The five bodies were found by an Air Force helicopter after Mrs. Carlos Rodriguez of Victorville called police to say her son had not returned from a brass-collecting expedition led by Calvin Duggai.
In testimony at Duggai’s trial, San Bernardino County Medical Examiner Dr. Philip Rawson stated that when the bodies were found, “They’d been picked fairly clean by buzzards and ants but we were able to piece the story together. Life expectancy in that desert is extremely brief, even for a healthy adult, if he isn’t a trained expert in the techniques of survival. People’s cars break down out there, they make the mistake of trying to walk out for help, and quite often they’re dead in just a few hours.”
Heat exhaustion and heat stroke are blamed for most summer desert fatalities of this kind. Dr. Rawson stated, “The blood almost literally comes to a boil.”
It was established at the trial that Duggai had deliberately abandoned the five men without water.
In the absence of clear evidence of motive, Duggai was charged with five counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of the five scavengers.
Rumors that Duggai’s motives involved Indian witchcraft and intertribal rivalry led Duggai’s court-appointed defense attorney to successfully petition for a change of venue from Barstow. The trial was held in San Francisco in March, 1972.
A prosecution witness, Oro Copah, testified that his brother, Taxco Copah, one of the five victims and a member of the Yuma Indian tribe, had argued several times with Duggai about Indian “medicine” or witchcraft, each man claiming greater power for the spirits and demons of his own tribe. On two prior occasions, Oro Copah recalled, the arguments had led to blows. According to Oro Copah, the argument had not been resolved between them when the two men—Duggai the Navajo, Taxco Copah the Yuma—set out on July 3 in the pickup truck with their three companions.
According to the testimony of the surviving brother, one topic of argument between the two men had been whether Yuma medicine or Navajo medicine provided greater protection against the “demons” of the desert. In his summation at the trial, San Francisco Prosecuting Attorney Edwin Garraty suggested that the motive for the crime was probably to be found in this dispute. “Essentially what must have happened,” Mr. Garraty told the jury, “is that Duggai and Taxco continued their argument throughout the trip into the proving ground, and finally Duggai must have said words to the effect, ‘All right, let’s find out just how powerful your medicine really is.’ And left the five men to survive as best they could.”
Duggai was found not guilty by reason of criminal insanity. He was remanded to the custody of the psychiatric division of the State Department of Corrections for an indeterminate period.
At the time of his escape Tuesday night, Duggai had spent five years and four months in two successive state hospitals, having been moved to Cochino nine months ago on recommendation of psychiatrists who judged that it was no longer necessary to confine him in the maximum security facility at Sacramento.
Duggai was born and grew up on the Window Rock Navajo Indian Reservation in northeastern Arizona. He is a graduate of an Arizona high school and attended the University of Arizona at Tucson for one semester. He was drafted in 1969 and served as an infantryman in Vietnam in 1969–1971. Prior to his medical discharge in early 1972 he underwent psychiatric treatment at Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco for a condition that was described at his trial by Army psychiatrist Captain Samuel Mackenzie as “combat disorientation caused by an experience of involuntary participation in atrocities.” According to the testimony of Capt. Mackenzie and three other expert psychiatric witnesses, Duggai was “not capable of distinguishing right from wrong,” and was not legally responsible for his actions, and thus met the legal definition of insanity.
By last night police had widened the dragnet for Duggai to include San Francisco and the Bay Area.
Mackenzie looked at the grainy wirephoto at the bottom of the newspaper column. Like most mug shots it was barely recognizable: there was no life in the face depicted—it might have been a photograph of a death mask. It was a face that had closed up completely. He saw no sign of the bewildered pleading he remembered.
Mackenzie hoped they’d nail him. Maybe it wasn’t Duggai’s fault but Mackenzie disliked him nonetheless: he remembered Duggai as a figure of sinister menace.
He stayed in the tower until nightfall; every twenty minutes he swept for smoke with the glasses. When it was dark he climbed down and went into the cabin to eat. The dog followed him inside.
He didn’t like the glare of a gas lamp; his light came from the cookfire and from a candle he’d stuck in the neck of a whisky bottle. He ate something that had come out of a can—five minutes afterward he couldn’t remember what it was. He mixed the remains of it into a bowl of Rival and Friskies and fed the dog; afterward he went back up the dark ladder and had a look around for fires. He spotted three or four campfires on the campground but nothing disturbing. At midnight he made another sweep and then went to bed.
When he was half asleep he heard the dog stretch, her claws scratching the floor. He thought of the pneumatic brunette who’d wandered into the station two weeks ago wearing a knapsack and chewing a string of jerky out of a cellophane pack—wide-eyed and full of college-girl enthusiasm for ecological conservation and the healthy outdoor simplicities. She wanted to apply to the Forest Service when she graduated: she saw no reason why fire rangers had to be men.
She wanted to know everything about the job. He’d answered her eager questions with a monosyllabic reluctance that only convinced her he was a lovable eccentric. She was ready to believe him heroic: she saw his isolation as a tremendous sacrifice. He did not disabuse her.
She fixated on the whisky-bottle candlestick as a symbol of his resourceful conservationist ingenuity. That amused him—he’d never thought of it as anything but a lazy whim—and he had laughed at her. His laughter in turn struck her as true communication and she was tearfully passionate, delighted she had been able to bring him out of his hermit shell, and he made love to her four times in the one night—the only time in his life he’d ever accomplished that.
In the morning she’d told him breathlessly that he had the great charm of one who didn’t fit into an acquisitive society.
When she was ready to leave she became shy. “You are an Indian, aren’t you?”
“Why?”
“You look like an Indian. You talk like one.”
“Navajo,” he told her, although it was only half true.
She left to go back to summer school at Pomona. Mackenzie had been relieved to see her go.
Where do you go on your days off?
Smyley, you stupid oaf, I go to whorehouses. Where the hell do you think a man goes after he’s spent three weeks on top of a Sierra Nevada mountain in a fire-lookout tower?
Finally he fell asleep.
The dog woke him. He heard the thump of her tail against the floor.
It triggered all his warning systems.
Pitch dark. Nothing to make a dog wag her tail—unless there was someone else in the cabin.
A voice spoke.
“Yah’a’teh.”
He recognized the Navajo greeting, the deep big voice in the darkness. The phrase meant Hello or It is good or just Nice day ain’t it but it had been spoken in an irony of vicious rage and he knew that voice.
A match struck explosively. In its light he saw Calvin Duggai’s big face and the huge revolver.
“Half your brains on the wall if you blink, Captain.”
The dog lay drowsily with her head rising slowly. She stopped wagging her tail.