FBI file: Animal Mutilation, Animal Mutilation Part 02

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

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most of them adopted a wait see attitude. And some of the Stateside fugitives had grown downright paranoid after years on the lam. "How do I know they won't lock me up and put me back in the Army?" asked a diehard deserter in New York.

When the Clemency Board-headed by an outspoken critic of the war, former New York Sen. Charles Goodell begins its work, some of the resisters' fears may be eased. Goodell's dovish views will be bolstered by those of other board members, including National Urban League director Vernon E. Jordan and the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame and a former head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

The panelists clearly have some very difficult problems ahead—weighing, for example, time served in jail against time owed for alternate service, or battle honors against time spent AWOL. And the board contained some hawkish members who might oppose leniency, including retired Marine Corps. Gen. Lewis Walt and James Maye, executive director of Paralyzed Veterans of America. Still, the Ford plan had the virtue of all compromises. Said Hesburgh: "As long as Nixon was in, these guys could rot as far as he was concerned. It's the difference between no chance and some chance."

## INDIANS:

Blazing Saddles

It didn't look like much of a border crossing. The sign by the side of the road merely demanded a 10-cent toll from passing motorists, most of whom didn't even stop. But the militant Kootenai Indians manning the roadside picket lines outside Bonners Ferry, Idaho, weren't kidding. After years of frustration trying to deal with Washington, the 67 members of the Kootenai tribe finally lost patience last week and declared war on the United States-by registered mail.

## MYSTERIES:

## The Midnight Marauder

Their challenge was delivered in a letter to President Ford demanding a 128,000-acre reservation, plus as much as $3.2 million for tribal land the government had paid for in 1962 at the rate of 36 cents an acre. To back it up, they threatened to tax white homeowners and businesses squatting on their ancient tribal lands. Idaho's Gov. Cecil Andrus sent in 60 lawmen to keep the highways clear, but tensions soon eased. The Bureau of Indian Affairs invited tribal leaders to begin negotiations, and the citizens of Downers Ferry relaxed. "The Indians have told us that they don't want a war," said one sympathetic local. "They know it's tough for 67 people to get a reaction from Washington, D.C."

Each day, just before dusk, ranchers and farmhands pile into pickup trucks and fan out across the rolling prairie of northeastern Nebraska. They park mostly on ridges or hilltops, where they can scan the pastures and the narrow roads that wind through them. With rilles and shotguns leaning against their trucks, the men watch nervously, smoking cigarettes and talking with each other over a network of citizen's-band radios. Some of the men will stand guard all night, yet none of them really knows what he is looking for. "I've never seen anything

'Warpath': Tribesman soliciting tolls

like this," says State. Sen. Jules Burbach, who has represented Knox County for eighteen years. "Folks are almost hysterical."

Since last May, more than 100 cattle have been found dead and gruesomely mutilated in Nebraska, Kansas and Iowa. On John Sunderman's farm outside Madison, Neb., a cow was killed with a blunt instrument last June and her udder and sexual organs were cut off. When a veterinarian examined the corpse, he found that all of the animal's blood had been drained. On the nearby ranch of Vern Stringfield, a month-old bull calf was clubbed to death. Its blood was drained off, too, and someone cut a hole in the calf's side, removing the intestines and coiling them neatly next to the head.

Rumor and anxiety have produced a host of unproved theories to explain the

bizarre events. Many people, noting that some of the victims were black, suggest that devoters of witchcraft may have done the soul deeds. "It could be someone setting up a fertility cult of some kind," says Richard Thill, a German studies professor at the University of Nebraska who teaches noncredit witchcraft courses, "or it could be someone putting you on. If they are putting you on, they are pretty sick." A few residents report sighting strange creatures resembling bears and gorillas, and at least one farmer claims that a shiny UFO landed in a field where a slaughtered animal was later found.

Rustlers: Still others think the killings may be the work of marijuana smugglers, who supposedly use searchlight-equipped helicopters to harvest the wild stands of pot known to grow in Nebraska. A helicopter often has been seen hovering over the range around the time of a mutilation, and some ranchers swear they have been chased down lonely roads by choppers. Helicopters are also said to have been used in cattle rustling, and some stockmen think the rustlers may be collecting blood and organs as lures for cattle grazing on the open range this fall.

As the tension mounted, law-enforcement officials held statewide conferences to sift the accounts and to calm the rille-toting cattlemen. They organized a posse for a fruitless search of the area. The plot thickened when autopsies were conducted on some of the dead animals. The doctors reported that most of the animals had died of natural causes, such as bacterial infections and kidney disease, or from swallowing oil that had been dropped on the range. Afterward, the medical reports concluded, the carcasses were chewed by predator coyotes, wolves, buzzards, eagles or even magpies.

Cuts: The explanation doesn't suit everyone. "Why didn't we notice this sort of thing in other years?" asks one skeptic. "The predators are not wolves," insists Senator Burbach. "They are a semidomesticated, two-legged animal called man." Noting that many of the cuts seemed to have been done with a blade, Gorden Gruber, an organizer of the patrols, remarked: "I've yet to see a coyote who can chew a straight edge."

Some officials are beginning to worry that the real danger is not some ghostly butcher, but the keyed-up vigilantes themselves. After two slugs pierced the canopy of a utility-company helicopter checking power lines, the Nebraska National Guard ordered its helicopter pilots to cruise cross-country at higher altitudes than usual-generally 2,000 feet instead of 1,000-to avoid being fired upon by frightened ranch hands. "I would hate to think what would happen," a Guard spokesman told Newsweek's William Schmidt, "if one of our pilots was forced to put down a disabled chopper in a pasture at night. Someone might get killed."

Newsweek, September 30, 1974