1865
In 1865 it was established as the first town in the area and was called Hamilton.
about 0:07:24The story
Manhattan, Montana, lies in Gallatin County in the south-west of the state, about twenty-five minutes from Bozeman and an hour from Helena and Butte. In the 1960s and 1970s it was a ranching town of roughly 800 people, where everybody knew everybody and children played outside with little supervision. Between 1967 and 1974 four people were attacked there, three of them children, and for years the town treated each death as an accident or bad luck.
On 19 March 1967 Bernie Pullman, thirteen, and his friend Richard 'Ricky' Hotsell, twelve, were climbing the supports of the Nixon Bridge over the West Gallatin River outside town and jumping into the water. Bernie stood on the highest beam, clutched his chest and shouted something Ricky could not understand, then fell about twenty feet into the river. He surfaced briefly and went under. Ricky ran half a mile to the nearest farmhouse for help. Deputies, highway patrolmen and volunteers searched the river; a wire net was strung across the water about five miles downstream at Logan, and Bernie's glasses were found in knee-deep water near the bridge. A memorial mass was held and his father walked the riverbank every night with a torch. Three weeks later, on a Wednesday night, the body was caught in the net. An autopsy found that Bernie had been shot through the heart with a small-calibre bullet, probably a .22, and that his watch had stopped at 3.20 p.m. The bullet went to Washington for ballistics testing and produced nothing. The town decided he had been killed by a stray round from someone shooting at a prairie dog, and life went on.
In early May 1968 Michael Rainey, twelve, a sixth grader, was at the Headwaters Campground near Three Forks with about two hundred Boy Scouts. The boys slept in two-man tents set close together, and Michael shared with eleven-year-old Kenny Summers about thirty feet from the scoutmaster. During the night someone cut the back of the tent open, stabbed Michael under the right armpit and struck him on the head. At about 5.30 a.m. Kenny woke, saw Michael covered in blood and could not rouse him. Michael was driven to the nearest telephone in Three Forks and then to the hospital in Bozeman, where doctors found a small stab wound and a lump on his skull with dirt in his hair. Deputies found the tent slashed from near the top to the bottom, with a second cut on the side facing the car park. More than two hundred scouts and leaders took lie detector tests and all passed; hundreds of knives were tested and none matched. Michael died three days later. The autopsy showed that the inch-wide knife wound had not punctured a lung. A blow to the head, leaving a wound about the size of a quarter, had caused massive brain damage. The town put it down to horseplay that went too far.
On 17 June 1973 William and Marietta Yager of Detroit set out with four of their five children in a mustard-and-white Chevrolet van and a red trailer for a month's holiday in Montana. William was a tool and die maker, the trip had been planned since the previous autumn, and the family camped at the Headwaters Campground, only yards from the spot where Michael Rainey had been attacked. On the night of 24 June Susie, seven, slept in a tent with three of her siblings while her parents slept in a trailer and her oldest brother and his wife slept in the van. Between two and four in the morning of 25 June a twenty-inch circular hole was cut in the tent and Susie was taken. Her teddy bear and stuffed reindeer were left on the ground outside. Her twelve-year-old sister Heidi found her gone at four, and the family raised the alarm at 4.30.
A fifteen-person search party was formed and the Bozeman FBI office took over the next day. The rivers were dragged, a nationwide alert went to petrol stations, and the Detroit News offered a $3,000 reward. On 2 July a caller telephoned Deputy Ron Brown's home, spoke to his wife Jane and demanded $50,000, saying the nails of Susie's first fingers were humped. On 24 September a collect call reached the Yagers; Danny, the oldest son, recorded it, and the caller again mentioned the fingernails. A month later a telephone toll ticket traced a call to a pay phone at Woody's, a three-pump truck stop outside Shayan, Wyoming. No useful fingerprints were recovered.
Eight months after Susie disappeared, in early 1974, Sandra Dykeman, nineteen, known as Sandy, vanished. She had married Jack Smolligan on her eighteenth birthday, 15 June 1972, and they had lived in a two-room flat over the Manhattan Machinery Company, where she waited tables at the bowling alley cafe. The marriage broke down after less than a year when Jack had an affair with his bowling partner. On a Saturday night in 1974, after a high school basketball game, she walked half a mile to the American Legion Bar in a white sweater, dark slacks and a long red cashmere coat. She left just past midnight, stepped off the curb and was never seen again. Her father reported her missing the next morning; her Ford Cortina was gone, and two blue suitcases and a white suit were missing from her flat. Six days later a command centre opened in the Manhattan fire hall. A week after that investigator Ron Green found women's underwear hanging on a fence post and the Cortina hidden under straw in a barn at the Lockhart Ranch. Sifting a fire pit produced about 1,800 bone fragments and human teeth, and a second pit held the smaller bones of a child.
The Smithsonian identified the first set as a woman aged eighteen to twenty-two, five feet to five feet four, and the second as a girl aged six to eight. Both had been burned at the same place. The FBI's Behavioral Science Unit produced its first criminal profile: a white man in his mid to late twenties, intelligent and organised, a loner with little experience of women, probably a combat veteran, living locally and regarded as odd. The profile said he would keep souvenirs and insert himself into the investigation.
On 25 June 1974, exactly a year after the abduction, the telephone rang at the Yager home after midnight. The caller told Marietta he had taken Susie a year ago to the minute, said she was still alive, claimed he had taken her to Disneyland and the San Diego Zoo, and admitted he had choked her on the first night. He was confronted and denied everything. He met Marietta at the city shop where he was building a parade float and still denied it. Later a man calling himself Mr Travis telephoned and put a girl on the line, but Marietta said the voice was not Susie's.
A search of his garage apartment, workshop and truck found a yellow and black lineman's handset, a homemade black mask, Bibles with passages about blood underlined, and a freezer containing two human hands and packages of human flesh mixed with deer meat. Some packages were marked with the initials SMDS, for Sandra May Dykeman Smolligan. He said he had shot Bernie from the bushes across the river with a .22, stabbed Michael through the tent, choked Susie, cut up her body, burned most of it and put her head in an outhouse behind the ranch. He also admitted killing Sandra. Six hours later he was found hanged in his cell, having torn a bath towel into strips and used it as a rope.
In 2005 the case was reopened when builders renovating a garage on East Main Street found Sandra's driving licence, wallet and notebook hidden in a wall. Bernie is buried in Fairview Cemetery in Three Forks, Susie in Sunset Hills Cemetery in Bozeman, and Sandra in Meadow View Cemetery.