Release Me

The newspapers at the time said the judge in the Missoula courtroom had instructed the jurors and the spectators, but it didn't make any difference. When the jury foreman announced the not guilty verdict, people in the courtroom gasped. A few cried out. In the front row, the dead boy's mother screamed and fell into the boy's father's arms. The prosecutor requested that the jury be polled. They were. A woman said "not guilty" through silent tears. A man could not be understood until his third attempt at "not guilty."

Cecil Hodges smiled. The judge finished his comments and set Hodges free. A photographer captured the half-closed eyes, the one-sided grin that would run on the next day's front page.

Hodges twisted his diamond horseshoe ring back to its proper angle, shook his attorney's hand, then grabbed the smaller man and whispered in his ear, "You earned your fee, you son of a bitch. You did it. Thanks."

The attorney's assistants pulled him loose, and they fled the courtroom. The bailiff escorted the jurors out a side door. Deputies encouraged the spectators to leave. Cecil Hodges waited for the room to clear. Bodyguards hired by the Hodges family assembled near the door then escorted him to his Cadillac.

Within the year, Lake County Sheriff Deputies found Cecil Hodges' ranch pick-up on a narrow dirt track, high on the West Side of the Mission Range, above St. Ignatius. They found Hodges' body, draped like a rag doll, over rocks at the bottom of a ravine. They suspected it was not an accident. They made a plaster cast of a boot print and further on, some tire tracks. Cecil's head was cracked like it had been struck with a bat, but the wound was not entirely inconsistent with the fall. The tire tracks did not help. Turned out they belonged to the truck used by the first deputy on the scene.

Old Man Hodges had a fatal stroke when he saw the body of his son. Cecil’s mother went into seclusion. The family had few friends. Deputies talked to the Hodges family associates and some other people, including a young social worker named Hedda Coldwind. The local authorities were busy that year, preoccupied. Nothing turned up. The case was never solved.