Criminal - Wolf 10

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

In April of 1995, wildlife biologists flew small airplanes over Yellowstone National Park, looking for two missing wolves. “They’re just gone. And that’s implausible because wolves don’t just disappear.” Thomas McNamee’s book is The Killing of Wolf Number Ten. This episode was originally released in 2020. 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. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, members-only merch, and more. Learn more and sign up here. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. 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

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It's time to sharpen your civic vision and ignite the spark for a brighter future. I'm Mila Atmos, and on my weekly podcast, Future Hindsight, I bring you conversations to translate today's most urgent issues into clear, actionable ways Hi, it's Phoebe. This month, we're bringing you two of our favorite episodes. Two stories about the same family of wolves in Yellowstone.

One is a crime story, and the other is a love story. For the love story, check out episode 72 of our other show, This is Love. We've got a link in the show notes. Here's the crime story. In April of 1995, a man named Mike Phillips was in a small airplane flying over Yellowstone National Park.

He was the leader of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, and he was looking for two wolves that had decided to head north. They were identified by numbers, nine and ten. Wolf nine was big, with black fur that people said looked gray in certain light. Ten was her mate. Ten was absolutely enormous, 122 pounds, white, with gigantic paws. Writer Thomas McNamee says Wolf Ten was the very definition of an alpha male. When you go into a gift shop and you buy a stuffed wolf, he looked like one of those. Nine in ten were research callers that transmitted signals,

wildlife biologists, used these to track the wolves when they started heading north. They track them the first day, and they find them up on the Beartooth Plateau. And for five days, they just don't move. They just sit there. And then these storms start to blow in, day after day after day, these howling snowstorms. And they can't fly, so they can't track 9 and 10. And finally, there's a break in the storms,

and they find them at a place called Franchise Meadow, which is way far north. The wolves had left the park. The wildlife biologists were terrified. They were only two months into their first attempt to reestablish the wolf population in Yellowstone.

And the success of the plan depended not only on the wolves staying in the park, but also reproducing. Nine was pregnant, and her pups would be the first wolves born in Yellowstone in more than 60 years. But Nine and Ten were gone,

and still heading north through an area with very little prey. And if they got through that alive, the biologists knew that the wolves would then be surrounded by cattle ranches. In 1995, it was illegal to shoot a wolf in Montana. But a rancher could shoot a wolf that was attacking their livestock. There was nothing the biologists could do. They felt helpless just watching the wolves move north. They can't land and try to chase them back south.

They just hope that they're going to figure out that they're in a bad place and go back south. But no. April 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, storms, and they can't fly. And so they don't know where the wolves are. One of the Yellowstone wolf biologists, Doug Smith, got into a small plane on April 20th and went searching for nine and ten. He can't find the wolves. They're just gone. And that's implausible because wolves don't just disappear. The next day, an agent from the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks called. Wolf tracks had been spotted outside a town called Red Lodge. So they think, okay, we've got to get two planes, and we're going to fly a much wider area and see where the hell they've gone.

But they get storms. Well, these spring storms are just horrendous, and they can't fly, can't fly, can't fly. On April 26th, Doug Smith is in the air and detects a clear signal from Nine's collar. He hears Nine quite clearly, but Ten's signal is faint and indistinct and he can't figure out where it is. And then just for a minute, he gets it quite clearly and it's going beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep beep beep beep which when an animal doesn't move for a long time it's a bad sign because even you know if they're asleep they move around a little bit and so the regular signal is on beep beep beep and when it goes beep beep beep beep that means

they have they're not moving at all, and it's called mortality mode. So he knows immediately that 10 is dead. As Thomas McNamee puts it, all hell broke loose. Federal agents from all over converged, not only to find Wolf 10, but also to find the person who killed him. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

Number 10 was one of 14 wolves brought from Alberta, Canada, down to Yellowstone in January of 1995. The wolves were brought into the park in what was called the Wolf Reintroduction Project. It was intended to correct a decision made at the beginning of the 20th century, not long after Yellowstone was set aside as the country's first national park. Wolves had been naturally present when the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act was passed. The act said that the land is, quote, set apart as a pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people. And back in the early 1900s, the people, as the story goes, didn't like wolves.

They were considered to be good and bad animals. I've never quite understood it, but you can easily imagine that, for example, a rattlesnake is a bad animal. A lot of people still think so. Most predators were considered bad because the big beautiful elk with its magnificent antlers or the moose or the delicate little deer. Those were good animals. And then there were the fuzzy little ones that looked like you could put them on your lap like a possum or a raccoon.

Those were good animals. Elk were good. Wolves were bad. There was that centuries-old animus against the wolf as a representation of evil. And so they were killed and killed and killed. Yellowstone's park rangers were given rifles and instructed to kill wolves. Non-rangers were offered bounties for killing them. In Montana, in 1907, the government would pay you $10 per wolf. This wasn't just happening in Yellowstone. In 1907 alone, 1,800 wolves were killed in national forests and parks across the country.

According to the National Park Service, by the mid-1900s, wolves had been almost entirely eliminated from the 48 states. The impact to the ecosystem was immediate. Thomas McNamee says that in Yellowstone, the elk population exploded. The vegetation they needed to survive couldn't keep up. And so you were having starving elk, and vegetation beat down and beat down. The grasses beat to pieces. And in 1947, the famous naturalist Aldo Leopold recognized that the Yellowstone ecosystem was missing its keystone predator, and he began to write and talk about the need for restoration of the Yellowstone wolf.

Aldo Leopold wrote, I myself cooperated in the extermination of the wolf, because I then believed it was a benefit. I do not propose to repeat my error. Over the next few decades, the discussion of bringing wolves back to Yellowstone went through a lot of twists and turns. In 1973, the Endangered Species Act was passed, and the following year, gray wolves were listed as endangered. The Endangered Species Act mandated that gray wolves be restored to their native habitats, including Yellowstone.

Well, of course, Yellowstone is surrounded by ranch lands, and the ranchers went bananas. All they could picture was wolves roaring into their herds and laying waste to their living, even though it had been shown in other parts of the world that wolves greatly prefer wild prey and really like to stay away from people. They just didn't believe that. The battle between ranchers and conservationists was incredibly heated. There were countless hearings.

More than 700 people testified, and 160,000 written comments were submitted. In the end, the conservationists won. Wolves would be brought back to Yellowstone. In 1995, 14 wolves were trapped in Alberta, Canada, and transported by plane. They were initially placed in large outdoor acclimation pens. Here's wildlife biologist Joe Fontaine. I've been a wildlife biologist for the federal government for 33 years.

And 18 of those years I spent as a deputy wolf recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. When the wolves were first brought to Yellowstone and were in their acclimation pens, weren't there armed guards? Oh yeah, there were guards that were stationed in different places. They were in what they call hides where they could get in and not be seen. And because the thought was that there might be somebody crazy enough to go in and try to kill the wolves while they were in the pen. And, you know, people had access to the park. People, you know, didn't care. That was just people driving through or whatever.

But you never know what somebody's going to do. And so there was a lot of temerity about what the heck to do with that. So we had law enforcement guys up there all the time. Why was there such a great fear? Well, during a lot of the public meetings, we would get people saying, we're going to kill every one of them. We're going to do them all in. We'll poison them. There was a real rhetoric from the anti-wolf people that was coming out that the only wolf is a dead wolf and I'll shoot everyone. And then the shoot, shovel, and shut up mentality, if you will. And so being that this was something new and

different that had never, ever been done before, you don't want to take chances. You want to make sure that everything is safe and ready to go. People have very strong feelings about wolves. This is true. That's kind of an understatement, actually. The wolves are unique in the fact that they travel as, they travel as a pack, a family unit, aunts and uncles. They take care of each other very well. They're very good parents. They're actually out there to do a job, which they become, in my mind, like shepherds of the flocks that are out there, whether it be elk or deer, moose, whatever. And their job is solely as a predator

to remove part of the animal population that's out there so that what they feed on is more abundant because the more animals you have, the more it's grazed down. It affects everything in that ecosystem. So even though wolves may kill an elk, there are a lot of things that come in and feed on the carcass that are all intertwined with the connection of that one dead elk. And when you don't have that, it's like there's a brick wall there, but it's missing a key brick. And so they

are very much part of our world and they need to be out there. Joe Fontaine and his colleagues hoped that the wolves brought from Canada would stay in the park, stay safe from people, and acclimate, so Yellowstone could slowly be repopulated to its natural state. The fear was that because wolves have a homing instinct, they would just head north, back to Alberta, which appeared to be exactly what 9 and 10 were trying to do when 10's tracking collar began to emit the mortality signal.

Federal agents and local law enforcement searched for Wolf 10 until almost midnight. When they lost 10's signal, they called it a night and went home. Very early the next morning, everyone convened again to continue the search, on foot, by car, and by airplane. They were able to track Wolf 9 from the air and see that she was staying in the same place.

Everyone assumed that she had dug a den to prepare to give birth. Wolf 10's mortality signal was going in and out, and they tracked it to a valley called Bear Creek. They communicated this to a team searching on the ground, and they were able to tune into a very strong signal near an abandoned coal mine. They realized the signal was coming from a culvert, one of those big drain pipes, and they could see footprints around the culvert.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Special Agent Tim Eicher put on waders and started feeling around below the surface of the water. And comes out on the other side with the collar, and it's been unbolted. Now that's something a wolf couldn't do, so they know that Tim didn't just die of natural causes. Somebody unbolted his collar. The Fish and Wildlife Service put up a $1,000 reward for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person who killed Wolf 10. Other wildlife groups contributed, bringing the total reward to $13,000.

Tim Eicher thought such a big reward would make a terrible situation a lot worse. It's too much money, he said. Any jury here is going to know people lie for $13,000. We'll be right back. The effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulties 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.

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Park rangers, biologists, special agents, and local law enforcement were all working together to investigate the killing of Wolf 10. But they also knew that Wolf 9 was still somewhere outside the park, having just given birth or about to. Without her mate, she and the pups would be in a lot of danger. A mother wolf can't leave her pups to go hunt. They'd freeze to death. And without hunting, she can't produce milk,

and they'd starve to death. Joe Fontaine says they typically don't micromanage the animals, but this seemed like a case where they'd need to make an exception and help Wolf Nine. And so we located him up above, and so I spent my time picking up roadkill and feeding, leaving them there so that she could, on this little fire road, so that she could feed her pups off of the roadkill, which is what she was doing. He watched over Wolf Nine from airplanes and from the ground. He said he would sit in the Super 8 motel and pick up her signal

so he knew everything was going all right. After several weeks, he and his colleagues decided that the safest thing was to pick her up with her pups and bring them back to Yellowstone. And so my job was to go in and find the den. And so I was left up by the geological station up there and started walking down. And I walked down the side of the mountain. I was, you know, I'm a hunter.

And I was very, very painstakingly going down. And I could hear a little bit of a noise. And I was very, very painstakingly going down. And I could hear a little bit of a noise. And I was walking really soft. And I even took all the antenna and everything off the radio receiver because she was so close. And then I heard some noises. And it sounded like some whimpering. And I took one more step. And then I saw the wolf.

She just bolted out of there. And I thought, damn. But I went over there to see exactly where the den was. And she never dug a den. She scooped out kind of a basin below the spruce tree. And they were pups underneath that spruce tree, boughs and everything. And so I raised the bough, I could see them and I counted them

and I better count again and I counted all of them. And then I let the bough back down again and then I got the hell out of there because I didn't want to spook her. And so we went back up, got up on the fire road and left it and reported what we had. Eight healthy wolf pups, an unusually large litter. They set a trap for nine and then collected her pups from the den and transported them back to the park.

Nine was underweight, and they gave her penicillin and vitamin injections. The family was put back in a wolf acclimation pen to stay only until the pups got a little bit older and stronger. Meanwhile, there was a lot of pressure on the law enforcement officers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to find Wolf 10's killer and close the case. Because there was so much reward money on the table, tips were pouring in,

but nothing was panning out as credible. Special Agent Tim Eicher had spoken with a man who lived near the culvert where Wolf 10's collar was found. The man's name was Dusty Steinmazel, and he said that he hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary or seen another person around except for his neighbor. But when Tim Eicher went to see that neighbor, he got a different story.

The neighbor said he'd seen Dusty Steinmeisel driving around with someone, a man named Chad McKittrick. Tim Eicher thought it was odd that Dusty Steinmeisel would leave that out. And so he sort of pokes around in the bars and tries to see if there are rumors. And he doesn't get much. He's kind of thinking that Dusty Steinmeisel is going to call him on the phone. But he doesn't. And so he finally calls this guy named Leo Grasshopper Suezo,

who's an expert interrogator for the Fish and Wildlife Service out of Denver. And Grasshopper flies up to Red Lodge, and they go pay a call on Dusty. And they really grill him. Were you up here with Chad McKittrick? And they say, we know who killed that wolf, Dusty. They don't, but they tell him that they do. Tim says to Dusty, listen, once you decide that you want to tell the true story, you call me. And then they leave.

You know, there was only one his mind that it was Dusty, he just had to wait and work his way. And, you know, another policeman might have used high-pressure tactics and tried to break him down, tough guy kind of thing. You know, we're going to keep you up all night until you break type of deal. And Tim is just a take it easy kind of guy. Leans back in his chair, puts his cowboy boots up on the desk and says, well, I think Dusty's going to call me. Three days later, Dusty Steinmazel did call Tim Eicher. He said he was ready to talk and that he'd seen everything. Dusty Stein Maisel said it all started when his friend, 41-year-old Chad McKittrick, got his truck stuck in the mud and asked Dusty to help him get it out.

And so they go up there and they try to get the truck out and then it gets dark and they can't. So Dusty drives Chad to his house, and they say they're going to get together in the morning, try again. They go back in the morning, drink a few beers. It's early morning, they're drinking beer. And so they haul, and they've got Dusty's truck, and they're trying to get the truck out of the mud. And Dusty says, hey, look up there.

There's something on the ridge. And Chad says, that's a wolf, Dusty. I'm going to shoot it. And he jumps out of the truck, shoulders his rifle, takes aim, blam. Ten falls to the ground, shot through the lungs, dead. They go up to the wolf, and they see he's wearing a radio collar. This is National Park Service. And Dusty's totally freaked out.

And Chad says, hey, man, let's take this thing down and hang it up and skin it. And also, I want the head. So they hang it up, drag it down the mountain and hang it up with some string. And Dusty unbolts the radio collar. And so as they head back down the mountain, there's a little creek there with a culvert under the road. And Dusty throws the radio collar in there, and they head for Chad's with the skin and the skull. Dusty wrote all of this out on a signed affidavit for Special Agent Tim Eicher, and the next morning, Tim Eicher went to federal court in Billings

and got a search warrant for Chad McKittrick's house. And so they assembled this SWAT team, Fish and Wildlife Service investigators, and they swarm over Chad's house. We'll be right back. Thank you. 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. Are you looking to eat healthier, but you still find yourself occasionally rebounding with junk food and empty calories? You don't need to wait for the new year to start fresh. New year, new me. How about same year, new me? You just need a different approach. According to Noom, losing

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Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com. Tim Eicher, along with two other fish and wildlife special agents, met the sheriff of Carbon County at the foot of Chad McKittrick's road. Chad McKittrick greeted them. He and Tim Eicher went for a walk while officers searched the house. Chad McKittrick admitted to Tim Eicher that he had shot an animal. An animal that he believed was a feral dog. He didn't deny it.

The officers searching his home found a Ruger M77 rifle under the couch and three rounds of ammunition In his garage, they found Ten's head and pelt Chad McKittrick was arrested and charged with the killing of Wolf Ten His crimes were violating the Endangered Species Act and the Lacey Act, which prohibits transporting wildlife that's been obtained illegally. Chad McKittrick was released without bail. His trial wouldn't begin for five months.

He didn't appear to be embarrassed or sorry in any way. On the 4th of July, he showed up to the town's parade wearing a T-shirt that said Northern Rockies Wolf Reduction Project. To some of his fellow Red Lodge residents, he was a hero. One rancher told CBS News that McKittrick should be given a medal. In October of 1995, Chad McKittrick's trial began in Billings. And Dusty is the star witness, and he's been given immunity.

Dusty Steinmazel testified that Chad McKittrick knew exactly what he was doing when he shot Wolf 10. He said that he tried to talk Chad out of it by saying that it could be somebody's dog. According to Dusty, Chad replied, that's a wolf, Dusty. I'm going to shoot it. Chad McKittrick's attorney argued the opposite, that Chad believed he was shooting a wild dog. His attorney said the shooting was admittedly stupid,

but not criminal. In Montana, it's pretty well considered just what you do, that you don't shoot an animal if you don't know what it is. You know, if you're elk hunting, you want to be sure it's an elk before you shoot. You don't shoot a cow and then say, oh, I thought it was an elk. And so it takes the jury a very short time to convict Chad. One of the jurors said afterward, hunting ethics was the key. We all agreed you must know your target before you pull the trigger. Joe Fontaine says he wasn't surprised by the verdict.

It was totally a criminal act and it's the same thing with people that drive around and shoot deer and elk and leave them lay. Why? Why do I do people do those things? I don't know. But to me,

the folks that I know that hunt and fish think it's a tragedy. And it is just nothing but a crime. We reached Chad McKittrick by phone, and he said he doesn't talk about this anymore. He was sentenced to three months in jail, three months in a halfway house, and also ordered to pay the U.S. government $10,000 in restitution for the costs associated with finding and recovering Wolf 10's body. He appealed his conviction and lost. But the Department of Justice issued a memo in 1999 announcing something called the McKittrick

policy. The McKittrick policy said that the government would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone knew exactly what kind of animal they were intending to harm, and that animal's endangered species status. In other words, if someone claimed mistaken identity, like Chad McKittrick did with a wild dog, the government couldn't prosecute. This was on the books for almost two decades. In 2017, environmental groups sued the Department of Justice,

and the policy was thrown out. The judge wrote, The government does not need to prove the defendant knew that killing an endangered or threatened species was illegal. The responsibility for any mistake falls on the defendant.

As for the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction project, although they lost Wolf 10, the project has been an unbelievable success. And now, of course, the Yellowstone ecosystem has been fundamentally changed in many ways because the Keystone predator has been restored. The vegetation has been changed.

The distribution of elk has been changed. The beavers are returning because the willows along the riverbanks that had been mowed down by very large numbers of elk have started to recover. Aspen have started to grow back in groves that had been mowed down by so many elk. And in those aspens, there are more songbirds nesting. It was really a triumph. The return of the wolves restored balance to the park. As Aldo Leopold writes,

all ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise, that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts, soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively, the land. As of January 2023, there are at least 108 wolves in the park in 10 packs, among them the descendants of Wolf 9 and Wolf 10.

What happened to 9 and to her pups is a whole other story, a very different kind of story, a love story with a happy ending. We think that at one point he came around and turned in the ravine and saw something that he had never seen before in his life. He saw the first two pups that had come out of the den in the process of being released. And for him, every day of his life, he was always the smallest wolf, and so he had no conception

that there were wolves out there that were smaller than he was. So he ran over and befriended those pups. So he played with them, shared some food, and whether he realized it or not, he was being watched by the mother wolf. For that story, check out episode 72 of This Is Love. There's a link in the show notes. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me.

Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Roberson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our technical director is Rob Byers, engineering by Russ Henry. 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 and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. You can read more about Wolf 10 in Thomas McNamee's book, The Killing of Wolf Number 10. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation.

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