Chapter One

Rock Springs, Wyoming
 

“Blessed are the Peacemakers,
for they shall be called the Children of God.”

Matthew 5: 9

Steve Watt wasn’t supposed to be working March 18,1982, the day he was shot.  The son of Larry Leavitt, the Chief of Police in Rock Springs, had died, and this was the day of the funeral.  (Steve’s boss, Sergeant Jim Pudge, authorized a shift swap with another trooper so that Steve could attend.  He had originally been scheduled for nights.)

As he was dressing for work, Steve looked at his bulletproof vest and consciously decided he would not wear it.  He thought it would be unlikely that he would be making any traffic stops, or doing anything else that would put him in harms way.  There had been a snowstorm the day before and he would be completing crash reports all day until the funeral.  He thought he would have no need for the protection it provided.  In today’s world, no cop with good sense would ever leave home without a ballistic vest, no matter the detail.  But on that day, Steve’s hung unused in the closet.

First thing in the morning, Sergeant Pudge ordered Steve to do some ambulance inspections at Vase Ambulance Service as part of an annual qualification.  Their office was just down the street from the WHP office and Steve could think of no excuse to get out of it.  He was stuck.

The owner, Pete Vase, was disgruntled to say the least.  “C’mon, Steve,” he moaned as the trooper failed three out of four ambulances, “you can’t really expect me to pull all of these units out of service, can you?”

Steve had found something wrong with all of them.  Some had lights burned out, some had mechanical problems.

 “Well, I’m not telling you to pull’em. After all, someday I might need one of these to take me to the hospital!  But you really do need to get them fixed before I can pass you, okay?”  Steve turned and left the ambulance building without another thought.  Pete Vase, still grumbling, snatched the inspection sheets from Steve as he strolled out the door.

Craig, Colorado

Later that same day, as Steve was finishing his paperwork at the Patrol office in Rock Springs, Mark Farnham, the college-educated son of a police officer, desperately in debt to the tune of $25,000 from failed business ventures and cocaine addiction, walked into Alpine Savings and Loan in Craig, Colorado.  He was an intelligent young man with four years of military training.  As a Military Police Officer in the U.S. Army he had protected nukes in Germany, and was a decorated soldier and an expert shot with a handgun. 

Always looking for quick and easy success, Farnham had taken multiple business and personal loans from friends. But the ventures had failed, either by poor planning or, more often, just bad luck and timing.  His last venture was an advertising coupon book in Jackson Hole, offering the millions of tourists to the spectacular area great deals on lodging, meals and events.  Unfortunately, with double-digit inflation at the time, the economy had ground to a halt.  And, after borrowing yet again to start up the ad book, he sold few ads.  But Farnham had other problems—bigger problems—drugs.  Cocaine had been introduced to him while cramming for finals in his college days, and soon he was just another college drop out strung out on cocaine; selling and dealing to support his habit.

With each business failure the addiction and debt were soon out of control and Farnham, who would later claim he was desperate and too self-conscious to claim bankruptcy or ask his distant but affluent relatives for yet more help, looked for an instant and easy way out. After deliberating all night and making out a list of all of his debts (later found in his getaway car) he decided a bank robbery and a well thought out escape plan would solve his problems.  The particular bank he robbed wasn’t chosen from a list, it was just there.  A small branch of a savings bank in a mall staffed by just three women. A bank in a small northern Colorado town—providing quick access out of the state.  Just a quick jaunt on a state highway and then dirt roads all the way to Wyoming.  Perfect.

Having driven down from Jackson early in the morning, Farnham had intended to just do it all in one day and be back in Jackson by evening in time to go to work.  As he passed Rock Springs along the same route he would use to escape later, he was stopped in the roadway near the Colorado border by a migrating heard of deer—some 500 head on their way back from a winter of feeding in the alfalfa fields of western Colorado.   He had to come to a complete stop several times as the deer would not move.  Even as he tapped his horn they remained in front of him, as though intent on stopping what was about to occur.  Farnham actually thought about this delay as perhaps an omen but quickly dismissed it, tapping his horn.  They just stood there—hesitating and delaying him.  Finally he weaved his way through the thick herd and continued on.

Once he arrived in Craig, he was so exhausted from the trip he elected to wait until the next day. Already, his plans were changing for the worse.  He drove on to Steamboat Springs where he got a room and stayed overnight. During the night, still desperate and unable to sleep, Farnham stole some Colorado license plates from another car in the motel parking lot and put them on his little tan hatchback just in case someone had noticed him.

The next morning, refreshed and ready, he drove down to Craig determined to fix his financial situation.  Wearing a disguise of a pair of greasy coveralls and a green ball cap and sunglasses, the unshaven robber was shaking as he walked up to a loan officer’s desk.  He sat down and pulled open the unzipped top of the coveralls, showing the loan officer a blue steel, foreign-made .32 caliber revolver he had picked up in a pawnshop.

 “This is a robbery,” he said, knowing he had now gone beyond turning back.  Now everyone was shaking.   The loan officer and another cashier were told to fill a folded up laundry sack with cash.  It was done without question.  Farnham was careful to instruct them not to remove the last bill in any slot, as he knew this would set of a silent robbery alarm.  Sensing his fear and inexperience, they went ahead and removed every bill, indeed setting off an alarm to the Craig police.  Next, Farnham noticed a wall safe and asked the cashier to open it.  She refused, dangerously claiming not to know the combination.  She did know the combination, but felt the young man was too frightened to push the issue.  She was right.

Quickly, after the sack was half-filled, Farnham instructed the cashiers to return to their duties and act naturally.  Then Mark Farnham walked out of the bank with $10,000. Police arrived at the mall in response to the cash drawer alarm within minutes, but Farnham was already in his car.

He had planned his escape route very carefully.  Driving quickly, Farnham was out of Craig and on a dirt road leading west into the desert in short order.  Farnham knew these dirt oil patch roads from a short stint as a roughneck for a drilling company.  As Craig police officers arrived inside the mall and got to the savings and loan, Farnham was already miles away.  The customers in the bank were alarmed when the police arrived, for the whole thing had gone of so smoothly they never even knew there had been a robbery!

Farnham’s route lead him due west toward Hiawatha Camp, a dusty, abandoned ghost town near the Wyoming state line.  He was certain no one would ever see him there.  He was right. 

They saw someone else. 

Babette Tully, a Colorado Division of Wildlife biologist working in the remote area studying eagles in the Moffat County backcountry, heard the broadcast on the A.M. radio station out of Craig about the robbery and a description of the suspect.  Not five minutes later, Babette saw an orange sports car being driven by a man she thought matched the description of Farnham. As it drove past her, she called it in to the Craig Police Department, including the Oregon plates it displayed. 

Farnham, yet unseen by anyone, was also using this same route and it was only the ironic coincidence of her sighting of the other car that put Watt and the other troopers on WY-430 looking for him. That and one other bizarre twist:  The Oregon plates Tully called in on that wrong car?  They were stolen too!

Farnham finally reached WY-430, a paved state highway rarely used other than by local ranchers, antelope hunters and oilfield workers. Turning north onto the pavement, Farnham looked at the vista before him.  It was starkly beautiful, “Kinney Rim,” standing high to the east was a series of sandstone and clay buttes jutting westward.  Sheer cliffs centuries old, hundreds of feet high.  These high walls dropped into a valley and, further north, became a scrub cedar and sage-filled canyon.  The highway would take him up this canyon and eventually to the rolling hills south of Rock Springs.  Once there, Interstate 80 would take Farnham anywhere he wanted to go. 

This area of Wyoming is not nearly as well-known as the pine-forested mountains of Jackson Hole and the Teton Range.  The rugged high plains hold a stark and secret beauty still mostly untouched other than by cattle and local rock hounds.  Prehistoric arrowheads and fossils by the millions still lay in these dry and desolate hills and cliffs, along with hieroglyphics and old camp sites with rocks still charred from prehistoric campfires.  Farnham planned this route with its desolation in mind, but still knew if he was spotted, there would be cops everywhere looking for him.  Now driving north, he felt confident that he had not been seen.

Back in Rock Springs as Farnham drove north, Steve, Sergeant Pudge, and other troopers were having lunch together before the Leavitt boy’s funeral.  Steve was finishing the last delicious mouthful of a juicy, greasy chiliburger with a double load of chopped onions at the Country Kitchen restaurant on Sunset Drive in west Rock Springs. 

Their waiter, Randy Hansen, interrupted the troopers.  Hansen (later to become a Rock Springs Police Officer) said there was a phone call for any of the WHP members in the restaurant.  Steve stood up first, walked over to the cash register area and took the call.

“This is Watt,” mumbled Steve through a mouthful of lunch.

“Hi Steve, it’s Nancy at dispatch.”  Nancy Cluster, the WHP dispatcher on duty for the Rock Springs area, was passing along the “BOLO,” or Be On the Lookout, for the suspect of a robbery in Craig and, a report that the suspect may have been seen northbound near Hiawatha Camp.  Steve returned to the table and announced the news, along with the description.  The report was that a getaway car might have been seen and was occupied by one man.  The report was that it was an orange sports car with Oregon plates. 

Steve told the others he was going to “just take a quick run down there” and see what he could see.  He never thought about the vest he wasn’t wearing. 

As he passed by milepost 6 southbound, Steve stopped one car (a red Subaru matching the description), but with a teenager and his grandparents inside.  He asked if they had seen anything that might fit the description and they anxiously told him the only car they had seen was a light brown compact car about five miles farther south.

With that, Steve let these people go and continued south toward history, still not thinking that he might actually find anything.  He saw a tan Plymouth Champ with Colorado plates coming north, near milepost 18.  This car didn’t fit the description, but Steve thought he would make another quick stop and ask the driver—a lone, white male wearing a cowboy hat—what he might have seen.  He turned in behind it and followed for five miles as he waited for a moment of “dead air” to call in the plate.  Other troopers were calling in routine matters while one checked on an abandoned car on the same highway. 

Farnham now felt his heart racing as he watched in his mirror as the black and white turned around and followed him.  He knew he was caught.  The trooper in his mirror was a threat to his freedom, as he assumed the officer knew he had just robbed the bank in Craig.  Still unsure what he should do, but always the shrewd player, Farnham quickly weighed his options. 

Finally at milepost 13, Watt started to call in the stop.  He reached down and flipped on his light bar.  Farnham’s heart now pounded in his ears.

“Rock Springs, 105,” said Watt calmly into his microphone.

No answer.  Nancy Cluster missed the call because of other radio traffic and problems with the radio system.  With the statewide system, WHP dispatchers were responsible for as many as three different divisions around the state, sometimes with as many as twenty different state troopers working crashes, chases and traffic stops—all expected to share radio time.

The moment Steve turned on his red lights, Farnham made the decision to kill the trooper.  Farnham slammed on the brakes and pulled the little Champ to the side of the road, coming to an abrupt stop.  With his left hand, Farnham reached for the door handle.  His right hand held his gun.

“Rock Springs, 105, a tan Merc…”  His transmission was cutoff as Steve mistakenly called the Plymouth a Mercury.  Then his world changed forever. 

This cutoff call caused no immediate alarm except to Tracy Self.  He knew.  His time and his experience told him Steve was in trouble. 

A cop’s “sixth sense” is real.  The “sixth sense” is a phenomenon well-known to police psychologists and veteran officers.  Somehow, a type of extra sensory skill develops with time on the job.  Voice inflections, facial expressions; even the way people breathe, blink or sigh.  All of it tells a veteran cop things other people never even perceive and, usually, it’s bad stuff.  Really bad stuff. 

As Steve was calling in the traffic stop, he was forced to slam on his brakes in response to the sudden stop of the Plymouth.  He pulled in quickly behind Farnham on the shoulder.  Waiting until the patrol car had stopped, Steve shoved the transmission into “Park”.  As he did all of this he saw just a flash of what might have been a warning.  He saw a glance in the rear view mirror.  Farnham—for just a millisecond—glanced with chilled eyes into his mirror.  “Cold,” recalls Steve, “like when a lion spots the zebra he’s gonna kill.  Cold.”

With the microphone still to his mouth, Steve saw Farnham come out of the car.  Steve immediately kicked his patrol car door open.  Then he saw Farnham crouch into a two-handed combat shooting stance facing the patrol car and fire a gun without taking aim. It hadn’t yet registered to Steve what was happening.  He had no time to react. 

Steve’s head jerked backward and hit the headrest as the first bullet exploded through the windshield.  For that first instant he still didn’t realize he’d been shot.  The slug and large fragments of glass continued through, penetrated the left lens of Steve’s sunglasses and, finally, the red-hot metal entered his left eye.  It ripped through flesh but stopped, miraculously, in the last membrane separating the eye socket from the cranial cavity—keeping it from entering his brain.  The trooper’s immediate sensation was of a red curtain in front of the left side of his face.

Then the second round hit the windshield, but deflected away.  Shocked, stunned and now in horrific pain, he now clearly understood was happening.  Steve’s heart raced as he dove down across the bench seat of his Pontiac patrol car for cover, pinning his right hand—his gun hand—under his large body.  Steve’s eye was destroyed and bleeding profusely. He felt like he had been hit in the face by a baseball bat as he frantically tried to find the microphone to call for help. 

The WHP used an array of three microphones; one for the regular police radio, one for the public address speaker and another for the citizen’s band radio.  They all hung next to each other on the radio console.  In his panicked state, Steve quickly but blindly reached out—unable to look and see—and grabbed the first microphone he felt—the citizen’s band (C.B.) microphone.  He quickly tossed it down and out of the way, then frantically grabbed another.  It turned out to be the public address microphone and he angrily threw it down as well.  As precious seconds ticked away, Steve finally found the radio microphone.

Meanwhile, Farnham, in his own panic, ran back to the black and white to make sure the trooper was dead.

Steve squeezed the microphone button and screamed, “I’VE BEEN SHOT!  I’VE BEEN SHOT!  HELP!  HELP!” 

But then Farnham came around to the open driver’s side door.

As Steve took his finger off the button, Farnham aimed into the patrol car at the back of the tan uniform shirt worn by the critically injured trooper.  At point blank range he rapidly emptied the four remaining bullets from his .32 revolver into the trooper’s back, clicking several more times on empty casings. 

With his left side peripheral vision gone, Steve was blinded to Farnham’s approach and never saw him coming.  Then, he heard the first shot. With that and each successive explosion, Steve felt like a red-hot branding iron was being shoved through his body. 

The first of the four body shots ripped apart his stomach, intestines and liver.  The second stopped in his spine only a few ligaments stopping it from severing his spinal chord.  The third tore through his abdomen and stopped in his pelvis while the forth followed the same path as the third.  Later, his doctors would express amazement.  Three of his wounds should have killed him, but something stopped the bullets just before they could inflict fatal damage.  Something yet unknown, unexplained and defying any logic.

Still fighting he tried to draw his gun, but with his right arm still pinned under him, he couldn’t.  Now he was getting mad—enveloped completely with anger and rage!

 At the same time, a psychological frenzy came over Farnham when his gun was empty. He reached in and tore Watt’s radar gun from its bracket, throwing it onto the highway thinking it was the trooper’s microphone.

Steve, now seething with anger, kicked from his prone position on the seat and connected with Farnham’s groin.  As Farnham tried to run back to his car, Steve grabbed at his arm but he was rapidly getting weaker and weaker from massive internal bleeding and pain and he couldn’t hold on.  Farnham quickly jerked away and ran back to his car. 

As Farnham jumped back into his car, the enraged trooper was slowly climbing out of his.  Now in devastating pain and shock, Steve refused to consider he was dying. Instead, he became furious.  Bleeding profusely now, he slowly stood straight and erect.   

“No way!” Steve’s thoughts of revenge were building with every second.  He was quickly getting weak, but for a moment—this sheer second—the pain, the fear, the weakness and gloom were all gone. He wanted more than anything else to kill this man—to take Farnham with him.  “We’re not done yet,” he mumbled to himself aloud but quietly, “not yet.”

With weakness overtaking him, Steve drew his Smith and Wesson Combat Model 66 .357 magnum and took aim.  He steadied himself by leaning against the front left fender of his patrol car, reaching up with his off-hand and gripping his weapon tightly.  Now, the hours and hours of his training took over. 

He didn’t shoot.  Instead, he clearly heard the voices of his Field Training Officer Dave Lankford, Tracy Self and other instructors at the academy telling him he could only shoot to defend his life while under attack or, at a fleeing violent felon who might hurt someone else.  In an insulting bit of irony, as he stood there dripping blood from five points on his body and having a clear shot at Farnham sitting in the Plymouth, Steve could not legally shoot him.  Farnham wasn’t fleeing and he was no longer attacking. 

“STOP!  STOP!!”  Steve screamed!  Even as he bled, Steve sobbed and shouted at Farnham to surrender.  “DON’T MOVE!  DON’T MOVE!”

Ignoring Steve’s weakened demand, Farnham slowly slid the manual transmission into gear and started off, certain the gravely wounded officer was no threat. 

But now Farnham was fleeing.  Now, Steve could shoot him.

With the first inch of movement of the Plymouth Champ, Steve emptied all six rounds at the back of the little hatchback.  This model of gun actually stings from the magnum loads, but Watt only felt one round.  The first one.  The slug shattered the rear window of the Plymouth as the safety glass exploded.  Steve hesitated for just a moment.  “Wow!  That’s pretty cool,” he thought.  Even with all that had happened, the little boy in him found amazement in the way the safety glass in the window exploded into little pieces. 

The round continued straight forward and, amazingly, hit Farnham in the shoulder after the slug went through the back of the headrest, disintegrated and deflected downward.  Had this bullet not found the headrest frame, it would have found Farnham’s skull and killed him.  The jacket from the semi-jacketed round ripped through Farnham’s flesh.

With his own adrenalin pumping through his veins, Farnham never felt the impact but he did notice a warm and wet feeling on his shoulder and back.  Only then did he realize he’d been shot. 

Steve’s next four rounds grazed the edge of the rear window frame, with three continuing to the driver’s headrest, where two ricocheted downward and one continued forward exiting through the front windshield.  The fifth round hit the top of the backseat frame and exploded.  Farnham had fallen forward upon being hit the first time, so none of these bullets connected with him.  Later, upon examination, the path of all of the rounds hitting the headrest clearly showed they would have hit Farnham behind the chest cavity had they connected. 

Steve’s sixth round also hit the headrest and ricocheted off; sailing over the head of Farnham and into the glove box door. 

Slumping to his right and ducking, Farnham continued driving northbound.  The little hatchback slowly continued on, quickly disappearing through a cut and over a ridge.  He was gone.  Steve was alone now.  Completely alone, on one of Wyoming’s most desolate and unused highways.

Now in full shock, Steve’s heart raced. Suddenly, he was worried no one had heard his cries for help the first time he shouted on the radio.  Holding himself up as he slid down the length of the patrol car, he reached his door.  He reached inside, found the correct microphone and finally got out a second call, screaming almost unintelligibly.  Tracy Self, along with other troopers and Rock Springs Police units now responding, heard one more blood curdling radio transmission…

“I’VE BEEN SHOT SEVERAL TIMES!  THEY SHOT MY EYE!”  Then he dropped the microphone and collapsed on the pavement.
Back Home