Park Predators - The Hire

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

In 2012 the disappearance of a young man working in the trucking and oil industry of North Dakota raised alarm for citizens...but the saga of events and murder-for-hire plots that followed left everyone in this portion of the badlands baffled and bewildered. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit parkpredators.com  Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter: @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck

Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. The story I'm going to share with you today is a wild one. It's not about one murder or even two murders. It's about a man who planned multiple murders in his quest for power and money. His attempt to seize the beauty of the American Northwest for his own gain left a blood trail from Washington State to North Dakota that baffled local state and federal authorities. The crimes I'll cover in this episode all revolve

around one main suspect and don't actually take place within the boundary of a national park, but the remains of at least one victim in this story are believed to reside very close to, if not directly on, federal parkland, the northern boundary of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, to be exact. This area of the United States is rugged, and according to the National Park Service, includes some grassland and rock formation landscapes that are known as the Badlands. Back in 1883, Teddy Roosevelt came to this area in North Dakota to hunt bison and big game. The adventures he had in this environment helped him grow an appreciation for nature

and realize how important the conservation of federal land is, thus the reason the park was named after him. But North Dakota is not one of those states you typically think about when you're reciting all 50 states. It might even be one that you forgot about on that geography test in grade school. But for those of you who've spent any amount of time there, you know it's special. One of the things I think makes it so unique is that it's home to five federally recognized tribal nations and their respective reservation land. According to the

website for the state's Department of Indian Affairs, in total there are 31,329 indigenous Americans living in North Dakota. Because the literal ground these nations control is so rich in resources, that leads to big politics and big greed colliding in a really nasty way. In 2012, a saga of events dealing directly with those two things and one man's insatiable desire for power merged and left a body count in this section of the Badlands that no one ever saw coming. This is Park Predators. On the evening of Sunday, December 15, 2013, ten days before Christmas, 63-year-old Doug Carlisle and his wife Alberta had just returned home from a church service in Spokane, Washington. The couple was looking forward to a quiet evening together,

finishing up their last-minute holiday decorating, when the unthinkable happened. Around 7 o'clock, while Alberta was climbing the stairs to their second-floor bedroom, she heard a commotion and hushed voices talking in the kitchen. When she walked back down the staircase to see what was going on, she couldn't believe her eyes. There, struggling with her husband in the middle of their kitchen, was a man dressed in all black, wearing a mask, holding a gun. Before she could even process what was going on, Alberta heard a bunch of gunshots and in a panic,

ran upstairs with her phone in hand and hid in a closet. She immediately dialed 911. While the receiver was still up against her ear, she heard what sounded like someone leaving the house quickly. Then there was just silence. When first responders and Spokane Police Department officers arrived, they found Doug dead on the couple's kitchen floor and a completely

distraught Alberta inside the house. According to Dateline, the two lead detectives on the case were Brian Sesnick and Mark Burbridge. When they arrived, they examined Doug's body lying in a large pool of blood and quickly determined that he'd been shot at least seven times. There were spent shell casings scattered all around him and Christmas music still playing throughout the Carlisle's home. Something that stood out right away about the scene was that it appeared the attacker's only motivation

had been to murder Doug. No valuables were taken during the shooting and the rest of the house appeared to be untouched. Even Doug's cell phone and wallet were still on him. And not to mention, Alberta had been completely unharmed upstairs. When Detective Burbridge questioned her about what she'd seen and heard, he started to wonder if it was possible she was involved,

mostly because her story of what had happened seemed so random and hard to believe. But Alberta told the detectives that while she'd been in another room heading up the staircase, she'd heard her husband's voice yell loudly from the kitchen, it's okay, it's okay, back off, back off. And when she'd gone to check things out, she'd seen a masked man wearing all black shoot Doug several times. But the detectives' first thought was that it was really strange the unknown intruder had killed Doug in such a brutal way,

but left Alberta alive as a witness. They didn't completely doubt her story, but they didn't feel super great about it either. Until they had more to prove that theory though, they continued to work the case like every other murder investigation, follow the evidence. A big clue that emerged came from Alberta

and people living in their neighborhood. According to Dateline's piece on this, Alberta said that when she and Doug had left for church a few hours before the murder, between 5 and 5.30, they'd noticed a white van parked by a curb near their house that they'd never seen before. And they weren't the only people that noticed it. A person living across the street from the Carlisles told investigators that they'd also seen the same van around five o'clock that evening. And the van had made this neighbor so

suspicious that they'd actually called 911 about a half hour after seeing it. Spokane police checked their records and they saw they'd received that call. But up until Doug was murdered, no one had put two and two together that the van might be related to the homicide in some way. Fortunately for police, another neighbor had a video camera mounted on his house that captured the mysterious white van idling near the curb just two hours before the murder. The video didn't show anyone getting in or out of the van. It was just parked for a while and then eventually moved around the block a few times. While some detectives were looking at that surveillance video,

others worked with scent dogs and crime scene techs in and around the Carlisle's house. The dogs picked up a scent that they'd tracked out of the home's back door, through an open gate of a fence behind the house, and into a puddle of water that was shallow enough to have a bunch of mud in it. Along that path, investigators found a large leather welding glove and a perfect imprint of a shoe in some of that mud. Tex collected the glove and swabbed it for DNA and made an impression of the shoe print.

Just beyond where that stuff was found, police dogs tracked what was believed to be the suspect's scent from the house to a wooded area and then to a nearby street. But then it just abruptly ended. Lucky for investigators, there was an elementary school directly across from where the scent ended, so authorities strongly suspected their killer had taken the pathway from the Carlisle's home on foot and then gotten into a vehicle, and hopefully the cameras from the school would show that. The detectives quickly got in touch with the school's administrators

and retrieved the security camera footage that showed the area they believed the perpetrator had to have walked through. And sure enough, when detectives reviewed those tapes, they saw the figure of a tall, muscular man wearing all black emerge from the wooded area they'd been searching and run in the direction of a nearby road that was out of view of the camera. The video footage wasn't super clear because it was from a distance, but what you could see plain as day was that this person in all black had jogged away from the exact area police believed Doug

Carlisle's killer had trampled through and left evidence behind. With the footage in hand, authorities quickly mobilized and brought in more detectives to help Brian Sesnick and Mark Burbridge work the investigation. The more and more police studied the grainy surveillance video from the school, the less and less likely they felt Alberta Carlisle could have been involved. From speaking with Alberta so far, she seemed genuinely distraught over her husband's murder

and had given great details to the authorities about what she'd witnessed. Their thought was, if she was lying and in on some murder-for-hire plot, it didn't make sense that she was being so cooperative and providing such good information. Eventually, police focused their investigation more on the man in the video

and less on the likelihood that he was somehow connected to Alberta. Figuring out who he was, though, took time, and the swabs they'd taken from the welding gloves had to be sent off to the crime lab for further analysis. In the meantime, detectives started looking more closely into Doug's life and background. Within a day of the murder, Alberta called all six of her and Doug's grown children and let them know what was going on. All of them were devastated and quickly came to their mother's side to help her cope. This was also advantageous for law enforcement because in order to learn more

about Doug, they needed to speak to his children. Detectives interviewed each of them, trying to piece together the bigger picture of who Doug was. Most importantly, who would want him dead in such a horrific way? What the investigators learned was that Doug owned an excavation business and employed at least two of his adult sons. But it wasn't always sunshine and roses for Doug when it came to financial success. He had a long history of ups and downs in his life when it came to making money. According to his family's interviews with Dateline, before his murder, Doug had filed for bankruptcy twice, had ongoing issues with the IRS, and had operated several failed businesses, as well as had business relationships deteriorate amidst accusations from partners that Doug

was not an honest man in all areas of business. The Carlyles rejected those rumors, though, and supported their dad no matter what. They told Dateline that right before his murder, Doug was doing the best he'd ever done in business. When authorities processed the inside of his office, they found a lot of proof that he was in fact doing all right when it came to the projects he'd been working on and the business dealings he was involved in. Detectives found paperwork detailing that Doug's net worth was anywhere from $6 to $12 million. Parked in the couple's driveway was Alberta's new Mercedes,

and Doug had a brand new pickup truck. On top of that, authorities had found documents in his safe that were written in Arabic that they determined hinted to an upcoming or ongoing lucrative business deal with multiple partners overseas. They also found some paperwork that related to Doug's involvement in the oil industry in North Dakota. The papers had several names written on them of men and women Doug had promised return on investments to, but not like small returns, extremely large returns on investments. According to Dateline's reporting, one document stated that Doug had promised his investors 100% return within 90 days, which to police detectives felt like a very over-the-top and

risky promise. According to multiple news reports, in early 2013, Doug had seen the boom that was happening with oil fracking in North Dakota and had decided to round up some investors to see if they could capitalize on an extraction business together. Doug and his partners took out a $2 million lease on 640 acres of land on the Fort Berthold Native American Reservation in western North Dakota. Doug had been the go-to man for business owners in the trucking and drilling industry who were going to make the operation happen. But the endeavor went bad pretty quickly, and eventually police determined that Doug had made a lot of enemies when it came to his investors. He was never able to give them back that 100% return on their investment within 90 days. So right away, anyone he owed money to became potential suspects,

and the investigation into his murder got a lot bigger. Ten individuals stood out right off the bat to the authorities as potentially ripe suspects. Most of these people lived in Washington state and could have had means and opportunity to commit the crime. It took a couple of weeks, but eventually, one by one, the detectives cleared a lot of those folks. And what came to the surface were two former business partners who really caught the investigators' attention. These two people were a young couple who'd poured a lot of money into Doug's oil fracking venture and admitted

to being pretty angry with the 63-year-old for not making good on his promises. Spokane police identified these two people who may have had an axe to grind with Doug as James Henriksen and his wife Sarah. In addition to potentially having bad blood with Doug, it also didn't help James' cause that he had a felony criminal record for several violent offenses like burglary, theft, assault, and other financial crimes. He and his wife had built a budding business empire in North Dakota with their trucking company, Blackstone Trucking. And according to Dateline, Doug Carlisle had initially

invested in Blackstone before he even really got interested in leasing the oil field and rounding up investors in that deal. It didn't take the authorities long to learn that before Doug's murder, the relationship between James and Doug had soured, mostly over who would take control of the oil lease operation. James said he felt he had the right to run it, but Doug was not a fan of that happening. By the time their relationship ended completely, Doug had expressed being fearful of James, and according to multiple news reports on this case, one of Doug's sons said that on one occasion, James had actually

shown up at Doug's office and demanded he be paid $400,000. During this incident, James reportedly told Doug that if payment wasn't made, quote, something bad could happen to him and his family, end quote. It was after that encounter and threat that Doug repeatedly told his sons that if something happened to him, everyone should first suspect James. Several sources for this story included an interview bite from one of Doug's sons that said Doug said, quote, if I disappear or wake up with bullets in my back, promise me you will let everyone know that James Henriksen did it.

End quote. Now, clearly that's a pretty damning statement against James, and police had to take it into consideration. By the end of December 2013, detectives had completely cleared Alberta, Doug's wife, and were more interested in exploring James and Doug's history as much as they could. So within days of Doug's murder, Spokane police detectives spoke with James over the phone, and he denied having anything to do with the crime and provided a pretty solid alibi. He was more than 700 miles away from Spokane in Watford City, North Dakota, when Doug was murdered.

Investigators were able to verify James' alibi after checking his cell phone records. But be that as it may, just because James was so far away physically didn't necessarily mean that he was not behind what happened to Doug. In fact, because authorities were growing more and more sure that Doug's death was a result of a murder for hire scenario, James having an alibi really didn't mean a whole lot to them. By Christmas Day, authorities kept pushing forward and chasing down leads. Spokane police assigned 20 investigators to the case and sent them all in different directions. Some of them focused on the murder-for-hire angle.

Others kept digging into Doug's finances and business dealings. A few more focused exclusively on James Henriksen. And the rest dedicated all of their time to tracking down the mysterious white van that had been parked in the Carlisle's neighborhood on the night of the murder. And after two weeks of dogged searching, the detectives were able to pin down the specifics of that van. They learned it was a certain make and model that had features on it designed for workers in certain trades, like welding or construction waste removal. They pulled information for all of the vans like that registered in the state of Washington, and narrowed down their pool of potential vehicles to just 75 individual vans that fit the description of the one seen on the video.

But right as the authorities were closing in on identifying the potential owner, a bizarre report showed up in their email inboxes. The message was a flyer that someone had made and sent to thousands of people, including the police. The flyer announced that people should be cautious of James Henriksen and his wife and accused them both of being frauds. The bulletin advertised that physical copies of the message would go up in businesses and storefronts all around Watford City, North Dakota and Williston, North Dakota. Now, at first, when the Washington investigators saw this flyer, they figured it was made by a former Blackstone trucking employee who was just upset with James and his wife over

being fired or something. But there was one thing at the bottom of the message that stood out to Spokane detectives. A few sentences claimed that a young man who'd been a former employee of James's had disappeared under mysterious circumstances in February 2012, more than a year before Doug Carlisle's murder. That former employee's name was Christopher Clark, who everyone just called KC. This was the first time Spokane investigators had read or heard anything about a man in James' company named KC going missing. The flyer in their email inboxes got them so curious that they started looking into KC's disappearance more,

and drove all the way to North Dakota to do some digging. When they arrived, what they found was an entirely new mystery waiting for them that would throw a big curveball into the Doug Carlisle murder case that they never saw coming. When Spokane police detectives arrived in North Dakota, they connected with the Williston Police Department, which was the lead agency in charge of investigating the disappearance of 29-year-old Casey Clark, a man who'd worked as an operations manager for Blackstone Trucking. Casey had not been heard from or seen since the morning of February 22, 2012. February 22, 2012. At the time of his disappearance, Casey had worked for Blackstone Trucking for just a few months in late 2011 and early 2012, before deciding to transfer to a different company called Running Horse Trucking. According to Jenna Ebersol's reporting, red flags initially went up

regarding Casey's whereabouts when a landlord he'd been paying rent to at a former address in Texas had noticed that rent checks had stopped coming. Around that same time, Casey's roommates at a house he was renting in Newtown, North Dakota, just a few miles from Blackstone Trucking's headquarters, had also noticed the 29-year-old just stopped paying rent and coming home. When local authorities called Casey's mother, Jill Williams, who lived in Washington State where Casey was originally from, she told them that in October of 2011, Casey had left Texas to work for James Henriksen. She said that prior to that, her son had gotten to know James at a

motorcycle racing event in Washington State. But within just a few short months of taking the job with Blackstone, Jill said Casey had called back home and complained that the gig wasn't really working out. He'd grown tired of working for James and felt he would be better off moving on to another trucking company. Williston police detectives had learned from speaking with Casey's friends that right when he'd made the decision to leave Blackstone behind, he'd started to make odd statements about being fearful of his boss. At first, Casey's friends said they didn't really take him seriously, but then when they saw him carrying a loaded Ruger pistol on him at all times, they started to get kind of concerned.

The Williston Herald reported that Casey's buddies said that on more than one occasion, Casey mentioned he was worried something might happen to him and that he felt like he was in danger. According to an episode of American Greed, in the first few days of Williston Police's investigation, they learned from a witness who worked with Casey at Blackstone Trucking that Casey had called him on the morning of February 22nd while Casey was on his way to the trucking headquarters. The two men had decided that they both wanted to leave Blackstone

and join mutual friends that had started running horse trucking. The men agreed that the long hours and demanding schedule at Blackstone weren't worth it and at the time, Casey had two weeks of vacation saved up that he told his co-worker he planned to use. The witness said while on the phone with Casey on February 22nd, Casey had mentioned that he was on his way to drop off his company credit card and final employment paperwork. When police obtained Casey's cell phone records, they determined that that conversation he'd had

with his co-worker was the last cell phone call placed from his device. But even with all that suspicious activity, law enforcement in Williston sort of let Casey's case fall to the back burner. I don't know if they assumed Casey had just left town or what, but based on the research material for this case, reporting about the law enforcement investigation into what happened to him just seemed to fade away after March of 2012. So during those months of radio silence, Casey's family and friends took it upon themselves to search for him, make flyers, and do their own investigation. A segment of American Greed explained that on one occasion, Casey's co-worker returned to Blackstone Trucking and ran into James Hendrickson, the owner. When asked if he'd seen Casey, James replied he hadn't and

assumed Casey had taken off to work for a competing company. According to the Williston Herald, a few months after KC's disappearance in June of 2012, police located the young man's truck on a residential street outside of town. I don't know if they were looking for the truck or had a bolo out on it or if they just stumbled upon it, but either way, it was found by police. When detectives examined the truck, they found it was unlocked and had all the telltale signs of having been rifled through. People who lived on the street it was parked on told police that it had been sitting there abandoned in the same spot for months and never moved. After the truck's discovery,

police and Casey's family upped their reward for information to $10,000 and continued assembling search parties to scour the grasslands around Williston and Newtown. The research material isn't very clear on when this next detail was uncovered, but at some point after Casey's truck was found, authorities got a tip about a pile of burned belongings left at an oil well about 80 miles outside of town. The cops checked it out and found several pile of burned belongings left at an oil well about 80 miles outside of town. The cops checked it out and found several pieces of burned clothing, a money clip, and a boot in a container at the site. They didn't release to the media at the time if they believed these items belonged to KC,

but they did say they took them as potential evidence. Right after that discovery, Williston police got back on the case and called in the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigations to assist. Technically, both agencies were working a missing persons investigation, but they had strong suspicions based on circumstances and now potential physical evidence that something really bad had happened to KC. So they wanted all the help they could to try and figure out what was going on. So, months after he vanished, authorities finally put out a missing persons bulletin

that described KC as a white male with brown hair and brown eyes, who stood 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighed about 140 pounds. The one thing that authorities wanted the public to know that really stood out about KC was the fact that he walked with a slight limp and had scars on his left wrist, torso, and upper back. Those markings had come from pins and plates that doctors had put in him after he survived a nasty motorcycle accident years earlier. Jill Williams, KC's mom, launched a Facebook page for her son, which quickly grew into a main hub of information on community searches and efforts that were underway to find KC.

Unfortunately, the only real information police had to work off of as the summer of 2012 came to a close was the fact that KC had last been seen at the headquarters of Blackstone Trucking. Then nothing. It was like he literally vanished from the face of the earth.

They also had no idea how his truck got to that random street in town. But based on everything investigators had learned about why KC wanted to leave his job at Blackstone Trucking, their next stop was to visit James Henriksen, the young man's boss. Williston police detectives questioned James and even had him come in to take a polygraph, and according to reporting by multiple news outlets, James passed. And the case, as far as Williston PD was concerned, had completely stalled after that, and 2012 dragged on with no updates about what had happened to KC. Some people in town speculated that he'd done what so many oil field workers and truckers do,

which was skip town and try their luck with a new business. But Jill Williams, KC's mom, was unconvinced of this rumor. She felt strongly that her son had been harmed, and his former employer was to blame for it. She took to the Facebook page she created for KC to air her suspicions and grievances about James Henriksen and his wife Sarah. According to reporting by the Grand Fork Herald, in early 2013, things started to get really tense between Jill and James.

The Bismarck Tribune reported that James actually sued Jill for defamation. Court records in Pierce County, Washington state that James claimed Jill's relentless posts online were hurting his business and ruining his name. The newspaper reported that around that same time, James had another lawsuit pending in federal court regarding an anonymous online blogger who'd gone online posing as James. This blogger had started posting photos

of James and his wife alongside claims that the couple, but mostly James, had scammed a ton of people. Probably most disturbing of all were that the anonymous posts also claimed James was directly involved in the disappearance of KC Clark. When James found out about the online activity, he and his lawyers had quickly subpoenaed Google to hand over records and reveal the identity of the anonymous blogger. But before the legal filings made it anywhere in court, the online user who'd been posting about James, as James, took their content down. Unfortunately, by the time Spokane police detectives Brian Sesnick and Mark Burbridge,

who were working the Doug Carlisle murder investigation, showed up to James' home in 2014 to discuss KC's disappearance, James declined to cooperate with them and said they needed to speak to his lawyer. In the end, the Washington detectives' trip to North Dakota seemed to be a big bust, but it wasn't all in vain. Just based on James' behavior and demeanor with them, they left with a growing suspicion that James was somehow connected to everything that had gone on in North Dakota and Washington between February 2012 and December 2013. They just needed the evidence to prove it. In late January of 2014, they got a huge break,

and the linkage they'd been hoping for between James, Doug Carlyle's murder, and Casey's disappearance materialized. According to Dateline, a DNA profile from the swabbed welding glove investigators had found behind Doug Carlyle's house had come back from the lab. When detectives entered it into a national database of convicted felons, they got a match. 50-year-old Timothy Sukow. Some news reports pronounced his last name Sukow. Others say Sukow, but the most common way I heard it was Sukow. Timothy just so happened to be from Spokane, Washington and worked for an asbestos removal company. For his job, he drove a specific model white van that authorities realized matched the description of the same van seen in the surveillance video casing the Carlisles home two hours before Doug's

murder. For several days, detectives watched Timothy and followed him around Spokane taking pictures and comparing his body type to the muscular man wearing all black that they were sure was their hitman. Eventually, they brought him in for an official interview and confronted him about his van, his DNA being on an item of evidence from Doug's murder, and the fact that he matched the description of the killer. Timothy's initial response was that he denied being involved and basically told the cops he'd see them in court. After that, police were able to make their case to a judge,

and they got a search warrant for Timothy's house and van. Inside the van, authorities found a black, full-coverage face mask that only had an opening for the eyes. Think of a ski mask with no mouth hole and like a merged hole for both eyes. Next to the mask, police also found a piece of notebook paper that had a to-do list scribbled down on it. Some of the handwritten entries said things like, quote, practice with pistol and, quote, wheel man. Detectives knew without a doubt Timothy was likely their killer.

All they needed to do was figure out how to get him to confess and tell them who'd put him up to committing cold-blooded murder. When investigators got an additional search warrant and examined Timothy's cell phone records, they found a list of names in his contacts, one of which was James N.D., who they suspected stood for James Henriksen from North Dakota. That was a turning point in the case. Here was the proof they needed to connect the prime suspect in the murder of Doug Carlyle in Spokane to James Henriksen. The puzzle pieces were falling into place. The last big one to click, though, came from Sarah, James' wife.

She told Dateline that after Doug's murder, she began to suspect her husband was possibly involved in both Doug's killing and Casey Clark's disappearance. But she maintained that her suspicions about those two things didn't emerge all at once. Sarah's doubts that her husband was not who he said he was, or at least not as straight-laced as she thought he was, had actually started long before Doug's death, back in October of 2012. Around that time, she learned that James had cheated on her

with the teenage daughter of the landowner who Blackstone Trucking and Doug Carlisle were leasing the oil field acreage from on the Fort Berthold Reservation. That landlord's name was Tex Hill, and he pretty much held power over everyone's heads when it came to land development and oil fracking in North Dakota.

Tex was a major political player in that region and a wealthy developer who owned a ton of land that was rich for mining oil. He was also the chairman of the three affiliated tribes on the Fort Berthold Reservation. Tex wielded a lot of money, power, and influence, and according to multiple news reports, James had impregnated his 19-year-old daughter sometime in 2011. When Tex found out about the baby and that affair, his personal and professional relationship with James went south fast, and essentially, Tex made it clear to James that he was not going to be making any money off his

oil field land. So, with all that drama coming to a head in the fall of 2013, police theorized that James had gotten desperate and that's why he'd been so aggressive with Doug to gain control over the oil leasing operation. Sarah told Dateline that around that same time, a lot of Blackstone's successful facade had also started crumbling too. The couple didn't know it, but an investigator from the Department of Homeland Security named Derek Trudall had started looking into the couple's finances and business dealings and had discovered that they were doing

a lot of fishy things, mostly fraud and money laundering to keep Blackstone trucking operations afloat. This Homeland Security investigator had also been paying close attention to Williston PD's ongoing investigation into the disappearance of Casey Clark. By January of 2014, when Timothy Sukau was in custody and Spokane police made the link between him and James, Derek Trudeau hooked up with the local agencies

and things really started to kick into high gear. For one, the case got picked up by the FBI, and the Homeland Security investigator compared his information to what Spokane PD's investigators had gathered. This included Timothy's phone records, and they discovered that not only did Timothy's phone link him to James and had been in the vicinity of the Carlisle home in December 2013, the device had also placed calls in Williston, North Dakota the day before and on the day KC Clark had vanished. It wasn't a smoking gun, but it did bring investigators one step closer to tightening the net around James. Unfortunately, by the time all these agencies connected and got on the same page,

James was on the run, or at least not living at the home he shared with his wife in Watford City, North Dakota. Sarah had filed for divorce from him and began cooperating with federal authorities. During an interview in early 2014, detectives revealed to her that James had taken out a hit on her and planned to have her killed. Sarah was shocked by this, but it only fueled her more to cooperate with investigators. She alerted them whenever James would try and harass her or her family, and eventually agreed to let authorities search her and James' former residence. According to reporting by the Grand Forks Herald, on January 14th, 2014, almost two

years after Casey's disappearance and just months after Doug Carlisle's murder, the FBI raided James' house and found a safe that contained a bunch of ammunition and seven guns, including pistols, shotguns, and rifles that belonged to him. Like I said earlier, the 34-year-old had a lot of previous felonies on his record, so it was illegal for him to possess those firearms. On January 18, 2014, four days after the raid, officials tracked James down to an apartment in a nearby town and arrested him for the weapons charges. Investigators and prosecutors' suspicions at that point were that James was definitely connected to Doug Carlisle's murder via Timothy Sukow. The motive, means, and opportunity were there,

considering the fact that James and Doug had been previous business partners who'd had a falling out. What was less clear to everyone was why James would have wanted to put an end to Casey Clark. While federal agents had been inside James' house collecting the guns he wasn't supposed to have, they'd also found and seized lots of financial and medical records they hoped would provide even more linkage between all the characters involved in what they considered a massive murder-for-hire plot. During the raid, police had housed Sarah in protective custody to ensure James couldn't get to her and any potential hitman he'd hired to kill her would be thwarted. The U.S. magistrate told James during his arraignment for the gun charges that the felon in possession of a firearm charge was solely intended to keep him in custody

while a grand jury weighed evidence against him on additional charges, which would include conspiracy to commit murder. While he waited out the grand jury's decision, James agreed to talk to investigators about Doug Carlisle's murder. He denied any direct involvement and instead adamantly insisted that drug cartels from outside of North Dakota had set him up to take the fall and that he was just a victim of greater criminals

hiring out a hit on Doug. Federal agents didn't buy a word James said. They kept him in custody and built a strong circumstantial case against him related to not only Doug's murder, but also whatever had happened to K.C. Clark. The problem was, neither case was strong enough to take to trial. For one thing, they didn't have K.C.'s body, and technically, James had not been the person to pull the trigger in Doug's murder. Investigators needed more hard evidence or a confession to keep the momentum of the case going, and thankfully, the latter is exactly what they got.

A full confession from a hitman whose conscience had been weighing on him. man whose conscience had been weighing on him. Despite repeated denials and being uncooperative early on with Spokane, Washington police detectives, Timothy Sukau had a change of heart and decided to come clean. In a series of interviews with federal investigators, he confessed to being the trigger man in Doug Carlisle's murder and bludgeoning Casey Clark to death in a garage bay at Blackstone Trucking. He said he'd done both crimes after being hired by James Henriksen. He agreed to plead guilty to his offenses and become a star witness for federal prosecutors in exchange for leniency when it came to his sentencing. Timothy's confession, combined with hundreds of documents published in court filings in the spring of 2014, only made the case against James stronger and stronger.

Mike Nowatzki reported that records from the homicide investigation into Doug's murder showed that at one point, James had expressed interest in hiring contract killings on multiple men in North Dakota, including Tex Hill, the man whose daughter James had impregnated. In September 2014, the Grand Forks Herald reported that a federal grand jury formally indicted James for a slew of crimes, which included charges for murder for hire and solicitation for murder in the deaths of Doug Carlisle and Casey Clark. The indictment detailed how prosecutors believed James had made plans to hire hitmen to kill even more business associates of his, but thankfully those murders had not happened. After he was

indicted, James faced the death penalty and was flown out of North Dakota back to Washington State to face trial in federal court there for his new charges. Right after the indictment was announced, KC's mom, Jill Williams, posted on Facebook, writing, quote, We had expected the worst for some time now, and I'm devastated to have to share that our KC was brutally murdered. We cannot share all of the details at this time so as not to compromise the case, end quote. When it came time to go to trial, the government's case revolved around Timothy Sukow's testimony that he'd not only murdered both victims, but he did so at the behest of James in exchange for money.

According to Dateline, after learning Timothy was going to testify against him, James didn't behave while awaiting trial. He attempted on more than one occasion to break out of jail by hiring people to attack the prison transport vans or shoot the drivers while they were in transit. At one point, he and one of his cellmates tied bedsheets together and busted out their cell window in an attempt to rappel down, but their efforts failed. Tex Hall's reaction to James's arrest and rumors of allegations that

he himself was somehow involved with the unsavory people who'd been caught up in the murder-for-hire plot was denial. Tex told reporters that he did not affiliate with gangs or any organized criminal activity. He said he was working fully with federal investigators and had nothing to hide. He said he wanted to, quote, make sure justice is swiftly and fully served in this case and that the victim's families see the justice they deserve, end quote. The Associated Press reported that in February of 2015, the government had decided not to seek the death penalty against any defendants, including James. The article also reported that a few months after that, in September, James opted to take a plea deal

in exchange for a 40-year prison sentence. The prosecution would only agree to the deal, though, if James promised to lead authorities to Casey Clark's remains. That deal stayed on the table for about two months, but eventually James reverted back to a not guilty plea and the case continued to trial. By the time it got in front of a jury in January 2016, prosecutors felt confident

in their arguments, but there was just one small problem. Well, actually two. They had still not found K.C. Clark's body and Timothy Sukow was reaching his mental breaking point. According to the lead prosecutor on the case, the weight of what Timothy had done and the pressure he knew he'd be under while testifying as the government's star witness had sent him into a bit of a mental health crisis. Two days before he was scheduled to testify in court, prosecutors had to go to Timothy in prison and make sure he would be mentally capable to take the stand. According to Dateline's reporting, Timothy had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder,

and for several days leading up to the trial, he'd spent hours lying on his prison cell floor, curled up in the fetal position. He was receiving medication in order for him to be able to testify, but things were far from ideal. Thankfully, when it was time for him to take the stand, though, he came through. Timothy told jurors that in January of 2012,

a guy he worked with at the asbestos removal company had come to him with an offer from James Henriksen. This middleman was one of five other men who had also struck guilty pleas with federal prosecutors and had spilled their stories to the government in exchange for leniency. Timothy said the middleman explained that James wanted one of his employees to be beaten up for having the audacity to leave Blackstone trucking for another company. Timothy said he was told the guy's name was KC Clark and he'd been shown a picture of what he looked like. Timothy agreed to beat up Casey,

but right before it was supposed to go down, James had changed his mind and said he actually wanted Timothy to kill the young man instead of just rough him up. During his testimony, Timothy identified Casey as the employee James had ordered him to kill. He detailed how Casey had arrived at Blackstone Trucking around mid-morning on February 22nd and went into the office to drop off his company credit card and notify staff that he was going to use his two weeks of vacation. As Casey was leaving, Timothy said James lured the young man over to a motorcycle in one of the garage bays under the false pretense that he wanted to show Casey something cool. Timothy told the court that when KC was next to the bike,

he jumped out from behind a door with a heavy truck jack and hit him over the head with it. He said KC didn't die right away though and attempted to stumble, but Timothy confessed to hitting him at least four more times with the jack, at which point it became clear KC was dead. Timothy said that as KC laid in a pool of blood, James remarked that he wasn't concerned about the body, he just wanted all of the blood off of his shop floor. A few minutes after the murder, Timothy said he and James had wrapped KC's body in a black garbage bag and locked his remains in one of the shop's restrooms. Not long after that,

they decided to transport the body in a large cardboard box using another employee's pickup truck. Timothy, the other employee, and James drove Casey's truck in the vehicle the body was in to buy shovels. Eventually, Timothy said he and the other employee drove Casey's truck into Williston and ditched it on the residential street. Then they drove about 20 miles into the grasslands to a random spot near Theodore Roosevelt National Park and buried Casey's body. Before putting him in the ground, they undressed him and packed his clothing and boots back into the garbage bag his body had been in. Timothy testified that James had offered to pay him $20,000 for the murder, and after

getting the cash, he'd taken the bloody clothes and burned them in a container in a random oil well. That was the evidence Williston authorities had already found years earlier that had been unsure at the time how it related to Casey's case. Despite countless volunteer searches

and authorities even escorting Timothy out to the areas he believed he'd buried Casey's body. No trace of Casey was found. Timothy said the reason he couldn't remember where he'd buried Casey was because everything about that morning was a blur. The landscape in North Dakota's prairie all looked the same, and when he was digging the grave, Timothy said he'd been worried that James would shoot and kill him

while he was digging the actual hole. Basically, Timothy just said he had no worried that James would shoot and kill him while he was digging the actual hole. Basically, Timothy just said he had no clue where the spot was and wished he could help investigators more. Jill Williams told a reporter with the Bismarck Tribune that Timothy's testimony confirmed everything she'd believed for so long. That her son had been killed because he learned too much about James and he decided to get away from that kind of lifestyle. Unfortunately, Casey's decision to break away from Blackstone Trucking had come with the ultimate price, his life. During the second day of Timothy's explosive testimony in court,

he detailed the events that surrounded Doug Carlisle's murder. He said that leading up to the murder, he'd exchanged several text messages with the middleman who was connected to James. Those messages, along with ones between the middleman's phone and James's phone, were read aloud in court. They contained information about Doug's comings and goings, where he lived, if he and Alberta's house had an alarm system, where they attended church, basically everything Timothy needed to know in order to be in the right place at the right time to kill Doug. Timothy confessed to bringing the welding glove with him in the event he needed to break a window of the Carlisles' home. He said he got freaked out when he saw Alberta at the house with Doug,

and in his panic, just fired as many rounds as he could at Doug. After fleeing the scene, Timothy said he'd thrown the murder weapon he'd used to kill Doug into a nearby river and it was at that point he realized he'd left his welding glove behind, which he knew had been a big mistake. In the end, that glove proved to be his undoing. It was the one piece of physical evidence that got the whole investigation rolling and was the thing that had led investigators to Timothy in the first place. After four long weeks of trial, it took jurors just one day to deliberate before finding James guilty on all of the 11 federal counts he was facing.

The middleman who'd been James' go-between was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Other men who'd contributed to concealing evidence in both cases and helping Timothy plan the two murders were all sentenced to decades of prison time. For his cooperation with the government, Timothy was sentenced to 30 years behind bars. The mastermind behind it all, James, was given two consecutive life sentences.

According to multiple news reports, he chose not to appeal his case. Sarah, his wife, was eventually cleared of anything related to the murders. She did, however, end up pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud, a crime for which she received a $340,000 fine and was ordered to be on probation for three years. To this day, she claims she did not know the true depth of her husband's depravity. She feels she was just as duped as everyone else when it came to James' sociopathic ambitions. The wild thing about this story, other than it just feeling ripped straight from a movie, is that Casey Clark's remains have never been found,

despite more than a dozen intensive searches by law enforcement. For years, his mom Jill has longed to return her son home to Washington and give him a proper burial. News reports on this case suggest that prosecutors are not completely convinced Casey's body stayed where Timothy Sukow initially buried it. The government has speculated that James may have returned to the original burial site at some point in 2012 and moved Casey's remains as a way to have leverage over Timothy and the other men involved in the murder-for-hire plot. Which, when you think about it, if that's true, that's pretty messed up. The fact that Casey's young life was ripped away from

him in such a brutal way for no other reason than pure greed and vindictiveness on James's part is truly tragic. Even though we know what happened to KC, I guess the only mystery left to solve is where the North Dakota grasslands and outskirts of Theodore Roosevelt National Park are holding him. Park Predators is an Audiochuck production. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?