Evil with a capital "E"
Author's note: This article was originally published as a full-page spread in the August 16, 2007 edition of the Chaffee County Times. Re-reading it all these years later I see I could have used an editor (some of my prose is a little heavy-handed to say the least) but I'm still proud of this piece - it was and is relevant and interesting and I put it all together before I was a professional journalist. I was a painter at the time, but found myself compelled to tell this story. I think it shows some pretty good investigative journalism, for a painter.
Buena Vista Police Chief Jimmy Tidwell greets well-wishers at his retirement ceremony, July 25, 2020. (Photo by Ken Scar)
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| Randy Hancock holds a letter for Chief Jimmy Tidwell at Tidwell's retirement ceremony, July 25, 2020. |
Evil with a capital “E”
By Ken Scar
“By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.”
— Macbeth, Act IV scene 1
Urban myths float around every town, big or small, and Buena Vista, Colorado was no exception when I was growing up. Kids told wide-eyed tales about witch’s covens at the base of Mt. Princeton, the KKK up Four Mile, satanic cults, river spirits . . . mostly juvenile campfire stuff.
Some tales, however, turned out to have some truth in them.
Since the late 1970’s, a story has been circulating that a young girl disappeared from the park behind K’s Dairy Delight and was never seen again. Allegedly, it was none other than infamous serial killer Ted Bundy that abducted her. While the abduction story cannot be confirmed, some simple research reveals that Bundy could very well have passed through BV between 1975 and 1977, when he was captured twice and escaped twice from jails in Aspen and Glenwood Springs.
You’d like to think you could feel it if the devil drives through your town, but if Bundy was indeed here his presence didn’t ripple the water.
That’s a frightening thing - the thought that bad people can seep into our little utopias without us noticing it.
Having said that, there is another story about bad people that I am compelled to retell.
As it goes, Evil with a capital “E” infiltrated Chaffee County about fifteen years ago, in 1992, and hardly anybody noticed. The events that transpired actually neutralized untold waves of chaos, as opposed to causing them, so like many stories with positive endings it has wilted away outside the media spotlight even though it likely affected every person alive in the U.S. at the time . . . by not affecting them at all.
Upon reflection, it’s probably one of the most important series of events that ever unfolded around here, and it all began with a little girl’s hug.
Bright eyes in the backseat
It was a seemingly routine stop to aid a stranded motorist. The hour was late — 2 or 3 a.m. — and Trout Creek Pass was deserted except for the small truck pulled over on the shoulder with its hood up and the police car that happened across it.
The officer behind the wheel was Jimmy Tidwell, then a sharp-thinking rookie for the Buena Vista Police Department. He saw the young man pacing beside the vehicle, visibly frustrated, and pulled up to see if he needed assistance. As Tidwell approached the car, he noticed a small girl, maybe ten years old, peering out at him from the backseat window.
“I can still see her like it was yesterday,” Tidwell, now Buena Vista’s Chief of Police, recalled during an interview in his office. “She was a beautiful little girl with her hair in these cute pony tails. I asked the guy if he needed a jump and he nodded ‘yes’. I got the jumper cables out, hooked them up, jumped his truck and got them going again. The whole time the guy never said a word to me, just nodded, and he never looked me in the eye. It was a little strange, to say the least.”
Tidwell paused here, his eyes seemingly looking straight through the walls of his office.
“What really got to me was that little girl. When I went around the car to look in at her she jumped into my arms and gave me this huge hug, like I was her grandfather or something,” he said, grinning. “She just clung to me desperately, this cop in full uniform she’d never seen before. I remember her glancing over at that guy she was with and . . . it’s really hard to describe . . . but I could just feel the terror coming out of her little body.”
Tidwell paused again, looking straight ahead in silence for several moments, still haunted by that surprise embrace all these years later.
Tidwell’s instincts were clanging, but he had no real reason to detain the strange man or his charming little companion. He helped get the vehicle restarted and let them be on their way.
But the alarms were too loud for Tidwell to ignore.
The police cruiser he was driving happened to be equipped with night vision equipment because of some drug activity in the county at the time, so he was able to “go dark” and follow the truck up the pass under the cover of night.
He tailed the car for several miles until it abruptly turned off onto an obscure side road. The man got out to open a nondescript metal gate. Tidwell watched as the truck disappeared into the woods, called the license plate numbers into dispatch, and headed back down the pass into town.
He walked into the BV police station about twenty minutes later to find his phone ringing off the hook. It was the FBI. By the next morning several agents were at the station, wanting to know everything Tidwell could tell them about his encounter the night before.
As it turned out, the federal government had been searching for the man in that truck for quite some time.
The raid
It’s October 1992. President Clinton is halfway through his first term. Ruby Ridge and Waco are still fresh in the public’s mind. Despite protests from many powerful leaders in the federal government, Colorado attorney general Gayle Norton authorizes a diverse group of about 70 government officers to descend on a “101-acre compound twelve miles east of Buena Vista near Trout Creek Pass.”
This was the place Tidwell had inadvertently led them to nearly a year before. The enforcement team consisted of — among other things — members of the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, federal agents, state patrol officers, Denver SWAT team members, and members of local law enforcement agencies including the Salida Police Department and BVPD including, of course, officer Jimmy Tidwell.
The official purpose of the operation was to serve a search warrant, but much more serious matters were behind that seemingly innocuous piece of paper. As it turned out, the man Tidwell had encountered and followed that night was a member of an extreme Islamist group called Jamaat al-Fuqra, which translated means “the impoverished ones” and has been called “the most insidiously dangerous of all terrorist organizations that maintain an active presence inside the U. S.” [Canadian Free Press, 2007]
Doug Wamsley was a Colorado assistant attorney general and lead prosecutor on the case under Gayle Norton. Tracked down a week before he retired this year, he recollected how challenging it was to gather enough force to serve the warrant.
“Nobody, especially the federal government, wanted to be involved in another Waco situation,” he told me. “They did everything they could to stay out of it.”
This forced him to take creative measures and scrabble together a team from several different government agencies: The “super group,” as he called it, described earlier.
Here are some of the things the Super Group found at the Trout Creek Pass compound:
— An elaborate video surveillance system
— A guard shack and guard tower with ports to fire weapons through.
— A sophisticated shooting range with pop-up targets.
— An elaborate physical fitness training ground, complete with obstacle course and “jungle gyms” as seen in those infamous Al Qaeda propaganda videos.
— Old mining shafts on the property bored out and holding stockpiles of weapons, including stacks of AK-47’s and at least 6000 rounds of ammunition.
Caches of bulk food like rice, grains and beans were found in other old mining shafts. Like some of the weapons stashes, they had been spoiled by water leakage because of the inexperienced way the tunnels had been prepared.
“There was no electricity, running water or phone service,” said Wamsley. “Cell phones didn’t work there. There was only one modern structure — a modular that had somehow been towed onto the property that only the adult males were allowed access to. It seemed like a very, very hard life they chose to live out there – especially for the women and children.”
Some 20 children under the age of 12 were found to be living on the compound under the conditions Wamsley described. The little girl that caught Tidwell’s interest and sent this whole thing in motion was undoubtedly one of them.
“There were supposed to be up to 50 adult males on that compound when we went in there,” Tidwell told me. “But we happened to go in on a day they had all gone off together on some kind of ‘mission.'”
According to Wamsley, the men had secured jobs with different construction companies around Colorado, which they would steal equipment from and sell to either fund or use on the compound. This kind of organized crime is probably what all the adult males were doing on the day of the raid.
“Thank god they weren’t there,” said Tidwell. “We walked in carrying pistols and shotguns and they had stacks of AK- 47’s. They could have killed us all.”
As the enormity of that statement sunk in, he continued, “I mean thank God there was no one in that guard tower because - stupid rookie that I was - I volunteered to be the first guy through the gate and I would have been the first one to go down. We had no idea what we were up against.”
What is known now is chilling: Jamaat al-Fuqra was in the process of building a high-altitude terrorist training camp right here in Chaffee County. The popular fatwa (Muslim edicts) then were against Russia because of the ongoing war between Soviet‑supported forces and Mujahideen insurgents fighting to overthrow communist rule in the highlands of Afghanistan. The secluded high mountain kingdom of Chaffee County had been handpicked as the perfect place to acclimate potential soldiers for martyrdom.
Fortunately, Tidwell helped catch them in the early stages of their plan.
“Gayle Norton authorized that search warrant and took a considerable amount of flack for it at the time,” said Wamsley. “I still remember one of your local residents at the time complaining that this group was ‘just a bunch of harmless shepherds in the mountains.’ That was definitely not the case and I think Gayle Norton made a courageous decision that has since been more than vindicated.”
If left undisturbed for another few months, the training camp would have become fully operational — a potentially devastating turn of events for our country, said Wamsley.
That might seem like an overdramatic statement until you learn more about Jamaat al- Fuqra, a villainous group founded in Pakistan by a cleric named Sheikh Mubarak Ali Jilani Hashemiit, more simply known as “Sheikh Jilani” -— a heavy hitter in the shadowy world of Islamic terrorism.
Daniel Pearl, the famous Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and beheaded in Pakistan in 2002, was being taken to interview Jilani when he was abducted. Jilani was detained for the murder of Pearl but eventually released under convoluted circumstances and has since disappeared bin Laden-like into the interior of Pakistan.
Before 9/11, Jilani’s fingerprints were connected to dozens of violent attacks carried out across the U.S. According to a January 2001 article in the National Review, Jamaat al- Fuqra was linked to attacks on “a virtual rainbow coalition of targets, including Hare Krishnas in San Diego [and Denver], Hindus in Toronto, Sikhs in Seattle, and Buddhists in Illinois.” The article goes on to state that al-Fuqra members have been implicated “in at least 17 bombings and 12 murders over the past twenty years.”
Simply put, Al-Fuqra was a menace to pre-9/11 America and a post-9/11 America's worst nightmare. Sheikh Jilani and his followers would have liked nothing more than to watch every citizen of this country die a painful death. He makes Ted Bundy look like Barney the dinosaur, and – this is the kicker – he personally paid at least one visit to Buena Vista.
“We have at least one witness who remembered Sheikh Jilani from the Buena Vista area, talking to realtors and looking at real estate,” Wamsley told me.
Quiet heroes
After the construction of their Trout Creek Pass compound was so rudely interrupted, members of Jamaat al-Fuqra spread out like a cancer across the country and wreaked havoc. To name a few high-profile examples: An al-Fuqra member, Clement Rodney Hampton-el, was convicted in the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993; the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid allegedly visited Jilani in Pakistan to receive spiritual guidance; and there are strong suggestions that the “Washington Sniper” John Allen Muhammad was also a member.
Sheik Jilani himself is still under investigation for possible ties to al-Queda and numerous other offenses against humanity, yet remains alive and in hiding somewhere in Pakistan. Consequently, Al-Fuqra is still active and able to direct more terrorist attacks — but thanks to Jimmy Tidwell they won’t be doing it directly across the valley from one of America’s most notable collections of Christian youth camps.
Today all is quiet, pretty and still on the piece of land that Jamaat al-Fuqra was prepping to be a school for killers. I visited it during my research for this story, using directions Tidwell gave me. Remnants of the guard tower still stand amid young groves of fluttering aspen trees, and I found the clever guard hut disguised as an old miner’s shack, perched on a hillside overlooking the solitary jeep road that leads into the property, seemingly untouched since the raid. Fifteen-year old computer manuals were still lying on the musty carpet.
It’s hard to believe mass carnage could be conducted from such a place, but in 2007 we know all too well the evil nature of extreme fundamentalism is more toxic than ever, and fully able to penetrate any barrier, even 14,000-foot mountains.
Think of the potential implications if Officer Tidwell hadn’t followed up on his gut feelings that night: Jamaat al-Fuqra could have continued operating under the radar here, smack in the geographic heart of the U.S., right up until 9/11. What horrors they would have happily executed in that circumstance we’ll never know, but it’s not outrageous to think hundreds if not thousands more innocent Americans could have lost their lives.
If the same thing happened today it would be the lead story on CNN, Fox News, every network news program and every newspaper in the Western world. Camera trucks would be lined up bumper-to-bumper from one end of town to the other and Jimmy Tidwell would be praised from coast-to-coast as a national hero (still should, don’t you think?).
But the billions of small, routine acts of heroism by our law enforcement officers that stop bad things from happening don’t get the ratings of the events when things go terribly wrong.
When my wife and I made the decision to move back to Buena Vista after ten years in California, it wasn’t just for quality of living. It was also a strategic move. San Diego, a border town and home to several major military bases, seemed like a primo target for terrorists. Buena Vista seemed like the last place terrorists would want to be. Unfortunately, ugly things happen in beautiful places.
Nevertheless, after researching and writing this piece I feel safer than ever in Chaffee County and here’s why:
The terrorists will never achieve their objectives because we are a vast army of people like Jimmy Tidwell, who look out for friends and strangers alike. It all goes back to the moment that little girl gave him such a peculiar, powerful hug. Tidwell immediately felt concern and compassion for an innocent child - a stranger - and went into action. That is something our enemies are incapable of. That is why they will ultimately lose this war.
A nation of good people is impossible to defeat.
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| This article as it appeared in the August 16, 2007 edition of the Chaffee County Times. |
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