The Cokeville Miracle

by Hartt

  While David was looking over the accommodations, Princess was sent to the van to bring in more weapons. By the time she returned, a newcomer had joined the group—sixty-six-year-old teacher’s aide Verlene Bennion. It was clear that the conference room would not be big enough for the number of people David intended to capture—many more than those taken hostage so far. Once everyone realized that the shopping cart held a genuine bomb and that he was ready to detonate it if crossed, it wasn’t hard to herd them back down the south hallway, searching for the most appropriate room.

  There are unanswered questions about what happened next. Tina Cook thought Princess was an enthusiastic conspirator, as guilty as David and Doris, of planning and executing the takeover of the school. Others felt her actions at this point showed that she was coerced into helping and had no wish to harm anyone.

  Whatever her state of mind at the moment, she appeared to have come to some kind of breaking point. Several in the group heard her say to David, “My God! My God! I can’t believe you would do this to innocent children!” Then she simply turned and walked away.

  David’s reaction to this outburst is almost impossible to define. Hindsight suggests he could easily have lost control, ordering Princess to remain, and if further crossed, attacked her or one of the innocent bystanders, perhaps even setting off the bomb. Perhaps she would have given in and obeyed his orders if he had simply cowed her with verbal threats. Perhaps he saw something in his daughter’s face that no one else could and knew she was more dangerous to his plans if she stayed than if she left. Whatever the case, witnesses all agree that he tossed the van keys to her and shouted, “Take these then and get the hell out of here!” She left the building immediately, taking with her David and Doris’s only avenue of escape.

  Quickly reasserting his authority after Princess’s defection, David settled on the middle door of the hallway and told Doris to go round up the other children and bring them all to him. He stood at the entrance to Room 4, where Mrs. Mitchell was presenting a flannel-board story to her students, plus Janel Dayton’s. After she finished “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” Jean Mitchell intended to move smoothly into a discussion of magnets and then into the kids’ favorite discussion topic, dinosaurs. Later, they would practice arithmetic and spelling. The afternoon was well-planned, and the students seemed to be enjoying the story.

  She was therefore a little irritated when a shaggy-looking man barged into her room, pulling a cart and surrounded by a group of people, some of whom she knew and some she had never seen before. She was even more surprised when the man began stacking rifles against her classroom wall. She quickly realized he had pistols tucked in his belt as well. Before she could adjust to the invasion, he was inside the room, as were the five other people with him, and he was sounding very much in charge.

  Within a few minutes, a crowd of other students began streaming through her door, taking the papers being handed out to them by a woman Jean didn’t know but who was obviously with the bearded man.

  Doris had managed her task of gathering hostages well. Thinking her invitation to be on the orders of Principal Max Excell, several of the teachers she had confronted had willingly led their students to Room 4 when she told them they were to assemble there. Music teacher John Miller had been swept along with them. In minutes, Jean’s room, designed for 30, held 135 children and 18 adults.

  Ten-year-old Jerry Dayton was curious about what was going on. The lady had told his class, “Follow me! . . . I have a surprise for you!” When he got in the room and saw all the guns and the strange people, he remembered they had been studying Libya recently. Maybe the school had put together a kind of assembly to teach everybody how to defend themselves against terrorists. It was a neat idea.

  The room David selected was good for his purposes. There was no door to the outside and the window sections that were movable were small, only opening partway. More and more self-assured as growing numbers of school children came under his gaze, David watched Doris hand out more of his pamphlets and waited for the commotion to die down.

  Jean Mitchell wasn’t ready to relinquish her classroom. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. David scowled. “This is my room!” she pressed.

  David wouldn’t condescend to argue. “Sit down and shut up!” he told her, and there was no mistaking the implied threat.

  Others were still being dragged into the situation. The special education teacher, Gloria Mower, was working one-on-one with a student in the adjoining room when the commotion began to distract her. Peeking into Room 4, she and her student were “invited” in.

  Fourth-grade teacher Kliss Sparks, as much a grandmother to her students as their instructor, was treating the class to an outdoor session on the lawn, the perfect place to read out loud from Tom Sawyer. Hearing the noise inside, however, she thought perhaps she had missed word of a program of some kind intended for her students as well. She took the class in and found herself trapped with everyone else. Now she struggled to forgive herself for exposing her students to danger.

  Sandy Gonzales, a UPS driver, came down the hall, looking for someone to accept her delivery. Soon she was one of the hostages.

  Eva Clark, who had earlier called the school not to be worried about Paul being a bit late, had just arrived with him and was taking him to class. Her four-year-old, Kathy, was left in the car, since Eva would be right back. Arriving at Paul’s classroom, she was surprised to find it empty. The library was vacant as well. Then she saw teacher Jack Mitchell coming down the hall. “They might be down in my wife’s room,” Jack told her with a laugh. “It looks like they’ve got something going on down there. Jean is always cooking up something new.”

  Eva and Paul went to Room 4, where the boy quickly found his classmates. The woman at the door beckoned Eva in as well. Intent on her afternoon tasks, Eva barely noticed her. Spring branding was scheduled to begin the next day, and she had shopping to do in Montpelier before she could even begin to help her husband, Lowell, bring the cattle in. Lots of relatives were coming, some from out of state. To host them properly and complete all the preparations, she would have to stick to her list.

  “I’ve got to go,” Eva smiled at the woman who had gestured to her.

  “No, come in,” the woman said. “You’ll want to see this.”

  “I just haven’t got the time,” Eva tried to explain.

  Again, the woman insisted. This time her expression was irritable rather than smiling.

  Then Janel Dayton stepped in. “You may want to stay,” she said quietly. “We have a problem here.” Eva saw the pistols David was wearing and the shoelace-trigger attached to his wrist. Suddenly, Eva thought about the other five of her six children who were in the room. There was no question. She would have to stay.

  School custodian Delbert Rentfro had not yet been seen by either David or Doris. He met up with Principal Max Excell and told him that the fifth graders were in their classroom but their teacher, Mr. Miller, wasn’t there. “The kids are starting to get a bit noisy,” he said.

  Since it was unlike Mr. Miller, a much-respected music teacher on loan from the high school, to be tardy or absent without notice, Excell went to look for him. On the way, he observed the milling and confusion around Room 4. What he saw in the doorway made him even more concerned: an unauthorized assembly—an assembly, in fact, of most of the school, crammed together in one classroom! He spotted John Miller about the same time he realized something was wrong. “What is going on here?” he demanded.

  David knew an authority figure when he saw one. “Are you the principal?” he asked.

  Excell said yes and repeated his question. Getting no satisfactory answer, Excell sat down and studied the children. Many of them were attempting to play or read. He noticed they also frequently looked up at David and Doris, as if hoping they would be gone the next time they looked. The children were apparently quite aware of the cart and its importance and realized that David was consciously holding his hand low and quiet
.

  “I didn’t get the feeling he was acting,” said one child later. “He was too careful to keep his hand down all the time.”

  One of his friends explained, “A teacher told me that we needed to be quiet and not upset the man. One jerk from his wrist and the bomb would blow. I kept watching to see that he kept his wrist down.”

  Once Excell realized the gravity of the situation, he also realized that there were things they needed to have in the room if the adults were going to keep the children well and occupied. He asked David for permission to gather up boxes of tissue, aspirin, and other things needed to keep the children settled down. David told him he could have a few minutes, and the principal went out to forage.

  When he came back, he learned that David had more plans for him. He named Excell his spokesman and told the principal to call authorities and state that he wanted two million dollars for each of the kids. “I want no part of the negotiations,” said David. “They have a way of trying to break you down. I don’t want to waste time with that. You do the talking.”

  Excell tried to keep his voice calm. Over a hundred kids meant over two hundred million dollars, just as a ballpark figure. What hope was there of getting that large a ransom? But he couldn’t solve that part of it now. “Who do you want me to call first?” he asked David. “The sheriff?”

  “That’s fine,” David replied benignly. “Tell them I’m prepared to be here ten days or more if necessary. It may take Congress that long to raise the money.”

  Excell thought the man was calm enough to risk a question: “Why this school?” he asked, keeping his voice low. “Why here?”

  David was very willing to reply. “Because this is a family town,” he said, “where people love their children, and they’ll do anything to get them back.” Unknown to Excell and the others, David was not just guessing. Later investigations proved that he had taken notes while living in Cokeville about the school children and their families, including things such as who was close friends with whom. David’s answer to Excell was much more than a casual remark. In fact, it was a real conclusion David had drawn about the kind of people who inhabited this small—but in his eyes—unique western town.

  As Excell got up to make his first outside call, David gave him a sharp warning. “Be back here every ten minutes to make your report, or I’ll start shooting these kids one by one.” Later, probably recognizing the impractical constraint he was placing on Excell, David allowed fifteen minutes instead of ten.

  Excell left for his office to make the all-important call. He tried to compute the total dollar amount of David’s ransom demand. It would be staggering, and probably impossible to get.

  Inside his office, he called the sheriff’s office and told them what was happening. He was surprised to learn they had just been contacted by someone else, a young woman calling herself Princess, who had made a “strange report” about a “hostage crisis” at the elementary school. Excell quickly confirmed her story. “It’s happening to us. Right now!” he assured the sheriff’s secretary.

  Princess had indeed used her unexpected freedom not to disappear into safe anonymity but to go for help. With Deppe and Mendenhall still shackled in the van, she swiftly drove to the town hall two blocks west and burst hysterically through the first door she saw, confronting a startled clerk. “Is there a police officer here?” she demanded.

  Nadine Dana said there was not. “Maybe I can help you,” she offered. No, Princess wanted a policeman. Nadine said she thought she could handle it.

  Frustrated, Princess poured out her incredible tale. She was excited and difficult to understand—sometimes rambling and profane. The noise brought city employee Kevin Walker over, where he took the stranger aside. “We don’t talk like that around here,” he admonished her.

  “Don’t you folks care about your children?” Princess demanded. She looked back and forth at the two city workers and tried to order her thoughts so she could communicate with them. “My father has a bomb, and he is going to blow up the grade school!” Mrs. Dana felt sick. She had twin daughters in third grade, and she knew the other children as well. Kevin Walker had three children, Travis, Kathy, and Rachel. From his expression, it was clear Kevin also realized that, whoever the woman was, she was totally serious.

  Across the hall, an emergency-strategy meeting was just breaking up. Wyoming regional watermaster, John Teichert, and Civil Defense and US Army Corp of Engineers officials were discussing a flood that was threatening north-side residents along Smiths Fork. Having decided on the appropriate emergency measures, the corpsmen had already left for their homes. Teichert, who lived in Cokeville, and the Civil Defense workers, who (like the corpsmen) all lived in other parts of the state, were just about to leave.

  They came out of their meeting to the news that the elementary school was under siege. The urgency of the flood suddenly vanished. Teichert was not only the regional watermaster but also a lifelong resident of the town and a local Mormon bishop. A number of the students were in his congregation; he knew most of the kids in town by name.

  As the scope and danger of their problem became clear to him, his first impulse was to pray. Seeking out a private room downstairs, Teichert pleaded for the Lord to intervene in some way for the sake of the children. “I emphasized how every child in there was vital to this community,” Teichert said. “I told God we would do all we could, but we would need His help.”

  The Civil Defense workers, Kathy Davison, Bob Looney, and Grant Sorensen, immediately began making emergency contacts. Davison had been a sheriff’s dispatcher, so she had considerable experience obtaining the needed help. With the aid of Mrs. Dana, they alerted ambulances in Cokeville and Lincoln County, at the county seat of Kemmerer and at Afton, both communities about fifty miles away. Davison then tried to locate the four law enforcement officers who lived in Cokeville. Through luck or prior planning on David’s part, the four were all out of town. Sheriff’s Deputy Ron Hartley was on his day off, as was local Police Chief Cal Fredrickson. Wyoming Highway Patrolman Brad Anderson was located via radio near Kemmerer, where he was patrolling. Sheriff’s Deputy Earl Carroll lived in Cokeville but was working in Kemmerer as well that day. He was the first lawman to reach the town hall.

  By the time Deputy Carroll arrived, Max Excell’s first contact with the sheriff’s department had been made. The authorities learned quickly that they had better not let themselves be seen near the school building. David had promised, through Excell, that he would start shooting if anyone appeared. Princess confirmed that her father was fully capable of doing just that. Warnings to keep their distance from the school were relayed to each new official as he or she arrived. Officer Carroll understood what Principal Excell was trying to tell him. “You’re there and we aren’t,” he told Excell. “We’ll take our cues from you. But . . . damn!”

  Even with this warning, it was imperative to get close enough to the school to make some kind of informed analysis about the situation there. The new building grounds were almost bare; there was just flat lawn all the way to the fence. Part of the boundary abutted Art Robinson’s backyard. Eventually, officers tried to see into Room 4 using binoculars from a position behind Art’s fence. Officers risked being easily seen if they moved while someone was looking out the window. But the officers themselves could only see vague figures moving about through the narrow, horizontal windows. It wasn’t helpful.

  During the interval after Deputy Carroll was located and before he arrived, Princess found the key to the handcuffs, finally allowing Deppe and Mendenhall to be released. Princess’s description of the morning of the takeover had basically exonerated them, but all three were, in effect, detained so that they could provide as much information as possible. John Teichert volunteered to keep an eye on them until Carroll and more deputies arrived. Deppe and Mendenhall were then questioned to glean every possible detail about David Young and his scheme.

  Princess’s information was particularly alarming. She described the number a
nd kind of weapons she had helped carry into the school and the kind of bomb David was using. It became clear that the takeover was a true case of terrorism. When Deputy Carroll arrived, he remained at the town hall to coordinate emergency operations. Davison and others alerted the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office, including bomb expert Rich Haskell; Teton County’s SWAT Team; Bear Lake County, Idaho’s Sheriff Brent Bunn and his deputies; and men from the sheriff’s department in Rich County, Utah. Neighboring counties also promised help, if needed.

  Since hostage-taking had been made a federal offense in 1932, as a result of the Lindbergh kidnapping, federal agencies also came onto the case—the FBI’s primary jurisdiction was the hostage-taking aspect of the case, while the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was particularly interested in the aspect of weapons violations.

  Everyone in Cokeville who had an official responsibility was mobilized. Every EMT and firefighter was suddenly on call. The takeover crisis was the first call for new EMT Glenna Walker, and one of the first for her husband, Kevin, who was already somewhat informed from talking to Princess at the town hall. They had the best reasons for wanting to help: their three children in the school.

  The growing official response held an irony few recognized at the time. One reason David had chosen Cokeville, apparently, was that he “didn’t want lawmen or others swooping down on him to thwart his plans.” But in this part of the sparsely populated, rural West, deadly attacks on one community were quickly seen as attacks against the whole region. Response to the small town’s plight was probably as swift and complete as it would have been in a modern, technology-driven, big-city emergency. “Strange he should select a rural area as safer for him than a city metropolis,” one observer remarked. “In the latter, he could vanish far more easily into a jungle of buildings and hideouts. Here a helicopter or vehicles could have easily followed him in the wide open spaces.”