Read an Excerpt
In Cold Storage
Sex and Murder on the Plains
By James W. Hewitt UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8073-1
CHAPTER 1
The Place
The state of Nebraska encompasses a vast area. Though not as large as Texas or Alaska or Montana, it would still take a long time to walk the 450 miles from east to west. Its rolling hills, golden wheat fields, and verdant cornfields fill up almost eighty thousand square miles. Travelers crossing the state on Interstate 80 may think Nebraska is flat. But it is not. The state rises gradually from the Missouri River, which forms the eastern border, to the high plains of its western border with Wyoming, gaining almost 4,600 feet in elevation on the way. Before Hawaii and Alaska became states, Nebraska boosters claimed Nebraska was the geographical center of the United States.
Travelers flying over Nebraska are provided with a bird's-eye view of huge circles imprinted on the state's landscape. The circles mark the thousands of center-pivot irrigation systems that contribute so much to the bonanza that is Nebraska farming.
Nebraska's population today is well under 2 million. About half of the state's residents live in Omaha and Lincoln, the state's only two cities of any size, and their surrounding suburban areas, all located within fifty miles of the eastern border. The western four hundred miles of Nebraska are dotted with small towns, farms, and ranches.
In far western Nebraska, people are isolated. Farmsteads and ranch homes are often located miles from each other. The most prevalent signs of civilization are grain elevators, which tower over western towns and villages and provide solitary landmarks on the horizon.
McCook, the county seat of Red Willow County, is today a bustling community of nearly eight thousand people. The town has remained nearly static in size over the past forty years; in the 1970 census its population was 8,285. The only town of significant size in the southwestern corner of the state, McCook is situated seventy-five miles east of the Colorado-Nebraska border on U.S. Highways 6 and 34, two of the major highways spanning the state from east to west. Located fourteen miles north of the Nebraska-Kansas state line, the town is a trade center for a large area, including part of northwestern Kansas.
McCook, named for Alexander McCook, a Union general in the Civil War, is an important city on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, which expanded into the Republican River valley in the late 1870s, on its way to Denver. The railroad was instrumental in the settlement of the Republican valley, enticing European immigrants into the area with fanciful tales published in newspapers and pamphlets all over Europe of an agricultural paradise waiting to yield its bounty. Despite their disillusionment in finding something less than a modern Eden, many of the immigrants remained and put down roots. The railroad has been a major employer and significant presence in McCook ever since.
McCook stretches north from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks. The town's principal street — originally called Main Street but now Norris Avenue, to honor the late senator George W. Norris, a McCook resident and one of Nebraska's most distinguished citizens — runs in a north-south direction. Highways 6 and 34, the most significant traffic arteries in the region, parallel the north side of the tracks and form the southern edge of downtown.
Two- and three-story buildings line both sides of Norris Avenue through downtown McCook. The majority of the buildings are outdated; there is no modern construction here. Some are empty. Many have been converted to something other than their original use. A bakery and café, a Mexican restaurant, the county historical society greet passersby. The town's last hotel, now in the throes of conversion to some other residential use, is the largest structure on the west side of the street. A short distance to the north, the county courthouse, a boxy tan three-story structure of little architectural merit, occupies the northwest corner of a Norris Avenue intersection. Past the downtown area, the city changes and improves. A short walk north of the courthouse is a residential neighborhood where McCook proudly claims one of the most impressive structures in the state, a home still known as "the Sutton House."
Sutton, a pioneer McCook jeweler, built a small structure on the property in the 1890s; his wife, who had somewhat grandiose ideas for housing in southwestern Nebraska, wanted more. She contacted noted Chicago architect Frank Lloyd Wright; during the first decade of the twentieth century, Wright designed and the Suttons built a magnificent prairie-style home on the property, razing the previous home. The home cost $10,000 in 1908, which infuriated Sutton, who had relied upon Wright's estimate that it could be built for less. Today, the construction would cost more than a million dollars, as inflation has elevated the cost of living some 2,200 percent since 1910.
After the death of the Suttons, the home passed into the hands of several owners, who modified it extensively. Its current owners, however, recognizing its merit, have restored it to its original grandeur; it remains a private residence and a source of civic pride.
Farther north of the Sutton House on Norris Avenue is the two-story white frame home of the late George W. Norris, a McCook resident for his entire forty-year career in the U.S. House and Senate. And Norris Avenue recognizes his service. Norris is generally acknowledged to have been one of the greatest senators to ever hold that office. He is widely recognized as the father of Nebraska's unique unicameral legislature, which he fostered as an exercise in good government. His home is now maintained and operated by the Nebraska State Historical Society. A pleasant park occupies the east side of Norris across the street from his home.
Much as Ohio and Virginia consider themselves "the cradle of presidents," McCook thinks of itself as the mother of governors. Three of Nebraska's governors — Ralph Brooks, Frank Morrison, and E. Benjamin Nelson — spent significant time in McCook. Morrison was a lawyer, and Brooks was the superintendent of schools in McCook. Though Nelson spent only his boyhood in the town, he remained a tireless advocate for McCook after he reached the U.S. Senate. In accord with the municipal penchant for recognizing the prowess of its native sons, all of these men's homes are outfitted with historical markers. No such marker, however, designates the home of Harold Nokes.
Rolling hills and weathered canyons eroded by wind and water surround McCook. Too difficult to cultivate, much of the land is used as pasture.
What few trees there are, mostly cottonwoods, line the banks of the region's streams and rivers. Many of the pastures and canyons are dotted with scruffy red cedars, a tree that most farmers and ranchers view as an invasive pest.
The Republican River, which flows eastward out of Colorado, at McCook is a puny little water course. Democrats say that it is a toss-up whether the Republican was so named because it was so shallow or so crooked. The water moving down the stream bed past the southern edge of McCook is about thirty feet wide, but it occupies only part of a much wider channel now nearly choked with weeds and grasses. Irrigation farther west in Nebraska and Colorado has siphoned off most of the water in the river bed by the time it gets to McCook. But that was not always the case. In late May of 1935, after a widespread downpour that averaged nine inches across a large area of the watershed, a wall of water up to eight feet high swept down the channel, expanding the usually sedate river from a width of one hundred yards to an uncontrolled monster over two miles wide. In the event, 113 people lost their lives. Property damage ran into the millions, with 341 miles of highway and 307 bridges destroyed.
Carl T. Curtis, then the U.S. congressman from the district and later a U.S. senator, worked zealously to include the Republican River valley in the flood-control provisions of the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program. Dams were constructed to control the feast or famine presence of water in the Upper Missouri and its tributaries to manage the flow of rivers. The Frenchman-Cambridge division of the Pick-Sloan Plan included a number of dams near McCook, water courses that are tributaries of the Republican River.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation supervised the construction of the Medicine Creek Dam, an impoundment in the hills two miles west and seven miles north of Cambridge, Nebraska, twenty-five miles northeast of McCook. The dam, built in 1949, is an earthen fill 165 feet high and over a mile long, lined all along its face with rock riprap. The lake created by the dam is named Harry Strunk Lake, after the irascible but public-spirited publisher of the McCook Gazette, who was a prodigious promoter of water projects in the area. Covering a surface area of 1,850 acres, with twenty-nine miles of shoreline, the reservoir is a heavily used recreation spot, drawing boaters and fishermen from a large area of southwest Nebraska.
Agriculture is critical to the economic well-being of the Republican valley, and Strunk Lake irrigates some 56,000 acres. The ubiquitous center pivot irrigation systems, now seen almost everywhere in the rough land around McCook, were just beginning to be utilized in the 1960s and 1970s, following their invention in the late 1940s. Corn, wheat, and grain sorghum were the principal Republican valley crops in the seventies and still are today. Cornstalks stand silent sentinel over the area, looking in the fall for all the world like China's terra-cotta soldiers.
In the 1970s the small towns in the area were hanging on by their fingertips. As populations shrank, businesses and schools closed. In 1920 there were 7,264 school districts in Nebraska's ninety-three counties. By 1953, when the legislature passed a mandatory consolidation bill, the number was 5,983. By 1973 it had shrunk to 1,287. When small towns lost their schools through consolidation, they lost much of the reason for their existence. The abandonment of branch lines by all the major railroads in Nebraska, lines that before World War II had served virtually every whistle stop in the state, hastened the demise of small towns. The railroads desired better operating efficiency, pleading poverty and the growth of truck competition; Nebraska's Railway Commission, now styled the Public Service Commission, granted the petitions to abandon service.
As small-town economies began to falter, the young and the more aggressive began to gravitate toward larger towns. If a town could not keep at least a café and a tavern open, it was doomed. Danbury — where both Harold Nokes and his wife, Ena, attended high school — is some twenty miles south and east of McCook, a mile from the Nebraska-Kansas border. Its current population is 101. Its population in 1940 — before the Nokeses finished school, married, and left town — was 236. The decline reveals both the exodus and the impact of school consolidation and the lure of jobs and activity in McCook.
For years, social life in small towns revolved around the churches. Bible classes, ladies' circles, and covered-dish suppers furnished an acceptable forum of social activity. People knew their fellow townsmen well, and fear of public condemnation kept all but the most adventurous in line. These rural communities appeared staid and circumspect, but beneath the veneer of respectability, much activity was beyond the pale.
In 1973 a conservative Republican represented Nebraska's Third Congressional District, which encompasses the western two-thirds of the state. In the U.S. House and Senate, Nebraskans were conservative, and so was the majority of the state legislature. The Third District can still be counted on almost always to select rigidly conservative political figures who reflect the views of their constituents, for various offices throughout the district. It is ironic that George Norris, the hero of McCook, was a liberal throughout his congressional career and won his last Senate election in 1936 as an Independent.
Women were an integral part of the workforce both on farms and on ranches in southwestern Nebraska, but in 1973 there was only one female lawyer in McCook, no female doctors, and only a few women business owners or public officials. Divorce was frowned upon, because cruelty and adultery were virtually the only recognized grounds, and divorced women often carried a stigma. Nebraska did not adopt no-fault divorce until 1972, after which divorces burgeoned.
The people of McCook received their news from the McCook Gazette. The Gazette was a far cry from a metropolitan paper and made no pretenses that it was. It covered local news vigilantly, reporting on the successes and pitfalls of local businesses and area farmers and recounting stories of social activities in McCook and the surrounding area. In short, it was the consummate small-town newspaper.
During the summer of 1973 in McCook, several items of note appeared very briefly in the Gazette, although their significance was not to become apparent until later. On July 13 a story on an inside page briefly indicated that the Sheriff's Office and the state patrol were investigating the appearance of obscene messages about a McCook woman that had appeared on road signs, bridges, park benches, and other highway structures in the region. And on August 31 a very brief paragraph of local news indicated that deputy sheriff Don Haegen was resigning October 1 and that state patrolman Bill Tumblin was resigning effective September 1.
The Gazette announced that on September 15 Dewayne Hein, a former McCook resident and backfield star on the 1960 champions, entered into his second marriage in Yuma, Colorado. The story reported that Hein's young daughters, Brenda and Angela, were candle lighters. He and his first wife, Kay Hoyt, had divorced in 1971. Kay was the daughter of Edwin and Wilma Hoyt.
CHAPTER 2
The People
Harold DeWayne Nokes was born April 19, 1928. The woman who would become his wife, Ena Nadine Ambler, was born November 6, 1929. Both lived all their formative years in Danbury, Nebraska. They were married April 26, 1946, when Harold was eighteen and Ena sixteen. Ena was one month pregnant at the time. Harold graduated from high school in Danbury in 1946, but Ena never received her diploma, dropping out after her junior year because of the marriage and pregnancy.
Harold was tall — six feet two inches — and well muscled, with a shock of thick dark hair. He was a capable athlete and was selected as second team all-conference in basketball, although the conference was of a somewhat lesser caliber than those including the state's larger cities. He was taciturn, hardworking during and after school, friendly, and well liked by his peers.
No one could describe Ena as tall. Seeing the Nokeses walking together evoked comparisons with Mutt and Jeff, the old comic characters. Ena was barely five feet tall but trim and attractive.
Ena determined early on that Harold's gene pool deserved close inspection. One of Ena's classmates said Ena chased Harold all through high school. They speculated her pregnancy involved a certain willingness on her part to yield to Harold's advances, in the hope that marriage might be in the offing. Perhaps she believed it would be a ticket out of Danbury.
The only institution of higher learning in the general area of Danbury was McCook Junior College, a two-year school known primarily for having introduced a group of reputedly thuggish football players into the area. There were no other colleges within easy driving distance, so students could not commute to college classes. The cost of tuition, books, and room and board at any of the colleges in central and eastern Nebraska must have seemed a fantasy to those eking out a hardscrabble existence in southwestern rural Nebraska. In any event, neither Harold nor Ena entertained thoughts of campus life.
Harold was the youngest of four children. At various times during Harold's youth and adulthood, his father, Leslie E. Nokes, was a county commissioner (commissioners are the governing body of a county) of Red Willow County and the Red Willow County assessor. Upon graduation from high school in 1946, Harold went to work for the county, operating a road maintainer used to care for the county's rural roads. He held that job for about six months and then served temporarily in North Platte, Nebraska, a larger city some seventy miles north of McCook, where he worked as a telephone caller for the Union Pacific railroad for two months, calling railroad crews to report for duty. After the birth of their daughter on December 19, 1946, Harold and Ena moved to Denver, where he worked for the Public Service Company of Colorado for three months. But Denver's lights were not as bright in 1947 as they are now, and the young couple opted to return to the ills they knew, rather than to stay in an alien world. The Nokeses went back to Danbury, where they bought a small café and Harold resumed the road maintainer operation.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In Cold Storage by James W. Hewitt. Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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