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Will Atkinson died last week. I didn't know him well. He was a lanky red-haired fellow whose voice and general demeanor reminded me of Jimmy Stewart. He ran the airport here, and I seldom fly, but our paths did cross with some regularity at meetings of the local computer user group.
He died after the plane he was piloting crashed in the Sangre de Cristo range up by Stout Creek Lakes, country so steep and rugged that even the hard-core backpackers seldom visit a second time.
Local accounts say he managed to land the plane in that rough country without serious injury to himself, his passenger, or the corpse they were hauling to Cortez. Two nights of sub-zero weather, not the crash, ended his days.
Small aircraft, winter, and the Rocky Mountains are often a lethal mixture. If that doesn't provide sufficient carnage, you can rely on the government to produce more.
Why leave a body in the mountains, to be removed when encountered by hunters or hikers, when you could send in search helicopters that often crash? More gore, more medical bills, more money for local reporters stringing for the city papers -- as economic development schemes go, airborne body searches work pretty well.
But that's an aside. Back up a little. Why was Will Atkinson flying a corpse to Cortez?
The remains, perhaps the goal of some future risky helicopter mission, are those of Richard Johnson.
He was murdered in January. His throat was slit, and his body was left near the Ute Trail road north of Salida. Combine that with the January murder of a convenience-store owner in Poncha Springs, extrapolate, and Chaffee County's annual murder rate works out to 192 per 100,000, putting us well ahead of Detroit and Washington. Let's see what the Board of Realtors and the Visitors Bureau can do with that number.
Did this Richard Johnson come to Salida to die? No, he was only 24, and he had lived in Alamosa. Apparently he got into trouble with the authorities there, related to the unauthorized distribution of controlled substances, specifically steroids.
But instead of paying a fine or going to jail, he must
have cut a deal. This criminal got sent to Salida, to serve
as a confidential informant for the Colorado Bureau of
Investigation
-- that's from the local paper, and the
CBI hasn't return my telephone call after I tried to check
for myself.
Informants are seldom recruited from the Methodist board of deacons; they're criminals trying to improve their lot by establishing relationships in a new town, and then betraying the people they built relationships with.
Years ago, I was called for jury duty, and the
prosecutor, an occasional drinking companion, questioned me
rather closely. Mr. Quillen, much of this case will
revolve around the testimony of an informant. Do you have
any problems with that?
Let me see,
I replied. This man moves to our
town, lies about who he is and what he does, but then, when
he gets on the stand, he'll tell the truth? I suppose that
could happen.
I was under oath, sworn to give honest answers about my attitudes concerning potential evidence. I was shown the door moments later.
Do we need to import such people? How does a town get selected to be the chessboard when law-enforcement agencies are moving felons around like so many pawns?
Why do we need more criminals when we're perfectly
capable of growing our own? And if that fails to produce
enough crime to support greater law-enforcement budgets and
increased prison construction (today's replacement for the
old military-industrial complex), the invisible hand
of the market ought to provide more criminals. Why get the
government involved at all?
But Salida didn't have enough criminals, so they sent us Richard Johnson, in the hope that he would produce more.
What is this with a confidential CBI informant
anyway? When the CBI was established, it was supposed to
provide laboratory services and trained investigators
(i.e., arson, homicide) for small police agencies which
lacked labs and specialist detectives. Since when did it
turn into an espionage shop, dispatching suspected felons
to serve as spies in selected towns?
So the CBI, presumably acting to serve and protect us, dispatches this felon to Salida. He gets killed. The body must to be transported for the funeral.
Will Atkinson got the transport job. He had nothing to do with that crime, or any other, but he still died as a result of some undercover scheme.
The other results to date: the informant's death, and a local kid charged with first-degree murder (maybe a drug deal gone bad, maybe an argument over something else that got out of hand -- the authorities are pretty close-mouthed about this).
I guess we're supposed to sleep better at night, secure in the knowledge that these folks are actually trying to preserve public safety when they bring criminals to town and the result is the death of an innocent person.
And maybe I will, after Will's funeral.
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