Town note
Butte is nicknamed "the richest hill on earth", because of the amount of mining there.
about 0:05:14The story
He lived on the ground floor of a six-apartment, three-storey building with his wife Mary, who worked at the Silver Bow General Hospital. On the second floor lived Jesse Vialovos, a 45-year-old miner, and Anna Vialovos, who worked at the state hospital at Warm Springs; the court records were not even clear whether the two were still married. Jay Smith and his wife had the other ground-floor apartment.
On 26 April 1966 Benny Sandoval, a friend of Jess, met him early in the morning at the Board of Trade bar. They played pool, drank beer, ate at a restaurant and reached the apartment about five in the morning, where Ann would not let her drunk husband in, so the two men slept downstairs in the Smiths' flat. Around noon they went up, Benny bought a fifth of whisky and he, Jess and Ann drank it. At three he bought a second fifth. He came back up with them.
The afternoon became one long argument. Jess went into the kitchen at one point and Benny thought he might have taken a knife, though he never saw one, and Ann, who spent most of the afternoon cooking a dinner, said she saw nothing. He told Mary that he had already killed Jess and might as well kill her too.
Police arrived about 7.45 p.m. and found Mary at the foot of the stairs; she was taken to hospital. Jess was dead on the floor of his apartment and Ann was sitting at the kitchen table. The knife, which Ann said did not come from her kitchen, had been taken from the Smiths' kitchen; it fitted the wounds, one to the chest that went through the heart and another to the back, and carried blood of Jess's type. Jess's blood alcohol was 0.27.