Logan’s hero
Monty Clem’s investigation leads to a landfill and a search for a blue suitcase
Editor’s Note: This is Part Three of a six-part series
The boy loved his little brother. Firstborn of a different father and two years older, Logan Tucker did as much as a 6-year-old kid could do to take care of Justin.
They inherited from their mother a rootless life. Married four times by age 27, Katherine Rutan drifted from town to town, always looking for the next man to love
her, yet ever-laden with her sons.
The men in their lives were shadows Katherine slept with, nameless shapes never turning into father figures.
Still, the boys knew love. Chasing each other
around the house. Pulling each other in their red wagon. Riding bikes and playing video games together.
Logan, the blond-haired boy, was hands-on with stuff, more assertive. Justin, the dark-haired boy, was reserved, taking his cue from his big brother, who looked out for him by pouring him a glass of water when he was thirsty, sharing snacks and inviting him to play.
Wherever their mother moved them, at least they were together.
The brothers were together until one day in Woodward.
It was a Sunday on June 23, 2002, when their mother was the last person known to see Logan alive.
‘Just kidding’
Monty Clem, the lead investigator from the sheriff’s office, kept his promise to Katherine. He investigated the case as a homicide.
He found a yearslong pattern of broken relationships in Katherine’s life, leading up to her arrival in Woodward.
Monty spoke with several men who dated Katherine. Their stories were the same: she wanted to be free of her boys. Perhaps the most frightening of their stories was told by a man named Richard Cody.
In 2001, Richard, in his early 30s, met Katherine at Kid Kountry Day Care in the town of Nowata in eastern Oklahoma, between Tulsa and Kansas. His young daughter attended the day care, and so did Logan and Justin.
Katherine told Richard her car wouldn’t run. Richard discovered it was out of fuel. He retrieved a gas can from his house, drove to a station, returned to the day care center and poured fuel in Katherine’s car.
Katherine invited Richard over for dinner. They enjoyed a meal and watched TV with the kids.
Soon after, Katherine told him she was being evicted from her house. Richard had a couple of extra bedrooms and invited her to stay at his place. Logan and Justin moved in, too.
Katherine’s and Richard’s relationship quickly became intimate. It ended one night in bed, when she blurted out something that spooked him.
I wish there was a way I could kill my kids and get away with it, Katherine said. Richard said, excuse me? Just kidding, Katherine told him.
Shocked by the comment, Richard slept in his young daughter’s bedroom that night, to keep her safe from Katherine. He told the day care center Katherine was not allowed to pick up his daughter.
Richard told Katherine to leave. When Monty learned that Katherine moved in with Michael Pettey in May 2002, he also discovered that in the span of about four years, Logan and Justin lived under the roofs of several different men.
‘Logan won’t be home anymore’
Monty needed to nail down where Katherine’s brother, Brian Marquardt, was on June 23, 2002, when Logan went missing. Katherine told authorities that Brian took Logan back east, on a camping trip.
Based on tips, Monty directed the FBI to find Brian. They discovered that on the morning of June 23, Brian was with a woman named Laurie Johnson. They were checking out of a hotel in Delmar, Maryland.
Brian and Laurie owned a business selling cleaning
products. His crew told the FBI they never saw a little boy with Brian and Laurie.
Monty also contacted anyone who encountered Katherine on Sunday, June 23, when Logan was last seen.
Among them was the daughter of Katherine’s roommate, Melody Lennington. On the day Logan went missing, Lacie Lennington, in her early 20s, had stopped by the house on Texas Avenue in Woodward.
It was around noon when Lacie showed up, only about nine hours after Melody thought she heard Logan scream in the early morning.
Lacie saw Justin first. He told her something peculiar. Logan won’t be home anymore, Justin said.
She found Katherine playing cards on the computer. Katherine told Lacie she just missed DHS. They took Logan, Katherine said.
Monty learned that about an hour later, Katherine and Justin paid a visit to Evelyn Pettey in Fort Supply. Evelyn was Michael’s mother. She lived within view of Michael’s house.
Evelyn tended her garden as Katherine and Justin walked up. Katherine told Evelyn that DHS picked up Logan that morning.
That’s awful odd, Evelyn said. Why would they pick him up on a Sunday instead of a weekday?
As they talked, Evelyn remarked on Katherine’s clothes. She asked her, what’s that goop on your shirt? Oh that, Katherine said. It’s candle wax. I spilled it on myself.
Katherine and Evelyn and Justin walked into the house. Katherine scratched at her arms and legs. Evelyn asked, what’s wrong? We were walking in the brush earlier, Katherine said. It’s making me itch.
The candle wax. The itching from the brush. Insignificant matters to those going about their daily lives. But to Monty, they could prove to be valuable clues in his investigation.
He knew that candle wax was found in the Texas Avenue basement, where Logan was the morning of his disappearance. If Katherine was walking in the brush, on the same day Logan disappeared, would Monty find the location? Would the location reveal more about what happened to Logan?
To Monty, the clues could show that Katherine was the last person to see Logan alive. And dead.
No wildflowers
As much as he looked into Katherine’s life leading up to Logan’s disappearance, Monty carefully examined her actions afterward.
On Monday, June 24, 2002, one day after Logan went missing, Katherine chatted with her roommate, Melody. I saw some wildflowers, Katherine
said. They’d look nice in your window box. I’ll dig them up and bring them over.
She called Michael and asked if she could borrow a shovel and some plastic. Michael had been building a small pond in his front yard. He was using large amounts of plastic to line the pond. I need the plastic to plant wildflowers at Melody’s house, Katherine told him.
Katherine and Justin drove to Michael’s house in Fort Supply. He wasn’t home. But his mother, Evelyn, was at her house nearby. Evelyn watched Katherine grab a shovel and some plastic, and stuff it in the trunk of her car.
Katherine and Justin walked over to Evelyn’s house. I saw some wildflowers along a highway, Katherine said. I’m going to dig them up and plant them at Melody’s house. The visit was brief.
Later that Monday, Evelyn noticed Katherine and Justin returning to Michael’s home. It was night time, and very dark.
Katherine never brought wildflowers to Melody’s house.
She canceled Logan’s placement with Meadowlake Hospital, the psychiatric center for children and adolescents in Enid.
On June 29, 2002, less than a week after Logan’s disappearance, she attended a biker rally in Packsaddle Bridge near Arnett, about an hour southwest of Woodward.
The rally was sponsored by The Satan Brothers Motorcycle Club. Katherine wore backless leather chaps, and danced in a topless contest.
Her party life didn’t last long. When Monty started looking into the case, Katherine panicked.
On July 8, 2002, she walked up to a man at Domino, a food and fuel store in Woodward. The man’s name was Don Hackley. He was pumping gas when Katherine approached him. She begged him to a leave a message on her answering machine.
He did.
“This is for Katherine,” Hackley said. “And this is for her brother. She has Logan. He’s all right, and they’ll be back in a couple of weeks.”
The rambling message drew instant suspicion from Monty and the sheriff’s office.
Afraid of Monty Clem
In late July 2002, Katherine moved into the Briarwood Apartments on 22nd Street in Woodward. She met a man who moved into an apartment nearby. He told her he was a truck driver who escorted single-wide mobile homes across Oklahoma.
The man’s name was Rick Stephens. In reality, Rick worked for the District 26 Narcotics Task Force.
He shared beers with Katherine at City Limits Club, a country and western bar in Woodward. Rick got Katherine to open up about her family. She told him Logan was with her brother.
On Aug. 27, Katherine and Rick talked again at his apartment. She didn’t know he’d wired the place with video cameras.
Incredibly, Katherine told Rick that even her lawyer at the time didn’t believe her stories. And that she had motive for murdering Logan — all the problems he caused her. Katherine said she thought about fleeing the country, to avoid the death penalty.
She wore light blue jeans and a long-sleeve white shirt. Katherine leaned forward and played with her keys. She talked about a warning her attorney gave her.
“He said, ‘Who I would be afraid of is Monty Clems, who is with the sheriff’s department, and Butch Hutchison, who’s part with the sheriff’s office and part with the DA,’” Katherine said.
She got their names wrong, but otherwise she was right. Monty would never give up the case.
‘This is a murder case’
During his exhaustive investigation, Monty wrote detailed notes in neat print. While he interviewed the long line of people impacted by Katherine’s erratic behavior over the years, he never lost track of her whereabouts.
On April 5, 2005, nearly three years after Logan disappeared, Katherine entered a common law marriage with a man in the Bartlesville area, four hours east of Woodward.
Her fifth husband was Jason Pollard. An IT worker, he met Katherine when she worked in an office with his mother. Katherine and Jason attended church together.
On Thursday, Feb. 23, 2006, Jason was at work. Katherine was at home, talking on the phone with a friend. She heard a knock on the door. When she opened the door, Monty greeted her with a grin. And a question. Remember me? Monty and Woodward County Sheriff Les Morton arrested Katherine in connection with Logan’s death.
Without a body, the prosecution would be tough. Monty found a man named Chris Ross in Ada, more than three hours south of Woodward. Ross was an expert on prosecuting murder cases in which the victim’s body was never found.
Authorities in Woodward County waited nearly four years before arresting Katherine because they were afraid that, without Logan’s body as evidence, a jury might find Katherine not guilty.
“They were in a position where they wanted to keep looking for the body until they were absolutely sure they couldn’t find it as opposed to trying her and not convicting her,” Ross said. “It was the fear, and the unfamiliarity of prosecuting a murder with no body.”
Woodward County prosecutors initially wanted to charge Katherine with child neglect.
“I looked at what they had and I said, ‘Well, this is a murder case,’” Ross said. “And they said ‘Well, but how are we going to prove what day she killed him, and how she killed him?’ My response was ‘How are you going to prove how she neglected him and what day she neglected him? It’s the same thing. And in a no-body murder case, the law is you do not have to prove the exact method of death.’ We got past that.”
Indeed, they did. Katherine was charged with committing first-degree murder against Logan.
A blue suitcase
When the Woodward News reported Katherine’s arrest, the case took another twist.
Mark Bell, a sanitation worker at the time of Logan’s disappearance, came forward and told authorities about what he saw on his route around June 23, 2002.
In the 500 block of Texas Avenue, where Katherine lived with Logan and Justin and Melody, Bell approached some trash for pickup. He noticed a blue suitcase. Wrapped in plastic and tied with rope, the suitcase weighed between 40 and 60 pounds.
Bell smelled what he thought was a dead animal.
He thought about opening the suitcase, until he saw a woman across the street, watching him. Bell threw the suitcase in the trash truck.
Later, Melody noticed she was missing a piece of luggage. It meant a lot to her. It was her father’s blue suitcase.
Nearly four years had passed since Logan disappeared, but Monty and authorities immediately began to search the local landfill. Some days, Monty spent 12 hours in a pit of trash.
Satellite images shot around the time of Logan’s 2002 disappearance showed where trash was dumped in the landfill. Crews used bulldozers and backhoes to churn through the mountain of garbage.
By the middle of May, crews had cut through more than 150,000 tons of garbage to reach the 2002 level. A hole in the landfill was about 30 feet deep. They found letters and other items from the same time and Woodward area when Logan was alive, but they didn’t find the suitcase.
After months under the brutal Oklahoma sun, authorities called off the dig. Monty was heartbroken over not finding Logan in the landfill. He always kept a framed photo of Logan on his desk.
‘What killed him’
In September 2006, Monty left his post at the sheriff’s office to work as a special investigator for Oklahoma’s chief medical examiner.
Ahead of Katherine’s murder trial, Monty and Ross shared a meal together, as was common between the new friends.
“We were eating dinner, and he said, ‘Well, good luck with your case,’ and laughed,” Ross said. “I said, ‘You’re not leaving me behind with this case.’ He just kinda laughed, too. And then that night he had a heart attack. Had a stroke the next day. I went and saw him. They kept him on a ventilator for a while, life support until the family could get there. So I’ve always thought that was an ironic conversation.”
Monty died Oct. 6, 2006. Family held his funeral at First Baptist Church in Woodward, where he’d married his wife, Pam, and where he served as a deacon.
When he died, Monty left behind a daughter, Keri, and a son, Matt; his parents; two brothers and two grandchildren, Colt and Adyson.
Those closest to Monty believe it was the relentless digging in the landfill that led to the lawman’s death.
“If you’re out in that kind of heat, taking in all sorts of smells and toxic waste fumes, things like that in the heat of the summer, and you go through that kind of anxiety and stress and anxiousness about succeeding or failing to find a body, I think it really, really took its toll on him physically as much as it did mentally,” Pam said.
“My mom always said looking for Logan was what killed him.”
Saturday: Trials and Tribulations