Breaking Blue (non-fiction book by Timothy Eagan, 1992)
“Breaking Blue” (non-fiction by
Timothy Eagan, 1992)
This short
volume is one of the most compelling True-Crime tales you will ever read. It is
set in two eras: 1935, when a Cop is Murdered, but his killing is not adequately
Investigated because of Police Coverup. Then in 1989, when the inadequate files
regarding this unsolved Murder are discovered by a Sheriff and he re-opens the
Cold Case. But it is about a great deal more than that, it examines our Society’s
changing view of what Law Enforcement Professionals are supposed to be; the
power of Fraternal Loyalties, even when the players have no skin-in-the-game;
and how Justice always comes at a cost, and is always inadequate.
The first
section, the events leading up to, the night of, and immediately following, the
Murder of Marshall George Conniff, vividly evoke the landscape of Rural
Washington State, a place of magnificent forests, mountains, rivers, and struggling
industrial towns, as well as the crippling depredations of the Great
Depression. There is sometimes a tendency to Romanticize that era, this book
leaves no doubt, those were terrible times, the worst collectively endured by
the people of the USA than anything since.
It presents
us with the community of Spokane, which liked to call itself the, “Queen City
of the Richest Empire in the Western Hemisphere” but Author Timothy Egan
describes as a “town of cumbrous secrets.” It barely surviving its own harsh,
though beautiful, landscape, and in the sixth-year of the World-Wide Financial
Crisis, Spokane was besieged by outsiders because it had some jobs, but not
enough for the homeless (called “bindle-stiffs”) flooding in from all-over the country,
confined to Hoovervilles and the ruins of an old Brewery nicknamed “Hotel de
Gink.” And to have employment was not a privilege, it was an invitation for
exploitation, because there was always a hundred men behind waiting to take
your place. Living Wages were out of the question, Labor Organizing was
violently suppressed, Gray- and Black-Market economies were viewed as
necessities even for those allegedly “gainfully employed.”
The Police
were Corrupt, this was not merely an unfortunate fact of Human Nature, but as an
expectation. Not only underpaid, their job was, by Community Consensus, never
supposed to be about Justice or the Constitution, but the maintaining of an
Order that required Oppression of all outside the acceptable Races and Classes.
That Consensus preferred Thugs in Uniform as long as they didn’t break the
wrong heads, or as Author Timothy Egan writes, “An honest cop during the
Depression was a loser and a loner.”
Detective Clyde
Ralstin was one of those Thugs in Uniform, but also a Cop’s Cop: 6’3”,
rock-fisted, an exceptional Marksman, skilled Hunter, and perversely a Pillar
of the Community despite his long list of Disciplinary Charges and being the
barely-disguised Boss of a petty Organized Crime Gang. He broke heads,
seemingly indiscriminately, and even when he broke the wrong heads, he got away
with it. That’s just the way it was. His Gang were a bunch of Butter Thieves, an
odd-sounding phrase today, but butter was in short supply, Creameries were less-protected
than Banks, and these guys seemed to do better than that era’s legendary Bank
Robbers whom we still remember today.
The book
presents a seemingly irrefutable Prima Facie Case that Ralstin murdered the other
Cop, Conniff, during one of the Creamery Robberies. Conniff left a wife and
children behind, but in the wake of the cold-blooded Murder of a
Brother-in-Blue, Spokane’s “Stone Fortress” (the nickname for the Police
Station) closed ranks around the Killer, and Conniff’s Murder was not seriously
Investigated and vital Evidence was deliberately disposed of. All the while, the
Cop’s hung-out with Bootleggers and Black-Marketeers at an all-night Diner
called “Mother’s Kitchen,” completely in public view as they Extorted sex,
food, and money from the bindle-stiffs and others.
He introduces
Pend Oreille County Sheriff Tony Bamonte, who had been a Logger, a Vietnam War Vet,
joined the Police force in the 1960s, and later and ran Sheriff in a Country
when it was “one part Mayberry, one part backwoods dictatorship.” Bamonte’s
Campain Platform was to bring the Police Force into the 20th c. and
he delivered on that promise; cracking down on Discipline, especially on accepted
unwritten Policies that were in fact Criminal, demanding greater Professionalism
from his Officers, specifically when Investigating the few Homicide cases they
had to deal with. He always reminded Officers that in those cases, “You are the
voice of the dead.” In the process he earned both Political Allies and Enemies.
He also was
working on his Master’s Degree in History and chose the subject of the past
decades of local Policing, and that is how he stumbled across Coniff’s forgotten
Murder. It was one of the oldest open Murder Cases in the USA, and he immediately
recognized that it was not properly Investigated initially; add to that a bizarre
Deathbed Confession by another Cop, Charles Sonnabend, not involved in the
Murder but dragged, unwillingly, into the Cover-Up. Bamonte became fascinated, soon
obsessed. It seemed a hopeless endeavor, all Witnesses and Suspects were
reportedly dead, but soon Bamonte learned that several, now in their 80s and 90s,
were still alive, including Prime Suspect Ralstin. In his attempts to approach
these people, drag them back into a distant and bad time and terrible secrets they’d
thought they’d left behind, he found that some longed to unburden themselves of
old guilts while others stone-walled him.
As Bamonte
began to crack-open “a conspiracy of small corruptions” he received great
pushback, the odds against building an Indictable case seemed impossible (more-than-fifty
years is usually an uncrossable charm, sometimes nicknamed a “passage of time
defense”), few cared about events so many decades past, and there was blunt opposition
by other Law Enforcement who resented Bamonte’s seeming violation of the “Cop
Code.”
Egan clearly
admired Bamonte, a “hard nose” who refused to “go along and get along.” The
flaws in Bamonte’s character that make it into the book are shown in a Romantic
light. Bamonte’s Thesis Advisor, Professor Carey, described Bamonte this way, “He
truly believes that a policeman should be somebody special, they had to live up
to something like a code of chivalry. What he found out, of course, was that
policemen have a feudal code of loyalty to each other.” It’s hard for the
reader not to be in awe of Bamonte’s tenacity and meticulous process. He
repeatedly considered throwing in towel, but always there was one more lead
that shouldn’t be ignored. Crime Novelist Tony Hillerman wrote of Egan’s book, "No
one who enjoys mystery can fail to savor this study of a classic case of
detection."
But there’s
also surprising sympathy in the portrait of Ralstin, at least late in the book.
After leaving Spokane behind, Ralstin disappeared from their memory (most
thought he was dead) and built a life of greater respectability elsewhere. Now,
still vigorous despite his twilight, he stood to lose all he built, and though
Egan never got to interview him, through the observations of others, we feel
the paranoia tighten around Ralstin’s neck like a noose as he waits for his
final curtain in a Nursing Home, all because of a forgotten Murder committed
before Bamonte was even born …
Oh, wait,
that’s not entirely true.
The Murder
wasn’t completely forgotten, Conniff’s children still lived. And Bamonte wasn’t
the first honest Cop who tried to reopen the Case, Bamonte discovered of
another attempt; in 1955 Detective Elmer Black tried, but that attempt was
aborted in wake of the Black’s Mysterious Death. And that wasn’t Ralstin ’s
only murder; after Conniff’s death, in 1937, Ralstin chased Joy-Riding teens
who crashed the stolen car, and when 15-year-old, Roger Irvine, unarmed, tried
to flee on foot, Ralstin shot the kid in the back.
Here I must
go outside what Egan wrote. Bamonte became a Cop in the 1960s, a time of Turmoil
and Transformation in the USA, which impacted the very idea of what Law
Enforcement was supposed to be about. The savageries of Birmingham, Alabama, Safety
Commissioner, Bull Connor, who controlled the Police and Fire Departments and
unleased attack dogs and fire hoses on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, in 1963, didn’t
hurt his State-level Political career one iota, but he became Nationally
Reviled and triggered demands for National Reformation that, in time, became
impossible to ignore.
1972 saw Congressional
Hearings, known as the Kapp Commission, focused on Corruption within the New
York City Police Department, which created a list of recommendations that were
slowly adopted by Local and State Governments Nation-Wide.
1974, there
was the Police Shooting in Memphis, Tennessee. Burglary Suspect, Edward Garner,
was clearly unarmed and trying to climb a chain-link fence, when Officer Elton
Hymon shot him in the back of the head and killed him. As Hymon had acted in
accordance to State Law, authorizing Deadly Force against a Fleeing Suspect ("if,
after notice of the intention to arrest the defendant, he either flee or
forcibly resist, the officer may use all the necessary means to effect the
arrest") Hyman was not charged. This would eventually become a US Supreme
Court Case, Tennessee v. Garner (1985), and its decision finally declaring that
type of Deadly Force un-Constitutional, empowering Prosecutors to Criminally
Charge Police Officers who shot a fleeing suspect who posed no immediate
danger. That decision, and a general decline in Violent Crime, has resulted in
the frequency of Police Shootings have dropped dramatically Nation-wide.
All of that unfolded in-between Bamonte becoming a Cop and
reopening this Case, but long-after Ralstin’s known crimes. In 1937, Ralstin’s
murder of the teen was wholly Legal, but the book overlooked that. I will also
add, Victim Conniff was a respected Cop, and Victim Irvine was a kid from a
good family; they were the “right” people and generations later there was still
some, if shabby, documentation. One must wonder how many deaths of bindle-stiffs
were even more overlooked.
Bamonte
found the records fragmentary, surviving reports indefensibly left without
follow-up, and though Ralstin had clearly been forced out of the Spokane Department
because of the killing of the teen, but not one document that actually said so.
And then there was the missing gun, the probable murder weapon, with multiple sources
stating that, not Ralstin, but multiple members of his Department who had no
role in Conniff’s Murder, removed it from the Stone Fortress and tossed it in a
river. The most bizarre twist in this True Story concerns that gun.
This book avoids
the cheap-Psychodrama of most True Crime, because Crime tales, though Morality
Tales, are far more about the Social Contract than the Collective Morality. In
the end, Bamonte pays high-prices, both Personally and Professionally, for his persistence,
and that says a lot about who we are as a Nation.
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