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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We knocked on more doors. At several places we heard powwow music: drumming and high-pitched singing that sounds like wailing. Some people were hesitant to talk, but all did; a few were terrified that their names would be used. “I’m scared for my family,” said one elderly resident, who watched Victor Peeples clean blood out of James Yankton’s Blazer with a mop and Pine Sol and burn a carpet in a barrel. This person, like many I talked with, asked not to be identified in deference to relatives who are employed at the casino or in offices where other Yanktons work. “It’s their turf, their fiefdom,” said an investigator on the case. “People are afraid of James Yankton, and rightfully so.”
Dwayne and I headed into Devils Lake to eat lunch and get some supplies at a supermarket. Leaning against the outside wall was Wesley Big Track, Patty’s brother and Richard’s half-brother. Many people believe Patty would have also eventually recanted her testimony, but she died of a pulmonary embolism in 1992. “She talked to me about everything,” Wesley said, “but she wouldn’t talk to me about this case.”
We went back by Fred’s house and saw that the door was open. Fred seemed happy to see Dwayne and invited us in. It was three in the afternoon, and Fred had a beer buzz on. A bed lay on the floor of the small living room and a fan rattled in the open window. While Fred’s girlfriend swept, we talked. Fred is large, with dark skin, and he had a week’s growth of a trimmed beard and brown-tinted glasses with tape on the horns. The front of his nose was scarred from a fight he had had while in protective custody twenty years ago. He’s unemployed but gets veterans’ disability payments from a car accident he had while he was in the Army.
I asked Fred the obvious question: Why did you say what you said in court? Because, he replied, he was worried that Yankton would beat him up again. So when he was arrested, he gave in. “He broke me down. I mean, Eddie was my older brother. I thought he was Superman. And they killed him. On a subconscious level, I knew. This rez—nobody ever fights for their rights. Everybody pleads guilty.” But why? I asked. Dwayne answered for Fred. “They want to get out of jail right away.”
Fred told how the feds took him and the DeMarces to Fargo. “James would coach us. He told me everything to say.” Fred reached over to Dwayne. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Dwayne shook his hand. “I know it wasn’t your fault.”
Fred slumped in his chair against the wall. The more we talked, the more wiped out he looked. Fred’s parents are dead, and he hasn’t made up with his sisters, who are still angry about his testimony. His eyes began to well up. I asked if he had made peace with his friends. “I tried, but . . .” A tear rolled down his left cheek, then his right.
Dwayne said, “All you have to know is it wasn’t your fault, Fred. You were pushed and pushed and pushed.”
“I just hope you can forgive me, man.”
“I don’t hold it against you.” They shook hands again.
There were long silences. I asked if he had ever talked to Beasley. “No.” He nodded toward his girlfriend, an older woman with graying hair. “I haven’t even told my woman about this. I have to hold it in.”
He got up and got another beer from the refrigerator. “I’ve had to live in hell for how many years? In some way I feel like I deserve it, because I lied.”
“The Yanktons really split the rez up,” said Dwayne.
As we got up to leave, they hugged. “It’s okay,” said Dwayne, and the tears came again.
Celeste
ANDREA PELTIER ICEMAN LOOKS A LOT like her brother Eddie, with the same handsome eyes and cheekbones. Sitting in her kitchen, she pulled out some family photos; one of them showed her father, John Peltier, and his five sons. Eddie, tall and good-looking, stood behind Fred and had his hands on his kid brother’s shoulders. Andrea was one of the last to see her brother alive—at her sister Flo’s, sometime after four that morning, when he left to walk home. He was wearing white painter pants, she remembers, a fact that led to one of the mysteries in the case. When Andrea and her father went to the morgue to identify the body, Eddie had on blue jeans. “They were too long for him, and they had orange string sewn along the bottom,” she said. “I used to iron his clothes—he would never have worn something like that. His appearance meant a lot to him.”
Andrea says she has also been witness to one of the other big mysteries of her brother’s death: the behavior of Celeste Herman, James Yankton’s sister, who also had a party that night. “In 1990 Celeste walked into my house,” Andrea said. “She was drunk, crying, all pitiful, trying to hold on to me, saying, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ I said, ‘What for?’ ‘Your brother was fighting with my brother and I got scared. I didn’t mean to hit him in the head.’” Andrea says Celeste has confessed to her five times, the last time at a bar. “She freaked out, pointed at me, and said, ‘Every time I look at you I think of Eddie.’ Maybe I do taunt her. I do resemble my brother. She could have told me once and let it be. Why did she have to do it five times? It’s so real—‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ tears, spit, snot, drool. She’s told half the rez.”
To those who believe there was a conspiracy to frame Richard and the others for the death of Eddie Peltier, Celeste is the key. I heard firsthand stories about Celeste from three other people, and they all involved drinking, crying, and rueful babbling, including one occasion in which she stood in a hallway of her home at three in the morning, yelling, “Quit peeking at me!” at Eddie’s ghost. A story had even made it into the public record. At the 1994 evidentiary hearing, Quentin Alberts, an uncle of Maynard and Terry Dunn’s, testified that at a party a month before the trial, Celeste had crawled into his lap. “She started to tell me how sorry she was that my nephews were involved in this case, and she started to cry, and she said, ‘I didn’t mean to hit him over the head with that bottle.’ So I asked her who she meant. I said, ‘Who do you mean? Do you mean Eddie Peltier?’ And she jumped off my lap and ran to the bathroom.”
Just as there was absolutely no evidence in court against Richard LaFuente except for some wild stories, there’s absolutely no evidence that any of the Yanktons had anything to do with Eddie’s death—except for some wild stories. I wanted to ask Celeste herself what really happened, so I visited her at the local community college’s child care center, where she works. When I walked into the room, she was playing with a couple of young children. She’s a big woman, with glasses, dark hair, and wide eyes. I introduced myself and asked if I could talk to her about the Peltier case. The phone rang, she answered it, talked for a minute, hung up, and told me, “I don’t have no comment, and I’m not gonna make any statement. As far as I’m concerned, it was settled.”
Later, I was thinking about all these stories I was hearing about Celeste and her brothers. Was it possible so many people could be making up so many things, either out of grief or anger at the Yanktons? How would I, an outlander from Texas, be able to tell? Fargo defense attorney Mark Fraase, who represented Leonard Fox, had told me something that made me wary: “So much of what people say up there is lies. There’s so much confabulation. I’m not sure about the Celeste Herman story. Eddie Peltier could have just been hit by a car while sleeping it off by the side of the road.”
The Abyss
WE’LL NEVER KNOW EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED to Eddie—it’s been too many years, and too many people have told too many stories—just as we’ll never know exactly why the government pushed this case in, as the Eighth Circuit put it, such a “heavy-handed” fashion. As defense attorney David Thompson says, “If it had been eleven young white kids, the case would never have been prosecuted—not with that evidence.”
“The feds don’t know what to do with the rez,” investigator Rolshoven says. In other words, the feds are outlanders too, and the Indians are as mysterious now as they have ever been. When Yankton, a Sioux policeman, strode into the abyss of a notorious unsolved crime and came out with answers for authorities, everyone went along with him: the FBI, U.S. attorneys, and judges. It didn’t matter that Yankton was a man with a violent reputation who had been drunk at the scene of the crime; whose brother was seen in the victim’s presence in his final hours; who would, two witnesses say, order fresh blood cleaned from his own car not long after the victim died and then force jail inmates to search the crime scene; who would, by many accounts, badger and threaten people until they said they saw things his way.
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