Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

he’d just received from Illinois. Then he checked local rec ords for any mention of George or Larry Light. He found that they had both served terms in the county jail in early 1971. George had been there first—in January. Larry had served thirty-three days of a ninety-day sentence in March and was released on the first of April to return to Illinois for parole violation.
    The FBI rap sheets on the two men listed scores of felony offenses.
    Byrnes saw a notation that a Silverton police officer—Bill Laws—had followed up some rumors about George’s disappearance. Laws had gone so far as to question Doris Mae Light, but she told him that George had abandoned her and the children and that she had no idea where he was. The poor woman was living in abject poverty with a pathetic bunch of little kids, and Laws didn’t doubt that she had been abandoned.
     
    It was early in the morning in the third week of August 1974 and the dew still clung to wildflowers on the old farm property when ten searchers arrived. Jim Byrnes, Captain Dick Bay, District Attorney Gary Gortmaker, his assistants Robert Hamilton and Richard Morley, Marion County detectives Larry Lord and Jan Cummings, Corporal Ron Boedigheimer, Deputy Jim Lovin, and Oregon State Crime Lab technician Richard Brooke began their search of the isolated property on the Powers Creek Loop Road. The buildings were gone, the undergrowth thick and tangled. It was a far different place than Larry Light remembered.
    Was there really a body lying here, undiscovered? It hardly seemed possible. All the landmarks that could have helped them were gone. The investigators poked beneath the weeds, searching for the foundations of the house and sheds that had once stood there. Jim Byrnes figured that the shed Light described had to have stood beyond a lean-to used for storage.
    They would begin with a backhoe. Cautiously, the operator broke into the ground, scraping the topsoil off until the red Oregon dirt was exposed in an ever-widening circle. At first, only rusted cans and old beer bottles surfaced. But thirty minutes after the backhoeing began, the shredded corner of what appeared to be a rotting blanket came into view. A chill came over the investigators, one that defied the burgeoning warmth of the day.
    The backhoe was pulled away; now the digging would have to be done by hand. Whatever clues might remain from the events of three years ago would be fragile, too easily destroyed by anything but the most meticulous hand search. Byrnes and Bay bent to the onerous task beneath a blazing August sun.
    Working in a carefully roped-off area, Byrnes found a broken segment of desiccated bone fragment. It was too large to have come from an animal. It was a piece of human skull. Next, he and Bay discovered wadding and a few pellets from a shotgun shell. Two hours after the first find, Byrnes located the upper teeth of a human being.
    George Light, the punitive husband, the Judas brother, had lain in this quiet ground decomposing for more than three years. Just as his brother, Larry, had predicted, his entire skeleton was there, still clothed in a shirt and blue jeans—the material virtually intact while the flesh beneath had rotted.
    Byrnes attached a tag, “Light, George, 8-20-74, #74-7731,” to the femur bone of one leg.
    They had searched for more than nine hours, and it was after five when the scene was cleared, the skeleton removed, leaving Boedigheimer and Lord to complete the diagramming of the exact spot where the grave had been unearthed.
    Jim Byrnes made reservations to fly back to Illinois to talk to Larry Light in person, while the other investigators followed the trail the Lights left behind in 1971.
    Jan Cummings and Ron Boedigheimer talked to Pete Getchell, the only friend George had made in Oregon. Getchell said he’d bought George’s horse from Doris and Larry after George had “took off,” and he tried to recall the last time he’d seen his friend. He remembered dropping into the farmhouse sometime late in February and finding the three Lights engaged in one of their increasingly frequent battles. Doris had run out of the house with George right after her.
    “He smacked her a good one and she screamed and ran back in the house while Larry tried to break it all up.”
    Getchell said he’d gone back a day or so later and Larry and Doris told him that George was taking a nap.
    “I told them I had to talk to George, and before they could stop me, I went and