Breaking Blue (17 page)

So they got away with it?

Bamonte held his response for a minute.

“That appears to be the case.”

A
FEW DAYS LATER
, Professor Carey was chatting with Carol Bonino, editor of
Signum
, the quarterly publication of Gonzaga University. Looking for stories, she asked Carey if he had any interesting students or anecdotes to share.

The teacher thought of Bamonte. “There’s this one middle-aged guy in the MOL class in Colville,” Carey said. “A sheriff.…”

On page two of the spring 1989 edition of
Signum
, a small story appeared, under the headline
SHERIFF BAMONTE BRINGS RUGGED WEST ALIVE WITH MOL THESIS
. The piece told about Bamonte’s thesis—filled with “short biographies on previous Pend Oreille
County sheriffs, but also macabre, tragic, and sometimes heroic true stories about enforcing the law in this corner of Washington.”

The Conniff case was mentioned only in passing, somewhat inaccurately, and not by name, as “a story that goes back to 1935, when a marshal in Newport was shot and killed, with no suspects. Two policemen from a nearby community were implicated in the shooting when, in a deathbed confession, an acquaintance of one policeman revealed his friend’s involvement in the incident.”

The story ended with a quote from Bamonte, his answer to a question about why he was doing the project. “I wanted to leave something behind,” the sheriff said.

Carol Bonino told her husband, Rick, a reporter and columnist at the
Spokesman-Review
, that Bamonte might make a good story. The tip was passed on, and eventually the story was assigned to a feature writer, Jim Camden. He was fascinated by the sheriff-scholar from the wilderness county. The paper’s morgue had plenty of clips on how Bamonte was always getting in trouble with the local powers, or digging up an obscure fact to counter what everybody had already concluded, or nipping at the boot heels of some federal bureaucracy. But meeting him was another thing entirely. He was lean, edgy, with a whispery voice, talking about history and theory with a .38 strapped to his chest, unsure of himself or his intellect, sometimes killing his words in mid-sentence, jumping in and out of his seat, offering coffee or interrupting to show a picture of Bull Bamonte or taking a call from an enraged citizen. He never put anything on hold, and so his days were chaotic and overcrowded. Around the office, some of the clerical staff thought the master’s degree would help the sheriff sharpen his organizational skills. But here he was going off in three new directions.

Spokane’s morning paper, which circulated all over eastern Washington, northern Idaho, western Montana, and southern British Columbia, ran a story about Bamonte’s master’s thesis on page one of the February 11, 1989 edition, under the headline
SHERIFF WROTE THE BOOK ON CRIME IN HIS COUNTY
. Like Bonino’s piece, the story told of the hyperactive cop and his unusual master’s thesis. “I love
to write,” the sheriff was quoted as saying. “This gave me a chance to get some professional help.” The article recounted each of the major chapters in the developing thesis, the sheriffs and the crimes of their time. Midway into the piece, the reporter mentioned, in a single paragraph, the killing of the Newport marshal, although he reported incorrectly that he’d been gunned down in the late 1920s, and that two police officers might have been involved.

“The murderers were never caught,” the story said, “but years later, the deathbed confession of a Spokane policeman revealed that he and a fellow officer were partners in a robbery scheme that led to the murder.”

G
EORGE
E
DWIN
C
ONNIFF
, J
R.
, was stoking the wood stove inside his home in north Spokane when his wife summoned him to the breakfast table and pointed at the front page of the newspaper. “Take a look at this,” Jane Conniff told her husband.

He closed the door to the stove and walked to the table. Tall, smooth-faced, and skinny at age seventy-three, the only son of the slain Newport marshal had gone nearly fifty-four years without the slightest hint of who had put four bullets into his father in 1935. When the shooting happened, he was twenty years old and had just returned to the Pend Oreille. Father and son had worked throughout the hot summer of 1935, laboring under smoky skies to build a new cabin to replace the home destroyed by fire. They had become close in a way that had never before been possible. For the next half-century George Jr. worked in sawmills and fruit orchards, fought against the Japanese on a destroyer in the Philippines, fished on commercial boats, and eventually settled on a career as an electrician.

“Is that your father they’re talking about here?” Jane Conniff asked her husband.

George took his glasses off and sat down. He read and reread the single paragraph about the marshal, then looked out the window at the frozen ground.

“I’ll … be … damned.”

The date given in the paper was wrong, but the circumstances seemed right. No other Newport marshal had been gunned down by robbers. What stunned George junior was the line about a deathbed confession implicating a Spokane policeman; he had never heard such a thing.

He called Bamonte. The sheriff was startled to hear a voice to go with a family name.

“George … Conniff—”

“Junior. I’m his son.”

“My God!”

Bamonte invited George and his family to come to his office and take a look at what he’d found. No longer would it be just Tony Bamonte talking to himself and the yellowed police reports in the middle of the night.

T
HE
P
END
O
REILLE
was under heavy snow when George and his two sisters, Mary and Olive, drove up to see the sheriff in early March. Even in late winter, when most landscapes looked ragged and tired, the Pend Oreille held its beauty: the larch, pine, and fir forests marching up the Selkirks, trickles of clear water pushing through stream channels frozen at the edges. George was the baby of the family; Mary Pearce was seventy-five and Olive Pearce was seventy-seven. Driving north along the Newport Highway, they were children again, a family growing up on a sixty-acre stump ranch in a meadow with views of Hoodoo Mountain. George remembered the Kalispel tribal elder who’d invited him in to see his tepee and feel the bearskin floor. The boy caught fish with his hands and swung from rope swings in the trees and dove into river pools. He thought of what 1935 was like in the Pend Oreille, cutting firewood for a dollar a day, and then eating that dollar at night to restock the calories burned up with the axe.

Olive saw the exhausted face of her father, who never seemed to rest, working by day to build the cabin, dragging himself through the night shift to protect the merchants of Newport. The fire that burned their home on the stump ranch had come at the worst time; for a
while, they thought they might join those other Americans who took to the road in boxcars. This road, paved and fast, had been its own trail of tears, a route for dust-bowl refugees and forest fire mercenaries and platoons of Civilian Conservation Corps workers. The drifters emptied into the Pend Oreille near Sandpoint, thirty miles east of Newport, where three railroad lines converged. Many of them ended up in the transient camp along the Pend Oreille River. In the absence of leads, all three children suspected that a drifter had killed their father, somebody whose empty stomach drove him to kill.

As the Conniffs entered Newport, and took the left-hand turn off the highway toward the sheriff’s office, George remembered his father’s dying hours. After spending the night in agony on an operating table in Newport, he was transferred to the ambulance that would carry the bleeding marshal to a hospital in Spokane. As he was lowered into the car, the marshal winced and spoke his last words:

“Make it snappy, boys.”

B
AMONTE GREETED
the Conniff family like lost relatives. Their grief was still evident, but they were gratified to have a partner after fifty-four years of unanswered questions.

The sheriff started talking nonstop, bringing up Sonnabend and Elmer Black, pawned pants and police cover-ups. “There’s so much to tell you,” he said. He went off on another verbal gallop, then pulled the reins back. “On second thought, I’ll let you see for yourself. Some of this stuff you won’t believe.”

He brought out a large box holding the old typewritten police reports, a few pictures, letters to and from the FBI, and two summaries of the 1955 and 1957 interviews with Sonnabend. The sheriff left them alone for a while, in the room with the written words.

Olive, broad-shouldered, stern-faced, bespectacled, became very angry, near tears at one point. “Why?” She lashed out. “Why didn’t they tell us any of this?”

She had worked in the Pend Oreille sheriff’s office in the 1940s and the early 1950s and knew every deputy from her father’s time. One of the county’s lawmen, Sheriff Holmes, was a neighbor of the
Conniffs at the very time he had heard Sonnabend’s deathbed story; yet he never said a word about the new information to any member of the victim’s family. What was there to protect? Had any of the Conniffs been told of the evidence linking a Spokane detective to the killing, they would have hounded the police for some resolution, Olive said. Alma, the marshal’s widow, died in late 1955, several months after Sonnabend summoned the authorities to his bedside. Though she had been assured that things had been thoroughly investigated until all leads were exhausted, Alma Conniff went to her grave frustrated by the great mystery of her husband’s murder.

When Bamonte returned to the room, he found George and Mary subdued. But Olive was red with outrage. “How could they keep this from us?” she asked.

Bamonte was gentle, the velvet-voiced cop accustomed to explaining random accidents that take children from mothers and spouses from lovers. He could have been explaining why a deer sometimes shatters the front window of a pickup truck, for he was no longer surprised by his conclusion.

“You wonder why nobody told you about any of this? So did I. It’s a big question without an obvious answer. I’ll tell you what I think: the people who were supposed to protect the public seem to have been the very ones responsible for the murder—”

“Dad was killed by a Spokane policeman,” Olive interrupted.

“But they’re dead, aren’t they?” George asked. “Everyone who had something to do with it is gone. So why would they continue to cover up?”

“You don’t understand. These are cops. They’re sworn to uphold the law, but a cop’s first loyalty is to his own kind.”

“So is this it?” Olive asked. “Can’t you do anything more?”

“Do you want me to?”

The Conniffs looked at each other, a silent survey.

“We do,” Olive said.

“You’re damn right we do,” George said. “We want to know what really happened.”

“I can’t promise you anything,” Bamonte said. “But if you give me some time, I’ll go after this. I’ll open it up. I’m the sheriff here. This
murder happened in my county. I don’t see why we can’t kick over a few rocks.”

The Conniffs were encouraged, but only moderately so. It was not the first time a Pend Oreille County sheriff had made such a statement.

W
ITH AN ENLARGED HEART
, a stump leg, and narrowed arteries, Dan Mangan’s body was a wreck that he dragged around the house and parked, for most of his waking hours, in front of a television set. The frame of the old man, held together by bolts below one knee and powered by a battery pack for the heart, was the least of his baggage. A few years shy of his ninetieth birthday, Mangan lived with his youngest daughter, Rosemary Miller, in a well-kept rambler in Spokane. He told the doctors that all he needed to stay alive were R and R and cigars, but the joke was feeble, a tired line he should have left behind when he sold his tavern in Hungry Horse. He needed much more than Canadian whiskey and stogies, and his daughter, who had grown up hating him, gave it to him. But it was care at a cost. Rose would let him stay in her home, drink his beer and an occasional blast of bourbon, carouse with his seventy-six-year-old girlfriend once a week. But he had to abide by her house rules, the most important of which was that he listen when she talked. In the early evenings, they would each crack open a beer and Rose would start in on him.

In her living room were pictures of her mother, Dan Mangan’s ex-wife, the former Joan Helen Sinclair. The photos were haunting, for they showed Helen at her best, barely a hundred pounds, lithe and
striking—before the bruises, welts, and scars of his fist reshaped her face, before the poverty and pain gave her a set of eyes that stared out at the world with trepidation, as if peering from behind a fence. During the mean years of the Depression, the family of six lived in a four-bedroom house in east Spokane, not far from the shanties of Hillyard. Mangan’s police salary was more than enough to pay the eight-dollar-a-month mortgage, but he still missed payments, and went days without bringing home a scrap of food. He spent his earnings at Albert Commellini’s, buying rounds of bootleg liquor and romancing women he had met through Clyde Ralstin. For Rosemary’s First Communion at Saint Ann’s, she wore undergarments sewn together from muslin sacks discarded by the Sperry Flour Mill. The mill’s logo showed through the dress, so that Rose’s First Communion picture looked like an advertisement for Sperry Flour.

When Mangan finally consented to a divorce, after the police found Helen half-dead on the floor of her house, battered and bleeding, in 1946, he took with him the life insurance money from a son who’d been killed in the war. Helen moved the family to the white pine country of Idaho, and she went to work as a clerk in the Potlatch Mill. She lived, as best she could, for her children, and maintained a faith in God, as interpreted by the Irish Catholic ministry of the inland Northwest. She loved to sketch and paint and write poetry; but as she aged, she lost her talents, one by one—robbed by Alzheimer’s disease. In her last years, living with Rose, she could barely remember her name. She died in 1985.