Friday, August 23, 2019

The Rosebud County Sniper

In the outside world of April 1, 1949, the Cold War was heating up. Yet all of that might have seemed rather remote to Russ Bean in his small farm home, located about fourteen miles west of Forsyth, Montana. The time was approaching 8 o’clock in the evening, and he sat with his family at the supper table. An outside window was behind him, but the only natural light came from a sliver of crescent moon. Thus, the room lights were shining brightly – making him, as it happened, a perfect target.

Then that peaceful scene exploded.

A bullet punched through the window and chair-back, pierced Russell’s chest from behind, grazed the head of a child sitting across from him, and clanged against an iron stove at the end. No words can adequately express the shock and devastation the family must have felt as Russ slumped forward, almost instantly dead.

They surely took some time to recover. Still, the county coroner was at the crime scene within about an hour and an undersheriff not long after. Sheriff Floyd “Whitey” Dowlin was there by 10 o’clock. The undersheriff had already talked with the two nearest neighbors. One of those was Mrs. Helen (Bean) Storm, Russell’s sister. The Bean family later spent the night at her place. Although they had to contend with some “sightseers,” officials did an adequate job of securing the Bean premises.

After matters were mostly settled at the crime scene, Sheriff Dowlin interviewed the other nearby neighbor, John Loy Storm. John was the ex-husband of Helen, and therefore ex-brother-in-law of Russell Bean. He and his thirty-year old son lived in a trailer home to the west of Helen’s house. In fact, Storm, his ex-wife, and the Bean family all lived within a half mile of each other. When the sheriff talked to Storm, he would have surely known about the family relationships.

Russell Owens Bean was born on a ranch near Forsyth in 1887. He graduated from the Billings Polytechnic Institute (a precursor to today’s Rocky Mountain College) in 1914. The following year he was a witness in Billings for his sister’s marriage to John Loy Storm. Born in Illinois, Storm had homesteaded west of Forsyth a year or two before the marriage, when he was about twenty years old. He would stay with the farm near Forsyth until 1949.
Russell O. "Russ" Bean, ca 1918.
Posted at FindAGrave by “Sharon.”

Russell Bean served in France with an artillery unit during World War I. He married his first wife in 1920 and worked for many years as an electrician. However, around 1934, Bean became a sewing machine salesman. He continued in that line of work for over a decade, even owning a store in Miles City for a time. During this period, he also divorced and remarried.

Then, right after World War II, he moved to the place west of Forsyth. Several of Bean’s relatives had homesteaded in the area when they moved to Montana from Texas in the early 1880s. Available records do not say if he owned or inherited family land, or simply purchased some at this time. Not long after his return to the area, he and John Storm (then still his brother-in-law) partnered in a joint venture to raise wheat. In 1948, Bean purchased a laundry business in Forsyth.

When Sheriff Dowlin went to quiz Storm, he probably knew that Bean’s sister had divorced John a bit over six months earlier. That could possibly have caused some tension in the partnership. The sheriff might have also heard that Russell and John were involved in some sort of business dispute. So perhaps Dowlin was not totally surprised at Storm’s reply when he was told about the shooting: “Good, I’m glad, the son of a bitch was no good anyhow.”

After the interview, Dowlin went home. He returned to the Bean place shortly after sunup and began recording key observations about the crime scene. That included the position of the bullet hole in the window. Then he and two other men searched the yard where the shot had originated. About fifty feet from the window, they found what was judged to be the impression of someone’s knee.

From that point, they sorted through footprints (some of the sightseers had wandered in the yard) to establish a trail of widely-separated tracks. This ultimately led them to within fifty yards or so of Storm’s trailer home. Some marks were distinct enough so that plaster casts could be made. However, others – including the knee “print” – would have required specialized photographic equipment, and skills, that this remote rural county did not have. All they could do was write down a general description of each.

Around 9 o’clock in the morning, the sheriff asked “an experienced civil engineer” to come out and help. They first used stout fishing line to backtrack the bullet path from where it hit the stove, through the hole in the window, and then out into the yard. Tellingly, the path ran directly over the knee impression, at a height consistent with someone kneeling to aim a weapon. The engineer also helped the sheriff map the location of every foot impression found earlier.

Some time during the morning, Sheriff Dowlin contacted the Lost Persons Foundation, an outfit that specialized in finding hikers and hunters lost in Montana’s wild back-country. A handler arrived at the crime scene with two bloodhounds at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Put on the scent at the knee impression, the hounds followed the general path defined by the faint tracks found by the sheriff. They stopped, satisfied, outside the trailer home until John Storm came out. They then immediately jumped on him in a friendly manner and licked his hands, just as they were trained to do when they found a scent-trailed missing person. The handler said simply, “There’s your man.”

By this time, several people had told Dowlin about vehement death threats Storm had made against Bean, including some on the day of the shooting. At this point, the sheriff jailed John, stating that a murder charge would soon follow. He also secured as evidence a .270 Winchester rifle found in the trailer home.

The case went to trial the following December. Storm’s death threats arose over a tractor he and Bean owned as part of their joint venture. Storm had tried, unsuccessfully, to arrange a deal where one or the other had full ownership of the tractor. Storm’s ex-wife and son both testified that he was enraged by the failure to reach an agreement. That was reinforced by Storm’s remark upon hearing of Bean’s death. How could such a seemingly mundane disagreement escalate so much?

One cannot escape the notion that the Storm divorce played a role. After over thirty years of marriage, Ethel had been the one to file, on the grounds of “habitual intemperance.” A quaint way to say he drank to excess, such behavior might well have gone along with spousal abuse. In any case, Russell Bean would have almost certainly taken his sister’s side, putting a strain on the business relationship. Ethel being awarded the family home would have exacerbated the problem. No such theory was presented at the trial, however.

Still, the business dispute would have established motive. For the means, criminologist Luke S. May appeared on the stand to confirm that the bullet that killed Bean was fired from a .270 Winchester rifle. Because the slug had fragmented, he could not tie the bullet to Storm’s specific weapon … but there were no markings to eliminate it either.

To establish opportunity, the court spent a lot of time on the tracks found by the sheriff … and especially the actions of the bloodhounds. The prosecution took the handler through the dogs’ pedigree, training, and past performance in great depth. Naturally, the defense quizzed him relentlessly, but the handler’s testimony held up.

To “seal the deal,” the prosecution put Herbert Hay, a former jail-mate of Storm’s, on the stand. Hay himself had a small-time criminal record. But he was judged reasonably credible since his testimony in this case gained him little … four days off of a 30-day sentence for passing a bad check. Hay stated that, in an unguarded moment, Storm had said, “I did kill the son of a bitch.” In the end, the jury found John Loy Storm guilty of second-degree murder and he was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Records show that he was admitted to prison on December 21, 1949.

However, in late 1951, the Montana Supreme Court, by a 3-2 margin, overturned that verdict, rejecting the use of what they chose to called “bloodhound testimony.” (Of course, it’s the handler who testifies, not the dogs.) The majority opinion seemed heavily prejudiced against the very idea. The text was loaded with phrases like “dogs and other dumb animals do not qualify as witnesses” and “evidence of the actions of the dogs themselves should find no place in a Court of law.” They ruled that the judge should not have allowed the jury to hear the evidence and decide on its credibility for themselves.

The dissenting opinion retorted, “The overwhelming weight of authority, however, holds that such evidence is admissible if there has been a proper foundation laid.” In the Storm case, that final proviso was satisfied by the intensive cross-examination about the training and capabilities of the dogs and their handler. At that time, 21 states had tested the issue legally and the vast majority allowed the use of dog tracking evidence. Today, 39 states and the District of Columbia approve and only 4 states disagree. (The issue has apparently not been tested in the other 7 states.)

Be that as it may, Storm was retried in 1952, without any of the bloodhound tracking testimony. A new jury again found him guilty, and he was again sentenced to twenty years in prison. Then, fifteen months later, the Supreme Court used legal hair-splitting to again over-rule the jury … and Storm was a free man. Despite being twice convicted for the death of Russell Bean, he served just four years in prison.
                                                                                
References: “[Bean Murder, Storm Legalities],” Independent-Record, Helena; Montana Standard, Butte; Great Falls Tribune, Billings Gazette, Montana (April 1949 – May 1954).
Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969).
SC-6 – Summaries of Case Law, K9Sensus, Lucas, Iowa (2005).
State v. Storm 238 P.2d 1161 (December 15, 1951).

No comments:

Post a Comment