Once Again Proving that Reality is Stranger than Fiction

In case you're wondering why I haven't been on the SleuthSayers much lately, I had cataract surgery on each eye, one on one week, and the other 2 weeks later, and an endless supply of eyedrops in between and going on, as far as I can see, until mid-August.  

The surgery actually wasn't as bad in one way as I feared it would be. But they put me (and everyone else) in a giant chair (well a chair made for people much taller and bigger than me), a surgical chair, and that wheeled around, lowered, sat up, flattened out, etc., like a hospital bed. But the top of my head just reached the  bottom of the headrest, and while they brought me a pillow, it all just didn't fit. (I've found the same thing with today's furniture, again, all made for giants, which is why I go furniture shopping at the Hotel Liquidators store.)

Meanwhile, the surgery itself was fascinating for a young adult of the early 70s.  Besides the endless eyedrops, after scooting down to the headrest like a caterpillar (if only I had transformed into a butterfly by the end of it!) I was taped down to the headrest (and, btw, my arms were also encased like a caterpillar; and yes, there was a part of me that thought instantly of the movie Coma).  

And then things happened.  No pain, no scalpels, but it definitely was psychedelic. A group of what looked like rocks, different colors, that changed, and vanished and came back and did that some more.  And then it was over. And they sat me up and rolled me back. Two hours and they were done. My eye dripped all the way home, and all evening along with my sinuses were dripping. But it was done. Ditto the other eye.  

Meanwhile, things did not slow down just because I was seeing fuzzy: 

For the criminally minded, we've had the usual weekly/twice weekly arrests of child predators and child porn. We've had a lot of hit and runs of late. And we had two beheadings in South Dakota this year:

• Yankton, South Dakota (January 2025): Craig Allen Nichols Jr. was charged with murder and manslaughter after the decapitated body of his girlfriend, Heather Bodden, was discovered in her apartment. Bodden's head was located in a trash bag inside the apartment, along with bloody clothing and weapons. Nichols had a history of prior arrests and had been recently released from a mental health facility.  Well, he's in jail, he's going to prison, one hopes to the mental health unit.  
• Clark, South Dakota (July 2025): Bowen Fladland was charged with the murder of his mother, Marlene Fladland, after her decapitated body was found in their front yard. He allegedly admitted to assaulting her, kneeling on her neck until she was deceased, and then using a tool to remove her head. Fladland had a history of domestic violence against his mother, including a prior aggravated assault conviction.  He's in jail, and he's going to prison, probably to share the prison's mental health unit with Mr. Nichols.

Then again, they both might get the death penalty. If so, they'll still end up in prison in Sioux Falls.  

BTW, is this a new trend in murder?  

Anyway, speaking of prison, our prison task force is finalizing a location in Sioux Falls for a new state prison with a $650 million budget (which is after 3 cities turned us down for the new prison), our legislature passed a ban on sanctuary cities (we have none), and the state ended the fiscal year with a $63 million operating surplus, which will be set aside for a rainy day, and when that comes, we still won't see any of it. I know South Dakota.

We also had 200 new laws come into effect as of July 1, 2025.  

My least favorite:  Senate Bill 100, which allows college students to conceal carry firearms on campus if they have an enhanced permit. 

“There is a lot of concern that we’ll see in coming time that it is unfounded and that we can get along just right, honoring and respecting our Second Amendment rights the way they were intended,” Governor Larry Rhoden said. God only knows what that sentence means. 

All I know is that all of my fellow retired colleagues from SDSU agree that we are SO glad we are no longer teaching, because there's a percentage of students (small, but enough) who are unstable and have a tendency to go off like a firecracker. Plus most of us taught a class or two in the Rotunda, which was just what it sounds, a rotunda containing pie-shaped classrooms with tier after tier of seats for students, leading down to the poor teacher at the bottom, who was a standing duck if one of those unstable students decided to exercise their "Second Amendment rights the way they were intended."

My favorite is HB 1067 which defines the term “must” to mean a mandatory directive and does not confer any discretion in carrying out the action so directed. And then goes on to say that "shall" means the exact same thing.  Soooo glad that's cleared up. 

And another polygamous sect has taken over the compound in rural Custer County, about nine miles southwest of the small town of Pringle, blends into the landscape just like other properties in the southern Black Hills that used to belong to the Warren Jeffs group of The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). Thankfully, Mr. Jeffs is now serving a life sentence in a Texas prison for sexual assault on a child. 

But there's apparently more where he came from, and this time it's the Order, – aka the Kingston Order, the Kingston Group, the Davis County Cooperative Society (DCCS) or the Latter Day Church of Jesus Christ (LDCJC), and while they're not officially affiliated with the FLDS, they practice most of the same stuff:  polygamy, incest, child abuse, child labor violations and fraud, according to the Associated Press.  (LINK)  

BTW, if you want to see the place, some of the buildings at the property have recently been posted as available for rent on Airbnb.  

Sigh…

Well, at least I can see better.

Criming and Dying Through History in South Dakota

From the Dakota Scout, some interesting stories from yesteryear:

March 29, 1900 - from the Madison Daily Leader, South Dakota was in the middle of a smallpox epidemic and in Ipswich, SD, schools were closed until fall to limit the spread of diphtheria.  

MY NOTE:  My mother had diphtheria as a child in the Appalachian mountains of the 1920s.  She never mentioned any vaccine (which had just finally been invented), but she did get the old-fashioned treatment for it, which included cauterizing the throat. It was so painful she hoped it would kill her.  

April 5, 1950 - State cement plant employee Ray Deig reported Rapid City's first flying saucer encounter.  He saw one on the night of March 21, but he didn't report it because he thought it "was one of Uncle Sam's secret developments" and "I thought people wouldn't believe me."  (No idea why he changed his mind about folks not believing him...)

April 19, 1900 - Five prisoners escaped the state penitentiary in Sioux Falls by breaking off the bottom of a fence during morning yard work.  

May 2, 1949 - Sioux Falls veterans tried to be first in line for the processing of their WW2 bonus forms, and pilot Joe Foss flew the paperwork overnight to Pierre, but Bonus Director J. J. Kibbe refused to accept it because it hadn't been mailed.  The forms were then mailed to the Pierre post office.  (Meanwhile, I'm sure much cursing was heard and Mr. Kibbe became the most unpopular man in Sioux Falls.) 

August 18, 1899 - the Weekly Capital reported that Manly Beaver, a 13 year old boy, saved the lives of 93 teachers taking a train ride into Spearfish Canyon, who were stuck by the wreckage of an accident on the train bridge.  Beaver ran down to flag the next train and warn them of the danger ahead.  Beaver received $10 and a "free course of education at the Madison Normal School" (now Dakota State University).

August 24, 1899 - Trainmen operating a freight engine in Hermosa had to fight off half a dozen tramps, one of whom drew a gun on the trainmen.  The workers forced the tramps into the depot and kept them locked inside until the law arrived.

September 4, 1949 - The Daily Plainsman reported that Redfield Maynard Schultz was charged with murder after getting involved in a private fight, and becoming so angry he rushed into the police station, grabbed his own .38 service pistol, and returned to the parking lot and killed Roy Sieben.  (Sadly, no backstory given, as in what was the argument about?)

September 9, 1899 - the Kimbal Enterprise reported that a customer paid a 20 cent lunch tab with a $20 bill, but no one noticed that it was a Confederate $20 until the guy left the restaurant. "When reported to federal authorities, the restaurant owner was told that the government didn't regulate the use of confederate money."  (I think they started regulating after incidents like this...  But you could always try it at a restaurant of your choosing.)  

September 17, 1999 - One hundred years later, an Alaskan man was buying rounds for the house until Sioux Falls police showed up and arrested him. Charles Cooper (don't you wish it had been D. B. Cooper?) was wanted for robbing the nearby U.S. Bank before heading straight to the bar.  Loren Bultena, who was one of those getting free drinks, commented, "He can't be all bad, he bought beer."  (Spoken like a true bar fly.)

September 13, 1924 - Mr. and Mrs. Steinbaugh and Tom McGray met with City Attorney Steinback, trying to reconcile their marriage after an affair between Mrs. Steinbaugh and McGraw. Everything went well until Mr. Steinbaugh pulled out a pistol, killed McGraw, and then shot himself to death.  (I hope Mr. Steinback gave up marriage counseling after that.)

December 4, 1924 - From The Black Hills Weekly:  Blackie Brady and Jack Wilson broke out of the Pennington County Jail and stole a Ford car.  Trouble was, it was snowing (no surprise there) and the car left tracks in the snow.  The two headed toward Buckhorn, Wyoming, and the authorities were alerted, and the two men were arrested at a nearby lumber camp.  (It really is all about winter in South Dakota.)

Now this one is out of sequence, but has modern repercussions and stories to go with them:

March 31, 1950 - An explosion at the Black Hills Ordnance Depot munitions facility in Igloo (named after the dome-shaped storage buildings) killed 3.

BHOD Landscape, taken by Vigilante Scout, Wikipedia

UPDATE: "The Vivos xPoint survivalist community was developed in 2016 on the site of the former Black Hills Army Depot munitions storage facility. More than 500 above-ground concrete bunkers are marketed for lease to those who are worried about a potential national or global disaster or who want to live mostly off-the-grid. It’s located in a remote area 8 miles south of Edgemont in southwestern South Dakota... The concrete bunkers, which look like earthen igloos, held military conventional and chemical munitions from 1942 to 1967. The town of Igloo grew up around the depot and was once home a young Tom Brokaw, a South Dakota native and former NBC anchor. The base and town are now abandoned."  Which sounds great, BUT

In 2024 "David Streeter thought abandoning his traditional life to relocate into a survival bunker in South Dakota would allow his family to retreat from the stresses, expenses and restrictions of the modern world.  The family of three also wanted to be prepared in case an apocalypse of some kind altered the course of mankind and threatened their lives and way of life.

"But 18 months after leasing a former Army munitions bunker in the Vivos xPoint residential complex south of Edgemont, the Streeters have had their dreams shattered. And they now find themselves embroiled in a situation that has brought on a level of upheaval, worry and danger they specifically sought to avoid...  In August, Streeter – an Army veteran who was injured while serving in Bosnia – shot a Vivos contract employee at close range. Streeter said the man had threatened his family and he was defending himself. No charges were filed in that case or another fatal shooting involving Streeter in Montana in 2010.

 

(Read more HERE.  You know you want to.)

Who could have predicted that a community of off-the-grid doomsday preppers could be a dangerous place to live?  

MEANWHILE:  HUZZAHS ALL THE WAY AROUND!

SleuthSayers' anthology, "Murder,  Neat" has won the Derringer Award for Best Anthology!  Thanks, Michael Bracken and Barb Goffman for a fantastic job of editing, and thanks to all of us weird and wacky SleuthSayers for writing some really wicked stories!  Huzzah!  Huzzah!  Huzzah!

REPEAT BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION:

Rabia Chaudry reads my story, "The Seven Day Itch" aloud on her podcast, Rabia Chaudry Presents The Mystery Hour with Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Listen to it here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-seven-day-itch/id1581854514?i=1000703738987

Also available in Instagram!

 

Welcome to The Zo

I'm involved in a variety of things at the penitentiary these days.  There's the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), that I've been doing for 10 years.  We're doing a training for facilitators (T4F) workshop in April for that, getting more inmates trained as inside facilitators.  AVP is going strong.  Our main problem is that we always need more outside volunteers.  In case you haven't noticed, volunteerism has gone down over the last few years.  Most of the service organizations I know of (Kiwanis, Elks, Lions, etc.) are seeing a dramatic drop in membership.  And the people who are interested in helping aren't that interested in doing a weekend-long workshop inside a prison, even though it's probably the most interesting, educational, entertaining, and safest place you can be.

Allan and I are also supervising the Lifer's Group, for the third fiscal year, and the achievements are beginning to really show.  There's Toastmasters, which the Lifer's Group hosted for almost 2 years, and now is a full-fledged group of its own at the pen.  There's the suicide watches, which the Lifer's Group has taken on (with, of course, permission and approval from prison mental health and prison administration).  We just hosted our 2nd Talent Show, and it was great.  Music, jokes, poetry, and a production of yours truly's "The Scottish Play", a five-minute rendering of Macbeth, complete with cheerleading weird women.  (Great laughter and applause.)  We have a few other on-going projects, and a lot of ideas.

Over the years, I've gotten sort of used to prison ways, and idiosyncrasies, because working with the inmates is worth it.  But I can go home.  Every night, I get to go home.  What about those who don't?  What is life really like for them?  Well, I'm presenting for your information and (?) entertainment, a series of videos (each runs about 5 minutes) called "Welcome to The Zo" presented on the website The Marshall Project.

And for the last episode, "Retaliation", see here:

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/02/27/welcome-to-the-zo

Life in prison.  

Meanwhile, let's talk - for a brief moment - about disease.  The coronavirus may never reach the South Dakota prison system, but colds and influenza go around swiftly and frequently and it often seems that everybody in the unit catches it.  They isolate prisoners - with their cellie (whether the cellie has it or not at the time) - in their cells, which is a 6 x 8 space with a window that does not have a view or access to fresh air but does have a toilet right in the front, at the door.  Toilet paper (which must also serve as tissues) is rationed.  Hand sanitizer is considered contraband (alcohol content).  There's a lot of bleach, and a lot of cleaning, but I've seen an awful lot of prisoners hacking and sneezing while cleaning.  See this article in the Marshall Project for more info:  (Marshall Project)

As I said, at least I get to go home.  And I always keep hand sanitizer in my car.  

Meanwhile, South Dakota - as of today - has 5 coronavirus cases, and 1 death.  As Daniel Defoe would say, not a high weekly bill of mortality, but has turned our eyes to the potentialities.  

Messages in a Bottle, or Notes from the Pen

For the next several days, our band of authors will be writing about writing— for magazines, especially non-mystery magazines. We’ll have a couple of surprises and a lot of expertize. Thanks to Eve for kicking off the program with non-traditional penmanship. You'll see.

—Velma

by Eve Fisher

I just got back from a weekend workshop at the local penitentiary, which (as always) was full of interesting moments, hard work, and definite characters.  If nothing else, the weekend confirmed (even if I do say so myself) that I really nailed the young meth-head who's the centerpiece of my latest story, "Iron Chef", in the November, 2016 issue of AHMM.  ("He thinks he's a lady's man because he wants to get laid," and more here...)

I did not tell the guys that.  Actually, I don't tell them much about my writing, because (1) That's not why I'm there (I'm there to facilitate an Alternatives to Violence Project Workshop, not talk about myself all the time) and (2) most of them don't really want to hear it.  Including the writers.

(Sometimes especially the writers.  Recent dialog between myself and an inmate:
Me: "There's a place on-line that lists publishers and -"
Inmate (interrupting): "I HAVE an agent. Or I will soon."
Me: "Okay."
Inmate: "Yeah.")

And there are a lot of writers (and artists) at the pen.  Interestingly, I haven't met one yet that writes mystery or crime stories.  I'm not sure if that's because it doesn't interest them, or they don't know how to do it, or if they're afraid if they put anything in writing, it might be held against them in a court of law.  Like a confession or a plan for future criminal activity...  Anyway, most are poets and/or songwriters.  Some write sci-fi and/or supernatural/horror. And a few write autobiographies.

Getting prison writing published is easier than you might think, thanks to the internet.  Here are just a few of the on-line resources for magazines, newsletters, anthologies and e-zines dedicated to prisoners' writing:

From South Dakota, The Prisoners for Prevention blog.
The Prisoner Poetry Page.
The on-line Prison Poetry Workshop podcasts.
The Prisoner Express which publishes poetry, journals, essays, etc.

One of the main problems, of course, for prisoners is that these days so many places only accept on-line submissions, and access to the internet is hard to get in the pen.  And sending out ms. in hard-copy is expensive when you only make 25 cents an hour.  (Not to mention that getting access to a typewriter is hard to come by, too.)  And almost all of the markets specifically set up to publish prisoners' work are non-paying.

In the search for paying markets, Writers' Digest is invaluable to prisoners:  I'd bet there's a (more or less) old, battered copy in every prison library.  I know inmates who've sent stories to Glimmer Train, Analog, Asimov's Science Fiction, and Playboy.  (No, I don't know any who've been accepted yet, but at least they're trying!)  I've read a couple of the stories, and even given a critique here and there. When I am specifically asked.  Again, not every inmate wants to hear any opinion other than that it's a great poem/story/song.  For that matter, not every writer OUT of the pen wants to hear anything else...

Another place where inmates writers can get published is with the PEN Prison Writing Contest. Prizes and publication in an anthology make this very prestigious.
And, for all of us, let's not forget sites like Angie's Desk and My Little Corner, both of which list anthologies and markets of all genres (although primarily mystery and science-fiction/fantasy).  Thank you, ladies!  Your hard work has opened up markets for us all!

Most of the work the inmates finally do get published is and has been edited by someone outside for content.  What gets passed around in the tier, chow hall, and our sharing circle is unedited, raw, and cannot be reprinted on this family blog.  Besides the poems of suicidal despair (since this is NOT the Gingerbread House of Corrections)

http://rhymeswithorange.com/comics/november-20-2016/

gangsta rap is HUUUUUGE.  Personally, I get bored with gangsta rap, because they all say pretty much the same thing:  ultra-explicit rap symphonies in F Major on drugs, bling, fights, arrests, killings, and sex.

(It's like the prison tattoos:  the first few times you go in the pen, you see these guys who are absolutely COVERED in tattoos, and it's hard to look away.  But after a while, you realize that they're mostly skulls, naked women, snakes, names, etc., in endless repetition, and the only reason you study them is to figure out what gang they're in.)

But there are those stories that show real creativity and thinking, and poems that take your breath away, like the following from PrisonerExpress.org/?mode=poetry

The thirteenth amendment, Amended

by Name Withheld by Request

A coffle of state slaves shuffles
Slowly into the radiant rays
Of dawn's early light.
Spartacus nowhere in sight.
Flight scarred all, and bone
Weary from strife and stress,
Destined to toil under the sun til
Twilight's last gleaming brings rest.

The tools are issued:
One hoe per man, each
Dull the blade, each
Seven pounds of sweat-stained misery,
Each, in proper hands,
Seven pounds of peril.

Let there be no peril today, we pray:
No quick and vicious fights, where, sweat stinging,
Fists flying, we cull living from dying:
No riots fought for fast forgot reasons__
Swinging steel scintillating in sunlight,
Blood gouting from the too slow heads__
Brown, black, white___
Our blood ruby red and thick with life,
No respecter of color or creed.

Let there be no peril today, we pray;
No dry crackling reports of leaden soldiers,
Chasing wisps of smoke from forge fashioned barrels,
Speaking the ancient tongue of Authority;
Guns guardgripped fast by bossfists,
In confederate gray cloths,
Their fire felling friends, freeing foes.

Let there be no peril today, we pray:
Today only__hard work, for no pay.

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except
as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall
have been duly convicted, shall exist within the
United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

So let it be rewritten.
So let it, at last, be done.

The Darwin Awards

I just got back from another weekend at the pen, and you know, sometimes you just don't know what the boys are thinking.   There's always some guy who's saying, "I always know I'm the smartest guy in the room."  And it's not always the same guy.  And none of them recognize the irony of saying that in prison...   There are the guys who persist in expressing their dissatisfaction with prison life by insulting, yelling, cursing, or spitting on guards.  "I showed them!"  Yeah, you showed them that you need a few days in the hole to think it over.  And the ones who are furious at the system for locking them up just because they walked away from a work release program ("I just went to pick up my meds!"  "My girlfriend was having a breakdown!"  "I needed some time to think..."), or because (I kid you not) they posted photos of themselves doing various illegal activities on social media...

There are times I think I'm in a room full of Darwin Award winners.  Speaking of Darwin Awards, in case you didn't catch them, here are the 2013 winner and his runner-ups:

1. When his .38 caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a hold-up in Long Beach, California would-be robber James Elliot peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again. This time it worked.

2. The chef at a hotel in Switzerland lost a finger in a meat cutting machine and after a little shopping around, submitted a claim to his insurance company. The company, expecting negligence if not outright fraud, sent out one of its men to have a look for himself. He tried the machine and he also lost a finger. The chef’s claim was approved.

3. A man who shoveled snow for an hour to clear a space for his car during a blizzard in Chicago returned with his vehicle to find a woman had taken the space. He shot her.

4. After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped. Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride. He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling the staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies. The deception wasn’t discovered for 3 days.  

5. An American teenager was in the hospital recovering from serious head wounds received from an oncoming train. When asked how he received the injuries, the lad told police that he was simply trying to see how close he could get his head to a moving train before he was hit.

6.. A man walked into a Louisiana Circle-K, put a $20 bill on the counter, and asked for change. When the clerk opened the cash drawer, the man pulled a gun and asked for all the cash in the register, which the clerk promptly provided. The man took the cash from the clerk and fled, leaving the $20 bill on the counter. The total amount of cash he got from the drawer… $15.

7. Seems an Arkansas guy wanted some beer pretty badly. He decided that he’d just throw a cinder block through a liquor store window, grab some booze, and run. So he lifted the cinder block and heaved it over his head at the window. The cinder block bounced back and hit the would-be thief on the head, knocking him unconscious. The liquor store window was made of Plexiglas. The whole event was caught on videotape.

8. As a female shopper exited a New York convenience store, a man grabbed her purse and ran. The clerk called 911 immediately, and the woman was able to give them a detailed description of the snatcher. Within minutes, the police apprehended the snatcher. They put him in the car and drove back to the store. The thief was then taken out of the car and told to stand there for a positive ID. To which he replied, “Yes, officer, that’s her. That’s the lady I stole the purse from.”

9. The Ann Arbor News crime column reported that a man walked into a Burger King in Ypsilanti, Michigan at 5 A.M., flashed a gun, and demanded cash. The clerk turned him down because he said he couldn’t open the cash register without a food order. When the man ordered onion rings, the clerk said they weren’t available for breakfast… The frustrated gunman walked away. 

10. When a man attempted to siphon gasoline from a motor home parked on a Seattle street by sucking on a hose, he got much more than he bargained for. Police arrived at the scene to find a very sick man curled up next to a motor home near spilled sewage. A police spokesman said that the man admitted to trying to steal gasoline, but he plugged his siphon hose into the motor home’s sewage tank by mistake. The owner of the vehicle declined to press charges saying that it was the best laugh he’d ever had and the perp had been punished enough!

Those are the official ones.  I'd like to add one from an idiot I knew, 40 years ago in L.A., who'd always wanted to steal a cop car.  Well, one day he saw one with (for some unaccountable reason) an open back door:  so he got in and pointed a gun at the cop sitting in the front.  The cop's partner showed up...  The guy's probably still in jail.