The Strange Story of Jack Harelson

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Outside Magazine October 2004

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The Killing Bones (cont.)

Over the Edge
BY DECEMBER, AN EASY TRUST had developed between Doland and Harelson. Unfortunately, the missing skulls still hadn't entered the conversation, so Doland and Markee came up with a way to get Harelson talking about them: Doland would mention that he'd seen a rerun of a true-crime show that had included a segment on Harelson's 1996 trial.

"Oh, I've seen that show a million times," Harelson told Doland. "It's all lies." Then, Doland says, he made a remark about the skulls, indicating that he still had them.

"You shitting me?" said Doland. "Man, that would be the ultimate. It'd be bitchin' to have one of those."

"Come back this afternoon and I'll have them out for you."

Doland returned a few hours later to find a box waiting for him in the garage.

"They're all yours," Harelson said, handing Doland the box. "I don't know nothing about 'em, never did."

"That's the way it'll be," Doland said.

Doland put the box behind the seat in his truck and drove away. He didn't get two blocks before he noticed one unmarked state police car in front of him and another behind. Walt Markee wasn't going to let the skulls get away this time.

With the skulls recovered, it seemed the case might finally be closed. The cops had nearly enough evidence to bring new ARPA charges against Harelson, but then the U.S. Department of the Interior, which houses the BLM, threw a joker into the deck.

Four days after Harelson gave Doland the skulls, Interior Department judge William Hammett rejected Harelson's final appeal of the $2.5 million civil penalty levied by the BLM. Harelson, it turned out, would have to pay the hefty fine after all.

"He came uncorked over that," recalled Doland. "You know how Fred Flintstone jumps up and down when he's real angry? That's what Jack would do."

He believes the penalty may have pushed Harelson over the edge. He recalled Harelson once saying, "Some people need to die," but now he wasn't talking in generalities. Doland told cops that Harelson had compiled a short list of targets that he intended to dispatch himself. Doland didn't recognize the first three names: Lloyd Olds, who owned the Bonanza Opal Mine; Richard Ledger, Olds's partner in the mine; and Lloyd O'Neal, the Josephine County judge who had called Harelson a common thief.

But Doland certainly knew the fourth name: Walt Markee.

Cops don't take murder threats against officers lightly. And they didn't want Harelson to go off half-cocked and start killing people. To keep his finger off the trigger, the police had Doland ramp up his fabrications and play along. Doland told Harelson that he knew a Southern California biker, a former trained assassin. Worked in Honduras in the 1980s. Big, buff guy with a metal plate in his head.

Doland claimed Harelson took the bait in a subsequent conversation. And luckily, Doland didn't have to produce a steel-plated hit man. "I ain't meeting him," Doland recalled Harelson telling him. "That's solicitation. I've studied the law. I've been planning this for a long time." Harelson couldn't pay cash, but Doland said he offered to give the fictional hit man raw opals worth as much as $10,000. Doland later said that he made a point of giving Harelson plenty of chances to back out.

"Man, are you sure?" Doland asked Harelson. "Because once you pay, it's going to be done."

"That's the way I want it," Harelson said. "Tell him if he finds any of his family members there, kill them, too."

On January 12, 2003, Doland showed up at Harelson's house for the payment. Harelson dug three raw black opals out of a jar filled with a liquid solution to keep them from drying and cracking.

"Make sure they're damn nice ones," Doland said.

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