Criminal - Bears, Birds, and Bones

Episode Date: August 4, 2017

As long as 2,500 years ago, Native Americans placed the bones of their dead in giant mounds of earth in the shape of animals. The Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa was created to protect one set of these - and the bones inside. But in 2011, a new superintendent, Jim Nepstad, discovered that the remains of 41 Native Americans had disappeared.  In this episode, we use the term "Native American" because the story refers to legislation that uses that term. The National Park Service now uses “American Indian.”  This episode contains language that may not be suitable for everyone. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, FDA approved for over 20 years. So, talk to your specialist to see if Botox Cosmetic is right for you. For full prescribing information, including boxed warning, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. Remember to ask for Botox Cosmetic by name. To see for yourself and learn more, visit BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series

worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving

homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. You can see we're standing near the head.

Right here is the head. And the front legs are extending off to the east. The main trunk of the body is extending northwards away from us. And the rear legs are extending also off to the east. What we're hearing is the description of a giant mound in the shape of a bear, made of dirt and covered in grass. There are mounds like these all over the Midwest, and many are effigies of animals. Here at Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa, the mounds are shaped like bears and birds, but other places in the country have snakes and turtles.

I met with the superintendent of Effigy Mounds National Monument, Jim Nepstead. The first mounds we visited are called the Marching Bear Group. From above, they look like a long line of bears walking south along the bluff next to the Mississippi River. So, I mean, this is a, you know, literally close to 100-foot-long animal that's been sculpted onto the earth by bringing basket after basket after basket of earth and piling it all up. I mean, there's the equivalent of dozens of dump truck loads of earth that were moved and placed in order to create just this one mound right here. And what's underneath this mound? Well, in many cases, we don't know.

There have been very few excavations here in the marching bear group, but what we do know is that nearly all effigy mounds do contain burials. This appears to be a place associated with ceremony. Just into the forest, can't quite see it with all the vegetation here, but there's the ruts of what's known as the military trail. That trace of that old road actually helps explain why the tribes are no longer present here in Iowa. A lot of people wonder, well you've got all of these spectacular monuments that were obviously built by American Indians. You know, where are the American Indians in northeast Iowa?

They're all gone. Why is that? Well, you know, it's because the federal government removed them, you know, back in the 1830s and 40s. Literally, you know, packed them up and moved them on to distant reservations and so on. This military road passing right near this mound group, again, is an artifact of that era. White settlers moved into the area and started plowing the fields, and sometimes plowing down anything that got in the way.

Up to 80% of the mounds, and any remains inside them, were ground up into the fields. Yeah, and that's, you know, that was the fate of many of the mounds. I mean, there were thousands of mounds throughout southern Wisconsin, northeast Iowa, southeast Minnesota, and northwest Illinois. Many of them like the mounds that we're seeing here, animal shapes, bird shapes, all kinds of other shapes, thousands and thousands of them dotting the landscape. But the rugged nature of the landscape here, the fact that it wasn't ideally suited for agriculture is what protected a lot of the mounds

in what eventually became Effigy Mounds National Monument. In 1949, Harry Truman signed a presidential proclamation making the Effigy Mounds in Iowa a national monument and stating that the mounds held quote great scientific interest. In 1951, the first archaeologist was assigned to, quote, reveal the mysteries of archaeology and the resources of the park, which really meant digging into the mounds to see what was inside and often putting it on display. The Native rights movement argued that the scientific community needed to treat Native American remains with respect.

In 1971, a highway construction crew uncovered an old cemetery in Iowa. The remains of 28 people were dug up, including one Native American woman and a child. The 26 white people were put in new caskets and reburied at the local cemetery. But the Native American woman and child were boxed up and sent to the state archaeologist. Stories like this started to make national news. By 1989, the Smithsonian reached an agreement with tribes to return some of their collection to any descendants they could identify. They said, when you face a collision between human rights and scientific study, scientific values have to take second place. Congress acknowledged that Native American remains were not being treated appropriately and passed a law requiring institutions to return their remains.

It's commonly referred to as NAGPRA. Okay, that's the Native Americans Gra objects, and patrimonial objects. This is Pat Murphy. He worked as the tribal representative on NAGPRA matters for the Iowa tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. His job was to help remove remains from museums across the country and ensure their reburial. We are charged with taking care of anybody that cannot take care of themselves, the little ones, the elders, and we're also supposed to take care of the ones that were dug up,

and their spirit journey was interrupted. In his role as a NAGPRA representative, Pat Murphy visited effigy mounds in the early 2000s. He worked with the other tribes that were descendants from the area, and they returned and reburied two sets of remains. So we didn't see all the bad things that went on. Here are the bad things that happened at Effigy Mounds. New construction had been completely reckless. Trenches and post holes damaged burial sites. A utility shed was built right on top of

a hidden mound. You know, once that investigation concluded, it was very, very clear that this park had kind of strayed away from the straight and narrow, and very few things were done appropriately here. Tribal groups were furious. The superintendent was removed. And that's when Jim Nepstead was brought in and asked to fix everything. You know, Effigy Mounds was in turmoil. I knew it was in turmoil.

It's clear as day that the park was in the wrong. So I wasn't about to come in here and try to minimize the seriousness of what happened. So I thought, you know, I'm just going to go in there. I'm going to pull things as I see them. I'm going to be extremely open and transparent. And that was easy enough for the first few months. And then, when it seemed like the situation at Effigy Mound's National Monument could not possibly get any worse,

Jim learned that the remains of 41 Native Americans were missing, and no one had any idea where they could be. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. When did you first suspect or discover that something was off at Effigy Mounds. The only thing I can tell you is that to me it was the old ones telling me to do something. I didn't know what. I didn't hear voices or anything like that. It was just a feeling that it wasn't complete up there. And so I started checking into it. In 2011, Pat Murphy, in his role as tribal representative, asked for a full inventory of the remains in the park's collection. He went to a park employee named Sharon Greener,

she handled the inventories, and asked her to show him the reports from the 90s and early 2000s. It took her a few days to find them. When she did, she didn't give them to Pat Murphy. Instead, she went straight to the new superintendent, Jim Nepstead. And she put this report down on my desk, just plopped it down my desk, and she said, you need to read this. And then she just walked out of the room. And the report is about an inch thick. It's a big report, but it's organized in such a way that after just about five minutes or so of leafing through it, I was seeing all these references time and time again about remains that had been sent off to the office of the state archaeologist

in Iowa City to be studied in 1986. They returned to the park in 1987, and they have now disappeared, and we don't know where they are. And so time and time again, you know, remains were studied in 86, returned in 87, and disappeared soon after. And, you know, one of my first questions was, did anybody tell the tribes about this? Jim Nepstad started making calls to anybody who had been around before his time who might know something. But nobody knew where they were, and they would all shrug their shoulders and say, look, a lot of smart people have looked into this over the years,

and nobody's been able to find them. You're not going to find them. And so I just thought, well, I'm going to have to account for them nonetheless. I'm going to let our tribal partners know that they're missing. So I started drafting the letter to notify the tribes formally. I mean, you must have thought at this point, give me a break. I cannot, you know, that. Yeah, I mean, in all honesty, you know, I knew the situation was bad here. But I had no idea that the park had this kind of a nagpur problem.

And there were some pretty big lumps under the carpet that were suddenly being revealed. The park had its own law enforcement officer, Bob Palmer. He'd been in the job for more than 20 years. He said he remembered something funny about the park's old superintendent, Tom Munson, taking home a box of animal bones. Bob offered to go to Tom Munson's house and check it out. They'd known each other for a long time. Tom looked around, but said he couldn't find anything. And unexpectedly, though, the next day, the phone rings in Bob's office, and it's Tom Munson. And Tom said, well, you know, I've got this box.

You might want to come over and look at it. So Bob goes over, and Munson produces this box out of his garage, and it has little catalog numbers, and Bob took that box back to the park and had them sitting on his desk, called me over to his office and said, Jim, you need to come over here. And I walked in and opening up the plastic bag and peering inside,

there's, I mean, it's just one of these things that you just never, ever forget. It's just like burned into the retinas of your eyes. I looked into the plastic bag and there's this human cranium staring out at me, you know, literally looking out, you know, from the bag. I mean, it just, it haunts you. I mean, it's almost like this person's inside this bag saying, help. Jim Nepstead and Bob Palmer arranged for someone from the state archaeologist office to come up and study the box's contents. And eventually, a few weeks later, we got a final report that, no, you don't have all of the missing remains. You've got, you know, a third to a half of them.

Jim Nepstead called in outside experts, and they went through every single box and filing cabinet of the park, tens of thousands of records, to make sure that every item on paper actually existed in the building. It's obvious that the remains are not scrolled up anywhere in our collection or anywhere else in the park.

They are not here. They are truly and verifiably now unaccounted for. And this isn't just a mere, I'm curious, where are these kinds of things? This is, okay, somebody is really seriously playing with us. Somebody has broken the law. This needs to be investigated. Jim called David Barlin Lyles, a special agent for the park system. Whatever felony occurs on park service property, whether it's a common law crime, people-on-people crime, murder, sexual assault,

all the way to cultural resource crimes, natural resource crimes, those are all what I do. David Barland Lyles is crisscrossing the country and leaving no stone unturned, going through thousands of pages of documents and so on. Yeah, I'm interviewing people that have moved from effigy mounds and now they work in Atlanta, they work in Washington, D.C., they're out on the, you know, they're all over the country. Some of them are retired, living up in Minnesota. Some of them are out in Olympic National Park, Washington. So I'm interviewing people all over the place. David interviewed all the park's employees, including Sharon Greener,

who'd put the report on Jim Nepstead's desk in the first place. He actually interviewed her twice. The first time, she said she thought the park's remains had been transferred to the state archaeologist in Iowa City. But David Barlin Lyles had already checked that. It wasn't true. So he went back for a second interview, and her story changed. And she finally told me that, indeed, she removed the human remains from the museum catalog drawers of the park unit, put them into two moving boxes. She created the report of survey all under the orders of Thomas Munson.

And she picked up a box. Thomas Munson picked up a box. They walked him up the stairs out of the basement of the visitor center, walked through the visitor center of Effigy Mounds, out the front door, out into the parking lot, and put them in the trunk of Thomas Munson's Ford Taurus, and he drove them away from Effigy Mounds National Monument, and she did not know where he was taking them.

David said that conversation with Sharon Greener was one of the most important moments of his career. The very next day, David drove to Tom Munson's house. This time, Tom's wife Linda was there too. They have a really beautiful home in Prairie du Chien, kind of a restored Victorian home. And it was a gorgeous spring day. And I walked up to the front door, and Tom was at the front door, and he let me in. I had never met his wife, Linda, personally. So I was introduced to her, and we sat at kind of a dining room table.

And they sat together on one end of the dining room table and I sat at my end. It was round, I think, so we were just really across from each other. And I spread out all the information I had in my case file and the documents I felt were pertinent to the investigation, and I started by asking Tom Munson to talk to me about what he thinks happened here. David says that Tom offered three different explanations. That he had sent the remains to the state archaeologist, that he sent them to an archaeological center in Nebraska, and that he had gotten an unusual directive from the national office in D.C. For each explanation, David produced documents to prove Tom wrong. Eventually, Linda turned to Tom and said,

I don't think you're telling this young man the truth. And turned back to me and said, well, what do you think happened? And the Munsons clearly love each other very, very much. And somehow she either believed me or just realized that I'm not going to leave their house until they kick me out. David pulled a consent to search form from his briefcase and put it in front of them. Linda signed. And we got up, and I followed Linda out the back door of the house

across a small lawn to a detached garage. She opened up a door to the garage and we stepped into it and then she opened up the garage doors to let all the light in. And she turned to her left and looked at an area in front of a white minivan that they had parked in there. And she goes, I wonder if that's it. And she walked to this cardboard box that was, frankly, out of place in their garage. Everything else about the garage was pretty tidy and neat and newer. And there was this older cardboard box, and she pulled it slightly out from the wall,

opened up the flaps of the cardboard box, and under the flaps was a partially opened kind of black garbage bag. And I peeked over her shoulder, and I could see the head of a femur. And I knew that that was what I was looking for. And she backed away from it, and I said, you know, stay here. I'm going to go get my camera. David took photographs, put the box in the passenger seat of his car, and texted Jim. I remember just being shocked when he texted me, you know, found the second box. You know, need to get back into the museum collection.

Can you, can we figured it out. And we felt both sad and happy at the same time. And did you immediately lock them up? Absolutely, yes. We even prepared a special place to put them as both returning them home, but also as strangely evidence of crime. Jim Nepstead and David Barlin Lyles told tribal representatives what had happened right away. Sandra Massey of the Sac and Fox Nation remembers seeing the pictures that David took of the box in the garage. And you see the trash bags. And, yeah, that was really, it hurt.

I was very angry, but it also hurt because the thing is, we in the Sac and Fox Nation still do our ceremonies. I lost my little brother a couple of years ago. We put him away in our traditional way, and it occurred to me that all those people had been buried with that same kind of love. It's just hard to imagine that anybody could do that. I don't know that I can tell you what a feeling it was. Pat Murphy.

I guess it'd be if your grandmother was dug up and misplaced and her remains were off in somebody's garage someplace, then that's how you would feel, you know, violated. Tom Munson pled guilty to one count of embezzling government property. His sentence was 10 consecutive weekends in prison, one year of house arrest, 100 hours of community service, and he was ordered to pay more than $108,000 in restitution. The tribes were disappointed. When he received community service, I wanted him cleaning out the toilets at Effigy Mounds. The federal prosecutor for the case said that Munson was

being punished as though he'd stolen a Xerox machine. The Department of Justice issued a statement that said, at all times during his employment, Munson was entrusted with preserving and protecting the sacred site. He failed this trust. Tom Munson had to make a public apology. In it, he said, please remember me as you know me, and not for what I've done. Why do you think Tom Munson did it? He didn't want those goddamn Indians to take away his stuff. Albert LeBeau is the cultural resources manager at the park, and an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. That was the mentality of NAGPRA in the 1990s.

People who had amazing collections, like Effigy Mountains did, or does, they were afraid that the Native Americans were going to come in and repatriate everything. Personally, I think he was given bad advice, but underneath it all, I think he was... Can I cuss? given bad advice, but underneath it all, I think he was... Can I cuss? Oh, God, yes.

Okay. Well, I believe Tom Munson took the remains because he's a fucking racist. He probably thought he was being like a hero. He was going to save these from the Indians and then bring them back. Sandra Massey. When NAGPRA started, anybody that had our artifacts or human remains

thought that we were going to bring our big trucks and load everything up and take it away. And there was sort of a disconnect. There was a distance between them and us. He literally admitted in writing that it was because NAGPRA was about to pass, and he wanted to protect the funerary objects, some of which were on display here in the visitor center. Jim Napstad. And in his mind, the best way to protect this stuff was to make the remains go away. And if we could eventually get people to forget the fact that this stuff was associated with human remains,

then maybe nobody's going to bug us and force us to repatriate it. And so it's very misguided effort on his part to protect the material goods that came out of the mounds, but at the cost of the remains themselves. Yeah, this is the last of the bear mounds. Jim told me that even though he works at the park, he spends most of his free time here too. And when he's not here, he thinks about it all the time. About why the mounds were built the way they were,

and about the people who built them, moving basket after basket of dirt from the river to the top of the bluffs. But he's okay with never getting the answers. They might not be his to know. Is this your favorite group in the park? Yeah, it is. There's just some kind of order and design here. And whether we'll really ever know what it was,

we'll just have to wait and see. We are definitely working with our tribal partners, trying to learn as much as we can. But at the same time, you know, we're cognizant of the fact that, you know, maybe there's certain things that we're not meant to know. The park hopes to begin reburial of the recovered remains next spring, when the ground thaws. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr, Nadia Wilson, and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers.

Our intern is Matilde Erfolino. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter, at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation,

and special thanks to AdCirc for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia. From PRX. The number one selling product of its kind From PRX. guidelines. Look better in adults. Effects of Botox cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Don't receive Botox cosmetic if you have a skin infection. Side effects may include allergic reactions,

injection site pain, headache, eyebrow and eyelid drooping, and eyelid swelling. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Tell your doctor about medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton syndrome in medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. For full safety information, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. See for yourself at Botoxoxcosmetic.com.

Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge,

to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts.