The murder of James Sackett

There was never any physical evidence that pointed to a shooter. The rifle was never found, no casing was recovered, and the only person charged for thirty-five years was the young woman whose voice matched the recording of the fake call. Tried in 1972, she was acquitted; she admitted making the call but said she had not known an officer would die, and she went to jail for contempt rather than name the person who told her to make it. The case was solved by people talking. The first crack came in 1994, when a KSTP television reporter found the caller living in Colorado and she admitted on air that she had made the call and that her boyfriend at the time, Ronald Reed, had been with her at the phone booth. St. Paul police reopened the case with help from the FBI; according to the Minnesota Supreme Court the investigation was formally reopened in 2002. In June 2004 she told detectives that Reed had driven her to the booth, told her to make the call and told her what to say, and that the two of them had then gone to Larry Clark's house, 102 yards from where Sackett fell. With that account in hand, investigators found others who had kept quiet for decades. A former military sharpshooter testified that days before the shooting Reed tried to recruit him to help "bring down the first pig", and said he had stayed silent out of fear for his life. A second man said he had twice carried a single-shot, bolt-action rifle for Reed and Clark, the kind of weapon forensic experts said probably killed Sackett. A federal prisoner said Reed told him killing a police officer could put St. Paul "on the map" with the Black Panthers, and that Reed confessed to him in the early 1980s. Another witness quoted Reed saying the police were killing them so they had to kill the police. A grand jury heard the caller in January 2005 and indicted Reed and Clark for first-degree murder and conspiracy. At trial she wavered, saying she remembered little and that she and Reed had been innocent agents, but prosecutors Jeffrey Paulsen and Susan Hudson argued that they did not need to prove who pulled the trigger, only the conspiracy. The jury convicted Reed on both counts after about ten hours. The defence had called no witnesses and had argued, without success, that people who come forward thirty-six years later should not be believed.