“Did you say anything to him?” Ahmed inquired.
“No. I was—I was stunned, really. I didn’t know what to say.”
“Did he at any point say, ‘Whoa, I just meant to beat him up, not to kill him?’ ”
“No.”
“[At] what point did you indicate that you agreed to do this?”
“Probably when we were standing in the shop is when I realized things were actually going to happen,” Suckow said.
Ahmed would later tell me that the night before the trial began, he had visited Suckow in his cell and found the witness curled in the fetal position on the floor. Ahmed knew Suckow took antidepressants, and when he asked the jail staff if they had treated the witness, they explained they did not have his medication. Ahmed demanded the staff call a doctor, who wrote a prescription that night. He worried the witness would be too ill to testify, but the next morning, Ahmed found Suckow upright, speaking again.
The hit man was not their most important witness—Robert Delao was—but as Ahmed coaxed Suckow through his story, I wondered if he offered something Delao could not. Suckow did not tremble like he had during his confession, nor did he cry in the opening hours of testimony. He delivered his lines numbly, as if reading from a script, and it was only when he came to the murder that his voice cracked. His shoulders tensed. His mouth went slack. His tone crept into a high, whispered pitch, as if someone were clasping their hands around his neck. Through all this, James had no expression at all, tracing the shape of his right eyebrow with the pad of his index finger.
“Where was the defendant standing when you were striking Mr. Clarke in the head?” Ahmed asked.
“Five to six feet away,” Suckow said.
“At any point during your four strikes to KC Clarke’s head, did the defendant tell you to stop?”
“No.”
“What did he say?”
Suckow paused, remembering, “ ‘We need’…“ ‘we need to stop the bleeding on the floor,’ ” he finally said.
Although George Dennis drove them to the badlands that day, it was James who told George where to go. When they came to the ravine James had chosen, James and Suckow got out of the truck and fought their way through brush to the bottom. There, as Suckow dug, James did not offer help. They had not yet negotiated Suckow’s fee, and when James asked how much the job would cost him, Suckow replied, “Twenty thousand dollars.”
“What was his reaction?” Ahmed asked.
“He choked and said, ‘Twenty thousand dollars?’ ” Suckow answered. “And I, uh—I turned around, and I looked at him, and I said, ‘It’s first-degree murder. It’s the death penalty.’ I said, ‘Do me a favor. Don’t shoot me in the back while I’m digging this hole.’ ”
That night, George drove them to the cabins, where Suckow changed his clothes, and to Williston, where they parked KC’s truck on a random street. From the truck, Suckow removed a cell phone and a money clip, which he would destroy, and a handgun, which he would keep. He found a pair of dirty shorts, which he sprayed with WD-40 and used to erase his fingerprints. He left the keys in the ignition, “hoping some kid would steal the truck.” Then he rode with George and James to a gas station, where he filled two jerricans, and to a well site where George worked. There, in a barren lot, Suckow burned the evidence.
In court the next day, Suckow still on the witness stand, Ahmed asked the judge for an exhibit to be admitted and, stepping toward a cart stocked with evidence, lifted a clear plastic bag containing several tiny objects. “Mr. Suckow, if you could step over here with me,” Ahmed said.
Suckow rose stiffly from the stand.
“Do you see this item?” Ahmed placed the bag beneath a projector.
“It looks like cardboard,” Suckow said when Ahmed pointed to an object. Then: “a loop from a hoodie”; “grommets from the tarp”; “loops from the top of my boots”; “the top button of my Carhartts”; and, at last, the remains of a money clip.
By the third day of trial, Suckow was exhausted, and when a tall, flappable defense attorney, Mark Vovos, questioned him, Suckow answered impatiently. Vovos was from Spokane and once had won a case against Ahmed, but he stumbled to discredit the witness, who now seemed utterly unwilling to defend himself. As Vovos rattled off Suckow’s past crimes—a vehicle stolen in California in 1989; another stolen in New Mexico; a car chase that ended with Suckow lying in roadside weeds, clutching a pistol—Suckow acknowledged each one gravely, and when Vovos noted that Suckow once had claimed he “hated cops” and threatened to kill one, Suckow admitted to this, too.
Vovos doubted that Suckow never intended to murder Clarke or Carlile—Suckow said he hoped to burglarize and frighten the older man, not kill him—but even this line of questioning fell flat.
“Was he scared?” Vovos asked about Carlile.
“Probably as much as I was,” Suckow replied.
“So you panicked.”
“Yes, I did.”
“And you fired.”
“Yes, I did.”
“You didn’t mean to kill him.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“Was your memory good?” Vovos asked.
This time, Suckow did not pause: “It haunts me every day.”
* * *
—
FOR THE FIRST week of testimony, I shared a room with Lissa in a large, empty chain hotel. She took the bed closest to the hallway; I took the one near a set of glass doors that led outside to a parking lot. Every morning, Lissa would rise an hour before trial, open the doors, and smoke a cigarette. Then she would shower, wash and comb her hair, and put on a pair of black pants and a cotton blouse, which she had purchased for the occasion. I had never seen her dress so nicely and was surprised when she emerged from the bathroom that first morning. She did not eat breakfast. She drank coffee and lit another cigarette, which she smoked in her car with the window down, waiting for me to come.
She insisted we arrive early to listen in on the conversations between the parties. Each day, before trial began, the attorneys discussed information they agreed to exclude from questioning, such as the failed hits James allegedly solicited on Jill Williams, Tex Hall, Robert Delao, and James’s wife, Sarah Creveling.
It was on these mornings that Lissa mingled with other attendees. The courtroom was never full. A reporter from Spokane came now and then, as well as some locals who had followed the case. But apart from Lissa and me, the only regular attendees were the Carliles—and usually only Elberta, a kind, fretful woman who watched quietly from the row in front of ours. One day, Elberta asked Lissa about Jill, who had come but left after a few days. Lissa felt Jill was making excuses, claiming she did not have money to attend while in fact the Department of Justice would have covered her expenses, but she did not share this with Elberta.
Our presence was obvious. James cast frequent glances at Lissa. At first, he seemed not to know who she was, and then, one day, he began smiling at her. “It’s weird,” Lissa whispered to me. “It’s like I’m still talking to Sarah and he thinks we’re on the same team.” In fact, James was among few in the courtroom who acknowledged Lissa. Several times, federal officials turned to survey their audience, but only Trudell spoke to Lissa—once, in the hallway. I did not see their interaction. Later, Lissa told me Trudell had seemed surprised that she would miss work for the trial and had asked how long she intended to stay. She told him she would leave after Tex Hall testified. Trudell abruptly ended the conversation.
I sensed Lissa was frustrated with Trudell, though she was more frustrated with Jill, who, by the end of Suckow’s testimony, still had not appeared. One morning, Jill called while Lissa and I were out getting coffee. “You know, if it’s any comfort, Timothy really seems remorseful,” Lissa said.
“I know,” said Jill.
“It’s like they found the perfect vulnerable adu
lt to carry out their mission.”
“I know,” Jill said again. “It just makes me hate James and Robert more.”
For a while we sat in the café parking lot as Jill sobbed quietly into the phone. Lissa asked Jill when she was coming back. Jill said she did not know.
“You need to be here, Jill,” Lissa said.
“I know,” Jill said. “I know.”
Lissa wanted Jill to find closure in attending the trial, but more than this, she believed Jill’s presence would send an important message. KC’s grandfather was dead. The only person who could sit in a courtroom with the murderers and remind them of the pain they had inflicted was Jill. Guilt, more than prison time, made criminals suffer, Lissa believed, and she resented Jill for letting them off the hook. She worried, too, what the jury saw. Did they think no one loved KC? Did they wonder if he had been less innocent than his story made him seem?
Lissa was losing confidence in the case. Each evening when we returned to the hotel, she opened the doors, lit a cigarette, and mulled over the day’s proceedings.
“It’s like they’re just going through the motions,” she complained one night. The prosecutors struck her as too assured, while their evidence in KC’s case was mostly circumstantial. That day, Ahmed had called Delao to the witness stand, and it had soon become clear that the case depended on his testimony. This made Lissa nervous, since Delao was an easy target. The defense could list his crimes, including a murder, and say that he had cooperated with the government before, that he “knew how to play the game.” They could cast him as an opportunist, talking his way in and out of his own mistakes. Certainly, Delao had a knack for telling people what they wanted to hear. In front of the jury, he assumed the bearing of a beloved high school teacher, gesticulating with his hands, defining his terms, pausing to be sure his audience understood.
In certain ways, Delao reminded Lissa of herself. He was smart, charming. She believed him when he said that he had gone to North Dakota in hope of escaping a life of crime. “This is where the criminal justice system fails people,” she said. “He gets out of prison, hears James is doing good. He just wanted to be legit, on top. It was the dream. I can do this without going to prison. But James already decided what his function was going to be because of his past. He exploited Robert just like he exploited Timothy. I can see why the state continues to make deals with Robert. They owe him. They’ve shortchanged him from the beginning. I would guess he comes from a single-parent, migratory family and all the bullshit that comes with it. And he’s been in the system most of his life, but he’s never been rehabbed. He’s never had a fair shake.”
Lissa dragged on her cigarette and shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. Her sympathy extended only so far. Delao did not seem as remorseful as Suckow. “I think he’s too fucking happy about this shit. Did you see the way James looked at me?”
I had. Not long after Delao entered the room, James had locked eyes with Lissa for a length of time that seemed more than accidental.
Lissa stamped out her cigarette, pleased with herself. “Remember I told him, ‘Aren’t you worried Robert’s going to snitch on you?’ ” She smiled. “I was thinking, I told you this day was going to come.”
* * *
—
THE BLUEPRINT ON which the prosecutors built their story came from a collection of more than ninety thousand text messages, which the FBI agent, Eric Barker, had recovered from Delao’s and Henrikson’s phones, as well as the emails traded between Delao and Suckow in the months prior to the Carlile murder. Barker would later describe to me how he sorted the data, which had come to him in one file containing, in chronological order, every message the phones delivered or received. First, he deleted conversations he deemed unimportant to the case; then, he copied the remaining conversations into spreadsheets corresponding with each alleged crime. “These guys lived on their phones, so there was just a ton of data,” he told me. He read every message. “Not that I’m a control freak, but I wanted to know exactly what was in there, so that if I had to explain this on the stand, I could.”
In fact, Barker admitted, he was a bit of a control freak. A former chief lending officer, he had just spent four years investigating corruption in Texas when he arrived at the FBI office in Spokane and was immediately assigned the Henrikson case. His father had been a truck driver in the oil fields of Wyoming, where Barker was from, and as he read the messages, Barker recognized the industry language. It had not taken him long to realize that this language was a code.
“When you want to send out roust crew?” Delao had written to James one night. Roustabouts were the workers who cleaned up sites after a company finished drilling, but Delao was referring to Todd Bates, the hit man, and another accomplice whom James had solicited to kill an employee the next day. “Get a good night sleep,” Delao wrote Bates. “Tomorrow afternoon you start work.”
The messages Barker sorted were so dense with innuendo that even the authors sometimes confused legitimate work with violence. “Welder will meet me for orientation tomorrow,” Delao had updated James. “Should I send welders to the 1st job while I do work on the second?” These messages, Delao explained to the court, referred to their preparations for a hit. When Delao later texted James about an actual welding job, he wrote, “We need welders. Real welders.”
Ahmed spent days deciphering the messages, and if ever the meaning of one was unclear, he asked Delao to enlighten the jury. Most of the messages concerned the heroin deals, for which the criminals used a different code. “Chinese food” was China white heroin. “Virgin black girls,” black tar heroin. “Spanish brown sugar cake” meant heroin from Mexico. Delao answered as eagerly as ever, lapsing into long explanations. “He’s basically offering translation services from the hood to the privileged,” Lissa said.
It was impossible to overlook the importance of the messages. While the Carlile murder file was thick with evidence—a gun, bullets, handwritten notes, a body, the welding glove—the Clarke file was comparatively thin. There was no body, no DNA, no weapon, no proof that a murder had even occurred. Later, Barker would say that KC’s murder might have been impossible to prove were it not for two pieces of evidence he discovered among the text messages—first, an exchange between Delao and Suckow on July 31, 2012:
RD: When you’re bored, look up missing Blackstone driver on the computer.
TS: Sounds serious. Everything alright?
RD: It’s all cool.
TS: Good, don’t make me worry about u.
RD: Heck no. That incident was before my time and it’s a North Dakota mystery lol Just sharing info as it passes to me. Drivers are comfortable with me now and asking me if I knew that guy
TS: Good, I don’t like 2 b worried. Lol
The second piece of evidence was a photograph of KC’s gun. Suckow had sent the photo to Delao in early August, shortly after James met with Steve Gutknecht, the Bureau of Criminal Investigations agent in Williston, and Gutknecht mentioned to James that KC’s gun was missing. James contacted Delao, who asked Suckow about the gun. Suckow admitted he had taken it. At work the next day, Suckow placed the gun in a vise, cut it in half, wrapped the pieces in duct tape, and tossed them into a dumpster. He sent the photo to Delao to prove he destroyed the gun.
* * *
—
AFTER DELAO CAME Steve Kelly, Rick Arey, Judd Parker, Justin Beeson, George Dennis, Ryan Olness, Jed McClure, and Peyton Martin. None of the testimonies would seem as important as Suckow’s or Delao’s, but they had, altogether, an impressive effect, as if the witnesses had been drawn into the same centrifugal epic and now were emerging, their lives forever altered. In the story the government crafted, James was a lonely villain, weaving the web in which the witnesses had been trapped. It was a simpler story than the one Lissa believed. It was the story, I supposed, that prosecutors had to tell. Later, I would ask federal officials if
they felt sympathy for some victims or perpetrators more than others. Ahmed said he felt most sorry for Clarke, whom he considered a truly innocent victim. Certainly no one deserved to die, Brian Cestnik added, but “they’re all con men, all conning each other.” The only outlier in this morass of deceit seemed to be the hit man. Several officials told me they felt most sorry for Suckow, who seemed more aware of his crimes than anyone and expressed the most remorse.
In this spectrum of guilt and innocence, I wondered where Sarah Creveling fit in. According to a report detailing the justification for James’s arrest, a few days after investigators raided James’s and Sarah’s house, Sarah and her lawyer called law enforcement and arranged a meeting with investigators in Minot. In this meeting, Sarah admitted she and James routinely defrauded their investors. She also admitted she had purchased, at her husband’s direction, most of the guns found in her home.
Every investigator had a theory about Sarah. One would tell me that he had been struck by her intelligence and could not help but wonder if she had been the mastermind behind it all. Another was certain of her innocence: “She was consistent with her story,” he told me. “I don’t know how many times we interviewed her. It was a lot, and her story didn’t waver.”
In the story Sarah told investigators, she had cast herself as another victim of her husband. She never had any reason to believe James murdered KC, and it was not until she was taken into protective custody that she realized he was capable of murder, she said. But while Sarah told a consistent story, there were parts of her account that confused investigators. A few months prior to the trial, the U.S. attorney of North Dakota had indicted Sarah for defrauding Blackstone investors, based on evidence Trudell and others collected. Although Sarah was the owner of Blackstone, and although she was responsible for keeping the books, in interviews she distanced herself from her company’s financial malfeasance. She raised suspicions in other ways, as well: Some Blackstone employees believed Sarah had known about the murders all along. According to Ryan Olness, the investor from Arizona, Sarah had asked him to speak to her in private shortly after KC disappeared, and she had acted so nervous that he felt certain she knew KC was murdered. Sarah denied the story. Nor did she remember meeting Suckow, but according to both Suckow and Olness, James and Sarah had driven Suckow to Williston the morning after the murder. James had forgotten to pay Suckow and called Olness, who took ten thousand dollars from his personal safe, stuffed the money in an empty Cheez-It box, and delivered it to James, Sarah, and Suckow in a pullout on the side of the road. Later, Sarah wrote two checks to reimburse Olness. “And she remembers none of this?” Mark Burbridge, the Spokane detective told me. “Come on. She spent probably two to three hours with Tim. He’s a dangerous, scary-looking guy. And you don’t remember that? My ass.”
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