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[{"type":"text","text":"Best relationship advice we've heard....."}]

Relationships 5 28 25

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

<title>Today In Relationships: Wednesday, May 28, 2025 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Best relationship advice we've heard.....

Today In Relationships: Wednesday, May 28, 2025

 Best relationship advice we've heard.....

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

Andrew Rossi

Wyoming Life

Around Wyoming

Meeteetse resident and paranormal investigator Tami Currie has added another object to her collection of haunted objects: an 1880s Old West grave marker with a criminal history.

“I walked into the Hole in the Wall antique store in Meeteetse and the owner, John Fremlin, said ‘I have an object you might be interested in,’” Currie told Cowboy State Daily. “He showed it to me, and I immediately knew I had to have it. There was no question about it.”

Currie has added the grave marker to the eclectic assemblage of items she’s obtained during her career as a paranormal investigator. She holds onto anything that has “energy attached to it.”

“There’s a story with this piece, and I’m going to make sure it’s preserved and told,” she said. “I don't like it when people are forgotten.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Submitted For Evidence"}]

Currie doesn’t have a certificate of authenticity for her grave marker, per se. What she does have is documentation from the Ogallala Police Department in Nebraska, which once retained the grave marker as evidence of a crime.

“It was taken into the police department in 1965 and documented as evidence,” she said.

Determining whose grave the marker had been marking was easy. It was placed at the grave of Joseph Evans, buried in Nebraska’s Boot Hill Cemetery in 1882.

Figuring out how the grave marker was involved in the crime took some sleuthing. Currie called the Ogallala Historical Society to get the details on what happened.

“I guess you want to call it a reproduction of the original,” she said. “They did a renovation in the cemetery in 1963 and put new markers so they could preserve the originals. That marker was stolen sometime between 1963 and 1965.”

During a routine traffic stop in 1965, an Ogallala police officer found the grave marker in the trunk of a vehicle being driven by John Fincher. 

[{"type":"text","text":"He was charged with theft, and the marker was retained as evidence."}]

Currie isn’t sure when the grave marker got out of the Ogallala Police Department’s evidence room, but she’s confident that she’s legally obtained it. Furthermore, Evans doesn’t need it back.

“They actually gave him a really decent headstone, and he's not buried at that cemetery anymore,” she said. “I had to make sure it was completely legal for me to own it.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Reading The Energy"}]

For Currie, collecting paranormal artifacts is part of the allure of paranormal investigation. She’s been traveling the country, visiting haunted places and trying to communicate with the dead, for over a decade.

Her collection includes the original glass doors from the old Mount Maurice hospital in Red Lodge, Montana, and a key that locked a jail cell in Salt Lake City, Utah.

“That key locked people into that cell and never let them out,” she said. “They perished in that cell.”

She got one of her most unusual pieces in Meeteetse: an abandoned prosthetic leg.

“I found it in the basement of the Cowboy Bar, and the old owners let me keep it,” she said. “I think it’s from the 1930s.”

Collecting these objects is about more than morbid curiosity. Currie sees them as pieces of people’s stories that “deserve respect.”

Joseph Evans’ stolen grave marker is an excellent example of that. He had barely started to live his life when he died on Dec. 15, 1882, at age 19.

“A gentleman with the Ogallala Historical Society told me that Evans ‘perished by timber.’ I assume he was cutting wood or something when he died.”

Evans’s story is sad and was cut too short. That’s why Currie believes it’s important to preserve his stolen grave marker.

“These things belonged to somebody, and sometimes they are tossed to the side,” she said. “People deserve to be remembered.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Calls And Communications"}]

When you’re an experienced paranormal investigator in Wyoming, people want to talk to you, either over the phone or from beyond the grave.

Currie has done several paranormal investigations in Wyoming, including the Buffalo Bill Center of the West and Old Trail Town in Cody. 

She’s worked in the historic Irma Hotel, allegedly one of the most haunted places in the state, but hasn’t had much success.

“The Irma Hotel definitely has a lot of energy, but you're not going to find it because it's such an active place,” she said. “It's really hard to say something was paranormal as opposed to it was just somebody in a room.”

For Currie, the most haunted experience she ever had was on the upper floors of Meeteetse’s Masonic Hall.

“That’s one of the scariest places I’ve ever been to,” she said. “It’s primarily upstairs where they would perform their ceremonies. That building holds a lot of energy, and it's a lot of negative energy.”

Currie also travels to other states to meet up with other paranormal investigators. Her next trip will be exploring the old Washoe Club in Virginia City, Nevada, which has been featured on dozens of ghost-hunting television series.

Currie used to conduct and post videos of paranormal investigations with her friend, Kara McCoy, as 

Sadly, McCoy died on Dec. 4, 2025, after a long battle with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and a rare genetic cystic lung disease.

“I might need to change the name, because I’m not a posse anymore,” she said.

Nevertheless, Currie keeps her friend’s spirit alive by continuing to explore and indulge in the paranormal.

[{"type":"text","text":"“It’s something I’m extremely passionate about,” she said."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Collection Of Curios"}]

Currie said she never aspired to be a collector of haunted artifacts. The stolen grave marker is another addition to her growing collection.

“I will collect anything that has an odd energy attached to it,” she said. “I started collecting creepy dolls for some reason. I don't like dolls, but I have one that is haunted, and I’d like to accumulate more.”

The Hole in the Wall antiques store has been a great place to acquire these artifacts. Oddly enough, many of the items she’s found there have come from Nebraska.

[{"type":"text","text":"“I don't know why they travel this far, but they do,” she said."}]

Currie would eventually like to open her own antiques store or museum of haunted objects to showcase her collection. Joseph Evans’s grave marker will have a prominent place in that display.

While she fully intends to preserve the grave marker, Currie hasn’t yet noticed any of its paranormal properties. With a history that unusual and intriguing, she’s confident it’s got a unique story to tell.

“I firmly believe people on the other side have stories that they want told, and they're always willing to talk to you,” she said.

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<title>Meeteetse Woman Adds Stolen Old West Grave Marker To Haunted Collection | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Meeteetse resident and paranormal investigator Tami Currie has added an 1880s grave marker with a criminal history to her collection of haunted objects. “People on the other side have stories they want told, and they're willing to talk to you,” she said.

Meeteetse Woman Adds Stolen Old West Grave Marker To Haunted Collection

Jen kocher

Jen Kocher

Crime & Courts

Law Enforcement

Lt. Doug Fisher had been about a week away from flying to Wisconsin to arrest Roger Durkee when he got the news: Durkee was dead.

The cat-and-mouse game Durkee had been playing with Elko County Sheriff’s Office (ECSO) detectives for the past few years was officially over.

[{"type":"text","text":"Fisher called the news bittersweet."}]

He and ECSO Det. Alex Cox had been looking forward to finally putting the cuffs on Durkee, who had spent 32 years eluding authorities after allegedly murdering an unidentified woman and dumping her nude body at a remote desert exit off Interstate 80 in Nevada.

but both officers agree that identifying Durkee’s victim 

For decades, she was known only as “Shafter Jane Doe,” named for the highway exit where she was found in November 1993.

detectives finally identified her as Marion Hertha Alexander

, a 25-year-old German immigrant who had been living in Salt Lake City, Utah, when she crossed paths with Durkee.

The woman also had spent seven months in Afton, Wyoming, shortly before she was killed, which was determined in 2010 via a breakthrough isotope testing procedure. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Family Devastated"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Alexander’s mother was devastated, Fisher said."}]

He and Cox had driven to her California home in January to tell her in person. She had met her husband, a

She married him and returned to California with him and her children in 1972.

Alexander left home in her late teens — a free spirit, her mother told detectives, who drifted and grew distant from the family.

They had not known she was missing and were devastated 

Her mother is now working with the sheriff’s office to finalize the inscription on a new headstone 

 paid for by the Elko County Commissioners.

[{"type":"text","text":"After more than three decades, they finally has the answer."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"“We want to make sure we finally get Mary laid to rest,” Fisher said."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Little To Go On At First"}]

Many detectives have worked on Alexander’s case over the years. It was not their only cold case, Fisher said.

Along with Alexander, there are five other unidentified people in Elko County dating back to 1972, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs).

[{"type":"text","text":"At first, they had little to go on."}]

When Alexander’s body was discovered about a week after she was killed, it was already badly decomposed.  

She’d been shot in the chest and the back with a small

caliber firearm and had been severely beaten in the face.

There was little to no evidence left at the scene, leaving authorities to believe she’d been killed elsewhere and dumped afterward.

Apart from a partial right thumbprint that had no match in federal databases, detectives had little to go on. The only other identifiers were a tooth that was in the process of getting a root canal and a 2-by-4-inch burn scar or birthmark on her right calf.

To draw attention to the case, detectives reached out to the national media and also held a funeral for her.

Her story initially gained traction after it was picked up by the 

news program “Hard Copy.” but it ultimately yielded no results.

The sheriff’s office took advantage of technological advancements over the years, including having a forensic facial reconstruction done as well as stable isotope ratio analysis of a hair follicle that linked her to Afton, Wyoming, where it was suspected she’d spent the last seven months of her life.

Oddly, this was one detail that the detectives couldn’t track down upon finally learning her identity.

They found addresses for her in California, Oregon, Utah and southern Nevada, but nothing in Wyoming.

In fact, at the time of her murder, she had been living in downtown Salt Lake City near Durkee, Fisher said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Overlooked Evidence"}]

The biggest break in the case happened in April 2019 when detectives took a new look at existing evidence and realized they had DNA on a vaginal swab for both the victim and perpetrator.

It’s not clear how this evidence went overlooked for so long, Fisher said, but it appears to have been the result of a miscommunication between detectives and the crime lab.

still needed to figure out to whom they belonged.

Neither was found in the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) or on genetic DNA databases, still leaving them with no answers, so they kept pulling threads, Fisher said.

approved a $10,000 expenditure that allowed the sheriff’s office to contract with Identifiers International for a forensic genetic 

This led investigators to Durkee in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who reached out to the FBI for help identifying him.

The FBI agents procured some items from Durkee’s trash and determined that profile could not be excluded from the one taken from the swab.

“Not being excluded” is as close as law enforcement and science can legally get to saying it’s a likely match.

[{"type":"text","text":"“That was a good indication that this is our guy,” Fisher said."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Still, Alexander’s identity remained a mystery at that point."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Closing In On A Killer"}]

Even with Durkee’s identity as Alexander’s killer likely confirmed, it was not enough to collar him for the murder.

All it proved, Cox noted, is that the two had been intimate, but not that he killed her.

[{"type":"text","text":"So they kept digging, Fisher said."}]

In doing so, they learned Durkee moved quite a bit during the 1990s and early 2000s while working 

. This included stints in Nevada, Idaho and Colorado and Salt Lake City.

They also learned he’d been arrested for third-degree sexual assault in Wisconsin in 1978.

Along with moving frequently during this period, Durkee also changed his name, assuming aliases of James W. Kenedy and Carrol T. Hiel.

why he changed his name, he told detectives it was during a time in which he’d made bad decisions in his life and didn’t care to be known by his real name.

Then Fisher and Cox flew out to Wisconsin for the first of three interviews with Durkee in Milwaukee beginning in August 2024.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Pulling Out Teeth"}]

A couple things struck the detectives about Durkee during that first meeting. For starters, he was toothless.

This is because he’d pulled out all of his teeth over the years by himself, Durkee told them. With pliers.

[{"type":"text","text":"“That was a first for me,” Cox said."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Fisher agreed."}]

“We’ve done thousands of interviews, and I can tell you that is the first time I ever heard anybody tell me they pulled out their own teeth,” Fisher said, wondering if it would have been 27 or 28 total 

Another thing that struck the detectives as odd is that Durkee had a collection of Faraday bags and cages, which are used to block electromagnetic fields and wireless signals.

“They’re used by law enforcement primarily when we take a suspect’s phone, so it can be protected for forensic analysis, but you don’t normally see these types of things in someone’s home,” Fisher said. “It was shocking.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"More Conversations With Durkee"}]

During this initial conversation, when asked about his potential connection to the still unknown Jane Doe who’d been murdered 

in Elko, Durkee shared that he remembered giving a .380 pistol to a woman named “Mary.”

the caliber of the pistol used to kill her.

During his second meeting with detectives 

pistol, Durkee recalled having “intimate relations” with a woman named “Mary Alexander” or “Mary Washington” on Halloween.

Later, when detectives learned Alexander’s name, they’d wondered if that was guilt talking or if Durkee was trying to give them a clue.

He didn’t kill “Mary” that night, however, Durkee told detectives, claiming to have instead dropped her off at a blue house in Salt Lake City and never 

“He sure knew a lot of obscure details about the case, though,” Cox said.

Durkee knew both about Alexander’s tooth that had been in the process of having a root canal as well as the isotopes in her hair that had traced her to Wyoming.

He claimed this was because he was a true crime buff, Fisher said, which forensic evidence would prove turned out not to be true.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Catching A Killer"}]

It was their third conversation with Durkee that convinced both detectives they had the right guy.

Prior to their trip out, they wanted to stir Durkee up and asked local Milwaukee detectives to pay him a visit under the ruse of questioning him about a local missing woman.

Durkee knew about the woman and also knew that she had already been found. He found that odd, he later told the Elko detectives, and wondered why the local cops weren’t better at their jobs.

[{"type":"text","text":"“He always had to be the smartest guy in the room,” Fisher said."}]

But the ruse worked in that it clearly worried Durkee that investigators were closing in on him, prompting him to do 90 internet searches of some derivative of “Shafter Jane Doe” over the course of two days as they later discovered when they procured warrants for his digital devices.

For Fisher, that was the final piece of the puzzle in a rapidly 

He figured they had enough — along with the DNA — to make 

“I don’t think you would be able to explain 90 spontaneous searches after two detectives are asking about a completely unrelated missing woman,” Fisher said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Too Late"}]

However, as Fisher, Cox and Det. Sgt. Crystal Cox made their travel plans to go to Wisconsin to arrest Durkee, they learned he was already dead.

Durkee died at age 77 after having multiple strokes over a period of days that led to cardiac arrest.

Due to some glitch in the Wisconsin Vital Statistics Department, Durkee’s death was not immediately reported, so it took months for the news to make it to Elko County.

This shocked investigators because every indication in their databases showed he was still alive.

And though their seven-year investigation did not ultimately lead to an arrest, the detectives were happy to finally identify both Alexander and her probable killer.

“That was our first goal to finally answer the question ‘Who Am I?,’” Fisher said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Identifying Alexander"}]

It took about a month to track down Alexander’s family after learning her name.

She was initially identified through enhanced FBI latent fingerprint comparisons that led the detectives to her birth certificate that listed her as a "white American."

Fisher had never seen that distinction and learned it was because Alexander had been born in Germany.

Her mother married a serviceman who adopted Alexander before moving them to the United States in the early 1970s.

Alexander had been issued a Consular Report of Birth Abroad, which a person receives when one of their parents is a U.S. citizen.

With the help of a genealogist, Fisher and Cox were able to track down Alexander’s mother in California, who learned that her daughter was dead.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"“She was devastated,” Fisher said."}]

Alexander had been estranged from her family, who had no idea she’d been unidentified for all these decades. A DNA test confirmed Alexander was indeed her daughter.

There was a lot of emotion, Fisher recalled, when they were finally able to give her a name and finally put her to rest.

Cold case 6 14 26

<title>After 32 Years, Suspected ‘Shafter Jane Doe’ Killer Avoided Justice By Dying | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A detective was about to fly to Wisconsin to arrest the lead suspect in the 32-year cold case of a woman whose nude body was dumped along I-80 when he got the news the suspect was dead. The woman's time in Wyoming led to the breakthrough in the case.

After 32 Years, Suspected ‘Shafter Jane Doe’ Killer Avoided Justice By Dying

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

The snowmelt from a long, strong winter 50 years ago seemed to mean a new eastern Idaho dam and reservoir on the Teton River to supply private canals and enhance the region’s agricultural base would be filled more quickly than anticipated.

By June 3, 1976, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Teton Dam project was considered completed, but contractors still needed to apply an anti-corrosion coating to its “water conveyance features in the outlet tunnel,” said Erika Lopez, a Bureau of Reclamation spokesperson.

The reservoir contained 234,259 acre-feet of water when the dam failed, sending a deluge downriver.

Those who lived through that flood a half-century ago still remember it as “one of the scariest days” of their lives.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"It Broke Fast"}]

A 1996 Bureau of Reclamation report on the project 20 years after the historic flood caused by that failure states that on June 3, 1976, two small springs were discovered below the 305-foot-high dam. 

One was 600 feet and the other 900 feet away. They were considered “normal” for an embankment dam, an engineer reported.

Two days later, a construction worker inspecting the dam around 7:30 a.m. found muddy water flowing out of the dam’s right abutment, 15 feet above the stream bed. 

The flow increased, and then another leak was discovered. 

A whirlpool developed in the reservoir indicating water quickly escaping through the dam, the report states.

Warnings were issued downstream telling people to evacuate.

Heroic efforts by bulldozer operators on top of the dam failed to plug the leak and by 11:57 a.m., the potential disaster became a real one.

“Unfinished Teton Dam Collapses,” The Idaho Statesman reported on June 6, 1976. “Floods Sweep East Idaho Towns.”

The surging water hit Wilford, Sugar City, and Rexburg. 

Before the day was over, 11 people were dead, 112,000 acres of farmland under water, 20,000 livestock lost, 32 miles of railroad track destroyed, 4,000 homes flooded, 250 businesses impacted, 3,500 farm and ranch buildings damaged, and 65 canal systems for irrigation disrupted.

Those who were in the water’s path that day remember it well.

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

Barbara Smith, 70, of Archer, Idaho, was a 19-year-old newlywed of three weeks and living in Rexburg. 

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

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

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

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

The couple then drove to her parents home in Rexburg. 

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

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

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

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

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

It was June 5, 1976, whe a dam on the Teton River collapsed, sending a torrent of water into the Idaho towns below. “It was one of scariest days of my entire life,” said a survivor, adding that 50 years later, the memories of the disaster are still vivid.

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