1
The sheriff’s office destroyed his notes long ago, but the detective still remembers. He knows where to find the spot of cracked pavement under towering coastal redwoods where so much went wrong.
At 90, and long retired, Erwin “Butch” Carlstedt drove there one day last autumn, snaking through the rugged hills of northwest Sonoma County, 110 miles north of San Francisco. He traveled along a vineyard-studded ridgeline, dipped into a forested canyon and then crossed a bridge onto narrow, twisting Skaggs Springs Road.
Carlstedt spent three eventful decades in county law enforcement, including 10 years as a homicide investigator. Over the years, reporters have come knocking, seeking his recollections. More recently it’s true-crime writers. They pick his brain about famous incidents from the 1960s and ’70s: ax murders, cold cases. They ask about Ted Bundy, the notorious serial killer that Carlstedt helped identify.
But for decades now, no one has asked the detective about what happened in these woods.
On Sept. 20, 1972, a white man pulled out a pistol, pointed it at an unarmed Indigenous father and fired a single bullet. It struck Richard Oakes in the heart, killing him almost instantly.
Oakes, 30, had been living at a small Native reservation nearby. But his influence reached far beyond it. Three years earlier, as a college student in San Francisco, Oakes had sparked an iconic 1960s protest, the occupation of Alcatraz Island. Sailing to The Rock with members of several tribes and claiming it for all Native Americans, he inspired global headlines and a wave of similar demonstrations. Since then he’d become the face of Red Power, a nationwide movement for Indigenous rights and sovereignty.
Yet his killing in rural Sonoma attracted almost no publicity. National newspapers didn’t pay much notice. Bay Area outlets, including this one, didn’t investigate. And only a couple local reporters covered the 1973 manslaughter trial of Oakes’ shooter, Michael Oliver Morgan.
Morgan was the caretaker of a YMCA summer camp next to the reservation. He told police he’d fired in self-defense after Oakes lunged at him. Morgan also said Oakes had menaced him on earlier occasions, describing a series of escalating threats by the Native man. Skepticism of this narrative emerged in court: A prosecutor argued that the physical evidence didn’t match Morgan’s account of the shooting, and witnesses testified that, days before pulling the trigger, Morgan had made racist and hateful comments about Oakes and “Indians.” Still, an all-white jury acquitted him.
He has not spoken to reporters, then or since. Reached at his home earlier this year, Morgan declined to comment for this story.
The verdict devastated Oakes’ family in ways his descendants still struggle with today. To them it seemed obvious that Oakes had been targeted because of his Native identity and political advocacy. “He was assassinated,” Leonard Oakes Jr., Oakes’ nephew, recently said. “That’s what we felt from the get-go.”
They weren’t suggesting that Morgan had killed Oakes to achieve some specific, pre-planned political outcome — only that the story of the killing was larger than a dispute between two individuals on some local road. It involved race. It involved the wider social context of the era and the place. But the justice system never acknowledged any of that.
Oakes’ widow, Annie Oakes, told her children that she “wanted closure, but she would never get it,” her daughter, Fawn Oakes, a 53-year-old Santa Rosa resident, recently recalled.
Outside the family, as decades have passed, Oakes has been largely forgotten. His death changed the course of an entire movement, depriving Indigenous people of a gifted leader while muddying Oakes’ legacy, making him appear responsible for his own death. Without clear answers, Oakes was never celebrated in movies or honored with statues.
“I used to ask my classes: How many of you have ever heard of Richard Oakes? And none of them raised their hands,” said Kent Blansett, a professor of Indigenous studies and history at the University of Kansas and the author of “A Journey to Freedom,” a 2018 biography of Oakes. “His erasure is systemic.”
Most of the crucial documents about the killing and the trial were overlooked or kept secret for decades. Some were lost forever. Many people with firsthand knowledge have already died: kin, friends, attorneys, police officers, FBI agents, jurors. The rest have terminal illnesses or, like Carlstedt, are very old.
But it’s now possible, 50 years later, to fill in some long-missing pieces. The Chronicle interviewed dozens of people, including members of Oakes’ family and inner circle, attorneys and law enforcement officials, several of whom have never spoken publicly before. Through the federal Freedom of Information Act, reporters obtained 600 pages of government records kept in a restricted section of the National Archives, including some remarkable files created in 1972 by a team of FBI agents and U.S. attorneys who quietly investigated Oakes’ killing — and never revealed their work.
These documents and interviews raise the same question that Native people did at the time: Was the Morgan trial a miscarriage of justice?
According to these sources, racial prejudice shaped and ultimately consumed the trial, preventing key facts from coming to light. Morgan had expressed anti-Native views, but he wasn’t the only one — so did a sheriff’s deputy who goaded him toward violence six days before the killing, multiple eyewitnesses told the FBI. County and federal officials knew about these explosive allegations. But the agencies either excused or never fully probed the deputy’s role, reporters found. The lead prosecutor, interviewed here for the first time, also failed to pursue nagging questions about Morgan’s intent.
On Skaggs Springs Road last fall, Carlstedt slowed his car, parking on the shoulder near the camp where Morgan once worked. Spry, with a wisp of white hair, the detective shut off the engine and jumped out.
“It was a simple little case,” he said, shaking his head.
The body. The bullet. The confession. It was all right here.
2
“What’s this ‘nation’ you want to establish out here?”
On the dock of Alcatraz Island, Richard Oakes fielded questions from reporters and TV crews. It was Nov. 10, 1969, the first full day of an occupation that would last almost two years.
“An American Indian nation,” Oakes, then 27, answered.
“Why Alcatraz?” another reporter asked.
Oakes flashed a smile. “Everybody can see it,” he said. He was 6 feet tall and muscular, with curly black hair and a broad, handsome face. He spoke in calm tones, a hint of the East Coast in his vowels.
“Do you think you have the legal right to claim the island, and why?”
“Well, you’re talking about two different societies now,” Oakes replied. “In my society, or in the Indian society, yes, we do.”
Oakes was a citizen of the Mohawk Nation, born on the tribe’s Akwesasne reservation that straddles upstate New York and Canada. His parents’ families had been there for generations, although some relatives had migrated to working-class Brooklyn, where Mohawk men carved a niche as ironworkers. Oakes grew up moving between these two communities. As a kid he lived most of the year in the city and spent summers on the reservation, where he heard elders talk about the tribe’s battles with the U.S. government. In the 1950s, federal officials had begun seizing Mohawk land to build a system of river locks, ignoring the tribe’s objections and paying them almost nothing.
These stories reflected a nationwide pattern. Through a postwar policy known as “termination,” U.S. officials passed laws that shrank the land and independence of Indigenous people, wiping out treaty obligations with more than 100 tribes. There was no real home for them in white society, either, as many had learned through bitter experience: Walking to school in Brooklyn, Oakes and his Mohawk friends used to get jumped by older white kids. He learned to speak Italian and throw a punch.
“It was all about respect: Respect your elders, be there for your family,” said nephew Leonard Jr., who as a kid gazed up at his uncle and perceived “a giant” with “the widest shoulders I’d ever seen.”
Oakes dropped out at 16 and followed his father and uncle into the iron trade, working on skyscrapers and bridges for the next decade. “I made good money,” he wrote later, “but beyond that there was nothing.” He took night classes to finish his high school degree. Then, deciding to see the country, he quit ironwork in summer 1968, the peak of the Vietnam War. He drove a red Ford Mustang to San Francisco, finding a job tending bar in the Mission District.
Before long he enrolled at San Francisco State, one of the most intensely radical spots in America’s most radical city. That fall, the Black Panther Party led a campus-wide strike that shut down classes while Indigenous students marched to establish the university’s first Native American Studies department. Joining a circle of young Native activists, Oakes soon discovered a gift for writing and organizing, pecking away at manifestos against termination policies on a dorm-room typewriter. He recruited protesters at parties, walking around with a grin and a beer.
“I didn’t follow many people, but I followed him,” said Eloy Martinez, then a young flooring contractor who had recently arrived in the Bay Area from Colorado. He had met Oakes in 1968 at an anti-war rally downtown, when Oakes offered him and his young kids bologna sandwiches.
That same year in the city, at a different protest against the Vietnam War, Oakes met Annie Marrufo, a bright, quiet 27-year-old who grew up on a Native reservation in Sonoma County. Her tribe, the Kashia Pomo, had fished and hunted throughout Sonoma’s coastal beaches and forests for thousands of years, surviving Termination with a small parcel of land.
A single mother of two girls and four boys, Annie would become Oakes’ closest confidante and protector. The couple married within months, and Oakes adopted her six children as his own; they would go on to have two more children together, Little Fawn and Richard Jr. It bothered Oakes when anyone referred to his “stepkids.” Annie later passed down stories about him scolding reporters for using that word. “He said, ‘Those are my kids,’ ” said daughter Fawn, who has since dropped the “Little” in her name. “He loved us all.”
Because Oakes was Mohawk and Annie was Pomo, they called the kids “Pomohawks,” reflecting an idea that had been spinning in Oakes’ mind for months — the spark of the “Red Power” movement he was about to ignite. In the Native world, inter-tribal politics are complex and fraught by old rivalries, but Oakes wondered: What if all the tribes got together? What if they showed up in numbers on a piece of land that was rightfully theirs and refused to leave? Police might arrest them for trespassing, but then Natives could go to court, make noise and win the public to their side.
Oakes was “talking about nonviolence,” Martinez recalled. “If they’re going to put us in jail, they’ll have to put us all in jail.”
3
Dispatches from a fracturing America spread across the front page of the Chronicle on Nov. 11, 1969. Richard Nixon’s administration railed against anti-war protesters; police in Memphis sprayed tear gas into a crowd of young Black people opposing segregation. But the lead story that day was Alcatraz. “A war party” of 14 “young Indian invaders” had claimed the island, calling themselves the Indians of All Tribes and naming Oakes their “president-elect.”
He’d been talking to Bay Area students about Alcatraz for months. It was once Ohlone land, but it was also a symbol: The U.S. didn’t just take the land. They put a prison on it. Then they shuttered the prison in 1963, saying it was too expensive to keep running. Except for a small federal patrol, Alcatraz was largely abandoned, with no ferry access.
Planning the “invasion” was a group effort, but Oakes was the one who finally catalyzed it, boarding a tourist boat called the Monte Cristo with 50 other students. They paid for a cruise toward The Rock, not telling the captain they intended to land there. When the boat was 250 yards off the island’s coast, the captain made a turn, planning to sail around the island and return to the city. Oakes climbed the rail.
As news spread, Indigenous people from all over were drawn to the island. They left jobs, schools, reservations. They brought their kids and spouses and friends. Geneva Seaboy, then an 18-year-old Sioux woman, rushed to Sausalito looking for a ride. The night of Nov. 20, she joined a convoy of three boats that snuck past a Coast Guard blockade. She was so excited and scared that she forgot her toothbrush. “It was just right,” recalled Robert Free Galvan, who was 20 and working at a city restaurant when he left to help hold The Rock. “Hell yeah. Taking back something from this country that took so much from us.”
During those first days on Alcatraz, the protesters chose Oakes to speak for them. His dive off the Monte Cristo had quickly attained the aura of legend, and they needed someone to negotiate with U.S. officials (in a sly inversion of federal terminology, the protesters established a “Bureau of Caucasian Affairs”). The government was holding its fire for the moment. Nixon feared making an ugly scene.
Oakes told the protesters not to bring guns. Much like Black civil rights protesters in the South, they would not cast the first stone. The point of nonviolent resistance was to be better than your adversary — to show the public the rightness of your cause and win their support.
He drew a line during the occupation’s first week, when several members of the American Indian Movement arrived at the island. AIM was a paramilitary group in Minnesota that promoted armed rebellion. According to one occupier who recalled this story to Blansett, Oakes’ biographer, in 2001, the AIM guys offered to take over the protest and “run it from here.” Oakes’ response was, “Get the fuck off this island, I’ll kick your ass.” The militants hurried to the boat.
Sleeping at first in the prison cell block, Oakes and the other protesters spread across the island’s 22 acres, eating fresh crab and canned food. Like many of Alcatraz’s new residents, Oakes brought his family, hoping to live there permanently with Annie and the six Pomohawks. “He wanted to make something for his kids,” said Blansett, who is of Indigenous descent.
In buildings where spotty electricity still flowed, activists set up a health clinic and a school that taught math, English and Native history. They wrote “INDIAN LAND” in red letters on the water tower and on a wall next to the warden’s former house. Women and men shared many tasks, governing the island through a multi-gender tribal council; among others, the UC Berkeley activist LaNada Means, the Lakota nurse Stella Leach and Seaboy emerged as leaders.
“At one time, I think we were ashamed to be Indian, because of the stigma that was put on us,” Seaboy recalled. “We were starting to fight back.”
Celebrities including Jane Fonda and Anthony Quinn soon declared their support, sailing to Alcatraz one day on a boat purchased for the protesters by the band Creedence Clearwater Revival. The occupation was becoming a ’60s event, tugging at politics and pop culture. But another set of visitors went largely unnoticed by the media. In the last weeks of 1969, delegations from tribes across the country journeyed to the island, curious to see what this new nation looked like. Oakes asked these elders for guidance, and they in turn asked for advice on land fights in their own territories.
“Alcatraz is not an island,” Oakes said repeatedly. “It’s an idea.”
4
Three hours northwest of the island, deep in the Sonoma County redwoods, Michael Oliver Morgan was shoeing horses and fixing pipes.
In 1970, several months after Oakes dove into the bay and launched the occupation, Morgan became the caretaker of Camp Gualala, a wilderness retreat owned by the Berkeley YMCA since the 1930s. Sprawling across 450 acres of forest and canyons, the camp hosted more than a thousand East Bay kids each summer. They learned how to ride horses and swim, staying in cabins along a fork of the Gualala River.
Aside from visitors and employees, the only people around for miles were local ranchers and about 125 Kashia Pomo, whose language had long ago given the river its name (Gualala means “where the water flows down”). The tribe’s 40-acre reservation, called a “rancheria” due to its small size, lay 4 miles west: Annie’s childhood home.
Unlike the camp, it was cut off from fresh water sources, and many tribe members lived in poverty. They often hitchhiked along the only paved road in the vicinity, Skaggs Springs Road, which starts at the coast and winds east, past the rancheria, then the camp, on its way to the northern tip of Dry Creek Valley. Here, in the ’70s, rows of Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay grapes had just begun to proliferate, heralding a wine boom that would bring wealth and tourism.
Sources: Reporting by Andrew Park / The Chronicle • Graphic: John Blanchard / The Chronicle
The county was still pretty rugged then. Ranchers drank at bars with loggers and back-to-the-land hippies. Most elected officials were Republicans; a supervisor in 1971 railed against new programs for poor pregnant women, saying it was “aiding and abetting the revolutionary movement.” According to Chris Andrian, an attorney who moved from San Francisco to Sonoma County in the early ’70s, “It was Redneck City, man.”
Morgan moved to Healdsburg from Mendocino County around age 10, making little impression on his peers. One classmate at Healdsburg High, Bruna Rose, assumed he was a “new kid” because he kept to himself; another, Reg Elgin, recalled that Morgan was unfriendly and “wasn’t outstanding in any particular sport or any particular thing.”
After graduating, Morgan joined the U.S. Army, serving for three years as a military policeman. Honorably discharged, he returned to the county, looking for work, and found it at Camp Gualala. He was in his early thirties, of average height and slightly stocky, with a muscular upper body. He and his wife, Nancy, ultimately moved into the director’s cabin with their three children.
The Y’s core staff was based in the East Bay, too far away to manage the facility year-round. For decades they had relied on local caretakers, giving them the freedom to hire their own cooks and ranch hands. Morgan “wasn’t up there for his people skills, let’s put it that way,” recalled Russ Hayward, who became the Y’s director of youth and camp programs in 1973, after the killing. “He was up there because he could fix pipes.”
Hayward never managed Morgan, but he met the caretaker a few times while visiting the camp as an outreach worker for the Y. Morgan seemed like a particularly “rough dude,” Hayward said.
Before Morgan took over, camp staff and the Kashia had mostly gotten along, according to both Martinez and Blansett. The tribe hosted campers at the rancheria to learn traditional arts and crafts. One caretaker, a genial older man known as “Grandpa,” had allowed tribe members to hunt on YMCA land. Morgan ended that practice. All 450 acres, in his view, were strictly private property.
Morgan also kept numerous firearms at the camp, including two .22-caliber pistols and a 9mm semi-automatic handgun. That confused Hayward. “I lived up there all summer long, and I never felt like I had to have a weapon to protect myself,” he recalled. “If anything, people get lost and stop and say, ‘Where am I?’ ”
5
Oakes and Annie were away from Alcatraz, running an errand, on the day their daughter fell. It was Jan. 3, 1970, two months into the occupation. Yvonne Oakes, 13, was playing with friends near a ledge in a decrepit prison building, above a three-story drop. She stumbled, plunged and hit her head. Rushed to a city hospital, Yvonne died five days later, her shattered parents at her bedside.
The tragedy marked the end of the family’s life on the island. Annie couldn’t bear to stay, and while Richard wanted to see the protest through, he also struggled with feelings of guilt and regret, telling a friend he didn’t “have the heart” for Alcatraz anymore. Without him, the occupation slowly dissipated. In June 1971, armed federal marshals removed the last stragglers by force.
By that point, though, Red Power had crossed to the mainland. And even in grief, Oakes remained the movement’s center of gravity.
After leaving Alcatraz, his family spent months on the road, staying for a time on the Akwesasne reservation in New York, then visiting tribes up and down the West Coast, fomenting new demonstrations. One of the biggest was in Shasta County, where the Pit River Tribe was fighting to reclaim millions of acres from the Department of the Interior and Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the powerful utility company. Deputies arrested Oakes and Annie for trespassing on PG&E property, but they hardly minded: Every arrest led to a court hearing where tribal attorneys could make a holy racket about Native land rights, fueling press coverage and forcing politicians to respond. In an era of social slogans like “Black is beautiful,” Oakes told a Chronicle reporter in 1970, “I plan to add one more: Indians are permanent.”
Even Nixon seemed to be listening that summer, signaling in a speech that he would repeal the doctrine of Termination that had long suffocated tribes.
“The time has come,” the president said, “for a new era in which the Indian future is determined by Indian acts and Indian decisions.”
Red Power was rising. But so was the risk to Oakes’ personal safety. He was in the thick of California now, mixing it up with judges, huge companies and baton-swinging police.
One day in June, at the Market Street headquarters of PG&E, Oakes and three colleagues tried to make a “citizen’s arrest” of the company’s CEO. They were ejected by security but held a press conference that drew reporters. Afterward the activists went to a Mission bar to celebrate, and while they shared beers, a man crept up behind Oakes and swung a pool cue at his skull.
Brain surgeons performed an emergency, six-hour operation; Oakes then fell into a coma that lasted weeks. Family members kept a vigil at San Francisco General Hospital while Bay Area reporters tracked his condition. Oakes didn’t regain consciousness until he was doctored by two Native healers and elders, Peter Mitten and Mad Bear Anderson, according to 1970 press accounts and Galvan, who said he observed the process. White doctors “told the elders, ‘You guys can do whatever you want to him because we’ve done all we can,’ ” Galvan recalled. The healers mixed herbal medicine into Oakes’ feeding tube, he said, and soon Oakes’s skin “turned red” and he started moving his hands.
When he finally awoke, his speech was slurred. Police said the attack was fallout from a previous bar brawl in which Oakes had broken the assailant’s nose, though no charges were ever filed against Oakes. His attacker was convicted of assault.
The Oakes family left the city in September. At Annie’s urging, they settled on Kashia lands, the Stewarts Point Rancheria, her childhood home in the Sonoma County forest. She believed its seclusion would protect them from further violence.
Her husband was supposed to take it easy for a while and recover from the bar attack, which had caused permanent damage. “He’s limping bad,” Galvan recalled. “He had a little bit of a distant look.” Still, Oakes inevitably grew restless. And though he continued to travel from his new home at the rancheria, his focus now shifted to land issues close by.
That year, Sonoma officials had proposed to widen Skaggs Springs Road, saying they needed to carve away 3 acres of tribal land. Oakes considered this outright theft. One night, he and 20 other Kashia blocked the road with a dead tree and a spray-painted sign: “Stop Pay Toll Ahead — $1.00 This is Indian Land.” For hours, they collected $8 from passing motorists before a California Highway Patrol officer, Harry Humes, placed Oakes in handcuffs.
“What took you so long?” Oakes asked Humes, smiling. “You can never find an officer when you need one.”
This wasn’t a violent event. One rancher who stopped at the toll later told the Washington Post that Oakes “politely explained the purpose” and gave him a receipt. Even Humes, the cop who arrested Oakes, thought he was “a pretty decent guy,” Humes recalled last fall at age 95. After the arrest, Humes returned to the rancheria on Oakes’ invitation and the pair chatted over coffee.
But the toll booth was perceived by some as an act of militancy. The Santa Rosa Press Democrat ran a photo of Oakes at the barricade next to his 10-year-old son, Rocky, who knelt with a rifle in his arms.
“Armed Indians Charge Toll on County Road,” the headline read.
6
On the afternoon of Sept. 14, 1972, a Mohawk boy walked along a wooded county road.
His name was Billy Lazore. A 15-year-old with long braided hair and a headband, he’d been staying with Oakes on the rancheria, along with another Mohawk teenager, Lloyd Thompson. They’d come from upstate New York and shared common ancestry with Oakes. Where they’d grown up, Lazore later told a judge, “a lot of Indians can hunt anywhere.”
That day, Lazore was heading toward the YMCA camp, looking for two young friends who had left that morning to hunt. The boys had been gone so long that people were getting worried. (They would later turn up, unscathed.)
A 24-year-old camp employee, Robert Myers, was in Morgan’s cabin having tea when he heard dogs barking, he later told the same judge. Myers grabbed a rifle and went outside. He saw “a hippie” coming around the bend in the road, a youth with a headband. Myers asked what he was doing “way up in the middle of nowhere,” he testified in court.
Lazore was standing on a public road near a Native reservation. “This is Indian land,” he said.
Oakes was also out looking for the two boys, and before long, he pulled into the camp’s parking lot in his blue station wagon. His 2-year-old daughter, Little Fawn, was in the passenger seat.
Oakes asked to speak to “your boss.” Michael Morgan emerged from the lodge. The two men, who had never met before, started to argue. Oakes said he agreed with Lazore: Any Native had a right to be here, hunt here, walk here.
There are two versions of what happened next, outlined in court transcripts and FBI records. The Bureau would get involved in October 1972, opening an investigation and interviewing eyewitnesses. The FBI gave versions of the witness reports to Blansett in 2001, although the pages were heavily redacted, with names and other information deleted. In May, the Chronicle obtained unredacted copies through FOIA.
One iteration of the story comes from the camp employees, Morgan and Myers. According to their testimony about the night of Sept. 14, they asked Oakes to leave the camp. But Oakes refused. He began “advancing” toward them, Myers said, and Lazore pulled out a hunting knife.
At the flash of the blade, Oakes extended his hand to the boy, taking the knife away. That’s when Morgan grabbed the shotgun from Myers.
He fired a round above Oakes’s head.
Morgan later described it as a warning shot, saying he feared Oakes would attack. At the sound of the shot, “Mr. Oakes flinched but very slightly,” Myers said.
Oakes “said that he would burn us out and he said he would be back to get us,” Myers testified. Then Oakes and the boy departed, returning to the reservation.
In Lazore’s telling, Oakes never said anything like that.
According to the boy, the camp men were the ones escalating the conflict while Oakes, though angry, tried to defuse it.
That’s when Lazore pulled out his knife, he recalled. As soon as he did, Oakes took it from him. Then Oakes turned his back to Morgan, to show that he posed no danger, Lazore said.
One witness friendly to Morgan bolstered Lazore’s chronology of events. Phyllis McMillen, a former camp cook, was having tea with Morgan, Morgan’s wife, Myers and another camp employee that day and observed the confrontation. She later told a judge that Oakes was not holding the knife when Morgan fired over his head.
At some point, Morgan’s wife, Nancy, called the police, and soon, sheriff’s deputy David Michael Craver arrived. So did a friend and neighbor of Morgan who worked for the county roads department, Tom Neville. Several key details about the following conversations have never been reported before now, including the deputy’s identity.
At the camp that day, Morgan and Myers told their story to the deputy, describing the knife and the warning shot fired at Oakes. Oakes and Lazore had left the scene by now; everyone remaining was white.
“You should have shot him when he had the knife in his hand,” Craver said to Morgan, according to a three-page sworn statement Myers provided to the FBI.
Neville later gave a similar account in a Sept. 25 interview with the sheriff’s office. The county shared a record of the interview with the FBI. “Deputy Craver remarked that if he had been Morgan he would not have shot over (Oakes’) head, that he would have shot him,” Neville said, FBI records show.
In front of the director’s cabin, Neville joined the discussion, according to Myers’ FBI statement. Neville bragged that he’d once “held off” 20 Kashia who had “surrounded” him. Craver chimed in, saying “the Indians” were “troublemakers.”
“I’m not scared of them,” the cop said. “Whether there are 20, 50 or 100 of ’em, I’ve got an M-16 in the trunk that just loves to eat Indians.” Craver also said, “I hate Indians,” Myers later told two other FBI witnesses. The M-16, a military rifle, is similar to the AR-15-style rifles that have since become America’s most notorious guns.
Neville said he heard Craver say “he was not afraid of the Indians as he had guns in his car too, naming several,” according to Neville’s interview with the sheriff’s office. In a later interview with the FBI, Craver denied mentioning his M-16 or saying he hated Indians.
There was some more talk that night about shooting Oakes and whether it would be legally justified if Oakes had a weapon. Neville asked the deputy, “Would a white man get off in a case like that?” Craver “said something that indicated a white man would get off,” Myers told the FBI in his sworn statement.
“I don’t want to kill him,” Morgan replied to the deputy. “I don’t want his trouble.”
But after that, he started carrying a concealed, loaded handgun, Morgan would later testify. He tucked it into his waistband.
7
The next morning at Camp Gualala, a 26-year-old hiking enthusiast and Democratic Party organizer named Frank Greer was having coffee with Morgan, Myers and a few others. Greer was vacationing there for a few days, and it was his first time chatting with Morgan. To make conversation, Greer asked whether it was hunting season for anything. He later testified in a court hearing about the conversation that followed.
According to Greer, Morgan replied that “some things you had open seasons on all year ’round. Those were coons, foxes, and Indians.”
The visitor asked Morgan why he felt that way about the local Natives. The caretaker replied that he “never had any problem with them at all until Richard Oakes came.” Morgan then called Oakes “a troublemaker” who was “half crazy” and said he “would be better off dead,” Greer testified. Myers later corroborated these quotes, testifying in court that Morgan said it was “open season on coons and Indians,” that Oakes was “better off dead” and “somebody was going to shoot and kill him sooner or later.”
Drinking coffee in the cabin, camp employees told Greer about the confrontation the previous night, and he grew concerned. Morgan’s fear of Oakes struck him as “real,” but it also seemed close to “hysteria” or “paranoia,” he testified.
Morgan later complained in court that Greer was misquoting him, at least in part. Someone else at the table declared “open season” on “Indians,” according to Morgan, “And I agreed with him.”
He also denied saying Oakes was “better off dead.” Morgan said his actual words were, “Some Indians are real troublemakers, like Richard Oakes. This county is better off without people like that.”
8
Five days after the “warning shot,” the two Mohawk boys, Lazore and Thompson, went back to the camp. They intended to steal a few horses, Lazore later testified. He thought the Kashia needed the animals more than the YMCA did. Late in the evening, the boys entered the corral.
They were poking around the tack barn when a green truck rolled up. Morgan jumped out. The boys ran. Morgan later testified that he wanted them arrested for attempted horse theft.
As the boys fled across a creek into the woods, Morgan lost their trail, but he didn’t let it drop. Hours later, still on the hunt, he called Tom Neville, who swung by in his car and picked up Morgan and Myers, according to Neville’s later testimony. The men drove back and forth for a time, cutting through the inky dark of Skaggs Springs Road. In the front passenger seat, Morgan gripped a gun with a “long barrel,” Neville later testified.
Morgan jumped out with the gun.
“He pointed the gun at my head and says, ‘Get in the car,’ ” Lazore testified. “And I says, ‘What if I don’t get in the car?’ He says, ‘Well, then I will blow your head off.’ ” (Neville and Morgan later disputed this in court, denying that Morgan threatened the boy or pointed his gun. They admitted, however, to taking Lazore against his will.)
The men drove the boy to the YMCA camp, holding him there while they called the sheriff. Lazore spent three days in juvenile jail, unable to contact Oakes or anyone else.
The day after Lazore’s arrest, Sept. 20, Oakes set out from the reservation in the afternoon, walking on Skaggs Springs Road toward the camp. No one knows exactly why, but the most likely scenario, according to court testimony, is that he was looking for the missing Mohawk boy.
Around 4 p.m., Oakes hitched a ride from a stranger, an old man named Ernest Ohlson Jr., who drove Oakes a few miles toward the camp and let him out. Ohlson later told the court that as he pulled away, he saw Oakes cupping his hands and shouting into the woods, as if searching for a lost companion.
At the camp, Morgan was working in the horse corral, a quick walk below the road, along with Myers and a groundskeeper named James Thomson. At 4:30 p.m., Morgan finished putting shoes on some horses, walked up to the road and stepped over a chain that separated the corral’s dirt driveway from the pavement. Then, as he told police in a statement later that day, he saw Oakes “jump out of a clump of redwoods directly in front of me … I was startled.”
According to Morgan, Oakes asked him, “What did you do with the boy?”
Back in the corral, the employees heard their boss arguing with another man for “two or three minutes,” Thomson later testified. He wasn’t concerned. But Myers started walking up the hill, then broke into a run.
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Annie Oakes got to her husband’s body before police did. She happened to be driving near the camp, returning from an errand, when she saw a man sprawled on his back in the road wearing Oakes’ boots, she later told the Press Democrat. She rushed to his side, bringing Little Fawn. Fawn was later told by relatives that Annie pounded on his lifeless chest. “My mother pleaded with him, ‘Get up,’ ” she said. “ ‘Let's go home. I'll make you dinner.’ ”
In Santa Rosa, Detective Butch Carlstedt walked into the radio room and heard some commotion about a homicide. He hopped into the sheriff’s helicopter with a crime-scene photographer and flew to the camp. He found Morgan standing next to the corral.
Morgan waived his right to remain silent and gave the detective a three-page statement. He said Oakes jumped out from behind some redwoods and asked about “the boy.” When Morgan replied that the sheriff took Lazore to jail, Oakes responded, “The deputy can’t help you now and I’m going to kill you,” Morgan told the detective. Then Oakes crouched down, “jumped at me taking about two strides and I fired,” Morgan said. “My thoughts were panic. I was scared and I thought I was all done.”
Carlstedt asked to see the gun. Morgan handed over a 9mm German pistol — a Walther P38. Morgan said he had started carrying it a week earlier because he was afraid of Oakes.
The detective was immediately suspicious of Morgan’s account, he recently told the Chronicle. Oakes had been shot through the heart. He lay frozen on his back, hands at his sides, no weapons on him or nearby. If Oakes had lunged at Morgan, the detective reasoned, his momentum would have carried him forward, onto his stomach.
Carlstedt also thought Morgan’s demeanor at the scene was odd, the detective recently recalled. In the cop’s experience, people involved in a shooting are usually distraught, even if they believe they fired in self-defense. Morgan seemed to think he would simply go home as soon as Carlstedt finished asking questions. When the detective said Morgan needed to get in the helicopter with him, Morgan looked surprised.
They flew to Santa Rosa, where the detective took him to county jail on suspicion of involuntary manslaughter — an unlawful yet accidental killing, carrying a top prison term of four years. That’s what the district attorney’s office wanted the initial charge to be, Carlstedt recalled. But the detective thought the charge was too weak.
If a person kills another during a sudden quarrel, motivated by an unreasonable belief that he must use deadly force to defend himself, that’s voluntary manslaughter, a more serious crime. If he deliberately kills another person, without reasonable fear for his life, it’s murder. Carlstedt believed the facts showed intent, and as he continued to gather evidence, his conviction grew.
He found the bullet the next day, a lead slug, in a dirt bank by the roadside. He heard the account of Myers, the camp worker, who described seeing his boss aim the gun with two hands. Carlstedt realized that Morgan must have had time to think. According to measurements of the homicide scene and Morgan’s own testimony, Morgan was at least 10 feet away from Oakes when he fired and possibly as much as 20 feet. There was no hand-to-hand combat. And Morgan had never called out for help, either, despite having two employees nearby.
“It was open-and-shut,” Carlstedt recalled. “It was a case that had no mysteries.”
The detective shared his conclusions with a 30-year-old deputy district attorney, Edward Krug. The prosecutor agreed that Morgan’s story “just didn’t add up,” he recalled.
Krug, now 81, has never spoken publicly about the trial beyond a brief comment on the day of the verdict, but he recently gave an extensive interview to reporters at his Santa Rosa home, greeting them with cookies. He said he took an interest in the case because he was “into Indians” as a kid growing up in San Francisco. He read books about the Old West and made figurines of Native chiefs out of modeling clay.
Looking at the evidence, Krug developed his own suspicions. It struck him that the bullet wound on Oakes’ chest was larger than the one on his back. Typically, an exit wound is bigger than an entry wound. Had Oakes actually been shot in the back? After all, he had turned his back on Morgan once before, during the confrontation on Sept. 14. “That troubled me,” Krug said.
The medical examiner concluded that the presence of muzzle residue on the chest wound marked it as the entry point. Though he didn’t seek a second opinion, Krug was never satisfied with the explanation, and the discrepancy would never be definitively resolved.
Either way, Krug believed the killing was motivated by prejudice. He laid out his argument to a judge at a pretrial hearing in October 1972. Morgan, he said, was never in danger and always kept the upper hand during his final encounter with Oakes.
“Mr. Morgan knows he has the advantage,” Krug said. “He knows he has a gun.”
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Native people never doubted it was murder. “When charismatic leaders try to stand up for what’s right in society, they get killed,” Oakes’ 22-year-old grandson, Elijah Oakes, recently told Chronicle reporters. Soon after the killing, Annie and a group of Kashia marched in Santa Rosa, demanding justice, while hundreds more joined a national protest caravan called the Trail of Broken Treaties, rumbling toward Washington, D.C., in Oakes’ name.
Family and friends buried him at the rancheria, shoveling a grave, pulling tree roots out of the ground with bare hands. Martinez kept the biggest root and later fashioned it into a cane, wrapped in leather and adorned with beads and buffalo nickels. As they carried Oakes’ coffin toward the grave, “His body got heavier,” Galvan recalled. “It was like he didn’t want to go in there.”
The district attorney’s office initially pursued a murder charge, arguing at the October hearing that Morgan should face trial for second-degree murder and manslaughter. But the judge disagreed, allowing only manslaughter charges to move forward. Although prosecutors could have asked for a new hearing to make the case specifically for murder, they chose not to, Krug recalled. He and his boss, District Attorney John Hawkes, worried about what a jury would think.
Oakes was “notorious” in the county, Krug recalled. “You either loved Richard Oakes or you hated him.” They decided to go for what they hoped would be a surer win, charging Morgan with both voluntary and involuntary manslaughter.
But everything unraveled when they got to trial in February 1973.
Krug, about four years out of law school, was inexperienced and poorly prepared, he admitted in his recent interview. The first morning, the jury was seated so quickly that he asked the judge for a delay. He wasn’t ready to give his opening statement.
He had also neglected to have the crime lab analyze Oakes’ jeans. Dirt or scuff marks might have shed light on how Oakes fell, potentially undermining Morgan’s account. But by the time Krug realized he’d “screwed up,” the prosecutor “was afraid to go back to the evidence room and look,” he recently recalled.
The defense attorneys committed no such blunders. Richard Pawson and Michael O’Donnell, a pair of seasoned litigators, had been recruited by the Berkeley YMCA. They came prepared with a clear narrative — and one that was easier to sell.
It was a story about a normal American dad, Morgan, trying to protect his wife and children from a fast-moving, physically imposing menace. Calling Morgan and his employees to the stand, the defense walked them through their version of the feud, focusing on their descriptions of Oakes’ threats against the men and the camp. Given that context, they stressed, anyone in Morgan’s shoes would have been deathly afraid of Oakes.
Krug’s narrative was more diffuse. He talked about how the physical evidence clashed with Morgan’s story, which continued to shift even during the trial. Originally, talking to police, Morgan claimed Oakes “jumped” from behind a tree. Now, under cross-examination by Krug, he said Oakes approached from the road, walking, arms at his sides. When Krug said Oakes couldn’t have “crouched” and “lunged” because of the way his body fell, Morgan said Oakes had actually “squatted,” then tumbled backward.
The prosecutor scored some points here. But these details weren’t the heart of the case. Race was. Or it was supposed to be. But Krug mostly stepped around it.
He avoided talking about Oakes’ Native identity and advocacy in a positive way. He feared, he recalled, that it would inflame any prejudices the jurors might harbor. At the same time, he hesitated to go after Morgan on race. In the opening statement he ended up delivering to the jury, Krug summarized the account of camp visitor Frank Greer, repeating the derogatory comments that Morgan reportedly made on Sept. 15 (“open season” on “Indians,” Oakes was “better off dead,” etc.) But while the prosecutor implied to the jury that Morgan shot Oakes out of racial animus, he didn’t say that explicitly. He wasn’t clear about the motive.
Krug also didn’t explore the troubling statements of Deputy Craver that eyewitnesses had reported to both the FBI and the county.
The prosecutor lacked a full picture of the cop’s comments. The FBI never shared its witness statements with the county, Krug said in his recent interview with the Chronicle.
Still, Tom Neville had already given his account to the sheriff’s office, and Krug had access to it. Neville’s interview alone would have been enough to raise red flags about the deputy’s role. However, Krug didn’t think it was his job as a prosecutor to cast aspersions on a county cop, he explained.
He did briefly put Craver on the stand to confirm some of what Morgan said on Sept. 14, but the prosecutor didn’t probe further. (Craver told the court his memory was “so vague.”) So the public never learned that a deputy had bragged about a gun that “loves to eat Indians.”
“We didn’t want to get into that” in court, Krug recently said. “We don’t want the community to feel prejudice was rampant in the sheriff’s office or in the people who are protecting you.”
Several years later, Krug’s legal career would implode. He was forced out of the district attorney’s office in 1978, accused of an ethical breach by a boss. Shifting to private practice, he ultimately lost his law license and was briefly incarcerated after pleading guilty to conspiring to counterfeit money. In his recent interview, Krug said he broke no laws or rules, blaming office politics for his firing and shady clients for his other troubles. He talked about these parts of his life in circuitous ways, but when asked to assess his performance at the Morgan trial, he was blunt. “I think I did a lousy job,” he said.
The jurors, at any rate, were not impressed. At least five have died since the trial, but three recently agreed to interviews.
At the start of their 25-hour deliberation, they said, the group was evenly split on Morgan’s guilt or innocence, but those who favored acquittal seemed more certain. In the end, none of the jurors felt confident enough in Krug’s case to hold out.
One juror, Lucille Batemon, then a 40-year-old Petaluma woman who worked at her family’s butcher shop, told the others that she knew Morgan was telling the truth because she had looked deeply into his eyes, she recalled. Another juror, James Sparks, then a 33-year-old grocery-store clerk, felt Morgan “was scared for his life, for his family,” he said recently.
Now 83, the juror said Oakes had been “stealing from (Morgan’s family) constantly” and added that Oakes once fired flaming arrows toward Morgan’s house. None of this is true.
On the third day of debate, court staff took the jury to a restaurant and bought them wine, Beverly Ritchey, an alternate, recalled. Ritchey said she thought the court was trying to loosen the jurors to speed up a decision.
On March 16, the clerk read the verdict to a hushed courtroom: not guilty on all counts.
“I couldn’t believe it,” recalled Martinez. Oakes’ people had never trusted the white-run courts. But the evidence against Morgan had seemed so damning that “everybody in the Native community thought he would be convicted,” Martinez said.
Security guards kept the jury indoors for a time, telling them it wasn’t safe to leave because Oakes’ family and friends were upset and gathering outside the courthouse.
“That was scary,” Sparks said. “Those Indians were out there, trying to claim he was an innocent man.”
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Annie left court in a daze. The moment the verdict dropped, the Press Democrat reported, she had cried “hysterically,” telling Krug, “Surely you did the best you can, but this isn’t justice.” She walked into the newspaper’s office later that day. “If an Indian had shot a white man,” she asked a reporter, “do you think they would have come out with the same verdict?”
She struggled after the trial in ways that were hard for people around her to watch, including her seven living children. Now a 31-year-old widow, Annie left the rancheria, moving to Santa Rosa and retreating from the activist life she’d shared with Oakes. The killing had robbed her of a husband, and then the trial stole the language that made it make sense: murder, assassination. Annie could keep saying the words, but who would listen? It was over.
In the years after her husband’s death, she turned to alcohol and drugs, daughter Fawn recalled. She remembers that Annie would get drunk and have entire conversations with Oakes as if he were there. “I know she missed him,” she said.
Fawn grew up wanting to know what her father was like, begging Annie for any detail, however small: What was his favorite food? For years, she didn’t answer. “I felt I was cheated,” Fawn said. “I grew up not wanting to be Indian. I didn’t want to be a part of it.”
The family’s quiet suffering left a void in the wider conversation about Richard Oakes and Red Power, and his name faded in the late 1970s and the 1980s, even as his struggle finally bore tremendous fruit. He’d helped turn the government against Termination, and now Congress passed bill after bill expanding Indigenous rights, thanks in part to the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan that assembled in the wake of his killing and focused attention on the plight of Natives, influencing policy for years to come. The world of today, where the U.S. negotiates with sovereign tribes on a “nation-to-nation” basis, was “triggered out of Richard’s death and assassination,” said Oakes’ biographer Blansett.
Starting in the mid-’70s, Oakes’ community set out to honor him. Students and professors preserved his writings; San Francisco State eventually named a building after him, the Richard Oakes Multicultural Center.
A series of Sunrise Ceremonies brought veterans of the Alcatraz protest back to The Rock, on the holidays that others call Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. Federal employees had painted over the iconic “INDIAN LAND” signs, but Martinez argued they were history, not graffiti, and spearheaded a successful campaign to get them restored. Eventually, Annie participated too (she died of cancer in 2010), and today, Oakes’ descendants play central roles at the Alcatraz gatherings, including Fawn and Elijah, her son, who bears an uncanny likeness to Oakes.
“It’s not just because of him, solely, that so many great things happened for Indians,” Elijah recently said of his grandfather. “But I think his intellectual prowess really gave fire to the movement that just hasn’t been replicated or emulated since.”
The family has proven resilient. Elijah, now a foreman for a landscaping firm, is training to be a cultural monitor with the Kashia tribe, protecting tribal sites and artifacts, while Leonard Jr. is helping organize Mohawk people back east, meeting in their traditional longhouse to press the same sorts of land claims that his uncle pursued 50 years ago. “There’s a reason we’re still here,” Leonard Jr. said, meaning both the family and Native people more broadly. “There’s a reason we need to stay here.”
They talk about Richard a lot these days. Still, every year, more pieces of the Oakes story are lost forever, destroyed by institutions or by time. That’s especially true of anything involving the killing.
Law enforcement agencies shut the books on the case even before the jury delivered its verdict. The Department of Justice closed its investigation in November 1972, finding “no evidence of a conspiracy” between Morgan and Deputy Craver, according to a 1972 department memo obtained by the Chronicle.
The memo downplayed the accounts of FBI witnesses, concluding that “Morgan alone contemplated Oakes’ demise.” The author of the document, then-U.S. Attorney James L. Browning Jr., was one of the federal officials who had proposed to remove the Alcatraz protesters at gunpoint.
Four months later, in February 1973, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office gave Craver a “Peace Officer of the Month” award.
Pawson, Morgan’s attorney, died in 1976. Craver passed in 2014, Lazore in 2021. Harry Humes, the highway patrolman who once arrested Oakes at a protest and thought he was a decent guy, died in March, not long after the Chronicle interviewed him.
The Berkeley YMCA was eventually absorbed into the YMCA of the East Bay, which sold the camp property in 2009. “We don’t have any historical records of events that occurred at that site,” a Y spokesperson said recently in an email. “Good luck with your article!” The new owner, the Mormon Church, has since renamed it Camp Liahona, a reference to a magic compass from scripture.
Morgan never returned to his caretaker job after the trial, but he soon found new employment with the state of California, which hired him as a correctional officer in 1974. He worked for two and a half years at San Quentin State Prison, according to a prison system spokesperson. He eventually moved out of the area.
He is still alive, at 84. Oakes’ kin thought he died long ago, and Fawn was recently shocked to hear otherwise. “I do not hate him,” she said, “but he did rob me of a dad.”
Morgan now lives in Oklahoma, a quarter mile from a stretch of highway named for a Native tribe. His street is windy, working-class. There’s a metal rocking chair on his porch and a sign that says “God Bless America.”
Seeking an interview with Morgan, reporters sent two letters to his home describing the Chronicle’s findings in detail and asking for his response. When the letters were not returned, a reporter visited him in person.
The front door was open. A bald man with wire-rim glasses rose slowly from the couch. “Yeah, I don’t want to talk to you,” Morgan said quietly. “I got your letters.” He waved his hand.
“It was a sad thing that happened,” he said.
He closed the door.
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Late last year, when Detective Carlstedt was first contacted for this story, he said he wasn’t sure he could add anything useful. He’d done his job. The jury did what it did. He disagreed with the call but moved on. And it was a long time ago.
But a few days later, he changed his mind about talking. He said he’d been thinking about the case.
Returning to the scene of the killing, he walked across the pavement. Morning sun punched through the fog and the towering trees. The detective pointed to a gravel driveway sloping down from Skaggs Springs Road into the camp.
He’d first encountered Morgan down there, he said.
Carlstedt glanced over at the double yellow lines where Oakes’ body had been in the road, his legs stretching toward the gravel driveway.
“I’ll never forget it,” he said. “I had a confession. I had a victim. I had a weapon. I had a bullet.”
After several more minutes here, there wasn’t much left to do or say. So Carlstedt headed home, taking a different route that passed through the small reservation. Children played basketball outside the Kashia Elementary School. Barbed-wire fence surrounded a large green water tank. A man stepped onto a porch to pet a barking dog.
In a flash, the reservation was gone, and thick forest surrounded the road again. Around a bend, a wood retaining wall held a hillside back from the pavement.
A few weeks earlier, its surface had been spray-painted with childlike handwriting, curlicues and a heart in bright blue. “NATIVES ONLY,” it said.
Now the wall was blank. Someone had taken the trouble to scrape it clean.