From westword.com
Originally published by Westword March 30, 2000
©2001 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
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The Accidental Jurist
Leonard Peltier. Stephen Miles. Now the witness who might break the
Ramsey case. It's no wonder Lee Hill thinks he needs to pack a pistol.
By Steve Jackson
Lee Hill pulls his truck over to the curb in an older, tree-lined Boulder neighborhood. He gets out
and glances around, a Glock 9-millimeter handgun concealed beneath his black trench coat.
The home where he's stashed The Witness is a few blocks away, but he doesn't want to park in
front -- just in case he's being followed. "You're not paranoid if they really are out to get you," he
says, and laughs as if he's not sure how seriously he should be taking all of this. This life of his.
But for now, the forty-year-old, ponytailed lawyer believes he has reason to exercise a little caution.
The Witness claims that she's been the victim of a child-sex ring whose participants included a
wealthy friend of the Ramsey family. Yes, that Ramsey family.
If what The Witness has to say is true -- and she does have documentation proving at least her
family's connection to the wealthy friend, and she's also sent one man to prison for rape -- then her
information may shed some light on the possible circumstances of JonBenét's murder. And that could
mean she's in danger. Maybe, Hill worries, he is, too.
For the past few days, the Boulder police have been in California checking the woman's story,
though from what Hill can determine, they've mostly been trying to find ways to damage her
credibility instead of investigating the possibility that maybe, just maybe, she's telling the truth.
Hill knows that police reservations about The Witness are understandable. In the last four years, the
JonBenét case has attracted more than its share of nuts, entrepreneurs and conspiracy theorists. The
Witness's story is bizarre. But perhaps, he points out, just bizarre enough to be true.
Despite what his critics describe as a penchant for finding high-profile cases, Hill contends he initially
tried to avoid getting involved with The Witness. Their meeting, he explains, was just another in a
chain of seemingly accidental events that have steered the course of his life and career. In this case, it
was all because he sued the National Enquirer on behalf of Boulder resident Steve Miles, whom
the tabloid had identified as a pedophile and suspect in JonBenét's murder. He knew Miles because,
once, when Hill was nineteen years old, he'd met and befriended writer and junkie William S.
Burroughs. Which, of course, had to do with the mother of an old school chum who'd written a
book...
Like dominoes set up to fall in intricate patterns, the seminal people and events of his life -- from
Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg to the Navy, the CIA, the American Indian Movement -- tumble and
click into the next, sometimes falling in a straight line, sometimes taking off on a tangent only to return
after several loops and whirls.
All of which lead to this point. Handgun strapped to his belt, he is walking up to a house where a
woman is hiding. She may -- or may not -- provide a clue that could blow open a murder
investigation that holds a city hostage.
Walter Leon Hill was born March 26, 1959, in Monroe, Louisiana, an only child. Both of his parents
were of mixed-blood Choctaw Indian ancestry, though the tribe had long been assimilated into the
mainstream. In Louisiana at that time, one was either white or black -- one drop of African blood
and you were the latter, everybody else was the former.
An unusually bright child, Hill was extremely bored in school. Hoping to find a way to keep him
occupied, his parents placed him in a parochial school at the beginning of the second grade.
Fortunately, the principal realized that he was more than merely disruptive and sent him to be tested
by noted child psychologist George Middleton, who recommended that he be allowed to skip the
second grade.
Even after skipping a grade, Hill found that he was constantly waiting for his classmates to catch up.
This was a kid who in third grade was checking out library books on clinical psychology.
His differences weren't easily accepted by his family. Hill's father had been the first on his side to
attend college, but was still more the outdoors type, an expert woodsman who taught his son to be
one as well. He'd come into the house, see Lee reading a book and ask, "Why aren't you doing
anything?" The boy's reply was that he was doing something.
At the end of sixth grade, Hill was accepted into the Louisiana Governor's Program for Gifted
Children, which Middleton had started ten years earlier. The program took exceptionally smart
children and placed them on the campus of McNeese State University in Lake Charles for the
summer. Hill spent the next three summers there, meeting other children who would become lifelong
friends, including Tony Kushner, who would grow up to be a Pulitzer Prize- and Tony
Award-winning playwright; Joe Barnes, who would become the protocol officer for onetime
Secretary of State James Baker; and Sammy Charters, whose father Sam Sr. managed such '60s
musical talents as Country Joe & the Fish and whose stepmother, Ann Charters, was an aspiring
author.
He got an early start in the legal profession as he and Kushner served on the program's "court,"
which tried and sentenced fellow students for breaking the rules. At the beginning of his last summer,
Hill learned what it felt like to be a defendant when he and a half-dozen other boys were caught
smoking marijuana, drinking alcohol and trying to sneak into the girls' dorm.
Hill and most of the others had been hauled into Middleton's office, where they earnestly denied the
charges. However, Mac Beasley, whose father was one of the founders of Planned Parenthood (and
who would himself grow up to be a lawyer), and another boy, Steve Hennigan (the son of a
professional football player who would become an infectious-diseases doctor), were belligerently
unapologetic. Yeah, they'd all been smoking marijuana, they admitted to the chagrin of their
compatriots. So what?
Eventually, Beasley suggested that they all plead guilty "with extenuating circumstances due to
hormonal activity." They were grounded for a week. That same week, the rest of the student body
elected Hill to serve as chief justice.
But life on campus wasn't all fun and games. It was 1972, and the war in Vietnam was still a hot
issue. There was friction between some older college students and the snot-nosed "eggheads" from
the governor's program, with their left-leaning instructors and their liberal program, who were
wandering around campus in their little Mao caps.
One evening, Hill was standing outside a party when an older college student told him to leave.
"By what authority?" Hill asked.
"By the authority that I'm going to kick your ass if you don't," the older boy said.
If Hill had learned anything from his father, it was that if he was right he shouldn't back down. Still,
he was a lot smaller. Then the lawyer in him took over, and he responded, "I'm a minor. You touch
me, and I'll have your ass thrown under the jail." The older student turned several shades of red and
walked away.
For all of its benefits, the program's learning-for-the-sake-of-learning premise ruined all structured,
formal education for Hill. From that point on, he either accelerated through his course work or
"punched out" early.
At age thirteen he was auditing college classes at Northeast Louisiana State University in physics,
and chemistry courses at fourteen. Even then the only thing that saved him from death by boredom
was racing motorcycles on a dirt track -- finding one of the few connections with his father, who
proudly wore his "Hill's Pit Crew" motocross shirt -- and becoming the state champion in the 250 cc
amateur class.
By the time he was fifteen, Hill was enrolled full-time at the university. Even the college courses
bored him, though he was excited to be the youngest member ever of the Kappa Alpha Order
fraternity, dating freshmen women and wearing his fraternity shirt to get into bars to drink.
When Hill was just sixteen, his paternal grandfather, a war hero whom he loved and admired, was
prosecuted by the federal government for fraud. He'd been made the scapegoat for a scheme to sell
stock in a paper mill that the men who'd hired him as a broker never intended to build. He obviously
thought the deal was legit -- he'd made gifts of the stock to his grandson. But the government wanted
to make an example of someone.
The main witness against Hill's grandfather was a convicted perjurer who swore, as did the
prosecutor, that he was not receiving any kind of deal for his testimony. It was later proved that the
witness did receive a deal -- in fact, the case would be annotated in 5th District Court records under
the heading "prosecutorial misconduct" -- but the perjury was not enough for the appellate courts to
overturn the jury's verdict. Visiting his grandfather in a filthy prison convinced young Hill that the
government can and does make mistakes -- and that justice was not always its first concern.
A year after enrolling at Northeast Louisiana, Hill transferred to Justin Morrill College on the
Michigan State University campus. It was an experimental school where students were allowed to
design their own curriculum, and Hill built his around psychology. Following his sophomore year, he
was invited to attend the Gestalt Institute of Canada on an island off the coast of British Columbia.
To get to Kuper Island, he had to take a ferry.
Approaching the tree-covered island, Hill saw a monolithic building brooding over the bay. It was
the largest structure on the tiny island, the only one made of brick and one of the few with a
foundation, or, for that matter, more than a dirt floor. However, it was obviously abandoned, all of
its windows either boarded up or broken out. He was later told that it had been a missionary
boarding school for the island's Indian children. But no one seemed to want to talk much about it.
Kuper Island was a reservation for a Coast Salish tribe. To get to the institute, Hill had to walk
through the single village -- mostly rough shacks scattered along dirt roads -- where many of the
reservation's inhabitants lived. Hill arrived at his destination to find that the "institute" was more a
communal farm than college campus. There were no classrooms or formal instruction. Everything
was a lesson in Gestalt therapy, which held that a human's response to a situation must be viewed as
a whole rather than a sum of responses to specific elements of the situation: If you were cold, you
chopped wood and built a fire; if you were hungry, you cooked something.
As time passed, Hill found himself drawn to the Indian village. It was logging country, but the timber
industry was depressed and the community was plagued by high unemployment and alcoholism. Still,
the people were friendly, and he felt an affinity for the way they viewed their land as a part of
themselves -- though at times they seemed to be living a paradox. Both communities took their
showers outdoors and used outhouses, but in many ways, the whites at the institute were more
back-to-earth than the Indians in the village. The whites milked the goats to make cheese and butter;
the Indians took the ferry to the mainland and bought their groceries. At the institute, the only
creature comfort was a stereo and a few classical records; there were no televisions. Over in the
village, nearly every shack had a television antenna poking out of the roof. The Indians were at odds
with their own culture.
Hill knew that feeling, and it was only heightened when he met an Indian named Leonard. He was in
his late fifties, with long black hair that was turning gray, and was missing many of his teeth. Leonard
was also the oldest of the tribe's dancers, a title that implied status as well as more spiritual power.
Like many of the men on the reservation, he was an alcoholic who could often be found clutching a
bottle of wine in front of his shack.
The old man terrified Hill -- in a benevolent sort of way -- by challenging him. "Okay, so you're
Indian," he would say to Hill. "Why do you act like you're not?" Still, he accepted Hill, inviting him to
a traditional potlatch at his home where he sang ancient songs that raised the hair on the back of the
boy's neck.
Much of what Leonard said Hill wouldn't understand for many years. But there were other events on
the island that would impact Hill's life as well. Some of the inhabitants were up in arms about the
U.S. government's efforts to extradite an American Indian who was suspected of shooting two FBI
agents on the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in South Dakota. The suspect had fled to Canada. It
was the first time Hill ever heard the slogan "Free Leonard Peltier."
Hill's office is in a small, nondescript building between Foothills Parkway and 28th Avenue, where he
shares a suite with several other lawyers. One of them is Julia Yoo, a small, pretty woman of Korean
descent who also happens to be his girlfriend.
He works surrounded by the yin and yang of his world. On one wall, next to a "Hill for City Council"
placard, is a poster of Soldier of Fortune publisher Lieutenant Colonel Robert K. Brown, wearing
jungle fatigues and holding a sniper's rifle, over the slogan, "Communism Stops Here!" It's signed:
"Dear Lee, Blow one away for me! Robert K. Brown."
Hill explains that the colonel, a neighbor he met when representing a Colorado militiaman, is much
more liberal than his right-wing magazine would indicate. Still, Hill thinks it's funny that he's hung a
poster of Soviet tyrant Josef Stalin next to Brown's. "I'm always striving for balance," he chuckles.
On the opposite walls are the obligatory framed pieces of paper proving his college education and
law degree. There's also a small plaque dedicated to Ensign Lee Hill from the Blacklion fighter
squadron, with the date 19MAR81-22MAR82, on which is inscribed the nickname Boot. "Anyone
in a fighter squadron with the last name Hill is automatically going to get the nickname 'Boot,'" he
says. Lee "Boot" Hill.
On a filing cabinet is a baseball cap with the logo "Oglala Nation." Above it is a cartoon, drawn by a
friend, depicting besieged cavalry men attempting to hold off a war party of Indians on horseback,
one of whom is riding double with a man dressed in a pin-striped suit and carrying a briefcase
labeled "W. Lee Hill." One of the soldiers is telling the other, "I guess they mean business this time."
The telephone is rarely quiet for more than a couple of minutes. At the moment, Hill is working two
phones at once, calling Steven Seagal, the actor and martial arts expert, on a cell phone to talk about
several movie and television ideas they're working on together, and, from the phone on his desk,
politely trying to deflect media calls regarding The Witness. He'd hoped to keep that whole thing
quiet and let the Boulder police do their job -- if they would -- but word got out.
Hill complains that he doesn't "need this. I've got work that two of me couldn't get done." As if on
cue, Yoo appears and needs to talk about their lawsuit against the Boulder Valley School District.
In early January, they filed suit in U.S. District Court in Denver, contending civil-rights violations on
behalf of a thirteen-year-old, brain-damaged student who had been sexually assaulted two years
earlier by a then-fourteen-year-old classmate at Burbank Middle School. The first assault occurred
right before Christmas 1997 while the two boys and at least one other student from a
special-education class were in a school counselor's office watching the PG-13 movie Anaconda,
which Hill described in the federal lawsuit as "a graphic sexual and violent film in which almost all of
the characters face gruesome, tortured deaths by the constrictive force of a giant phallic anaconda."
The students' teacher, Rachel Bradshaw, showed the movie as a "treat" for the boys. But when she
left the room, the older boy, who was already on probation for sexually assaulting other children,
fondled and performed oral sex on the younger boy and threatened to kill him, his mother and his
dog if he didn't comply. The victim was then assaulted again, while still on school property, orally
and possibly anally.
Bradshaw questioned the boys but got only denials. Her suspicions were referred to county social
services that day, but no one told the victim's mother. Nor were the police informed, until five days
later when the older boy admitted to a therapist what he'd done. The counselor notified the Boulder
police, but the detective assigned to the case somehow determined that it was a case of consensual
sex and referred it to the district attorney's office for prosecution on a charge of public indecency.
Still no one told the victim's mother, who'd noticed that her son was despondent and compulsively
washing himself. Three weeks later, when she finally learned why, she turned to a friend of her
family, Lee Hill.
When news about the case broke in January 1998, then-Boulder police chief Tom Koby (whose
department had been under fire for a year for its handling of the JonBenét murder case), admitted
that his department "screwed up" and should have contacted the parent.
However, Barbara Taylor, a spokeswoman for Boulder Valley Schools, said that "all the school
district's practices and procedures were followed." A week later, district authorities rethought that
statement and apologized for the "delayed communication" and a "lack of compassion" in their
response.
The older boy eventually pleaded guilty to sexual assault. In the meantime, Hill was trying to
negotiate a settlement with the school district, and to change the policy so that a parent would be
notified.
He thought the kid had already been handed too many hard shakes. He'd been run over by a car,
resulting in brain-damage; now he'd been raped at school, where he should have been safe. The
more Hill learned about the circumstances of the case, the angrier he got -- especially when he found
out that the older boy's father had warned school authorities that his son should never be left alone
with other children.
The lawsuit named the district, Bradshaw, Superintendent Tom Seigel and then-principal Joette
Donnelly as defendants. He didn't specify how much he was seeking. However, he noted when he
filed, "I don't think a jury will hesitate to assign a value to being raped when you're eleven years old."
Now, Yoo is pointing out that there may be a problem with their case. Apparently there's a conflict
between a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that says schools are responsible for the safety of their
students and a statute that could be interpreted to say that they're not.
Still, on the heels of Columbine and a recent settlement that paid $1.25 million to the families of five
victims sexually assaulted by former Nederland Elementary School teacher David White, the district
might not enjoy the publicity of making such an argument. And if they do, Hill thinks he and Yoo
could get the issue before the Colorado Supreme Court -- a fight he would relish.
However, he also feels that it's part of his job to keep the case out of court, saving his client the
emotional hardship of a trial. He tells Yoo that if the school district will come back with a
"reasonable opening offer," they'll drop parts of the complaint.
Of course, a just settlement will make the whole thing go away without the school district having to
tell the world that it's not responsible for the health and safety of the children on its campuses. Yoo
grins and heads out the door.
A minute later, Hill is back on the telephone explaining to another client that he has a settlement offer
ready for him to sign. He comments that the other attorney "is really a pretty good guy."
There's an angry buzzing from the receiver as the client apparently takes exception to that
assessment. Hill shrugs and makes a minor correction. "Well, he's a lawyer, which means he's scum.
But in a sea of scum, he's near the top."
In 1977, Hill graduated from Justin Morrill College with a bachelor's degree in psychology. He had
just turned eighteen and was already accepted into a Ph.D. program at Louisiana University on a
full-ride scholarship.
The professors at Louisiana were kind and encouraging. It wasn't every day they saw an
eighteen-year-old Ph.D. student. But it soon seemed to Hill that his presence in Louisiana wasn't
meant to be. After he arrived, it rained for forty days and forty nights. A neighbor ran into his
brand-new sports car. Moreover, he felt out of place in the stodgy ivory tower of traditional
academics, and had learned in Canada that human behavior was more than "multi-variate statistical
analysis." He abandoned his scholarship and dropped out of the program after just six weeks.
The decision was aided by a trip he'd made to a metaphysical bookstore in Baton Rouge, where
he'd spotted a brochure lying on a table. It was for a small Buddhist college in Boulder called the
Naropa Institute. The courses looked interesting and the structure less formal than a typical college.
Hill paid a visit to Naropa, and soon he had enrolled in the school's master's program in
Comparative Buddhist and Western Psychology.
In those days, Naropa was located upstairs in a building on the Pearl Street Mall. One day, Hill
hurried up to the second floor, where he hung his coat on a rack before proceeding to the third floor
for his class. When he reached the top of the stairs, he realized that he'd left his wallet in his coat. He
hurried back down the stairs, noting that a distinguished older gentleman in a stylish fedora was
reading a book on a bench across from the coat rack.
Hill reached into the pocket of his coat and retrieved his wallet, then went back upstairs. But he felt
like a shoplifter with the eyes of a store manager on him. It was his wallet, but he wondered if the old
gentleman thought that he was stealing it.
He ran back down the stairs. The old man was still sitting on the bench reading his book. "I just
wanted to say that I wasn't stealing the wallet. It's mine," he stammered.
The old man just looked at him. "I like your fedora," Hill said lamely. He did like the man's hat, but
was beginning to feel foolish. "Where'd you buy it?"
The old man seemed to accept his explanation and questions at face value. "Which way are you
going?" he asked in a low, gravelly voice.
"What?" Hill replied, confused.
"Which way do you go home?" the man repeated.
Hill said he lived up on the Hill.
"Fine," said the old man. "I go that way myself. When you're ready to go, I'll show you where I
bought the hat."
So Hill found himself walking beside the old man, who pointed out a conservative men's clothing
store on a corner of the mall. The mannequin in the window was wearing an identical fedora.
The man said his name was William S. Burroughs -- which rang a bell with Hill, but he didn't know
why. Perhaps his new friend was on the Naropa faculty.
The next day he was in the Boulder Book Store, and a book caught his eye. Kerouac was the title,
but what grabbed his attention was the author, Ann Charters -- the stepmother of his old friend
Sammy Charters.
Hill knew little about Jack Kerouac, other than that he had written a book called On the Road, that
he had something to do with the Beatniks and there was a writing program at Naropa called the Jack
Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. He was leafing through the pages of photographs when he
stopped short -- there was a photograph, and then another and another, of the old man he'd just
met.
Hill began looking for excerpts about Burroughs. The more he read, the more shocked he became.
Burroughs was an author, one of the Beat writers along with Kerouac, and had written something
called Naked Lunch. But that refined, cordial Southern gentleman, the scion of a wealthy St. Louis
family, was also a notorious heroin addict and homosexual who had shot his wife between the eyes
while on a drug bender in Mexico City.
Hill was a bit apprehensive the next time he met Burroughs, who was lecturing at Naropa that term,
but he soon decided that his first impression had been the more accurate. He would always be
thankful that he'd met Burroughs before reaching a conclusion based on what others said or wrote,
which was a good lesson.
The man did have a great fondness for firearms and drink, often mixing the two. Even though it had
been an accident that he'd shot his wife, that didn't make Hill feel much better when Burroughs was
waving a gun around with one hand while clutching a martini in the other.
But no one got shot and Hill learned a lot, including how to properly cook a steak and mix a martini.
And if the old man was a drug addict and alcoholic, he was a controlled one. He'd remain sober until
five o'clock, then he'd pull out a steak -- more if he was entertaining -- slide a bottle of vodka out of
the freezer and light up a bong. All of which he shared generously with his young friend.
Although Burroughs had supposedly kicked his heroin habit (and Hill never saw him inject a drug),
the former medical student knew how to keep himself well-medicated. And anyone else, for that
matter. Once in the summer of 1978, when Hill showed up at Burroughs's apartment with a
"high-altitude cold," the kind with a splitting headache, Burroughs immediately set tea water to boiling
and scooted off to his bathroom, returning with a prescription medicine bottle. He poured Hill a cup
of tea and dumped in a tablespoon of whatever liquid was in the bottle.
"I'd like you to drink this," Burroughs told him.
He hesitated. "Well," he said, sniffling, "what's in it?"
"Methadone." His mentor smiled.
Hill drank the concoction, and it wasn't long before he pronounced his cold cured. At least until
about four hours later, when the effects wore off and his cold returned worse than ever. Such was
the price of drug addiction, Burroughs told him.
Burroughs was also generous with his time and encouraged Hill to write. And he handed him a list of
books, starting with Celine, the author of Journey to the End of Night and the model for writers
from Norman Mailer to Kerouac to Ken Kesey.
Burroughs had a modest view of himself as a writer. Writing was a good gig, he told Hill, if you
could get someone to pay you. It paid his bills, but his writing was nothing compared to the great
ones.
In the summer of 1978, Hill also met Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. He worked as one of Ginsberg's
teaching assistants in exchange for tuition in the writing program.
Hill soon learned that there was at least one fundamental difference between Burroughs and
Ginsberg. While Burroughs's sexual orientation was well-known, he never made any advances on his
handsome young protegé.
Ginsberg was another story. Brilliant and formal, the author of the Beat anthem "Howl," he was also
a sexual predator who liked teenage boys and young men. Hill quickly developed an empathy for
women who endure unwelcome advances from men.
Although Hill managed to set boundaries and become a friend of Ginsberg's, whom he otherwise
found to be a genuinely good-hearted man who also mentored him in his writing, Hill was disturbed
by a couple of things. One was the parents -- white, liberal Boulder Buddhists -- who practically
shoved their sons at Ginsberg to learn at the feet, so to speak, of the great man. The second was
the fact that Naropa's administration and faculty ignored Ginsberg's tendency to use his position to
coerce male students into sexual liaisons. This same group would have found it scandalous if a male
faculty member at the University of Colorado seduced and harassed female students. At Naropa
they looked the other way, and the hypocrisy was troubling.
Each of these lessons was shaping him, as was the challenge of matching his wit and intellect against
unusual thinkers like Burroughs, Ginsberg and, in 1979, one of the great American writers of the
mid-1900s. That spring, Hill married a woman who was a hostess at a restaurant where he worked
as a bartender. He was twenty and she was 31, a rebellious, beautiful woman who enchanted him
with stories about her life overseas. It was his dream to travel and immerse himself in foreign
cultures.
He had become increasingly disenchanted with the Boulder Buddhist community, and decided to get
away from it all by taking his new bride to Europe, perhaps stop by the gravesite of the poet
Rimbaud. Burroughs suggested that since he was going to France, he ought to drop farther down
and see one of his old friends and teachers, Paul Bowles, in Tangier, Morocco.
In the 1920s, composer, writer and painter Bowles had run to Paris, where he'd been befriended by
Gertrude Stein. He was a protegé of Aaron Copland and had collaborated with Tennessee Williams
as a songwriter. He had visited Morocco in the 1930s and returned to Tangier in 1947, where he
wrote his most famous book, The Sheltering Sky, which had been high on Burroughs's reading list.
As America's most famous expatriate writer, his home was a pilgrimage for other artists from the
Beat writers to Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger.
Visiting Bowles in Tangier sounded incredibly romantic. Hill's marriage was already troubled, and he
thought the trip might help. And so the Hills had shown up in Tangier where, thanks to Burroughs,
Bowles welcomed them into his home.
That time took on a surreal quality. Bowles's own protegé, Mohammed Mrabet, showed up and
entertained them with his gift for telling stories. As he wove his exotic tales, Mrabet would smoke
hashish while Bowles smoked kif -- a mixture of marijuana and tobacco -- from a long cigarette
holder.
Mrabet finished his stories late at night, saying "Life is a dream." Then Bowles urged Hill to listen.
There came the sound of yapping and the click of hard nails on brick. "It was jackals running through
the streets of Tangier," Hill says.
The telephone rings. Hill answers with one hand, while reaching with the other to turn down the
sound -- and somehow maintaining control of the car. It's a friend who's having trouble with her
landlord. He groans but assures her that he'll help get the problem resolved.
Hill gets a lot of such calls -- usually without offers to pay, which he probably wouldn't accept
anyway. Still, he and Yoo are running their firm on a frayed shoestring, lately having taken several
financial hits on cases. "Unfortunately, I seem to attract a lot of intriguing and noisy cases that don't
make any money," he says dryly.
Out of the car, he's reminiscing about the past, pointing out where the Boulder Book Store now
occupies the space on the mall where Naropa used to be. The spot where he met Burroughs, who
died in 1998, has been altered into a staircase. Farther up the street, he notes that the conservative
men's clothing store is now a Banana Republic, which sells leather jackets it markets as being like
one worn by Jack Kerouac.
Hill apologizes. He doesn't mean to name-drop, he says, but it really is just an accident, the way the
falling dominoes brought him into contact with so many famous and unusual people. "I suppose it's
the circles one runs in," says Hill, whose business card reads "Representing Artists & Other
Criminals."
And sometimes people many folks would consider crackpots. This gets him in more trouble than he
bargains for, such as when he represented Kevin Terry, a 24-year-old member of the self-styled
Colorado 1st Light Infantry of the U.S. Militia. In May 1997, Terry, along with Ron Cole, 27, the
author of a book critical of the government's action against the David Koresh's Branch Davidians in
Waco, and Wallace Stanley Kennett, 33, a Branch Davidian who had left the Waco compound
before the siege, were arrested in an Aurora home that was stockpiled with illegal firearms and
explosives.
While militia members cooled their jets in jail, Hill learned that their landlord had posted an eviction
notice, which meant they would lose anything of value left in the house. He called the landlord's
lawyer and said he was going to the house to remove, with his clients' permission, as much as he
could get out in his truck. The landlord told him to go ahead.
Hill arrived at the house with then-law intern Julia Yoo. They found that a sliding glass door was
open, as was a doorway leading from there into the house. The pair searched for those items that
were the most valuable.
Hill had just stepped out of the house when he came eyeball-to-barrel with a shotgun held by a
member of the Aurora SWAT team. Another officer kneeled off to the side, behind a Plexiglas shield
with his handgun drawn, and ordered him to his knees. From there he was told get down on his belly
and crawl to the concrete driveway, where he was held down with a knee on his back and a gun to
his head while he was handcuffed.
"My law clerk is also inside and she is also unarmed," he told the police, to let them know he was a
lawyer and to keep Yoo from getting shot by a surprised cop.
As he spoke, more of the SWAT team hustled past. Julia came out of the house, not frightened but
angry as hell. But she, too, had to drop to her knees and crawl to the driveway, where she also was
handcuffed at gunpoint.
The pair was escorted into the house for questioning, where they remained handcuffed for 45
minutes. Finally the officers released them, saying they'd received a call from a patrol officer who
thought the house was being burgled. Then the cops said that they had been concerned for the pair's
safety because the militiamen might have booby-trapped the house.
Then why'd they take us into the kitchen, Hill wondered. He had experience watching the FBI
work with local law enforcement, and he could tell that the Aurora cops had been plenty pumped up
-- maybe federal agents had a role in the tension level. They seemed to be chasing ghosts.
Hill considered suing the Aurora Police Department, but he and Yoo were just beginning to see each
other socially. He didn't want her conservative Korean parents' first impression to come from a
newspaper article describing how their daughter had been held at gunpoint with him.
Instead, Hill went about the business of getting Terry off with just probation.
In 1979, out of work, with his marriage falling apart, Hill decided that what he really wanted to do
was join the Central Intelligence Agency. He wanted to be a spy.
In part that was because he still dreamed of traveling to foreign places, and this was a way to get
paid doing it. But more important, he wanted to know what was really going on in the world. He'd
spent a lot of time listening to Ginsberg, who was absolutely paranoid about the agency and its
impact on world affairs. Hill wanted to see "the machine" from the inside, to find a balance to the
poet's hysteria.
Burroughs was encouraging. In fact, the old man confided that shortly after World War II he'd tried
to get on with the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA. He, too, had thought that being a spook would
be great fun and a great life experience.
Still, it was difficult for a twenty-year-old to just walk up and join the agency. Hill figured that doing
a stint as a Naval Intelligence officer would ensure his eventual acceptance, so he'd signed up. After
finishing boot camp, he'd invited only one person to his commissioning: his grandfather. But despite a
letter from Hill's commanding officer, his grandfather's parole officer wouldn't grant him permission to
travel out of state.
Hill was assigned to the Blacklion fighter squadron, with whom he spent eight "miserable" months
patrolling areas such as the Indian Ocean aboard the aircraft carrier USS America. Much of the time
he worked inside a top-secret vault, tracking Soviet submarines and aircraft. (A Navy
public-relations photograph from that time shows young Hill in an aviator's jacket, posing over a map
while writing on a notepad, over the caption: "GATHERING INFORMATION: Ensign Lee Hill
uses a map to prepare a squadron briefing." However, what he's actually written on the notepad is
just barely discernable: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..." -- the
opening line of Ginsberg's poem "Howl.")
Hill also volunteered for flight training when the carrier returned to port in Florida. And while in port,
he contacted the CIA and was invited for an interview. The meeting took place in a large, empty
room where one man sat behind a desk. Figuring honesty was the best policy -- and that they'd
probably find out anyway -- Hill told him everything about his past, including his drug use, though he
did manage to leave out his association with Burroughs and Ginsberg.
It didn't seem to phase his questioner. However, at the end of the interview, the man suddenly leaned
across the desk and snarled, "I don't know if you have the killer instinct."
Feeling the sudden accusation might be a test, Hill leaned forward and gave the attitude right back.
He had a killer instinct, by God, if he needed one.
The answer seemed to satisfy the interviewer, but the man said the agency couldn't hire him while he
was on active duty. If Hill was to somehow go inactive, he hinted, then the agency might be
interested.
It so happened that a bad economy, and the release of the movie An Officer and a Gentleman,
had swelled the number of volunteers signing up for the Navy. It was announced that anyone who
had not completed specialty programs -- such as flight training -- could opt to go inactive and spend
the rest of his time in the reserves. Hill had not yet received his wings, and was able to opt out with
an honorable discharge. He left the Navy and his first marriage at the end of 1983.
He was disappointed when the CIA recruiter told him he was going to have to wait at least eighteen
months. The agency didn't need him right away, so Hill decided to apply to law school at University
of San Diego, never intending to practice law -- which he saw as a less-than-honorable way to make
a living given his grandfather's experiences. But he believed that a law degree, combined with his
Naval intelligence experience, would make him all the more valuable to the agency.
Hill was accepted to law school, where he met a German national who in June 1984 became his
second wife. He accelerated his course work and received his degree in December 1985. He
prepared to take the bar exam in February, still believing he would never have to work as a lawyer.
The week before he was to take the bar, the CIA flew Hill to San Francisco to meet with a
career-operations officer. Like Burroughs, the agent handed him a reading list. This one included spy
novels like The Spike (a story about how foreign journalists are manipulated by intelligence agencies)
and former CIA operative Philip Agee's nonfiction Inside the Company.
Hill took the bar and then waited for the results. In the meantime, the agency flew him to
Washington, D.C., where he was put through another battery of tests, including a polygraph
examination. He had never wanted anything so badly in his life. In May, the agency offered him a
position. He signed nondisclosure statements, as well as paperwork agreeing to go wherever he was
sent. He was told to begin "fading away" -- starting with destroying any written evidence tying him to
the agency -- and was even given a "cover" to explain his departure to his friends and family. He did
as he was told.
There were a few more minor details to be cleared up, but he would soon hear about the next step.
A week after he learned that he'd passed the bar, Hill heard from the CIA -- but it wasn't the news
he expected. With little explanation and a polite thank you, he was notified by mail that his services
were not needed.
It's 9 in the morning, and Julia Yoo is in her office, tunneling into a birthday cake. Her dad's birthday
was the previous Saturday, but it's been difficult arranging all of their schedules so that they can
celebrate. So they keep buying, and devouring, birthday cakes until they can get together with him.
This is the fourth in a week. Sometimes it appears that the office runs on birthday cake and coffee.
Yoo was born and spent her childhood in South Korea. Her family moved to Colorado in 1982, and
she went to high school in Denver. She got her bachelor's degree at Wellesley and was a "nomad"
for several years before deciding to return home and attend the University of Colorado School of
Law.
Like Hill, she claims she never intended to practice law. "I just figured that with a law degree
everyone would want to hire me, no matter what I decided to do," she says. Then in mock outrage,
she adds, "It's a lie. No one wants you. You're hostile, confrontational and aggressive! Who's going
to hire you? No one!"
She is only half joking when she says, "I'm the real brains behind the operation." At least she's the
one who realizes that there is a bottom line and such a thing as cost analysis -- not that she is any less
likely than Hill to take on a lost cause or a finance-killing case.
The first case they worked on together, Hill as the attorney and Yoo as his intern, was the Stephen
Miles case, in which they sued the National Enquirer for printing that Miles was a pedophile and
suspect in the JonBenét murder case. "It was a huge risk -- a poor client, and in the end we were left
holding the bag financially," she says.
"He knew the risk, but he wanted to help Steve make a statement, empower him to stand up for
himself. Steve needed a champion and Lee was that champion."
It's the same now with The Witness. When the woman first called, Yoo says she counseled Hill not
to get involved. "We already had so much going on."
Such as representing the family of Jeong Uk Noh. On January 16, a fifteen-year-old Brazilian named
Lucas de Arruda drove a Chevy Suburban to McDonald's. He'd been snowboarding that day with
another Brazilian, Fabio Strazzer, 28.
Strazzer had separated his shoulder on the slopes and asked de Arruda, who did not have a driver's
license, to drive them back to a friend's house in Boulder. The younger boy had been living in a
house in Conifer with his sponsor, a Brazilian named Marcio Dias, a longtime friend of the boy's
family. Dias was the caretaker of the house and had lent the Suburban, which belonged to his
employers, to Strazzer.
There were several stories of how de Arruda had ended up with the car. One was that he wanted to
go to McDonald's and ignored Strazzer's admonition not to take the Suburban for the three-block
trip. Another was that he was asked to go pick up food for himself and the others.
While trying to park, de Arruda later told police, he accidentally pressed on the accelerator instead
of the brake. The vehicle lurched forward, smashing through an outside dining area and striking
Jeong Uk Noh, a 25-year-old South Korean who was attending the University of Colorado, and his
girlfriend, Sun Jung Yoon, who had only just arrived for a visit.
Noh died at the scene. Yoon escaped with minor injuries.
Yoo and Hill were soon involved, since Yoo was one of the few area lawyers who spoke fluent
Korean, and Hill had experience with international matters.
Apparently, de Arruda's family was well-connected in Brazil. "His mother called the president of the
country and pretty quick the Brazilian consulate was involved," Hill says. "So we called the Korean
consulate and pretty soon we had an international incident on our hands."
Both consulates let District Attorney Alex Hunter's office know that they would be carefully watching
the proceedings. The DA handled the case well, Hill thought, but once again he found himself
wondering about the level of communication between the Boulder police and the prosecutors. He
was the one who had to tell the district attorney's office that a small quantity of narcotics had been
found in the car, though the boy hadn't tested positive for drugs in his system.
Yoo and Hill were able to translate the whole process to Noh's family so that they felt that their
voice was heard. And they filed a wrongful- death lawsuit.
On February 25, de Arruda, with a Portuguese translator and his mother at his side, pleaded guilty
to careless driving resulting in death and careless driving resulting in injury. In exchange, prosecutors
dropped a charge of criminally negligent homicide and agreed to take no position on whether de
Arruda should serve jail time. (On March 24, de Arruda received a year's probation.)
At the same time, Hill had received his first call from The Witness, and Yoo was warning him against
getting involved. However, when she heard more about what the woman had been through, Yoo,
who often deals with sexual-assault cases, agreed that they couldn't turn their backs. "She's no
different than many of our other clients. She needed help."
Being turned down by the CIA was devastating to Hill. But he needed to find a job -- all his student
loans from 1977 through law school were coming due. He went out and found the best-paying
position he could -- as a civil lawyer for a firm that specialized in defending insurance companies
against claims.
His first day, he was assigned a case in which the client had been accused of sexual assault. The
district attorney's office had refused to even file criminal charges, but the woman was now trying to
win civil damages. Hill met with the client, who spoke with an accent that he claimed was German.
But Hill's wife was German, and he knew better.
The mystery was cleared up a couple of days later when a lawyer with the Central Intelligence
Agency, as well as another from the U.S. Attorney General's office, showed up. They insisted that
the firm's managing partner and Hill sign a nondisclosure agreement. When that was accomplished,
they revealed that their client was a major Warsaw Pact defector. Hill's firm was to see to it that
information about their client, who would be in danger if he was discovered, did not get out in the
court proceedings.
All the cloak-and-dagger stuff rubbed salt into Hill's wounds. But he liked his client, a former fighter
pilot. The case was ultimately dismissed as a clear attempt by the woman to extort money from the
client, and Hill made a lifelong friend of the defector.
But cases like that, where Hill derived some job satisfaction and actually liked his client, were few
and far between. Too often his job was to stonewall and quibble until an injured person received far
less compensation than was justified. Disgusted, he quit after a year.
He didn't last much longer when he joined a plaintiff's firm in San Diego. This time, instead of
sneering at injured clients, he found himself working for partners who seemed overjoyed when a
prospective client rolled in who'd been paralyzed or maimed. It was just the flip side of the same
awful coin -- a game lawyers played at the expense of either the injured party or the people who
paid for insurance.
Hill applied for a position with the San Diego District Attorney's Office. His grandfather's case had
demonstrated the power a prosecutor's office had over people's lives. Just as a dishonorable
prosecutor had injured the man he loved, he figured that one with good intentions could accomplish a
lot on the other side.
While he was with the district attorney's office, he was "drafted" to work for the major narcotics unit
in cooperation with federal prosecutors, which meant he was cross-sworn as a special assistant U.S.
Attorney. When he was in that position he heard that former Harvard professor and '60s LSD guru
Timothy Leary was appearing at a bookstore to sign his latest work. Hill drove to the bookstore,
where he introduced himself to Leary as having a mutual friend in William Burroughs. As a lark, Hill
handed him his business card. Leary broke out laughing. He thought it was terribly funny that a friend
of one of the country's most notorious junkies was an assistant deputy district attorney with a
narcotics task force.
But as a deputy district attorney, Hill had opportunities to do good work. The task force took a lot
of dangerous criminals off the streets. However, a lot of his work was in asset forfeiture, which
allows the government to seize property and funds linked to a defendant's drug business. It was a
dangerous job. Many of the defendants, including gang members, thought of the forfeiture program
as an "extra" punishment, and Hill began receiving so many threats that he applied for and was
granted the right to carry a concealed handgun.
But he also came to view the forfeiture program as "evil work." Not when it took the ill-gotten gains
of a violent felon, but when he'd seize some little old lady's car because her son the drug dealer had
purchased it for her -- or when he confiscated the house of a couple of old hippies who were caught
growing pot in their backyard.
Hill was relieved to be transferred to the Jurisdictions Unified for Drug Gang Enforcement -- an
experimental program combining local, state and federal agencies that targeted gang members who
violated terms of probation. At times, the JUDGE unit would sweep into a neighborhood and arrest
dozens of gang members. He often had to go with the police officers, wearing a bulletproof vest and
carrying a gun.
It was better than the forfeiture work, but at the same time he was expected to ignore certain aspects
of police behavior that violated the rights of the suspects -- another lesson he would carry into the
future. Other lessons, like the pattern of falling dominoes, would become more clear years later.
During this time, Hill also received training in prosecuting hate crimes. One aspect of that training was
to read Talked to Death, Steven Singular's book about the murder of Denver radio personality Alan
Berg by white supremacists. Another domino fell when he began paying attention to one of the cases
in the San Diego DA's office. It involved a man named Dale Akiki, who was accused of ritualized
torture and sexual assaults on children at a church day camp. The case was lost because an
overzealous prosecution team relied on "repressed memory development," in which a therapist used
hypnosis to supposedly draw lost memories of assaults out of some of the children. Such techniques
are fraught with danger, because hypnosis can plant "memories" of events that never occurred, which
the defense was able to demonstrate at Akiki's trial. The jury ended up rejecting the prosecution's
case as a result.
The longer he worked for the prosecutor's office, the more Hill felt disabused of the notion that his
role was to facilitate justice, whichever way the chips fell. His supervisor frequently reminded him
that "it's easy to convict the guilty. It takes a really good prosecutor to convict the innocent."
Recalling what such a philosophy had done to his grandfather, Hill finally quit the district attorney's
office in 1993 and went back into private practice.
Hill hurries into the federal courthouse in downtown Denver. He's late, but he has to stop at the
security checkpoint and make an announcement. "I have a gun," he says quietly.
There is a tense moment. But one of the guards quickly informs the others, "He's a lawyer" -- which
Hill seems to hope will not inspire them to shoot him on the spot.
Another guard advises Hill that "only federal law-enforcement officers" are allowed to bring guns into
a federal building. But even before the man has finished his lecture, Hill interjects, "I'm a former
special assistant U.S. attorney. And I didn't want to leave it in the car."
"Just this once," they tell him, he can lock up his piece. Hill takes the key and walks over to the small
lock boxes where he deposits his Glock.
Then it's back through the metal detector and he's off and running for the elevator to the fifth floor.
He's no sooner off the elevator than he spots his client, a young Honduran man, handcuffed and
dressed in a federal prison khaki jumpsuit, being escorted by a U.S. Marshal. "You better get in
there," the marshal says, indicating the courtroom and the judge inside. "He already called for you."
Hill dashes through the courtroom doors. It's too late. U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Sparr is
gone. So Hill approaches a large, bald, black man who's the assistant U.S. attorney on the case.
Soon they are bullshitting and laughing. It turns out that Hill and the attorney have something in
common. Heck, they may even be related. "He's got Choctaw blood. Well, actually he says he's
Creole, which is the same thing," Hill says.
It doesn't do him any good now, though. Because he was late, Hill will have to wait until Sparr deals
with the next case -- make that cases, as nearly a dozen men in khaki jumpsuits are led to the jury
box and told to take a seat. They are all Hispanic, and each, including two who managed to make
bond and who appear in street clothes, is accompanied by his court-appointed lawyer. It's a big
methamphetamine case, but they don't seem too concerned. There's a lot of laughing and pointing to
friends and family members -- many of them young women either pregnant or holding babies -- in
the audience.
Hill dryly comments on all the lawyers "sucking at the public tit. If the public only knew." His
attention turns to a lawyer sitting behind one of the defendants. He says the guy offered to help and
then tried to steal his client, Stephen Miles, when they sued the National Enquirer. He doesn't
know whether to report him to the bar association or simply strangle him the next chance he gets.
Today's client is one of the two men who made the news last summer when they were hauled out of
their car by Denver police officers and pistol-whipped while a television helicopter and camera crew
hovered overhead. An independent review of the officers' behavior by the Arapahoe County district
attorney cleared them, but amid public uproar then-chief Tom Sanchez called for the officers to be
disciplined.
Meanwhile, Hill, Yoo and Eugene Iredale, a San Diego "terrorist with a briefcase" and old friend
who had brought Hill into the case, filed notice that they plan to sue the city and its police
department. Today, Hill needs to work out some issues regarding the federal drug charges pending
against his client.
His client, Aguedo Garcia-Martinez, Hill says, was just an innocent passenger in a 4Runner. That's
his story and Hill is sticking to it.
In 1993, Hill met a woman who was a member of the Pala band of Mission Indians, of which there
were several bands, on reservations north of San Diego. The woman invited him to a sweat-lodge
ceremony on the reservation.
Hill was surprised at how comfortable he felt when he arrived at the reservation and waited for the
ceremony to begin. He was caught off-guard, however, when an older woman asked him, "Are you
Indian?"
Hill started to explain that he had some Choctaw blood, but the old woman interrupted and asked
again, "Are you Indian?" He didn't have a chance to answer before he was escorted into the sweat
lodge and the ceremony began.
Nor did he give it much thought until the woman who'd invited him to the reservation called the next
morning. She said that tribal members had stayed up all night arguing over whether he was in denial
over his Indian heritage.
The woman's call prompted one by Hill to his parents. He questioned them about his family tree. It
was the beginning of a journey to learn not only his own family history, but the history of Native
Americans and their treatment by the white culture. It would lead him to stop drinking and to let his
hair grow long at the insistence of medicine men who said it was a way to honor their ancestors.
It also began a precedent of using his law degree to champion American Indian causes. The first
such opportunity involved a battle on behalf of another band of Mission Indians called the Rincon,
who were fighting with the state of California for the right to put video gaming machines on their
reservation. He enlisted the aid of Russell Means, one of the founders of the American Indian
Movement. With Means, Hill was able to attract media attention to what was supposed to be their
legal right to contract with states for legalized gambling on reservations.
Just when it appeared there might be a large settlement in the Rincon case, then-California governor
Pete Wilson reached an agreement that in effect rendered the lawsuit moot. Hill was out all of his
legal fees and most of his expenses from eighteen months of work. It forced him into bankruptcy and
pretty much ended his second marriage, which, in part due to his deepening commitment to Indian
issues, had been on the rocks. Much of the reason for the failure, he admits, was his fault.
Hill's next opportunity to fight for justice for American Indians arrived when he received a call from
Bobby Costilla, the head of California AIM, who asked if he'd be willing to get involved in the case
of Leonard Peltier, the man he'd first heard of nearly twenty years earlier. Despite flimsy evidence
and questionable government witnesses, Peltier had been convicted of murdering two FBI agents.
He was serving two life sentences.
In September 1994, Peltier called Hill at home. Hill felt an immediate rapport with the man who had
become a symbol for Indian rights and whose case had attracted the support of celebrities in both
the entertainment and legal fields, including William Kunstler, the brilliant legal tactician who had
defended the Chicago Seven.
Hill had to admit that he knew little about Peltier's case. Peltier asked him to read Peter
Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, written about his case, and then, if he was so moved, to
visit him at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.
Soon afterward, Hill flew to Kansas. The first thing Peltier said to him was, "I did not kill those
agents."
"Even if you did, you were not convicted lawfully," Hill replied. Before he left, he asked Peltier to
sign his copy of the book.
Hill moved back to Boulder in 1995. He continued to work on Peltier's case, becoming an executive
member of the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. Much of the work consisted of protecting
Peltier from those who tried to attach themselves to his cause for personal gain -- whether it was a
plethora of fake wives who all claimed to be the real Mrs. Leonard Peltier or hucksters collecting
money for the "defense fund." Other work involved trying to come up with new strategies to win a
new trial, or at least examine the more than 5,000 pages of documents the U.S. government has
refused to turn over in the case.
Through his work with Peltier, Hill met many celebrities, including Steven Seagal, who called to
inquire about obtaining the rights to make a movie on Peltier's life in which he wanted to play the
starring role. That created debate among Peltier's supporters on whether such rights should be
granted to a non-Indian. At first Hill thought not, but the more he got to know Seagal and saw that
his intentions were honorable, the more he thought the actor's star power would create a wider
audience for Peltier's story (those negotiations are ongoing). But the Peltier case was another taking
up lots of time and resources spent without pay.
Hill's home, a three-story Boulder townhouse, is a mess. Dishes are piled up in the sink, even though
Yoo says they haven't eaten dinner there in a year. Clothes appear to have been left where their
owners stepped out of them. There's plenty of artwork around, paintings and photographs, much of
it in lieu of payment from their clients. "I have this nightmare of dying like Mozart, impoverished in a
house full of treasures," Hill says, then laughs. "Only I don't have any treasures."
Except for those things that are treasures to him -- like his books, most of them signed by their
authors. Hill pulls out In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. "Lee, it was my pleasure meeting you," Peltier
wrote. "I hope we can work together in success for not only my freedom, but also of our Indian
Nations." It was the way Peltier emphasized the our that made Hill realize that he belonged.
And he's continued to litigate on American Indian issues. In September, Hill filed a lawsuit against
Naropa for "perpetuating cultural genocide" by sponsoring a Native American-studies program in
which non-Indians performed sacred rituals in the classroom. The college had advertised the class as
being taught by a traditional spiritual Lakota leader.
Hill represents former Naropa student Lydia White Calf and her husband, Royce. Royce White
Calf, who is full-blood Lakota, says that when Lydia, who is white, complained, Naropa officials
told him he was ignorant of his people's own spiritual practices. A lawyer cousin of Lydia's sent them
to Hill, who Royce says impressed him initially because of his involvement with Peltier. The suit
alleges fraud, harassment, negligent hiring, breach of duty, defamation and outrageous conduct.
At the heart of the dispute is the contention that the Naropa instructor, who went by the name Eagle
Cruz, was not only not qualified to teach the class, use sacred items such as eagle feathers or lead
sacred prayers and songs, he was not Indian as he claimed. Cruz told several stories. One was that
he was part Lakota, another was that he had been "adopted" by Lakota medicine man Vernal Cross
-- until the family of Cross, who had died, said that was untrue. Then Cruz said he was Yaqui Indian
and had been born in 1948 and raised on the Yaqui reservation. The only problem there was that the
Yaqui reservation wasn't established until some fifteen years ago, and even then, tribal authorities had
no one by his name enrolled on the tribal records.
It is important to stop inappropriate use and "exploitation" of Indian spiritual rituals, Royce White
Calf says, because it is "the final stage of colonialism. Our identity is based on our spirituality; it's
who we are. Once they take over our spirituality, our people will become extinct. We will have no
say in our intellectual or cultural property rights."
Cruz has since left his job, sold his house and moved out of state. Meanwhile, Naropa asked for the
suit to be dismissed, arguing that First Amendment guarantees of free speech protected the school.
In December, district judge Roxanne Bailin announced that "broad claims of cultural genocide" won't
be heard by the court. "Naropa correctly asserts that it has no duty to provide an adequate
education," she noted.
Hill says that figures. "That's the crux of their argument. They have no duty under Colorado law to
educate their students."
The judge also dismissed all the claims except "breach of contract." Still, Hill argues, the basic issue
of the lawsuit -- that Naropa participates in "cultural genocide" -- remains at its heart. "The persons
responsible know it for what it really is," he says. "Even though they're in denial."
Hill says it ticks him off that Naropa has made a big deal of noting that Lydia is white. "She has two
children who are half-Indian," he says. "She is trying to protect their heritage from exploitation [by
whites] to make a buck."
In 1996, the domino pattern appeared to be coming full circle when Hill was invited to be on a panel
moderated by Ginsberg. Even back then, Hill had managed to irritate some members of the audience
by commenting -- pointedly in the case of Naropa -- that it was fine to study and learn to respect
other cultures, but that they should steer away from "misappropriating" traditional and spiritual
practices.
Still, it was good to see Ginsberg, who was soon up to his old tricks, asking, "Remind me, did we
ever get it on?" Later, the old poet got to the microphone for a little extemporaneous poetry that
included asserting, several times, "I am a balding pedophile." The admission seemed to disturb no
one but Hill. Some things never changed.
Through Ginsberg, Hill met Stephen Miles, the 47-year-old son of a well-loved Boulder physician.
Miles was a photographer, a sort of photo biographer of Ginsberg who was also known for his
pictures of rock stars. He'd been arrested in 1989 for possessing photographs of nude teenaged
boys and had been charged with sexual exploitation of a child, but the photographs had turned out to
be of a seventeen-year-old, above the age of consent. The exploitation charge had been dropped,
though Miles had pleaded guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a minor for supplying beer to an
underage drinker.
Ginsberg had told him that he never knew when he might need a good lawyer, and recommended
that he contact Hill.
Hill was in the middle of the worst year of his life. He was bankrupt. His second marriage was over.
And it would not get any better when he woke up the day after Christmas to the news that a
six-year-old girl named JonBenét Ramsey had been murdered in her family's home, just blocks from
where he was living.
At first, Hill stayed out of the JonBenét fray. But in 1997, dismayed by the apparent lack of
cooperation between the Boulder Police Department and the Boulder District Attorney's Office in
the case, Hill decided to run for city council. He argued that there should be civilian oversight of the
police department, which he viewed as some sort of rogue elephant.
It didn't win him the election. But it did bring him to the attention of Stephen Singular, who was
working on a book about the Ramsey case. Cautiously at first, then increasingly as they got to know
and respect each other, the two men exchanged ideas on the investigation.
Singular eventually theorized in his book, Presumed Guilty, that JonBenét's death may have links to
where the child beauty-pageant industry brushes up against the child-pornography business. But, he
argued, the public had only been given two choices: Either JonBenét's parent(s) killed her or an
intruder broke into the house. The real truth, he contended, might lie somewhere in between. The
police had not shown much interest in pursuing this avenue of investigation, even when he discussed
having seen (but not downloaded, which was a felony) Internet photographs of young children being
strangled (as was JonBenét) and sexually assaulted. But he found an interested listener -- at least --
in Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter and a like-minded comrade in Lee Hill. When the book
was released in 1998, Singular dedicated it in part to Hill.
By that time, Hill was more involved than he had ever wanted to be. In October 1997, the National
Enquirer ran one of its myriad stories on the Ramsey case, this one under the headline, "Dad: We
Know Who Did It." Below a pouty-lipped photograph of JonBenét was a picture of Stephen Miles,
along with the promise of an "exclusive interview with the man the Ramseys say killed JonBenét."
Enquirer reporters John South and David Wright started their story: "John and Patsy Ramsey
expect to be arrested for the murder of their daughter, but they already have their defense strategy in
place -- pointing at a man they'll claim is the intruder who killed JonBenét. 'John and Patsy will claim
that the real killer is a neighbor, Stephen Miles, who was once arrested and accused of a sex offense
against a minor,' a source close to the couple revealed."
Frightened and angry, Miles recalled the lawyer Ginsberg had introduced him to and called Hill. In
February 1998, Hill filed a defamation suit against the National Enquirer and John Ramsey.
There were a number of issues to the case, the most important being whether the Boulder Police
Department had ever considered Miles, who had never shown any interest in females of any age, a
suspect. According to Miles, Miles's mother, Hill and Yoo, Boulder detective Jane Harmer told
them that Miles was never a "real suspect." And that, Hill planned to take to the bank.
The lawsuit allowed him to question John Ramsey in an October 1998 deposition that lasted five
hours -- the only time Ramsey has been forced to answer questions under oath. Hill was prohibited
from asking direct questions about the murder until after a grand jury had decided whether to hand
down an indictment, but he figured he would get a second chance when that occurred. Because of
the grand jury proceedings, the deposition was sealed.
Hill was stunned when the National Enquirer's lawyers filed a motion to have the case dismissed --
and when he discovered that at the very end of the file was a sworn affidavit from Harmer stating
that Miles had indeed been a suspect. He immediately filed a notification to interview Harmer under
oath; the Boulder police department fought the deposition. The police lost that appeal but while they
stalled, District Court Judge Clarence Brimmer ruled on the tabloid's motion and dismissed the case.
Hill couldn't believe it. He had witnesses who'd heard Harmer tell him just the opposite. What's
more, this meant that the police were now saying that a rather harmless gay photographer was the
only "official" suspect who had ever been named publicly by the police. Not John Ramsey. Not
Patsy Ramsey. Not any of their family friends who had acted suspiciously. Just Stephen Miles.
In a case filled with strange bedfellows, the Boulder Police Department's climbing into the sack with
the National Enquirer seemed incredible. It had certainly cost Hill thousands of dollars, but more
than that it was unfair to Miles, who'd done nothing to deserve being nationally vilified so a magazine
could make money. But when Hill tried to get an answer from Chief Mark Beckner or Detective
Harmer, he was referred to the department's legal counsel. Neither Harmer nor Beckner returned
Westword's phone calls.
When the grand jury disbanded in October 1999 without handing down an indictment, the seal on
Ramsey deposition was lifted. No one, however, asked to look at it.
Hill was at breakfast in November 1999 with Nile Southern, the son of eclectic director and writer
Terry Southern of Easy Rider and Dr. Strangelove fame, who needed help collecting royalties
owed to his late father's estate, when he was approached by Barrie Hartman, the managing editor of
the Boulder Daily Camera. Hartman suggested that they get together for lunch, an event that, as so
often happened in Boulder, included a conversation about the Ramsey case.
As a former prosecutor, Hill couldn't understand why no one seemed interested in the deposition --
if for no other reason than to compare what John Ramsey had told him to what he had told the
police.
The editor agreed that it didn't seem right. Later that day, he called DA Hunter to ask about the
deposition and was told that Hunter thought the police would have looked at it. Hartman told Hill
he'd called Beckner, who had replied that they figured John Ramsey was "a liar," so there was no
need.
Hartman asked if Hill would be willing to show the deposition to a reporter. With the seal lifted, Hill
didn't see why not. It was only after that reporter asked Beckner why the police hadn't looked at the
deposition that Hill suddenly got a telephone call from Deputy District Attorney Bill Wise, who had
miraculously developed an interest.
When the story broke, other members of the media were suddenly interested, too. A reporter from
the Fox Network interviewed Hill, who openly wondered why, after spending $2 million on the case,
the Boulder police had not bothered to pick up a free, five-hour interview with one of the prime
targets of their investigation.
A thousand miles away, a 37-year-old woman saw the interview. She talked to her therapist, who
did a little Internet research on Hill, and together they agreed that he could be trusted with the
woman's secret.
The woman called Hill. "I think I have information that may be relevant to the Ramsey case," she
said.
Hill's response was to put her on hold and go make a pot of coffee. "Great," he said to Yoo. "Now I
got someone who wants to talk to me about the Ramsey case." He hoped the woman would hang up
before he got back, but she was still there when he picked up the phone five minutes later.
Resigned, he asked her to tell him her story. She had been victimized since early childhood, she said,
by a subculture, including members of her own family, that used children for sex. One of the men
who had participated in the abuse was a friend of the Ramseys.
The woman listed the ways she could authenticate her connection to this man and prove what she
was alleging. For example, when she was seventeen years old, she had persuaded the police in the
small southern California town where she lived to charge a man named Mackie Boykin with sexual
assault. Boykin, she said, had choked her using cords, scarves and ropes to make her body simulate
orgasm while other men had sex with her. Boykin had pleaded guilty and been sent to prison.
The more the woman talked, the more disturbed Hill became. If even part of what she said was true,
she had endured one of the most horrific childhoods he'd ever heard of. And if the woman's therapist
-- who The Witness said could verify that she'd been telling this story long before JonBenét was
killed -- was legitimate, then this woman was potentially a very important witness.
Within the hour, Hill received another call, this time from the woman's therapist. She confirmed what
he'd been told. "I feel sorry for you," she said. "You're where I was ten years ago."
Recalling the Akiki case, Hill's first question was whether she practiced "repressed memory
development" or used hypnosis. No, the therapist replied. Her client, like many others who have
suffered sexual abuse as children, had mental-health issues dealing with dissociation; but otherwise
she was a mentally competent and honest woman who only asked that the police investigate her
allegations. "She's doing it for other little girls," she said.
Hill looked for any excuse to dismiss what The Witness had to say. He did not need to get
re-involved in a case that had already cost him more than he could afford. He had plenty of other
cases to worry about.
Still, this woman sounded so alone and frightened. After several more telephone conversations with
The Witness, as he'd now come to think of her, and her therapist, Hill decided he needed to go to
California to meet her and review her materials.
At her therapist's office, The Witness laid out what she knew while Hill videotaped. She said she
didn't expect Hill, or the police, to take her word for what had happened to her -- what was still
happening, she said, as her therapist confirmed that The Witness continued to be assaulted and
controlled by this subculture. The police in her hometown just took her family's word for it that she
was crazy, despite the fact that she had told the truth twenty years ago and sent a perpetrator to jail.
Hill returned from that trip "a changed man." He believed her -- even if not every word she said was
true, even if she was drawing conclusions that might not be accurate, he agreed that a qualified
law-enforcement agency needed to look into her claims.
Back in Boulder, Hill spoke to Barrie Hartman, who arranged a secret meeting with Hunter.
Accompanied by Singular, who thought that in light of his own research The Witness's story was
plausible, Hill met with the district attorney and one of his investigators at Hartman's home.
Hill presented what The Witness had told him. He knew it sounded incredible, but was impressed
when Hunter didn't blow him off. He, in fact, asked a lot of questions. They all agreed that they
should proceed slowly, that The Witness should gather what evidence she could of her family's own
role in the sexual abuse of children and its possible connection to the Ramsey case.
But then things changed drastically. The Witness called, frightened. She had recently been beaten
and sexually assaulted by members of her extended family, and they'd warned her about keeping her
mouth shut, she said. They were trying to pressure her into coming to Colorado with one of the men
she said had been her childhood tormentor, who was connected to the Ramseys. He had been
calling her himself, ever since Hill's television interview regarding the Ramsey deposition, to check on
her. Now she was afraid she might be abducted, or worse.
Hill contacted law-enforcement friends in the Los Angeles area, where The Witness claimed much of
the abuse had happened, to try to get a case going. However, he ran out of time.
On the Saturday of President's Day weekend, the woman's therapist called Hill from her mobile
telephone. She had The Witness in her car and they were on the run. "We think we're being
followed," the therapist said. The Witness had left everything -- her apartment, her clothes, her
belongings, even her car, so that anyone stalking her wouldn't know that she was escaping. They
were on their way to an airport four hours away so that The Witness wouldn't be spotted leaving
Los Angeles. She was coming to Colorado.
Hill met her at Denver International Airport after midnight. She was frightened and had little more
than the clothes on her back. She'd even left her purse and the prescribed estrogen she took
because of a hysterectomy she'd undergone several years before (attributable, she said, to the sexual
abuse she'd suffered since childhood).
Hill took her to a hotel in Boulder, where he left her to spend the night. He'd contacted Hunter,
who'd arranged for him to bring her to the Boulder Police Department on Tuesday. At first, the
police said that Hill couldn't be in the interview room with her, at which The Witness balked. But
after pointing out that even the Ramseys were allowed to have their attorney sit with them during
police interviews, and the fact that there would be no interview otherwise, the police relented.
In the meantime, Hill needed to find a safe place to hide her. His first thought was an official
"safehouse" of the sort used to protect victims of domestic violence. However, because Hill would
not reveal the name of the man The Witness was afraid of -- whose name would have been instantly
recognizable -- the safehouses in Boulder and Longmont refused to accept her, even after Hunter
intervened.
On Tuesday afternoon, The Witness met with two Boulder detectives while Hunter watched the
interview on closed-circuit television from another room. Hill didn't know it, but The Witness was ill
and running a high temperature.
Halfway through what would be a four-hour interview, Hill took a break and went back to his office.
He was stunned when he listened to a message from The Witness's therapist. They had figured that
The Witness's family would file a missing-persons report in order to locate her; they'd even briefed
Hunter about the possibility. Now he learned that the Boulder police had contacted the police in The
Witness's hometown and told them that not only was she in Boulder, but that she would be coming
to the police station with her attorney, Lee Hill, to talk about the Ramsey case. The police in
California had passed all of that information back to The Witness's family -- the very people she
didn't want to know where she was or what she was doing.
Livid, Hill returned to the police station and told The Witness what had happened -- in front of the
detectives, who tried to explain that they were just following standard procedure. The Witness
turned pale. She said she was now concerned over the safety of her niece, who she suspected may
be suffering the same abuse she had. And she was worried about the case, because now her family
would know to destroy or hide evidence. And she was worried about her personal safety. The man
she was naming was wealthy and these people, she said, were ruthless.
At the end of the interview, the detectives slid their business cards across the table to her. But there
was one last thing The Witness wanted to tell them. She said that in the most recent assault, she had
been burned with a stun gun. She wanted to know if there was a female detective who could
examine and photograph the marks as evidence. The cops arranged it.
When she stepped out of the interview room, Hill, who didn't want to make a scene in front of her,
demanded that Hunter come into the room. When the district attorney was present, Hill lit into the
detectives. They'd done very little about letting The Witness get to the important parts of her story,
choosing instead to question her about when she might be "going home."
"She can't go home," Hill yelled. If their leak to the California police was standard procedure, then
any stalker in the country could locate his prey by filing a missing-persons report. He was a former
law-enforcement officer and he knew that revealing the whereabouts (much less that she was a
potential witness in a murder case) of a competent adult who knew where she was didn't wash.
"At considerable risk to herself, she leaves everything and comes forward to try to help you people.
Then you needlessly strip her of her only security and tell her pursuers where she is and what she's
doing. And all you can give her to shield herself is two fucking business cards. I'll be goddamned if
I'm the only one responsible for her safety."
Hunter tried to diffuse the situation, but Hill and The Witness left through the back door. Now Hill
was really worried about finding her a safe place to stay. He turned to his friends with the American
Indian Movement -- if there was one group of people who weren't afraid of standing up to the
government, it was AIM. He called friends, a poor family who didn't have much. Yet without asking
any questions about why this woman might be in danger or what risk they might face, they told Hill to
bring her over. Suddenly, he felt enormous relief. Leave it to his people to offer what they had to
someone in need.
The Witness stayed with them for several days, but Hill knew that they were barely scraping by as it
was, so he looked for someplace else to hide her while they waited to hear from the Boulder police.
In the meantime, Hill called an FBI agent he knew and told him the story. The agent recommended a
colleague who was a specialist in child pornography. Accompanied by Singular, Hill and The
Witness went to meet the federal agent. In one hour, the agent knew more of the woman's story than
the Boulder police had learned in four. What's more, whether he believed her or not, he treated her
with respect and empathy. And he set her up with an FBI victim-witness advocate who found her a
place with a Denver-area safehouse. There, once staffers knew The Witness's story, they hired extra
armed guards.
The next day, however, Hartman called Hill. He'd decided that the woman's best protection would
be to publicize her story. Then, if anyone made a move against her, he'd draw attention to himself.
Hill, Singular and Hunter were against the idea, but Hartman remained convinced that this was the
best way. And that's how a brief outline of the woman's allegations hit the newspapers.
The meeting with the FBI and the news story accomplished two things. At the safehouse, The
Witness, who had been complaining that she was in severe pain, was taken in for a medical
examination, which revealed that she had recently been beaten and sexually assaulted as she'd
claimed; in fact, she was suffering from abdominal bleeding, had several sexually transmitted diseases
and showed marks where she claimed to have been burned with a stun gun. Her injuries were so
severe that she stayed in the hospital for two days.
However, because of the publicity, tabloid reporters were on her trail. The safehouse managers were
afraid they'd find her and reveal the location, endangering other women. She had to find someplace
else to stay. This time, a friend of Hill's, who had made it a passion to gather information on the
Ramsey case through her Web site, offered her home in Boulder. Hill and The Witness gratefully
accepted.
The Witness sits on the couch, clutching a pillow to her abdomen. She looks ready to bolt when Hill
announces he has an errand to run and leaves her alone to tell her life story to a stranger.
Dressed in a loose-fitting plaid shirt and sweat pants, The Witness would blend in to any crowd.
She's of average height and build. Her hair is short, brown and unremarkable. Her blue eyes tear up
behind wire-rimmed glasses and her face flushes several times during the interview, but she doesn't
cry. When she smiles or laughs, it's always a quick, fleeting thing, as though she's waiting for the
other shoe to drop.
She's been living here since the first article appeared in the Daily Camera. She's afraid to go
outside. Afraid that they may spot her, and she will have to flee again.
The question is: Are they real? Or are they just the figments of her paranoia, the bogeymen of a
troubled 37-year-old woman?
It's easiest to dismiss her story, as the police in Boulder and California apparently have done. But
there's also enough to make one wonder.
She was born April 25, 1962, and since that time has led a double life. One life was presented to the
public: a pretty little blond, neatly dressed and very polite, though quiet under her mother's watchful
eye. And like another famous girl thirty some years later, she was dressed up and posed for
photographers -- for example, she's a model for a 1964-'65 calendar that's among the "evidence"
she has shown to Hill.
The other side of her life was much darker. Her earliest memory, she says, is of sitting on the toilet in
her parents' home when she was three years old, screaming because blood was dripping from her
body into the water. "I had been raped," she says.
In hundreds of pages of recollections she wrote down for her therapist, long before JonBenét was
murdered, she alleged, "I was taught at a very young age to tolerate the pain or be punished. I was
taught at a very young age to always thank the man for being so good to me, and one of the first
statements I memorized for my family was, 'It was my pleasure,' even if what had just been done to
me hurt me.
"The only problem that they ever had with me was that sometimes when a man was going to start
fucking me, I would urinate all over the bed. My urinating in the bed caused me to have more than
one beating with a belt, but it seemed to be something that I couldn't help."
Her child's body was too young to enjoy sex or achieve orgasm. Toward this end, a man named
Mackie Boykin was appointed as her "handler." Boykin had been in her life, she says, "ever since I
can remember." However, he became part of the family after his brother married her mother.
Living just a few houses down the street, Boykin's job was to train her and other little girls -- whom
she says her family and their "guests" referred to as their "Pretty Little Whores" -- in sadomasochistic
sexual practices. One of his favorite techniques was to get her body to simulate orgasm (through
convulsions) by choking her to the point that she almost passed out (and occasionally did). To
accomplish this, he sometimes pressed his thumbs against the carotid arteries in her neck, or used a
variety of ropes, belts and scarves to bind her wrists and ankles and choke her, all while other men,
referred to as "Uncles," sexually assaulted her.
This subculture was a family tradition, according to The Witness. Her own mother told her that, as a
child, she had been similarly used by one of the men whom she allowed to rape her daughter.
Some of The Witness's evidence seems innocuous until it's placed in context with the Ramsey case.
There are photographs of her on Santa's lap, like those last photographs of JonBenét -- however this
Santa, The Witness says, was part of the child-sex subculture, a "warmup for the main event."
There are the letters and photographs, even a name in her baby book that proves she and her family
have a long connection -- dating back to the 1930s -- with the family of men she says sexually
abused her, including the man who has been a family friend of the Ramseys.
Still, it doesn't prove anything regarding JonBenét's death. They're just tantalizing pieces of an
unsolved puzzle, especially in light of recent information that's made headlines -- after The Witness
came forward. The Ramseys contend in their new book, The Death of Innocence, that the police
need to look at their innermost circle of friends. Also, investigator Lou Smit, a legendary homicide
detective who was hired by Hunter but quit because he felt the Boulder police were too focused on
the Ramseys, recently said he believes that an intruder entered the house, and noted that JonBenét
had stun-gun marks on her. And, as everyone knows, JonBenét was found with a garrote around her
neck and a piece of cord tied around one of her wrists.
The most convincing piece of the puzzle is that when The Witness claimed to have been sexually
assaulted once before, she told the truth. Boykin was subsequently charged with 64 counts of sexual
assault, kidnapping and various other related crimes. He was allowed to plead guilty to four counts
and served only ten months. Two days after he was released from prison, he showed up at the
doorstep of The Witness, who had moved out of state and was supposedly in protective custody --
but her own family had told him where to find her. She was seventeen, and her torment by Boykin
and others, she says, continued for nearly twenty years.
It even continued after November 1996, when Boykin died -- one month before JonBenét was
murdered. The question lingers: With the master of sexual asphyxiation of little girls gone, had an
amateur messed up and accidentally killed JonBenét?
The Witness does not know. But she and people like Singular, Hill, Hartman and even apparently
Alex Hunter believe it is a possibility worth examining. As to whether she seems credible, The
Witness doesn't act any crazier than Detective Linda Arndt, who rolled her eyes wildly, talked about
counting her bullets because she was afraid of John Ramsey and claimed to know who killed
JonBenét in an interview with ABC last fall.
At any rate, The Witness's account is interrupted when Hill returns. She's exhausted and starting to
stress out, clutching the pillow ever tighter. She nearly goes through the roof when there's a knock on
the door. It's the Boulder police. But how did they find her?
Not to worry. The officer is there to arrest the home's owner because she failed to appear in court
over a citation for her barking dog. The tension runs out of the room, lost in the irony as Hill laughs:
The Boulder police haven't managed to arrest anyone for the murder of JonBenét, but they can track
down a renegade dog owner -- all while a would-be witness in their town's biggest murder case
cowers behind the door.
As Hill begins to leave to arrange bond for the home's owner, The Witness looks up from where
she's sitting on the ground, petting the dog, and tells Hill, "You're my hero."
{ http://www.westword.com/issues/2000-03-30/feature.html/page1.html }