Cold Case Files - Death in Deadwood

Episode Date: January 12, 2021

In a town most famous for the death of legendary gunfighter Wild Bill Hickok, police try to solve a murder not in the 1880s, but the 1980s. This murder involves a man named David Crockett, another named "Outlaw," a bus full of hippies, and a very large rock. Check out our great sponsors! Madison Reed: Go to Madison-Reed.com and get 10% off PLUS free shipping on your first color kit with code CCF Purple: Go to purple.com/coldcase10 and use promo code coldcase10 to get 10% off any order of $200 or more. Terms apply. SimpliSafe: Get a FREE home security camera, when you purchase a SimplISafe system at SimpliSafe.com/coldcase - You also get a 60 day risk free trial, so there’s nothing to lose! Skillz: Have more fun playing the games you love and win some extra cash! Go to skillz.com/ccf - Must be 18 or older, terms and conditions apply, not available in all states, prizes may vary, winning is not guaranteed. See website for details

Thank you for listening to this Podcast One production, available on Apple Podcasts and Podcast One. There's a town in South Dakota called Deadwood. It's a somewhat famous Old West town. You might recognize the name from its place in the legend of Wild Bill Hickok, or perhaps from the HBO show of the same name. If you think about anything when you hear the name Deadwood, you probably think about saloons and gunfights and prospecting for gold. You probably don't think about boulders. But in 1982, it wasn't a duel with pistols that caused the death of David Crockett Rhodes. It was a boulder to the head.

Who wielded the rock, though? That would remain a mystery for over 20 years, until a beer can, a tattoo, and a bus full of hippies led police to the killer. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files, the podcast. I'm Brooke, and this story, adapted from a classic episode of Cold Case Files, the podcast. I'm Brooke, and this story, adapted from a classic episode of Cold Case Files, is told by the spectacular Bill Curtis. We're on Main Street, Deadwood, South Dakota.

A lot of history here. Deadwood has a number of different characters that came along. Slough number 10 claims to be the site that Wild Bill Hickok was shot during a card game, holding the hand of aces and eights. Aces and eights, also known as a dead man's hand. 106 years to the day that Wild Bill Hickok was gunned down, Deadwood, South Dakota has another murder to deal with. We are walking up the main road from off of Highway 85 to the parking area and picnic

area. We got called up here that there was a dead body up at the picnic area. In 1982, Dwayne Russell is a detective with the Lawrence County Sheriff's Office. Deputies at the scene are Nils Jussel arrived first. The vehicle is a Chevy. Looks like a Mazda. I do remember the victim. He had defensive wounds on his left arm and his arm was up. There was a lot of blood and it would have

been a pretty vicious murder. This area, the one of two tables, Miscellaneous clothing. To the right, a mattress. Budweiser can. To the far side of that is the remains of the unknown. White male. Subject's head was covered with blood. It was smashed in pretty good.

Very bloody, you couldn't recognize him. And I knew that this person, at the time we didn't know who it was. The man is ID'd as David Crockett Rose, a local who apparently came out on the losing end of a fight. Well, just by looking at it, you could maybe surmise that there was a struggle, there was a fight. The rock was a weapon of opportunity. The rock weighs approximately about 25 pounds.

There's blood on the bottom part of the rock. And there's also blood splatters on the top of the rock here. Around the campsite are several beer cans. Next to the body, a jumble of clothing and personal effects. Stuff was just strewn about. It looked like a Salvation Army box. A drop-off point. There was old clothing. Once you kind of put two and two together, it looks like somebody was kind of in a panic

situation, lightening their load and getting rid of as much as they could. Some of those personal items have names attached. What are those names? A free spirit named Vernon Chaney. It was an excellent summer. Excellent. Believe it or not, I had the best time in my life that year. Vernon Chaney is an old hippie. I had long hair. When I had long hair. In the summer of 82, he channels the spirit of 69.

About a bunch of hippies get together. We kind of hooked up back in the late 60s, early 70s, and made a coalition to be free peace people. They call themselves the Rainbow Family, and they draw attention wherever they go. They come from all over the world, the rainbow family and they draw attention wherever they go. They come from all over the world, lured by the rainbow vision of sharing and caring. All are part of the loosely knit rainbow family of living light.

They get together every summer in a national forest for a giant old-fashioned love-in. We're just on a road trip. The road trip, however, is not all peace, love, and understanding. This couple in-law, out-law hooked up with us, and they started pilfering and stealing stuff from people. So we kicked them off the march. You've got to go. You're not part of us.

These are very tolerant people of each other, so he must have been a little worse than the others for them to kick him off. According to Cheney, items found at the crime scene were stolen off the peace bus by outlaw and in-law. All I ever got was outlaw and he's with an in-law. He was called outlaw and he called his girl that is with him his in-law. And that's all they knew and he called his girl that was with him his in-law. And that's all they knew. They gave me the description. They gave me some of the clothing he was wearing,

as much as they could remember. Other than the aliases, the detectives have one solid lead, an unknown fingerprint lifted off a beer can. There's an example here. This Budweiser beer can that was found at the scene, we used a carbide lamp to bake the print on and then it would, it was actually a latent print and it developed

it so it was to a point where we could photograph it. Problem is, in the early 80s, there's no automated database of fingerprints. It would literally have to be done by hand. This was pre-computer days. Every police department, every sheriff's office would have to go through thousands, if not millions, well, it'd be millions and millions of files looking for an alias.

And chances are you'd probably find a couple hundred thousand outlaws. Deputy Russell speculates that outlaw and in-law were kicked out of the Rainbow family, thumbed a ride with David Rose, and ended up killing him. By circumstance, it's like lightning hitting, happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, saw these people hitchhiking, stops, gives them a ride, probably started visiting with them. Without a name or a fingerprint match, the case goes cold.

We got nothing back. So if you have nothing else to go on, so basically the fingerprints were the last, our last hope. The David Rose case stays cold for 20 years until the prints are resubmitted and outlaw and in-law become flesh and blood. The decision was made to resubmit the print, which we did. And that's when we actually got a hit. I'm McKamey, the producer of Cold Case Files,

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Basically, the picnic area is the same as it was in 1982 when the murder occurred, and that's right over here. We get through some of the deeper snow. Detective Randall Rosenau is walking a crime scene 20 years cold. The victim himself was just on the far side of the picnic table and scattered on this area, as we showed you in the crime scene photos, was property that belonged to our suspect, identified as outlaw and in-law.

Outlaw and in-law are a male and female. Beyond that, Rosenau knows nothing about them. He hopes a trip to the evidence room will change that. What we did was we went back in and pulled everything out of evidence, out of the vault, and have since moved it over here. These are all either cold case, this is all cold case information, and right now David Rose is still in here too. This evidence hasn't been examined in more than ten years.

There's four more rocks. This is probably the largest of the four, down in a smaller size. But this one in particular did contain some flesh matter in here. Which would indicate it was used. As the weapon come down. It's a blunt object.

It's hard. I mean, it does a lot of damage. Among the most promising items of evidence, a beer can. Well, initially, through the investigation, the investigators on scene in 82 did fingerprint and process the crime scene itself. They found a number of different beer cans that were related to both the scene and the vehicle. On one of those beer cans, they did make a lift of a viable print. Twenty years ago, print comparisons were made by hand. Now computers do the heavy lifting,

comparing the unknown against millions of prints in a matter of seconds. On May 29, 2002, the database yields a cold hit. Our fingerprint itself did come back with a hit, and they identified our individual as Thomas Dalton. So now we had a potential name and date of birth to give to Outlaw. Rosenau reads Dalton's rap sheet and notes the suspect has done time in Texas for violent assault. Within our data system, we can pull up our booking photos, and part of that process involves tattoos. I'll give you an example of the outlaw tattoo

that we talked about on the shoulder, the right shoulder. As I say, they've got a little dagger above outlaw and a set of wings is what I assume that it's supposed to be. Kind of an aha moment. Rosenau digs deeper and learns that Thomas Dalton is an alias as well. At that point, obviously, we ran more computer inquiries

into his criminal history, into his background, and eventually identified his name as Fred Allen Bates, or his actual name. Fred Allen Bates lives off the grid, working as a day laborer and constantly on the move, a fact underscored by the discovery of yet another alias. In the back, he also had another tattoo identifying him as Drifter. How long Drifter? Very appropriate for him.

The Drifter part, he did move around quite a bit. He had two different names, two different social security numbers, and two different dates of birth, so he was a little bit hard to track. We knew he was going to be kind of an elusive quarry. Bates has one outstanding arrest warrant from downstate Illinois. For cold case detectives, it's a start. 20 years after the murder of David Rose, cold case detectives in Deadwood finally have the technology to be able to do something with the fingerprint, which was taken off a beer can found at the crime scene. The computer is able to compare this print against millions of others in the database, and it gives detectives a name. Actually, two names. Thomas Dalton and Fred Allen Bates.

Dalton is an alias used by Bates, but it's not his only alias. Another is outlaw, a word Bates has tattooed on his shoulder. Investigators are pretty confident that Bates is their killer. But with two names and two social security numbers, he isn't easy to track down. Once in Illinois is pretty well a river town, pretty low in the crime rate. We have our share of methamphetamine crimes, but we've got some real good agents that keep those numbers down. Fred Kinsley is a deputy with the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force. When a violent fugitive is wanted in an area,

we all combine manpower and go to that area to try to capture that fugitive. On March 19, 2003, Kinsley gets a call from Deadwood about a man named Fred Bates. What's in the file here is actually the booking record from the Adams County Sheriff's Office. This is the mugshot of Mr. Bates. We did not know him personally as one of the more known bad guys in town, I should say.

We run some backgrounds on him, run some police checks. Come up with nothing recent, so he wasn't really known to us. He's pretty well living a normal life. Bates has recently applied for welfare assistance and provided a current address in Quincy. It gave us a start, you know. A lot of it's good old footwork, too. You know, talking to people, talking to neighbors. Have they seen this person? You know, heard things like that. The Deadwood detectives come out to Quincy.

Together with Kinsley, they survey Bates' house on 6th Street. 6th Street, this is 4th, so about two blocks up to your right here, we're going to be where he was living. As soon as he exited the house, we rolled up in the surveillance van and took him down right on the front porch. No struggle, very surprised, but that's the safest way is the ultimates of surprise, so a subject cannot get to a weapon or anything like that. We felt we had the right person, didn't we? Right. At that point, we decided that we had enough to issue that warrant. Fred Bates sits in an Illinois jail cell as cold case detectives map out a strategy for securing a confession. The game plan was always open because we never know whether Fred was even going to talk to us or maybe even confess to us. So it was kind of an open book as far as that goes rosinow takes his suspect back

to the summer of 1982 and the rainbow family gathering he did identify initially right away to us that yes he was involved in the rainbow gathering in that year um yes he did leave the was in the peace march left that fred allen is talking about an individual that probably spent most of his life living on the street, from conversations either later or investigations later. We could tie him back into homeless shelters, a number of different cities, maybe living with friends. Kind of spent most of his life drifting about. Detective Rosedow turns up the heat

and asks Bates why his fingerprint was found at a murder scene. And then at a latter point, we talked specifically about fingerprints. At that point, he decided that he was done talking to us. Basically, the interview, too, was a fishing expedition on his part. You know, he was looking for information from us at the same time. So we got to the specifics, and he felt a little cornered. Right. He then used his rights and asked for an attorney.

Which was probably another indication that you were going the right direction, because when you got to those areas of concern, he didn't want to answer any questions at all. Bates is transported back to Deadwood, booked into jail and given a cellmate who provides detectives with the rope they need to hang Fred Bates for murder. Everyone wants to keep their home and family safe, whether it's from a break-in, a fire, flooding, or a medical emergency. SimpliSafe

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states. Prizes may vary. Winning is not guaranteed. See website for details. Would you state your name? Serge Derosier. You were arrested and put in jail here in Deadwood, is that right? That's right. This is a videotaped deposition. The man speaking is a cellmate of Fred Allen Bates, a man who police believe killed David Rose with a 50-pound rock. When people commit crimes, particularly heinous crimes,

they seem to always tell somebody. What did he say about how the killing had occurred? He said that the guy, David, turned out to be an asshole, that he was looking for trouble and that he left, David left with some of his personal stuff. Did he talk about his fingerprints? He did. He said that he told the cops he'd never been in South Dakota, but they had fingerprints on a beer can, and he was f***ed. Okay. He was f***ed. Was that his term for it?

That was his term. How many times did he say that? Many times. Serge DeRosier is looking at a long prison stretch for an unrelated crime and is eager to cut himself a deal. Our job was to try to verify if we could independently whether he was just making this story up to get a plea bargain or there were things in the story that only the killer would have known

and therefore Serge's story was accurate. Fitzgerald believes there are telling details in DeRossier's statement, details only the killer would know, or someone the killer had confessed to. Was he concerned about any other physical evidence at the scene? The detail that comes to mind as the most significant was that Fred Allen Bates had told Serge that the police still had his hat, which was a unusual looking leather cap. They had clothes of his and they had a hat of his, and you couldn't believe how, after 20 years, they still had all those of his.

And there was no way that Serge de Rozier could have known that information unless he had talked to the killer himself. Did he describe it as an accidental killing or an intentional killing to you? Accident. He said accident many times what it did was for the first time we could do more than just paint the picture of fred allen bates being at the scene of the killing we could now actually put the rock in his hand and we had

a confession that he was the one responsible for killing David Rose back in August of 1982. So it strengthened our hand tremendously. Before Bates goes to trial, there's one more loose end to tie up. Outlaw's suspected partner in crime, a woman named In-Law. And there was always the In-Law element. Right. We certainly hoped to find some kind of indication of who she was. But she was just another link, another piece of evidence that needed to be explored and gotten to and interviewed.

Today's date is November 28, 2003. My name is Randall Rosenhoff. Five months later, detectives get a line on the woman they believe to be in-law. Ultimately, we developed a small light of hope that we might have located her. Pouring through old arrest records, cold case detectives find a woman who used to run with Bates. Her name on the street, in law. Seemed like it had been a long time ago. It seemed like it was something that she had spent the last 20 years trying to forget. The woman is now a college student living in California. Cold case detectives ask what she remembers about Bates.

One picture that I remember about him? Yeah. I don't know. I think we worked carnivals together for a while. Was he taller than you? Everybody taller than me. I'm only five foot. How long were you with him before a trouble broke out?

Who are you talking about? Well, a guy got killed, so that's the trouble I'm talking about. In-law says she and outlaw were hitchhiking through South Dakota and wound up at a campsite with David Rose. Then she says David Rose made a pass at her. Bates, whom she knew by another alias, Thomas Dalton, didn't like that. Tom tried to tell him no,ton, didn't like that. just grabbed a boulder and, for, what would be self defense or whatever, and hit him with it? Where was David when Thomas was hitting him with boulders?

I think he was on the ground. How many times did Thomas hit David with boulders? Oh, it looked to be like maybe three or four times. Then we knew we had what we needed. We needed another independent witness to place Mr. Bates at the homicide and put the rock in his hand or the murder weapon. And you've had an opportunity to view the rock. You can see that it's definitely not a defensive-type weapon, so the mere fact that we can associate a rock

and that particular rock to the victim himself will give you some indication of the condition of the victim at the time that was used. I mean, that's a heavy rock. It's not a defensive weapon. As for in-laws' culpability, Fitzgerald believes she might have been an accessory after the murder. But the statute of limitations on that crime has expired. The only crime that she could have been an accessory after the murder. But the statute of limitations on that crime has expired.

The only crime that she could have been prosecuted for would be the homicide itself. And there just was not enough evidence to prosecute her for homicide. As for Fred Bates, Fitzgerald's case is made. In December 2003, however, Bates decides to cut a deal and pleads guilty to first-degree manslaughter. He is sentenced to 35 years in prison. I consulted with the relatives, and there was agreement that they were satisfied that justice would be served if we let him plead guilty to manslaughter in the first degree.

I think he'll be eligible for parole when he's about 70, if he lives that long. In the town of Deadwood, 127 years after Wild Bill Hickok breathed his last, another outlaw takes a fall, and the family of his victim finally has some answers. David Rose had two children, and they grew up, they were very small children when their dad was killed. And so I know that they were happy to see that this man, his life was so important that 20 years later, they pulled out the file and dusted it off and they solved it. And I'm just really proud to have been a part of that. Fred Allen Bates, aka Thomas Dalton, aka Outlaw, is still serving his prison sentence

for first-degree manslaughter in a South Dakota state prison. Cold Case Files, the podcast, is hosted by Brooke Giddings, produced by Scott Brody, McKamey Lynn, and Steve Delamater. Our executive producer is Ted Butler. We're distributed by Podcast One. The Cold Case Files TV series was produced by Curtis Productions and presented by host emeritus Bill Curtis. Check out more Cold Case Files at aetv.com and by downloading the A&E app.