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?

by Michael Hall

October 2006

(Page 6 of 6)

What could Yankton’s motivation possibly have been for striding into that abyss and framing eleven men? Richard’s former attorney Garaas says it’s simple: “On the rez, there was constant talk about the blood in the Blazer and the family members who were with Eddie just before his death. The only way to avoid the accusations was to find another murderer.”

Crooks, the government’s lawyer, doesn’t buy the rogue-cop theory. “You’re talking about three experienced prosecutors as well as FBI agents—we didn’t pick up on Yankton making up stories from whole cloth? I don’t think so.” That’s exactly what the other side thinks. If it’s true, the government didn’t just “bend every effort” to get a conviction—it bent every neck to look away from what was being done in its name. “We implored them to take a look at the inconsistencies,” Garaas says. “The prosecutors all knew this was a bad case. They won’t say it, but they know. Lynn Crooks is my friend, and when I talked to him, I assumed I could appeal to his sense of justice. He said, ‘If you think we’re gonna change our minds, that’s not gonna happen.’”

“Did we feel uneasy about this case?” Crooks asks. “Of course we did. Everyone felt uneasy about who did what. I felt very uneasy asking the jury to convict all those guys: There was no proof they were out to murder Eddie Peltier. But I had no discomfort about the LaFuente case. It was open-and-shut, unless you buy into the argument that Yankton or somebody else did this. Their argument was that none of this ever happened, that there was never a murder. The jury didn’t buy that.”

So it was a fair trial? “As to LaFuente, absolutely,” Crooks told me. “I’m not going to get into arguments about the others.”

Driving on the Rez

ON MY LAST MORNING, WE STOPPED by Bernice Juarez’s house. She sat back in a recliner, surrounded by pictures of her children and grandchildren and paintings of Jesus. Bernice, who has short, curly hair, was born again not long before Eddie died. I had driven by her old house on the hill, just above the crime scene; it was small, with a tiny yard. I told her it didn’t seem possible to have had a party there without waking anyone up inside. “There was never a party,” she said loudly. “It was lies, and the jury went along with it.” Bernice is still angry that her two sons Jesse and Paul were convicted of murder. “They were never given justice,” she said. From the beginning she suspected that the Yanktons had orchestrated the frame-up. “People started telling me they agreed with me, but they were scared.” She says that once, when she was driving from the rez toward Devils Lake, she was pulled over by Yankton in his police car. “He was harassing me,” she said. When another car approached, he hurried back to his and sped off.

Bernice lives down the street from James Yankton. I figured, as it was ten on a Sunday morning and Dwayne had said that Yankton didn’t work Sundays, that this was as good a time as any to try again to talk to him. I’d been hearing nothing but horrible things about him for a week, and perhaps he would like to respond. (In a rare interview with the Forum, in June, Yankton denied any guilt, saying, “I have no idea why they continue to accuse me and my brother and my family of Edward’s death.”) Yankton lives in a small white house set back from the road by a long driveway. There were four cars parked outside, including his blue pickup. A neighbor’s dog yipped incessantly as I walked up the driveway, past the “Welcome Friends” sign and the children’s chalk graffiti on the sidewalk. The blinds were drawn, yet I heard a TV, as well as muffled voices and shuffling around. I knocked and waited, nervously rehearsing my questions. As much as I wanted to talk to him, I really wanted to see what he looked like. I’d never even seen a picture of him. Everyone had told me he was big and mean, but how big and how mean? Like Orson Welles in A Touch of Evil or like Tony Soprano?

The TV droned; the shuffling continued. After a few moments, I knocked again. Nothing. I knocked a third time and called out, “Hello?” The shuffling stopped. I thought I heard a little click at one of the windows but saw nothing. I knocked a fourth time and a fifth, turned around, and walked off.

Dwayne and I drove out on one of the small rez roads to try to find someone who, I had been told, might have seen something that August morning. We cruised past miles and miles of pastures, with the occasional home or trailer in the distance. I asked Dwayne a question that had been on my mind for a couple of days: Why was he spending so much of his time guiding me around? “Eddie was my brother-in-law,” he said, “and I really feel bad about what they did to him. Sometimes it just eats me up.” He paused. “He never had a chance.”

At some point I noticed a car behind us with its headlights on. I turned onto a dirt road, and the car turned too; it was then that I saw the large antenna on its roof. I thought about saying something but didn’t, certain I was just being paranoid. After a minute, Dwayne, looking in the passenger mirror, said, “That sure is a big aerial on that car.” We talked anxiously about what to do—drive faster? pull over?—when the car turned onto another dirt road. We both exhaled.

“So,” I said, laughing. “Life on the rez.”

“Yeah,” Dwayne said, and laughed too.

Fort Worth Blues

RICHARD SAYS HIS MARRIAGE BROKE UP early in his life sentence. “I told my wife, ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be here. Get a divorce. Get on with your life.’” He reestablished contact with his girls, who have children of their own, in 1997. “My daughters come visit at Christmas,” he says. I asked what it was like to see his grandchildren. “Oh, man, I was in tears. I cried the whole time. The biggest problem is, I don’t have no memory of my kids.”

He spends time reading—“a lot of positive-thinking books”—and goes to a sweat lodge at the prison every Thursday and to church on Sundays. He preaches some; Roger Charboneau remembers how, twenty years ago in the lockup, he led the group in prayers. Richard seems hurt that his co-defendants never wrote him. “I guess everyone just went back to their lives,” he says.

He’s picked up some unlikely allies over the years—from Cat West, a Canadian woman who in 1998 put up a Web site called “Restless Spirit: The Murder of Eddie Peltier,” to Pat Springer, who covered the 1986 trial for the Forum. Springer was convinced of the defendants’ guilt, mostly because of Fred’s testimony. Now he’s not so sure, which is why his twentieth-anniversary coverage of the trial focused on the lack of scrutiny given to the Yanktons. “If the things that came to light after the trial had been known to the jury,” he says, “it’s hard to believe those eleven guys would have been convicted.” His paper has come around too, editorializing that Richard’s conviction was “scandalous.”

Then there’s Gladys Peltier, Eddie’s mother, who cursed the defendants every day in court. After Fred recanted, she too changed her mind. Before she died in 2002, she even campaigned for Richard’s release, writing to the parole board and videotaping a statement. “Richard LaFuente has been in jail too long for something he did not do,” she wrote. “The Yanktons are trying to hide their involvement in my son’s death.” The letter was read at Richard’s 1999 parole hearing, but it made no difference. Neither did the video, which she sent to the parole board in 2001.

Richard gets a hearing every two years, but it’s almost impossible to get parole in the federal system. There are two ways, according to Julie Jonas, of the Innocence Project: “You can ask for a pardon based on actual innocence, or you can say, ‘Mea culpa, I’ve truly reformed.’” In other words, show you didn’t do it or show remorse. Richard’s best chances to prove his innocence are through DNA testing, which wasn’t available in 1986, or a new witness’s coming forward. Jonas is focusing on the former, and she and investigator Rolshoven have been searching everywhere for Yankton’s old Blazer, hoping it might still have some of that blood in the back. Garaas has never given up trying to get the right person to come forward and talk. Celeste Herman would be ideal, but he’s tried and failed with her; Mary McDonald also refuses to be interviewed (“I don’t wish to discuss it,” she told me. “I’m trying to move on with my life and keep that in my past”).

As for the mea culpa: Richard keeps running up against the mea part. “Look at my progress report,” he says. “No trouble in twenty years. I abide by their rules. I don’t get involved with gangs, drugs, homosexuals. Each time, the parole officer reads the facts of the case, and I sit and look at her. She asks, ‘What do you have to say?’ I say, ‘I can’t show remorse and I won’t show remorse. I won’t ask forgiveness for a crime I didn’t do.’ Then the officer says, basically, ‘See you in two years.’”

Richard is up for parole again in April 2007. Approaching fifty, his life is well more than half over. He never had a fair trial—the courts have said so twice. The truth is, like Eddie, Richard never had a chance. It would be a grand gesture if the government, which bent every effort to convict him, finally gave him one.

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