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Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

Gillette resident Matthew Hohnholt’s destiny was to put on a uniform.

One grandfather fought in World War II as a medic, and his grandmother worked in U.S. Army Intelligence directly with General Dwight D. Eisenhower during that war.

Another grandfather was a tank mechanic in Korea, and his father was a U.S. Marine who served with Task Force Delta on classified missions in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Once he graduated from high school in Washington state, Hohnholt traded cowboy boots for combat ones in Marine Corps boot camp.

“I was a young kid, I didn’t have any skills, and it was kind of a golden ticket out,” he said. “I wanted to serve my country, and that meant a lot to me to be able to do it.”

Hohnholt’s enlistment in 2000, and an injury while going through infantry school, had him reassigned to learning electrical repair for generators and other equipment. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Then 9\/11 happened."}]

Hohnholt remembers being at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, when the base commander called all the trainees together to talk about the attacks and “kind of explaining to us what had happened and kind of the uncertainty of the future.”

He was put on a list to go to Afghanistan, but that tour was canceled.

In 2003, he was sent to Kuwait in support of a Marine fighter squadron as the invasion of Iraq was being staged. 

That led to a role in providing security for convoys into Iraq when the war got underway.

The 45-year-old now is a 100% disabled veteran who suffered more loss last year when his 19-year-old son, Garrett, took his own life. 

Hohnholt is still trying to pay off the funeral debt.

“I’ve been divorced for four years,” he said. “I kind of ran low on money and had to get rid of the house because I couldn’t afford to make payments on it anymore. 

"And then I moved in with my brother, and so, I just have been kind of helping with my brother and that’s kind of where I am at.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Funeral Bill"}]

He said he still owes $8,000 on his son’s funeral bill and is trying to save money for a gravestone.

Candy Morris, a Washington state friend who went to school with Hohnholt, started a GoFundMe campaign last October to try and help chip away at the funeral debt and also to assist with housing. 

She characterizes Hohnholt as an “all-around great guy” who is the best friend of her husband. 

Morris and her husband moved to Alaska 15 years ago, but Hohnholt has visited a couple of times and they stay in touch.

“He showed up for our family with care and love, spending hours with us and helping care for my newborn daughter,” Morris said. “He became her first babysitter, and I later named her after his grandmother, Faye, a woman who meant so much to him.”

Morris said she was recently contacted by Australian kindness and mental health social media influencer Samuel Weidenhoferl, who asked her to revise the 

as part of his “kindness” effort for a veteran in every U.S. state. 

Once she did, Weidenhofer made Hohnholt the Wyoming representative of his campaign.

Weidenhofer has helped raise thousands of dollars for veterans in other states. He typically meets with the veteran, does an interview and then posts it on his social media with a link to the GoFundMe.

Weidenhofer has 8.1 million followers on TikTok and 3.3 million on Facebook. His GoFundMe effort so far has raised $2 million nationally from 53,500 donations.

Hohnholt said Weidenhofer traveled to Gillette to meet the man at his son’s grave on Memorial Day. 

Hohnholt came away impressed and calls Weidenhofer and his cameraman “super nice guys.”

“I was blown away at him telling me I was selected,” he said. “It was a flattering, humbling experience.

"I have never really been recognized for anything before, and it was pretty emotional. I believe he even got me to cry, just a little bit.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Thankful For Recognition"}]

Hohnholt said any money he receives is secondary to just being recognized for his time in the Marines and trying to lead by example while he served. 

He said he appreciated “just having someone there and telling me that I was not alone.”

An attempt to reach Weidenhofer was not successful. 

Hohnholt said he appreciates people who have donated to the GoFundMe to help with his son’s funeral costs. 

Garrett Hohnholt struggled with depression for much of his life, but had seemed to have come of the tunnel of darkness that surrounded him, he said.

“He graduated from high school and had a couple of really good friends that he loved,” Hohnholt said. “It really shocked me. … I spent a lot of my time with him and I was really looking forward to getting to know him as a man.”

Born in Wheatland, Hohnholt’s Wyoming roots go back to time on a ranch outside of Guernsey until second grade. 

His family moved to Casper until he was in sixth grade and then to Washington state. 

Hohnholt said he returned to Wyoming every summer to work on his grandfather’s ranch.

Hohnholt said his war experiences left him with PTSD and definitely changed him. 

He has struggled with depression, anxiety and stress. He likes to socialize and has friends, but avoids crowds and busy places.

He also finds there are times he just needs to be alone.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"'Shock And Awe Stuff'"}]

While serving in Iraq, Hohnholt’s security role for convoys involved protecting their fuel, water, and supplies for a helicopter squadron at forward bases as well as other convoy missions.

“We saw a light amount of combat, and it was pretty much during convoy operations,” he said. “It’s not like we were staying and having big battles. But it was moving gear and stuff like that.”

After Iraq, he spent a year serving in his career field doing generator and electrical repair before getting out of the service. 

Hohnholt looks back on his Marine Corps service with no regrets, and while he does not like to dwell on specifics about incidents that led to his disability, he said they can be put into the category of “shock-and-awe stuff.”

Hohnholt left the Marines with an honorable discharge and campaign ribbons. He sees his younger self as a “just an average Marine doing average things who fought in a war.”

But if called upon, there is no hesitation about whether he would raise his hand to take the oath of service again.

“You know, absolutely I would,” he said. “It’s the good and the bad that has made me who I am. I have a lot of family and friends and people seem to like me. That’s just good enough for me.”

Garrett and Matthew Hohnholt

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

<title>Gillette Marine Vet With PTSD Struggles To Pay Off Funeral Debt From Son’s Suicide | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A 45-year-old Gillette Marine Corps veteran struggles with PTSD, along with paying off funeral debt from his 19-year-old son’s suicide last year. "I was really looking forward to getting to know him as a man,” said Matthew Hohnholt.

Gillette Marine Vet With PTSD Struggles To Pay Off Funeral Debt From Son’s Suicide

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

Renée Jean

Business & Tourism

Business

CHEYENNE — Patricia Miller was helping another customer when a smooth-talking gentleman came in and quickly grabbed some crystals that he said were a gift for his mom. 

“He was trying to small talk with me about how wonderful of a person he was, because he’s getting them for her,” Miller told Cowboy State Daily. “And he’s going to print out information about each one of them, and all this other stuff.”

Miller thought that was sweet and said so, but what happened next was anything but sweet.

“He handed me this $100 bill, and I could feel that something was different,” she said. “And I was looking at it, and I’m like, ‘Well, maybe it’s old?'”

That prompted the man to helpfully add that the bill was from 1996.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"That’s when things clicked for Miller."}]

“Like, who knows what year the bill is that you’re handing a cashier?” she said. “So that’s what really triggered my mind to be like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is counterfeit.’”

Not wanting to falsely accuse the man — or ignite a confrontation — Miller took a different tack. 

“I said to him, ‘I”m sorry, but I don’t have change for this. You’re going to have to maybe get change and come back. Do you have anything smaller?’" Miller said. “And he said, ‘No, I’ll go to Bomgaars and get change.’”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"The man never returned for his items. "}]

Later, looking at the store’s video surveillance, Miller saw the man had several recognizable bags with him. When she visited those other stores, it confirmed her suspicion that the $100 bill had been fake. 

The same man with the same story and multiple copies of the same $100 bill, all sharing the same serial number, had hit all of the stores.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Same Serial Number All Over Town"}]

Miller’s social media post about the experience drew jeers from some skeptical online commenters who accused her of overreacting. 

She posted the bill so others would know what was happening, to prevent anyone from getting duped.

A manager at a discount store on South Greeley Highway in Cheyenne, who asked that her store not be named for corporate reasons, confirmed she’d encountered both the same man and the same $100 bill as Miller. 

The man came to the store on South Greeley between the hours of 3:30 and 4 p.m., she said, trying to buy some baby wipes and a gallon jug of water with the $100 — a classic, small-purchase, big-change tactic.

The cashier felt something was off with the bill, but couldn’t identify what. She used a traditional counterfeit detector pen. If the iodine ink, which reacts with starches in standard, wood-pulp paper, remains black, that’s supposed to indicate that a bill is real. 

But the manager has learned a different trick to identify counterfeits lately. 

“I swabbed it with rubbing alcohol, and the ink smudged,” she said. “So I told him it was fake and we were not going to accept it.”

When the cashier told the man the bill was fake, he said, “Keep it,” and walked out, by then visibly trying to hide his face from the camera.

“That confirms to me that it was fake,” the manager said. 

The bill has been turned over to Laramie County Sheriff’s Office for further investigation.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Bleached Bills Fool Counterfeit Pens"}]

The discount store manager said counterfeiters have come up with a smart strategy to fool the traditional iodine counterfeit detector pens.

What they do is bleach a $1 bill, and then print a $100 bill over the top of it. Because it’s genuine currency paper, the iodine pens won’t catch that the bill is fake. 

“The counterfeit pens are garbage,” the manager said. “You can write on that and it won’t catch it because it is in fact money paper, just not the right denomination.”

She prefers that her employees use rubbing alcohol to test the ink. If it smudges, that’s a huge red flag.

She also has them hold the bill up to the light, to look for water marks and other security features that $100 bills have that $1 bills do not.

The last check is the texture of the bill itself, which is slightly changed by the bleaching process. 

“When we held it up, it did not have a water mark in it,” she said. “It did not have a face in it, and I felt no texture on the bill itself.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"A Prop Money In Riverton"}]

In Riverton, meanwhile, funny money has taken a slightly different tack, with Hollywood-style prop bills circulating around town.

At Blossoms and Boba Cafe, owner Jesica Fritz told Cowboy State Daily a group of children roughly ages 10-13 came in for a shopping spree with what they thought was a genuine $100 bill, given to them by a friendly stranger who had encouraged them to spend all of the money in one place. 

“One of the girls who works for us thought it was real at first,” Fritz said. “It did look very realistic, unless you read it and looked closely at it.

"The other girl, my daughter, was like, ‘No, absolutely this is not real. Look, it doesn’t even say, ‘In God we trust.”

Instead the bill said, “In Prop we Trust,” and elsewhere, in tiny fine print, it identified the money as a film prop, not for legal tender.

Fritz said her cafe does use counterfeit detection pens and also trains staff to hold bills up to make sure the paper shimmers correctly, and to look closely at fine print and seals.

“If you’re slammed and super busy and someone just hands one of these to you, I can totally understand why some people would take it as regular money,” she said. “It looks very realistic.”

The children had already paid for their Boba teas before trying to use the fake $100 for extra items. When told the bill wasn’t real, they were crestfallen, but cooperative.

“The kids legitimately believed they had real money, and were super stoked about it,” Fritz said. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Staying Ahead Of Funny Money"}]

Fritz turned the bill over to the Riverton Police Department. 

The department did not return Cowboy State Daily’s request for comment, but Fritz said they told her that several other businesses in town had also seen prop money circulating.

Cheyenne police, meanwhile, said it has seven reports of counterfeit bills being passed around at local businesses so far this year. 

“The counterfeit bills we encounter the most are $20 and $100 denominations,” said department spokeswoman Alexandra Farkas. “Many of the fake $100 bills are novelty bills intended for film production and are marked with the phrase, ‘For Motion Picture Purposes.’”

That can be easy to overlook during a busy transaction, Farkas acknowledged.

“If counterfeit currency is seized and is not associated with an active local investigation, our Property and Evidence Division will send it to the U.S. Secret Service for further investigation,” she said. “For more information about identifying counterfeit bills, the Secret Service offers educational resources online at 

By policy, businesses are supposed to try to retain suspicious bills and turn them over to police. But both Miller and the discount store manager admitted they considered their own personal safety first and foremost. 

Fake 100 bill inset 1 6 6 26

<title>Fake $100 Bills Making The Rounds In Wyoming, Counterfeit Pens Don't Detect Them | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Counterfeit $100 bills are getting passed throughout Wyoming and store clerks say iodine counterfeit detector pens won't detect the fake bills. “The counterfeit pens are garbage,” said one store manager

Fake $100 Bills Making The Rounds In Wyoming, Counterfeit Pens Don't Detect Them

It’s a scene that feels like it belongs in a sepia-toned, black-and-white movie, but it’s living color at Slack Elementary School near Parkman, Wyoming. 

Students there begin and close out their school year by riding their horses to the one-room schoolhouse on horseback.

Picture a dozen or so kids, legs swinging in sometimes too-big stirrups, strung out along a narrow ranch road. 

For the last day of school in May, the Bighorn Mountains might still hold a streak or two of snow while ahead a tiny, white schoolhouse awaits. 

The horses plod along at a slow walk — by strict family decree — helping create a moment of what feels like suspended time. 

“If you let one horse start trotting, then you’re going to have a horse race on your hands,” ranch mom Jill Kerns told Cowboy State Daily with a chuckle. 

Three of her four children have been young enough to participate in the tradition. 

“It usually takes about 10 to 15 minutes,” she said. "Honestly, it takes longer to catch the horses and saddle them than it takes to ride down there.”

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The end point of the horse parade is the historic Slack Elementary School, one of about a couple dozen remaining one-room schoolhouses in Wyoming. 

The Slack School opened in 1890, giving it 136 years of history in this ranching community. The present building was buildt in the 1930s, after the original schoolhouse burned down. 

Although no one is quite sure when the first- and last-day horseback rides began, they are a cherished community tradition, one that honors the school’s heritage in a ranching community and salutes the history of the American West.

Teachers at Slack use the activity to throw open a window to local history and lifestyles, pointing out there was a time when the ride wasn’t ceremonial at all. 

Jill’s father-in-law Krayton Kerns remembers when the school used to have an old barn for people to put their horses in during the day.

“It was pretty well used up by the time we got here in ’65,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “And I’m not sure when it got torn down the rest of the way, but prior to my time at Slack School, the generation before, they rode to school because that was their only transportation.”

Krayton, meanwhile, walked to school every day. 

“Dad mentioned to me that he always walked to school,” he said. “So I decided I was going to do that, too, even though we had a bus driver who ran a Suburban van that hauled a bunch of kids to school.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Big Brother, Big Sister Teaching Method"}]

Slack might seem on the surface like it’s some kind of throwback. But there’s more value in this old-fashioned approach than people realize, and parents say they see their children earning a leg up in key areas like reading.

“The teachers have told me when the Slack kids get to Tongue River, they tend to be a little bit ahead,” Jill said. “By the time they leave Slack, they’re very well prepared, if not ahead.”

Jill’s son Henry, who had one year at Slack, told Cowboy State Daily he was able to work at his own pace, which meant he didn’t have to wait on learning new material. 

“You get to just keep going if you’re ahead on stuff,” he said. “You learn a lot more that way.”

In a classroom with just a few kids per grade, there’s also no hiding in the back row. Everyone is going to get called on, and that means everyone better be on their toes.

Older students also help the younger ones, and everyone has chores to do around the school. Those things have made the students more tightly knit together, more like family than a typical school. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"'Great Way To Grow Up'"}]

Krayton, who is a veterinarian, believes Slack School gave him the best possible foundation for his future career. 

He never felt, as he was pursuing his doctorate, that the one-room school had disadvantaged him in any way. 

Part of it, he believes, was how the older students were quietly absorbing lessons meant for the grades below them, retraining their minds on past materials, ensuring there were never any gaps in their learning. 

“The teacher would have the attention of the first graders and get them lined out on a job,” he said. “Then she’d go to the next grade. … You could sit there and kind of absorb it all.”

The sixth graders, meanwhile, often helped the younger students with schoolwork if they were having some issues, which further helped them become experts at the material.

“The teacher couldn’t be involved with everybody at each instant,” he said. “So the older kids were always willing to help us if we had a question on something. 

"These were upperclassman, but they were still just your friends, and you were interacting and playing with them at recess.”

Socially, it gave the younger students a sense that they had big brothers looking out for them. On the flip side of that coin, the older students felt a certain responsibility to look out for their younger classmates.

“It was a great way to grow up, learn, and mature,” he said. “You soon realized that you had not only classmates but an entire community who knew who you were, and you were expected to be on your best behavior at all times. 

"If you weren’t someone would catch it, and you would get it once you got home.”

Krayton has seen the one-room school in Slack have positive effects on his grandchildren’s attitude toward school.

“The eagerness to go to school is pretty high down here,” he said. “They started out in Billings, so they were going to classrooms that had 30 and 40 students. But when they moved down here, all of a sudden you’re one of 10 in the school. It’s just a totally different perspective.”

The eagerness is something Jill has also seen playing out with her own children.

Connor, her youngest, started Slack in kindergarten and is now in second grade, while her daughter Nora just finished fourth grade this spring and heads to Tongue River Elementary in the fall. 

Henry had a single year there, while her oldest son never attended Slack at all.

The differences have been noticeable to her in both academics and attitude.

“It just kind of speaks to that one-on-one nature,” she said. “When they get to Tongue River, they adjust, and are able to fit right in with their classmates without any issue.”

She credits the social skills they’re learning thanks to the closer-knit environment.

For Nora, this spring’s last day ride was her last to Slack. Connor, though, still has two more years of first and last-day horseback trips ahead of him.

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Recess is another memorable part of the Slack experience. 

The playground, for example, grows larger on really hot days, taking in a shallow swimming hole the kids know by heart. 

“There’s a rope swing and you swing off of it,” Jill’s daughter Nora told Cowboy State Daily. “But it was never really deep enough, so you have to like belly flop on it before you actually land.”

The playground also includes a few nontraditional items, like roping dummies, which the children can practice during recess. 

“The para (a teaching assistant) who is there right now, her name is Ashley, and she is working with the kids on roping and things like that,” Jill said. “Things you just won’t get to do at a school in town.”

Nerf gun wars sometimes break out during the 45-minute recess, too, with kids dashing around the old schoolyard like they’re in a Wild West movie — minus the real bullets, but plus streams of really cold water to shoot at each other.

Krayton remembers similar recess experiences growing up, like playing hockey on a makeshift skating rink.

“If the snow was really good or the slough froze up, we could play hockey,” he said. “It wasn’t a fourth the size of a basketball court, but we’d go out there and bang a can around like we were playing real hockey.”

Playground equipment then was more unforgiving than now, though.

“This was the good old stuff that you could fall off of and break an arm,” he said with a chuckle, recalling a tall metal slide and other relics. “It had a little adventure to it.”

The lessons learned on a playground like that went far beyond the lessons of today, Krayton believes. Students had to learn to improvise on such a playground, using imagination to create their own fun.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"How Long Can It Last?"}]

As wonderful as the whole experience is, Krayton observed uneasily how much the world is changing around the school, and he can’t help but wonder how long it will last.

Where once there were dozens of small cattle outfits up and down the creek sending kids to school, now there are just a few large operations here and there.

“Most of the ag country around here has been bought up by two or three large, big-money landowners,” he said. “We’re hitting a point where the generation that’s raising children isn’t out here anymore. That generation may be dying out.”

That’s part of what makes the little horse parade to Slack feel larger and more important lately. It’s a bittersweet moment that’s more than a photo-op. It’s a link to a vanishing way of life, one that nurtured generations of Americans.

Still, all is not yet lost. The number of children may be dwindling, but there are still children left who are ready to catch a horse and tighten a cinch and head down the narrow road at a slow walk. 

They will have the chance one day to help keep Slack what it’s always been. A small, sturdy place where children can grow up with a sense of all that America once was, and, if they have their way, will continue to be.

Riding to school At Slack Elementary near Parkman Wyoming kids still ride horses to a tiny one room schoolhouse on the first and last day of class 6 6 26 jpeg

<title>Kids Still Ride Horses To This One-Room Wyoming Schoolhouse | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Kids who attend the one-room school near Parkman, Wyoming, still ride horses to their schoolhouse on the first and last days of class. “If you let one horse start trotting, then you’re going to have a horse race on your hands,” one ranch mom said. 

Kids Still Ride Horses To This One-Room Wyoming Schoolhouse

Jen kocher

Jen Kocher

Crime & Courts

Law Enforcement

Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series on the infamous "Rawlins Rodeo Murders." Part two will be published Sunday and will focus on the suspects that have cropped up over the last 52 years.

It was the early 1970s and Rawlins was at the dawn of an energy boom. Oil and gas rigs studded the high-desert plains while Union Pacific trains hauled out coal around the clock. 

The population swelled to nearly 11,500 — many of those people transitory workers drawn to southwest Wyoming by high-paying jobs. 

New houses cropped up in the formerly empty fields around the county faster than downtown businesses could absorb the growth. It was a prosperous time. 

Then girls started to vanish before anyone could figure out what was going on. 

[{"type":"text","text":"The first two disappeared on Fourth of July weekend in 1974. "}]

They were 19-year-olds Carlene Brown and Christine “Christy” Gross, who had been visiting Rawlins from South Dakota. 

The pair had gone to the Little Britches Rodeo at the Carbon County fairgrounds, and just vanished.  

[{"type":"text","text":"Neither was seen again. "}]

Nine years later, Gross’ remains were discovered in a field 3 miles outside the neighboring town of Sinclair. 

More than 50 years after four young girls vanished in what has become known as the “Rawlins Rodeo Murders," the case remains unsolved. "We lost our innocence. That summer we lost that. We were never again the same,” said one longtime resident.

Barbara "Barb" Ann Fletcher, 77