Yellow Bird Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country - Sierra Crane Murdoch Page 0,3

grandfather in Oregon, but no one saw Clarke again. In February 2014, after he had been missing two years, I came across some news about a break in his case: There had been arrests and, soon afterward, a confession. The alleged perpetrators were awaiting trial, but while prosecutors believed Clarke had been murdered, they lacked one thing that would prove their case: They could not find his body.

The story caught my eye because I was familiar with the reservation from which Clarke disappeared. Since 2011, I had been going there myself to report on the oil boom that was transforming the tribal community. One of the ways I had seen the place change was a rise in crime, a new pervasiveness of violence due to an influx of non-Native workers over whom the MHA Nation had no criminal jurisdiction. That was why I took an interest in Clarke: I had some understanding of the legal topography into which he disappeared, and I suspected his case might be a window into the darker realities of the boom.

On the morning of November 4, 2014, I dropped by the tribal newspaper offices, where the editor, a woman I knew, suggested I interview Lissa, who at that moment happened to be out searching for Clarke’s body. The editor arranged for us to meet that night.

The offices were in a clapboard house perched on the west shore of Lake Sakakawea, a reservoir that flooded the center of the reservation in 1954 after the federal government built a dam on the Missouri River. It was dusk when I arrived, a cold wind sweeping off the surface of the lake. I climbed a set of steps, knocked, and the editor answered. She led me past an office furnished with a space heater, a coffee maker, and a crystal lamp into an airy room strewn with proofs and cardboard boxes, where she instructed me to wait. An hour passed. I began to shiver. Then, at last, the door opened, and Lissa entered.

Her face was luminous with cold, her hair flecked with ice. She wore a sweatshirt, long underwear, hiking boots, reading glasses, and a Bluetooth device affixed to her right ear. She did not shake my hand or say hello but spoke as if we had seen each other just that morning. Only when she caught me glancing at her long underwear did it seem to occur to her that we had never met. She explained that she had been searching for Clarke “down at the river” and sunk in a pit of mud.

She had been looking for him since the summer of 2012, when a relative sent her a Facebook message posted by Clarke’s mother. The mother, Jill Williams, was pleading for information regarding the whereabouts of her son. By that time, Clarke, or “KC,” as Jill called him, had been missing for three months. Investigators found his pickup truck parked on a street in Williston, about an hour west of the reservation, but no other clues had turned up. Lissa thought she could help. Since 2008, she had been living five hours east of Fort Berthold, in Fargo, but many of her relatives lived on the reservation, and she often visited them there. Lissa sensed that Jill, who lived with her husband in Washington State and was unfamiliar with Fort Berthold, had no idea where to begin. So she wrote to Jill, offering to ask around about her son.

Lissa had a ready laugh, I noticed, the bearing of a woman who derives entertainment from the absurdities of the world. Her speech was rushed and giddy, her legs kicked beneath her chair, and her hands were in flight, touching pens and cigarettes and the Bluetooth earpiece and darting in her lap. She did not seem nervous. Rather, she seemed so intent on telling the story that she had lost track of her own body. Only in her expressions did she retain full control. She laughed when I became confused, smiled when I looked surprised. Once, when I interrupted her with a question, she stared at me, stone-faced and abruptly still, as if the question were stupid and the answer too obvious to say. I stopped asking questions, and as I listened, it occurred to me that Lissa knew far more about Clarke’s disappearance than the editor had let on. Lissa was not just searching for his body. She had done much more than that. If she had not exactly solved the case, I suspected that