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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Whitefish artist Rocky Hoerner’s “Buckskin and Powder.” Acrylic and pen on agate. Running of the Bulls II.GREG LINDSTROM | FLATHEAD BEACON
bartender at the old Log Cabin Bar. “She’d have to leave me alone, she couldn’t afford a babysitter,” Hoerner
said. “So I would draw.”
He figures they moved about every
three months. Alcohol was a problem for her, he said, and by the time he was 16, he was taken from her care and placed with a foster family.
The uprooted childhood meant he made the rounds at most of the schools in the county, and it helped in high school when he would get to a kegger or the drive-in movie theater and know people from every school.
“That was an upside,” he said. “But it was also no stability – zero.”
Hoerner would eventually gradu- ate from Columbia Falls High School in 1975, and started working for Thomas Printing as an artist. He reconnected with his mother when he was 19.
She was married, and Hoerner said it was the calmest he remembers seeing her. She died of a brain hemorrhage later that year, at the age of 37.
His father, George Hoerner, wasn’t involved in his life much at that time. In an interview, George Hoerner said he tried to reach his son, but it didn’t work out. He didn’t know that Rocky’s life had been so transitory, and regrets that.
Rocky would visit on the weekends, where he connected with his lifelong friend, Dave LaValley, who lived next door to Rocky’s dad and sisters.
LaValley remembers a tough early life for his friend, but that art was one of the only constants in Hoerner’s life. When they were kids and didn’t have money, LaValley would enter the fair
competition to catch a greased pig, and with his winnings would buy Playdoh.
Hoerner would make outrageous creations with it, LaValley said.
“He was good at it, even then,” LaVal- ley said.
When Hoerner was 14, he sold his first piece of art. He was finding his style, which now includes extremely detailed pen and ink drawings.
By the 1980s, his art was growing quickly. He was selected for the West- ern Heritage Art Show in Great Falls, and remembers being the youngest art- ist invited to the event. He also hosted the Rocky Hoerner Picture Show at the Mountain Mall in Whitefish, and a cou- ple of successful shows at the old Paul Bunyan Bar in Columbia Falls.
Hoerner’s series of mountain man pieces were shown worldwide. He moved to Boise at the end of the ‘80s, but couldn’t stay away from Montana for long. He married his first wife in 1992, and opened a screen-printing shop with her in 1993.
Their daughter was born in 1995. Hoerner said this was a happy time in his life, but the stability didn’t last; the couple split in 1998 and Hoerner was back to living in his trailer.
Despite the dissolution of his mar- riage, Hoerner said he was productive in his art.
“I’ve spent most of my life alone, so it’s kind of a necessity at times,” he said.
After a brief stint in Spokane to live with his sister, he moved back to the Flathead. He traded art for a 1959 Air- stream trailer, and began dreaming big again.
“I thought, ‘I’ve got to get a gallery,’” Hoerner said.
With a loan in the works and a new location in Columbia Falls, Hoerner was about two weeks into getting the build- ing ready when his grandmother died. After the funeral, he went down to the Sportsmen’s Bar and got a beer and a sandwich.
That’s where he would meet Eileen Holmquist.
“All of a sudden, Eileen walked by and I was like, ‘whoa,’” Hoerner said.
She had come to the bar with a boy- friend, but she and Hoerner struck up a conversation. He learned that she was only with the guy because she was hid- ing from Aceto, whom she had been see- ing before.
Within a few days, Eileen ended it with her boyfriend and was working with Hoerner at his gallery. She was also a talented artist, he said, into drawing surreal scenes with pen and ink.
After only three years in prison, he was released under the witness protec- tion program, but wound up in prison in Arkansas for a series of robberies and burglaries. There, he would be charged with the stabbing murder of a fellow in- mate and receive another 25 years, but Aceto was released in 1997 to federal au- thorities.
In his court testimony, Aceto said the night of the shooting, he had been at the Blue Moon in Columbia Falls, drink- ing with another of Holmquist’s ex- boyfriends, when he learned about her whereabouts with Hoerner.
He testified that he went to the gal- lery with the intent to scare Hoerner, not to kill anybody.
W
was shaking.
“All I could think was ‘she’s dead,’”
Hoerner said.
That was apparently what Hol-
mquist was thinking about Hoerner, be- cause when they were finally reunited after two days, she told Hoerner that Aceto had been telling her, “I killed that son of a bitch.”
The days Holmquist spent with Ace- to in the North Fork were brutal, accord- ing to Hoerner. She said he raped and beat her, though rape charges were nev- er filed in this case. She was found near Big Creek, alone.
Wendy Ostrom Price was working at radio station KOFI during the manhunt for Aceto, and remembers meeting with then-Sheriff Jim Dupont to talk to the
J
oseph Aceto moved to the Flat- head in 1999 as part of the feder- al witness protection program.
He was using the name Joseph Balino, and had a lengthy criminal record by the time he set foot in the valley.
Law enforcement had him under surveillance in 1976 in connection with a bombing in Maine, and he was arrested and charged after he crashed his car and officers found dynamite.
He pleaded guilty to an explosives charge in connection with bombing and bank robberies in New Hampshire and Maine, and testified against his co-con- spirators.
hen the police finally arrived at the gallery, the adrenaline had left Hoerner’s system and he