transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] When a hunter living on a remote Montana homestead went missing, authorities believed he'd just gotten lost in the woods. But when more facts emerged, along with a gruesome discovery, it began to look less like a missing person, and more like an execution. That's next on Blood Trails. On an overcast night in October of 2011, a Montana sheriff named Leo Dutton stepped in front of local media cameras to deliver some troubling news.

Speaker 2:
[00:34] 911 received a phone call from Forest Service Law Enforcement that up in this area, they were doing an area check and had discovered some bags alongside the road and found what they thought was bones.

Speaker 1:
[00:49] The site was near a campground about 14 miles west of Helena on the east side of McDonald Pass. Bones aren't necessarily unusual at a Montana campground, especially during hunting season. But that's not what made those Forest Service officers dial 911. Later that evening, County Coroner Mikey Nelson stepped in front of those same cameras and made a shocking announcement.

Speaker 3:
[01:14] It was my observation that we had human remains here. Because of the very unusualness of it, I believe it to be some type of a homicide.

Speaker 1:
[01:24] He couldn't yet say whether those remains belonged to a man or a woman. He couldn't say how long they'd been there. He couldn't even say how many people had died. What he could say is that whoever was inside those bags had not died of natural causes. That's because they'd been hacked to pieces. Arms removed at the shoulders, legs at the knees, fingertips gone. What remained had been zipped tied together and stuffed into plastic bags. But that wasn't even the worst part.

Speaker 4:
[01:58] I'll never forget. It's just the worst thing ever that I had to tell my mom when they found that first set of remains. She asked me, Connie, can they tell if he was shot in the head? I told her, I said, mom, there's no head. Oh my God, the look on her face. I mean, to hear that about your son.

Speaker 1:
[02:19] Connie Crites had been looking for her brother since he went missing four months earlier. The coroner couldn't confirm it that night, but subsequent DNA tests revealed that those remains belonged to 48-year-old John Michael Crites. When John Michael, who went by Mike, had disappeared from his rustic cabin north of Helena, sheriff's deputies had speculated that he might have left of his own volition. But even in the hours and days after Mike vanished, Connie and her family knew that something was terribly, horribly wrong. Finding Mike's remains confirmed their worst fears, but the nightmare was far from over. Almost a year later, in September of 2012, the rest of Mike's body was discovered. A man traveling down the highway had let his dog out of his vehicle on the west side of McDonald Pass, about 12 miles from the first site. When the dog wouldn't come out of the bushes, the man went into the undergrowth and found a human head. It had been dug up and moved, but investigators found a hole a short distance away with the same kind of plastic bags and zip ties.

Speaker 4:
[03:25] They showed his skull and his teeth had been knocked out. So it was probably just one good boom. My brother fell, and then two shots to the back of the head, just like that.

Speaker 1:
[03:41] Mike hadn't just been murdered, he'd been executed. The horrific nature of the crime shocked the residents of Lewis and Clark County, but finding justice turned out to be a longer and more tangled road than anyone could have imagined. The problem was Mike had enemies and not just one. For years, he and his neighbors had been feuding over access to their properties. Tempers had flared, firearms had been discharged, and lawsuits created financial incentives for making some of those neighbors disappear.

Speaker 5:
[04:16] He said a number of things, including said that would pay, and he was right. Mike paid with his life.

Speaker 1:
[04:27] I'm Jordan Sillars, and this is Blood Trails. Who murdered Mike Crites? A place to escape the stresses of modern life, live off the land, and enjoy everything the mountains had to offer.

Speaker 4:
[05:10] He just fell in love with the land, and the unspoiled land in Montana.

Speaker 1:
[05:17] Connie didn't totally understand her brother's attraction to Montana. Colorado has mountains too, after all. But Mike's decision to build a house without running water and live by himself wasn't just about the scenery.

Speaker 4:
[05:30] He's like, no, I want to own land. And I want to live, I want to live my way, basically. So he just wanted to go do his thing and not be bothered.

Speaker 1:
[05:39] Mike liked his independence, but he was also by all accounts a hunter's hunter. It's become cliche to say that the outdoors is a lifestyle, but for Mike Crites, living alone in a cabin he built himself, it truly was a way of life.

Speaker 6:
[05:55] The first time I met Mike, extremely friendly, super nice guy, he was just like a survivor, man. He lived to hunt.

Speaker 1:
[06:03] Shane Allen met Mike in 2004 through a mutual friend. Mike and this friend had taken a trip down to Colorado and killed what Shane described as a 180-inch mule deer. That piqued Shane's interest, to put it mildly, and he joined them on one of their next hunts.

Speaker 6:
[06:19] You know, when we met him over there, he was camping on the back of this little S10 pickup. It was super simple and extremely focused on what his driving life was, and that was to learn animals and to harvest big, mature animals. He was talking about the biologies and why deer are here, and what they're doing that time of the year, what they're browsing on, just super, super detailed. I thought I knew a lot about hunting until I met Mike.

Speaker 1:
[06:48] He used that knowledge to kill a deer on this trip that most hunters would consider a once-in-a-lifetime animal. According to Shane, it was business as usual for Mike.

Speaker 6:
[06:57] And Mike, he's like, well, I got a game plan. I'm getting up at one in the morning, and I'm hiking to this ridge where he saw a deer, saw some deer way, way the heck off. It was like six miles in. And I remember that night, it was after dark, and we were starting to worry about it. Here about 8 or 9 o'clock at night, Mike comes traipsing in to camp with like 190 inch typical mule deer on his back. I'm like, gosh, he knew the game better than anybody.

Speaker 1:
[07:30] Connie told me her brother was extremely intelligent, and he leveraged that intelligence to help him kill big, mature bulls and bucks. But like all serious hunters, he didn't just care about animals so he could kill them.

Speaker 4:
[07:43] He fell in love with nature. You know, a lot of people have this, they have a bad impression of hunters, you know? Mike loved animals. He loved animals so much. And he didn't like to just kill them for fun. You know, he wanted his trophies and his records, but he didn't like to kill just for the sake of killing because he would cry talking about animals and animals dying.

Speaker 1:
[08:11] It was clear from our conversation that Connie loved her brother dearly. So you might assume that she's looking back through rose-colored glasses. But Shane told me exactly the same thing.

Speaker 6:
[08:21] Everything he did was for the betterment of the animals. Sure, he was a hunter and he wanted to harvest big critters, but you know, he would study the different grasses. And I actually got a book here that when he passed away, I went into his house. The sister asked me to go and see if there's anything that I wanted out of his house. And I grabbed a couple of things and one of them was this book here, it's Elk Ecology and Management. Oh, cool. Yeah, as I went through it, like he had read through this 500 page book about elk ecology and he'd found this seed that he wanted to plant on his property to create better habitat for animals.

Speaker 1:
[09:03] Mike was clearly intelligent, articulate and curious and he had a wide range of interests and passions, especially when he was younger.

Speaker 4:
[09:11] After high school, he became my best dance buddy. So this is the early 80s when music was awesome. So Mike and I would go dancing all the time.

Speaker 1:
[09:22] Along with muscle cars and dancing, Connie said Mike was into music, roller skating and tennis. It doesn't sound like he was exactly a homecoming king in high school, but Connie, who's only 13 months older than him, says he had a knack for making people laugh.

Speaker 4:
[09:37] He wasn't mean, but he just liked to have a lot of fun and mess with people. And back then it was all like, yeah, your mama does this. Well, yeah, no, your mama does that. And Mike was the king of the mama jokes, just like off the cuff, just the witty comebacks, just really witty, really funny, very popular. Just a fun guy.

Speaker 1:
[10:03] He had various girlfriends over the years, but he wasn't in a relationship at the time of his death. He worked in the trades mostly as a metal worker, but Connie says he really wanted to find a career in the outdoors.

Speaker 4:
[10:16] He really wanted to make a living concerning wildlife, nature. He wanted to write a book.

Speaker 1:
[10:24] He dabbled in the outfitting business, but it doesn't sound like he had much interest taking other people to his hunting spots. In the early 2000s, he also got into some pretty serious trouble with Montana fish, wildlife and parks.

Speaker 7:
[10:38] The sheriff had reported to us seeing the potential for some baiting, where there was a lot of indication that maybe that there were some bait piles. It looked to him like there were a lot of wildlife parts, whether that was carcasses and or antlers and that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1:
[10:59] That's Randy Arnold, a former game warden with Montana FWP. The information from the sheriff was enough for the wardens to obtain a warrant, and they returned to search the property on a day Mike wasn't there. Randy was one of the wardens who took part in that search, and his recollections give us a small window into Mike's life on the mountain.

Speaker 7:
[11:18] There were some salt blocks and a bunch of really dug out and scraped out areas. There were deer on site that didn't leave when we arrived. He was completely off grid. Right in the living room was like a four foot stack tall of antlers. Most of those were sheds. Before we were done, we ended up coming across a lot of documentation and some photos which indicated that Michael did a lot of hunting. I don't believe that he killed anything on site other than there was a lot of skull cap deer and bone parts.

Speaker 1:
[11:53] The wardens doubted that all those sheds and mounts had been harvested legally. That meant more search warrants.

Speaker 4:
[12:00] They had him sit outside and they went and they took all the meat out of his freezer. They took all of his VHS tapes, photo albums, tons of stuff. And it was insane. I've never seen anything like it. And of course, he calls my parents and he's just sitting there and he's crying. He's like, I don't know what's going on. And they took his life.

Speaker 1:
[12:23] In the end, Mike was hit with 15 wildlife related offenses including illegal feeding, unlawfully taken wildlife, wanton waste of an elk or deer, and unlawful possession of a game animal. But when the case went to trial in June of 2008, only one of those charges stuck. For all 14 others, either the judge dismissed them or the jury found him not guilty. I reached out to Montana FWP to obtain the case documents related to these incidents, but I have yet to hear back. Connie admitted she's not much of a hunter. So I asked Shane Allen about the one count for which Mike was found guilty.

Speaker 6:
[13:00] They had changed the law that year, so you had to have a special permit to hunt mule deer in specific units. So he had killed a mule deer in a unit that required a special permit. He didn't have a special permit. That was what I would call honest mistakes.

Speaker 1:
[13:15] Court records indicate that Mike paid $750 in fines and court fees for that misdemeanor. But in reality, he and his family paid a far higher price.

Speaker 4:
[13:26] My parents had to take out a second mortgage on their house. They spent $100,000 in legal fees. And I strongly believe that they caused my dad's heart attack because my dad was already stressed from all this fish and game stuff. But he was so stressed out about, you know, the money, the money, the money. And, you know, there's only so much he could do for Mike.

Speaker 1:
[13:47] The death of Mike's father became a wedge in Connie and Mike's relationship, which had always been strong. Connie told me she still loved her brother and fully expected to mend their relationship. In the eight months leading up to his disappearance, she'd been meaning to call him to set things right.

Speaker 4:
[14:03] But the thing about my brother, you think I talk a lot, my brother was a talker. And I am not even kidding, the only reason I didn't call him is because I was always like, okay, I need a two-hour block. And it is in the back of my mind for eight months. Oh man, I really need to call Mike. Oh, I really need to call Mike. And I never, I never made the time. And then, you know, we get this call that he's missing and I'm like, are you kidding me? And so I beat myself up about that.

Speaker 1:
[14:33] What happened is heartbreaking, but it also shines a light on one of the more humorous aspects of Mike's personality. Connie wasn't the only one to mention Mike's propensity to talk. Shane also described seeing Mike's caller ID and preparing himself for a multi-hour conversation.

Speaker 6:
[14:51] He was portrayed as this loner. He wasn't really a loner. I mean, you get it. You become friends with him and man, you got a connection.

Speaker 1:
[15:00] Mike had his share of troubles on the mountain even before the real trouble began. But at his core, he wanted to preserve the animals and wilderness he loved. For him, that work started on his own property. He felt a keen sense of responsibility for what happened on his 80 acres. And knowing that facet of Mike's mindset is critical to understanding the debacle that happened next. Mike's property was situated near the top of a mountain and had previously been part of a larger ranch. In the 1970s, the ranch owners sold their land in large chunks, which were further subdivided into 20-acre parcels. Mike bought four of these parcels, but he wasn't the only one. Others purchased land of varying acreage and they were all supposed to access their properties via an easement called Turk Road. An easement is a legal agreement that gives someone the right to access private property. Turk Road was included as an easement in the deal between the original ranch owner and the subdividers. It allowed for a 60-foot public easement for ingress and egress to the property. Turk Road ran from the bottom of the mountain all the way up to Mike's place, but it wound its way through several other properties before getting there. There were also parcels beyond Mike's place that were accessed through various two tracks, logging roads, and private driveways. Here's where things start to get hairy. Easements are notoriously difficult to litigate. There are sometimes nothing more than informal agreements between private landowners, and even if they're written down, it's not always clear if they continue to apply after those original landowners sell their parcels. Combine that lack of clarity with a strong desire for privacy, and you've got yourself a potentially explosive situation.

Speaker 8:
[16:54] The area that we're talking about is up on the side of a mountain, and the people that live there do so purposely. They really don't like a lot of neighbors. They like their solitude, and the person that we're talking about, Mike Crites, was one of those people.

Speaker 1:
[17:13] That's Lewis and Clark County Sheriff Leo Dutton. He told me that from around 2009 to when Mike went missing in 2011, he and his deputies were called up to that area multiple times to resolve conflicts over access.

Speaker 8:
[17:25] Where this started was a dispute over access to Mike's property. Here was John Mehan, Katie Wetzel, owned the property that they claimed that no one had an easement through their property. We will get calls from Mike that in the wintertime, John would plow his road shut, that he couldn't get past the road. Then we would get calls that they were shooting firearms at each other.

Speaker 1:
[17:56] In 2008, a couple named John Mehan and Katie Wetzel moved into a property below Mike's on Turk Road. They believed that contrary to the agreement that had been in place since Mike moved there in the late 90s, they could block the portion of Turk Road that ran through their property. They dug ditches, shoveled snow and even stacked up hay bales across the road and coated them with water so they'd freeze. Mike did not take kindly to this, and he and John ended up nose to nose or gun to gun on multiple occasions.

Speaker 8:
[18:29] There was a confrontation right down pretty close to Mehan's property, where there was an argument about access, and they're shouting back and forth, not for TV language. Mike claims that he goes to leave, and he hears a bullet whizz over his head, hears the bang, and says, the only one that could have done it was John.

Speaker 1:
[18:57] Sheriff Dutton says they took a report but weren't able to find a bullet or shell casings to corroborate Mike's story. Meehan leveled the same kinds of accusations against Mike, but as far as I know, he never recorded one of these incidents on video. But Mike did.

Speaker 9:
[19:14] Tuesday, March 1st, and we got John Meehan, apparently going snowmobile crazy again here. Tracks come right down from his driveway, go right up the road that he's continued to try to pile snow in front of and block and etc.

Speaker 1:
[19:36] That's Mike. He usually used his camcorder to observe animals, but as the conflict with his neighbors intensified, he also used it to record the goings on along Turk Road. In the video, which you can check out by watching the YouTube version of this episode, he appears to be near John Meehan's driveway. He begins to walk away as he speculates that Meehan had been trespassing on his property, which is when a shot rings out.

Speaker 9:
[20:05] Well, I'm hoping you guys just heard that shot. I just heard a bullet fly over my head. I see horses running there. So we'll see if that's enough to make you, make you law enforcement types do something. Hope you will. This is not getting any better up here.

Speaker 1:
[20:39] You can't hear the bullet whizz past in the video, but the way Mike's breathing gets heavier indicates that his stress levels are rising. What's more, Mike wasn't the only one to accuse Mehan of this kind of behavior.

Speaker 5:
[20:53] We were consistently confronted by this neighbor.

Speaker 1:
[20:57] Gloria Flora and her husband Mark moved into another property in this area around 2004. When she left her job as the supervisor of the Lewis and Clark National Forest, she and Mark purchased 160 acres just north of what would become John Mehan's place. Like Mike, they'd moved up that mountain for the wildlife, the solitude, and the challenge of living somewhere genuinely wild. Gloria spoke with me about how she and her husband found themselves in Mehan's crosshairs just like Mike did.

Speaker 5:
[21:29] The first time my husband and I encountered the owner, he was drunk on our driveway, and my husband asked him what he was doing there, and he said, I'm your new neighbor, and I want to use this road, and I want to use your property for my recreation. And we said, sorry, this is, you know, there are very strict limitations on this property because of the conservation easement. And he said a number of things, including would be sorry, and he also said that would pay. And he left.

Speaker 1:
[22:15] At first, Gloria says, John Meehan tried to block access along Turk Road using the same tactics I've already mentioned. But eventually he put up a gate, and the alternate route to the floor's property took them an extra hour along 12 miles of logging roads and two tracks. They contacted a sheriff's deputy who advised them to put up cameras to document any illegal activity. Those cameras ended up being a critical part of this story, but we'll get to that in a minute. The floor has decided to build their own driveway to avoid Meehan's property entirely. But instead of mollifying the man, it actually seemed to make things worse.

Speaker 5:
[22:51] Then once we were using the driveway, that's when they would shoot at us. There was one time he used a rifle. I was driving out of my new driveway, not on his property, and he shot right over my car. You could just hear it go right over the car. The way that we had to do to use our driveway was, you pre-dialed your phone to 911, you had a loaded gun on your lap, and you had a camera or some other video recording device every time you left the property.

Speaker 1:
[23:28] This was supposed to be the Flora's dream home, where they'd retire to enjoy the fruits of long and successful careers. But they had no idea who would move in next door, and I can only assume neither did Mike.

Speaker 5:
[23:41] Mike was going through the same thing. I don't want to make this about us. We're talking about Mike, but we know that Mike was not exaggerating. We know that Mike was not conflating some other issues or past trauma or whatever you want. This was very real. These were angry, nasty encounters.

Speaker 1:
[24:07] Shooting at someone is a serious crime, even in Montana. Gloria says she and Mark kept the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff's Office apprised of everything Meehan was doing, but they were frustrated by what they saw as a lack of action.

Speaker 5:
[24:20] You know, and we were keeping the local authorities informed, and the local authorities tried to make it out like, oh, this is Hatfield and McCoy. You know, these are just two neighbors. And it's like, dudes, this isn't Hatfield and McCoy. It's like Hatfields, period.

Speaker 1:
[24:37] I asked Sheriff Dutton about this, and he said they always responded when they got a call from either party up on the mountain.

Speaker 8:
[24:43] Each would call with their own story. We would investigate it multiple, multiple times. Mike felt and had had tracks where John had stalked him on a four-wheeler. Then John Meehan would say that Mike was stalking him. And it was difficult for us. We can't take sides. We operate off of what evidence is present.

Speaker 1:
[25:11] Sheriff Dutton pointed out that, as in any jurisdiction, he isn't responsible for charging someone with a crime. He can arrest someone for an obvious instance of lawbreaking, but it's up to the county attorney, in this case, a guy named Leo Gallagher, to actually prosecute. When it came to access disputes, Sheriff Dutton said that Gallagher didn't want to get involved.

Speaker 8:
[25:32] When John flout in Mike's access to his property, we responded, took pictures, and referred that to the county attorney. Then the county attorney would look at that and decide not to prosecute.

Speaker 1:
[25:46] Now, it's important to note that Mike wasn't totally innocent when it came to neighborhood conflicts.

Speaker 5:
[25:52] A neighbor down at the bottom of the road was looking for her dog, and she drove up to Mike's area with her kids in the car looking for her dog. She's not there to do evil. Well, Mike got rude with her, got in her face. What are you doing here? And he's wearing his gun. She was very scared, and the kids were in the car. Mike was wrong. He shouldn't have done that.

Speaker 1:
[26:16] Mike agreed that he shouldn't have acted the way he did, and he told the Flores he'd drive down and apologize. Unfortunately, Mike's peace offering was not taken in the spirit it was given.

Speaker 5:
[26:27] Her fricking husband comes out and takes a swing at Mike. It's like, you jerk, you knew he was there to apologize.

Speaker 1:
[26:34] The sheriff's office wasn't called in this situation, as far as I know, but the law did eventually catch up to Meehan. In November of 2010, about seven months before Mike went missing, Mike called the Flores because he'd gotten stuck on the road and needed help. But when they arrived, they saw Meehan pointing a gun at their friend.

Speaker 5:
[26:54] You know, he had Mike pinned down on the road because he's above him, he's in a superior position with a rifle pointing right at Mike. And his wife, who's pretending she's hunting, has actually gone across the draw and is watching everything that's transpiring through her rifle scope.

Speaker 1:
[27:14] Meehan was arrested and charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon, but he struck a deal and pleaded guilty to negligent endangerment, a misdemeanor. The case was dismissed by a judge two years later. He ended up paying $85 in court fees. Connie didn't live in Montana while this was happening, but she'd hear bits and pieces from her brother. I asked her, looking back, how she explains the way this situation was allowed to spiral so far out of control.

Speaker 4:
[27:41] It's small and it's the county sheriff's department, right? The county is huge. This county is huge. So there was a little bit of that. There was a little bit of, we don't like this guy anyway. Then I'll be honest, there was a little bit of, oh shoot, this guy's a loner, nobody cares about him.

Speaker 1:
[28:02] This wasn't true, of course. Mike had a family who loved him dearly and friends around the country who he spoke with regularly. One of those friends, Shane Allen, can't help but think if this conflict had been handled differently, his friend would still be alive.

Speaker 6:
[28:18] It breaks my heart that he had went to authorities so many times trying to resolve it and continually got told, we're not getting involved. Unfortunately, there's no accountability there, and I don't know who ultimately who should have been the ones that got involved from a legal standpoint to make sure that it never got to the point that somebody lost their life.

Speaker 1:
[28:40] The problem for law enforcement was that the disagreements on that mountain went beyond Mike Crites and John Meehan. Other disputes had erupted over the years, some of which had also escalated to include firearms. Like the Flores, these individuals had purchased property they hoped would become their picture-perfect retirement getaway, and they weren't about to let a loner like Mike Crites get in their way. That's next, after the break. Part Three. Missing. Mike went missing on Sunday, June 26, 2011, and Gloria and her husband were two of the last people to speak with him before his disappearance.

Speaker 5:
[29:27] Mike called us on a Sunday morning, around nine o'clock, and our daughter-in-law and grandkids were visiting. And it was the first time that they visited since before 2008 because we won't let them come to the property because of the danger.

Speaker 1:
[29:50] Gloria was making brunch for her grandkids, but when she heard her husband talking to Mike, the couple stepped into another room and Mark turned on the speakerphone.

Speaker 5:
[29:58] And Mike said, look, Ford showed up here last night screaming, beaten on my door, beaten on the walls, telling me I better open the gate or else. And he said, I told him to, you know, it was dark and Mike's wolf dogs were going crazy. And he said, I told him to come back at 10 o'clock this morning. Can you come up and be with me when he shows up? To witness what's gone on.

Speaker 1:
[30:28] Mike was referring to another neighboring property owner named Leon Ford. Ford lived in Washington state with his wife, but he'd purchased two parcels higher up the mountain from Mike's place. The easiest way to access his property was to use a road that ran through Mike's. Ford believed he had the legal right to use that road, but Mike disagreed and the sheriff's deputies had been called to settle a dispute in 2007. As with John Meehan, both men claimed the other had pulled a firearm, and Mike accused Ford of cutting open one of his gates. There was no love lost between Ford and Mike, but since Ford only visited his property every few years, the conflict wasn't as intense as with Meehan. Still, it put the Flores in an awkward position. They wanted to support their friend, but they didn't want to be hypocrites. They couldn't back Mike in blocking access through his property while they were engaged in a legal battle to stop John Meehan from doing the same to them.

Speaker 5:
[31:25] And we said, you know, Mike, we're in the middle of this god-awful lawsuit. We don't know if you're in the right, and we're just sitting down to Sunday brunch with the kids.

Speaker 1:
[31:35] They advised Mike to record his conversation with Ford and let them know how it went. Gloria said Mike seemed annoyed that they refused his request, which is why they weren't concerned when they didn't hear from him the next day. But then something happened that sent them running up the road to check on their friend.

Speaker 5:
[31:53] Our daughter-in-law, Arrow, she started yelling in the afternoon. She said, Oh my God, there's wolves. There's wolves. There were wolves. At our driveway, our little Yorkshire terrier went out the gate. One of the wolves grabbed my terrier by its head and ran.

Speaker 1:
[32:13] Mark ran from his house, grabbed the nearest stick and gave chase. The wolves were running back towards Mike's place and thankfully they dropped the terrier after about a quarter mile. The small dog was unharmed, but Mark quickly realized that those weren't ordinary wolves.

Speaker 5:
[32:28] And then Mark sees the collar and then he recognizes these. He said, Oh shit, these are Mike's dogs.

Speaker 1:
[32:34] Mike owns several high content wolf dogs that he kept in a fenced yard on his property. You can see images of these dogs in the Case File for this episode and it's clear that he loved them and took care of them. The reason seeing those dogs set off alarm bells is that in all the years the Flores had lived next to Mike, he'd never let them run free on the property.

Speaker 5:
[32:56] He said, Yeah, I tried to call Mike earlier to find out what happened yesterday and there was no answer. So he goes over to Mike's and the front door is open and it's like there's no Mike. And Mike always had his phone with him. Mike's not answering the phone, Mark's yelling, walking around, no Mike. All of Mike's vehicles are there. No Mike.

Speaker 1:
[33:22] Gloria said that Mike fed his dogs by walking through the back door of his house, not by opening the gate to the yard. But when Mark walked behind Mike's house, he saw that the gate was wide open.

Speaker 5:
[33:34] Mike doesn't do this. He would never leave without telling us or making arrangements to take care of his dog. And he would never let his dogs out.

Speaker 1:
[33:44] They called Sheriff Dutton, who sent deputies up to investigate. He told me that initially they weren't overly concerned.

Speaker 8:
[33:51] We began to look, as we always do and did, but didn't find him. But we weren't alarmed because of past practice of he was probably out in the hills hunting or he was hunting sheds.

Speaker 1:
[34:06] Hindsight is 2020, so given what happened, it's easy to criticize the sheriff for his initial assumption. Still, Gloria and Mark had communicated how strange it was to see Mike's dogs outside the fence. They also noticed that Mike's car was still in his driveway, which they told Connie when she called.

Speaker 4:
[34:25] First, I called the sheriff and he's like, he just went on a walkabout and, you know, his dogs aren't there. And I'm like, oh, wait a minute. He doesn't take his dogs on the walkabout when his vehicles are there, you know.

Speaker 1:
[34:38] The sheriff's office launched a search effort on June 30th, four days after anyone had heard from Mike.

Speaker 8:
[34:45] I launched a three-week extensive search using helicopters, dogs, volunteers to search every piece of the property that we could find. And we brought in sent dogs to look for maybe a cadaver or things like that and just nothing. I was one day in a helicopter, flew slow, methodical, grid searched over the property, nothing. Just nothing turned up.

Speaker 1:
[35:15] Connie had been communicating with the sheriff from afar for about a week, but she felt like he wasn't really considering the possibility that something more nefarious might have happened to her brother.

Speaker 4:
[35:25] I just felt like, I don't think they're taking this seriously. So we just got in the car, me and my boyfriend and my mom. I'm just like, we're driving to Montana.

Speaker 1:
[35:34] Connie wasn't able to talk to anyone at the sheriff's department when they arrived, but she saw a news van parked outside the office and knocked on the door.

Speaker 4:
[35:43] So they came out and I'm like, hi, my name's Connie Crites and my brother's missing and yada, yada, yada. And the reporter was like, oh, my goodness, she says, I was just here trying to talk to Sheriff Dutton and nobody will talk to me. And I said, I'll talk to you. And then boom, wow, now we need a search party, right? You know, I think this is, you know, he's been missing for almost two weeks at this point, right?

Speaker 1:
[36:06] The sheriff had sent out search and rescue and by July 4th, detectives had also interviewed John Meehan and his wife. But Connie still had reason to believe the office wasn't taking the case as seriously as she would have hoped.

Speaker 4:
[36:20] We go up there, we get in his car that he drives all the time, and my husband reaches over, opens the glove box, and there's Mike's wallet. It's like, oh, yeah, okay, no, he's not on a walkabout.

Speaker 1:
[36:39] Nothing else seemed to be amiss at Mike's place and the cadaver dogs hadn't found anything on his 80 acre property. They also hadn't found any sign of a struggle in the yard or in the cabin, though the sheriff admitted that Mike wasn't the tidiest person, so it was tough to tell. As the official search came to an end, Connie's feeling of dread grew.

Speaker 4:
[37:01] For a while, I thought he was just hurt, but then after a while, I was like, no, something happened. And it would be really hard for Mike to get hurt in the wild on his own land. I mean, like really hard.

Speaker 1:
[37:13] Connie told me that to her, her brother seemed invincible. It didn't make sense that he'd walk off and get himself hurt or killed. So as soon as she learned more about Mike's conflict with John Meehan, her mind took her to some pretty dark places.

Speaker 4:
[37:28] Honestly, we're thinking it's John Meehan who has done something to Mike. This is really gruesome. But you know, Meehan did own sled dogs. And Mark and Gloria, shortly after Mike went missing, they had heard all kinds of commotion from these sled dogs and then a big fire and everything. There was even, you know, because there were no remains at this point, right? There was even some talk of, you know, oh, they killed Mike, they cut him up, they burned him, they fed him to the dogs. I mean, it was just a bunch of morbid, gruesome stuff. But, you know, that's the thing, you've got no remains.

Speaker 1:
[38:10] That might sound like an overreaction, even given the circumstances. But Connie wasn't the only one who feared the worst. Shane Allen told me that even before he went missing, Mike shared his sister's fear of what was coming next.

Speaker 6:
[38:24] The last few years, the last few years of his life, you know, he was fearful. He knew how serious it was, and he knew that there was a chance that they were going to try to take his life. I went up to his property and actually went archery elk hunting with him. He was, you know, always kind of looking, always watching, thinking that, you know, there was eyes on him. And that was, it was actually really sad to see. And then ultimately what happened, you know, was was exactly what he thought was going to happen.

Speaker 1:
[38:58] Part four, the investigation. You may have noticed that in a lot of the stories we cover here on Blood Trails, the victim doesn't have any real enemies. Hunters and anglers are a congenial group and they don't tend to make other people want to kill them. But as you've heard, Mike had already been shot at on at least one occasion. John Meehan had expressed real animosity towards Mike. So even before Mike's remains were discovered in October of 2011, investigators went knocking on Meehan's door.

Speaker 10:
[39:29] Mike Crites had a number of conflicts up there. There were a lot of different reports about incidents. So when you brought up Mr. Meehan, the Sheriff's Office had focused a lot of time on him as a suspect in this case.

Speaker 1:
[39:45] That's Shane Shaw, a veteran investigator with the Montana Division of Criminal Investigation, who worked the scene where Mike's remains were first discovered, and later worked to find Mike's killer. He told me that the Sheriff's Office did a tremendous amount of work trying to find evidence that would pin the crime on Meehan. They interviewed both him and his wife, tried to track his movements on the day of Mike's disappearance, and executed search warrants on his home.

Speaker 8:
[40:10] We got a search warrant and a ground penetrating radar to go up on John Meehan, Kate Webster property, go through cement.

Speaker 1:
[40:19] Meehan didn't do much to help his case. According to court documents, as well as the people I spoke with, he engaged in some pretty suspicious activity after Mike's disappearance.

Speaker 5:
[40:29] He also got arrested for taking down our game cameras. He walks up to the game camera and takes it down and doesn't take the card out.

Speaker 1:
[40:38] Detectives had been using these cameras to monitor the area, so Meehan was charged with tampering with physical evidence in July of 2012. He and his wife had been interviewed and their property had been searched, so he knew he was under investigation. Given the timeline, it's unlikely those cameras held evidence that he killed Mike, but it was nonetheless eyebrow-raising behavior. But what's even more suspicious is what that investigation revealed about Meehan's past comments.

Speaker 6:
[41:06] He had stated that even if they find the body, they're not going to have, you know, the evidence that they need to understand how Mike was killed, basically, insinuating that, you know, he was shot in the head and, you know, they had separated the parts and all that.

Speaker 1:
[41:28] This information was revealed in an affidavit attached to Meehan's tampering with evidence case. I've reviewed this affidavit and Shane got the details almost right. Here's what it says, quote, During the weekend of June 29th to July 1st, 2012, Meehan spoke with a concerned citizen at a public event in Helena. Meehan told the concerned citizen it would be impossible for police to obtain a DNA profile from the bones located on McDonald Pass because police had not recovered a specific body part necessary to develop a profile. Although the fact that a complete skeleton was not recovered on McDonald Pass had been public, the specific body parts that were missing from the skeleton have been known only to law enforcement. The affidavit doesn't say which body part Meehan is referring to, but it very well could have been the head. You don't need a skull to extract a DNA profile, but it's possible Meehan didn't know that. If that's the case, how on earth did Meehan know Mike's skull was still missing? We know investigators found Meehan's statement suspicious because they put it in the arrest affidavit. Unfortunately for prosecutors, both the camera and the statement can be explained. Given how protective Meehan was of his property, it makes sense that he wouldn't appreciate being surveilled by law enforcement. And while certain information about Mike's remains hadn't been released by the sheriff's office, it may still have leaked out. I was told by someone close to the investigation that Meehan wasn't the only person who knew that detail about Mike's head, and officials suspected it had been unintentionally released. What's more, investigators hadn't been able to find physical evidence to prop up their suspicions about Meehan. Four months had passed between Mike's disappearance and when the first set of remains were found. The search and rescue operation hadn't begun in earnest until days after his disappearance, and Mike's house wasn't fully processed until a full week had elapsed. That was plenty of time for whoever did this to hide or destroy evidence, and Shaw told me they couldn't make the pieces fit to justify an arrest warrant for Meehan.

Speaker 10:
[43:39] There were a lot of things that were laid out there, but none of the work they did ever did anything to really put him at the scene, or none of the evidence connected him to the actual crime.

Speaker 1:
[43:53] Shaw said that Katie Wessel, Meehan's wife, was in Helena the day Mike disappeared, attending her daughter's softball game. Meehan's whereabouts couldn't be confirmed, but there also wasn't any evidence that he'd been on Mike's property the morning Mike went missing. They did find long cable ties at Meehan's house, but they didn't match the ones that had been used to secure Mike's remains. Mike was shot with a.38 caliber bullet, but similarly, they couldn't match the.357 Magnum pistol found in Meehan's home to the bullet fragments found in Mike's skull. A lack of evidence doesn't absolve someone of a crime, but other facts came to light that don't look great for Mike's neighborhood rival. We'll get to those in due course, but I don't think there's any doubt that the history of conflict on that mountain made this investigation exponentially more difficult. With so many allegations of bad behavior, it was tough to know which threads to pull, and even though deputies pulled as many as they could, none of them led to an arrest.

Speaker 8:
[44:54] We all had theories, but the theories just didn't work. We had suspects, and the theories didn't fit those suspects.

Speaker 1:
[45:04] That's how the situation remained for eight years, until Sheriff Dutton brought in a retired sheriff from Powell County named Scott Howard. Sheriff Howard passed away last year, but shortly after taking the case in 2019, he asked Shane Shaw to help him on a pro bono basis. Shaw had had a decades-long career as an investigator and, as you already heard, was involved in processing the first site of Mike's remains.

Speaker 10:
[45:30] We spent hundreds of hours working on this over the next three years.

Speaker 1:
[45:37] They reviewed the massive case file, re-interviewed suspects and persons of interest, and came to some different conclusions than the investigators who had looked so closely at Meehan. One of the first things they realized is that, whoever had dumped Mike's body had been in a serious hurry.

Speaker 10:
[45:54] Yes, they were trying to hide the remains, but it was done in haste. It was someone who was panicked, who was trying to get rid of these things, these pieces of Crites' body. This was an easy off the road spot. They were taken down the hill, away. There were some effort to disguise them, plastic bags, that sort of thing. But they didn't take the time to dig a hole and bury the main part of the body. The places where the body parts were dumped are evidence of someone that's unfamiliar with the area. There's a lot of public ground where if they'd have driven somewhere in a ravine, we probably would have never found the remains, but they were dumped right off Highway 12 in two spots, one on each side of the pass.

Speaker 1:
[46:46] Meehan had been living on that mountain for about three years. He was a big time hunter, so he was familiar with the area. He also had ATVs and other vehicles that would have allowed him to carry Mike's body into the wilderness. Why, Shaw wondered, would he drive out to a state highway and dump Mike's remains near a campsite where they were far more likely to be found? The other thing that jumped out to Shaw and Sheriff Howard was the timing of Mike's disappearance.

Speaker 10:
[47:13] Mike Crites disappeared on June 26th of 2011. That's the last day his phone was used. That's the last day anyone heard from him. And so I just said, what is special about June 26th? What happened that day? Why that day? And the event that was significant was Leon Ford showed up.

Speaker 1:
[47:39] Remember, the morning Mike went missing, he'd called the florist to ask that they attend a meeting he had planned with Leon Ford. Ford was in town to spray weeds on his property as part of an agreement he had with Lewis and Clark County. He didn't live on that property, but he'd agreed to keep his weeds under control. According to Mike, Ford had arrived in town the day before, driven up to Mike's property and knocked on his door. He was angry because Mike had locked a gate on a road that led back to Ford's property. This was the same road they'd fought about four years earlier in June of 2007. During that disagreement, Ford had cut a lock on that gate and was in the process of replacing it with his own when Mike confronted him. According to a complaint Mike filed with the Sheriff's office at the time of that incident, Ford pointed a handgun at him. Then Mike said, Ford had shouted, you'd better run when Mike retreated. Here's Ford explaining his side of that story.

Speaker 11:
[48:33] When he stepped out, it was a hunting rifle with a scope on it. And as he started to walk toward me, he cradled it across his body into his right hand, didn't point it at me, but he was, all he would have to do is lift it up. As he got closer and still no talking, I just pulled the gun out and down the back of my leg. He didn't see it.

Speaker 1:
[49:04] Ford returned to the gate three days later and saw that it had been welded shut. He kicked the gate until the welds broke and went back up to his property. The next day, Mike was served an order signed by a Lewis and Clark County judge ordering Mike to allow Ford to use that road. There is some disagreement about whether the judge made the right call here, but there's no question that Mike was served with the order. With this history in mind, you can see why four years later, Ford would be upset that the gate once again was closed. But you can also see why Mike might be nervous about the meeting planned for the next morning. He was already worried about the neighbors who lived on that mountain, and now here's another guy showing up out of the blue who he says had pulled a gun on him. He didn't know if Ford might do the same thing again, so I have no doubt that tensions were high as the 1030 meeting time approached.

Speaker 10:
[49:56] When you look at that, that seems to be the incident that set this off.

Speaker 1:
[50:02] The next day rolled around and phone records show that Mike called a friend of his in Billings after he spoke to the Floras.

Speaker 10:
[50:10] He tells him someone's here and he hangs up the phone and that's about 1030. So you have a conversion of events, which it's kind of unique that somebody's on the phone when someone shows up at his house, and the only vehicle that went up the road is Leon Ford's.

Speaker 1:
[50:29] We know this is true thanks to those trail cameras the Floras had set up during their conflicts with Meehan. Detectives pulled the SD cards and at 1037 AM on June 26th, Leon Ford's red 1986 Chevy pickup can be seen in a video driving up Turk Road towards his and Mike's properties. This is the same time Mike hung up the phone on his friend and told him that someone had arrived.

Speaker 10:
[50:54] So just the fact that no other vehicles were on the game camera didn't mean nobody else was up there. But we could say that Leon Ford was up there. That was the start of this that we looked at. He was there. He had motive. Crites disappears when he shows up. That's where we focused our attention.

Speaker 1:
[51:17] That's next, after the break. Part five, lies and cable ties. The timing of the meeting between Mike Crites and Leon Ford strongly suggested Ford's involvement, but it wasn't the only piece of evidence investigators found, or didn't find. Remember how Mark Flora had advised Mike to record his conversation with Ford?

Speaker 8:
[51:50] Mike had a propensity to record every conversation that he had. There was a recorder in the back of his vehicle, an old-time cassette recorder, opened with the cassette tape gone.

Speaker 1:
[52:02] It's not just that they didn't find the tape. It looked as if someone had removed the tape from the recorder. Even more suggestive was what Ford claimed to be doing on Sunday, June 26th.

Speaker 10:
[52:14] You have someone with motive, he's there, he has a meeting, we have evidence to put him there. He never denied he was there. His story changed the 28th. The sheriff's office interviewed him, and that's a recorded interview. And in that interview, he used the word Sunday, which I felt was interesting, that on Sunday he was up there spraying weeds. And when he got up there, the gate was open. When in fact, he never checked out the sprayer till Monday because he rented it from the county.

Speaker 1:
[52:47] The sprayer tank he'd rented from the county was installed on a trailer, but he wasn't towing a trailer in the trail cam footage from that day. It shows his truck driving up around 10:30 a.m. and then driving back down again around 3:30 p.m. And neither of the videos depicts any kind of trailer. He changed his story later to say that he had actually spent those five hours using a metal detector to look for nails on his property. It's of course not unusual to misremember dates, but only two days had passed between Ford's initial interview with detectives and the day in question. The idea that Ford could mix up what he did on Sunday and Monday when he was asked by law enforcement on Tuesday was a tough pill to swallow.

Speaker 10:
[53:29] The other thing was is the sheriff's office had taken photographs of tire prints in the mud behind Crites' house, but he explained that he went back there to spray weeds because Mike had asked him to.

Speaker 1:
[53:42] This is what he claimed to be doing the next day on Monday, June 27th. According to him, his first meeting with Mike on Saturday had been cordial, and Mike had actually asked him to spray the weeds on his property. Here's Connie.

Speaker 4:
[53:57] You know, I caught Ford lying to me because I was trying to play Nancy Drew in the very early stages, and so I had gotten Ford's number, and I called him. We were on the phone for 45 minutes. He puts it on speaker, puts his wife on there, and he's like, oh yeah, me and Mike, blah, blah. Yeah, we were, you know, I was talking to him about, you know, I pulled up a bucket and we're talking, and you know, I told him that I was gonna be spraying weeds and that I'd be happy to spray his weeds, and he said, oh yeah, that'd be really great, and blah, blah, you know, and I'm just like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:
[54:32] This might not sound like a big deal, but if you know someone who's passionate about native grasses and non-toxic solutions for weeds, I think you can see where Connie is coming from. And she wasn't the only one to mention this to me.

Speaker 5:
[54:44] And we had a serious issue with weeds, and Mike was really good on non-toxic blends for suppressing weeds.

Speaker 1:
[54:54] Ford also claimed that he had made multiple trips with the weed sprayer on June 27th, but the trail cam footage only showed him driving up at 2:50 p.m. and then returning about an hour and a half later. The tank is translucent, so investigators could see it was only half full when Ford went up and the level hadn't decreased significantly when he went back down. What's more, the county weed inspector, a guy named Mike Bacon, told investigators that he didn't think Ford had sprayed at all when he checked the tank on June 28th. He said he didn't smell any weed killer and the gas tank on the pump was still full. You might also be wondering how Ford drove his truck and weed sprayer up to his and Mike's properties if that gate Mike had installed was still closed. Here's how Ford explained that one.

Speaker 10:
[55:44] On the 26th, he said he never saw Mike. He got up there, the gate was open, this story of the gate's open. Well, he must have listened to me.

Speaker 1:
[55:53] The problem is the gate hadn't just been opened. It had been cut down and the cross arm had been thrown down the hill. Ford said he thought Mike had done that, which didn't make much sense to Gloria.

Speaker 5:
[56:07] A person who doesn't have a lot of money and who does a lot of metal work and stuff is not gonna take a perfectly good length of pipe and throw it down the hill. And Mike is not gonna cut his own gate. So it was clear to us that there was foul play.

Speaker 1:
[56:27] Ford denied destroying the gate, but Shaw says he did initially admit to cutting the center post that was still sticking up out of the ground.

Speaker 10:
[56:35] So what you're gonna postulate here is that somebody went up there and tore the gate down before Ford got there, but left a steel post in the middle of the road that Ford then had to cut. It's because Ford said he cut that post down, and then later he kind of changed that story, but that was what he said initially.

Speaker 1:
[56:59] Ford's story seemed just a little too far-fetched, and even in those early weeks and months after Mike disappeared, Lewis and Clark County detectives took a hard look at the man from Washington State. They even traveled out to his home to interview him on January 9th, 2012. That interview lasted three hours, and investigators said Ford and his wife changed their story twice. By the end of it, investigators noted, quote, it was apparent to detectives that the Fords were being untruthful in their statements to law enforcement. Sheriff Dutton told me that interview with Ford and his wife was the closest they came to solving the case in those first few years.

Speaker 8:
[57:40] I felt his wife almost confessed to it. She was just close, but the detective didn't feel like going further. So I can't fault him, I wasn't there. But that's why I say they came close.

Speaker 1:
[57:55] They weren't able to secure a confession in that interview, but Sheriff Dutton didn't give up. He brought in several retired investigators over the years, and as you already heard, Sheriff Jackson and Shane Shaw were the final two. When they agreed to take the case, they knew they needed to find hard physical evidence connecting Ford to Mike's murder. That started with going back to the closest thing they had to a crime scene.

Speaker 10:
[58:19] With the body were zip ties, and these are huge, they're like 175-pound tensile strength zip ties. At the time, you couldn't buy those. At least I had never seen any that big at Home Depot or Lowe's or the local hardware stores. That's what I told the sheriff's office when we were doing the initial work on that. As I said, these zip ties are worth following up on.

Speaker 1:
[58:47] And follow up, they did.

Speaker 10:
[58:48] Platt Electric was the company that could order those in. They didn't have them on the shelf. And they didn't either out in Washington. They were a shelf item at the naval base out there. In fact, Leon Ford had checked some of those out.

Speaker 1:
[59:06] Ford had served as a Master Chief in the Navy. And though he wasn't a seal himself, he had reportedly gone on missions with the Special Forces as a demolitions expert. He had retired by 2011 and was working as a Safety Officer for Chugach Industries at Whidbey Island Air Force Base in Oak Harbor, Washington. Chugach Industries had a warehouse where authorized personnel could check out gear and equipment. Among the shelf items at this facility were the distinctive zip ties found on Mike's remains.

Speaker 10:
[59:36] The number on it was traced to a batch that included ones sold to Platt Electric. And in that time frame that Leon Ford checks them out.

Speaker 1:
[59:47] Records at the facility indicated that on February 16th, 2011, Ford had checked out 24 of these cable ties. But it was unclear why. Ford's work as a Safety Officer did not require the use of such heavy duty ties, and records did not specify the project for which Ford withdrew them. This was one of the most critical pieces of physical evidence connecting Ford to Mike's murder. But it wasn't the only one. Cat hair was found inside one of the plastic bags that held Mike's remains, and the Fords had taken a cat with them on their trip to Helena. Shaw told me they weren't able to do a DNA test to confirm it was the same cat, but that was nonetheless suspicious. Mike had also been shot with a.38 caliber handgun, and investigators retrieved a Ruger.357 Magnum, a Colt.380 Semi-Auto, and a Smith & Wesson 9mm from Ford's residence.

Speaker 10:
[60:42] I've worked on a lot of death investigations, and I don't recall ever seeing a case where someone was shot in the head twice. And my own opinion is, is that someone, one who's very experienced with a gun and has a little more warrior mentality, I think it is more likely fit with a man who'd gone on missions with the Navy SEALs, and a guy who was a ski instructor that happened to live down the hill.

Speaker 1:
[61:09] In addition, they looked closely at Ford's cell phone data to try to track his activity on the day Mike disappeared. Ford had made calls after he drove up to Mike's place. The cell tower his phone used was consistent with him being in that location, and Ford himself had admitted to driving up to his property on that day. But Ford had also called his wife twice after he drove back down the mountain around 3.30 that afternoon.

Speaker 10:
[61:35] His call pinged off the cell tower that we hit when we made a call from Highway 12 and the road that would go by the Fort Harrison. It also went up to Bird's Eye where the property was.

Speaker 1:
[61:47] Bird's Eye and Fort Harrison are both along the quickest route between Ford's property and Highway 12, which leads to McDonald Pass and the locations where Mike's remains were buried. Ford and his wife also connected for another call, this time around 5 p.m. along a road west of Helena.

Speaker 10:
[62:04] Scott Howard actually drove it, put a timer on and drove the truck, his pickup from the game camera up McDonald Pass and over the top to the second dump site and back to the first one and back to William Street Bridge and allowing for 15 or 20 minutes at each site that he found that that time frame fit that.

Speaker 1:
[62:29] Even the route the Fords took on their return trip to Washington was strange. McDonald Pass is along a major state highway and a much easier route if you're pulling an RV. But the Fords avoided it.

Speaker 10:
[62:41] When Fords left, they didn't go back over McDonald Pass even though they had a motor home. They went over Flesher Pass to Lincoln. And I'm sure they provided an explanation for that, but it seemed like they avoided those dump sites.

Speaker 1:
[62:56] After seeing all this evidence, Lewis and Clark County Attorney Leo Gallagher made a decision. On September 11th, 2020, over nine years after Mike was brutally killed, an affidavit was filed accusing Leon Ford of deliberate homicide and tampering with physical evidence. He was arrested about a month later.

Speaker 10:
[63:15] Ultimately, you have a whole set of circumstantial pieces of evidence that it's unlikely that anyone else would have fit all of those. When you take one piece of evidence, it doesn't prove much, but when you take multiple pieces of evidence and you add motive, opportunity, all of a sudden, you can start to rule out almost anyone else.

Speaker 1:
[63:39] Investigators believe that Ford had driven up to Mike's property, noticed that the gate was still shut, and picked a fight with a Turk Road resident. At some point, whether on Mike's property or somewhere else on the mountain, Ford had punched Mike in the face and shot him twice in the head. Then, using what the medical examiner said appeared to be some kind of saw, he'd cut Mike into pieces and stuffed him in bags. He'd let out Mike's wolf dogs to clean up the mess from that gruesome task and driven up to McDonald Pass, where he disposed of what was left of Mike Crites. It was a compelling theory and all that evidence, the lies, zip ties, trail cam footage, guns, cat hair, and history of conflict with Mike pointed in Ford's direction. But it hadn't been tested in a court of law. And as I've been told time and again by investigators, it's not what you know, it's what you can prove. Convincing a jury of 12 that they'd arrested the right man was the prosecution's next task. And it turned out to be a taller one than you might expect. Part six, the defense of Leon Ford. Leon Ford maintained his innocence and he hired two attorneys to build his case. Palmer Huvastall from Helena and Julie Pierce from Billings. I reached out to both Huvastall and Pierce to get a better sense of their defense and to ask if Leon himself would be willing to speak with me, but neither responded. Fortunately, I was able to obtain portions of the transcripts from Leon Ford's trial. Between those documents and the people I interviewed who attended the proceedings, we have a clear understanding of the arguments they mounted in defense of their client.

Speaker 12:
[65:25] This is cause number ADC 2020-493, the state of Montana versus Leon Michael Ford.

Speaker 1:
[65:32] Leon Ford's trial for murder began with opening statements on June 1, 2023, and ran through closing arguments on June 20. The prosecution laid out all the evidence we've covered so far, while the defense tried to cast doubt on each piece. They didn't have to prove that Leon Ford was innocent or that someone else did it. They just had to sow uncertainty in the minds of the jurors to convince them that reasonable doubt existed about Ford's guilt. Shane Shaw knew this case better than anyone else, and he worried there was room for those seeds of doubt to grow.

Speaker 10:
[66:07] When you look at all the evidence, each piece individually is not enough to find anyone guilty, and it's the reason the jury had trouble with parts of this, because the defense is able to explain away or offer an alternative theory or whatever.

Speaker 1:
[66:24] They started by pointing out that investigators were never able to find a murder weapon. They had never found where Mike was murdered or even where his body was dismembered. These are some of the basic building blocks of a prosecution, but they were noticeably absent. When Leon Ford took the stand in his own defense, he flatly denied having anything to do with Mike's death.

Speaker 13:
[66:45] Mr. Ford, did you kill Mike Crites?

Speaker 11:
[66:47] Absolutely not.

Speaker 13:
[66:49] Did you dismember Mike Crites' body?

Speaker 11:
[66:52] Absolutely not.

Speaker 1:
[66:53] Then they went after the zip ties. Those ties were unusual and they were on the shelf at the Air Force Base.

Speaker 10:
[67:00] But as Shaw admitted, There's no way to say that the zip ties that were on Michael Crites' remains were the ones that Leon Ford had. You cannot do that. The defense was sure to point that out.

Speaker 1:
[67:14] Ford said he didn't remember checking out any cable ties. To bolster this claim, the defense called a man who also worked on the base named Leon Iron Moccasin. Moccasin told the jury he used those cable ties all the time. Ford's defense suggested that the person who entered the request into the computer started typing Leon, the computer auto-filled Leon Ford, and he mistakenly hit enter. They also pointed out that the numbers on the request form were used to designate both Hellermann Titan ties and 3M ties, so there's no way to know whether Ford checked out the 3M product or the ones found on Mike's body. Finally, they noted that while those ties can't be purchased at big box hardware stores, they can be ordered online. They also poked holes in that trail cam footage of Ford driving up and down Turk Road. The camera didn't pick up anyone else driving up to Mike's on the day he went missing, but the defense noted that something did trigger the camera at 1201 a.m. on June 27th. The camera took a video, but failed to capture anything moving up or down the road. The defense contended that this was actually Mike's murderer driving up to kill Mike in the middle of the night. The prosecution's theory that Ford disposed of Mike around 5 a.m. explained the apparent haste with which the holes were dug. But it definitely would have been a risky move, so it made just as much sense that the killer had struck under the cover of darkness. Hunters have more experience with trail cams than virtually anyone else, so I think it's worth weighing in here. The defense makes a big deal about how there wasn't any wind to trigger the camera, so it must have been a vehicle. But any hunter can tell you that these cameras can go off for all kinds of reasons. Birds, squirrels, or even just apparently nothing at all. They're finicky devices, and that was especially true in 2011. Unfortunately for the county attorney, the defense could point to at least one example of someone driving past that camera without their car appearing on video. After Ford's first meeting with Mike on June 25th, he'd triggered the camera around 11 pm, but his truck didn't appear on the corresponding video. That offered a strong piece of evidence that those trail cameras could be faulty, which cast doubt on the assertion that Ford was the only one near Mike's place on the day he went missing. The jury also heard from another neighbor we haven't met yet, a guy named Dennis Shaw. Dennis isn't related to Shane Shaw, the detective you've heard throughout this episode. He lived farther down the mountain from John Meehan and the Flores, and he was deposed by Leo Gallagher and one of Ford's attorneys. We obtained a recording of that deposition, which was played during the trial.

Speaker 14:
[70:06] Good morning, Mr. Shaw, thank you for being here.

Speaker 1:
[70:08] Dennis said he and Ford were friends and he described Ford as a, quote, neat person.

Speaker 13:
[70:13] I think you testified, you told law enforcement, Detective Nyland, that you thought he was honorable. Remember that?

Speaker 15:
[70:20] Yep.

Speaker 13:
[70:21] And why is that?

Speaker 15:
[70:23] If he said something, that's what it was. He had never heard seen him or heard of him or anything, lying to me or anybody else. So to me, I mean he's honorable until somebody proves him different to me. And it would be a lot of proof. Not noticed zip ties yet.

Speaker 1:
[70:45] Dennis interacted with Ford in the days after Mike went missing and Ford's attorney asked him whether the Navy man was acting strangely.

Speaker 13:
[70:53] Was he acting like a guy who just killed somebody?

Speaker 15:
[70:55] Oh, you got right. No. I mean, how can you say shit like that? I mean, how can they dream that stuff up? I mean, he doesn't have horns on his head.

Speaker 13:
[71:12] Was he acting like?

Speaker 15:
[71:14] He was acting like, yeah. He was meeting people and everybody was getting along and smiling and joking and talking shit.

Speaker 1:
[71:24] Here, Dennis is describing a cookout he hosted on Tuesday, June 28th. He had invited Ford and his wife along with John Meehan and Katie Wessel, and the three couples ate together to welcome the Fords to the neighborhood. It was the kind of party you'd expect in June in Montana, but given what had just happened to Mike and his history with some of those couples, it was easy to see something far more nefarious.

Speaker 10:
[71:49] The other thing was is there was a belief that there was a conspiracy of people that agreed to take out Mr. Crites.

Speaker 1:
[71:57] News of this cookout fueled this conspiracy, but it wasn't the only reason Mike's friends were suspicious.

Speaker 10:
[72:04] Well, there were people saying that Meehan had bragged about a military man that was going to come up here and fix this situation.

Speaker 1:
[72:12] You can hear that Shaw is skeptical, but I heard this same rumor about John Meehan from pretty much everyone I spoke with.

Speaker 5:
[72:19] He had gone to two neighbors that we personally know and said, in two weeks, a military guy is coming back up here, and he's going to take care of Mike once and for all. That was exactly two weeks before Mike was murdered.

Speaker 1:
[72:37] Sheriff Dutton admitted that 15 years makes these kinds of rumors hard to verify, but he acknowledged that they were floating around that mountain.

Speaker 8:
[72:45] There were some neighbors who wouldn't come testify that said that Meehan had said he was bringing in somebody who was really good at getting rid of people.

Speaker 1:
[72:54] One of those neighbors was apparently Dennis Shaw, and the jury heard him say as much at trial, though he wasn't as clear as prosecutors likely hoped.

Speaker 14:
[73:03] Did Meehan ever tell you that he expected Ford to come out or anybody, a military man?

Speaker 15:
[73:13] I don't know what you're saying.

Speaker 14:
[73:15] Well, did Meehan before Ford showed up that Monday, did Meehan ever tell you that he thought that Ford was coming out, or did Wessel?

Speaker 15:
[73:23] I'm pretty sure.

Speaker 1:
[73:24] The idea that Meehan and Ford were in cahoots was an obvious assumption. Ford denied it, and if John Meehan and Katie Wessel had agreed to talk to me, I assumed they would too. But it remains one of the most frustrating, most ambiguous parts of this case today. Because if Meehan really did say that, if he told his neighbors two weeks before Mike disappeared that a military man was coming to handle the situation, then this wasn't just a neighborhood dispute that got out of hand. This would have been like some kind of contract. But Dennis Shaw's on-the-record statement wasn't definitive, and without phone records, without a paper trail, without Meehan willing to admit it himself, investigators didn't have the evidence to prove the two men had ever spoken before that cookout on June 28th. The possibility of a conspiracy is a theory that Connie and her family wondered about almost immediately.

Speaker 4:
[74:20] From the very beginning, we thought that it was Meehan who was the main guy, but that Ford either did the deed or helped get rid of the body.

Speaker 1:
[74:31] Of course, Ford's defense was more than happy to talk about John Meehan. They emphasized Meehan's ongoing dispute with Mike, the violent encounters and threats. They even theorized that Mike had been cut up not to hide his identity, but to fit in a freezer. During one of the searches of Meehan's home, investigators had found a dead dog stuffed in one of his freezers. The dog had been put in a clear plastic bag, which had then been stuffed in a black plastic bag. Mike's remains, the defense noted, had been found in exactly the same manner. What's more, in the months prior to Mike's disappearance, Meehan, Wessel and Dennis Shaw had sued Mike for interfering with the enjoyment of their land. They then requested a default judgment after Mike's death. The jurors heard Dennis explain this in his videotaped deposition, which no doubt fanned the flames of suspicion against John Meehan. This could have been a risky maneuver for the defense. Pointing the finger at Meehan wouldn't do them much good if the prosecution could prove he was working with Ford. But as the defense very well knew, there was no evidence to suggest that the two men had ever met prior to that cookout two days after Mike's disappearance.

Speaker 10:
[75:45] Meehan testified in a deposition that he never met Ford until after Crites disappeared. In fact, he met him at that picnic they had up there, which was like on the 28th. I looked at all the phone records. There were no phone calls between Ford and Meehan or Meehan's wife.

Speaker 1:
[76:06] The final move for the defense was to call John Meehan and Katie Wessel to the stand. But instead of outlining their alibis or making excuses for their actions, they did something no one saw coming.

Speaker 5:
[76:18] And then the defense put them on as witnesses for the defense, and then they both pled the fifth.

Speaker 1:
[76:27] Imagine for a second how this looked from the jury's perspective. They'd been hearing about Meehan's conflict with Mike. They knew about his arrests for brandishing his rifle and tampering with evidence. And now here he was pleading the fifth and refusing to testify for fear of incriminating himself.

Speaker 5:
[76:44] And so the jury, they were hung because it's like, we're not sure who killed him.

Speaker 16:
[76:53] The trial of Leon Ford concluded Wednesday with the jury unable to reach a verdict. The official word from the jury Wednesday was that they were deadlocked, meaning that the jury in good consciousness were unable to reach a verdict, which resulted in a mistrial.

Speaker 1:
[77:09] We don't know exactly how the voting broke down. I've heard rumors about some of the jurors, and if you served on that jury, I'd love to talk with you. But I don't believe it was 11 to 1 in either direction.

Speaker 4:
[77:21] Now, this is just hearsay. I didn't talk to these people, but you know, allegedly the jurors were like, yeah, we thought he was guilty, but we didn't think it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Speaker 1:
[77:32] Still, hope remained that the man she believed killed her brother would be brought to justice. Leo Gallagher had come out of retirement to prosecute Leon Ford. Connie thought Gallagher didn't do a great job, but she believed his replacement could be more successful.

Speaker 4:
[77:47] The new county attorney, I just loved her. She just, she was like, we're going to redo this, we're going to redo this. And then I heard like six weeks later or something like that, you know, we just really feel like without new evidence, we're going to have the same outcome.

Speaker 17:
[78:05] Almost a year after his trial for deliberate homicide ended with a deadlocked jury, Lewis and Clark County prosecutors have filed a motion saying they'll no longer pursue charges against Leon Ford for the 2011 killing of John Mike Crites.

Speaker 1:
[78:22] Ford was a free man. His charges were dropped, and since that announcement in 2024, there hasn't been any official movement in this case.

Speaker 8:
[78:33] The county attorney now is reluctant to try Mr. Ford again without some substantive new evidence. Maybe the answer is right in front of us. I don't know, but that's where we're at with the case.

Speaker 1:
[78:54] Part seven, Hope. It will be 15 years this June since anyone heard or saw Mike Crites alive. It took over a decade for a suspect to be arrested for his murder and then another two for the trial to start. For the result of all that waiting to be neither an acquittal nor a conviction was for everyone involved incredibly frustrating. But that doesn't mean they're without hope. Shaw is no longer on the case. He said that solving Mike's murder will require someone to step in and own it, much like he and Sheriff Jackson did in 2019.

Speaker 10:
[79:29] And one of my requests of the sheriff's office was that we go through every piece of evidence again and submit things for more DNA work. Somebody also has to come up with the money, and it's thousands and thousands of dollars to do that. I'm not sure where that goes. I had a conversation with the sheriff at the end of July about this. And at that point, he was interested in doing that, but he had to get some budget things squared away. And so, you know, I don't know what's gonna happen.

Speaker 1:
[80:03] When I asked Sheriff Dutton about this, he said he's hopeful that new advancements in DNA analysis will provide the results they're looking for. As we saw in the Danny Howchans case we covered last season, these technologies can be powerful tools in solving cold cases.

Speaker 8:
[80:18] What didn't exist then was touched DNA. And whoever did this was very, very careful not to leave any DNA, but there's probably some we've just missed. Touched DNA had not been developed yet.

Speaker 1:
[80:34] Touched DNA is a forensic technology that allows investigators to extract DNA profiles from nothing more than a few skin cells left on an object. There are still boxes and boxes of evidence in Mike's case, and we know for a fact that DNA has been found on some of those objects.

Speaker 10:
[80:51] DNA was found that don't match any of the people that are currently connected with the case or the law enforcement officers. You know, if it's not in the CODIS system and it's not people connected, you know, it's very expensive to do some kind of genealogical work on it. There may be more items that additional DNA might be extracted.

Speaker 8:
[81:15] If we find new evidence that indicates that he's the person, then we'll try it again. Or if we find other evidence that someone else will go after them. So, it's just taken some time and I feel bad for Connie, I really do, but we've got to be successful in our next attempt.

Speaker 1:
[81:36] Connie expressed some skepticism that her brother's case will ever be solved. After so many years advocating for justice and fighting against a system that will never care as much as she does, it's tough to blame her. She didn't talk to me because she hopes the publicity from this podcast will bring Mike's killer to justice. Instead, she wants the world to remember Mike, not as the grouchy mountain man who chased people off his property, but as the little brother who made her laugh, took her dancing, and was always happy to talk for as long as she wanted to stay on the phone. After Mike died, Connie and her family held a memorial. They all wrote notes to Mike, attached them to balloons, and released them, hoping that Mike would somehow see them.

Speaker 18:
[82:22] Hey, little bro, miss you and can't believe you are gone. I will always remember the long nights chatting, dancing. You were the best dancer. Your humor, your wit, and intelligence will never be gone because I have so many memories. I love you. Say hi to dad. Your big sis, Connie. Okay, should we let them all go? Bye, Mike.

Speaker 1:
[83:03] Thanks for listening to this episode of Blood Trails. To see images from this case, including photos of Mike, his property, his wolf dogs, and a map of the area, head on over to themeateter.com/bloodtrails and click on the case file for this episode. Thanks to everyone who agreed to be interviewed. Connie Crites, Gloria Flora, Shane Allen, Sheriff Dutton, Shane Shaw, Randy Arnold, and Joe Gill, the listener who first told me about Mike's case. If you know about a case you think we should cover or have a tip about this one, send me an email at bloodtrails at themeateter.com. See you next time. Stay safe out there.