Yellow Bird

by Sierra Crane Murdoch

  When Sarah entered the courtroom on the thirteenth day of trial, she had the poise of a funeral-goer. She did not appear to walk so much as float, her hips moving slightly, her shoulders entirely motionless. She wore black flats, dark gray pants, and a long coat fitted to her slim figure. Her hair was dark at its roots, tied in a bun.

  She noticed Lissa only after she had taken her seat on the witness stand. Her eyes flickered and looked away. She would not glance at James, who did not look at Sarah, either. Where, before, James had stared aggressively at every witness, now his face flushed, and he looked like he might cry—the only emotion I had seen him express in the days he had been on trial.

  Sarah’s voice was sweet and firm.

  “Did you ever ask the defendant about KC’s disappearance?” Scott Jones asked.

  “Yes,” Sarah replied.

  “How many times?”

  “Maybe a handful.”

  “On any of those occasions, did he have a physical response to the question?”

  “Once. He went pale and completely quiet.”

  “At some point in time, [did you see a] Facebook posting indicating that KC’s body might have been found?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where were you?”

  “In the vehicle with James.”

  “Can you please describe his physical reaction?”

  “He looked like he’d seen a ghost. He went completely white and started asking me questions.”

  A half hour had passed when Jones showed Sarah a copy of the flyer. Suddenly, her still exterior cracked. She glanced at Lissa and began to cry. Lissa looked surprised. “Do you think she knows you made those flyers?” I murmured.

  “No,” Lissa said. “She has no clue.”

  The next morning, a defense attorney would suggest inconsistencies in her story, but Sarah would not soften under his questioning. She would correct his dates, his mixed-up facts. She would interrupt to clarify what he had asked. I would notice Lissa smiling, as if in approval of Sarah. She tore a sheet from her journal and composed a note. She was glad Sarah was safe, she wrote, and when we broke for lunch, I watched Lissa hand the note to a slender woman with curly gray hair, whom I recognized as Sarah’s mother. Later, when we returned to the courtroom, the woman bent to whisper in Lissa’s ear.

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  “She said, ‘Thank you,’ ” Lissa replied.

  * * *

  —

  WE ROOMED TOGETHER for a little over a week, until a friend joined Lissa from North Dakota, and I rented my own place. I don’t think I could have lasted another night with her, and I don’t think Lissa could have lasted with me, either. She was hardly sleeping. I had taken to shutting off the lights to see if she would go to bed, and still she would lie on the covers in her court clothes, scrolling through news long past midnight. Later, we would laugh about this—Lissa liked to mock my sleep habits, which she considered excessive and dogmatic—but, at the time, nothing seemed very humorous. As she had expected, the defense was undermining Delao’s credibility, calling for his impeachment, which could exclude his testimony from the jury’s consideration and result in a mistrial. Coincidentally, the judge was presiding at the same time over another case involving Delao: Years earlier, the witness had been accused by a defense team of giving false testimony to a jury regarding his involvement in the attempted robbery of an elderly woman. Two weeks into the Henrikson trial, the judge ruled Delao had, indeed, lied in the robbery case, but he chose not to inform the Henrikson jury of this ruling.

  Ahmed was livid, especially when the Spokesman-Review printed an article before the Henrikson trial was over about Delao lying in that other case. “I’m not being critical of the judge,” he later told me. “I am being critical of the timing of it.”

  At trial, the parties began to bicker, which Lissa took as a sign that the prosecutors were getting nervous. “I’m sorry, but I could do better than that,” she bragged to me one morning. I had begun to suspect the distrust was mutual. In the first week of trial, Lissa had gone looking for Jill on a lower floor of the courthouse when someone yelled her name. She had turned to find herself face-to-face with an agitated guard. She was not allowed on the floor, the guard had said, and Lissa complied, but it was the way the guard called her attention that rattled her: “He knew my name,” she told me—not “Lissa,” but “Yellow Bird.”

  She had noticed other things, too—the way Trudell avoided her after their encounter in the hallway, the way the guards watched her whenever she went out to smoke. After Mark Burbridge, the Spokane detective, gave his testimony, we both saw him roll his eyes at her.

  Then, one afternoon, as I rode with Lissa to her hotel, a cop trailed us most of the way. When we got to the room, I sat at the desk, turned on my recorder, and asked Lissa to repeat the story of the flyers. “So I came home to switch Percy’s bandages one day,” she said, “and he was like, ‘Sis, your packages are here,’ and I looked, and they were all piled up—” Lissa pulled a cigarette from her pocket and slid open the glass doors. “And I—” She stopped. “The fucking cops are here,” she said.

  “What?” I rose to the doors.

  “They’re taking my license number and shit.”

  Indeed, a cop had parked behind her rental car—one of only two in the lot—and was pointing some sort of device at her license plate. He looked up at us and drove off.

  Suddenly, Lissa was laughing, folding over, choking on her cigarette smoke.

  “That’s some covert shit up in this bitch,” she said. “See him take off as soon as he seen me? That door surprised him. I looked right at him. He was sitting there behind that license plate.”

  I watched Lissa. She was laughing still, her eyes blinking tears. She swallowed her breath, wiped her eyes. “That’s not my imagination, girl,” she said. “I’m telling you. That’s why I say, ‘Be alert. Don’t fuck around.’ Because nobody knows whose team you’re on. I’m perceived as an enemy of the state. I’m a threat.” Lissa pulled on her cigarette. She coughed, a loose rattle. “And it’s like, they don’t know what I’ve been through. I’m here because I have a right to be here. I know my rights. Try to tell me I can’t be here.” Her cigarette had gone out, and when she relit it, I noticed that her hand was trembling. “I’m telling you. I live like that all the time. All the time. All the time,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  I NEVER FOUND out why the cop followed us. Lissa suspected it had to do with the trial, but as for who would have given him the order, she did not know. “I feel so far from home,” she told me. Three weeks into the trial, she bought a return flight to Fargo. I agreed to drive her to the airport, but when I called to make plans the evening before her departure, Lissa did not answer. At last, she called. I asked how her night was going. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “I just need to get my ass home.”

  She was smoking a cigarette when I found her the next morning. For a while, we drove in silence. Finally, she said, “I’ve been thinking, and I’m kind of at the point where maybe he’s better off if we leave his ass out there.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Do you remember when I was out there with Obie? There was this really steep incline, and my pelvis was hurting, so I couldn’t go down there, but I told Obie, ‘When you go down, it’s a drop, about sixty feet, and there are trees, and if you start going, those trees aren’t going to stop you.’ I told him, ‘If you start going, just drop back and grab those bushes.’ He didn’t believe me. He got maybe a quarter of the way down, and gravity started taking over. He did exactly like I told him. He grabbed those bushes. Then he kind of tumbled down some more, because gravity kept pulling him, and he ended up in this tiny grove, and there was an opening in the shrubs there. He landed on his feet. And he said, ‘Oh my God, Mom. I wish you could see this.’ He s
aid, ‘You’re not going to believe how beautiful it looks from here.’ ”

  “It is a beautiful place,” I said.

  “That’s what I’m thinking. He’s buried in a beautiful place.”

  16

  The Body

  THERE WERE TWO WEEKS REMAINING in the trial when Lissa left. I called her the night Tex Hall took the stand and again on the day of the verdict, but she did not answer. The jury convicted James Henrikson on all eleven counts, including both murders-for-hire, four attempted hits, and the conspiracy to distribute heroin. Later, the judge would hand him two life sentences—one for killing Doug Carlile and the other for Kristopher Clarke.

  As I watched the trial alone, I had the strange sensation that Lissa was nowhere and everywhere at once. No attorney or witness mentioned her name, though signs of her glared out at me. The flyer appeared many times throughout the trial, the most essential prop in the story the government had crafted and a symbol of the ruin of Blackstone’s reputation, since it had forced James and Sarah to flee Fort Berthold and seek another front man in Carlile. This version of the story was true except on one point: According to prosecutors, it was Jed McClure, the investor, who acted alone to distribute the flyer—McClure who had been intent on forcing Blackstone off the reservation. And this was not the government’s only omission. When Scott Jones questioned Sarah Creveling about the “Facebook posting” suggesting Clarke’s body had been found, he was likely asking about a text message Lissa sent to Sarah in the summer of 2013. Indeed, a body had been found, but Lissa knew it was not KC’s; rather, it belonged to a rancher murdered on his property near Williston. Lissa had sent the message to see how Sarah would react, and in the days afterward, Sarah asked Lissa about the body multiple times, wondering if anyone identified it. Later, when I asked officials what made them believe Sarah knew about KC’s murder, they mentioned this moment when Sarah told James a body had been found, and James, in her words, “went pale and completely quiet.”

  I suspected prosecutors left Lissa out of their story because they did not know the depth of her involvement. If Sarah or Jed mentioned her in interviews, each would have known only a small piece of the role Lissa played in the case. Trudell knew that Lissa had spoken frequently to Sarah, but none knew the extent of their communication. Even I found it difficult to define what Lissa had done. It was easier to say what might never have occurred had she not been involved in the case: James might not have been forced off the reservation; Carlile might not have been killed; KC’s murder might not have been solved; and Tex might have remained chairman of the tribe.

  I also suspected that investigators left her out because they distrusted her. Aine Ahmed, the federal prosecutor, told me that after Suckow brought investigators to the burial area, they had tried to keep the site a secret, because, “We felt that if Yellow Bird or anyone else found the body, now we have issues with forensics. I just didn’t want a thousand people at that scene, looking for a body, when we had expended all those resources.”

  Other investigators seemed suspicious of Lissa’s motives. “I want to be careful what I say,” Burbridge told me. “She’s a cop wannabe who forms theories based on theories without evidence, without any real knowledge of how bad guys work, and she can cause problems. You can get off on a tangent and get lost if you start going down some of those roads.” Even Mike Marchus, whom Lissa considered a friend, made clear to me that he did not reciprocate the feeling: “She’s a smart gal. I think she always wanted to be in law enforcement.” Police have a word for this—“We call them ‘holster sniffers.’ ” Before Lissa went to prison, Marchus told me, “I didn’t like dealing with her. She was a pain in the ass. Then, after she got out, I’d hear from her. Then I wouldn’t hear from her. I just always assumed she was going through that cycle, you know?” He meant that he assumed she was still using drugs and was surprised when I told him Lissa was sober.

  When I recalled the conversation for Lissa, she told me that Marchus was playing down how friendly they once had been. She was more bothered that he thought she was still using. “Maybe it’s because these guys in law enforcement don’t often see addicts get sober?” I suggested.

  “No,” she said. “I think it’s just easiest for them to think of us as throwaways. Being an addict is unsightly. It’s unattractive.”

  Burbridge’s comment stayed longer with Lissa. No real knowledge of how bad guys work. “They’re so set on labeling people,” she told me. “I am the bad guy. They put this veil between themselves and what they project to believe is a bad guy.”

  The investigator who had the clearest sense of her involvement in the Clarke case was Darrik Trudell. Though the Department of Homeland Security would not allow me to interview him on the record, I sensed Trudell was also wary of Lissa, if not confused by her. Lissa sensed his wariness too. “I’m not trying to put a feather in my hat,” she told me when I visited her after the trial. “But what if I didn’t call up to Washington and say, ‘You need to call Darrik’? What if I didn’t call Darrik and say, ‘You need to call up to Washington’? What if Darrik didn’t call them and say, ‘Hey, you need to ask about KC Clarke’? There were just so many things that could have happened that would have let these guys off. Tim Suckow could have gone down for the Carlile deal, kept his mouth shut, and all those people would be walking out in the free world, conjuring up their next con game on some other unsuspecting victim.”

  Lissa and Trudell had recently spoken by phone. She congratulated him on the verdict and mentioned Tex Hall again, suggesting he was less of a victim than he had made himself seem. Trudell defended Tex, having no reason to believe Tex acted nefariously. This made Lissa angry with Trudell all over again.

  “Darrik thinks I have an agenda,” she told me. “Of course I have an agenda, but Darrik is so young and green that he can’t even understand it. This is a spiritual journey for me. This is beyond Darrik’s comprehension. He made this clear in Washington, when he asked, ‘You’re missing work and losing pay? Why?’ You have no soul, Darrik. You can’t put this kind of shit on paper. He may be well trained by the book, but when it comes to spirit or compassion, he’s a flunky. A lot of Indians say, ‘That’s a white thing. They’re not really taught from birth how to have these experiences.’ Maybe something drastic will have to happen, something like I went through with Shauna, or with prison, but one day, the fucking light’s going to go off, and he’ll be like, ‘That’s why. I get it.’ ”

  Lissa was getting worked up. “He’s got his feather. I don’t know why he’s worried about me. I must be pretty goddamn important. God, I’d just like to meet that fucker at the bar,” she said. “Yup, you got your ass kicked by a fat little Indian chick.”

  A week later, when I called Lissa, she had forgiven Trudell. “If it wasn’t for him, this case would still be sitting on Gutknecht’s desk,” she said. “My goal was to get justice for KC, and if it weren’t for Darrik, I would have never gotten that. What I wanted to happen happened. I’ve got to give him a little chicken feather for that. He did listen. He did take the time to meet with me. All that Tex Hall bullshit aside, I think he should get credit, because one person out of all these people listened. Just because somebody doesn’t have a badge doesn’t mean their story’s not worth listening to.”

  * * *

  —

  IN JUNE 2016, after receiving federal permission, Trudell invited Lissa and Rick Arey into the badlands to give them a tour of the burial area to which Suckow and George Dennis had led him. The Clarke case was officially closed, but Trudell suspected Lissa would want to keep on searching even after investigators had given up.

  Lissa accepted the offer. Indeed, she was not done looking for KC, she decided. She chose not to tell Trudell that she had already seen the area, and she invited me along. One weekend, she picked me up in Bismarck, and together we drove west into the badlands.

  We met Trudell and Rick at a pull-off pas
t a gate, climbed into Trudell’s dark SUV, and headed north. The grass was high and gone to seed. Trudell was wearing hiking boots, jeans, a gray T-shirt, and wraparound sunglasses. He kept sighing, as if he wanted to get the day over with as quickly as he could.

  We came to a bend in the road, and Trudell pointed out a window to a small, desiccated pond. When he first asked Suckow to look at a map and identify the burial site, Suckow had chosen this pond as a landmark, but when agents brought the hit man into the badlands, Suckow had led them farther south, to the bottom of a ravine. Now Trudell showed us this ravine, dense with brush.