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“Cottonwood County and nearby. This area didn’t offer outlaws good targets because most of its development came after the heyday. The famous ones were far more active earlier and around major railroad lines and bigger banks. But they did pass through here frequently on their way to and from, say robbing the railroads across the southern parts of Wyoming and Montana.
“You really should talk to Clara Atwood at the museum. You’re friends, right?” Not exactly, though the curator of the Sherman Western Frontier Life Museum and I did have a man in common. My friend, rival, and colleague Wardell Yardley, who was her... Hmm. Semi-significant other from two-thirds of the way across the continent and neither wanting to settle down? “Keefe talked about wanting to discuss things he found with her.”
“Like what?”
She shook her head gently. “He didn’t go into details with me, Elizabeth. He came here frequently, but he stayed focused on what he was doing. He didn’t ask for a great deal of help. And whatever he did say was in passing. Very pleasant. Always. He was a sweet man. It’s such a shame... Especially when he was so excited the last time he came in.”
“Excited? About what?” I had a guess, but additional sources are always welcomed.
“He’d had one of those DNA tests — from that company HelixKin — and he expected to get the results at any moment.”
Keefer Dobey certainly hadn’t kept taking a DNA test and expecting the results soon a secret.
She raised her palms up. “Truly, that’s all I know.”
I was far from done fishing for details, though. “Was he interested in specific outlaws?”
“The usual ones around here. The Hole in the Wall Gang, of course, since that hideout was across the Big Horn Basin from here, down in the southern Big Horns. Though most people asking about the Hole in the Wall Gang are interested only in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
“But Keefe wasn’t? Interested only in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, I mean.”
“He started there, but then he headed in other directions. Less obvious ones.” She seemed surprised by that insight.
“Lesser-known outlaws?”
She nodded, apparently still musing over her own words.
“Oscar and Pearl?” I asked. I was on a first-name basis with them because I wasn’t a hundred percent sure my memory captured the last name correctly.
“You know about Oscar and Pearl Virtanen? He wanted every scrap we had. But we don’t have many scraps. They haven’t been of much interest to historians, who are generally the ones who dig up the scraps.” Smiling fondly, she added, “They’re like archaeologists going after bones. They value every scrap. And then they try to put the scraps together.”
She leaned toward me, close enough for me to catch a whiff of coffee on her breath. “To tell the truth, I think some of what they create from the scraps is a real Frankenstein’s monster. You know, they can’t know which scraps they’re missing and the bridges they fabricate to fill in...” She shook her head.
Not unlike some journalists building a story. Or, I suppose, investigators.
My turn to muse on an insight.
One of the things I’ve learned about the murders we’d investigated during my time at KWMT-TV was that the two people most involved — the murderer and the victim — crossed paths somehow.
That might seem obvious.
But it’s really very wise.
Honest.
To investigate a murder, you learn about the victims and what brought them to the point where they intersected with the killer. Victimology helps you understand where and how and why the murder happened at that particular moment in the victim’s life. Once you stand at that moment, then you can start to see what the cross street that represents the murderer must look like.
It’s one of the reasons law enforcement has so much difficulty solving crimes that don’t stem from the life of the victim, but only from the path of the murderer. Then, all law enforcement knows is one point in the murderer’s path — that crime.
In this case, though, the chances of a random murderer getting to out-of-the way Elk Rock Ranch in Cottonwood County, Wyoming, and into Keefer Dobey’s cabin — taking care to put his dog outside — then shooting Keefe just because, were way down there with the Super Bowl being held in Sherman next year.
In other words, we were looking for someone who’d had more intersections with Keefer Dobey than the murder.
Along with his life at the ranch, his search into Old West outlaws appeared the most likely point of connection.
“So, no historians have been interested in Oscar and Pearl Virtanen,” I recapped, “but was anyone other than Keefe Dobey interested in them?”
She had to be better than that at hiding the flash of awareness in her eyes if she hoped to deny there was someone.
