores of other parts for Packards, Model Ts and Model As.

“We had Bonhams come and look at them and they were so excited,” said Kathy Dillmon, Connell’s youngest daughter, referring to the international auction house. “We let them take a 1916 Studebaker, it wasn’t the best one.”

The price the car went for at an Arizona auction was well below the value the Bonham representative told the family it would likely bring. 

Their dad left them his estimates of the value of his cars. Now the heirs are looking at a long and winding road to determine next steps in selling their dad’s passion and collection.

The remaining nearly restored cars include a 1909 Packard Limo, 1909 Packard Touring Car, and 1929 Roadster.

Connell’s children — Kim Parker, 72; Kay Irwin, 70; Kris Connell-Johns, 67; Tom Connell, 65; and Dillmon, 67 — now have the cars listed with Horseless Carriage Club of America at reduced prices. 

They know that the older generation interested in antique models like these has given way to Baby Boomers more interested in Mopar muscle cars.

But they have stories to tell about family outings at Cheyenne Frontier Days parades, where they were all dressed in period clothes while riding in one of their dad’s restored machines.

Parker said both of their parents were born in Michigan, Alex Connell in Muskegon and Luann in Holland.

Connell enlisted in the U.S. Air Force after graduation from high school and was assigned to F.E. Warren Air Force Base for his technical school as a lineman.

After arriving on the base in 1952, one day her dad told his squadron’s leadership a story after mail call.

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

“Daddy told his commanding officer that he got a woman in trouble in Michigan and he had to get married right away,” she said. “That was a lie.”

The family story is that Connell hopped a train “like a hobo” and went back to Muskegon to knock on the door where Luann lived. 

Her mother answered on a Friday night and asked him what he was doing back in Michigan.

“I’m here to marry Lucy and we’re going to do it tomorrow,” Parker repeated her dad’s lines. “We’re going to get a train and go back to Cheyenne by Monday.”

The unsuspecting Luann, aka “Lucy,” agreed. 

Her mother and grandmother helped put together a Saturday wedding and they were married. She was 17, he was 19.

The couple caught a train back to Wyoming that had them sitting up in passenger seats for 24 hours, Parker said.

When they got to Cheyenne, they walked seven blocks from the depot to an apartment he had rented for them. 

Two years later, both his mother and Luann’s mother died of cancer, and Connell obtained a hardship discharge. They moved back to Michigan with 1-year-old Kim to help their families.

In Michigan, two more daughters (Kay Irwin and Kris Connell-Johns) were born. But the couple missed the West and the mountains. 

They moved back to Cheyenne in 1957 and Connell joined the pipefitters’ union and became an apprentice, and then journeyman, Parker said.

Connell’s children said that their dad’s career involved several construction projects that included schools, a water plant, hospitals and a lot of work for the Air Force on missile silo construction.

Kay Irwin remembers her dad one day being contacted by an F.E. Warren Air Force Base officer to do some welding at a missile site and how a helicopter was sent to pick him up and take him out there. He returned home at the end of the day.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Car Hobby Begins"}]

Tom Connell said his dad’s love of antique cars and restoring began before he returned to Wyoming. 

He had been a aficionado of black powder rifles when he learned about an old Ford someone had in Marne, Michigan.

“He traded a black powder rifle for a Model T,” he said. 

Alex Connell went on to become a self-taught craftsman and expert restoring cars, graduating to Model As and more upscale Packards, American Underslung and Pierce-Arrow Motor Cars.

In an article written for the Horseless Carriage Gazette in 1983, Alex Connell described how he restored a 1910 American Underslung after a friend showed him a flexible brass tube that he found while antelope hunting next to what he thought were remnants of an old Ford.

Connell pestered the friend to take him to the location, and when he got there saw the potential for something special.

“There, in a wash, lay the entire body, fenders and hood from a 1910 American Underslung just as it had been left there during the first part of World War II,” he wrote. “I found the owner of the property and he told me how he wrote to a scrap metal dealer in Torrington and instructed him to go to the ranch … and scrap out the old cars and machinery there and buy war bonds in the name of the owner.”

Connell wrote that he began his effort to restore the car, which spanned several years of finding parts, learning to fabricate his own on a metal lathe or using wooden frames and sheet metal to fashion parts.

Over the decades, his children estimate their dad collected and restored dozens of antique cars, then traded and sold many of them.

As part of their dad’s restoration efforts, the Connell kids remember their mother finding and making period clothing for them all to wear and driving the cars in a succession of Cheyenne Frontier Days parades.

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

Parker said when the movie “The Great Race” was released in 1965 starring Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon,  the local theater recruited her dad to display the American Underslung at the theater.

“It was such a great movie that the Paramount Theater downtown asked dad if they could put his main Underslung in the theater, and it was all roped off with beautiful brass poles and red velvet,” she said. “It was a beautiful showcase car.”

The Connell children grew up in a home that their parents built that came mostly from recycled materials from an Air Force base warehouse that their dad contracted to tear down. 

It was part of several home showcase tours, they said.

All remember their father coming home from work and going to garage where there were metal lathes, saws, and tools for his restoration work. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"There was always a project going on."}]

“I remember when I was, like, 10 years old, he had taken me in his truck and he was going to get this car frame out of Horse Creek that was kind of buried in the sand, and he dug and dug and couldn’t get it out,” Kay Irwin said. 

“And he put a two-by-four under the frame and he had me lean over on that two-by-four and bounce on it and try it get it out of the creek bed. We finally ended up getting it,” she added.

Parker said the only real family vacation they ever took involved their dad announcing they were going to go to Yellowstone. 

The family piled into a cab-over truck with a big trailer behind and instead drove to the south entrance of Grand Teton National Park.

Her dad parked the rig in the middle of a forest. 

That’s when Alex Connell broke the told his family that they weren’t going to vacation in Yellowstone and instead search for a Packard body that he heard was buried in a creek somewhere in Grand Teton.

“So, we spent days and days looking for that body in a creek,” Parker said. “I was walking in the woods and I couldn’t have been more than 12 or 13, and I walked up on an elk that was fully horns.

“I backed up, he just stayed there and watched me.”

After days of no luck finding the Packard, the family went to Yellowstone to visit Old Faithful, watched it erupt, then drove to Thermopolis to go swimming, she said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Restoring Pierce-Arrow"}]

Tom Connell tells the story of his dad meeting a man in a town east of Colorado Springs who owned an old Pierce Arrow Roadster that was identical to his dad’s Packard. 

The owner who was up in years told Alex Connell he bought the car when he was kid.

“He wanted to drive that some day before he died and he didn’t want to sell it,” Tom Connell said. “Right next to it was an old Lincoln Bus, and in the spur of the moment (dad) said, ‘I’ll take that car home and restore if for you in exchange for that Lincoln Bus.'”

Tom Connell said he and his dad hauled the Pierce Arrow back to Cheyenne and over a period restored it so that it was able to be driven and returned it to the Colorado owner. 

That man cried when they brought it back to him.

Alex Connell got the Lincoln Bus, but never got around the restoring it. It remains on the property as an item for his children to deal with.

Dillmon said her father sold and traded his restored cars and parts with people throughout the country and Europe, and she has boxes of his correspondence about parts and other facets of his restoration expertise.

Alex Connell also got into refurbishing big, old Minneapolis Steam Tractors and took a class to learn to drive them. 

The family story is that Luann Connell made him sell them because one day he drove a tractor into the house. The tractors were sold to a man in Argentina.

Working hard on his restoration efforts into his 70s, Alex Connell slowed down in the last two decades of life, but maintained his efforts in the garage for as long as he could. 

Luann Connell died in January 2025, and that same month Alex Connell fell and developed a brain bleed that required surgery.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Alex Connell died May 10, 2025. "}]

His children remain busy trying to find the right homes for his beloved antique vehicles and parts, but thankful for the memories he left behind.

“The goal is to find passionate buyers within the vintage car community who will drive, preserve, and enjoy them,” Dillmon said.

Dads Cars Connell Siblings 6 14 26

<title>Cheyenne Dad Leaves His Five Heirs Antique Packards — And A Lifetime of Memories | Cowboy State Daily</title>

The children of a Cheyenne car restorer inherited a lifetime collection of antique Packards and car parts that include a nearly complete disassembled 1907 American Underslung Roadster. Their goal is to find a buyer who will preserve and enjoy them.

Cheyenne Dad Leaves His Five Heirs Antique Packards — And A Lifetime of Memories

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily State Government and Politics reporter, Leo Wolfson.

Leo Wolfson For Cowboy State Daily

Sports

Beartooth Basin, located at nearly 11,000 feet of elevation in northern Wyoming, is North America’s only ski area open exclusively during the summer months.

Situated just 5 miles from the Montana border in the Beartooth Mountains outside Red Lodge, the basin symbolizes everything that bucks the direction of the nation’s mainstream ski industry.

The low-frills mountain describes itself as “backcountry skiing with a lift.” There is no base lodge, ski school, rental shop, or slopeside lodging. 

The ski area runs on a single generator. An old repurposed service truck with “Little League” emblazoned across the front serves as a combination lift-ticket office, snack shack, and lost-and-found department.

The dirt parking lot is small and full of potholes, people lounging in camping chairs, and plenty of smiles in the best spirit of ski-bummery.

“It’s just a really small, unique operation,” co-owner Justin Modroo told Cowboy State Daily. “When we’re rolling, it can really be quite smooth and fun and enjoyable.”

In an increasingly transactional society, where metrics and profit margins often seem to drive every business decision, skiers say Beartooth is heartwarming and surprising as an operation that looks beyond those concerns simply for the love of their sport.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"How It Works"}]

Operating for only a handful of weeks each summer and catering to a diehard niche of skiers and snowboarders, everything about Beartooth Basin 

What little profit the mountain generates, if any, is reinvested into operations, which unsurprisingly are not cheap.

As long as there is enough snow, the basin opens around Memorial Day each year, relying on the high-alpine Beartooth Highway to be cleared before operations can begin. 

Once open, the ski area remains operational as long as conditions allow. In 2019, it stayed open until July 4. This year, the goal is June 21, the summer solstice.

Two aging Poma surface lifts serve the ski area, making the ride uphill sometimes as nerve-racking as the trip down. Riding a Poma lift involves placing a small plastic disc beneath your hips and hoping your legs can hold on long enough as you’re towed to the top.

“It’s just simple, basic uphill travel to get people up the hill so they can go back down and have fun,” Modroo said.

The basin’s twin Poma lifts are relics dating back to the 1980s, and breakdowns are not uncommon. Located atop a mountain pass with no maintenance facility on-site, the ski area faces significant challenges when equipment fails.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"This year was no exception. "}]

The main drive on the upper lift failed earlier this month, forcing the mountain to close for roughly two weeks. 

Modroo described the situation as “pretty rough,” requiring the lift to be transported more than 90 minutes to Billings, Montana, for repairs. 

Now fixed and with the Beartooth Highway cleared of a late-season snow, Beartooth opened at 9 a.m. Sunday.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Modest Amenities, Five-Star Skiing"}]

As minimal as the amenities may be, the basin offers some of the most remarkable skiing in North America.

The runs are short but steep, reaching grades of nearly 50 degrees in some sections. According to Modroo, there’s always an opportunity “to get puckered,” ski slang for experiencing fear on the slopes.

Despite competing professionally on the World Freeskiing Tour and skiing some of the most challenging terrain on the planet, Modroo still describes the basin’s terrain as “mind-boggling.” 

Professional ski legends such as Tanner Hall, Karl Fostvedt, and Sander Hadley have also skied its slopes.

“People that go up there for the first time are always blown away — just absolutely blown away,” Modroo said. “Even if they’re pro skiers, even if they’re not skiers. It doesn’t get close to boring.”

Many of the runs resemble narrow snow corridors bordered by massive boulder walls. The snow is almost always slushy, creating a forgiving surface to navigate moguls that can grow as large as a small car.

From the top cornice, skiers are treated to sweeping views of the Beartooth Mountains. It is easy to become lost in the beauty of the landscape without ever feeling the need to make a turn.

Whether you’re an expert skier or simply trying to survive your way down the mountain, it is hard not to feel like a rock star as soft, mashed-potato snow sprays from beneath your skis and glitters in the high-elevation sunlight.

And despite it being summer skiing, conditions at 11,000 feet can quickly shift back to winter. Fresh June powder is not uncommon.

The ski area is staffed by professional ski patrollers and lift operators, but this crew is a special breed. They sacrifice a month of their summers to work long, unpredictable hours in an extremely rugged environment.

Aside from operating snowcats, the staff are true jacks-of-all-trades, doing whatever is necessary to keep the mountain running.

Cody native Dean Madley drives snowcats at the basin and has been skiing the mountain since childhood.

“The Beartooth Pass skiing community is filled with some of the most committed skiers and snowboarders anywhere, extending their seasons into the summer months,” Madley said. “The lift-access operation at Beartooth Basin is never easy and always unpredictable, but it is run by some of skiing’s most passionate people.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"The Basin’s History"}]

The Basin began its operations in 1962 when Austrians Pepi Gramshammer, Eric Sailer, and Anderl Molterer founded it as a summer training ground for alpine ski racers.

Over time, it became known as the Red Lodge International Ski and Snowboard Camp. When new owners took over, the ski area opened to the public for the first time in 1986. 

Since, the basin has earned a reputation for providing a raw, untamed skiing experience rooted in a passion for high-alpine summer skiing and snowboarding.

One of Modroo’s favorite Beartooth memories came in 2006, when he 

timed an avalanche-control blast to coincide with a drop from the top cornice

 to a landing roughly 15 feet below. As chunks of snow cascaded down the mountain behind him, Modroo linked perfect turns through the terrain.

The basin regularly uses avalanche-control explosives to reduce risk, and videos of the resulting slides frequently 

 because of the massive amounts of snow tumbling down the mountain.

Even those pale in comparison to some of the larger airs 

riders have been sending at the Basin this summer

The summer of 2020 was particularly memorable because Beartooth Basin became the first ski area in North America to reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Modroo remembers that summer fondly, describing the mountain at the time as “the happiest place on Earth."

A few years ago, Modroo and the other owners announced they were putting the ski area up for sale. They have yet to receive a serious offer, and Modroo said they are only interested in selling to someone who shares their vision.

He admits he does not really want to part with the mountain he has frequented since his days as a young ski racer, and hopes to retain a minority ownership stake if a buyer eventually emerges.

“For me, it’s just a labor of love, and I enjoy it,” he said.

Although Modroo dreams of someday building a tram from the base of the Beartooth Highway to the ski area, allowing access throughout the winter, such a project is unlikely anytime soon.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"And that’s probably OK."}]

The basin is already a diamond in the rough — rugged, beautiful, and fleeting.

Berartooth Basin6 6 14 26

<title>Inside North America's Only Summer-Only Ski Area: Wyoming's Beartooth Basin | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Beartooth Basin, located at nearly 11,000 feet of elevation in northern Wyoming, is North America’s only ski area open exclusively during the summer months. “People who go up there for the first time are always blown away," co-owner Justin Modroo said.

Inside North America's Only Summer-Only Ski Area: Wyoming's Beartooth Basin

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.

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.

Daily Darwin: Friday, April 25, 2025

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