The Strange Story of Jack Harelson

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Outside Magazine October 2004

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The Killing Bones (cont.)


	Road to trouble: Highway 140—the route between Grants Pass and the Black Rock Desert—near the border of Oregon and Nevada (James Fee)

An Unmarked Grave
THE CAVE NEAR ELEPHANT MOUNTAIN remains almost exactly as Jack and Pam left it 20 years ago. Rattlesnakes live in the soft tailings piles outside the entrance. A colony of bats flits through the entrance at dusk. Harelson's broken metal-and-plastic lounge chair rusts against the cave wall. Now, though, little pink flags—markers left by the BLM team that surveyed the damage—stick out of the crumbly earth, fluttering in the hot wind. BLM archaeologist Pat Barker, along with a team from the University of Nevada–Las Vegas, plan to return to the cave later this year and salvage whatever's left to find.

Harelson never discovered the crescent head that he was certain would make his name. But he did achieve his greatest fame just as his world was collapsing. Three days before his 2003 arrest, Harelson was interviewed by Archaeology magazine for a story about the $2.5 million BLM penalty.

"I'm not a thief," Harelson told the magazine. "When I find something significant, I turn it over. That was my intention all along, but they had to go hammer on me. Ruin somebody's life just because they need some attaboys. It's just government [expletive]. I never did say it was mine. I wasn't collecting that particular stuff; hell, everybody's got a jillion pieces of that stuff, broken sticks and twigs and human feces—and I had them all in sealed containers . . . The archaeology community has lost so much because of this. There is not anybody now who will turn in a discovery, for fear of Barker and his kind. You try to do things right and they lie, cheat, and steal to get where they gotta go."

Harelson's trial is scheduled to open in late October in Jackson County. He currently sits in a Josephine County (JoCo) jail, held without bail, charged with conspiracy to commit aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, and four counts of solicitation to commit murder. Harelson has pleaded not guilty.

Harelson's defense will likely characterize him as a man sold down the river by vindictive BLM officials, a bitter ex-wife, and a smooth-talking police informant. "This is dangerously close to a perfect entrapment scenario," said Peter Sparacino, publisher of the Web site Behind the Scenes in JoCo, who has been closely following the case. Sparacino suspects the BLM civil action "was launched to incite Jack to be vulnerable to an undercover stooge's urgings to seek revenge."

As for the two Paiute children, they will not return to the cave. At the conclusion of Harelson's trial, no matter what the verdict, Dean Barlese will lead a private reburial to return the children to their native soil. With skulls and bones now reunited, the ceremony will happen on an unmarked section of Paiute land in Nevada, to guard against further looting. "We may have to do it in the middle of the night," Barlese told me last fall. "But we will know they are finally safe."

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