If you didn't know we have criminal merchandise available on our website, you can get T-shirts, tote bags and stickers and every now and then we've limited edition merchandise available to head did. This is criminal dotcom slash shop to get criminal merch now that this is criminal dotcom slash shop. Thanks very much for your support. Hi, it's Phoebe. We're trying something new. Two stories about the same family of wolves in Yellowstone. One is a crime story and the other is a love story.

For the love story, check out Episode 19 of our other show, This is Love. We've got a link in the show, notes. Here's the crime story. In April of 1995, a man named Mike Phillips was in a small airplane flying over Yellowstone National Park. He was the leader of the Yellowstone Wolf Project and he was looking for two wolves that had decided to head north. They were identified by numbers nine and 10. Wolf, nine was big with black fur that people said looked gray in certain light.

Ten was her mate. Ten was absolutely enormous, 122 pounds, white with gigantic paws. Writer Thomas MacNamee says, Wolf, 10 was the very definition of an alpha male, when you go into a gift shop and you buy a stuffed wolf, that he looked like one of those. Nine and 10 more research collars that transmitted signals wildlife biologists use these to track the wolves.

When they started heading north, they tracked them the first day and they find them up on the bear, too.

FLATOW And for five days, they just don't move. They just sit there and then the storms start to blow in day after day after day, these howling snowstorms.

And they can't fly, so they can't track nine, 10. And finally, there's a break in the storms and they find them at a place called Frenchy's Meadow, which is way far north. The wolves had left the park, the wildlife biologists were terrified they were only two months into their first attempt to re-establish the wolf population in Yellowstone, and the success of the plan depended not only on the wolves staying in the park, but also reproducing. Nine was pregnant and her pups would be the first wolves born in Yellowstone in more than 60 years.

But nine and 10 were gone and still heading north through an area with very little prey. And if they got through that alive, the biologists knew that the wolves would then be surrounded by cattle ranches. In 1995, it was illegal to shoot a wolf in Montana, but a rancher could shoot a wolf that was attacking their livestock. There was nothing the biologist could do. They felt helpless just watching the wolves move north. They can't land and try to chase them back south.

They just hope that they're going to figure out that they're in a bad place and go back south. But no, April, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 storms and I can't fly. And so they don't know where the wolves are.

One of the Yellowstone wolf biologists, Doug Smith, got into a small plane on April 20th and went searching for nine and 10. He can't find the wolves. They're just gone. And that's implausible because most don't just disappear.

The next day, an agent from the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks called Wolf Tracks have been spotted outside a town called Red Lodge.

So they think, OK, we've got to get to planes and we're going to fly a much wider area and see where the hell they've gone. But they get swarms of these spring storms are just horrendous and they can't fly. You can't fly. Can't fly. On April 26th, Doug Smith is in the air and detects a clear signal from Nine's caller. He hears nine quite clearly, but 10 signal is faint and indistinct and he can't figure out where it is.

And then just for a minute, he has it quite clearly and it's going beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Which when an animal doesn't move for a long time, it's a bad sign because even, you know, if they're asleep, they move around a little bit. And so the regular signals are beep, beep, beep.

And when it goes beep, beep, beep, beep, that means that they're not moving at all and it's called mortality mode. So he knows immediately that 10 is dead. As Thomas MacNamee puts it, all hell broke loose, federal agents from all over converged not only to find Wolf ten, but also to find the person who killed him. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal.

Number 10 was one of 14 wolves brought from Alberta, Canada, down to Yellowstone in January of 1995. The wolves were brought into the park in what was called the wolf reintroduction project.

It was intended to correct a decision made at the beginning of the 20th century, not long after Yellowstone was set aside as the country's first national park. Wolves had been naturally present. When the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act was passed, the act said that the land is, quote, set apart as a pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people. And back in the early 1980s, the people, as the story goes, didn't like wolves. There were considered to be good and bad animals.

I've never quite understood it, but you can easily imagine that, for example, a rattlesnake is a bad animal.

A lot of people still think so. Most predators were considered bad because the big beautiful elk with its magnificent antlers are the moose are the delicate little deer. Those were good animals there.

And then there were the fuzzy little ones that you look like and they looked like you could put them on your lap like a possum or a raccoon. Those were good animals. Elk were good, wolves were bad or that, you know, centuries old.

Animus against the wall, Wolf, is a representation of evil. And so they were killed and killed and killed. Yellowstone's park rangers were given rifles and instructed to kill wolves. Non rangers were offered bounties for killing them. In Montana in 1987, the government would pay you ten dollars per wolf, this wasn't just happening in Yellowstone. In 1987 alone, 1800 wolves were killed in national forests and parks across the country.

According to the National Park Service, by the mid 1980s, wolves had been almost entirely eliminated from the 48 states. The impact to the ecosystem was immediate. Thomas McNamee says that in Yellowstone, the elk population exploded. The vegetation they needed to survive couldn't keep up.

And so you were having starving elk and vegetation beat down and beat down the grasses, pit pieces.

And in 1947, the famous naturalist Aldo Leopold recognized that the Yellowstone ecosystem was missing its keystone predator. And he began to write and talk about the need for restoration of the Yellowstone Wolf.

Aldo Leopold wrote, I myself cooperated in the extermination of the wolf because I then believed it was a benefit. I do not propose to repeat my error. Over the next few decades, the discussion of bringing wolves back to Yellowstone went through a lot of twists and turns.

In 1973, the Endangered Species Act was passed and the following year, gray wolves were listed as endangered. The Endangered Species Act mandated that gray wolves be restored to their native habitats, including Yellowstone.

Well, of course, Yellowstone is surrounded by ranch lands and the ranchers went bananas so all they could picture was wolves roaring into their herds and laying waste to their living, even though it had been shown in other parts of the world that wolves greatly prefer wild prey and really liked to stay away from people that just didn't believe that the battle between ranchers and conservationists was incredibly heated.

There were countless hearings, more than 700 people testified and 160000 written comments were submitted. In the end, the conservationist's won wolves would be brought back to Yellowstone. In 1995, 14 wolves were trapped in Alberta, Canada, and transported by plane. They were initially placed in large outdoor acclimation pens. Here's wildlife biologist Joe Fontaine.

I've been a wildlife biologist for the federal government for 33 years. And 18 of those years I spent as a deputy wolf recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service when the wolves were first brought to Yellowstone and were in their acclimation pens.

Weren't there armed guards?

Oh, yeah, there was. There were guards that were stationed at different places. They were in what they call Hydes, where they could get in and not be seen. And because the thought was that there might be somebody crazy enough to go in and try to kill the wolves while they were in the pen and young people had access to the park and people, you know, didn't care, you know, that was just people driving through or whatever.

But you never know what somebody's going to do. And so there was a lot of a lot of temerity about what the heck to do with that. So the other we had law enforcement guys up there all the time.

Why was there such a great fear?

Well, you know, during a lot of the public meetings, we would get people saying we're going to kill every one of them, we're going to do them all and will poison them. There was a real rhetoric of that from the anti-war people that was coming out, that yellow wolves. They did, Wolf. And I'll shoot everyone and then the shoot, shovel and shut up mentality, if you will. And so being that this was something new and different that had never, ever been done before, you don't want to take chances.

You want to make sure that everything is safe and ready to go. People have very strong feelings about wolves, this is true. That's kind of an understatement, actually.

So the wolves are unique in the fact that, you know, they travel as a pack, a family unit, aunts and uncles, they take care of each other very well. They're very good parents. They're actually out there to do a job, which they become, in my mind, like a shepherd to the flocks that are out there, whether it be elk or deer, moose, whatever. And their job is solely as a predator to remove part of the animal population that's out there so that what they feed on is more abundant because the more animals you have, the more it's graze down.

It affects everything in that ecosystem. So even though wolves may kill an elk, there are a lot of things that come in and feed on the carcass that are all intertwined with the connection of that one dead elk. When you don't have that, it's like there's a brick wall there, but it's missing a key brick. And so they are very much part of our our world and they need to be out there. Joe Fontaine and his colleagues hope that the wolves brought from Canada would stay in the park, stay safe from people and acclimate so Yellowstone could slowly be repopulated to its natural state.

The fear was that because wolves have a homing instinct, they would just head north back to Alberta. Which appeared to be exactly what nine and 10 were trying to do when Ten's tracking collar began to emit the mortality signal.

Federal agents and local law enforcement searched for, Wolf, 10 until almost midnight when they lost her signal. They called it a night and went home.

Very early the next morning. Everyone convened again to continue the search on foot by car and by airplane. They were able to track Wolf nine from the air and see that she was staying in the same place, everyone assumed that she had dug a den to prepare to give birth. Wolf, tens mortality signal was going in and out and they tracked it to a valley called Bear Creek. They communicated this to a team searching on the ground and they were able to tune into a very strong signal near an abandoned coal mine.

They realized the signal was coming from a culvert, one of those big drain pipes, and they could see footprints around the culvert. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Special Agent Tim Iker put on waders and started feeling around below the surface of the water and comes out on the other side with the collar and it's been unbolted.

That's something a wolf can do.

So they know that 10 didn't just die of natural causes. Somebody unbolted his collar. The Fish and Wildlife Service put up a thousand dollar reward for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person who killed Wolf. Ten other wildlife groups contributed, bringing the total reward to 13000 dollars. Tim Iker thought such a big reward would make a terrible situation a lot worse. It's too much money, he said. Any jury here is going to know people why for 13000 dollars.

Park rangers, biologist's special agents and local law enforcement were all working together to investigate the killing of Wolf 10. But they also knew that, Wolf, nine was still somewhere outside the park, having just given birth or about to. Without her mate, she and the pups would be in a lot of danger, a mother, Wolf, can't leave her pups to go hunt. They'd freeze to death and without hunting, she can't produce milk and they'd starve to death.

Joe Fontaine says they typically don't micromanage the animals, but this seemed like a case where they need to make an exception and help Wolf.

Nine And so we located him up above. And so I spent my time picking up roadkill and feeding, leaving them there so that she could on this all fire road so she could feed her pups off of the roadkill, which is what she was doing.

He watched over, Wolf, nine from airplanes and from the ground. He said he would sit in the Super eight motel and pick up her signal so he knew everything was going all right. After several weeks, he and his colleagues decided that the safest thing was to pick her up with her pups and bring them back to Yellowstone.

And so my job was to go in and find the den. And so I was left up by the geological station up there and started walking down. And I walked down the side of the mountain and I was, you know, I'm a hunter. And I was very, very, you know, painstakingly going down. And I could hear a little bit of a noise.

And I was walking really soft. And I even took all the antenna and everything off the radio receiver because she was so close.

And then I heard some noises and it sounded like some whimpering. And I took one more step. And then I saw the wolf. She just bolted out of there and I thought, damn it. But I went over there to see exactly where the den was and she never dug it down. She scooped out a kind of a base of all the spruce tree. And she was they were pups, Republican underneath that spruce rebels and everything. And so I raised the bow and I could see him and I counted them and I better count again.

And I counted all of them. And then I then I let them go back down again. And then I, I got the hell out of there because I didn't want to speaker. And so we went back up, got up on the fire road and left it and reported what we had eat healthy wolf pups, an unusually large litter. They set a trap for nine and then collected her pups from the den and transported them back to the park.

Nine was underweight and they gave her penicillin and vitamin injections. The family was put back in a wolf acclimation pen to stay only until the pups got a little bit older and stronger. Meanwhile, there is a lot of pressure on the law enforcement officers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to find Wolf killer and close the case because there was so much reward money on the table. Tips were pouring in, but nothing was panning out as credible. Special Agent Tim Iker had spoken with a man who lived near the Colvard Werewolf 10th caller was found.

The man's name was Dusty Stein Misael, and he said that he hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary or seen another person around except for his neighbor. But when Timika went to see that neighbor, he got a different story, the neighbor said he'd seen Dusty Stein Misael driving around with someone, a man named Chad McKitrick. Timika thought it was odd that Dusty Stein measle would leave that out.

And so he sort of pokes around in the bars and tries to see if there are rumors and he doesn't get much e he's kind of thinking it that Dusty Steinman's is going to call him on the phone. But he doesn't, and so he finally calls this guy named Leo Grasshopper Suazo, who's an expert interrogator for the Fish and Wildlife Service out of Denver, and Grasshopper flies up to Red Lodge and they go pay a call on Dusty and they really grilling.

Were you up here with Chad McKitrick? And they say, we know who killed that Wolf. Dusty, they don't. But they tell him that they do. Tim says to just listen to you, once you decide that you want to tell the true story, you call me.

And then they leave. You know, there was only one witness and that was dusty. And so. Once Tim had pretty well fixed it in his mind that it was just a. He just had to wait and work his way and, you know, another policeman might have used high pressure tactics and trying to break him down. Tough guy kind of thing. You know, we're going to keep you up all night until you break type of deal. And Tim is just to take it easy, kind of guy leans back in his chair, puts his cowboy boots up on the desk and says, well, I think he's going to call me.

Three days later, Dusty Stein measle did call a.. He said he was ready to talk and that he'd seen everything. Dusty Stein measle said it all started when his friend, 41 year old Chad McKitrick, got his truck stuck in the mud and asked Dusty to help him get it out.

And so they go up there and they try to get the truck out and then it gets dark and they can't. So Dusty drives Chad to his house and they say they've got together in the morning driving again. They go back in the morning, drink a few beers.

It's early morning. They're drinking beer.

And so they haul and, you know, they've got Dusty's truck in there like they were trying to get the truck out of the mud and. Dusty says he look out there. There's something on the rich. And Chad says that's a wolf. Dusty, I'm going to shoot it and he jumps out of the truck, shoulders, his rival takes aim, blam.

Tenth falls to the ground, shot through the lungs, did they go up to often and they see this guy wearing a radio collar? Yes, his National Park Service and testees totally freaked out. And Chad says, hey, man, let's let's take this thing down and hang it up and skin it. And I also I want the hand so they hang it up, take it, drag it down the mountain and hang it up with some string and a dusty unbolt the radio collar.

And so as they head back down the mountain, there's a little creek there with a culvert under the road. And Dusty throws the radio collar in there. And they had four jazz with the skin and the skull dust.

He wrote all of this out on a signed affidavit for Special Agent Tim Iker.

And the next morning, Tim Iker went to federal court in Billings and got a search warrant for Chad McKitrick House.

And so they assembled this SWAT team, Fish and Wildlife Service investigators, and they swarm over Chad's house with their search warrant.

Tim Timika, along with two other Fish and Wildlife special agents, met the sheriff of Carbon County that the foot of Chad McKitrick road. Chad McKitrick greeted them. He and Timika went for a walk while officers searched the house. Chad McKitrick admitted to Timika that he had shot an animal, an animal that he believed was a feral dog. He didn't deny it. The officers searching his home found a Ruger Seventy-Seven rifle under the couch and three rounds of ammunition in his garage.

They found tons head and pelt.

Chad McKitrick was arrested and charged with the killing of Wolf Ten.

His crimes were violating the Endangered Species Act and the Lacey Act, which prohibits transporting wildlife that's been obtained illegally. Chad McKitrick was released without bail. His trial wouldn't begin for five months. He didn't appear to be embarrassed or sorry in any way. On the Fourth of July, he showed up to the town's parade wearing a T-shirt that said Northern Rockies wolf reduction project. To some of his fellow Red Lodge residents, he was a hero, one rancher told CBS News the McKitrick should be given a medal.

In October of 1995, Chad McKitrick trial began in Billings and Dusty as the star witness. And he's been given immunity. Dusty Stein Macel testified that Chad McKitrick knew exactly what he was doing when he shot Wolf 10. He said that he tried to talk Chad out of it by saying that it could be somebody's dog. According to Dusty, Chad replied, That's a wolf, Dusty, I'm going to shoot it. Chad McKitrick attorney argued the opposite that Chad believed he was shooting a wild dog.

His attorney said the shooting was admittedly stupid, but not criminal. In Montana, it's pretty well considered just what you do that you don't shoot an animal if you don't know what it is. You know, the elk hunting. You want to be short an elk before you shoot. You don't shoot a cow and then say, oh, I thought it was an elk. And so it takes the jury a very short time to convict Chad, one of the jurors that afterward hunting ethics was the key, we all agreed you must know your target before you pull the trigger.

Joe Fontaine says he wasn't surprised by the verdict.

It was totally a criminal act. And it's the same thing with people that drive around and shoot deer and elk and leave them. Why? Why why do why do people do those things? I don't know. But to me, the folks that I know, that that hunt fish, I think it's a tragedy and it is just nothing but a crime. We reached Chad McKitrick by phone and he said he doesn't talk about this anymore. He was sentenced to three months in jail, three months in a halfway house, and also ordered to pay the U.S. government ten thousand dollars in restitution for the costs associated with finding and recovering wolfhounds body.

He appealed his conviction and lost. But the Department of Justice issued a memo in 1999 announcing something called the McKitrick policy, the McKitrick policy said that the government would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone knew exactly what kind of animal they were intending to harm and that animals endangered species status.

In other words, if someone claimed mistaken identity like Chad McKitrick did with a wild dog, the government couldn't prosecute. This was on the books for almost two decades in 2017. Environmental groups sued the Department of Justice and the policy was thrown out. The judge wrote, The government does not need to prove the defendant knew that killing an endangered or threatened species was illegal. The responsibility for any mistake falls on the defendant. As for the Yellowstone Wolf reintroduction project, although they lost Wolf Ten, the project has been an unbelievable success.

And now, of course, the Yellowstone ecosystem has been fundamentally changed in many ways. Because the Keystone predator has been restored. The vegetation has been changed, the distribution of elk has been changed. The beavers are returning because of the willows along the riverbanks that had been mowed down by it. Very large numbers of elk have started to recover. Aspen have started to grow back and groves that had been mowed down by so many elk. And in those aspens, there are more songbirds nesting.

It was it was really a triumph. The return of the wolves restored balance to the park. As Aldo Leopold writes. All ethics so far involved rests upon a single premise. The individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts, soils, waters, plants and animals or collectively the land.

As of January 2020, there are 94 wolves in Yellowstone in APACS. Among them, the great grandchildren of Wolf nine and Wolf 10, what happened to nine and to her pups is a whole other story, a very different kind of story, a love story with a happy ending.

We think that at one point he came around a turn in the ravine and saw something that he had never seen before in his life. He saw the first two pups that had come out of the den in the process of being released. And for him every day of his life, he was always the smallest, Wolf. And so he had no conception that they were wolves out there. There was smaller than he was.

So he ran over and befriended those pups.

So he played with them, shared some food. And whether he realized it or not, he was being watched by the mother Wolf.

For that story, check out Episode 19 of This is Love. There's a link in the show notes. Criminal is created by law, S'pore and me, Nadie Wilson is our senior producer, Susanna Roberson is our assistant producer, audio mix by Rob Byers. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at this is criminal dotcom. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. And you can read more about Wolfmen in Thomas McNamee's book.

The Killing of off number 10 Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio WNYC, where a proud member of Radio Topia from PUREX, a collection of the best shows around.

I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. Radio to from your ex.