The Cokeville Miracle by Hartt & Judene Wixom

Author:Hartt & Judene Wixom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cedar Fort, Inc.

Within fifteen minutes after the bomb exploded in Cokeville, Lincoln County’s Assistant Attorney Richard Leonard was at the schoolhouse to provide legal advice, including questions of proper search warrant and investigative procedure. He would initiate the monumental criminal investigation. The takeover, in Leonard’s own words, “appeared to us to be the most extensive act of terrorism ever attempted in the United States [at that time].”

Leonard was prepared to charge both David and Doris with kidnapping, had they lived. If convicted of that crime alone, each could have received a minimum of twenty years for each of the 154 hostages. That would have added up to 3,080 years apiece. While the plan was David’s, Doris was clearly complicit. She entered the school building on her own volition, without any known coercion from her husband. Add to that the penalty for extortion, and the Youngs would have needed all the years they dreamed of in their Brave New World just to serve out their sentences! Further, had David lived, there would have been the added crime of murder for shooting his wife. (An investigation concluded that David had shot his wife after she caught fire from the explosion.)

The authorities felt that Princess would probably not have been charged, possibly even if she had remained in the school with her father, due to the fact that her life was often threatened.

Along with Leonard, Lincoln County sheriff’s investigators Earl Carroll and Ron Hartley spent days in the schoolroom, talked to hostages, and pored over evidence in the case. All were veterans at their jobs. Leonard had spent more than five years in the attorney’s office, while Carroll had been a police chief in Utah for twelve years before joining Lincoln County. Hartley had also spent years with the county as an investigative officer. Together, they launched a thorough probe into everything known about David and Doris Young: their possessions, travels, lifestyle, and particularly their diaries.

When Hartley arrived in Cokeville, he had heard nothing on his car radio of the crisis and assumed a “massive mock drill” was in progress. He was soon told otherwise and taken inside the school building. Later, the forty-one diaries and journals of David and Doris that had been located were turned over to Hartley, who began the complicated process of examining them, both for a basic understanding of the two personalities and for specific references to “the Biggie” of May 16, 1986.

While the takeover was underway (but prior to the explosion), two agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Boise and Denver were hurrying to Cokeville to help negotiate the ransom. To be more accurate, they were hoping to talk the Youngs out of their extortion threats. When the bomb exploded, that wasn’t necessary anymore. But they were still involved because it is a federal crime to kidnap or attempt to kidnap anyone. The agents from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms were also en route, pulled in by David Young’s weapons violations.

In the matter of weapons, investigators turned up three guns the hostages didn’t know the Youngs had.

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