Black White Blue: The Assassination of Patrolman James Sackett

Chapter 3

204 3 W ho was Larry Clark? After more than thirty-five years of on-and-off public conversation, three separate police investigations, three grand jury hearings, dozens of media references, and a high-intensity trial in which his name was frequently invoked, Clark’s identity as well as his role in the assassination of Patrolman Sackett remained murky enough for his own counsel to raise the question in a context where it might have been evident: State of Minnesota v. Larry Larue Clark. Moments into his opening statement, public defender Tom Handley answered his own question by telling the jury who Larry Clark wasn’t. “He is not a yes man,” Handley said. “He is not a scapegoat . He is not a hateful person. He is not a follower. He wasn’t then, he isn’t now.” More to the point, Handley added a few moments later, though Clark “knew Ron Reed” and “considered him a friend,” Clark was “not his fall guy or understudy . . . or co-conspirator in this case.” Jeff Paulsen, opening the state’s case, had already linked Clark with Reed in a conspiracy to kill a police officer, telling the jury that “each one in a conspiracy is the alter ego of the other.” Clark, Paulsen said, was Reed’s “right-hand man, the person he was closest to,” and that “anything Ronnie Reed said or wanted, Mr. Clark would back it up by words and actions.” The Burden of Proof 205 The fact that both sides spent more time talking about Reed than about Clark spoke volumes about both the nearly thirty-six-year-old case and this year’s successive trials. In the thousands of pages of reports and transcripts dating back to 1970, when Clark’s name was mentioned it was almost always as half of a Reed-Clark tandem, and usually the latter half at that. Even in the recollections of old neighborhood acquaintances, Clark rarely had an extended speaking part but was rather a voice in the anti-“pig” choir. Speaking to a journalist after the trials, former police chief Bill Finney, who knew them all growing up in the neighborhood, recalled the “loud-mouthed radicals ” who hung around the Inner City Youth League and Dayton Avenue Presbyterian Church. Reed, he said, was the leader. “Clark—he was just kind of in there with them.” The task force investigators who spent almost four years trying to learn more about Clark could, in the end, add little to the state’s profile. “Clark was just Reed’s gofer,” Tom Dunaski said with a shrug. “What happened that night was the high point, his one claim to fame. After that, he helped rob that bank in Nebraska and went to prison. Then what? He came back, and he’d steal a lawn mower and buy a little crack. We had people who were into him, but he never talked about the Sackett case. He never talked much about anything. He’d mentioned robbing another bank once in a while, but that never happened. He was just a petty thief.” At trial, Clark’s lawyers would seek to shorten that bleak biography even further by removing the reference to Sackett. It was not a crime, after all, to be a cipher. Clark may have been Reed’s friend, they would argue, but it wasn’t Clark who told Trimble to make that phone call; nor had anyone placed Clark at the scene in the hour or so after Sackett’s murder. In his antipathy toward the police and the white establishment, he was one of countless young men and women who talked the talk in those days. Unfortunately for his defense, Clark didn’t have to be anything more prominent than a mostly silent partner. Aiding and abetting, after all, meant merely helping with the commission of the murder, and to be part of a criminal conspiracy you had only to agree to and in some way assist with the plan. The state did not have to prove that Clark pulled the trigger. It would be enough to prove that he had knowingly and purposely been there—as he had often been there—at Ronnie Reed’s side. 206 Black White Blue * * * Clark’s trial had gotten under way in Courtroom 840, the Honorable Judge Gregg Johnson again presiding, on April 10, 2006, five and a half weeks after Reed’s...