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you can see where we're standing near the head right here is the head and the front legs are extending off to the east
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the main trunk of the body is extending northwards away from us and the rear legs are extending also off to the east
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what we're hearing is the description of a giant mound in the shape of a bear made of dirt and covered in grass
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there are mounds like these all over the Midwest and many are Effigies of animals
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here at Effigy Mounds National monument in Iowa the Mounds are shaped like bears
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and birds but other places in the country have snakes and turtles I met with the superintendent of Effigy
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Mounds National Monument Jim nepstead the first Mounds we visited are called the marching bear group from above they
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look like a long line of bears walking South along the bluff next to the Mississippi River so I mean this is a
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you know literally you know close to a hundred foot long animal that's been sculpted onto the Earth by bringing
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basket after basket after basket of Earth and piling it all up I mean there's the equivalent of
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dozens of dump truckloads of of Earth that were moved and and placed in order to create just this one Mound right here
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and what's underneath this mound uh well uh in many cases we don't know there have been very few excavations
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here in the marching bear group but what we do know is that nearly all Effigy Mounds do contain burials
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this appears to be a place associated with ceremony foreign just into the forest
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I can't quite see it with all the vegetation here but there's the ruts of what's known as the Military Trail you
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know that trace of that Old Road actually helps explain you know why the tribes are no longer present here in
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Iowa a lot of people wonder well you've got all of these um spectacular monuments that were
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obviously built by American Indians you know where are the American Indians in Northeast Iowa they're all gone why is
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that well you know it's because the federal government removed them you know back in the um back in the 1830s and 40s
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literally you know packed them up and moved them on to to distant reservations and so on
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this Military Road passing right near this mountain group again is an artifact of that era
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white settlers moved into the area and started plowing the fields and sometimes plowing down anything that got in the
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way up to 80 percent of the Mounds and any remains inside them were ground up into
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the fields yeah and and that's you know that was the fate of of many of the the Mounds I mean there were
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thousands of Mounds throughout Southern Wisconsin Northeast Iowa southeast Minnesota and Northwest Illinois
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you know many of them like the Mounds that we're seeing here animal shapes bird shapes you know all all kinds of
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other shapes thousands and thousands of them dotting the landscape but the rugged nature of the landscape here the
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fact that it wasn't ideally suited for agriculture is what protected a lot of the Mounds in what eventually became
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Effigy Mountains National Monument in 1949 Harry Truman signed a presidential Proclamation making the Effigy Mounds in
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Iowa a national monument and stating that the Mounds held quote great scientific interest
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in 1951 the first archaeologist was assigned to quote reveal the mysteries of archeology and the resources of the
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park which really meant digging into the Mounds to see what was inside and often
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putting it on display the native Rights Movement argued that the scientific Community needed to treat
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Native American remains with respect in 1971 a highway construction crew uncovered an old Cemetery in Iowa the
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remains of 28 people were dug up including one Native American woman and a child
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the 26 white people were put in new caskets and reburied at the local Cemetery but the Native American woman and child
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were boxed up and sent to the state archaeologist stories like this started to make
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national news by 1989 the Smithsonian reached an agreement with tribes to return some of
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their collection to any descendants they could identify they said when you face a collision
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between human rights and scientific study scientific values have to take second place
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and then in 1990 Congress acknowledged that Native American remains were not being treated appropriately and passed a
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law requiring institutions to return their remains it's commonly referred to as nagpra
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okay that's the Native Americans grave protection and repatriation act and it allowed Indian tribes
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to repatriate remains sacred objects and patrimonial objects this is Pat Murphy he worked as the tribal representative
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on nagpra matters for the Iowa tribe of Kansas and Nebraska his job was to help remove remains from
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museums across the country and ensure their re burial we are charged with taking care of the any body that cannot
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take care of themselves the little ones the elders and we're also supposed to take care of the ones that
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were dug up and their Spirit Journey was interrupted in his role as a nagpur representative
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Pat Murphy visited Effigy Mounds in the early 2000s he worked with the other tribes that were descendants from the
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area and they returned and reburied two sets of remains so we didn't see all the
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bad things that went on here are the bad things that happened at Effigy Mounds new construction had been completely
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Reckless trenches and post holes damaged burial sites a utility shed was built right on top of a hidden Mound you know
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once that investigation concluded it was very very clear that things had that this park had kind of
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straight away um from the straight and narrow and very few things were done appropriately here tribal groups were
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Furious the superintendent was removed and that's when Jim nepstead was brought in and asked to fix everything you know
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Effigy Mounds was in turmoil I knew it was in turmoil it's clear as day that the um that the the park was in the
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wrong so I wasn't about to come in here and try to minimize the seriousness of what happened so I thought you know I'm
00:07:45
just gonna go in there I'm gonna all things as I see him I'm going to be extremely open and transparent and that
00:07:54
was easy enough for the first few months and then when it seemed like the situation at Effigy Mounds National
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Monument could not possibly get any worse Jim learned that the remains of 41 Native Americans were missing and no one
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had any idea where they could be I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal [Music] when did you first suspect or discover
00:08:33
that something was off at Effigy mountains I can tell you is to me it was the old ones
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telling me to do something I didn't know what and I didn't hear voices or anything like that it was just a feeling
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that it wasn't complete up there and so I started checking into it in 2011 Pat Murphy in his role as tribal
00:09:02
representative ask for a full inventory of the remains in the Parks collection he went to a park employee named Sharon
00:09:09
Greener she handled the inventories and asked her to show him the reports from the 90s and early 2000s it took her a
00:09:17
few days to find them when she did she didn't give them to Pat Murphy instead she went straight to the
00:09:24
new superintendent Jim napstadt and she put this report down on my desk just plopped it down my desk and she said you
00:09:35
need to read this and then she just walked out of the room and the report is about an inch thick
00:09:42
it's a big report but it's organized in such a way that after just about five minutes or so of leafing through it
00:09:50
I was seeing all these references time and time again about remains that had been
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sent off to the Office of the State archaeologist in Iowa City to be studied in 1986 they returned to the park in
00:10:08
1987 and they have now disappeared and we don't know where they are and so time and time
00:10:16
again you know remains were studied in 86 return at 87 and disappeared soon after
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and you know one of my first questions was did anybody tell the tribes about this Jim Knupp said started making calls
00:10:30
to anybody who had been around before his time who might know something but nobody knew where they were and they
00:10:38
would all shrug their shoulders and say look a lot of smart people have looked into this over the years and nobody's
00:10:42
been able to find them you're not going to find them and so I just thought well I'm going to
00:10:49
have to account for them nonetheless I'm going to you know let our tribal Partners know that they're
00:10:56
that they're missing so I started drafting the letter to notify the tribes formally
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I mean you must have thought at this point give me a break like I cannot you know that
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yeah I mean in in all honesty you know I knew the situation was bad here um but I I had no idea that the park had
00:11:18
this kind of a uh a Negra problem and and there there were some pretty big lumps under the carpet that were
00:11:29
suddenly being revealed the park had its own law enforcement officer Bob Palmer he'd been in the job for more than 20
00:11:36
years he said he remembered something funny about the Park's old superintendent Tom
00:11:42
Munson taking home a box of animal bones Bob offered to go to Tom Munson's house
00:11:48
and check it out they'd known each other for a long time Tom looked around but City couldn't find anything and
00:11:57
unexpectedly though the next day the the phone rings in Bob's office and it's Tom Munson
00:12:06
and Tom said well you know I've got this box you might want to come over and look
00:12:11
at it so Bob goes over and um Munson produces this box out of his garage and it has little
00:12:24
catalog numbers and Bob took that box back to the park um and had them sitting on his desk
00:12:36
called me over to his office and said Jim you need to come over here and I walked in
00:12:41
and opening up the plastic bag and peering inside there's I mean it's just one of
00:12:48
these things that you just never ever forget it's just like burned into the retinas of your eyes
00:12:54
um I looked into the plastic bag and there's this human Cranium steering out at me you know literally looking out you
00:13:03
know from the from the from the bag I mean it just it haunts you I mean it's almost like this
00:13:09
person's inside this bag saying Help Jim nepstead and Bob Palmer arranged for someone from the state archaeologist's
00:13:16
office to come up and study the Box's contents and eventually um a few weeks later we got a final
00:13:24
report that uh no you don't have all of the missing remains you've got you know a third to a half of them
00:13:32
Jim napstadt called an outside experts and they went through every single box and filing cabinet at the park tens of
00:13:41
thousands of Records to make sure that every item on paper actually existed in the building it's obvious that the
00:13:49
remains are not swirled up anywhere in our collection or anywhere else in the park they are not here they are truly
00:13:56
and verifiably now unaccounted for this isn't just a mere I'm curious where are these kinds of things this is okay
00:14:04
somebody's really seriously playing with us somebody has broken the law this needs to be investigated Jim called
00:14:13
David barlin Miles a special agent for the park system whatever felony occurs on Park Service property whether it's a
00:14:22
common law crime people on people crime murder sexual assault all the way to cultural resource crimes
00:14:31
natural resource crimes those are all what I do David barlin Lyles is crisscrossing the country and leaving no
00:14:41
stone unturned you know going through thousands of pages of documents and so on yeah I'm interviewing people that
00:14:47
have moved from Effigy mounds and now they they work in Atlanta they work in Washington DC they're
00:14:56
out on the well you know they're all over the the country some of them are retired living
00:15:04
up in Minnesota some of them are out in Olympic National Park Washington so I'm interviewing people all over the
00:15:11
place David interviewed all the parks employees including Sharon Greener who'd put the report on Jim nepset's desk in
00:15:19
the first place he actually interviewed her twice the first time she said she thought the
00:15:24
Park's remains had been transferred to the state archaeologist in Iowa City but David barlin Lyles had already
00:15:32
checked that it wasn't true so he went back for a second interview and her story changed and she finally
00:15:39
told me that indeed she removed the human remains from the museum catalog drawers of of the park
00:15:49
unit put them into two moving boxes she created the report of survey all under the orders of Thomas Munson
00:16:01
and she picked up a box Thomas Munson picked up a box they walked him up the stairs
00:16:08
out of the basement of The Visitor Center walked through the visitor center of Effigy Mounds
00:16:14
out the front door out into the parking lot and put them in the trunk of Thomas Munson's Ford Taurus and he drove them
00:16:24
away from Effigy mount's National Monument and she did not know where he was taking
00:16:30
them David said that conversation with Sharon Greener was one of the most important
00:16:36
moments of his career the very next day David drove to Tom Munson's house this time Tom's wife
00:16:43
Linda was there too they have a really beautiful home in Prairie duchenne kind of a restored Victorian home
00:16:53
and um it was a gorgeous spring day and I walked up to the front door and Tom was at the front door and he let me
00:17:04
in I had never met his wife Linda personally so I was introduced to her and we sat at kind of a dining room
00:17:13
table and they sat together on one end of the dining room table and I sat at my end it
00:17:20
was browned I think so we were just really across from each other and uh I spread out all the
00:17:29
information I had in my case File and the documents I felt were pertinent to the
00:17:37
investigation and I started by asking Tom Munson to talk to me about what he thinks happened
00:17:46
here David says that Tom offered three different explanations that he had sent the remains to the state archaeologist
00:17:53
that he sent them to an archaeological Center in Nebraska and that he had gotten an unusual directive from the
00:18:01
national office in DC free explanation David produced documents to prove Tom wrong eventually
00:18:10
um Linda turned to Tom and said I don't think you're telling this young man the truth
00:18:17
and turned back to me and said well what do you think happened and these the munsons clearly love each
00:18:27
other very very much and somehow she either believed me or just realized that I'm not gonna leave their house until
00:18:38
they kick me out David pulled a consent to search form from his briefcase and put it in front of them Linda signed and
00:18:48
we got up and I followed Linda out the back door of the house across a small lawn to a detached garage
00:18:57
she opened up a door to the garage and we stepped into it and then she opened up the garage doors to let all the light
00:19:04
in and she turned to her left and looked at an area in front of a white minivan that they had
00:19:14
parked in there and she goes I wonder if that's it and she walked to this cardboard box that was frankly out of
00:19:23
place in their garage everything else about the garage was pretty tidy and neat and newer and there was this older
00:19:29
cardboard box and she pulled it slightly out from the wall opened up the flaps of the cardboard box
00:19:35
and under the flaps was a partially opened kind of black garbage bag and I peeked over her shoulder and I
00:19:45
could see the head of a femur and I knew that that was what I was looking for and she backed away from it
00:19:57
and I said you know stay here I'm gonna go get my camera David took photographs put the
00:20:06
box in the passenger seat of his car and texted Jim I remember just being shocked
00:20:12
when he texted me you know found the second box you know need to get back into the museum
00:20:20
collection can you can you meet me out at the park what emotions were very high with me and Jim was just
00:20:32
so shocked that we did it that we figured it out and we felt both sad and happy at the same time and
00:20:46
did you immediately lock them up absolutely yes we even um prepared a a special place to put them
00:20:56
as both returning them home but also as strangely evidence of crime Jim napstadt and David barlin Lyles told
00:21:08
tribal Representatives what had happened right away Sandra Massey of the sack and Fox Nation
00:21:14
remember seeing the pictures that David took of the box in the garage then you see uh the trash bags
00:21:23
um and yeah that was really it hurt um I was very angry but it also hurt because the thing is we in the sack and
00:21:35
Fox Nation still do our ceremonies um I lost my little brother a couple of years ago we put him away in our
00:21:44
traditional way and it occurred to me that all those people had been buried with that same
00:21:50
kind of love you just it's just hard to imagine that anybody could do that I don't know that I can tell you what a
00:21:59
feeling it was Pat Murphy I guess it'd be if your grandmother was dug up and misplaced and her remains were
00:22:10
off in somebody's garage someplace then that's how you would feel you know violated
00:22:21
Tom Munson pled guilty to one count of embezzling government property his sentence was ten consecutive
00:22:29
weekends in prison one year of house arrest 100 hours of community service and he was ordered to pay more than a
00:22:38
hundred and eight thousand dollars in restitution the tribes were disappointed when he
00:22:45
received community service I wanted him cleaning out the toilets at Effigy my house
00:22:50
the federal prosecutor for the case said that Munson was being punished as though
00:22:55
he'd stolen a xerox machine the Department of Justice issued a statement that said at all times during
00:23:02
his employment Munson was entrusted with preserving and protecting the sacred site he failed this trust
00:23:10
Tom Munson had to make a public apology in it he said please remember me as you know me and not for what I've done
00:23:20
why do you think Tom Munson did it he didn't want those goddamn Indians to take away his stuff Albert LeBeau is the
00:23:29
cultural resources manager at the park and in a Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe that was
00:23:36
the mentality of nagpra in the 1990s people who had amazing collections like Effigy mountains did it does
00:23:45
you know they were afraid that the Native Americans were incumbent and repatriate everything
00:23:51
um you know personally I think he was given bad advice but Underneath It All I think he was
00:24:00
kind of cuss okay I believe Tom Munson took the remains um because he's [ __ ] racist he
00:24:12
probably thought he was being like a hero he's gonna save these from the Indians and then bring them back Sandra
00:24:18
Massey when nagpur started but anybody that had our artifacts or human remains thought that we were going to bring our
00:24:27
big trucks and load everything up and take it away um and there was sort of a disconnect there
00:24:34
was a distance between them and us he literally admitted in writing that it was because Negra was about to pass
00:24:42
and he wanted to protect the funerary objects that some of which were on display you know here in The Visitor
00:24:51
Center Jim napstad and in his mind the best way to protect this stuff was to make the remains go away and if we could
00:25:01
eventually get people to forget the fact that this stuff was associated with human remains then maybe nobody's going
00:25:09
to bug us and force us to repatriate it and so it's very misguided effort on his part
00:25:16
to protect the material Goods that came out of the Mounds but at the cost of you know the remains themselves
00:25:34
yeah this is the last of the paramounts Jim told me that even though he works at
00:25:41
the park he spends most of his free time here too and when he's not here he thinks about it all the time
00:25:48
about why the Mounds were built the way they were and about the people who built
00:25:53
them moving basket after basket of dirt from the river to the top of the Bluffs but he's okay with never getting the
00:26:01
answers they might not be his to know is this your favorite group in the in the park
00:26:09
yeah it is yeah there's just some some kind of order and design here and whether we'll really ever know
00:26:22
what it was um you know we'll just have to have to wait and see um you know we we are definitely working with our
00:26:35
tribal partners [Music] um trying to learn as much as we can but at the same time
00:26:42
you know we're cognizant of the fact that you know maybe there's certain things that we're not meant to
00:26:48
know the park hopes to begin reburial of the recovered remains next spring when the
00:26:58
ground thaws [Music] foreign [Music] Spore Nadia Wilson and me audio mix by Rob Byers our intern is matild or
00:27:24
fellino Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal you can see them at
00:27:31
thisiscriminal.com where on Facebook and Twitter at criminal show criminal is recorded in the studios of
00:27:38
North Carolina public radio wunc we're a proud member of radiotopia from PRX a collection of the best podcasts around
00:27:48
radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight foundation and special thanks to adserc for providing their ad serving
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platform to radiotopia I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal please [Applause] [Music]
00:28:11
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