And to the question I asked Scott earlier, about why John D Lee was the only one convicted and executed, Rick Turley and Ron Walker give a hint of what's coming in their next book:
Q: You mention that you don’t coddle John D. Lee as much as Juanita. Could you give me an A, B, C, D, F, grade on Lee’s last confession?
right-wing: I think Rick may want to comment on that. One of the interesting things in our research is, you know Lee in one of the most exceptional cases in American jurisprudence, is taken to the Meadows for his execution in 1877. When he goes to the Meadows, he speaks with reporters from throughout the United States who were there for the event, and as he speaks with reporters, for the first time he really starts to come clean with what he had done, and the account that he gives the reporters moments before his death, substantially contradicts his earlier statements, long standing statements of 20 years. For example: He clearly puts himself at the initial attack. Is that right? [turns to the other authors]. But he does concede that he was involved in the killing on the 11th of September.
RT: Ron, earlier mentioned my optimism in getting the book finished more quickly than we did. That optimism was based in part on our initial assumption that certain of the major sources on the history of the massacre were good, solid bedrock sources, among those John D. Lee’s Mormonism Unveiled, his last confessions. Among them, the trial transcripts of the John D. Lee, two trials in 1875, and 1876. What we discovered is that as we walked out on what we thought was bedrock, it crumbled under our feet, much like the ground does at Yellowstone, and what we discovered is those sources were not entirely reliable, and I’ve got an article coming out in the next issue of BYU Studies that will talk about some of those sources very, very briefly. But, just to let you know we have been working for example on the trial transcripts of John D. Lee, we’ve gathered legal sources from many locations, we brought them together, we found out that the trial transcripts were not created at the time. They were created later on for other purposes, and as we began to compare them they differed from one another, so then we recognized that we had the original shorthand notebooks taken by the court reporters in the church archives, and also at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. So we got those shorthand transcripts, found a woman who could transcribe them, and she spent the last several years helping us transcribe these. We now have, I think 3400 pdf files of these legal records, we’ve taken all of them, and we’ve lined them up in columns. The shorthand for the two reporters, the various transcripts that were created, the newspaper accounts, and so on, so that we can get a good, final picture of what really happened at the John D. Lee trial. You’ll be interested to know that even though John D. Lee’s gotten the most attention, in 1874 there were actually nine people indicted for the massacre, we found the original indictment, of those nine people why only John D. Lee tried and executed, that’s the story of the next book. [laughter]. Let me just give it in a nutshell. In a nutshell, they wanted to go after William Dame, he was the highest official that had been indicted, they arrested him very quickly, shortly after they arrested John D. Lee, in fact they took about half of those nine indicted people into custody. They went after Dame, they tried to use Lee as the person who was going to cop on Dame, very typical type of approach for a prosecutor. So they went to Lee and said: “You’ve got two indictments against you, we will automatically drop the first indictment if you’ll just agree to give us a confession, if your confession is quote “satisfactory”, close quote, we drop the 2nd count and you walk. So John D. Lee checked with his lawyers, they said, “best deal you’re going to get, go for it.” So he agreed to write a confession, they dropped the first indictment, he wrote the confession, presented it to them, they said, “nope, not satisfactory, and since we don’t have enough evidence to go after William Dame, we’re going to go after John D. Lee.”
Curt Bench: We could go on all night, but unfortunately we can’t. I hope it’s very clear to everyone how much knowledge is here tonight, and uh, this is just a fraction. [applause]. I want to also point out something that some of you have already figured out, we’ve never seen anything like this before. The church did not officially, they did not publish this book, it’s not a church publication, it’s not endorsed by the church, but church resources were made available to these authors, and we have seen something here that I have never seen in my lifetime, the doors that were opened, the possibilities that were explored, largely because Rick Turley thought that this was something that should be done, and he deserves a lot of the credit for that. [applause]. I think it’s a very positive step, I welcome it, I think along with something like Richard Bushman’s “Joseph Smith, Rough Stone Rolling”, we are seeing a new era in church history, and I welcome it. I think with Rick as Assistant Church Historian, Marlon Jensen as the Church Historian, I think this is just the beginning, that’s my hope and prayer anyway, and I think that these gentlemen deserve a lot of credit, and have opened some important doors here, and have dealt with a subject that has been ignored or whitewashed for a long time, and this will go a long way to promote the kind of healing that they’re hoping will take place, and our thanks to you for doing that. [applause].
