Black White Blue: The Assassination of Patrolman James Sackett

Chapter 4

55 4 T he torrent of calls, letters, and tips on the street during the first few weeks following Sackett’s murder thinned during the summer of 1970. In the wake of even spectacular crimes such as this one, both the quantity and quality of information almost always fall off within a week or two of the event, and weeks had become months without a breakthrough or arrest in the Sackett case. Many if not most of the leads the St. Paul police were picking up were not, in any event, coming from sources on the Hill, where people were keeping their mouths shut, and what the investigators were hearing was not very helpful. Typical was the call, in late September, from the Holy Spirit Catholic School on Randolph Avenue , where a “boastful” young teacher reportedly told his students he was tight with the Black Panthers and knew who killed Sackett. When questioned by Earl Miels, however, the teacher conceded that while he did believe certain (unnamed) Panthers had been involved, he personally knew nothing about the shooting. Meantime, tensions remained high in the area. Flashing red lights drew unfriendly crowds. Squads responding to calls in SummitUniversity made quick work of their responses, getting in and out in a hurry, often with a second squad backing them up. Ed Steenberg and John LaBossiere, back walking a beat on the Hill (foot patrols had been suspended for a couple of weeks after the Sackett mur- 56 Black White Blue der), were told that certain individuals had gotten their hands on a number of cut-down .30-caliber carbines and that officers “should be careful” in the area of Cotton’s pool hall and the apartment buildings between St. Albans and Grotto. Informants told their police and FBI contacts about late-night gatherings at which “black nationalist activities ” were discussed and about “informal meetings” where “individuals discussed how to make bombs.” Ronald Reed, Eddie Garrett, and Kelly Day, another young man well known to police at the time, were among those mentioned in the reports. Then, just before suppertime on Saturday, August 22, a twopound stick of dynamite planted in a wastebasket and activated by a timer blew the door off a women’s restroom on the main floor of the Dayton’s department store in downtown St. Paul. The restroom ’s sole occupant at that moment was a forty-seven-year-old high school English teacher and Democratic Party activist named Mary Peek, who was combing her hair when the dynamite exploded and who was critically injured in the blast. Police and firefighters responding to the explosion discovered, moreover, a timer and twenty pounds of dynamite in a coin-operated locker outside the restroom; the second, much more powerful bomb, if it had exploded, would doubtless have caused dozens of casualties, mostly among the cops and firefighters. Witnesses reported seeing an African American boy or young man, wearing a woman’s wig and dress, running from a door near the restroom and locker area shortly before the explosion. Within the next two weeks St. Paul police and local FBI agents responded to bombings or attempted bombings at a Union 76 storage tank, the Midway National Bank, the Burlington Northern Railroad Building, and a Gulf Oil facility. Near the Wabasha Street Bridge, a small, soft-spoken fifteen-year-old Central High School student was slightly injured in a small explosion. His name was Gary Hogan. A wig, woman’s dress, and bomb-making instructions were reportedly found in his possession, and, despite his age, he was reported to have ties with the Panthers and other militant groups. He was soon charged with attempted first-degree murder in the Dayton’s bombing. On September 12, acting on an informant’s tip, police found a dozen cases of dynamite in a car parked in a garage behind a Dayton Avenue apartment rented by Kelly Day. The bombings were part of a wave of terroristic explosions throughout the United States and Europe at the time. Two days be- Young Men and Murder 57 fore the St. Paul Dayton’s explosion, a bomb caused a half-million dollars in damages (but no serious injuries) at the Federal Building in downtown Minneapolis. Two days after the Dayton’s blast, a massive bomb detonated in the early hours of the morning killed a graduate student at the Army Mathematics Research Center on the University of Wisconsin...