Chapter 34
Bisbee, Arizona
Friday, December 8, 2023
Being sheriff did have its perks. Even though Joannahad dropped off her Interceptor less than half an hour earlier, the spare tire had been replaced with a new one while the old one was being repaired.
Once in the car, and just to be sure she wasn’t going on a fool’s errand, Joanna called the county attorney’s office to be sure Craig Witherspoon was actually in his office that morning. “Please tell him Sheriff Brady is on her way to see him on an urgent matter.” Once that call was finished, she dialed Anna Rae Green.
“Did it work?” Anna Rae asked once she realized who was on the phone.
“Are you kidding?” Joanna said. “Our phones are ringing like crazy. I just talked with a former sheriff from Polk County, Minnesota. After speaking to him, I’m pretty sure Roper was responsible for the death of a little kid who disappeared from the Polk County Fair in Fertile, Minnesota, on August 19, 1961.”
“Wait,” Anna Rae said. “Isn’t Fertile Stephen Roper’s hometown?”
“Yes, it is.”
“And how old was he?”
“He would have been sixteen,” Joanna answered, “but here’s the kicker. The guy I spoke to, Dan Hogan, was also the first officer to arrive on the scene years earlier when Stephen called for help after his grandmother, Lucille Hawkins, fell off the front steps of her home, cracked her head open, and died on the spot. Her death was ruled to be accidental, but Hogan always suspected Stephen of having had something to do with it. I happen to agree with that assessment, by the way.”
“How come?” Anna Rae asked.
“When Orson Hawkins went to collect his wife’s personal effects, her wedding ring was missing.”
“So there’s a good chance Roper started down this road when he was what?”
“Eleven years old,” Joanna answered.
“Geez!” Anna Rae muttered. “How can I help?”
“I’m on my way to the county attorney’s office right now to see if he thinks we have enough probable cause to go for a search warrant,” Joanna told her. “I’m not holding my breath on that score, so I’m wondering if you can get one issued for Amanda Hudson’s murder in North Dakota. We know Roper keeps trophies, and they’re bound to be somewhere inside his residence, but we’ve got to gain access to his place and find them before he gets wind that we’re onto him and destroys them.”
“I’ll get in touch with Philip right away and see what he can do,” Anna Rae promised. “Good luck with your prosecutor.”
“Thanks,” Joanna said. “I’ll need it.”
Once again it took several minutes to drive to the county attorney’s office, and again Craig Witherspoon greeted Joanna with a smile. “Back so soon?” he asked. “What happened with your trash DNA?” he asked.
“Nothing yet,” Joanna replied. “As far as I know they’ve yet to develop a DNA profile, but we got a hit off AFIS.”
“AFIS?” Witherspoon repeated in disbelief. “You actually found a fingerprint in the Delgado case?”
“Not a fingerprint, a palm print,” Joanna answered. “And it’s not from our case, either. It’s from somebody else’s.”
Fortunately, along the way, she’d been making iPad notes of names, dates, and places. After consulting them for a moment, she continued. “The palm print was found at the crime scene in the murder of one Amanda Marie Hudson somewhere near the Turtle River in North Dakota on May 26, 1962.”
“Are you serious?” Craig asked. “You’ve got a crime scene palm print from a case that’s more than sixty years old?”
Joanna nodded and then quickly filled him in on the background.
During the telling, Craig’s fingers were steepled again. That meant he was thinking, so Joanna continued. “I’ve also just gotten off the phone with a guy named Dan Hogan, the former sheriff of Polk County in Minnesota. He was the lead investigator in the 1961 homicide death of a boy named Brian Olson. At age eight, he disappeared from the Polk County Fair in Fertile, Minnesota, which happens to be Stephen Roper’s hometown. Stephen would have been sixteen at the time and still living at home. In addition...”
“Stop, stop, stop,” Craig said. “You’ve convinced me. Do you have evidence of the AFIS match to the North Dakota case?”
“Yes, the official match came in from the DPS crime lab in Tucson yesterday morning. Since Amanda Hudson was half Lakota, Anna Rae Green of the federal Missing and Murdered Indigenous Victims Task Force was able to get the FBI to send out a BOLO for unsolved homicides with striking similarities to ours. That’s how the call from Dan Hogan came in to me.”
“Well,” Craig said, “whoever came up with that BOLO idea is pretty damned smart.”
