1866
Fort Smith was established in 1866, because the Bozeman Trail ran through the area.
about 0:06:21The story
Catherine Daniel Little was born on 27 October 1970 and grew up in Arlington, Texas, the daughter of Dr Thomas Daniel and Mary Lou Daniel. She had a brother, Thomas, and a sister, Sherry. A strong swimmer, she went on to Southern Methodist University, where she took a BA in psychology and sociology, captained the polo team and rowed on the crew team.
They moved to Colorado, then to Montana, where Laird passed the bar and opened a small practice in Billings. They married in February 1999, and in July 1999 they moved into the Fort Smith Trailer Park near the After Bay of the Yellow Tail Dam. Laird guided fishermen on the river and kept his Billings practice part-time; Catherine made breakfast at the Quill Gordon Fly Fisher shop and cooked and shuttled guests at the Big Horn River Country Lodge.
The marriage was in difficulty within months. In mid-July Catherine told a co-worker, June Rose, that it was not going well, that she wanted to end it and that she needed to go to Billings to sort out the legal side. She also visited the clerk of court's office at the Yellowstone County Courthouse asking for separation paperwork, and was told she would need a lawyer because the office only handled divorces.
Another neighbour, Nick Forrester, saw the same thing. Catherine went to work at the lodge at about 7.30 that evening; Laird turned up at about 8.30 and argued with her until the owner, Rob Warren, told him to take it home. He calmed down and left. Catherine finished at about 11 p.m. and went home.
The couple in the Dutchman RV on the lot across the alley, Eric and Kathleen Anderson, had heard the Lairds arguing most weekends that summer. Shortly before midnight, while Kathleen was in the shower, they heard through the shower vent a male voice repeating "you fucking bitch" and a female voice crying "no, no, no", with the couple's small dog Ralphie barking. The shouting stopped after a few minutes. About ten minutes later the Andersons saw a white or cream Toyota 4Runner driven slowly out of the trailer park and turn onto B Street; they took the driver to be a man. About three quarters of an hour after that their daughter's dog, tethered outside, began barking towards the open ground by the walking path down to the After Bay.
Laird's account was different. He said he had driven his green 4Runner to the After Bay parking lot to sleep rather than argue; that Catherine came down and knocked on the window wanting a fight; that she drove off at speed and he went back to the trailer; that she came in about twenty minutes later, slamming drawers and turning photographs face down, and left at about 1.30 a.m. in the white 4Runner after saying "take care of Ralphie". Later he added that she had also said she was going to kill herself and had taken thirty dollars from the counter.
On the morning of 31 July 1999 the phone woke him. Greg Heidrich, who managed the fly fishing shop, asked whether something was wrong with Catherine; Laird said she was at work, and Heidrich said she was not. Heidrich then collected his girlfriend to help serve breakfast and, at about 6.40 a.m., saw Laird driving away from the After Bay towards his trailer. At 7.50 a.m. Laird walked into Tanya Warren's kitchen and told her he had found Catherine's car at the After Bay, unlocked, with the keys and her purse in plain sight and a bottle of tequila on the passenger floorboard; he wondered whether she had gone for a walk and hurt herself. Tanya found him later sitting in a rocking chair on his porch, and the two of them drove out to search. He shuffled about, called her name quietly and made little effort; asked whether they should lock the car, he said no, because she would not be able to get back in, and he took his fishing rods but left her purse and keys. Only at Tanya's insistence did he call 911.
Tanya Warren then drove to the far end of the overflow parking lot. From a bridge she saw what looked like a bubble on the water; from the lot she saw Catherine's body floating face down. She called 911 from a friend's house, then went back to the trailer with the news. Laird jumped into his SUV and drove off alone. When the deputy and Tanya arrived at the overflow lot he was in the water pulling the body out, wailing. Officers had to pull him off her. Catherine was wearing grey sweatpants, a bra and a button-up shirt with one or two buttons fastened, earrings, a ring and a wristwatch, but no shoes, socks, glasses or contact lenses.
Dr Mueller performed the autopsy at the mortuary, with an FBI agent present. He found bruising on her hands, right thigh, arms and the tops of her feet, and fresh bruising of the sternocleidomastoid muscles on both sides of the neck, with focal haemorrhage in the subcutaneous fat, which he called troubling, repeatedly. A second forensic pathologist who reviewed the tissue agreed the neck bruising was real and pre-mortem. Nobody at either of her jobs that day had seen any bruises on her. Toxicology found therapeutic levels of an antidepressant and a blood alcohol level of 0.000; there was no alcohol in her system at all. The death certificate gave asphyxia by drowning as the cause and could not determine the manner of death.
Laird left Montana within a week. On 6 August a ranger named Ryan sent FBI agent Randy Jackson a note saying that Josh Anderson, who worked at the marina, reported that his parents Eric and Kathleen Anderson had heard an argument at trailer number nine on the night of 30 July. Jackson put the note in an envelope, filed it, and never spoke to the Andersons; apart from Ranger Ryan's conversation with them they were not interviewed again until 2012. In April 2002 Laird applied to practise law in Missouri and was questioned under oath by the Board of Law Examiners. He said Catherine was argumentative during her premenstrual time, that there had never been any physical confrontation, and that he had refused to argue because it was late and he had to be in Billings. Asked about the bruising round her neck, he said the coroner had told him it was consistent with falling while drunk; asked about the sleeping pills, he said he took the same medication and would have been stumbling if he had drunk alcohol as well, and was told there was no alcohol in her blood.
Jackson was promoted and transferred to FBI headquarters in 2004 and the case was effectively closed. The case was reopened when FBI agent John Teeling began reviewing the file; an assistant told him the belief was that Laird, an attorney, had murdered his wife by putting a knee or a foot on her back and holding her under water. Teeling spent about a thousand hours on it, re-interviewed the family and in September 2012 finally interviewed the Andersons. He also engaged Mark Majeris, an agronomist and grass expert, who examined Catherine's sweatpants. Majeris found cheat grass seeds fixed to the inside of the cloth high on the left thigh with their awns broken off, and glumes forced through the outside at the back of the left leg, evidence, he said, of the wearer being dragged through grass. He compared the grasses at the two parking areas and found the clothing matched the overflow lot where the body was found rather than the After Bay lot where the car was left.
The motion failed. The state put it to him that Montana had stopped contracting him for autopsies in 2015 and that he had resigned as Iowa's medical examiner in 1997 after a missed diagnosis.
His lawyer called it a circumstantial case and asked for forty years. The judge gave him one hundred years.
The state said it would retry him, and he remained in custody after his bail was revoked. On 22 August 2022 Catherine's family posted that the retrial was set for 26 September 2022. Catherine's mother said she was elated that Catherine could rest in peace; Sherry said she had never given up hope and that it was worth it to know he would not be free; Thomas said he carried guilt for not doing more, and had seen bruises on her arms and face over the years.