Town note
Originally called Ponderer's Rest, at the western end of the 26-mile desert on the bend of the Carson River, where immigrants stopped for water and decided whether to follow the river south or go west.
about 0:10:27The story
In February 1993 Dayton, Nevada, was a former gold-mining town in Lyon County, about twenty minutes from Carson City and forty-five from Reno. Jason Kopack, a teenager who liked Dungeons and Dragons and metal music, lived in a ten-foot by fifty-foot single-wide trailer with his father, David Kopack, a Vietnam veteran who had been a gunner.
On the night of 23 February 1993 snow fell between midnight and 2.30 a.m. At 1.23 a.m. David Kopack woke to a loud noise, looked at the clock, looked out of the bedroom window at the tin shed beside the trailer, decided it was a cat or flying debris, and went back to sleep. He had no door on his bedroom, only a curtain, and the living room was a few feet away. In the morning he got up, stepped over his son's legs three times as he moved between the kitchen and the television, made coffee, and eventually noticed that Jason had not moved. The boy was dead on the floor in his socks, wrapped in a blue blanket, with very little blood visible. He called the police.
Investigators found no blood trail and no sign of a struggle. An oval wound on the back of Jason's left shoulder was first taken for a blow from a crowbar or similar blunt instrument, and officers searched the area for one. X-rays and the autopsy showed number six shotgun pellets and plastic wadding from a 20-gauge shotgun in his body, fired from somewhere between two and eighteen feet. Blue fibres matching the blanket were on the wadding. Lividity showed that he had died where he was found. Nothing had been moved or staged.
Two things made no sense. A 20-gauge blast inside a tin trailer should have woken the whole park, yet David Kopack, who knew gunpowder from Vietnam, heard what he took for a cat and smelled nothing. Kenneth Bradley, a neighbour whose trailer stood thirty feet away, heard nothing and said his dogs, which barked at everything, did not bark. And although it had snowed during the night, there was one set of footprints leading to the trailer and none leading away.
I shot Jason."
In a closet they found a recently fired 20-gauge shotgun holding an expended number six shell with a non-factory primer, which made it a reloaded shell. They also took wet shoes whose tread was said to resemble a print in the snow, filterless cigarettes, a bottle of oil the police said was for burning the trailer, journals with satanic symbols, books on witchcraft, a Derringer and a pipe bomb, which the bomb squad dismantled.
He never admitted the killing.
The state's case rested on Mike Owings. Kenneth Bradley repeated that he heard nothing and his dogs did not bark.
The list, he said, was of Dungeons and Dragons characters. He said his satanic writings were copied from a book and were a way of keeping other pupils away. The prosecutor asked whether he wanted to end it all and tell the truth; he said he already had. The state closed on the taped call and its tone.
The defence had already gathered material that the state had not disclosed: a report placing Owings at an apartment at Dayton Valley Road, near the trailer, on the afternoon of the murder; tenants who heard noises from a recently vacated apartment in the early hours; a missing Reebok shoe from the crime scene; and the earlier Bradley interview.
The dissent was furious.