Trial lawyers are storytellers, and every trial lawyer who has ever left the practice of law has a story to tell about that decision. My story is, I think, just a little more dramatic than most.
In 1994, my wife Lynda and I traveled from Los Angeles to southeastern Utah to spend Thanksgiving weekend with friends at a remote bed-and-breakfast inn. Located just north of a Navajo reservation, it was around 20 miles from Mexican Hat (population 88). This is America's red rock country, a striking panorama of buttes, mesas, gorges, and spires. Our plans called for three days of relaxation and hiking - a welcome respite from our chaotic and often stressful lives in California.
The second day of our weekend found us deep inside John's Canyon, a sheltered enclave considered remote even by San Juan County standards. By late afternoon it had begun to snow, so we headed back to our vehicle, swaddled in a cottony silence so complete we could hear our own hearts beating.
And that's when we stumbled upon the two skulls - human, bleached, and grinning, amid a jumble of weathered bones.
We knew they were Native American skulls, from their shape and dental condition. But what were they doing there? More intriguing still, what were we to make of the jagged fissures - possibly bullet holes - in the backside of each?
Thus began what would become for me a decade-long obsession to answers the riddle of the John's Canyon skeletons. Little did I know that the story, once finally revealed, would change my life forever.
That story begins in May 1934, outside of Hugo, Oklahoma, where a homeless widower and his 13-year-old daughter are befriended by a Texas drifter newly released from the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. The drifter, 36-year-old Clint Palmer, lures father and daughter back to Texas where the father, Dillard Garrett, mysteriously disappears and where his daughter Lucile begins a one-year ordeal as Palmer's captive, traversing the Depression-era West on a crime-and-killing spree that leaves four dead in Utah - including two Navajo sheepherders whose remains are never found. But in Palmer's sensational 1935 "skeleton murder" trial, the testimony of star witness Lucile Garrett does lead to his conviction and 99-year sentence.
To assemble the story's disparate pieces, I returned several times to Utah, visited Texas courthouses, and poured over newspaper, historical, genealogical, and oral history archives in four states.
I felt I had uncovered one of the great, buried tales of the American West - a story of innocence and evil, perseverance and salvation - and one that cried out to be told. But my responsibilities as a trial lawyer, hiring partner, executive committee member, and litigation department chair at Pasadena's Hahn & Hahn left little time for auctorial pursuits. And so, on my fiftieth birthday, I made the agonizing decision to swap my briefcase for a typewriter and become a full-time writer.
I resigned my 20-year partnership in February of 2006, to the bewilderment and charitably veiled skepticism of my colleagues. Lynda and I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I spent two years wrestling with the manuscript of what would become
Hard Twisted, a fictionalized account of the John's Canyon murders, told from the viewpoint of young Lucile "Lottie" Garrett.
While still in manuscript, the book was named Best Historical Novel of 2010 in SouthWest Writers' international writing contest. Author Pinckney Benedict described it as "the perfect amalgam of Cormac McCarthy and Jim Thompson: violent, hilarious, and as bracing and painful as the blow of a dog quirt across the face. Utterly irresistible." It will be released worldwide by Bloomsbury in November.
So, yes, I still tell stories for a living. Stories of crime and deception, intrigue and detection. And always, stories of redemption.
This one is mine.
Chuck Greaves' debut novel Hush Money,
a legal thriller, will be published by St. Martin's Minotaur Books next month (www.chuckgreaves.com).
Kari Santos
Daily Journal Staff Writer
