PROLOGUE Shadows Come Monday, October 10, 2005 Manhattan, Montana A hired man discovered the stuff in the hidden space behind an old wall. He'd boast years later that he always knew these things-these ghosts-were hidden there, but really he was as surprised as anybody. Manhattan's got a past. It is one of those places where winter and shadows come early, but it isn't the town it was before everybody died. It is just one of those things that nobody wants to talk about. You can ask, but the memories are always fuzzy when it comes to him. They'll pick out a few, switch around a couple of facts, and point to some old pictures on the bank wall. But those photos are like the memories: They'll never tell the whole truth, because the photographer decides what he wants you to see. They recall something that isn't there anymore. Except him. He's still there, hanging over everything. The hired man called the boss, who called the sheriff. A deputy came out to look at the stuff and take it away. His boss, the sheriff, saw nothing of value in the old bad memories, and took them to a mother who'd grieved for thirty painful years. Why does this damn thing keep coming up? he thought. There are no degrees of separation here. Everybody knows everybody, they tell you. That whatever you did, they always knew you would. That they know who's driving past their houses by the sound of the engine-although they don't know where the car's going. That they know about the skeleton of the old wrecked car beneath the Lover's Leap-although they don't know how it got there. That they know everybody by first name-although they don't know their secrets. What goes on behind those doors goes on, they say. Asking about him is like picking a day-old scab and waiting for blood. There's an uncrossable line that outsiders can't see. All these years later, some of them say they knew all along he was evil. But nobody said anything then. He's still got family here, they say. You'll be stepping on toes, they say. Let sleeping dogs lie, they say. But what about the secret the hired man found hidden in the wall? Aw, hell, they say, there are secrets hidden behind all the walls. CHAPTER 1 Prelude to Night Manhattan, Montana One expects more from a place called Manhattan, but it's just a southwestern Montana village (pop. 900) more than two thousand miles from that other Manhattan. While that one screams for attention, this one keeps to itself. Not impenetrable, but not very approachable. Except for a forlorn old grain elevator, the Conoco sign out near the frontage road, and a church steeple that's slightly closer to Heaven than the trees around it, the town mostly hides itself from passersby on the interstate. Not that there's much to see. Get off the highway and you'll find, way back, an aimless congregation of buildings divided smack down the middle by the "NP"-the old main line tracks of the Northern Pacific Railway. If you happened to be here at noon, you'd hear the firehouse whistle that goes off every midday, as it has since it got a whistle. Manhattan calls itself the Potato Capital of the World, but that might be more chamber-of-commerce hype than a genuine agricultural fact. Nevertheless, the town sponsors the Manhattan Potato Festival every year, highlighted by a grand parade and the volunteer firefighters' breakfast. Spuds are a big deal. A town has existed here since before Custer was slaughtered at the Little Bighorn. The town has had a few different names, but in 1891 when beer-brewing executives of New York City's Manhattan Malting Company moved operations closer to the Dutch barley fields out West, they simply renamed the whole town Manhattan out of pure puffery. Since then, nothing much out of the ordinary has happened here. Manhattan's history is static and unexciting, the way its subdued, devout Dutch settlers intended. Farmers and ranchers passed their land to their kids, not Hollywood stars and rich guys wearing cowboy boots from Fifth Avenue. No traffic jams (except parades), so no traffic lights. More keggers than baptisms, more paperboys than parking spots, more steeples than stop signs. Oh, they still talk about the time the whole town was in a national TV commercial for beef (which is definitely true), and some folks are proud that Manhattan, Montana, has raised up more military generals per capita than any other municipality in America (which might not be true, but nobody can say otherwise). Probably Manhattan's biggest celebrity wasn't really a celebrity in the traditional sense. William Frankena was born in 1908 to Dutch-immigrant farmers in Amsterdam, an unincorporated hamlet near Manhattan. He moved away as a youngster, and in adulthood he became one of America's most celebrated postwar philosophers. Almost nobody in Manhattan in the 1960s recognized his name, but if they had, Frankena would have been thrown a parade of his own. He earned his doctorate from Harvard University in 1937 with a dissertation entitled "Recent Intuitionism in British Ethics." His strengths were in metaethics and moral psychology, subjects that curiously weren't in Manhattan High School's curriculum. He said high-handed stuff like, "We should not see the relationship between action-based and virtue-based ethical theories as disjunctive, but as conjunctive." He also was an enthusiastic bird-watcher, which might have impressed folks back home if they had known who he was. So Manhattan's past, like that of a thousand other little towns that nobody had made famous, was ordinary. Even its depravity was ordinary. Kids didn't get away with much because everybody was watching and everybody knew every kid. They recognized the girls with reputations. The local druggist usually called the parents of teenage boys who bought condoms at the Rexall. As such, transgressions were always minor. There was a "night cop," who usually had some innocuous day job. His role was mainly to spotlight horny teenagers at Lover's Leap, bust up parties, and call kids' parents if they were out after curfew. Delinquent behavior involved drinking beer in the graveyard and skinny-dipping in the rainwater that collected in potholes left by railroaders quarrying ballast. Some naughtiness was funny. Folks fondly recalled the time when some local kids tunneled under the local liquor store in hopes of popping out in the basement to steal booze. That one was always worth a laugh. But there was that time back in '64 or '65 when some unidentified late-night hoodlums were nailing stray cats and puppies-alive-to power poles and trees around town. Damn kids. When the night cop stopped caring, and folks no longer gossiped about it down at Cookie's CafZ, the anonymous cruelty stopped. Nobody ever knew who among them would be so cruel to animals, or why. And back in '67, a thirteen-year-old kid named Bernie Poelman was doing what Manhattan kids did on warm days: He and his buddy Ricky were climbing the steel girders of the Nixon Bridge, a nineteenth-century truss bridge out north of town, and cannonballing into the Gallatin River below. The cold springtime water ran fast enough to make it a medium-powerful rite of passage, slow enough for a kid to dog-paddle to a riverbank not too far downstream. On that March Sunday, the short and skinny Bernie sat atop the bridge's highest beam and prepared to leap. Down below, Ricky dared him to make a big show of it. Suddenly, Bernie grabbed his chest and hollered something-possibly "I'm shot," but Ricky couldn't be sure. Bernie plunged twenty feet onto a shallow sandbar under the bridge, then appeared to be swimming before he disappeared below the surface. The current carried him away. Ricky ran a half mile to the nearest farmhouse, where they called the sheriff. A posse quickly searched the river downstream from the bridge. They found Bernie's horn-rimmed glasses in knee-deep water, but no Bernie. Searchers slung a wire net across the river about five miles downstream to catch anything-or anyone-that might float past. They set up searchlights on the shore and sat up all night . . . but no Bernie. Although the kid's body hadn't been found, he was presumed dead. The local parish priest conducted a memorial requiem mass a few days later. Even in the 1960s, Catholics were still viewed with some suspicion in mostly Protestant Gallatin County, and there was only one small Catholic church, up in Three Forks, twelve miles away. Nevertheless, a good number of non-Catholic Manhattan folks filled up the modest Holy Family Church. Bernie's sad father walked miles of riverbank every night, looking for his boy. Men in boats dragged the channel with no luck. Nearly every boy at Manhattan High School, a couple of dozen in all, walked and canoed all the way to Logan, almost five miles downstream. No Bernie. The mystery of young Bernie Poelman dominated the chatter in the hallways at his junior high, where his eyewitness friend told and retold the story breathlessly and with great drama. Even for these kids who lived around the harsh realities of farms and ranches, human death was a curious concept, especially when it came randomly and without warning. Of course, this wasn't murder, but even terrible accidents were hard for kids to grasp. Three weeks later, deputies found Bernie's waterlogged body tangled in the wire net downstream. His wristwatch had stopped precisely at three twenty p.m. An autopsy showed he had, indeed, been shot through the heart with a small-caliber gun, probably a .22. The bullet was sent for ballistics testing in Washington, DC, but it revealed nothing of value. Even as Bernie was buried in the Three Forks cemetery, the closest consecrated Catholic graveyard in these parts, the mystery remained unsolved. Informal juries convened down at Cookie's CafZ, Keen's Hardware, and the Stockman's Bar. Since murders never happened in Manhattan and it wasn't hunting season, folks concluded that Bernie must have been killed by an errant bullet from a crappy marksman's shooting range or a distant shot that missed a prairie dog. The aimless shooter-literally-probably never even knew he killed a kid. Dumb, but accidental. It wasn't a satisfying explanation, but freak accidents, by definition, defied explanation. So Manhattan's most notable 1960s homicide-the official word for a death caused by another person, not always murder-was an accident. The only other unnatural local death for the rest of the decade wasn't even in Manhattan, but in Three Forks, which was close enough to be Manhattan's principal rival in high school sports, far enough to be thought of as completely different. But truth be told, Three Forks and Manhattan were more alike than anyone in either town would have admitted. High school boys from one town always thought the girls in the other were prettier. So naturally, a Boy Scout's unexpected death near Three Forks in 1968 was felt by Manhattan, too, even if it wasn't "local." That it was clearly not accidental made it especially rumor-worthy. In early May 1968, Bozeman sixth grader Michael Raney was one of two hundred Scouts at a camporee at Missouri Headwaters State Park, just outside Three Forks-where Lewis and Clark discovered that the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin rivers merged to become the mighty Missouri River. The Scouts' two-man pup tents were arrayed in close ranks across a two-acre grassy area, each not more than three feet from the next. Troop leaders finally got their juiced-up eleven- and twelve-year-olds to bed by midnight that Saturday night. Michael Raney, a well-liked kid, shared his tent with his eleven-year-old friend Kenny Summers. Their tent was only thirty feet from their adult scoutmaster, so they weren't inclined to any hijinks, un like some of the other kids, who jacked around all night. When the troop leader ordered all his Scouts to their tents, they went. That was fine with Michael and Kenny. They'd played together all day, riding horses and tussling like young boys everywhere. They were exhausted. They crawled into their sleeping bags laid out on rubber air mattresses, their heads toward the back of the tent, and quickly fell asleep. It sprinkled a little that night, but Kenny and Michael never heard the rain dappling their tent. Nor did they hear a passing train. They were dead to the world. Kenny awoke at five thirty the next morning, as dawn broke and the sky tiptoed toward day light. As he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, he was startled to see Michael's face covered in blood. His first thought was that Michael had suffered a bloody nose in the night. Kenny couldn't rouse his friend, so he hollered for his adult troop leaders nearby. They couldn't wake up Michael, either, so they dragged him out of his tent feetfirst. They peeled his sleeping bag away and found his sweatshirt bloody. Michael was breathing heavily and had vomited on himself. The startled men found a lump above his right ear and dirt in his hair. Had he been roughhousing during the night or fallen down in the dark? Michael mumbled something incoherent as a couple troop leaders drove him to the nearest phone in Three Forks, then to the hospital in Bozeman, the county seat, a half hour away. There, doctors found a small stab wound just under Michael's right armpit. The lump on his head indicated somebody had clubbed him with something small but hard. Back at camp, deputies discovered that the back of Kenny and Michael's tent had been sliced open, and someone had reached in and stabbed him through his sleeping bag. But nobody had seen anybody moving around the night before, other than a few Scouts goofing off. However, now deputies knew there'd been a knife. None was found in the immediate area, but before the troops decamped that Sunday morning, all their knives-hundreds among the "always prepared" Boy Scouts-were collected. Over the next few weeks, the Gallatin County Sheriff's Office administered a lie detector test to every single kid and troop leader in camp that night. They all passed. Somebody mentioned that Michael's troop had wrested a victory trophy from another troop in a contest, so maybe some of the losing Scouts had sought revenge. But such wins and losses were common among troops, and nobody reckoned it'd end in foul play. Ever. Somebody else reported hearing a little boy yell, "Help! Help!" in the middle of the night, but maybe it was "Dale! Dale!" He couldn't be sure. Suspicion fell squarely on Michael's tentmate, poor Kenny Summers. The kid had had a weapon and opportunity, but what would have caused an eleven-year-old to stab his friend? What kind of wicked genius would it require for a fifth grader to brutally assault his tentmate in the night, lie beside him until dawn, pretend to find his victim's body, and yell for help? Those were impossible dots to connect. Excerpted from ShadowMan: An Elusive Psycho Killer and the Birth of FBI Profiling by Ron Franscell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
