23-year-old Patty DeMarce, a member of the Devils Lake Sioux tribe in Ft. Totten, North Dakota, called her half-brother Richard LaFuente in Plainview,Texas, and told him there was a percap, or distribution of money from the tribe, waiting for him on the reservation. An enrolled member of the tribe himself, and having received this type of payment before, Richard had no reason to doubt her. Little did he know it was a ruse in the making.
Eager for the money, Richard set out on the 1200-mile journey in his souped up 1971 El Camino with his brother-in-law, John Perez, to collect the percap. Both were unemployed at the time and left Texas with what little cash they had, roughly $300, to cover gas and food. Once they had the check in hand, which Patty estimated would be approximately $15,000, they would easily make their way back home and Richard would pay John for his time and good company on the long trip.
Lo and behold, Richard and John arrived on the rez to discover there wasn't a percap as Patty had promised. Rather, they learned Patty wanted Richard to rescue her little brother Wesley from life on the rez and take him back to Texas. Richard refused. Making the best of a bad situation, Richard and John spent the next few weeks visiting Richard's relatives, meeting new friends, and looking for work to get money to return to Texas.
Not long after Richard and John arrived on the rez, the battered body of Jerome "Eddie" Peltier was found on a road in the early morning hours by an off-duty BIA policeman named James Yankton. Yankton, along with his brother Roger, a higher-up in the tribal council, and two other passengers, were allegedly on their way home from an all-night wedding party in nearby St. Michael. All had been drinking heavily, but trial testimony would later establish that no such party occurred.
Although Eddie's death was initially classified as an accidental hit-and-run, questions remained, and investigators interviewed numerous people who had seen him that night. They learned that Eddie had been to a number of bars and parties, and was last seen by his sister Andrea on the reservation at about 4:00 am, wearing white painter pants. When James Yankton found the body, it was clad in blue jeans.
Frustrated with the investigation, Eddie's parents, Gladys and John Peltier, crawled around on their hands and knees at the spot where their son's body had been found and discovered evidence -- including a blood-smeared box from a twelve-pack of beer and a bloody piece of carpet. About the same time, an Indian boy found a necklace with the name "Eddie Peltier" stamped on a medallion. The necklace had been found less than a block from the home of Celeste Herman, James Yankton's sister, who had a party at her house that Eddie attended the night of his death. The Peltiers took the items to James Yankton, who was still leading the stalled investigation. All later mysteriously disappeared from evidence.
A few days after Eddie's death, Richard and John, who were staying with Richard's aunt on the reservation, attended Eddie's wake, though neither had ever met Eddie. They followed a horse-drawn cart which pulled Eddie's casket to the cemetery. Not realizing they would be charged with the murder of her son, Eddie's mother Gladys graciously served them dinner after the service and joked with them that the stew they were eating was made from dog meat.
A few weeks after Eddie was laid to rest, Richard, penniless, took out a small bank loan, bought John a bus ticket back to Texas, and set about trying to sell the El Camino which by then needed repairs. Both were eager to get home; John had five small children to take care of, and Richard's wife was pregnant with their second child.
Unable to sell the El Camino and still without any money to put gas in the tank, Richard left the car at a service station in Devils Lake and hitchhiked back to Texas. His first lift came from a priest who took him from Devils Lake to Grand Forks and prayed for his safe return to the Amarillo area. His next ride came from a semitruck driver who carried him from Grand Forks to Oklahoma City. A tired, elderly man in a Cadillac picked him up in OKC and let Richard drive them to Amarillo, where his brother-in-law John, who had already arrived home, picked him up.
Two years later, BIA policeman James Yankton was called to the scene of a domestic incident involving Patty DeMarce's intoxicated husband, Kenneth. While transporting Kenneth to the police station for detox, Kenneth volunteered information that his wife had information about the death of Eddie Peltier.
With her husband Kenneth sobering up in police custody, Patty DeMarce confessed to James Yankton that her sister in Texas had told her..."ever since Richard LaFuente had returned from North Dakota he had been acting strangely"... and that he had been at the scene where Eddie Peltier's body was found.
A month later, Patty DeMarce revised her initial statement to James Yankton, explaining that Richard himself had confessed to the murder of Eddie Peltier and gave her a list of others involved: his brother-in-law John Perez, Terry Dunn, Maynard Dunn, Eugene DuBois and Merlyn Knutson. She provided the location of a beer-drinking party - the Juarez residence - and details of a fight that precipitated LaFuente wantonly running over Peltier with his El Camino.
A few weeks after her second statement to James Yankton, Patty DeMarce gave an account of the incident to FBI Special Agent Spencer Hellekson, revealing that she herself had been at the scene and witnessed the gruesome death of Eddie Peltier. In this version, she provided elaborate details not mentioned in previous statements. Her story seemed to grow.
Three weeks after Statement #3, Patty gave another statement to Spencer Hellekson, admitting that she had not been entirely truthful previously, but reiterated that she herself did in fact witness Peltier's death. Here, she named other people who were allegedly present at the beer-drinking party, including Loren Grey Bear, Paul Cavanaugh, Jesse Cavanaugh, Leonard Fox and Billy Fox.
A short while later, Patty came forward with yet another statement to James Yankton, her third in 3 months. In this version she identified Dwayne Charboneau and his uncle Roger as having been part of the mob who attacked Eddie at the Juarez residence. Remarkably, she was able to recount when Yankton and his brother arrived on scene to find Eddie's body, and Yankton kneeling over the body, crying -- details, if true, could be known by no one except the Yanktons. Her account flawlessly corroborated Yankton's story to the first responder, Colin Brunelle of the Ft. Totten Police Department.
On New Years Eve 1985, federal agents and BIA police officers, including James Yankton, swarmed the Devils Lake reservation and arrested the nine North Dakota suspects ID'd by Patty DeMarce: Loren Grey Bear, Jesse Cavanaugh, Paul Cavanaugh, Dwayne Charboneau, Roger Charboneau, Maynard Dunn, Terry Dunn, Leonard Fox, and Tim Longie, who hadn't been named in any of Patty's statements. Longie, 19, had made the mistake of going to police to offer help with the case, as Eddie was one of his best friends.
Simultaneously, LaFuente and Perez were summoned to the sheriff's station in Plainview, Texas, for what Richard naively thought was an unpaid speeding ticket. Instead, federal marshals arrested both for Eddie's murder. They were released on bond by a magistrate in Lubbock and, amazingly, ordered to drive to North Dakota to face charges. Both thought it was just a horrible mistake that would be cleared up once they arrived in court.
Four days after Richard and John were arrested in Texas, a 19 year-old member of the tribe, Mary McDonald, who lived next door to Richard's aunt on the reservation, surfaced with an astonishing allegation that she was sitting beside Richard in the cab of his El Camino when he ran over Eddie on Highway 57. Curiously, McDonald does not appear in any of Patty's statements, or any other account of the incident, and was never given a polygraph examination to validate the credibility of her statement. She became the prosecution's "angel" witness. And it didn't hurt that she was an employee of the Ft. Totten Police Department, where James Yankton was a cop.
After all the defendants were in custody, Patty DeMarce gave a supplemental statement to Spencer Hellekson, officially implicating Tim Longie in the crime, and gratuitously reiterating Paul Cavanaugh's involvement. In the statement, which was given in the presence of James Yankton, she recounted that Longie and Cavanaugh had captured Eddie, who was fleeing the angry mob, prior to the run-over by LaFuente.
Veteran Assistant U.S. Attorney Lynn Crooks was assigned the case of Eddie's murder, officially known as the United States of America v. Loren Grey Bear et al. At the time, Crooks was best known for prosecuting Leonard Peltier, who happened to be Eddie's cousin, in the internationally-acclaimed case of two FBI agents who were murdered on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota during an armed conflict with members of the American Indian Movement, of which Leonard was the leader. Former journalist turned prosecutor Dennis Fisher and Norman Anderson were also assigned as AUSA's to Eddie's case.
In early April of 1986, jury selection was completed and not one Native American was impaneled. Critics later attributed this to the venue change ordered by Judge Paul Benson (who also presided in the Leonard Peltier case) from the Northeastern Division of the state, where many of the residents are Indians, to the Southeastern division in Fargo, with a largely Caucasian population.
The trial for the eleven defendants, tried jointly as one, lasted five weeks and was the largest federal murder trial in the history of North Dakota. Coached testimony, frequently contradictory, from the government's four key eyewitnesses (Patty DeMarce, Shirley Greywater, Mary McDonald, and Eddie's brother Fred) was all the jury needed to hand down murder convictions for all defendants except one: Maynard Dunn, who was convicted of assault resulting in serious bodily injury. All were sentenced to federal prison, or as Leonard Peltier once observed..."the largest growing Indian reservation in the U.S." Not one scintilla of physical evidence linked any of the defendants, all of whom had legitimate alibis, to the death of Eddie Peltier.
Roughly a year later, attorneys for the eleven defendants filed a lengthy appeal based largely on insufficiency of evidence and assertions of gross prosecutorial misconduct by the federal government. Court documents show how Judge Benson routinely overruled objections by the defense, which some critics believe controlled the outcome of the trial. David S. Thompson, attorney for Loren Grey Bear, said of Benson: "He was the most racist judge I'd ever encountered, in all my years of practicing law in North Dakota."
Two years after the trial, a federal appeals panel overturned convictions for Dwayne Charboneau, Roger Charboneau, Paul Cavanaugh, Terry Dunn, Maynard Dunn and Tim Longie, and ordered new trials for Richard and John, Loren Grey Bear, Leonard Fox, and Jesse Cavanaugh. The judicial tide was beginning to turn, or so it seemed on the surface...
Haunted by the outrageous trial verdict, acclaimed Fargo lawyer Jonathan Garaas took over for Richard and began re-investigating the case on his own accord. One of the key government witnesses, Shirley Greywater, recanted, explaining to Garaas that she had lied at trial because James Yankton had threatened to take away her children. Others began talking too, and later, in 1993, the 8th Circuit ordered an evidentiary hearing to look into Richard and John's convictions.
Amazingly, a three-judge panel of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the convictions of Richard and John, Loren Grey Bear, Leonard Fox, and Jesse Cavanaugh. Critics attributed institutional racism as the underlying cause in the 8th Circuit's decision.
Led by Jonathan Garaas, lawyers for Richard and John, Loren Grey Bear, Leonard Fox, and Jesse Cavanaugh filed a Petition for Certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court on the basis that the trial court failed to properly sever the defendants -- in other words, try them separately rather than as a group. Certiorari was denied. Justice failed again.
In February of 1994, forty-five witnesses testified over four days in front of U.S. District Judge Patrick Conmy, who was perceived by many as a fair-minded justice. They told of seeing Eddie Peltier wearing white painter pants the night of his death, though he was found in blue jeans by an intoxicated James Yankton. They told of being out on Highway 57 just before dawn that morning and seeing no evidence of a massive fight. They told of seeing both James Yankton and his brother Quentin with Eddie that night and morning, of seeing Quentin quarreling and fighting with Eddie, and of being at a party at James' sister Celeste's house less than an hour before Eddie was found dead. It was a shocking rebuttal to the government's case. And it pointed to police and prosecutorial misconduct and corruption at the highest levels of our government. The mainstream media didn't seem to notice. Or care.
Another "Quentin" involved in the case, Quentin Alberts, had been at Celeste's party the night of Eddie's death, where he saw James tell his brother Quentin not to start any trouble. Alberts later passed out and woke up to find blood nearby. He told Pat Springer, a reporter covering the case for the Fargo Forum, that he didn't come forward because he was afraid of the Yanktons: "I wanted to live, you know, so I just didn't." Alberts surfaced 23 years later with a startling revelation about the blood he woke up near...
In the wake of the devastating hearing to grant new trials for Richard and John, government prosecutors called Jonathan Garaas with a deal: both inmates, who had each served eight years in prison, could go free if they confessed to Eddie's murder. They declined, steadfastly refusing to admit guilt for a crime both claimed they did not commit. Richard told Garaas: "Let those prosecutors take that plea bargain and stick it where the sun don't shine."
Originally believing that all the defendants were responsible for her son's death, Gladys Peltier campaigned for Richard and John's release, writing to the parole board and videotaping a statement. She said: "Richard LaFuente and John Perez have been in jail too long for something they did not do. The Yanktons are trying to hide their involvement in my son's death." Gladys died in 2002, not long after her husband passed, and was unable to see justice served.
Key government witness Fred Peltier, Eddie's brother, recanted his trial testimony, stating that James Yankton threatened his family if he didn't testify favorably for the government. His allegation of police misconduct mirrored that of his fellow eyewitness Shirley Greywater, who was the first to recant. But the two other key witnesses for the government, Patty DeMarce and Mary McDonald, didn't recant. Patty couldn't, because she died of lung cancer in 1992. And Mary wouldn't, presumably because she was an employee of James Yankton's at the Ft. Totten Police Department on the reservation.
In May of 1994, Judge Conmy issued an order granting new trials to Richard and John. Conmy said in his ruling that both men did not receive a fair trial for the following reasons: a) because the prosecution's dubious use of subpoenas to require witnesses to attend pretrial interviews and conferences; b) the arrest of witnesses as "material witnesses" and then paying their living expenses before and during the trial; and c) filing perjury and other charges against potential witnesses and sealing the files, then dismissing the charges after the witnesses testified. Conmy's ruling shined a harsh light on the government's overreach and abuse of power in the trial.
Less than a year later, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Conmy's order granting new trials to Richard and John. The legal wrangling was effectively over at that point. No further appeals could be filed. Sentenced to life, Richard would die in prison. But sentenced to 20 years, John had a shot at freedom...
Out of the blue, after serving 14 years of a 20-year sentence for the murder of a man he'd never met, John Perez was finally paroled from federal prison and started his life over in Texas. He remains free to this day.
Almost 20 yeas after the conviction, The Innocence Project of Minnesota, led by Managing Attorney Julie Jonas, began re-examining Richard's case and launched an exhaustive search for DNA evidence when it was learned that James Yankton had ordered a jail trustee to clean blood from the back of his Chevy Blazer the same morning he found Eddie's body on Highway 57. Jonas dispatched law students to the scene, and hired local private investigator Ross Rohlshaven, who had worked for the defense at trial, to search for the missing Blazer and any other evidence that could disprove the government's case.
Michael Hall, veteran criminal justice reporter for Texas Monthly magazine, was approached by Richard's cousin and LULAC organizer, Ray Rodriguez, to write a story about the case. Realizing the case was probably a lost cause, Hall nonetheless traveled to the reservation to investigate. Enlisting the help of one of the original defendants, Dwayne Charboneau, to serve as his chaperone and bodyguard on the rez, Michael made startling discoveries that further confirmed Richard's innocence. In the fall of 2006, Texas Monthly published Michael's findings, which five years later would be read by a television crime writer in Los Angeles.
A Los Angeles-based television writer serendipitously discovered Michael Hall's Texas Monthly story during an unrelated Google search and was riveted by the case. Enamored, he called his friend in Arkansas, a retired firefighter and EMT, and together they began re-investigating the case from the writer's garage.
Almost a year later, the writer and firefighter launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a feature-length documentary film about the case. To gather new evidence and witnesses, they also launched a Facebook page and Twitter feed, as well as a dotcom website populated with existing evidence and court documents provided by defense lawyer David S. Thompson, who served as a legal advisor to their efforts. They also posted on the dotcom website the 23-volume, 4,000-page trial transcript given to them by Julie Jonas of the Innocence Project -- pieces of which they discovered were missing from the official file at the federal courthouse in Fargo...
In the midst of the Kickstarter campaign, Michael Hall wrote another story about the case, which was published in the New York Times. In this piece he focused on Eddie's sister Andrea and her pursuit to find the truth behind her brother's gruesome death. At this point Andrea already had an inkling of the truth after run-ins with James Yankton's sister Celeste, who drunkenly revealed that she had been involved along with her brothers. But the reason why they killed him still haunted her, though some believe Eddie's arrest of their father for DUI when Eddie was a police officer in Devils Lake may have sparked their anger. But local authorities didn't care or were too afraid of the all-powerful Yankton clan to do anything about it.
Amazingly, executives at Kickstarter ordered the writer and firefighter to pull down their campaign because "...no aspect of a Kickstarter project can contain charity or cause awareness elements. Can you reframe your project around a creative endeavor you're looking to make, and take out all mentions of wanting to use your project as an awareness campaign?"
In the spring of 2013, a new witness surfaced after reading the trial transcript on the dotcom website of the documentary film project. Brian Pearson, the biological son of James' brother Quentin, came forward with corroborating evidence that Eddie was beaten to death by Quentin and his aunt Celeste at her infamous party, his body transported to the highway by James and run over to disguise the homicide. Pearson testified under oath that for over seventeen years he listened to the quiet ruminations of his family discussing the murder and how they'd gotten away with it. This damning evidence was presented by David Thompson to the then U.S. Attorney in North Dakota, Tim Purdon, and FBI agents in Fargo. Still unwilling to reopen the case, Purdon, an Obama appointee, shelved the evidence, though some believe that this critical discovery may have prompted Richard's unexplained release from federal prison just over a year later.
Just over a year after Thompson presented Pearson's sworn statement to authorities, Richard LaFuente was finally released from federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, after serving 28 years for a crime he did not commit. In the attached photograph he is seen with his adult daughters a few yards from the entrance to the prison. Richard currently lives in Plainview, Texas, where he works as a truck driver and lives with his wife, Juanita. Though his release from prison is miraculous, he has not been exonerated of the crime and to this day remains a convicted murderer despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.
Beto Rodriguez, son of the LULAC organizer Ray who urged Michael Hall to write a story about the case, began his own investigation a short while after Ray passed away. He's making terrific progress, and one of the nuggets he turned up earlier this year was testimony from Quentin Alberts, the witness who woke up in a pool of blood on the doorstep of Celeste's house the night of her party. Turns out that blood belonged the corpse it drained out of, which was on the ground beside Alberts: that of Jerome "Eddie" Peltier, presumably moments after he was beaten to death and then transported by James to Highway 57, where he was run over.
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