The Strange Story of Jack Harelson

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Outside Magazine October 2004

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The Killing Bones (cont.)


	A kind of curse: Jack Harelson, mastermind of an alleged murder-for-hire conspiracy (James Fee)

A Questionable Pastime
JACK HARELSON'S ARCHAEOLOGY HOBBY took root innocently enough. During his twenties, near his home in the rough-hewn Oregon timber town of Grants Pass, Harelson began collecting Indian artifacts from the hills outside of town: arrowheads, knives, and such—the spent weapons of long-ago Takelma and Latgawa hunters. Plenty of westerners collected arrowheads, but as Harelson's zeal for ancient artifacts escalated, it would plunge him into a world of disintegrating morality and lethal obsession. By the end, his trajectory would culminate in one of the largest antiquities crimes the country has ever seen, a morass of litigation, desecration, bitter disputes, and alleged contract murders.

Harelson, who was born in 1940, had weathered reform school as a kid and eventually carved out a living as a stonemason and, later, an insurance salesman. "Jack's a promoter at heart— Mr. Personality, very self-assured and a good talker," said John Taft, an acquaintance of Harelson's and former president of the Josephine County Taxpayers Association, a local government watchdog group. But archaeology was his lifelong passion. He volunteered for the Oregon Archaeological Society and helped on professional digs. He bought dozens of books on Native American culture and studied the uses of the curious stone tools he unearthed. Although he bartered some items he found on his own digs, Harelson's primary motivation wasn't commerce; he loved to collect the stuff, and he dreamed of one day finding an artifact that would make his name.

Problem was, the tolerance for pothunting, a term used to describe everything from low-grade scavenging to widespread pillaging, was shrinking fast. The American Antiquities Act of 1906 made it illegal to remove artifacts from public land without a permit, but by the 1970s, when looters were commanding as much as $10,000 for a single pot, the act's maximum penalty—a $500 fine and 90 days in jail—was hardly a deterrent. Moreover, enforcement of the act was rare; from 1906 to 1979, prosecutors nationwide recorded a total of 18 convictions, $4,000 in fines, and two 90-day jail terms. By the late seventies, looters were amassing collections worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Colorado officials estimated that two-thirds of the state's 31,000 prehistoric sites had been plundered. In Arizona, pothunters had ruined at least half of the state's ancient sites.

"What they were doing was like taking the Dead Sea Scrolls and selling pieces of them as curiosities," said Washington State University professor William Lipe, a former president of the Society for American Archaeology.

To toughen things up, Congress passed the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) in 1979. An ARPA conviction could carry two years in prison and a $20,000 fine for a first offense, and it went up from there. But while ARPA increased the pressure on pothunters, it didn't exactly snuff out a burgeoning black market. By 1985, estimates of illegal antiquities sales worldwide had reached $1 billion a year, second only to narcotics.

Meanwhile, Native American indignation over the treatment of cultural remains, especially grave sites, by the scientific establishment and rogue collectors was rising on the tide of social-rights activism. Vine Deloria Jr., a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and author of the Native American rights manifesto Custer Died for Your Sins, summed up the problem: "We have been the objects of scientific investigations and publications for too long," he wrote. "It is our intent to become people once again, not specimens."

Congress reacted with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a 1990 law targeting traffickers and pressuring museums and other federally funded institutions to work with tribes to return and rebury skeletons. It was NAGPRA that established legal precedent for the well-publicized tug-of-war between scientists and tribal officials in Washington State following the 1996 discovery of Kennewick Man, the 9,300-year-old skeleton of an early North American.

Jack Harelson wasn't oblivious to the increasing restrictions and controversy surrounding his activities. Though his connection to archaeology was informal, he was too engrossed—and too sharp—not to understand the accumulating gravity of his pastime. He even approached Don Tuohy, curator of anthropology at Nevada State Museum, to solicit support from the institution. But Tuohy "refused to work with ‘Amateur Archaeologists' not formally educated and not a government employee," Harelson was quoted as saying in court documents. "[Tuohy] stated . . . that he might lose some of his funding for the museum if he did so."

In fact, Harelson might have remained an anonymous collector if not for a fateful conversation back in February 1980, in the small town of Denio, Nevada. Harelson had recently married Pam Shaffer, a Medford, Oregon, single mom with a love of the outdoors. Jack and Pam—and, on rare occasions, Pam's ten-year-old daughter, Laurie—began making pothunting trips to Nevada.

One night, Pam later recalled, the couple sat at the Denio Junction Motel having drinks with Marge Stevens, a local they had befriended a few months earlier. At the bar, Marge produced an arrowhead given to her by a friend. The relic, she said, had come from the Black Rock Desert. Jack and Pam immediately fired up the questions: Could Marge tell them more? Did she know how to get to this site? Marge, it turned out, didn't know much, but she knew enough to send Jack and Pam searching for the location. The trouble had begun.

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