The Strange Story of Jack Harelson

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Outside Magazine October 2004

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The Killing Bones
The thriving criminal trade in Native American archaeological artifacts always seems to be one step ahead of law enforcement. But when cops learned that a notorious Oregon antiquities collector had graduated from grave robbing to ordering up a contract murder, their macabre sting operation exposed the dark side of digging up the past.

By Bruce Barcott


	Where the dead children lay: the view from Nevada's Elephant Mountain (James Fee)

ON a darkening January afternoon in 2003, near the rain-lashed Oregon coast, 62-year-old Lloyd Olds opened his front door and met the two armed men sent to kill him.

Resigned to his role as a victim, Olds, a former Curry County municipal judge, climbed into his rig and drove north into the soggy green foothills of the Coast Range, on the western edge of the Siskiyou National Forest, toward Gardner Ridge. The two men followed closely behind. Twenty minutes later, the vehicles turned onto a narrow road used mostly by deer hunters and car campers, and stopped at a spot where the thick underbrush parted enough for the men to dig a shallow grave.

They got busy hacking and shoveling a foot-deep trench while Olds stood brooding beneath the broad limbs of a Douglas fir, clutching himself against the cold and wet. A mature fir is usually as tight as a golf umbrella, but on that day the rain found Olds no matter where he stood.

"We're ready for you, Mr. Olds," one of the men said finally.

Olds lay down in the fresh, damp hole and closed his eyes. He was getting more enraged with each moment, his fury directed at the man responsible for this: Jack Harelson, an amateur archaeologist who had become one of the most notorious grave robbers in the American West. Stupid, stupid, Olds thought. All this over what—a bunch of rocks and bones?

The rain fell harder as the men prepared to finish their job. One of them produced a Polaroid camera, and the judge knew it was almost over: The pictures would prove to Harelson that Olds was good and dead.

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Contributing editor BRUCE BARCOTT wrote about the Chalillo Dam in May 2003.

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