Ep 1: Who Murdered Mike Crites?

00:00:01
Speaker 1: When a hunter living on a remote Montana homestead went missing, authorities believed he’d just gotten lost in the woods, but when more facts emerged along with a gruesome discovery, it began to look less like a missing person and more like an execution. That’s next on blood Trails. On an overcast night in October of twenty eleven, a Montana sheriff named Leo Dutton stepped in front of local media cameras to deliver some troubling news.

00:00:34
Speaker 2: Nine one one received a phone call from Fort Service law enforcement that up in this area they were doing an area check and had discovered some bags alongside the road and found what they thought was bones.

00:00:49
Speaker 1: The site was near a campground about fourteen miles west of Helena on the east side of McDonald Pass. Bones aren’t necessarily unusual at a Montana campground, especially during hunting season, but that’s not what made those four Service officers.

00:01:04
Speaker 3: Dial nine one one.

00:01:07
Speaker 1: Later that evening, County corner Mikey Nelson stepped in front of those same cameras and made a shocking announcement.

00:01:14
Speaker 4: It was my observation that we had human remains here because of the very unusualness of it.

00:01:21
Speaker 3: I believe it to be some type of a homicide.

00:01:24
Speaker 1: He couldn’t yet say whether those remains belonged to a man or a woman. He couldn’t say how long they’d been there. He couldn’t even say how many people had died. What he could say is that whoever was inside those bags had not died of natural causes. That’s because they’d been hacked to pieces. Arms removed at the shoulders, legs at the knees, fingertips gone, What remained had been zip tied together and stuffed into plastic bags. But that wasn’t even the worst part.

00:01:58
Speaker 5: I’ll never forget.

00:01:59
Speaker 6: It’s just the the worst thing ever that I had to tell my mom, you know, when they found that first set of remains, and she asked me, you know, Connie, can they tell if he was shot in the head? And I told her, I said, Mom, there’s no head. Oh my god, the look on her face. I mean to hear that about your son.

00:02:19
Speaker 1: Connie Crites had been looking for her brother since he went missing four months earlier. The coroner couldn’t confirm it that night, but subsequent DNA tests revealed that those remains belonged to forty eight year old John Michael crites. When John Michael, who went by Mike, had disappeared from his rustic cabin north of Helena, sheriff’s deputies had speculated that he might have left of his own volition, But even in the hours and days after Mike vanished, Connie and her family knew that something was terribly, horribly wrong. Finding Mike’s remains confirmed their worst fears, but the nightmare was far from over. Almost a year later, in September of twenty twelve, the rest of Mike’s body was discovered. A man traveling down the highway had let his dog out of his vehicle on the west side of McDonald Pass, about twelve miles from the first sight.

00:03:10
Speaker 3: When the dog wouldn’t come out.

00:03:11
Speaker 1: Of the bushes, the man went into the undergrowth and found a human head. It had been dug up and moved, but investigators found a hole a short distance away with the same kind of plastic bags and zip ties.

00:03:25
Speaker 5: They showed his skull and.

00:03:29
Speaker 6: His teeth had been knocked out, so it was probably just one good boom my brother fell, and then two shots to the back of the head.

00:03:40
Speaker 5: Just like that.

00:03:41
Speaker 1: Mike hadn’t just been murdered he’d been executed. The horrific nature of the crime shocked the residence of Lewis and Clark County, but finding justice turned out to be a longer and more tangled road than anyone could have imagined. The problem was Mike had enemies, not just one. For years, he and his neighbors had been feuding over access to their properties. Tempers had flared, firearms had been discharged, and lawsuits created financial incentives for making some of those neighbors disappear.

00:04:16
Speaker 7: He said a number of things, including that that uh would pay, and he was right. Mike paid with his life.

00:04:27
Speaker 1: I’m Jordan Sillers and this is Blood Trails who murdered Mike Kritz Part one The Hunter. To understand what happened to Mike, you first have to understand who he was and why he was willing to do whatever it took to protect his way of life. Mike spent much of his life in Colorado, but in nineteen ninety two he purchased eighty acres of wild, undeveloped land twelve miles northwest of Helena, Montana. It was supposed to be a hunter’s paradise, a place to escape the stresses of modern life, live off the land and enjoy everything the mountains had to offer.

00:05:10
Speaker 6: He just fell in love with with the land, and you know, the unspoiled land in Montana.

00:05:17
Speaker 1: Connie didn’t totally understand her brother’s attraction to Montana. Colorado has mountains too, after all, But Mike’s decision to build a house without running water and live by himself wasn’t just about the scenery.

00:05:30
Speaker 6: He’s like, no, I want I want to own land and I want to live I want to live my way basically, so he just wanted to go do his thing and not be bothered.

00:05:40
Speaker 1: Mike liked his independence, but he was also, by all accounts, a hunter’s hunter. It’s become cliche to say that the outdoors is a lifestyle, but for Mike, krit’s living alone in a cabin he built himself.

00:05:52
Speaker 3: It truly was a way of life.

00:05:55
Speaker 8: The first time I met Mike, extremely friendly, super nice guy. He was just like a man. He lived to hunt.

00:06:03
Speaker 1: Shane Allen met Mike in two thousand and four through a mutual friend. Mike and this friend had taken a trip down to Colorado and killed what Shane described as a one hundred and eighty inch mule deer that peaked Shane’s interest, to put it mildly, and he joined them on one of their next hunts.

00:06:19
Speaker 8: You know, when we met him over there, he was camping on the back of this little less ten pickup. He was super simple and extremely focused on what his driving life was, and that was to you know, learn animals and to you know, harvest big mature animals. You know, he’s he was talking about the biologies and you know, why why deer here, and why they’re you know, what they’re doing that time of the year, what they’re browsing on. Just super super detailed. I thought I knew a lot about hunting and telling met Mike.

00:06:48
Speaker 1: He used that knowledge to kill a deer on this trip that most hunters would consider a once in a lifetime animal. According to Shane, it was business as usual for Mike.

00:06:57
Speaker 8: And you know Mike, He’s like, well, I guess game plan. I’m getting up at one in the morning and I’m hiking to you know, this ridge where he you know, he saw deer, saw some deer way way the heck off. It was like six miles in and I remember that night, it was after dark and we were starting to worry about it. I’m like, here, about eight or nine o’clock at night, Mike comes trapesing into camp with like one hundred and ninety inch typical mule deer uncle’s back. I’m like, gosh, he knew the game better than anybody.

00:07:30
Speaker 1: Connie told me her brother was extremely intelligent, and he leveraged that intelligence to help him kill big mature bulls and bucks. But like all serious hunters, he didn’t just care about animals so he could kill them.

00:07:43
Speaker 6: He fell in love with nature. You know a lot of people have this, They have a bad impression of hunters. You know, Mike loved animals. He loved animals so much, and he didn’t like to just kill them for fun. You know, he wanted his trophies and his records, but he didn’t like to kill just for the sake of killing, because he would cry talking about animals and animals dying.

00:08:11
Speaker 1: It was clear from our conversation that Connie loved her brother dearly, so you might assume that she’s looking back through rose colored glasses. But Shane told me exactly the same thing.

00:08:22
Speaker 8: Everything he did was for the better man of the animal. Sure, he was a hunter, and he wanted to harvest big critics. But you know, he would study the different grasses and I actually got a book here that when he passed away, I went into his house. The sister asked me to go and see if there’s anything that I wanted out of his house, and I grabbed a couple of things and one of them was this book here. It’s elk Ecology and Management. Oh cool, Yeah, as I went through it like he had read through this, you know, five hundred page book about elk ecology, and he’d found the seed that he wanted to plant on his property to create better habits at for animals.

00:09:03
Speaker 1: Mike was clearly intelligent, articulate, and curious, and he had a wide range of interests and passions, especially when he was younger.

00:09:11
Speaker 6: After high school, you know, he became my best dance buddy. So this is you know, this is the early eighties when you know, music was awesome. So Mike and I would we go dancing all the time.

00:09:22
Speaker 1: Along with muscle cars and dancing. Connie said Mike was into music, roller skating, and tennis. It doesn’t sound like he was exactly a homecoming king in high school. But Connie, who’s only thirteen months older than him, says he had a knack for making people laugh.

00:09:37
Speaker 6: He wasn’t mean, but he just liked to have a lot of fun and mess with people. And back then it was all like, yeah, your mama does this, well, yeah, no, your mama does that. And Mike was the king of the mama jokes, just like off the cuff, just the witty comebacks, just really witty, really.

00:09:59
Speaker 5: Funny, very very popular. It’s just a fun guy.

00:10:03
Speaker 1: He had various girlfriends over the years, but he wasn’t in a relationship at the time of his death. He worked in the trades, mostly as a metalworker, but Connie says he really wanted to find a career in the outdoors.

00:10:16
Speaker 6: He really wanted to make a living, like concerning wildlife nature. He wanted to write a book.

00:10:24
Speaker 1: He dabbled in the outfitting business, but it doesn’t sound like he had much interest taking other people to his hunting spots. In the early two thousands, he also got into some pretty serious trouble with Montana Fish, Wildlife and parks.

00:10:38
Speaker 9: The sheriff had reported to us seeing the potential for some baiting where there was a lot of indication that maybe that there were some bait piles. It looked to him like there were a lot of wildlife parts, whether that was carcasses and or antlers and that kind of stuff.

00:10:59
Speaker 1: That’s Randy Arn’t, a former game arden with Montana FWP. The information from the sheriff was enough for the wardens to obtain a warrant and they returned to search the property on a day Mike wasn’t there. Randy was one of the wardens who took part in that search, and his recollections give us a small window into Mike’s life on the mountain.

00:11:18
Speaker 9: There were some salt blocks and a bunch of really dug out and scraped out areas. There were deer on site that didn’t leave when we arrived. He was completely off grid. Right in the living room was like a four foot stack hall of antlers. Most of those were sheds. Before we were done, we ended up coming across a lot of documentation and some photos which indicated that Michael did a lot of hunting. I don’t believe that he killed anything on site other than there was a lot of skull cap deer and bone parts.

00:11:53
Speaker 1: The wardens doubted that all those sheds and mounts had been harvested legally. That meant more search warrants.

00:12:00
Speaker 6: They had him sit outside and they went and they took all the meat out of his freezer.

00:12:05
Speaker 5: They took all of his VHS.

00:12:07
Speaker 6: Tapes, photo albums, tons of stuff, and it was insane. I have never seen anything like it. And of course he calls my parents and he’s just sitting there and he’s crying. He’s like, I don’t know what’s going on, and they took his life.

00:12:23
Speaker 1: In the end, Mike was hit with fifteen wildlife related offenses, including illegal feeding, unlawfully taken wildlife, wanton waste of an elk or deer, and unlawful possession of a game animal. But when the case went to trial in June of two thousand and eight, only one of those charges stuck. For all fourteen others, either the judge dismissed them or the jury found him not guilty. I reached out to Montana FWP to obtain the case documents related to these incidents, but I have yet to hear back. Connie admitted she’s not much of a hunter. So I asked Shane Allen about the one count for which Mike was found guilty.

00:13:00
Speaker 8: They’d changed the law that year, so you had to have a special permit to hunt mule deer in specific units. So he had killed a mule deer any in it that required a special permit, he didn’t have a special permit. That was what I would call honest with six.

00:13:15
Speaker 1: Court records indicate that Mike paid seven hundred and fifty dollars in fines and court fees for that misdemeanor, but in reality, he and his family paid a far higher price.

00:13:26
Speaker 6: My parents had to take out a second mortgage on their house. They spent one hundred thousand dollars in legal fees, and I strongly believe that they caused my dad’s heart attack, because my dad was already stressed from all this fish and game stuff, but he was so stressed out about you know, the money, the money, the money, and you know, there’s only so much he could do for Mike.

00:13:47
Speaker 1: The death of Mike’s father became a wedge in Connie and Mike’s relationship, which had always been strong. Connie told me she still loved her brother and fully expected to mend their relationship. In the eight months leading up to his disappearance, she’d been meaning to call him to set things right.

00:14:03
Speaker 5: But the thing about my brother.

00:14:04
Speaker 6: You think I talk a lot, My brother was a talker and I am not even kidding. The only reason I didn’t call him is because I was always like, Okay, I need a two hour block, and it is in the back of my mind for eight months. Oh man, I really need to call Mike. I really need to call Mike. And I never I never made the time. And then you know, we get this call that he’s missing, and I’m like, are you kidding me? And so I beat myself up about that.

00:14:33
Speaker 1: What happened is heartbreaking, but it also shines a light on one of the more humorous aspects of Mike’s personality.

00:14:41
Speaker 3: Connie wasn’t the.

00:14:41
Speaker 1: Only one to mention Mike’s propensity to talk. Shane also described seeing Mike’s caller ID and preparing himself for a multi hour conversation.

00:14:51
Speaker 8: He was portrayed as this loaner. He wasn’t really a loaner. I mean, you get it. You become friends with him, and man, you got a connection.

00:15:00
Speaker 1: Mike had his share of troubles on the mountain even before the real trouble began, but at his core, he wanted to preserve the animals and wilderness he loved for him that work started on his own property. He felt a keen sense of responsibility for what happened on his eighty acres, and knowing that facet of Mike’s mindset is critical to understanding the debacle that happened. Next Part two, Welcome to the Neighborhood. Mike’s property was situated near the top of a mountain and had previously been part of a larger ranch. In the nineteen seventies, the ranch owners sold their land in large chunks, which were further subdivided into twenty acre parcels. Mike bought four of these parcels, but he wasn’t the only one. Others purchased land of varying acreage, and they were all supposed to access their properties via an easement called turk road. An easement is a legal agreement that gives someone the right to act says private property. Turk Road was included as an easement in the deal between the original ranch owner and the subdividers. It allowed for quote a sixty foot public easement for ingress and egress to the property. Turk Road ran from the bottom of the mountain all the way up to Mike’s place, but it wound its way through several other properties before getting there. There were also parcels beyond Mike’s place that were accessed through various two tracks, logging roads, and private driveways. Here’s where things start to get hairy. Easements are notoriously difficult to litigate. There are sometimes nothing more than informal agreements between private landowners, and even if they’re written down, it’s not always clear if they continue to apply after those original landowners sell their parcels. Combine that lack of clarity with a strong desire for privacy, and you’ve got yourself a potentially explosive situation.

00:16:54
Speaker 10: The area that we’re talking about is up on the side of a mountain, and the people who live there do so purposely. They really don’t like a lot of neighbors. They like their solitude, and the person that we’re talking about, Mike Chritz, was one of those people.

00:17:13
Speaker 1: That’s Lewis and Clark County Sheriff Leo Dutton. He told me that from around two thousand and nine to when Mike went missing in twenty eleven, he and his deputies were called up to that area multiple times to resolve conflicts over access.

00:17:25
Speaker 10: Where this started was a dispute over access to Mike’s property. There was John Meehan Katie we Wetzel owning the property that they claimed that no one had an easement through their property. We will get called from Mike that in the wintertime John would plow his road shut that he couldn’t get past the road. Then we would get calls that they were shooting firearms at each other.

00:17:56
Speaker 1: In two thousand and eight, a couple named John Meehan and Katie west So moved into a property below Mike’s on Turk Road. They believe that, contrary to the agreement that had been in place since Mike moved there in the late nineties, they could block the portion of Turk Road that ran through their property. They dug ditches, shoveled snow, and even stacked up haybales across the road and coated them with water so they’d freeze. Mike did not take kindly to this, and he and John ended up nose to nose or gun to gun on multiple occasions.

00:18:29
Speaker 11: There was a confrontation right down pretty close to Mihan’s property where there was an argument about access and they’re shouting back and forth, not.

00:18:44
Speaker 10: For TV language. Mike claims that he goes to leave and he hears a bullet whizz over his head. Here’s the bang, and says the only one that could have done it was.

00:18:56
Speaker 1: John Sheriff Dutton says they took a report but weren’t able to find a bullet or shell casings to corroborate Mike’s story. Mehan leveled the same kinds of accusations against Mike, but as far as I know, he never recorded one of these incidents on video.

00:19:12
Speaker 3: But Mike did.

00:19:14
Speaker 12: Tuesday, March first, and we got John Mihan apparently going snowmobile crazy again. Here tracks come right down from his driveway, go right up right up the road that he’s continued to try to pile snow in front of, and block and et cetera.

00:19:36
Speaker 3: That’s Mike.

00:19:37
Speaker 1: He usually used his camcorder to observe animals, but as the conflict with his neighbors intensified, he also used it to record the goings on along Turk Road. In the video, which you can check out by watching the YouTube version of this episode, he appears to be near John Meehan’s driveway. He begins to walk away as he speculates that Mehn had been trespassing on his property.

00:19:59
Speaker 3: Which is when a shot rings out.

00:20:05
Speaker 12: Well, I’m hoping you guys just heard that shot. I just heard a bullet fly over my head. I see horses running there. So we’ll see if that’s enough to uh make you make you law enforcement types do something. I hope you will. It’s not getting any better up here.

00:20:40
Speaker 1: You can’t hear the bullet whiz passed in the video, but the way Mike’s breathing gets heavier indicates that his stress levels are rising. What’s more, Mike wasn’t the only one to accuse Mehn of this kind of behavior.

00:20:53
Speaker 7: We were consistently confronted by this neighbor.

00:20:57
Speaker 1: Gloria Flora and her husband Mark into another property in this area around two thousand and four, when she left her job as the supervisor of the Lewis and Clark National Forest. She and Mark purchased one hundred and sixty acres just north of what would become John Meehan’s place. Like Mike, they’d moved up that mountain for the wildlife, the solitude, and the challenge of living somewhere genuinely wild. Gloria spoke with me about how she and her husband found themselves in Meehan’s crosshairs, just like Mike did.

00:21:28
Speaker 7: Uh. The first time my husband I encountered the owner, he was drunk on our driveway and my husband asked him what he was doing there, and he said, I’m your new neighbor and I want to use this road and I want to use your property for my recreation. And we said, sorry, this is you know, there are very strict limitations on this property because of the conservation aisement. And he said a number of things, including would be sorry, and he also said that would pay.

00:22:13
Speaker 5: And he left.

00:22:15
Speaker 1: At first, Gloria says John Mihan tried to block access along Turk Road using the same tactics I’ve already mentioned, but eventually he put up a gate and the alternate route to the Flora’s property took them an extra hour along twelve miles of logging roads and two tracks. They contacted a sheriff’s deputy who advised them to put up cameras to document any illegal activity. Those cameras ended up being a critical part of this story, but we’ll get to that in a minute. The Floras decided to build their own driveway to avoid me Hen’s property entirely. But instead of mollifying the man, it actually seemed to make things worse.

00:22:51
Speaker 7: Then once we were using the driveway, that’s when they would shoot at us. There was one time he used a rifle. I was driving out of the drive my new driveway, not on his property, and he shot right over my car and you could just hear it go right over the car.

00:23:07
Speaker 5: You know.

00:23:07
Speaker 7: The way that we had to do to use our driveway was you predoualge your phone to nine to one one, You had a loaded gun on your lap, and you had a camera or some other video recording device every time you left the property.

00:23:28
Speaker 1: This was supposed to be the Flora’s dream home where they’d retire to enjoy the fruits of long and successful careers. But they had no idea who would move in next door, and I can only assume neither did Mike.

00:23:41
Speaker 7: You know, Mike was going through the same thing. So I don’t want to make this about us. You know, we’re talking about Mike, but we know that Mike was not exaggerating. We know that Mike was not conflating. You know some other issues or you know, past trauma or whatever you want. This was very real. These were angry, nasty encounters.

00:24:07
Speaker 1: Shooting at someone is a serious crime, even in Montana. Gloria says she and Mark kept the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s office apprized of everything Mehan was doing, but they were frustrated by what they saw as a lack of action.

00:24:20
Speaker 7: You know, and we were keeping the local authorities informed, and the local authorities tried to make it out like, oh, this is Hatfield and McCoy, you know, these are just two neighbors, and it’s like, dudes, this isn’t Hatfield and McCoy’s. It’s like Hatfield’s period.

00:24:37
Speaker 1: I asked Sheriff dutn’t about this, and he said they always responded when they got a call from either party up on the mountain.

00:24:43
Speaker 10: Each would call with their own story. We would investigate it multiple multiple times. Mike felt and had had tracks where John had stoked him on a four wheeler, and then John me and would say that Mike was stocking him, and it was it was difficult for us, you know, we can’t take sides. We operate off of what evidence is present.

00:25:11
Speaker 1: Sheriff Dutton pointed out that as in any jurisdiction, he isn’t responsible for charging someone with a crime. He can arrest someone for an obvious instance of lawbreaking, but it’s up to the county attorney in this case, a guy named Leo Gallagher, to actually prosecute. When it came to access disputes, Sheriff Dutton said that Gallagher didn’t want to get involved.

00:25:32
Speaker 10: When John flowed in Mike’s access to his property. We responded to pictures and referred that to the county attorney, and then the county attorney would look at that and decide not to prosecute.

00:25:46
Speaker 1: Now, it’s important to note that Mike wasn’t totally innocent when it came to neighborhood conflicts.

00:25:52
Speaker 7: A neighbor down at the bottom of the road was looking for her dog and she drove up to Mike’s area with her kids in the car looking for her dog. She’s not there to do evil. Well, Mike got rude with her, got in her face, what are you doing here? And you know, and he’s wearing his gun and she was very scared, and you know, the kids were in the car, and Mike was wrong. He shouldn’t have done that.

00:26:16
Speaker 1: Mike agreed that he shouldn’t have acted the way he did, and he told the Floras he drive down and apologize. Unfortunately, Mike’s peace offering was not taken in the spirit it was given.

00:26:27
Speaker 7: Her freaking husband comes out and takes a swing at Mike. It’s like, you jerk. You knew he was there to apologize.

00:26:34
Speaker 1: The Sheriff’s office wasn’t called in this situation as far as I know, but the law did eventually catch up to Mehan. In November of twenty ten, about seven months before Mike went missing, Mike called the flooras because he’d gotten stuck on the road and needed help. But when they arrived, they saw Mihan pointing a gun at their friend.

00:26:54
Speaker 7: You know, he had Mike pinned down on the road because he’s above him. He’s in a superior position with a rifle point and right it might and his wife, who’s pretending she’s hunting, is actually gone across the draw and is watching everything that’s transpiring through her rifle scope.

00:27:14
Speaker 1: Mihen was arrested and charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon, but he struck a deal and pleaded guilty to negligent endangerment, a misdemeanor. The case was dismissed by a judge two years later. He ended up paying eighty five dollars in court fees. Connie didn’t live in Montana while this was happening, but she’d hear bits and pieces from her brother. I asked her, looking back, how she explains the way the situation was allowed to spiral so far out of control.

00:27:42
Speaker 6: It’s small, and it’s the county Sheriff’s department, right, and the county is huge, you know, this county is huge.

00:27:48
Speaker 5: So there was a little bit of that.

00:27:50
Speaker 6: There was, you know, there was a little bit of you know, we don’t like this guy anyway, and then I’ll be honest, there was a little bit of, shoot, this guy’s a loner, nobody cares about him.

00:28:02
Speaker 3: This wasn’t true.

00:28:03
Speaker 1: Of course, Mike had a family who loved him dearly and friends around the country who he spoke with regularly. One of those friends, Shane Allen, can’t help but think if this conflict had been handled differently, his friend would still be alive.

00:28:18
Speaker 8: It breaks my heart that he had went to authorities so many times trying to resolve it and continually got told we’re not getting involved Unfortunately, there’s no accountability there, and I don’t know who ultimately who should have been the ones that got involved from a legal standpoint, to make sure that it never got to the point that somebody lost their life.

00:28:40
Speaker 1: The problem for law enforcement was that the disagreements on that mountain went beyond Mike Kritz and John Miehan. Other disputes had erupted over the years, some of which had also escalated to include firearms. Like the Floras, these individuals had purchased property they hoped would become their picture perfect retirement getaway, and they weren’t about to let aloner like Mike Crits get in their way.

00:29:07
Speaker 3: That’s next after the Break Part three.

00:29:15
Speaker 1: Missing Mike went missing on Sunday, June twenty sixth, twenty eleven, and Gloria and her husband were two of the last people to speak with him before his disappearance.

00:29:27
Speaker 7: Mike called us on a Sunday morning around nine o’clock and our daughter in law and grandkids were visiting, and it was the first time that they had visited since before two thousand and eight because we won’t let them come to the property because of the danger.

00:29:50
Speaker 1: Gloria was making brunch for her grandkids, But when she heard her husband talking to Mike, the couple stepped into another room and Mark turned on the speakerphone.

00:29:58
Speaker 7: And Mike said, look, Ford showed up here last night screaming, beaten on my door, beaten on the walls, telling me I better open the gate or or else. And he said, I told him to. You know, it was dark and Mike’s wolf dogs were gone crazy, and so I told him to come back at ten o’clock this morning. Can you come up and be with me when he shows up to witness what’s gone on.

00:30:28
Speaker 1: Mike was referring to another neighboring property owner named Leon Ford. Ford lived in Washington State with his wife, but he’d purchased two parcels higher.

00:30:36
Speaker 3: Up the mountain from Mike’s place.

00:30:38
Speaker 1: The easiest way to access his property was to use a road that ran through Mike’s. Ford believed he had the legal right to use that road, but Mike disagreed, and the sheriff’s deputies had been called to settle a dispute. In two thousand and seven. As with John Meehan, both men claimed the other had pulled a firearm, and Mike accused Ford of cutting open one of his There was no love loss between Ford and Mike, but since Ford only visited his property every few years, the conflict wasn’t as intense as with Mehan. Still, it put the Floras in an awkward position. They wanted to support their friend, but they didn’t want to be hypocrites. They couldn’t back Mike in blocking access through his property while they were engaged in a legal battle to stop John Meehan from doing the same to them.

00:31:25
Speaker 7: And we said, you know, Mike, we’re in the middle of this god awful lawsuit. We don’t know if you’re in the right and we’re just sitting down to Sundy brunch with the kids.

00:31:35
Speaker 1: They advised Mike to record his conversation with Ford and let them know how it went. Gloria said. Mike seemed annoyed that they refused his request, which is why they weren’t concerned when they didn’t hear from him the next day. But then something happened that sent them running up the road to check on their friend.

00:31:53
Speaker 7: Our daughter in law Arrow. She started yelling in the afternoon, she said, oh my god, there’s wolves. There’s wolves. There were wolves at our driveway. Our little Yorkshire terrier went out the gate. One of the wolves grabbed my terrier by its head and ran.

00:32:13
Speaker 1: Mark ran from his house, grabbed the nearest stick, and gave chase. The wolves were running back towards Mike’s place, and thankfully they dropped the terrier after about a quarter mile. The small dog was unharmed, but Mark quickly realized that those weren’t ordinary wolves.

00:32:28
Speaker 7: And then Mark sees the collar and then he recognizes. He said, oh shit, these are Mike’s dogs.

00:32:34
Speaker 1: Mike owns several high content wolf dogs that he kept in a fenced yard on his property. You can see images of these dogs in the case file for this episode, and it’s clear that he loved them and took care of them. The reason seeing those dogs set off alarm bells is that in all the years the Floras had lived next to Mike, he’d never let them run free on the property.

00:32:56
Speaker 7: He said, yeah, I tried to call Mike earlier to find out what happened yesterday, and there was no answer. So he goes over to Mike’s and the front door is open and it’s like there’s no Mike. And Mike always had his phone with him. Mike’s not using the phone Mark’s yelling walking around, No Mike. All Mike’s vehicles are there, No Mike.

00:33:22
Speaker 1: Gloria said that Mike fed his dogs by walking through the back door of his house, not by opening the gate to the yard. But when Mark walked behind Mike’s house, he saw that the gate was wide open.

00:33:34
Speaker 7: Mike doesn’t do this. He would never leave without telling us or making arrangements to take care of his dogs, and he would never let his dogs out.

00:33:44
Speaker 1: They called Sheriff Dutton, who sent deputies up to investigate. He told me that initially they weren’t overly concerned.

00:33:51
Speaker 10: We began to look as we always do, and did but didn’t find him. But we weren’t alarmed because of past practice of he was probably out in the hills hunting, or he was hunting sheds.

00:34:06
Speaker 1: Hindsight is twenty twenty, so given what happened, it’s easy to criticize the sheriff for his initial assumption. Still, Gloria and Mark had communicated how strange it was to see Mike’s dogs outside the fence. They also noticed that Mike’s car was still in his driveway, which they told Connie when.

00:34:24
Speaker 6: She called first, I called the sheriff and he’s like, he just went on a walk about and you know, his dogs aren’t there. And I’m like, oh, wait a minute, Okay, he doesn’t take his dogs on the walk about when his vehicles are there, you know.

00:34:38
Speaker 1: The Sheriff’s office launched a search effort on June thirtieth, four days after anyone had heard from Mike.

00:34:45
Speaker 10: I launched a three week extensive search using helicopters, dogs, volunteers to search every piece of the property that we could find. And we brought in sent dogs to look for maybe a cadaver or things like.

00:35:01
Speaker 3: That, and just nothing.

00:35:04
Speaker 10: I was one day in a helicopter, flew slow, methodical grid searched over the property. Nothing just nothing turned up.

00:35:15
Speaker 1: Connie had been communicating with the sheriff from Afar for about a week, but she felt like he wasn’t really considering the possibility that something more nefarious might have happened to her brother.

00:35:25
Speaker 6: I just felt like, I don’t think they’re taking this seriously. So we just got in the car, me and me and my boyfriend and my mom. I’m just like, we’re driving to Montana.

00:35:34
Speaker 1: Connie wasn’t able to talk to anyone at the Sheriff’s department when they arrived, but she saw a news van parked outside the office and knocked on the door.

00:35:43
Speaker 6: So they came out and I’m like, hi, my name’s Connie Creatz and my brother’s missing, and YadA, YadA, YadA, and the reporter was like, oh my goodness. She says, I was just here trying to talk to Sheriff Dutton and nobody will talk to me. And I said, I’ll talk to you, and then boom, wow, oh now we need a search party, right, you know this is you know, he’s been missing for almost two weeks at this point, right, The.

00:36:06
Speaker 1: Sheriff had sent out search and rescue, and by July fourth, detectives had also interviewed John Meehan and his wife, but Connie still had reason to believe the office wasn’t taking the case as seriously as she would have hoped.

00:36:20
Speaker 5: We go up there, we get.

00:36:23
Speaker 6: In his card that he drives all the time, and my husband reaches over, opens the glove box.

00:36:31
Speaker 5: And there’s Mike’s wallet.

00:36:32
Speaker 6: It’s like, oh, yeah, okay, no, he’s not on a walk about.

00:36:39
Speaker 1: Nothing else seemed to be a miss at Mike’s place, and the cadaver dogs hadn’t found anything on his eighty acre property. They also hadn’t found any sign of a struggle in the yard or in the cabin, though the sheriff admitted that Mike wasn’t the tidiest person, so it was tough to tell. As the official search came to an end, Connie’s feeling of dread grew.

00:37:01
Speaker 5: For a while, I thought he was just hurt.

00:37:03
Speaker 6: But then after a while I was like, no, something happened, and it would be really hard for Mike to get hurt in the wild, on his own land. I mean, like really hard.

00:37:13
Speaker 1: Connie told me that to her, her brother seemed invincible. It didn’t make sense that he’d walk off and get himself hurt or killed.

00:37:21
Speaker 3: So as soon as she.

00:37:22
Speaker 1: Learned more about Mike’s conflict with John Meehan, her mind took her to some pretty dark places.

00:37:28
Speaker 6: Honestly, we’re thinking, it’s John Meehan who has done something to Mike. Oh, this is really gruesome, but you know, Meehan did own sled dogs, and Mark and Gloria shortly after Mike went missing, they had heard all kinds of commotion from these sled dogs, and then a big fire and everything and there was even you know, because there were no remains at this point, right, there was even some talk of you know, oh, they they killed Mike. They cut him up, they burned them, they fed him to the dogs. I mean, it was just a bunch of morbid, gruesome stuff.

00:38:06
Speaker 5: But you know that’s the thing. You’ve you’ve got no remains.

00:38:10
Speaker 1: That might sound like an overreaction, even given the circumstances, but Connie wasn’t the only one who feared the worst. Shane Allen told me that even before he went missing, Mike shared his sister’s fear of what was coming next.

00:38:24
Speaker 8: The last few years, the last few years of his life, you know, he was he was fearful. He knew how serious it was, and he knew that there was a chance that they were going to try to take his life. I went up to his property and actually went archery el hunting with him. He was, you know, always kind of looking, always watching, thinking that you know, there was eyes on him, and that was it was actually really sad to see. And then ultimately what happened, you know, was was exactly what he thought was going to happen.

00:38:58
Speaker 1: Part four the investigation. You may have noticed that in a lot of the stories we cover here on Blood Trails, the victim doesn’t have any real enemies. Hunters and anglers are a congenial group, and they don’t tend to make other people want to kill them. But as you’ve heard, Mike had already been shot at on at least one occasion. John Meehan had expressed real animosity towards Mike. So even before Mike’s remains were discovered in October of twenty eleven, investigators went knocking on Mehan’s door.

00:39:29
Speaker 13: Mike Critz had a number of conflicts up there. There were a lot of different reports about incidents. So when you brought up mister Meehan, he the Sheriff’s office has focused a lot of time on him as a suspect in this case.

00:39:45
Speaker 1: That’s Shane Shaw, a veteran investigator with a Montana Division of Criminal Investigation who worked the scene where Mike’s remains were first discovered and later worked to find Mike’s killer. He told me that the Sheriff’s office did a tremendous amount of work trying to find ever that would pin the crime on Mehan. They interviewed both him and his wife, tried to track his movements on the day of Mike’s disappearance and executed search warrants on his home.

00:40:10
Speaker 10: We got a search warrant and a ground penetrating radar to go up on John Meehan Kate webs of property go through cement.

00:40:19
Speaker 1: Mehan didn’t do much to help his case. According to court documents as well as the people I spoke with, he engaged in some pretty suspicious activity after Mike’s disappearance.

00:40:29
Speaker 7: He also got arrested for taking down our game cameras. He walks up to the game camera and takes it down and doesn’t take the card out.

00:40:38
Speaker 1: Detectives had been using these cameras to monitor the area, so Meehan was charged with tampering with physical evidence. In July of twenty twelve, he and his wife had been interviewed and their property had been searched, so he knew he was under investigation. Given the timeline, it’s unlikely those cameras held evidence that he killed Mike, but it was nonetheless eyebrow raising behavior. But what’s even more suspicious is what that investigation revealed about Mihn’s past comments.

00:41:06
Speaker 8: He had stated that even if they find the body, they’re not going to have, you know, the evidence that they need to understand how Mike was killed, basically insinuating that you know he was shot in the head, and you know they had separated the parts and all that.

00:41:28
Speaker 1: This information was revealed in an affidavit attached to me Han’s tampering with evidence case. I reviewed this affidavit and Shane got the details almost right.

00:41:37
Speaker 3: Here’s what it says.

00:41:38
Speaker 8: Quote.

00:41:39
Speaker 1: During the weekend of June twenty ninth to July one, twenty twelve, Mihn spoke with a concerned citizen at a public event in Helena. Mihn told the concerned citizen it would be impossible for police to obtain a DNA profile from the bones located on McDonald’s pass because police had not recovered a specific body part necessary to develop a profile. Although the fact that a complete skeleton was not recovered on MacDonald’s pass had been made public, the specific body parts that were missing from the skeleton have been known only to law enforcement. The affidavit doesn’t say which body part Mihan is referring to, but it very well could have been the head. You don’t need a skull to extract a DNA profile, but It’s possible Mihan didn’t know that.

00:42:26
Speaker 8: If that’s the.

00:42:26
Speaker 1: Case, how on earth did Miehn know Mike’s skull was still missing. We know investigators found Mihan’s statements suspicious because they put it in the arrest affidavit. Unfortunately for prosecutors, both the camera and the statement can be explained. Given how protective Mihan was of his property, it makes sense that he wouldn’t appreciate being surveilled by law enforcement. And while certain information about Mike’s remains hadn’t been released by the Sheriff’s office, it may still have leaked out. I was told by someone close to the investigation that Mehn wasn’t the only person who.

00:43:01
Speaker 3: Knew that detail about Mike’s.

00:43:03
Speaker 1: Head, and officials suspected it had been unintentionally released. What’s more, investigators hadn’t been able to find physical evidence to prop up their suspicions about Mehan. Four months had passed between Mike’s disappearance and when the first set of remains were found. The search and rescue operation hadn’t begun in earnest until days after his disappearance, and Mike’s house wasn’t fully processed until a full week had elapsed. That was plenty of time for whoever did this to hide or destroy evidence, and Shaw told me they couldn’t make the pieces fit to justify an arrest warrant for Mehan.

00:43:39
Speaker 13: There were a lot of things that were laid out there, but none of the work they did ever did anything to really put him at the scene or none of the evidence connected him to the actual crime.

00:43:53
Speaker 1: Shaw said that Katie Wessel, Mehan’s wife, was in Helena the day Mike disappeared, attending her daughter’s softball game. Mee Han’s whereabouts couldn’t be confirmed, but there also wasn’t any evidence that he’d been on Mike’s property the morning Mike went missing. They did find long cable ties at Mehn’s house, but they didn’t match the ones that had been used to secure Mike’s remains. Mike was shot with a thirty eight caliber bullet, but similarly, they couldn’t match the three fifty seven magnum pistol found in me Hen’s home to the bullet fragments found in Mike’s skull. A lack of evidence doesn’t absolve someone of a crime, and other facts came to light that don’t look great from Mike’s neighborhood rival. We’ll get to those in due course, but I don’t think there’s any doubt that the history of conflict on that mountain made this investigation exponentially more difficult. With so many allegations of bad behavior, it was tough to know which threads to pull, and even though deputies pulled as many as they could, none of them led to an arrest.

00:44:54
Speaker 10: We all had theories, but these theories just didn’t work. We suspects, and the theories didn’t fit those suspects.

00:45:04
Speaker 1: And that’s how the situation remained for eight years until Sheriff Dutton brought in a retired share from Powell County named Scott Howard. Sheriff Howard passed away last year, but shortly after taking the case in twenty nineteen, he asked Shane Shaw to help him on a pro bono basis. Shaw had had a decade’s long career as an investigator, and, as you already heard, was involved in processing the first sight of Mike’s remains.

00:45:30
Speaker 13: We spent hundreds of hours working on this. Over the next three years.

00:45:37
Speaker 1: They reviewed the massive case file, reinterviewed suspects and persons of interest, and came to some different conclusions than the investigators who had looked so closely at Mehan. One of the first things they realized is that whoever had dumped Mike’s body had been in a serious hurry.

00:45:54
Speaker 13: Yes, they were trying to hide the remains, but it was done in haste. It was someone who panicked, who was trying to get rid of these things. These the pieces of Chrits’s body. This was an easy off the road spot. They were taking down the hill aways. There was some effort to disguise them, plastic bags, that sort of thing, but they didn’t take the time to dig a hole and bury them the main part of the body. The places where the body parts were dumped our evidence of someone that’s unfamiliar with the area. There’s a lot of public ground where if they’d driven somewhere in a ravine, we probably would have never found the remains. But they were dumped right off Highway twelve and two spots, one on each side of the pass.

00:46:46
Speaker 1: Mihan had been living on that mountain for about three years. He was a big time hunter, so he was familiar with the area. He also had ATVs and other vehicles that would have allowed him to carry Mike’s body into the wilderness. Why Shall wondered, would he drive out to a state highway and dump Mike’s remains near a campsite where they were far more likely to be found. The other thing that jumped out to Shaw and Sheriff Howard was the timing of Mike’s disappearance.

00:47:13
Speaker 13: Mike Critz disappeared on June twenty sixth of twenty eleven. That’s the last day his phone was used. That’s the last day anyone heard from him. And so I just said, what is special about June twenty sixth, What happened that day? Why that day? And the event that was significant was Leon Ford showed up.

00:47:39
Speaker 1: Remember the morning Mike went missing, he’d called the Floras to ask that they attend a meeting he had planned with Leon Ford. Ford was in town to spray weeds on his property as part of an agreement he had with Lewis and Clark County. He didn’t live on that property, but he’d agreed to keep his weeds under control. According to Mike, Ford had arrived in town the day before, driven up to Mike’s property and knocked on his door. He was angry because Mike had locked a gate on a road that led back to Ford’s property. This was the same road they’d fought about four years earlier, in June of two thousand and seven. During that disagreement, Ford had cut a lock on that gate and was in the process of replacing it with his own when Mike confronted him.

00:48:19
Speaker 3: According to a complaint Mike.

00:48:21
Speaker 1: Filed with the Sheriff’s office at the time of that incident, Ford pointed a handgun at him, then Mike said. Ford had shouted, you’d better run when Mike retreated. Here’s Ford explaining his side of that story.

00:48:33
Speaker 14: When he stepped out, it was a hunting rifle with his coupe on it, and as he started to walk toward me, he cradled it across his body into his right hand. Didn’t point it at me, but he was All he would have to do is lift it up. As he got closer, and still no talking, I just pulled the gun out and down the back of my blague.

00:49:01
Speaker 8: He didn’t see it.

00:49:04
Speaker 1: Ford returned to the gate three days later and saw that it had been welded shut. He kicked the gate until the welds broke and went back up to his property. The next day, Mike was served an order signed by a Lewis and Clark County judge ordering Mike to allow Ford to use that road. There is some disagreement about whether the judge made the right call here, but there’s no question that Mike was served with the order. With this history in mind, you can see why four years later, Ford would be upset that the gate once again was closed. But you can also see why Mike might be nervous about the meeting planned for the next morning. He was already worried about the neighbors who lived on that mountain, and now here’s another guy showing up out of the blue, who he says had pulled.

00:49:46
Speaker 3: A gun on him.

00:49:48
Speaker 1: He didn’t know if Ford might do the same thing again. So I have no doubt that tensions were high as the ten thirty meeting time approached.

00:49:56
Speaker 13: When you look at that, that seems to be the incident that set this off.

00:50:02
Speaker 1: The next day rolled around and phone records show that Mike called a friend of his and Billings after he spoke to the Floras.

00:50:09
Speaker 13: And he tells him someone’s here, and he hangs up the phone, and that’s about ten thirty. So you have a conversion of events, which it’s kind of unique that somebody’s on the phone when someone shows up at his house and the only vehicle that went up the road is leon Ford’s.

00:50:29
Speaker 1: We know this is true thanks to those trail cameras the Floras had set up during their conflicts with Mihan. Detectives pulled the SD cards and at ten thirty seven am on June twenty sixth, leon Ford’s read nineteen eighty six Chevy pickup can be seen in a video driving up Turk Road towards his and Mike’s properties. This is the same time Mike hung up the phone on his friend and told him that someone had arrived.

00:50:54
Speaker 13: So just the fact that no other vehicles were on the game camera didn’t mean nobody else was up there. But we could say that leon Ford was up there. That was the start of this that we looked at. He was there, he had motive. Christ’s disappears when he shows up. That’s where we focused our attention.

00:51:18
Speaker 1: That’s next after the break Part five, Lies and cable Ties. The timing of the meeting between Mike, Chrit and Leon Ford strongly suggested Ford’s involvement, but it wasn’t the only piece of evidence investigators found or didn’t find. Remember how Mark Flora had advised Mike to record his conversation with Ford.

00:51:50
Speaker 10: Mike had a propensity to record every conversation that he had. There was a recorder in the back of his vehicle, an old time cassette recorder opened with the cassette tape gone.

00:52:03
Speaker 1: It’s not just that they didn’t find the tape. It looked as if someone had removed the tape from the recorder. Even more suggestive was what Ford claimed to be doing on Sunday.

00:52:13
Speaker 3: June twenty sixth.

00:52:14
Speaker 13: You have someone with motive. He’s there, he has a meeting. We have evidence to put him there. He never denied he was there. His story change the twenty eighth. The Sheriff’s office interviewed him, and that’s a recorded interview. And in that interview he used the word Sunday, which I felt was interesting that on Sunday he was up there spraying weeds and when he got up there, the gate was open, when in fact, he never checked out the spray or till Monday because he rented it from the county.

00:52:47
Speaker 1: The sprayer tank he’d rented from the county was installed on a trailer, but he wasn’t towing a trailer. In the trail cam footage from that day, it shows his truck driving up around ten thirty am and then driving back down again around three to thirty, and neither of the videos depicts any kind of trailer. He changed his story later to say that he had actually spent those five hours using a metal detector to look for nails on his property. It’s, of course not unusual to misremember dates, but only two days had passed between Ford’s initial interview with detectives and the day in question. The idea that Ford could mix up what he did on Sunday and Monday when he was asked by law enforcement on Tuesday was a tough pill to swallow.

00:53:29
Speaker 13: The other thing was is the Sheriff’s office had taken photographs of tire prints in the mud behind Kritz’s house, but he explained that he went back there to spray weeds because Mike had asked him to.

00:53:42
Speaker 1: This is what he claimed to be doing the next day, on Monday, June twenty seventh. According to him, his first meeting with Mike on Saturday had been cordial, and Mike had actually asked him to spray the weeds on his property.

00:53:56
Speaker 3: Here’s Connie.

00:53:57
Speaker 6: You know, I caught Ford lying to me because I was trying to pay place Nancy Drew in the very early stages, and so I had gotten a Ford’s number and I called him. We were on the phone for forty five minutes. He puts it on a speaker, puts his wife on there, and he’s like, oh, yeah, me and Mike blah blah. Yeah, we were you know, I was talking him up. You know, I pulled up a bucket and we’re talking, and you know, I told him that I was going to be spraying weeds and that i’d be happy to spray his weeds, and he said, oh, yeah, that’d be really great and blah blah, you know, and I’m just like, m m mm hmmm.

00:54:32
Speaker 1: This might not sound like a big deal, but if you know someone who’s passionate about native grasses and non toxic solutions for weeds, I think you can see where Connie is coming from. And she wasn’t the only one to mention this to me.

00:54:44
Speaker 7: And we had a serious issue with weeds, and Mike was really good on non toxic blends for suppressing weeds.

00:54:54
Speaker 1: Ford also claimed that he had made multiple trips with the weed spray on June twenty seventh, but the trail came footage only showed him driving up at two point fifty pm and then returning about an hour and a half later. The tank is translucent, so investigators could see it was only half full when Ford went up, and the level hadn’t decreased significantly when he went back down. What’s more, the county weed inspector, a guy named Mike Bacon, told investigators that he didn’t think Ford had sprayed at all. When he checked the tank on June twenty eighth. He said he didn’t smell any weed killer and the gas tank on the pump was still full. You might also be wondering how Ford drove his truck and weed spray up to his and Mike’s properties if that gate Mike had installed was still closed. Here’s how Ford explained that one.

00:55:44
Speaker 13: On the twenty sixth. He said he never saw Mike. He got up there, the gate was opened. This story of the gate’s opened, well, he must have listened to me.

00:55:53
Speaker 1: The problem is the gate hadn’t just been opened. It had been cut down and the cross arm had been thrown down the hill. Ford said he thought Mike had done that, which didn’t make much sense to Gloria.

00:56:07
Speaker 7: A person who doesn’t have a lot of money and who does a lot of metalwork and stuff is not going to take a perfectly good length of pipe and throw it down the hill, and Mike is not going to cut his own gait. So it was clear to us that there.

00:56:25
Speaker 10: Was foul play.

00:56:27
Speaker 1: Ford denied destroying the gate, but Shaw says he did initially admit to cutting the center post that was still sticking up out of the ground.

00:56:35
Speaker 13: So what you’re going to postulate here is that somebody went up there and tore the gate down before Ford got there, but left the steel post in the middle of the road that Ford then had to cut. Because Ford said he cut that post down, and then later he kind of changed that story, but that was what he said.

00:56:58
Speaker 1: Initially Ford’s story, it seemed just a little too far fetched, and even in those early weeks and months after Mike disappeared, Lewis and Clark County detectives took a hard look at the man from Washington State. They even traveled out to his home to interview him. On January ninth, twenty twelve. That interview lasted three hours, and investigators said Ford and his wife changed their story twice by the end of it. Investigators noted quote it was apparent to detectives that the Fordes were being untruthful in their statements to law enforcement. Sheriff Dutton told me that interview with Ford and his wife was the closest they came to solving the case in those first few years.

00:57:41
Speaker 10: I felt his wife almost confessed to it. She was ture, just close, but the detective didn’t feel like going further, so a camp faultim I wasn’t there, But that’s why I say that King closed.

00:57:55
Speaker 1: They weren’t able to secure a confession in that interview, but Sheriff Dutton didn’t give up. He brought in several retired investigators over the years, and as you already heard, Sheriff Jackson and Shane Shaw were the final two. When they agreed to take the case, they knew they needed to find hard physical evidence connecting Ford to Mike’s murder. That started with going back to the closest thing they had to a crime scene with the.

00:58:20
Speaker 13: Body were zip ties. And these are huge. They’re like one hundred and seventy five pound tensil strength zip ties. At the time, you couldn’t buy those at least I had never seen any that big at Home Depot or Low’s or the local hardware stores. That’s what I told the Sheriff’s office when we were doing the initial work on that. As I said, these zip ties are worth following up on.

00:58:46
Speaker 3: And follow up they did.

00:58:48
Speaker 13: Plaid Electric was the company that could order those in. They didn’t have them on the shelf, and they didn’t either out in Washington. They were a shelf item at the naval base out there. In fact, Leon Ford had checked some of those out.

00:59:06
Speaker 1: Ford had served as a master chief in the Navy, and though he wasn’t a seal himself, he had reportedly gone on missions with the Special Forces as a demolitions expert. He had retired by twenty eleven and was working as a safety officer for Chugach Industries at Whidby Island Air Force Base in Oak Harbor, Washington. Chugach Industries had a warehouse where authorized personnel could check out gear and equipment. Among the shelf items at this facility were the distinctive zip ties found on Mike’s remains.

00:59:36
Speaker 13: The number on It was traced to a batch that included once sold to Plat Electric, and in that time frame that Leon Ford checked some out.

00:59:47
Speaker 1: Records at the facility indicated that on February sixteenth, twenty eleven, Ford had checked out twenty four of these cable ties, but it was unclear why Ford’s work as a safety officer did not require the use of such heavy duty ties, and records did not specify the project for which Ford withdrew them. This was one of the most critical pieces of physical evidence connecting Ford to Mike’s murder, but it wasn’t the only one. Cat hair was found inside one of the plastic bags that held Mike’s remains, and the Fords had taken a cat with them on their trip to Helena. Shaw told me they weren’t able to do a DNA test to confirm it was the same cat, but that was nonetheless suspicious. Mike had also been shot with a thirty eight caliber handgun, and investigators retrieved a Ruger three fifty seven magnum, a Cult three eighty semi auto, and a Smith and Wesson nine millimeter from Ford’s residents.

01:00:42
Speaker 13: I’ve worked on a lot of death investigations and I don’t recall ever seeing a case where someone was shot in the head twice. And my own opinion is is that someone one who’s very experienced with a gun and has a little more warrior mentality. I think it more likely fit with a man who’d gone on missions with the Navy Seals than a guy who was a ski instructor that happened to live down the hill.

01:01:10
Speaker 1: In addition, they looked closely at Ford’s cell phone data to try to track his activity.

01:01:14
Speaker 3: On the day Mike disappeared. Ford had made.

01:01:17
Speaker 1: Calls after he drove up to Mike’s place. The cell tower his phone used was consistent with him being in that location, and Ford himself had admitted to driving up to his property on that day. But Ford had also called his wife twice after he drove back down the mountain around three point thirty that afternoon.

01:01:35
Speaker 13: His call pinged off the cell tower that we hit when we made a call from Highway twelve and a road that would go by the Fort Harrison. It also went up to Birdseye where the property was.

01:01:47
Speaker 1: Birdseye and Fort Harrison are both along the quickest route between Ford’s property and Highway twelve, which leads to McDonald Pass and the locations where Mike’s remains were buried. Ford and his wife also connected for another call, this time around five pm along a road west of Helena.

01:02:04
Speaker 13: Scott Howard actually drove it, put a timer on, and drove the truck his pickup from the game camera up McDonald Pass and over the top to the second dump site and back to the first one and back to Williams Street Bridge and allowing for fifteen or twenty minutes at each site. That he found that that timeframe fit that.

01:02:29
Speaker 1: Even the route the Fords took on their return trip to Washington was strange. McDonald Pass is along a major state highway and a much easier route if you’re pulling an RV, but the Fords avoided it.

01:02:41
Speaker 13: When Fords left, they didn’t go back over McDonald Pass, even though they had a motor home. They went over flesh Or Pass to Lincoln, and I’m sure they provided an explanation for that, but it seemed like they avoided those dump sites.

01:02:56
Speaker 1: After seeing all this evidence, Lewis and Clark County Attorney Leo Gallagh made a decision on September eleventh, twenty twenty. Over nine years after Mike was brutally killed, an affidavit was filed accusing Leon Ford of deliberate homicide and tampering with physical evidence. He was arrested about a month later.

01:03:15
Speaker 13: Ultimately, you have a whole set of circumstantial pieces of evidence that it’s unlikely that anyone else would.

01:03:23
Speaker 3: Have fit all of those.

01:03:25
Speaker 13: When you take one piece of evidence, it doesn’t prove much. But when you take multiple pieces of evidence and you add motive opportunity, all of a sudden, you can start to rule out almost anyone else.

01:03:39
Speaker 1: Investigators believe that Ford had driven up to Mike’s property, noticed that the gate was still shut, and picked a fight with the Turk Road resident. At some point, whether on Mike’s property or somewhere else on the mountain, Ford had punched Mike in the face and shot him twice in the head. Then, using what the medical examiner said appeared to be some kind of saw, he cut Mike into pieces and stuffed him in bags. He led out Mike’s wolfdogs to clean up the mess from that gruesome task, and driven up to McDonald Pass, where he disposed of what was left of Mike Critz. It was a compelling theory and all that evidence, the lies, zip ties, trailcam footage, guns, cat hair, and history of conflict with Mike pointed in Ford’s direction, but it hadn’t been tested in a court of law. And as I’ve been told time and again by investigators, it’s not what you.

01:04:31
Speaker 3: Know, it’s what you can prove.

01:04:34
Speaker 1: Convincing a jury of twelve that they’d arrested the right man was the prosecution’s next task, and it turned out to be a taller one than you might expect. Part six, The Defense of Leon Ford. Leon Ford maintained his innocence, and he hired two attorneys to build his case, Palmer Hoovestahl from Helena and Julie Pierre from Billings. I reached out to both hou Vestal and Pierce to get a better sense of their defense and to ask if Leon himself would be willing to speak with me, but neither responded. Fortunately, I was able to obtain portions of the transcripts from Leon Ford’s trial. Between those documents and the people I interviewed who attended the proceedings, we have a clear understanding of the arguments they mounted in defense of their client.

01:05:25
Speaker 10: This is Cole’s number ADC twenty twenty four to ninety three the State of Montana versus leon Michael Ford.

01:05:32
Speaker 1: Leon Ford’s trial for murder began with opening statements on June first, twenty twenty three, and ran through closing arguments on June twentieth. The prosecution laid out all the evidence we’ve covered so far, while the defense tried to cast doubt on each piece. They didn’t have to prove that leon Ford was innocent or that someone else did it. They just had to sew uncertainty in the minds of the jurors to convince them that reasonable doubt existed about Ford’s guilt. Shane Shaw knew this case better than anyone else, and he worried there was room for those seeds of doubt to grow.

01:06:07
Speaker 13: When you look at all the evidence, Each piece individually is not enough to find anyone guilty, and it’s the reason the jury had trouble with parts of this because the defense is able to explain away, or offer an alternative theory or whatever.

01:06:24
Speaker 1: They started by pointing out that investigators were never able to find a murder weapon. They had never found where Mike was murdered, or even where his body was dismembered. These are some of the basic building blocks of a prosecution, but they were noticeably absent. When Leon Ford took the stand in his own defense, he flatly denied having anything to do with Mike’s death.

01:06:45
Speaker 14: Just afore you killed Mike Christ, Absolutely not, Jada, just never Mike Christ’s body.

01:06:52
Speaker 8: Absolutely not.

01:06:53
Speaker 1: Then they went after the zip ties. Those ties were unusual and they were on the shelf at the Air Force.

01:07:00
Speaker 13: But as Shaw admitted, there’s no way to say that the zip ties that were on Michael Kritz’s remains were the ones that Leon Ford had. You cannot do that, man, The defense was sure to point that out.

01:07:14
Speaker 1: Ford said he didn’t remember checking out any cable ties. To bolster this claim, the defense called a man who also worked on the base named Leon Iron Moccasin. Maccison told the jury he used those cable ties all the time. Ford’s defense suggested that the person who entered the request into the computer started typing Leon, the computer auto filled leon Ford, and he mistakenly hit enter.

01:07:39
Speaker 3: They also pointed.

01:07:40
Speaker 1: Out that the numbers on the request form were used to designate both Hellerman Titan ties and three M ties, so there’s no way to know whether Ford checked out the three m product or the ones found on Mike’s body. Finally, they noted that while those ties can’t be purchased at big box hardware stores, they can be ordered on line. They also poked holes in that trailcam footage of Ford driving up and down Turk Road. The camera didn’t pick up anyone else driving up to Mike’s on the day he went missing, but the defense noted that something did trigger the camera at twelve one am on June twenty seventh. The camera took a video, but failed to capture anything moving up or down the road. The defense contended that this was actually Mike’s murderer driving up to kill Mike in the middle of the night. The prosecution’s theory that Ford disposed of Mike around five in the afternoon explained the apparent haste with which the holes were dug. But it definitely would have been a risky move, so it made just as much sense that the killer had struck under the cover of darkness. Hunters have more experience with trailcams than virtually anyone else, so I think it’s worth weighing in here. The defense makes a big deal about how there wasn’t any wind to trigger the camera, so it must have been a vehicle. Any hunter can tell you that these cameras can go off for all kinds of reasons, birds, squirrels, or even just apparently nothing at all. They’re finicky devices, and that was especially true in twenty eleven. Unfortunately for the county attorney, the defense could point to at least one example of someone driving past that camera without their car appearing on video. After Ford’s first meeting with Mike on June twenty fifth, he’d triggered the camera around eleven PM, but his truck didn’t appear on the corresponding video. That offered a strong piece of evidence that those trail cameras could be faulty, which casts doubt on the assertion that Ford was the only one near Mike’s place on the day he went missing. The jury also heard from another neighbor we haven’t met yet, a guy named Dennis Shaw. Dennis isn’t related to Shane Shaw, the detective you’ve heard throughout this episode. He lived farther down the mountain from John Mihan and the Floras, and he was deposed by Leo Gallagher and one of Ford’s attorneys. We obtained a recording of that deposition which was played during the trial.

01:10:06
Speaker 15: Good morning, mister Shaw, thank you for being here.

01:10:08
Speaker 1: Dennis said he and Ford were friends, and he described Ford as a quote neat person.

01:10:13
Speaker 14: I think you testify or you told law enforcement detective Nyland that you thought he was honorable?

01:10:20
Speaker 8: Remember that?

01:10:21
Speaker 5: Yep?

01:10:21
Speaker 16: And why is that? If he said something, that’s what it was. He had never heard seen him or heard of him or anything, lying to me or anybody else. So to me, that me need honorable until somebody proves indifferent to me. Okay, and there’d be a lot of proof, not more zipize shit.

01:10:45
Speaker 1: Dennis interacted with Ford in the days after Mike went missing, and Ford’s attorney asked him whether the Navy man was acting strangely.

01:10:52
Speaker 8: You know, would he acting like a guy who just killed somebody?

01:10:55
Speaker 5: Oh?

01:10:56
Speaker 16: Yeah, right, No, I mean, how can you say shit like that? I mean, how can they dream that stuff up? I mean, he doesn’t have horns on his head?

01:11:12
Speaker 15: Was he acting like exact like realities?

01:11:17
Speaker 16: Meeting people and they were everybody was getting along and smiling and joking and talking shit.

01:11:24
Speaker 1: Here Dennis is describing a cookout he hosted on Tuesday, June twenty eighth. He had invited Ford and his wife, along with John Mihan and Katie Wessel, and the three couples eight together to welcome the Fords to the neighborhood. It was the kind of party you’d expect in June and Montana, but given what had just happened to Mike and his history with some of those couples, it was easy to see something far more nefarious.

01:11:49
Speaker 13: The other thing was is there was a belief that there was a conspiracy of people that agreed to take out mister Kritz.

01:11:57
Speaker 1: News of this cookout fueled this conspiracy, but it wasn’t the only reason Mike’s friends were suspicious.

01:12:04
Speaker 13: Well, there were people saying that mehnn had bragged about a military man that was going to come up here and fix this situation.

01:12:12
Speaker 1: You can hear that Shaw is skeptical, but I heard this same rumor about John meehan from pretty much everyone I spoke with.

01:12:19
Speaker 7: He had gone to two neighbors that we personally know and said, in two weeks, a military guy’s coming back up here and he’s going to take care of Mike once and for all. That was exactly two weeks before Mike was murdered.

01:12:37
Speaker 1: Sheriff Dutton admitted that fifteen years makes these kinds of rumors hard to verify, but he acknowledged that they were floating around that mountain.

01:12:45
Speaker 10: There were some neighbors who wouldn’t come testify that said that Uh Meehan had said he was bringing in somebody who is really good at getting rid of people.

01:12:54
Speaker 1: One of those neighbors was apparently Dennis Shaw, and the jury heard him say as much at trial, though he wasn’t as clear as prosecutors likely hoped.

01:13:03
Speaker 15: Did me Hann ever tell you that he expected Ford to come out or anybody a military man? I find all the year saying, well, Didnehann before Ford showed up that Monday? Did me Hann ever tell you that he thought that Ford was coming out?

01:13:21
Speaker 8: Or did Wessel? I’m pretty sure.

01:13:24
Speaker 1: The idea that Meehan and Ford were in cahoots was an obvious assumption. Ford denied it, and if John Meehan and Katie Wessel had agreed to talk to me I assumed they would too. But it remains one of the most frustrating, most ambiguous parts of this case today because if me Hann really did say that, if he told his neighbors two weeks before Mike disappeared that a military man was coming to handle the situation. Then this wasn’t just a neighborhood dispute that got out of hand. This would have been like some kind of contract. But Dennis Shaw’s on the record statement wasn’t. And without phone records, without a paper trail, without Mihan willing to admit it himself, investigators didn’t have the evidence to prove the two men had ever spoken before that cookout on June twenty eighth. The possibility of a conspiracy is a theory that Connie and her family wondered about almost immediately.

01:14:20
Speaker 6: From the very beginning, we thought that it was Meehan who was the main guy, but that Ford either did the deed or helped get rid of the body.

01:14:31
Speaker 1: Of course, Ford’s defense was more than happy to talk about John Meehan. They emphasized Mihan’s ongoing dispute with Mike, the violent encounters and threats. They even theorized that Mike had been cut up not to hide his identity, but to fit in a freezer. During one of the searches of Meehan’s home, investigators had found a dead dog stuffed in one of his freezers. The dog had been put in a clear plastic bag, which had then been stuffed in a black plastic bag. Mike’s remains, the defense noted, had been found in exactly the same manner. What’s more, in the months prior to Mike’s disappearance, Meehan, Wessel and Dennis Shaw had sued Mike for interfering with the enjoyment of their land. They then requested a default judgment. After Mike’s death, the jurors heard Dennis explain this in his videotape deposition, which no doubt fanned the flames of suspicion against John Meehan. This could have been a risky maneuver for the defense. Pointing the finger at Meehan wouldn’t do them much good if the prosecution could prove he was working with Ford, But as the defense very well knew, there was no evidence to suggest that the two men had ever met prior to that cookout. Two days after Mike’s disappearance.

01:15:45
Speaker 13: Mehan testified in a deposition that he never met Ford until after Chrit’s disappeared. In fact, he met him at that picnic they had up there, which was like on the twenty eighth I looked at all the phone raps. There were no phone calls between Ford and me Han or me Han’s wife.

01:16:06
Speaker 1: The final move for the defense was to call John Meehan and Katie Wessel to the stand, but instead of outlining their alibis or making excuses for their actions, they did something no one saw coming.

01:16:18
Speaker 7: And then the defense put them on as witnesses for the defense, and then they both pled the fifth.

01:16:27
Speaker 1: Imagine for a second how this looked from the jury’s perspective. They’d been hearing about Mehn’s conflict with Mike, They knew about his arrests for brandishing his rifle and tampering with evidence, and now here he was pleading the fifth and refusing to testify for fear of incriminating himself.

01:16:44
Speaker 7: And so the jury they were hung because like, we’re not sure who killed.

01:16:54
Speaker 4: The trial of Leon Ford concluded Wednesday with the jury unable to reach a verdict. The official word from the jury Wednesday was that they were deadlocked, meaning that the jury in good consciousness, were unable to reach her verdicts, which resulted in a mistrial.

01:17:09
Speaker 1: We don’t know exactly how the voting broke down. I’ve heard rumors about some of the jurors, and if you served on that jury, I’d love to talk with you. But I don’t believe it was eleven to one in either direction.

01:17:21
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is just hearsay.

01:17:22
Speaker 6: I didn’t talk to these people, but you know, allegedly the jurors were like, yeah, we thought he was guilty, but we didn’t think it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

01:17:33
Speaker 1: Still, hope remained that the man she believed killed her brother would be brought to justice. Leo Gallagher had come out of retirement to prosecute leon Ford. Connie thought Gallagher didn’t do a great job, but she believed his replacement could be more successful.

01:17:48
Speaker 6: The new county attorney, I just loved her. She just she was like, we’re going to redo this. We’re going to redo this. And then I heard like six weeks later or something like that. You know, we just really feel like without new evidence, we’re going to have the same outcome.

01:18:05
Speaker 17: Almost a year after his trial for deliberate homicide ended with a deadlocked jury, Lewis and Clark County prosecutors have filed emotion saying they’ll no longer pursue charges. Against Leon Ford for the twenty eleven killing of John Mike Chritz.

01:18:23
Speaker 3: Ford was a freeman.

01:18:25
Speaker 1: His charges were dropped, and since that announcement in twenty twenty four, there hasn’t been any official movement in this case.

01:18:33
Speaker 10: The county are turning now is reluctant to try mister Ford again without some substive new evidence. Maybe the answer is right in front of us. I don’t know, but that’s where we’re at.

01:18:49
Speaker 8: What’s the case?

01:18:54
Speaker 3: Part seven?

01:18:55
Speaker 1: Hope it will be fifteen years this June’s anyone heard or saw Mike Kritz alive. It took over a decade for a suspect to be arrested for his murder, and then another two for the trial to start. For the result of all that waiting to be neither an acquittal nor a conviction was for everyone involved incredibly frustrating. But that doesn’t mean they’re without hope. Shaw is no longer on the case. He said that solving Mike’s murder will require someone to step in and own it, much like he and Sheriff Jackson did in twenty nineteen.

01:19:29
Speaker 13: And one of my requests of the Sheriff’s office was that we go through every piece of evidence again and submit things for more DNA work. Somebody also has to come up with the money, and it’s thousands and thousands of dollars to do that. I’m not sure where that goes. I had a conversation with the sheriff at the end of July about this, and at that point he was interested in doing that, but he had to get some budget things squared away, so you know, I don’t know what’s going to happen.

01:20:03
Speaker 1: When I asked Sheriff Dutton about this, he said he’s hopeful that new advancements in DNA analysis will provide the results they’re looking for. As we saw in the Danny Houchen’s case we covered last season, these technologies can be powerful tools in solving cold cases.

01:20:19
Speaker 10: What didn’t exist then was touch DNA, and whoever did this was very, very careful not to leave any DNA, but there’s probably some we’ve just missed. Touch DNA had not been developed yet.

01:20:34
Speaker 1: Touch DNA is a forensic technology that allows investigators to extract DNA profiles from nothing more than a few skin cells left on an object. There are still boxes and boxes of evidence in Mike’s case, and we know for a fact that DNA has been found on some of those objects.

01:20:51
Speaker 13: DNA was found that don’t match any of the people that are currently connected with the case or the law enforcement offs. You know, if it’s not in the code of system and it’s not people connected, you know, it’s very expensive to do some kind of genealogical work on it.

01:21:10
Speaker 8: There may be.

01:21:11
Speaker 13: More items that additional DNA might be extracted.

01:21:15
Speaker 10: If we find new evidence that indicates that he’s the person, then we’ll try it again, or if we find other evidence that someone else will go after them. So it’s it just taken some time, and I feel bad for Connie, I really do, but we’ve got to be successful in our next attempt.

01:21:36
Speaker 1: Connie expressed some skepticism that her brother’s case will ever be solved. After so many years advocating for justice and fighting against a system that will never care. As much as she does, it’s tough to blame her. She didn’t talk to me because she hopes the publicity from this podcast will bring Mike’s killer to justice. Instead, she wants the world to remember Mike not as the grouchy mountain man who chased people off his property, but as the little brother who made her laugh took her dancing and was always happy to talk for as long as she wanted to stay on the phone. But after Mike died, Connie and her family held a memorial. They all wrote notes to Mike, attached them to balloons, and released them, hoping that Mike would somehow see them.

01:22:22
Speaker 18: Hey, little bro, miss you and can’t believe you were gone. I will always remember the long night’s chatting dancing. You were the best dancer. Your humor, your wit and intelligence will never be gone because I have so many memories.

01:22:39
Speaker 5: I love you.

01:22:40
Speaker 18: Say hi to Dad. You’re bakesis Connie?

01:22:46
Speaker 5: Okay? Should we let him all go?

01:22:50
Speaker 8: I Mike?

01:23:03
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this episode of Blood Trails. To see images from this case, including photos of Mike, his property, his wolf dogs, and a map of the area, head on over to the meeteater dot com slash blood Trails and click on the case file for this episode.

01:23:20
Speaker 3: Thanks to everyone who agreed to be interviewed.

01:23:22
Speaker 1: Connie Krits, Gloria Flora, Shane Allen, Sheriff Dutton, Shane Shaw, Randy Arnold, and Joe Gill, the listener who first told me about Mike’s case. If you know about a case, you think we should cover or have a tip about this one, send me an email at blood Trails at the meeteater dot com.

01:23:43
Speaker 3: See you next time, and stay safe out there.