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| Kevin Ives (left) and Don Henry (right) (source: vocal.media) |
The Deaths
It started as a normal Saturday night on August 22, 1987 in Bryant, Arkansas. Teenagers Don Henry, 16, and Kevin Ives, 17, popular students who were gearing up for their senior year at Bryant High School, had decided to hang out with a group of friends at a local commuter parking lot, a popular gathering place for teens. Kevin and Don were typical teens who enjoyed working on their cars (a Firebird and a Camaro), hunting, and going out with their girlfriends. Around midnight, they left their friends to go to Don's house, where the boys planned on spending the night. Kevin waited outside on the porch while Don went inside to chat with his dad. It was around 12:15 a.m. August 23 when Don grabbed his .22 rifle and one of his dad's spotlights and he and Kevin departed for the woods and railroad tracks that ran behind Don's home. They were going "spotlighting," an illegal form of night hunting in which a bright line is shone in the eyes of the animal, transfixing it, and allowing it to be easily shot.
Around 4 a.m., a 6,000-ton cargo train a mile long was making its regular nightly run north from Texarkana to Little Rock at a speed of 52 miles per hour. Just passing the town of Bryant and approaching Alexander, engineer Stephen Shroyer noticed two immobile figures lying parallel across the tracks, covered from the waist down with a light green tarp, and with their arms straight down by their sides. He immediately laid down the horn and placed the train into a frantic emergency stop. Less than five seconds later, with no reaction or movement by either of the boys on the tracks, the train made impact with the two bodies, carrying them for a half-mile before the train came to a complete stop.
An EMT at the scene of the train tracks noted that the boys' blood looked darker than it should have, as though it lacked oxygen. The same individual said the blood was oozing, instead of fresh, and that their skin was colorless, which indicated that Kevin and Don had been dead for some time before their bodies were put on the tracks.
The Investigation, the Rumors and Mena
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| Kevin (in foregound) and Don (in background) (source: Reddit) |
The boys, though mangled, were identified as Kevin Ives and Don Henry. At their autopsies, Dr. Fahmy Malak, the state medical examiner, concluded that the two had smoked as many as 20 marijuana cigarettes, causing them to lay on the tracks in a stupor, pass out, and not hear, or feel, the approaching train. He then ruled their deaths an accident due to marijuana intoxication.
Interestingly, the hospital where the boys' bodies were taken, and where the initial examinations were performed, had no record of them being there.
Two persons came forward to say that they had heard gunshots shortly before Don and Kevin were hit by the train. The Saline County Sheriff's Office assured the families that tests would be done on Don's gun to see if it had been fired -- but these tests were never conducted.
As early as Wednesday, August 26, the Arkansas Democrat was reporting that "the only thing Saline County authorities are sure of" in the case "is that foul play wasn't involved." This, at the same time that the initial investigators had managed to miss locating one of Kevin's severed feet, which had been discovered by one of the Henry family, as well as parts of Don's gun and other personal belongings which had been inexplicably overlooked during the investigation of the crime scene.
The Ives and Henry families weren't so quick to agree with authorities. Larry Ives, Kevin's father, (who worked for the railroad and until recently had the train route that would have put him on the train that struck his son), hired a private investigator to look into what happened but, as he later said, the investigator was met with resistance from different authorities, preventing them from getting anywhere.
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| James H. Steed, Jr. (source: SCSO) |
Linda Ives, Kevin's mother, criticized Saline County Sheriff James H. Steed, Jr., who had said repeatedly that there was nothing at the scene to suggest anything more than a simple, but strange, accident. (In fact, the case was initially investigated as a traffic accident.) Dan Harmon, a private attorney in Benton who, at that time, had no official role in the case, approached the families and offered to help them by making a deal with Steed in February of 1989 that if the Henrys and Iveses withdrew their criticism of Steed and supported him, they would receive the investigation they wanted.
At roughly the same time, about six months after the deaths, the Henry family received Don's belongings from the medical examiner's office. Don's stepmother found a partial bag of marijuana (1.9 grams) in the pocket of Don's jeans, leading the family to wonder what else the so-called investigation had overlooked.
The Ives and Henry families then held a joint press conference. They announced that Dr. James Garriot of San Antonio, Texas offered a second opinion on Dr. Malak's findings. Dr. Garriot concluded it was unlikely, highly unlikely, for any amount of THC (the main compound in cannabis) exposure to have the effects that Malak alleged. Furthermore, Dr. Garriot said the only reliable test for the presence of drugs in the boys' systems was mass spectrometry and that had not been performed. Dr. Arthur J. McBray, a toxicologist from North Carolina, deemed Malak's conclusions "very bizarre" and that he had never heard of anyone becoming unconscious from exposure to any amount of THC.
The families hoped that the investigation would be reopened by their speaking out and the tactic worked. The following day, the case was officially reopened. Newly assigned prosecutor Richard Garrett had Kevin and Don exhumed for second autopsies around the same time that Dan Harmon was appointed by a circuit judge to head a county grand jury investigation as a special prosecutor.
The second autopsies were performed by Georgia medical examiner Dr. Joseph Burton. Dr. Burton found that Don and Kevin had minimal marijuana in their systems; the equivalent of one joint between the two of them, not twenty. He also opined that Don had been stabbed in the back and Kevin suffered a crushing blow to the left side of his skull, not owing to the train. In his professional opinion, one of the boys was already dead and one unconscious at the time their bodies were struck by the train.
A grand jury ruled that the deaths of Don and Kevin were probable homicides.
There would be third autopsies performed at Richard Garrett's request. This pathologist took a closer look at Don's clothing and at Kevin's body. He found evidence of stab wounds on the shirt Don wore that night, but which he was not wearing at the time his body was struck by the train, that corresponded with the wounds to Don's back that Dr. Burton had identified. In Kevin's case, he found the bludgeoning would to the left side of Kevin's head was similar to the butt of Don's .22 rifle. (The rifle had been seen lying parallel to both boys by the train crew before the impact. Curtis Henry said that his son would never have risked scratching the gun by placing it on gravel.)
The second autopsy ruling was overturned, and the deaths were officially classified homicides.
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| The area where Don and Kevin were killed (source: Google via Daily Mail) |
Garrett questioned the green tarp that the train crew had seen and reported. The tarp had disappeared, and Garrett wanted to know who had covered Don and Kevin and why. Local police claimed that the train's engineer, Stephen Shroyer, had never mentioned seeing a tarp before impact. Shroyer said they immediately began questioning the tarp's existence.
Leads surfaced that in the week before Don and Kevin were killed, a man in military fatigues was seen near the train tracks. His unusual behavior around suspicion and police were called. When the responding officer stopped to question him, the man opened fire and fled. The officer, who had taken cover in his vehicle, was not struck; a search immediately following produced nothing and the suspect was never found or identified.
On the night of August 22-23, 1987, witnesses again reported seeing a man in military fatigues less than 200 yards from where the bodies of Kevin and Don would be found. Once again, police were unable to locate him.
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| Barry Seal (source: Wikipedia) |
Rumors began, and then intensified, that the murders of Don and Kevin were tied in with drug trafficking. Nearby Mena, Arkansas, sitting 160 miles west of Little Rock, had ties to the cocaine trade thanks to Barry Seal, who had been gun-running and smuggling cocaine for the Medelin cartel out of Colombia and into the U.S. since 1981. A pilot by trade, Seal used low-flying planes to airdrop drug packages in remote areas of Louisiana, where his ground team picked them up. The number of planes (Seal had 12) and frequency of flights, however, soon alerted Louisiana State Police and Federal investigators and so Seal moved his operation to the smaller Mena area. He was also a covert CIA operative who was murdered in February of 1986 in a hail of gunfire after a hit was put out on him by the Medelin cartel but het story was that the drug trafficking had continued, with a high profile politician involved.
It was whispered that Kevin and Don may have unintentionally stumbled upon one of these drug and/or cash drops and were killed as a result.
In the fall of 1988, a year after the murders, Unsolved Mysteries featured the case in one of their episodes. Prosecutor Richard Garrett was asked his thoughts about the case by the show's host, Robert Stack. Garrett alleged that Don and Kevin "saw something they shouldn't have seen and it had to do with drugs."
Although the grand jury had announced that the boys' deaths may have been related to drug trafficking, Sheriff Steed refused any funds that might aid in the investigation. It was also discovered that Steed lied about where he had seen Don and Kevin's clothing for examination. Rather than sending the items to the FBI, as he claimed he had done, he instead sent them to the Arkansas Crime Lab. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, Steed was not reelected following his involvement in the case.
More Deaths
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| Keith McKaskle (source: Twitter) |
On November 10, 1988, only two days after Steed lost his reelection bid, 43-year-old Keith McKaskle, an informant of Dan Harmon's, was killed. Something of a legend for breaking up bar room fights, with or without weapons (he was a big guy who stood at six-foot-two and weighed over 200 pounds), McKaskle had been stabbed 113 times. His body was found in the carport of his home, wrapped in a flowered shower curtain; the home throughout was spattered with blood from the ferocious and prolonged fight.
McKaskle, believing he had been speaking with the "wrong people," and saying that he was being followed by two police officers who had been named as suspects in the Ives-Henry case (see the following section concerning potential police involvement), had prepared his own funeral arrangements and told his family and friends goodbye only days before his murder, believing he was not long for the world.
In August of 1989, Ronald Shane Smith, a 19-year-old neighbor of McKaskle's who was considered "slow" by others, was sentenced to 10 years for McKaskle's murder. Following Smith's conviction, another prison inmate claimed that he had been offered $4,000 to kill McKaskle. Smith later said that he had been at McKaskle's home to pay him for items he had purchased, including a silver tray for his mother, when three men in clown masks (or five men in all-black) burst into the home, with two carrying knives and one with a gun. Smith claimed to have been held at gunpoint by one man while the other two killed McKaskle. Then, according to Smith, the men ordered him at gunpoint to stab McKaskle, at which point they took a Polaroid photo of him doing so and used it to blackmail him into taking the rap for the murder.
McKaskle was a known drug user and assumed dealer and had been suspected of being at the train tracks when Kevin Ives and Don Henry were killed. Two days before his murder and before it was announced that Steed had lost the election, McKaskle had reportedly said publicly that if Steed lost the election, his life would not be worth two cents.
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| Greg Collins (source: idfiles.com) |
On January 22, 1989, 26-year-old Greg Collins, who had been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury with regard to the deaths of Kevin Ives and Don Henry, was found in the woods of Prescott, Arkansas, with three shotgun blasts; two to his chest and one to this face. Greg had reportedly left his home to go hunting. It was said prosecutor Richard Garrett and Dan Harmon had questioned Greg shortly before his murder. Medical examiner Fahmy Malak ruled Greg Collins' death a suicide.
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| Keith Coney (source: idfiles.com) |
Coincidentally or not, only six weeks before Greg Collins was killed and roughly six months after Kevin Ives and Don Henry were killed, Greg's friend Keith Coney had been killed in a motorcycle accident. The official story was that Keith had run his motorcycle into the back of a semi-truck while traveling at a high rate of speed. Witnesses, however, claimed that he had been accosted before being chased by a vehicle and while trying to escape, he had swerved into the back of the truck. Witnesses who saw his body claimed that he had suffered a slashed or cut throat and other injuries that did not correspond with a vehicular accident.
Keith was an acquaintance of both Don Henry and Kevin Ives and told his mother he knew something about their deaths but wouldn't tell her anything further. He did reportedly tell his father and a few friends, though, that he had been out with Kevin and Don the night they died and the trio were approached by a police vehicle with two officers inside. Keith claimed to have fled on his motorcycle and either witnessed or merely believed that Kevin and Don were killed by those officers. Shortly before his own death, Keith had been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury.
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| Daniel "Boonie" Bearden (source: idfiles.com) |
In March of 1989, police received a tip that a man by the name of Daniel "Boonie" Bearden, who had been missing for about eight months, had been buried in a remote location near the Arkansas River. The search yielded a portion of clothing identified as Boonie's but no body and no other clues. Boonie was alleged to have been a drug distributor and had been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury in relation to the Ives-Henry case. He is suspected to have been murdered but has never been located.
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| Jeff Rhodes (source: idfiles.com) |
In April of 1989, a 21-year-old man by the name of Jeffrey Edward Rhodes, a reported dealer, told his mother he was in fear for his life and called his father in Texas to say that he needed to get out of Arkansas as he knew way too much about "the boys on the tracks" and Keith McKaskle. Only days later, Jeff's motorcycle was found on the side of the road with the kickstand down, as if he had stopped for someone. A week later, his body was found in a trash dumpster in Benton, Arkansas. He had suffered a gunshot wound to the head as well as mutilation to his body that included his hands, feet, and head being partially sawed off. His body had then been set on fire.
An anonymous caller said that she believed that Jeff may have stopped for a Benton police officer or officers and was then killed, as there were corrupt individuals in the department.
It was rumored that in the days before August 22-23, 1987, Don Henry had purchased a small amount of marijuana from Jeff and had told Jeff that he knew "the ultimate dealer" in Little Rock.
A man by the name of Frank Pelcher was eventually convicted of Jeff's murder and sentenced to life in prison.
In July of 1989, Richard Winters was killed by a shotgun blast to the face in what was initially thought to be a robbery but was suspected to be a set-up. Richard, at one point, had been considered a suspect in the murders of Kevin Ives and Don Henry but had offered to cooperate with the grand jury shortly before he was killed.
Also in 1989, James "Dewey" Milam had been found decapitated in his home and with his head missing. Medical examiner Fahmy Malak claimed the death to be of natural causes, brought on by an ulcer. He also claimed that Milam's small dog had eaten its owner's head. Milam's head was later found in a trash bin several blocks away, leading Malak to state that the dog had regurgitated the head. Milan was reportedly a witness to the Mena drug operation and to the murders of Kevin Ives and Don Henry.
In June of 1990, Jordan Kettleson, rumored to have information on the murders of Don Henry and Kevin Ives, and also rumored to have played a part in the murder of Keith McKaskle, was found shot to death in the front seat of his pickup truck. His body was cremated before an autopsy could be performed and no police investigation took place.
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| Mike Samples (photo: idfiles.com) |
In June of 1995, grand jury witness Mike Samples was shot to death. Mike was allegedly involved in retrieving the drugs dropped from airplanes. Authorities, however, have denied any connection between his murder and the Ives-Henry case.
The murders of Greg Collins, Daniel Bearden, James Milan, Jordan Kettleson, and Mike Samples remain unsolved.
The Possible Police Connection
A witness using the name of "Jerry" came forward to say that he saw sitting in a convenience store parking lot the night of August 22-23, 1987 and saw three teenaged boys, one on a motorcycle, hanging out by the store and, he believed, smoking pot. According to Jerry, a police car rolled up, the boy on the motorcycle took off, and the two officers ended up "beating the shit" out of the two remaining boys before throwing them in the back of the police vehicle. When Jerry went to the authorities with his story, he was jailed for outstanding child support. After being released from jail 90 days later with a suggestion to leave town, Jerry picked up and departed for parts unknown.
Another witness, this one named Ron, had been at a club on Saturday night, August 22, 1987. He was driving home sometime after 12:30 a.m. or one o'clock when he noticed a vehicle he took to be an "undercover" police car around the area of the convenience store that Jerry had mentioned. Ron claimed that he saw a young man that fit Don Henry's description being beaten by two officers. He couldn't describe the second boy, as his head was down. Both were thrown in the backseat of the vehicle and the car eventually headed down what Ron knew to be a dead-end road. As he had been drinking at the club, Ron pulled his car over to wait for the police vehicle to pull out and go on its way. He recalled it being 15-20 minutes before the car returned and he could not tell if either or both boys were still in the backseat.
Two police officers were specifically named as suspects by witnesses and tipsters. Those officers sued for defamation and lost their case. One of the officers later went to prison on drug-related charges and the other eventually became a police chief and head of a drug agency.
Dr. Fahmy Malak
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| Dr. Fahmy Malak (source: Sword and Scale) |
On September 10, 1991, Dr. Fahmy Malak resigned as medical examiner for Arkansas after holding the position since 1979 and after years of questionable actions that included (besides what has already been mentioned) labeling a gunshot victim with five shots to the chest a suicide, testifying erroneously in criminal cases, mixing up tissue samples and DNA, and falsely accusing a deputy county coroner of killing someone when he misread a chart.
Once Malak had resigned, it came out that when the grand jury had overruled his findings in the Ives-Henry case, then-governor Bill Clinton, using his discretionary fund to cover the $20,000 cost, hired two out-of-state pathologists to review Malak's findings. The two pathologists, in opposition to the doctors hired by prosecutor Richard Garrett, gave Malak high marks and suggested that he be given a raise. Clinton and his board decided not to review Malak's files and cases and instead, sent a proposal to the Legislature to give Malak a 41.5% increase in salary, to $117,875. Clinton had also elected not to fire Malak, despite four years worth of complaints about his practices.
Malak had also allegedly protected Clinton's mother, a nurse-anesthesiologist, from potential charges of negligence and malpractice in autopsies performed on two patients under her care.
Following his resignation as medical examiner, Malak was hired at the Health Department as a consultant on sexually transmitted diseases for $70,000 a year.
It had also been discovered that when the previous medical examiner had retired, Malak, who had been working as his assistant, took over the role without proper medical credentials or qualifications to do so.
He died in Florida in 2018.
Dan Harmon
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| Dan Harmon in 1988 (source: idfiles.com) |
As the years rolled on, Don and Kevin's case remained unsolved but the rumors continued and law enforcement appeared, to some, to be unconcerned about bringing closure to the case. Books and articles were written.
Attorney Dan Harmon, who had reached out to the Ives and Henry families to broker some sort of "assistance," ran into his own legal troubles. As early as March of 1990, he was reportedly linked to illegal drug activity. In June of 1991, U.S. Attorney Chuck Banks held a press conference to publicly clear Harmon and other Saline County officials of drug-related misconduct. One rumor was that Banks was blackmailed into shutting down any kind of investigation due to Harmon having tapes of sexual encounters by Banks with prostitutes. Harmon had also allegedly been facing seven counts of income tax evasion. Several months after Banks held his press conference, he received a federal judgeship nomination by then-President George Bush. (He never received his judgeship, as all Bush nominations were withdrawn when Bill Clinton won the presidency.)
In 1993, Linda Ives was contacted by a young man who was 12 or 13 years old in the summer of 1987 when her son was killed. He told Linda that he had been out that night with friends around the railroad tracks and upon seeing lights, had hidden in some bushes. He claimed to have seen Dan Harmon on the tracks, involved in killing Kevin and Don. He personally knew Harmon as Harmon had dated his mother. The authorities chose to give his tale little merit, even though he passed two lie detector tests and was put in the witness protection program.
Also in 1993, a witness by the name of Sharlene Wilson came forward to accuse Harmon in the murders of Kevin Ives and Don Henry. She claimed that not only Harmon but Keith McKaskle and a man by the name of Larry Rochelle were involved in the deaths of Kevin and Don. She said she believed that Kevin and Don were curious about the drug drop site and were caught. In her first statement, she claimed to have been high on coke and meth and only witnessed the boys being killed. In a follow-up statement, she claimed that under pressure from Harmon, and high on coke and meth, she stabbed one of the boys with her own knife but only a shallow, superficial wound. She also brought up the long-forgotten green tarp, which she stated came from her car.
Shortly after providing her statement, Sharlene was busted on a drug charge and prosecuted by none other than Dan Harmon. Despite it being a first-time drug offender charge, she was given a 31-year sentence. (That sentence was eventually reduced by Governor Mike Huckabee, allowing her to be paroled.)
Sharlene had signed a statement in front of three law enforcement officers in 1993 and yet her accusation was buried in the case file until 2015.
In early 1994, a pilot claimed to have flown a drug drop to the location that Kevin and Don were murdered.
By November of 1996, when Harmon was the Saline County prosecutor, his then-wife was caught out of Harmon's jurisdiction with cocaine packages from the district's evidence locker.
That same year, he was driven out of office, resigning as part of a plea deal he took after beating a reporter from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette who had asked him for a comment.
In April of 1997, a federal grand jury indicted Harmon with racketeering, dealing in cocaine, manufacture of methamphetamine, extortion, witness tampering, and retaliating against an informant. Two other men, a local attorney and the administrator of the drug task force, were also charged in the scheme. Harmon was convicted on five counts: racketeering, three extortion conspiracies, and one marijuana distribution charge. He was sentenced to eight years in prison, with an additional three tacked on for a subsequent drug charge.
Once Harmon was sentenced, stories began to leak out. Some 900 criminal cases in Saline County had been dropped because Harmon, as then-prosecutor, did not bring the cases within the legal statutory time of one year. Persons facing drug charges stated that Harmon demanded money in exchange for charges against them being dropped. One woman claimed that Harmon offered to drop charges against her husband if she would have sex with him. Harmon had been arrested previously and had not only refused to take drug tests when arrested but had attempted to flee during one stop. He boasted of having physically struck another lawyer in front of a judge -- and faced no consequences. He was accused of battery by several women, including his ex-wife, who claimed that he had not only physically assaulted her but had threatened her with death. At every step, it appeared that Dan Harmon was protected, whether it be by judges, police, or the Committee on Professional Conduct, who did not revoke Harmon's license when he refused mandatory drug testing upon arrest.
In 1999, the Arkansas Supreme Court disbarred Harmon.
In 2006, he was released from prison after assisting prosecutors in a murder conspiracy case.
In 2008, unbelievably, Harmon was again working for Saline County, and on their payroll, organizing files for the circuit clerk.
In February of 2010, he was charged once again, following a six-month drug investigation, for selling morphine and hydrocodone near a school. The prosecution's case was weak as the only testimony against Harmon was that of an admitted drug user. He was ultimately acquitted.
Two years earlier Harmon had told a reporter that he used drugs and deserved to go to jail for that but blamed his downfall on women and other people.
Further Developments
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| Linda Ives in 2017 (source: russiainsider.com) |
In 2016, Linda Ives filed a civil suit citing a Freedom of Information Act violation against multiple agencies, including the CIA, the FBI, and the Bryant Police Department. Ms. Ives' action alleged a cover-up in her son's death. Over a year later, in November of 2017, a federal judge ordered three defendants in the suit -- the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security -- to turn over documents for private review that had formerly been redacted. The same judge dismissed several agencies from the suit, including the CIA, the U.S. State Department, the FBI, the Arkansas State Police, the Saline County Sheriff's Department, and the Bryant Police Department. The suit was dismissed in 2019.
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| Billy Jack Haynes, 1980s (source: Facebook) |
In February of 2018, former World Wrestling Federation (now the WWE) wrestler Billy Jack Haynes recorded and released a video in which he claimed that while providing security for a drug trafficking drop in August of 1987, he had witnessed the murders of Kevin Ives and Don Henry. Haynes named six others that were at the scene, including three law enforcement officers, two attorneys/politicians, and a bouncer from a local club. He claimed the corruption in the state went to very high levels.
Possible Connections
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| The final resting place of Billy Don Hainline (source: Find a Grave) |
On June 25, 1984, 21-year-old Billy Don Hainline and 26-year-old Dennis Decker were found lying on a stretch of the Kansas City Southern railroad twenty miles south of Poteauin, Oklahoma. Both were run over by the train and killed. The autopsies revealed that there was a slight amount of alcohol in one of the men's blood, close to the legal limit for drunkenness, but none in the other body. Their deaths were ruled accidental by the county coroner, who believed Billy and Dennis fell asleep on the tracks in a drunken state. The state medical examiner's office, however, ruled the manner of death as unknown due to the small amount of alcohol and the fact the bodies were lying together, parallel. Others felt convinced that Billy and Dennis were the victims of foul play.
Their case was reopened in 1985, with investigators focusing on the possibility that drugs were involved. The new investigation discovered that one month after Billy and Dennis were struck by the train, a secret methamphetamine laboratory was discovered less than two miles from the tracks where their bodies were discovered. In 1987, the deaths were ruled accidental.
Sheriff Charles Hurley said he believed the bodies were put there. Le Flore County District Attorney Ray Edelstein said he believed that people didn't "simply lay down on the tracks and go to sleep three miles from nowhere." Edelstein also said that it was not uncommon in the drug industry for people who "don't play ball to be eliminated."
The Ives-Henry case in 1987 caused the Hainline-Decker case to be looked into once again. Le Flore and Latimer County investigator Claudie Higgins stated he felt any similarity between the two cases was purely coincidental, with no connection whatsoever. Higgins also stated, erroneously, that the blood alcohol level in both men was at the legal level for drunkenness and the two had simply fallen asleep on the tracks.
There are no known suspects in the case and it remains unsolved.
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| Sean Reineke (source: Find a Grave) |
On August 20, 1985, best friends Sean Reineke, 15, and his neighbor, David Taylor, 13, were killed when they were struck by a Kansas City Southern freight train at a railroad trestle around five in the morning, three miles south of Joplin, Missouri. According to Newton County Sheriff Mark Bridges, an investigation produced the theory that the boys were lying with their faces down between the rails when they were struck by the train but foul play was ruled out. The train engineer reported that he did not see the boys when the train went over the trestle, which could be seen from both boys' homes. Some gossips claimed that Sean and David committed suicide but according to their families, they were both looking forward to school and not exhibiting any behavior to suggest depression and/or suicide.
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| Norman Ladner (source: Unsolved Mysteries Wiki) |
On August 31, 1989, almost exactly two years after Kevin Ives and Don Henry left the Henry residence to go hunting, 17-year-old Norman Ladner left his parents' local store in Picayune, Mississippi to go hunting on the family farm. A popular high school student known for his kindness who loved the outdoors, Norman knew his family's 122-acre property inside out. He was also very punctual and responsible so when he hadn't returned to the family business by 7 p.m. as he had historically done to help close up the store, his father suspected something was wrong and organized a small search party to look for Norman. Norman, Sr. found his son lying on the ground under a tree, cold, and with a bullet wound in his head.
The Pearl River County Sheriff's Department arrived around 10 p.m. and roped the area off. Before the investigation had really begun, Pearl River County Sheriff Lorance Lumpkin said from the start that he did not believe a crime had occurred. He said he ruled it out because he saw nothing that supported a crime. He believed that Norman had been in a tree and had fallen, causing the gun to discharge and accidentally shooting himself in the head.
The coroner informed Norman's parents, in the presence of two deputies, that he was 90 percent certain that their son's death was accidental. When the official ruling came down, though, the coroner had determined that Norman had committed suicide. His reasoning was that it was a typical suicide wound; a close-contact head wound, the bullet entered the right temple and exited the left. Sheriff Lumpkin speculated that Norman had gone to an area that he felt comfortable in and for reasons unknown, decided to take his own life. Neither Sheriff Lumpkin nor the coroner explained how Norman managed to shoot himself in the temple with a shotgun/rifle.
Norman's family was horrified and offended. Norman had been a happy and outgoing young man, not depressed, and would never have taken his own life. They pointed out that the investigators never fingerprinted the gun, never ran a test to attempt to determine what kind of gun killed Norman, nor made any attempt to locate the bullet that had killed him.
The investigation also had no explanation for why Norman's wallet, with $140 inside, was missing or how he had received a one inch cut to the top of his head. Authorities speculated that he had fallen on a bloody tree root found at the scene but the Ladners did not understand how Norman could have ended up with the cut to the top or crown of his head.
Discouraged, they began their own investigation and in so doing, found a bullet in the dirt underneath where Norman's head had lain. The bullet had dried blood and hair on it and was not the size to fit in Norman's gun. The Ladners believed that Norman was lying on the ground when he was shot by someone in a standing position.
Sheriff Lumpkin dismissed their finding and their claim, stating his belief that Norman was in a standing position when he was shot, making it impossible for the fatal bullet to end up underneath his head. The bullet the Ladners found, in his opinion, was unrelated to the case. (The Ladners turned the bullet over to authorities to be tested with the stipulation that it be returned to them. The bullet that was returned to them was a different make and caliber; not the same bullet at all.)
According to Norman's mother, on one of the Ladners' trips to the coroner's office to question his ruling, she was approached by a stranger who told her not to open the case up, that she had other children to raise, for her own good she should raise them and that she would never find the person who killed her son. This unknown man disappeared before Norman, Sr. could locate him.
Norman, Sr. continued to investigate the scene of his son's death and during one of those visits found what appeared to be a homemade radio-like device hanging from a tree, 300 yard from where Norman's body had been discovered. Authorities, naturally, said it was not important to the case but Norman, Sr. took it to a former DEA agent who said it was a type of device that drug dealers used to signal aircraft by sending out a low-range signal for the correct alignment to drop a shipment of drugs.
Sheriff Lorance Lumpkin was later charged with dogfighting and other illegal activities. Rumor had it he had ties to the local Dixie Mafia group drug cartel although nothing was ever proven. He died in 2007. Norman Ladner, Sr. died in 2003.
Norman's case remains unsolved.
Over Thirty Years On
The murders of Kevin and Don remain unsolved. The Ives and Henry families have accepted they will likely never get justice for Kevin and Don. Linda Ives still believes that the boys were killed after stumbling upon an illegal drug drop or deal.
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| Kevin's final resting place (source: Find a Grave) |
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| Don's final resting place (source: Find a Grave) |
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