A Father’s Day 
Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
Free Richard Lafuente!
Did the kid from Plainview really drive his El Camino over Eddie Peltier on a North Dakota Indian reservation in 1983? Nobody on the rez thinks so, and neither will you. So why is he still in federal prison?
Connie says: I have relatives that live on the SLN reservation, I am from South Dakota, and an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Out of curiosity one day I stumbled on to Cat West’s website which also brought me here to this site. I am saddened by how our people are potrayed and sad but true, reservation life is this way. How can this go on like this for so long? Eddie’s death, I mean. It is just sad, and I feel so badly for his family, and the family of those whom are falsely accused of his death. This is 2011! We should be able to do something to solve this. And if it is due to a bigger corruption, how can this not be ignored?! It is outrageous! My heart goes out to Eddie’s family, Richard’s family and other family members who have lost because of this. I applaud Cat West for standing up for those who couldn’t and didnt have a chance to do it themselves’, Eddie and Richard, for getting thier stories out there. And to this paper for writing this story. (June 7th, 2011 at 2:30pm)
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His body was discovered on state highway 57 just before six a.m. on Sunday, August 28, by four people driving by. Two of them were James Yankton, then a BIA cop, and his brother Roger, and both had been drinking all night at various bars and parties. The corpse was unrecognizable. James held it and cried, later explaining that he’d thought it was his brother Quentin.
Since Eddie’s death occurred on an Indian reservation, it became a federal case, and the FBI was called in. Special Agent Spencer Hellekson worked closely with the BIA as well as the Devils Lake police force and the state highway patrol. Except for tire marks on either side of the body, investigators found no evidence at the scene of anything out of the ordinary—in particular, no clutter of empty beer cans on the road, in the nearby driveway leading up to Bernice’s house, or at the house itself. Police interviewed dozens of people who talked about assorted parties that Saturday night, though none at Bernice’s. Eddie had been seen at a couple of the parties and had gone from one, at the home of James Yankton’s sister Celeste Herman, to another, at his own sister Flo’s house, at around four a.m. He had left there not long after, walking home to Devils Lake. The person who’d driven him to Flo’s—one of the last to see him alive—was Quentin Yankton. The FBI questioned Quentin, who took and passed a polygraph. After a month, the case was closed and ruled a hit-and-run.
Two years later, in June 1985, James Yankton delivered the big break the case needed. Patty DeMarce (formerly Patty Big Track) had suddenly started to remember some things about that night. Her new husband had just spent time in police custody, drunk and injured from a fall; at some point while Yankton was chauffeuring him between the hospital and the jail, he had said that his wife knew something about Eddie’s death. When Yankton questioned Patty, her initial story was that her sister had told her that Richard LaFuente claimed he’d been at a party at Bernice’s house. In her next version, Richard had told her about a fight. In her third version, she herself had seen the fight, along with some two dozen revelers.
Yankton, by then the head of the local BIA office and the FBI’s go-to guy on the rez, took the information to Hellekson; soon he was driving Patty to the agent’s office, where she remembered more and more. Hellekson liked what he heard, and it was here that the investigation took a crucial turn. “In any case on a reservation,” says Ross Rolshoven, an investigator who worked this case and many others on rezes all over the state, “the FBI has to decide who to believe, then it goes along with them.”
The FBI chose to believe Patty. It reopened the case later that summer, and a grand jury was seated in October. Called to testify, Patty told of the beating. Others testified too, including Eddie’s brother Fred, Beasley Greywater, and a man named Billy Fox, all of whom said they didn’t know anything about Eddie’s death. Still, the grand jury handed down indictments for nineteen people it thought were at Bernice’s party—thirteen were charged with murder, assault, witness tampering, and perjury (two died before trial), and the rest were charged with perjury or other lesser crimes, including Fred, Beasley, and Billy. On New Year’s Eve, 1985, federal agents descended on Fort Totten and made arrests; two days later, Richard and John were nabbed in Texas. A new grand jury was impaneled, and this time Beasley said she had been at the party, had watched the beating, and—although she hadn’t seen Richard kill Eddie—had heard the tires squeal as he was run over. Fred said the same thing. So did Billy.
To the FBI, Yankton was a hero. But even as late as February 1986, two months before the trial, the bureau still seemed to have some doubts about the case. According to the Forum, two agents took shovels into Yankton’s backyard and began digging, looking for a piece of carpet from his Blazer. After 45 minutes they gave up.
The Trial
FROM THE BEGINNING, nothing went well for the eleven defendants: Richard, John, Dwayne, Dwayne’s uncle Roger Charboneau, Leonard Fox, Loren Grey Bear, Tim Longie Jr., Maynard Dunn and his brother Terry, and brothers Jesse and Paul Cavanaugh. The trial was moved from the Northeastern Division of the state, where many residents are Indians, to the Southeastern Division in Fargo, a much whiter area. The rationale was that the courthouse in Grand Forks wasn’t big enough for a trial like this, but the end result was that no Indians sat on the jury. Then there was the no-nonsense judge: Paul Benson, who’d presided over Leonard Peltier’s trial in 1977, which may have resulted in an innocent man’s going to prison and, at the very least, made him the most famous political prisoner in the country.
The trial began in April and went on for six weeks. The prosecution had no fingerprints, blood, or hair to connect any of the accused to Eddie Peltier’s death. In fact, the evidence tended to favor the defense. For example, the tire marks didn’t match those of the El Camino. And though it had rained heavily two days before, and though Peltier had supposedly fought a gang of men for fifteen minutes on the side of a road, his pants weren’t muddy. Two doctors testified that his body showed no signs of a beating that severe; all they knew was that he had died as a result of being run over by a car. His legs weren’t broken, indicating he was probably lying down when it happened.
But the prosecution had witnesses: Patty, Beasley, Fred, and a teenager named Mary McDonald, whom the government had found after all the arrests had been made. They were all young—ages nineteen or twenty—and all wildly inconsistent. Patty was, to say the least, nervous and timid, often answering questions with one word. She spoke so quietly that defense lawyers complained repeatedly about not being able to hear her; sometimes she sat mute or took several minutes to answer questions. At one point a defense lawyer accused one of the prosecutors of discreetly nodding and shaking his head at her to help her answer (he denied it). Defense attorneys focused on the eight different statements she had given and the person she had given them to. “Your recollection gets better, particularly after you have had a chance to talk to Mr. Yankton or the other law enforcement officers, isn’t that right?” asked one. “Yes,” she replied. Then she changed her story again, adding a “shadowy figure” in Richard’s car.
A defense attorney suggested that this was because, between her last statement and the trial, the prosecutors had discovered Mary, who would testify that she had been in the car that had run over Eddie. But Mary also said she had been driving around and drinking with Richard and John for five hours and that when they showed up at Bernice’s party at five a.m., the fight was already in progress. She also said Richard ran over Eddie only once.
Both Beasley and Fred corroborated the party line, but Billy, who had also been charged with perjury, surprised prosecutors and went back to the story he had told the grand jury—that he knew nothing about a party—and then testified that Yankton had threatened to send him and his parents to prison if he didn’t play along.
The defense did its best to highlight all the things that didn’t make sense. Fred had said he’d watched Tim Longie help beat his brother bloody, then told how he and some friends all crashed at Tim’s house. Eddie was plastered—his blood alcohol level was .24—yet he had held off a dozen armed men. Maybe strangest of all, on the rez, where there is no such thing as a secret, four witnesses had kept quiet about an almost unbelievable act of violence.
To say nothing of the eleven defendants. Each denied having anything to do with the crime, each rejected efforts to get him to tell the state’s version of events for a lesser sentence, and there was not one bit of evidence offered that any of them had ever said a word about beating a man that night. All but one—Maynard, who said he couldn’t remember what he’d done that night—had an alibi. In addition, Bernice Juarez, a born-again Christian who had twice that summer called the cops on her sons Jesse and Paul Cavanaugh for drinking in her yard, said emphatically that there was no party at her house. So did her husband, Domingo. They had gone to sleep at eight or nine that night with the windows open and would have heard two dozen people drinking, yelling, and fighting outside. The defense theory was that Eddie had left Flo’s house after four a.m., walking or hitching to Devils Lake. He was drunk, probably lay down to sleep it off, and was run over. It was an accident.
Judge Benson (who died in 2004) was often disdainful of the defense, overruling almost every objection it raised, sustaining almost every one made by the prosecution, and allowing prosecutors to ask leading questions of Patty, their star witness. “The tone of his voice, his demeanor—the message the jury got was, the judge thinks they’re guilty,” says David Thompson, the attorney for Loren Grey Bear. “He was probably the meanest, most bitter, most anti—Native American judge I ever practiced in front of—a vicious man who presided over a terribly unfair trial.” The jury took three days to convict Richard of first-degree murder, Maynard of assault, and everyone else of second-degree murder; it also handed down several counts of perjury and witness tampering.
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