706: A Mess to Be Reckoned With
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbpeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. It started as something that she was doing in her spare time and kind of took over her life. Let's say yellowbird searches for missing people, people nobody else is looking for, people the police have given up looking for. A reporter, Sarah Crayne-Mardock, met with Sen. 2014 when Sierra was looking into the disappearance of a young white oilworker, Casey Clark, who had managed a couple of years before on the reservation with us from in North Dakota. Lesso was investigating it, too. She had just gotten out of prison. She was looking for a distraction, a way to stay sober. She basically opened up her files to me and allowed me to see the degree to which she had involved herself in this case. She had actually spent years and she cracked that case through really, really nontraditional means by basically waging this campaign against the person who she believed had murdered Casey Clark. She mailed tens and tens of thousands of flyers around Western North Dakota. The flyer said beware, with a photo of the guy she thought murdered Casey Clark and his wife. And they did turn people against him, but at the same time, Lesso befriended the wife. They were texting each other almost every day. They were talking on the phone constantly. And so she had this really intimate window into the lives of these people. She was trying to investigate and through that window she was able to see their vulnerabilities. So at the same time that she was maintaining this faux friendship with this woman, she was also completely undermining her and her husband, and the case broke open. Sierra spent years with Lesso watching this play out and ended up writing a book about Lesso in the case that got close. Sierra would stay at Lesso's apartment for months, they'd drive through the badlands running down weeds, talked for hours every week when Sierra wasn't in North Dakota. And during those years, this thing happened. Native American families started asking Lesso to look for their loved ones. Lesso is a rickara, a member of the Mandan Hidatsa, a rickara nation. Remember, Lesso was just kind of inventing how she did this work. Before this, she'd been a welder, a prison guard, a social worker, did some law enforcement work and studied criminal justice in college, but she'd also been a drug dealer. Lesso has lived on both sides of the law, which is what makes her so good at what she does. She's gone to prison. She knows how law enforcement operates from a perpetrator's point of view as well. In dozens of cases now, sometimes in her own, sometimes with law enforcement, Lesso has deployed the same doggedness and resourcefulness that she marshaled in that first case. Like, for example, when a woman named Olivia lone bear went missing from Lesso's reservation in 2017, there was this national search for her. But Lesso's theory was she might not be far from home, or she was last seen. And one day, she decided to take a boat out on the lake near Olivia's house with some fishing sonar that she brought years earlier thinking someday it might come in handy to find missing people. She just launched the boat and, yeah, within about ten minutes, her younger relative spotted
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