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DEER LODGE – If anything’s clear it’s that a piece of Rich- ard Raugust is somewhere else, someplace tangent to Trout Creek, Montana, July of 1997, a summer so vivid and trans- forming that right now it happens to be a detail about the trees that chokes him with grief rather than a stranger’s questions about the cold-blooded murder of his best friend.
Raugust came to Trout Creek because of the allure of high mountains, braided, blue ribbon trout streams and thick, ver- dant forests of green. And he came because of Joe Tash, the man he’s in prison for killing.
The two men met as boys growing up in northern California and, nearly 20 years later, arrived in northwest Mon- tana, Tash having encouraged Raugust to join him at a remote campsite near the Clark Fork River after falling on hard times in the wake of his father’s death.
Eager for his friend’s company and knowing his affinity for the forests, Tash told him about the trees.
“He was my best friend. He knew I liked big mountains and dense forests, and when I asked him about the trees he told me, ‘Some of them, you can’t even see through them,’” Raugust says, his head bowed and his eyes squeezed tight as he recalls Tash’s enthusiasm for the new- found paradise.
Reuniting at Tash’s father’s funeral, the summons to Montana betrayed a des- perate hopefulness, akin to a prospector invoking the specter of gold, the sincerity of Tash’s awe palpable as Raugust barely makes out the words, each syllable crack- ing with remorse.
He’s dressed now in nondescript pris- on-scrub beige, the smock-like cotton garb a few shades darker than the bleak wall of whitewashed cinderblock behind him, his 6-foot-4-inch frame cast against it in stark relief, his blue eyes bright, obscured only by a watery sheen that doesn’t recede.
“I came up here to help Joe, to be near Joe,” he says. “And I just fell in love with the trees.”
Raugust was a few years younger than Tash when he came across the teenager duck hunting on a small lake that bisects two cattle ranches near Mount Shasta,
California. He’d heard gunshots and went along with a ranch hand to investi- gate, thinking it was trespassers. Instead, they found Tash, just outside the fence line, winging teals off the shore.
They became fast friends and over the next decade-and-a-half roomed together at a ruck of houses, including the home of Ken Bonner, the ranch hand, always keeping in close touch, even when Rau- gust joined the Army.
In 1997, they found tenuous purchase on a postage stamp of land in Northwest Montana, living in Raugust’s trailer at a campsite up Swamp Creek in Sand- ers County, off of Highway 200 north- west of Trout Creek, between Thompson Falls and the Idaho border. To make ends meet, they cobbled together logging and construction jobs. They frittered away time drinking at the Naughty Pine Saloon with a crew of locals, they fished and they smoked a bit of marijuana.
But in the 18 years he’s been in prison, there have been no mountains, no trout or trees, and, most significantly, no Tash, whose gruesome death on the morning of July 24 earned Raugust a life sentence in Deer Lodge. It’s a tough existence for anyone, but for Raugust, who says he’s as sure of his innocence as he is of the bond he shared with Tash, it’s a waking nightmare.
“It can crush you,” he says. “I’ve never used a cell phone or been on the Internet, I’ve been in here for so long.”
And yet, he’s optimistic.
From the moment of his arrest, the 49-year-old inmate at the Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge has insisted that
he did not commit the murder, that it wasn’t him who took Tash’s life with a single-barrel shotgun blast to the head while he lay in bed, unconscious and defenseless. He claims he wasn’t even present at the crime scene; that he was sleeping on an acquaintance’s living room floor in Trout Creek that night, catching a few hours’ sleep at Rick Scarborough’s before an early-morning painting gig, passed out when the report of buckshot ripped across the Swamp Creek camp- site, shattering the quiet of the dawn and setting into motion a chain of events that form the substance of his 18-year resolve to clear his name.
In recent years, a legal team assembled by the Montana Innocence Project has been mounting a case for Raugust’s inno- cence, fighting to secure a new murder trial by arguing that if jurors heard newly presented evidence that has emerged since Raugust’s conviction they would not reasonably believe he could have committed the crime, that the facts sup- port his alibi, and that key state witnesses – including the man they say pulled the trigger – colluded to spin a web of lies, framing Raugust for Tash’s murder.
The guilty verdict was handed down in March 1998 by a Sanders County jury, which sat deadlocked for 10 hours before reaching a unanimous decision late at night, though some jurors, including the jury foreperson, say they weren’t con- vinced of Raugust’s guilt, that they capit- ulated only after the judge instructed them that a new trial would be too costly for the state and county to bear – a state- ment omitted from the trial transcript
but recalled by, among others present in the courtroom, Mary Harker, the pas- tor of the Whitepine Community United Methodist Church in Trout Creek, who served as foreperson of the jury.
“I do remember the judge saying it would be too expensive and costly to hold another trial and the county could not afford it. I considered this in making my decision, and I remember the jury talked about the expense of a new trial, which was one of the pressures that led me to vote to convict Richard Raugust even though I believed the evidence presented at trial did not prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” Harker explained in a sworn affidavit. “The instructions given to us by the judge did not leave me with the belief I could disagree with the rest of the jury, the way the judge put it, it seemed like a lost cause.
“This has been on my mind and on my heart ever since that jury service,” she continued. “It rises up and troubles me in the night. I was shocked at the way it ended and thought it was a miscarriage of justice.”
The successful prosecution that put Raugust behind bars was based in large part on the eyewitness testimony of Rory Ross, the man who Raugust’s legal team asserts is the true killer.
The new evidence challenges the key testimony provided by Ross, who told the court he saw Raugust kill Tash, and theorizes that Ross collaborated with Scarborough to cover up the murder and pin it on Raugust – a theory prosecutors staunchly oppose.
According to Ross, he had been
JULY 29, 2015 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM
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