Breaking Blue (16 page)

A
CITIZEN
was on the line: somebody had poisoned his horse—he was sure of it—and he wondered what the goddamn sheriff was going to do about it. (The sheriff would send a deputy as soon as he could free one up.) Snow was piling up on the few roads that were passable
during winter, which meant more accidents. A county commissioner was on another line, demanding a meeting to go over Bamonte’s latest budget requests. Another citizen called about poachers, two men shooting deer out of season. (Call Fish and Game.)

Bamonte took his tie off. He usually walked around the office, even during winter, with his shirt sleeves rolled up and the collar open. His office always seemed to be closing in on him—a room stuffed with unzipped files and oddball artifacts. Two pictures were on prominent display inside the sheriff’s office: one was of Chief Joseph, the leader of the Nez Percé, who was said to have died of a broken heart on the Colville Reservation, just west of the Selkirks; the other was a portrait of Geronimo, the Apache leader. Bamonte liked them because they were underdogs who held on to their dignity in the face of failure and retreat.

A call came in from the local Democratic party. Would Bamonte be attending the fund-raiser in Spokane? A lifetime Democrat in a forest of conspiracy-divining Republicans (a local state legislator introduced a bill in Olympia, the state capital, to outlaw teenage sex, and fluoride in the water supply was still considered evidence of a communist plot to take over the inland Northwest, even as the Cold War came to an end), Bamonte wasn’t sure how much he wanted to do with partisan politics after the debacle of Michael Dukakis.

A call came in from out of state—a scholar doing research, he said—asking about the Nazis. Somebody was always asking about the Nazis. Bamonte put his feet on the desk and told the short version. He was building a log home in 1975 around Metaline Falls when he met a small, introspective young man from Arizona, Robert J. Mathews, who had just moved to the Pend Oreille from Arizona. Mathews hated the federal government, hated big cities, hated what America had become. He used to lecture his parents about the dangers of the Federal Reserve Board and castigate them for watching television. Bamonte didn’t know much about Mathews when he met him, but he knew a lot about the piece of land he was building on; it was the site of the shoot-out between Black Jack Rowden and a posse half a century earlier.

Mathews took a job at the cement factory and mostly kept to himself. One day a letter appeared in the Newport
Miner
, signed by Mathews. In part it said, “Our people have degenerated into some of the most cowardly, sheepish degenerates that have ever littered the face of the earth.” To prove that he wasn’t a coward, Mathews founded the Order, a group of about thirty men, most of them ex-cons or semiliterate drifters, who set out to start a revolution. Following a six-point plan hatched by Mathews, they robbed banks, blew up public buildings, sent hate mail to Jews and blacks, shot and killed a Denver talk-show host, and plotted the assassination of numerous public figures, including former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and Fred Silverman, the onetime programming chief of NBC. The Order collapsed after Mathews was killed and most of his followers were convicted of federal racketeering and conspiracy charges. Like Black Jack Rowden, Mathews had died in a shootout with dozens of lawmen.

Yes, Bamonte told the caller, he knew Robert Mathews fairly well. The neo-Nazi’s mother, who still lived in Metaline Falls, had given Bamonte the last letter she ever received from her son, a note in which he was already casting himself for posterity as a martyr. Bamonte said Mathews was one of those urban rejects looking for the good life in the Pend Oreille, who came in search of the simple rhythms of nature but strayed to the darker impulses of isolation.

“We used to talk about pileated woodpeckers,” Bamonte said. “Know what a pileated woodpecker is? Lives in tree snags. A beautiful bird. Mathews would spend hours watching ’em. You never think a guy could like animals so much and still have such a grudge against people.”

A
T DUSK
, Bamonte slipped out of the office. The sky was pink, the air cold, the Selkirks holding the last blush of alpenglow. The rodeo stands just across the street from the sheriff’s office were stuffed with snow, and its overhang seemed to be sagging.

Back in Metaline Falls, the main road was clear, snow-plowed by
a volunteer. Bamonte wanted to talk to Betty, to apologize for his moods and fits. He also wanted to reach out to their boy. Nobody was home.

He went to the study, intending to have a quick peek at the graduate project. He removed his shoulder pistol, loosened his collar. The room was cold.

As he fanned through another stack of documents, a single page jumped out at him; it was written on yellowed paper with the same wobbly type as the 1955 summary. A Pend Oreille officer’s report, it summarized another visit with Sonnabend, in November 1957. In the two years since his first recounting of the 1935 shooting, Sonnabend had clung to life. Back in the hospital, he thought he was down to his last days, and wanted again to tell something about the Conniff case. The doctors had sent him home—perhaps for the final time. There, the big carpenter added a considerable footnote to his earlier revelation.

The summary was written by Sheriff William Giles, the man Bamonte had defeated in 1978. It read:

What impressed Bamonte was the tenacity of Charley Sonnabend. At least
somebody
was outraged that a cop killer had escaped justice. He pictured the 270-pound carpenter propped up in bed, one day before going into the hospital for an operation that could likely end his life, trying to pass on the key to solving an old murder—a living will of sorts. He had carried the story around with him for more than two decades, but what had come of it since? Who had carried it for the last thirty-two years? In Bamonte’s mind, the last official words from Sonnabend raised more questions than they answered:

• The gun. Earlier, Sonnabend had said one of the pistols taken from Logan had been signed out by Detective Roston. Now Sonnabend was saying that he had taken possession of a gun and later gave it to his nephew. Was this the murder weapon? Was Sonnabend
himself covering for Roston by holding on to the pistol that may have been used to shoot Conniff?

• The roadblock. Could there be a police report, or better yet, one of the original officers, somewhere, with details of what happened the night of the roadblock? If Roston had indeed been stopped at the North Division Street roadblock, with an overheated car and a passenger next to him, one hour after the shooting—the time it would take to drive from Newport to Spokane—that could be a damning piece of evidence against the detective.

• The follow-up interview. Why was Sonnabend prevented from interviewing Logan at the McNeil Island Penitentiary? Logan had already confessed Roston’s role, or so Sonnabend said; but Sonnabend apparently needed something more. To Bamonte, it made no sense that the Spokane Police Department would deny permission for one of its veteran detectives to pursue a killing. But this raised the larger question of what had come of Sonnabend’s case. If Logan had indeed told the whole story of the butter racket and the shooting, why hadn’t Roston been arrested? And what had happened between Sonnabend’s initial summoning, in 1955, and this second one, in 1957? Did the new investigation die with Elmer Black? Down went Black and up went the old Blue Wall.

Bamonte shivered from the cold. He wiped away a thin layer of frost inside his window and looked outside. The streets were dead. He opened the refrigerator and stared; he had not eaten anything since lunch, but he wasn’t hungry.

He hated being alone. His worst fears grew quickly, all out of proportion, without the leveling effect of a trusted companion. What if Betty left him? The thought took him back to the Christmas when his mother and father were hauled off to jail.

He stretched out on the couch and fell asleep. When he awoke, sometime in the predawn, he felt chilled. He walked to the sink and washed his face.

“Betty …?”

No answer. He looked in the bedroom, not expecting to find anything. The clock blinked—and Betty was asleep.

Bamonte was drawn back into the study, lured by another stack of
forgotten police reports and by the voices waiting to tell their stories. Just a quick peek. Within minutes, he was out of the family doubts and back in the winter of late 1957. The temperatures were plunging to thirty-five below zero around Newport. When the Conniff case was presented to Sheriff Giles by Sonnabend, he had worked only a single homicide: a drunken seventeen-year-old, attempting to start a fire under his car as a way to heat the vehicle up, got into an argument with his uncle and pulled a knife on the older man. The uncle shot him; a jury later ruled it was justifiable homicide.

With Sonnabend’s narrative, Giles had a more difficult task. From what Bamonte could tell from the records, Giles, who had jurisdiction over the Conniff killing, decided not to reopen the case unless he could find some compelling piece of physical evidence to back what Sonnabend had said. The deposit of clues from the dying Spokane cop apparently was not enough.

“What more do you want?!” Bamonte said, slapping the papers with the back of his hand.

Also in the stack, Bamonte found two letters. One was from Giles, the other from the FBI. The first note, dated a day after the 1957 Sonnabend meeting, was a request to J. Edgar Hoover that the FBI director examine the .32 pistol which Sonnabend had retrieved from Logan and given to his nephew. He also sent along a packet of spent bullets—slugs taken from the groin, armpit, and rib cage of Marshal Conniff. A few weeks later, one of Hoover’s assistants returned the bullets and pistol with a short note:

“None of these .32 bullets could have been fired from the gun submitted.”

O
N
S
ATURDAY MORNING
, in the basement classroom in Colville, Bamonte told the other students what he had found. The class met once a week in the pine country east of the Columbia River. The sheriff was always dragging stories in from the Pend Oreille and trying to wedge them into the discussion. When the study group was first assembled, nearly two years earlier, some of the students expected ignorance and hayseed homilies from Bamonte. And at times he even played along, doing his cowboy-sheriff role to live up to the stereotype. Once when the class was gathered for a dinner party at Professor Carey’s house, Bamonte arrived late, on his motorcycle, dusted and breathless.

“Where you been, Tony?” Carey asked him.

“A murder. How’s the food?”

“What kind of murder?”

“Guy hacked up another guy after he caught him screwing his wife.”

And of course that ended all discussion, for the time being, of grade points and career goals.

But Bamonte was a serious student, incapable of looking out at the flat surface of the Columbia River near Colville, backed up by dams,
without thinking of the Indian tribes that used to gather at long-buried waterfalls to trade salmon with Hudson’s Bay Company scouts. On this Saturday, as he discussed his research project, he sounded like a scientist who has just emerged from years in the lab with a breathless discovery.

“I can’t believe they sat on this!” he said. “It’s a damn shame!”

After he told the class about Detective Sonnabend’s revelations, there were dozens of questions:

What happened to Sonnabend?

He died, free of the story he had carried for the last third of his life, but frustrated because nobody had ever been brought to trial for the killing of George Conniff.

Didn’t the sheriff’s office at the time try to do anything?

Yes, they sent a gun to the FBI in 1957. But after it was returned the case went dormant again.

What about Detective Roston and this Sergeant Mangrin mentioned by Sonnabend—were they ever found, or questioned?

As near as anyone could tell, both men were dead, their secrets buried with them. The files indicated that Sheriff Giles, in the mid-1950s, could find no trace of either man.