Two law enforcement cases — one entirely local, the other making statewide headlines — stick most in Jim Carman’s mind from his 34-year law enforcement career in Lincoln County.
The 12-year North Platte city councilman, who retired from his Ward 3 seat Tuesday, recalled them for The Telegraph during a City Hall reception before his last council meeting.
Christensen murder, 1992
Of all the cases he worked as a North Platte police officer from 1972 to 1998, Carman most remembers the one that started Feb. 19, 1992, with the late-night beating death of 49-year-old Barn Store clerk Bettie Christensen.
She was found dead from blunt trauma to the head linked to a tire iron, Telegraph stories reported at the time. Her assailants, who told Christensen they were robbing the store, also made off with $300 to $500 in cash.
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A day later, police went to a local residence and arrested Ira R. Leon of Sacramento, Calif., and Stacey Fletcher of North Platte. The two men, then 19, both pleaded no contest to first-degree murder and were sentenced to life in prison on Nov. 2, 1992.
Carman, then a lieutenant and commander of the Police Department’s Criminal Investigation Division, was sitting in his office Feb. 20 as he and his staff tried to develop leads.
Then someone called with a tip. That person, Carman said, would speak only to him.
“In a couple of hours, we had the guys,” he said.
Then-Police Chief Martin Gutschenritter said at the time that a Barn Store customer had entered the store about the time of the robbery. A man there had told him to leave because the store was closing, raising the customer’s suspicions, he said.
The customer helped police develop a composite drawing that was distributed around North Platte, Telegraph reporter Blaine Flamig wrote.
Charles Moses Jr. chase, 2000
Carman’s 1998-2006 tenure as Lincoln County sheriff coincided with the violent rampage of Charles Lannis Moses Jr., subject of western Nebraska’s tensest manhunt since mass murderer Charles Starkweather’s east-to-west statewide flight in 1958.
It started on the snowy night of Feb. 12, 2000, when then-Deputy Casey Nelms tried to arrest Moses on an outstanding Texas warrant at a convenience store at Sutherland’s Interstate 80 interchange.
“He took a shot at one of my deputies, and he was trying to go and get gone,” Carman remembered.
Nelms got Moses’ .22 revolver away from him and fired three times, wounding Moses in the shoulder, the Omaha World-Herald reported.
Moses then fled south in a pickup truck, with eight Sheriff’s Office and Nebraska State Patrol cruisers pursuing him. He stopped, got out and fired several shots at them with a rifle.
Deputy Stan McKnight took a bullet that crashed through his windshield into his hand, the World-Herald reported. He lost a finger that later was reattached.
Trooper Jeff Crymble was seriously wounded when another Moses bullet struck him in the abdomen. Hampered by the bad weather, authorities gave up the chase that night.
Moses, who was high on methamphetamine, fled to Denver but then returned to west central Nebraska. On Feb. 14, he shot and killed 48-year-old farmer Robert Sedlacek as the latter checked suspicious tracks in the snow at an abandoned farmstead west of Paxton.
Authorities caught up with Moses Feb. 15 near Lusk, Wyoming, the same state where Starkweather had been captured.
Moses, arrested peacefully there, was returned to Lincoln County. He pleaded no contest there to second-degree murder and five other felonies.
The late District Judge John Murphy sentenced Moses on Jan. 23, 2001, to spend at least 94 years in prison before he would be eligible for parole.