Maintaining the wilderness trails became one of Ed Dyer’s responsibilities not long after he began working at the Sisters Ranger Station, and they were his pride. He estimated that, on foot or on horseback, he covered six or seven hundred miles on the trails every year himself. He presided over trail-maintenance crews funded by the Forest Service and whatever government program happened to be in operation—the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act or the Youth Conservation Corps or the Young Adult Conservation Corps. He acted as liaison with equestrian groups that made use of the trails. As a scoutmaster, he was known for organizing and leading “fifty-milers”—weeklong backpacking trips that covered a full fifty miles on the wilderness trails.
After several years in Sisters, the Dyers had moved to the outskirts of Redmond—a much larger, more conventional Central Oregon town twenty miles to the east—so that the children wouldn’t have to take a twenty-mile bus ride every morning to get to the nearest high school. Even before the move, though, the entire family was active in the Redmond Mormon church. Both Ed and Tona Dyer taught Sunday school. Ed Dyer had become scoutmaster of the church’s Boy Scout Troop 26 within a year of his assignment to Sisters. Dyer had never really left Scouting. Years before his own boys were old enough to be Boy Scouts and years after they had gone on to other things, he went through a constant round of troop meetings and courts of honor and campouts and fifty-milers. It was said around Redmond that Troop 26 did consistently well in amassing merit badges and producing Eagle Scouts. Ed Dyer was given any number of awards. Scouting, in the view of another member of the congregation, was Dyer’s “prestige thing, his ego trip.”
Being a successful scoutmaster may bring a certain kind of prestige, or at least some community appreciation, in an outdoor sort of place like Central Oregon. There are a lot of places—indoor sorts of places—where it would bring no prestige at all. There are a lot of places—places that value social skills and appearance and sophistication—where Ed Dyer might have had some difficulty fitting in. Even his friends acknowledged that once he had you cornered, he could tell you a lot more about a fifty-mile hike than you wanted to know. The western clothes he wore when he was out of his Forest Service uniform did nothing to disguise the fact that he had put on a lot of weight over the years. He was not thought of as someone who always knew precisely what to say at precisely the right moment. But Ed Dyer was someone who seemed to have found a niche in Central Oregon. Through Scouting and other good works, he had become a valued member of the community. He had his wilderness trails and his hunting and his horseback riding. Behind the Dyers’ house, two or three miles toward Sisters on Oregon Route 126, there was a patch of pastureland where he kept a couple of horses. Dyer rode on the trails, and he rode in the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Posse. He and his wife—a rather retiring, soft-spoken woman with a strong commitment to the Mormon Church—not only raised four children of their own but occasionally took in children of friends and relatives when help was needed. In Central Oregon, the Dyers had carved out a pretty good life for themselves—except for what was, much later, always referred to as Ed’s problem. His problem was pedophilia—homosexual pedophilia. He could not control his sexual desire for young boys.
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The Mormon Church does not have a professional ministry. The leader of a Mormon congregation—in Mormon terminology, the leader of a ward—is a layman who is known as the bishop. In 1982, the bishop of the Mormon ward in Redmond got some disturbing news about Ed Dyer. One of the Scouts in Troop 26 had told his parents that Dyer made a sexual advance to him during an overnight camping trip. Dyer’s version was that he had inadvertently touched the boy while they were sleeping in a tent together, and the boy had panicked. But it turned out that there were other stories of sexual misconduct concerning Dyer and Scouts in Troop 26. Ed Dyer was asked by the church to resign as scoutmaster.
Aside from that, the church leadership had trouble figuring out exactly what to do about him. The first step was easy. The president of what the Mormons call a stake—a stake is roughly the equivalent of a diocese—has a high council that at times sits as a sort of ecclesiastical court. The court has the power to excommunicate a Mormon. It can also simply reprimand him. In Dyer’s case, it took a middle course—what the Mormons call disfellowship, a sort of probation that is based on a period of repentance and rehabilitation. The church authorities did not inform the civil authorities of the allegations against Dyer.
It could be said, of course, that the church was simply trying to avoid embarrassment, or even lawsuits: if the accusations against Dyer were true, after all, the Redmond ward had for twelve years had a pedophile in a position of trust and intimacy with young boys. The Mormons would offer some other explanations for not having gone to the police. It was always possible, for instance, that the accusation by the Boy Scout was untrue or exaggerated; Dyer apparently told some members of the congregation that it was all a mistake and he was being treated unfairly. It could be argued that the fact that the inquiry had started within the church gave it the equivalent of the confidentiality traditional between priest and penitent—although there is no indication that Ed Dyer confessed to anything. It was presumably also true that the Mormons had difficulty facing an issue that a lot of them considered appalling and repugnant. Apparently, those in the ward who came to know about Ed Dyer’s problem rarely discussed it. “It’s the sort of subject you avoid because it’s distasteful,” one of them said later. “It’s something you just don’t want to believe has happened.”
For whatever reason, it was about a year before the high-council court prepared to convene again to consider refellowshipping Dyer. By that time, though, one high-council member had heard what seemed to be a corroborating allegation from the time Dyer still lived in the Valley, and had learned that Dyer had put up notices in places like gun shops announcing that he was certified to give the hunting-education course required in Oregon for any hunter under eighteen—notices that could, of course, be seen as a device to meet boys. That member was asked by the stake president to undertake an investigation, a role provided for in church rules. The boys in Troop 26 were reluctant to say anything, but the investigator began calling around to young men who had been Boy Scouts in Redmond in the past. He worked just about full-time on the investigation for three weeks, and in the end he gave the stake president a thirty-page dossier, accompanied by tape recordings that, with the permission of his informants, he had made of several telephone conversations. The report indicated that the incident with the Boy Scout in the tent was not an isolated incident but part of a pattern that went back at least twenty-five years.
The stake president did not reconvene the court to consider refellowshipping Dyer, but some time passed before he decided what to do instead. Part of the delay may have been caused by preoccupation with other matters. In August of 1983, one of the Dyers’ sons, a young man of nineteen named Lance, was found to have leukemia. The members of the ward rallied around to help the Dyer family through the months of treatment—treatment that turned out to be of no avail. Lance Dyer died of pneumonia in May of 1984. It didn’t seem to be the best time to pursue a case against Ed Dyer. Also, according to a member of the church who was familiar with the case, Dyer “kept saying he was going to turn himself in.” It had been the high council’s understanding that during the disfellowship period, Dyer was going to seek counseling and was going to avoid situations that would put him in the company of young boys. Apparently, the council concluded that Dyer had not complied with that understanding, because when it finally convened as a court, in late 1984, the decision was to excommunicate him. “I stayed away from kids for a long time,” Dyer said some time later, when his problem was finally being dealt with in a court of law. “And then Louis came along.”
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Like Ed Dyer, Susan Birdsell Conner grew up loving the outdoors. She lived on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California, where her parents owned a beauty parlor and her father dabbled in real estate. From t
he time Susan and her twin sister, Sharon, were eight or nine, they both knew that they were going to be veterinarians, and they both knew that they were someday going to live in a place where the horses were back of the house rather than miles away in a boarding stable. Their mother can summon up life with two aspiring veterinarians in one sentence: “We had cages all over.” Like many identical twins, the Birdsell sisters were a lot more comfortable with each other than with other people. By the time they entered school, they had used a private language with each other for so long that they had to be treated for slight speech impediments. They enrolled together at the University of California, Davis, and in 1967 they graduated as veterinarians. Both married Davis veterinary students who planned to practice as equine veterinarians. It was a double wedding.
Sharon got to Sisters first. She and her husband, Eric Sharpnack, moved there from Point Reyes, California, in 1978 and took over the Sisters Veterinary Clinic. She concentrated on small animals; he treated horses, and on a number of occasions llamas. Susan had been living in the East with her husband, a racetrack veterinarian named Edward Conner, and their two sons. She and her husband were divorced in 1976, and after a couple of years she and the boys moved to Oregon, where she eventually joined the Sharpnacks’ practice. Not long after that, Sharon and Eric Sharpnack were divorced. Seventeen years after the double wedding, the Birdsell twins—both divorced and both with two children—were in practice together as the sole partners of the Sisters Veterinary Clinic.
They seemed to be among those people who were well suited to Central Oregon and might have been uncomfortable in a place less focused on the outdoors. “I don’t think they’d even know how to dress up,” a friend says of them. Susan Conner bought a house in Tollgate—a simple rough-cedar house that had nearly an acre of ponderosa pines and a paddock in the back. Tollgate, like Black Butte Ranch, is virtually inside the national forest, and she took great joy in being able to ride from her own paddock onto the forest’s trails and logging roads. She became particularly active in what is known locally as wagon driving—leisurely caravans of horse-drawn conveyances that might range from sulkies to restored buggies to covered wagons.
Susan had one problem not shared by her sister. Sharon Sharpnack’s children were both girls, and their father was still in Sisters. Susan Conner’s boys had virtually no contact with their father, who remained in the East. Her younger son, Brian, was an outgoing boy who had adjusted with relative ease to the move to Oregon and life in Sisters. But her older son, Louis, was more diffident than his brother and more obviously in need of a father figure. That was why Susan Conner was so pleased when, during Louis’s eighth-grade year at Sisters Junior High School, he met an avuncular outdoorsman from the Forest Service named Ed Dyer.
Louis Conner, who was then fifteen, seemed a couple of years younger than he was—a slim, nice-looking boy with sandy hair and a quick, shy smile. He had his mother’s love of animals and the outdoors. He belonged to two 4-H groups—one having to do with horses, the other with dog obedience and showmanship. He was gentle and unassertive, the sort of boy who tends not to register on his classmates in a large school. The adults who came in contact with him—teachers, 4-H leaders, Susan Conner’s friends—thought of him as a polite young man, eager to be befriended by them. “Every year, there are boys, and sometimes girls, who adopt you,” James Green, Louis’s science teacher at Sisters Junior High, has said. “You could tell he wanted to talk to an adult—particularly a man.”
In the spring of 1984, just before Easter vacation, Jim Green asked the Forest Service if it was possible to have someone come out and instruct his eighth graders in the proper use of the national forest. The Forest Service sent Ed Dyer. Green and Dyer gave a three-day course on how to exist in the wilderness—how to use a compass, how to read a map, how to pack a horse, how to survive in an emergency. During the visit, Dyer said he was looking for someone to hike the trails with him—to take part in “camping and skiing and different things in the outdoors.” As Dyer later recalled it, Louis Conner “turned around and said, ‘I’d like to be your friend and go with you.’ ”
By that time, as it happened, a member of the Mormon congregation had informed an acquaintance on the Redmond police force that Ed Dyer had been disfellowshipped because of allegations of sexual misconduct with Boy Scouts. The informant suggested that it was a matter the police should investigate, but eventually it became obvious to him that whatever investigation had taken place was not going to lead to an indictment. It may be that the Redmond police had problems with the statute of limitations. It may be that there were problems with jurisdiction; a lot of the crimes that were alleged, after all, had occurred on hikes and encampments far outside the Redmond city limits, in the Central Oregon outdoors. It may be that the police were reluctant to launch a vigorous investigation of good old Ed Dyer, or that, like some members of the church, they were simply unable to face the possibility that what was being said about the man who had been entrusted with so many boys for so many years was true.
Louis worked that summer as a volunteer helping to maintain trails in the national forest. He began to talk about the possibility of making the Forest Service his career. Ed Dyer and Louis did a lot of things that a father and son would do in an outdoor sort of place. They went deer hunting together. Dyer gave Louis a shotgun. When the time came for Louis to buy a horse, Dyer helped him pick one out. Dyer often dropped by the house in Tollgate. He offered to supply the Conners with firewood. He had discussions with Susan Conner about how Louis was doing in school and what sort of friends he should be meeting. The adults who knew Louis—the woman who led his 4-H horse group, for instance—thought it was “really nice that he could have an older friend who was interested in the same things he was.” Susan Conner was delighted. She thought that her worries about the absence of a father figure for Louis were over.
Of course, neither Susan Conner nor Louis Conner nor their friends knew why Ed Dyer had resigned as scoutmaster of Troop 26 two years before he met Louis at Sisters Junior High. They were not Mormons. They knew nothing of the deliberations concerning Ed Dyer in the stake high council. They knew nothing about an investigation by the Redmond police. Sooner or later, though, the Forest Service was told of the information that the police had about Ed Dyer. As a result, the ranger in charge of the Sisters Ranger District walked into Dyer’s office in February of 1985, closed the door behind him, and informed Dyer that he would no longer be permitted to work with young people unless other adults were present. The allegations in the hands of the police had not been proved, of course, and the ranger apparently tried to be balanced in responding to them. Recalling the ranger’s instructions later, Dyer remarked, “He said, ‘Well, just be prudent. Don’t put yourself in a situation where you’re set up.’ And I followed those rules.”
Dyer did not interpret the rules as applying to his relationship with Louis Conner. Louis continued to be Dyer’s companion in the outdoors—although there were times when he seemed reluctant to go on outings with Dyer, and periods when they didn’t see each other at all. Susan Conner thought that Louis might be getting tired of Dyer’s stories or that he was beginning to prefer the company of boys his own age. Dyer persisted, though, and eventually Louis would accept one of his invitations. Dyer took him elk hunting. Two or three times Dyer took him to an event called a Mountain Man Rendezvous, a weekend encampment at which men dress in buckskin clothes and hold marksmanship contests with black-powder muskets and drink a lot of modern-day beer. In the summer of 1985, a little more than a year after their meeting in Jim Green’s science class, Dyer arranged for Louis to work as a member of the Youth Conservation Corps crew maintaining trails.
Meanwhile, the informant from the Mormon church, having tried both the Redmond police force and the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Department with no success, turned to the state police. The state police were interested. They didn’t foresee any jurisdictional problems. They weren’t troubled by the fact that so many of t
he allegations were beyond the statute of limitations; the behavior pattern of a pedophile tends to be so unvarying, they told their informant, that incidents within the statute of limitations would almost certainly be turned up. The case was assigned to Lynn Fredrickson, a state police detective who has a reputation for dealing sympathetically and effectively with young people. New names of boys who knew Ed Dyer were not difficult to find. On June 18, 1985, Fredrickson showed up at the Sisters Ranger Station and asked to speak to a summer Youth Conservation Corps employee named Louis Conner.
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