Where can I go from here?  On one hand, there's still a lot more story to tell.  On the other hand . . . . there are fingers (?)  Sorry 'bout that, folks.  Sometimes I just can't help myself.  [Sure . . . . And if you believe that . . . .]  On the other hand, the same people were still involved in the same actions.  They acted in pretty much the ways they usually acted.  Goons kept on gooning.  Harassers kept on harassing.  And AIM kept on being targeted for "decapitation."  [A real hearts-and-minds solution, indeed!]  At this point I'm going to jump ahead of myself, and pick up the story later on:  On November 25, 1975 a grand jury indicted James Eagle, Darrelle Dean Butler, Robert Eugene Robideau, and Leonard Peltier on two counts of first degree murder.  Although four men men had been indicted, the government's case was very weak.  Firearms and ballistics evidence had not been linked to the defendants, and Eagle's boasting - still the only firsthand account of the actual killings - had failed to establish the premeditation that is a precondition for first-degree murder.  A hunt for "witnesses" ensued.  On January 9, Wish Draper was picked up in Arizona , charged with drunkenness and "strong-armed robbery" and taken to Gallup, New Mexico.  There he was strapped to a chair by Gary Adams and his partner, Victor Harvey.  He was then threatened with prosecution for the killings.  Three days later he returned with Adams to South Dakota, where he testified before a special grand jury on January 13.  Both Draper and his cousin Norman Brown, who also testified, would later claim they were coached beforehand by Robert Sikma.  Both would state that in their testimony for the prosection, they had lied.

From Draper, the FBI learned who had sheltered the fugitives on Pine Ridge.  Subsequently the Bear Runner family was repeatedly harassed by police and goons.  Grace Bear Runner was assaulted by a goon named Charlie Winters, and Edgar's brother Dennis was run off the road by goons in Porcupine.  Edgar himself, who had been attacked in the Pine Ridge supermarket in November 1975 by Manny Wilson and two others, was seized in early 1976 by FBI agents who burst into his father's house and took him to Rapid City for questioning.  Although the winter's day was very cold, the bundled-up agents kept all the windows open.  On the whole hour-and-a-half trip, they treated this as a joke at the young Indian's expense.  The following year he was sent to prison on charges of "obstructing" a police officer who was pistol-whipping him in Gordon, Nebraska.  Apparently Norman Charles was so determined in his refusal to cooperate that he was discarded as a potential witness.  Despite his known involvement at Oglala and despite his subsequent arrest with Bob Robideau on weapons and explosives charges in Kansas this young Indian (twenty years of age) was never prosecuted.  However Angie Long Visitor and Joanna LeDoux - both innocent bystanders and mothers of young children - went to prison for refusing to cooperate.  The Long Visitors were released from jail in early December, but LeDoux served eight months in a federal prison.  She was finally released on orders from Attorney General Levi, partly because of bad publicity caused by the refusal of the women's prison authorities to let her nurse the baby born in jail.  (Matthiessen, ibid, pp. 246-247.)

Meanwhile, Butler was arraigned before Judge Bogue in Rapid City, and his bond was raised from$5,000 to $250,000.  The same bond was set for Robideau when he was transferred from Wichita to Rapid City for the grand-jury hearing of January 13, 1976.  In the original murder indictment no distinction was made among the four defendants.  Not until this grand-jury hearing did the FBI produce affidavits purporting to show that Leonard Peltier had actually pulled the trigger in the agents' deaths.  With Eagle, Butler, and Robideau in custody, the ResMurs investigation could now concentrate on the only one of the four defendants still at large.  [Observation: A cynic could believe that vengeance and a "decapitation operation" were in full swing.  Remember that the Lakota were the people of the Wounded Knee Massacre (or the Battle of Wounded Knee), which was the last armed conflict between the Great Sioux Nation and the United States of America and of the Indian Wars.  After nearly a century, passions still ran high.]

There followed a complex series of mishaps (which could almost have been comedic - if not so deadly serious.)  Leonard Peltier, with a shotgun wound in the back, turned up in British Columbia.  In December 1975, his name appeared on the "Ten Most Wanted Fugitives" list of the FBI, and he moved over the mountains to Alberta - way out in the bush.  Russ Redner (an AIM member) and Kenny Loud Hawk (one of the twilight horsemen who had encountered the escaping fugitives after the agents' deaths in June) were arrested in Oregon for illegal possession of weapons and explosives, and were held on $100,000 bail because of Loud Hawk's association with Oglala.  Anna Mae Aquash and Kamook Nichols were arrested along with them.  Ms. Aquash was returned to Pierre, South Dakota for trial on the Rosebud charges.  Kamook Nichols, eight months pregnant, was returned to Kansas City for violation of her parole.  Her new baby, named Iron Door Woman, was born in jail.  The charges against Ms. Nichols were eventually dismissed because of "vindictive prosecution" by the government attorneys.  (Matthiessen, ibid, pp. 250-251.)  After that point, things went from bad to worse.  A reporter interviewing Anna Mae in jail at Vail, Oregon, said she told him "If they take me back to South Dakota, I'll be murdered."  But once in South Dakota, she managed to slip away from custody.  Sometime during that period, she called her sister in Nova Scotia, saying "They're out to kill me.  They'll get me if the FBI doesn't get me first."  Her sister didn't know who "they" were.  (There was pervasive suspicion of everyone being an FBI informant, at that time.)  Any who thought Anna was an informer assumed that "they" referred to AIM.  But "they" could have just as easily been the hostile goons who were still roaming the roads of the Pine Hill Reservation.