Mystery in Mountainair: The Murder of Rookie Cop Stephen Sandlin -

“There is something wrong here.”

Those were the words of rookie cop Stephen Sandlin, just days before he was murdered in the Mountainair Police Station. Sandlin was proud to follow his dad’s footsteps and become a cop. He thought he would genuinely make a difference in the world and put bad guys away. Instead, he was murdered when he was only 21 and on the police force for only two months.

Stephen Sandlin’s Last Moments

Sandlin grew up in Bosque Farms, near Albuquerque. His dad, Tom Sandlin, was on the Albuquerque police force for 21 years before retiring. As a little boy, Stephen would watch his dad dress for work with admiration in his eyes. He liked to try on his dad’s police motorcycle boots and helmet, even though they were way too large for him.

After high school, Sandlin worked at a few cable companies, before he entered the police force in the small town of Mountainair, about an hour from Albuquerque. Since he wasn’t a state-trained or certified police officer, he was mostly relegated to traffic stops. But he was looking forward to a bright career in law enforcement like his father. He was excited for this opportunity in Mountainair – and he was tragically naive. He thought his fellow officers would have his back. He also thought his job was all about convicting people of crime and putting them away. Unbeknownst to him, that’s not how things worked in Mountainair in 1988.

Mountainair is a beautiful tiny town at the foot of the Manzanos. Many people grew marijuana in the mountains at that time and openly bragged about their crops in the Mountainair bar. Though marijuana is legal in New Mexico now, even at the recreational level, it was highly illegal back then. Sandlin went after these growers, not realizing that Mountainair had a good ole boys’ club, where marijuana farmers and cops protected each other. Sandlin upset the natural order of things and tragically paid for it with his life.

On May 7, 1988, around 7:30 pm, Sandlin was on duty at the police station. He was working alone; no one else was believed to be in the station that evening. The station had two stories and huge windows that let anyone see inside. It was also completely open to the public and anyone could enter at any time. One website reports Sandlin was working from home – which means he should not have been at the station at all. But this was inaccurate; he was actually ordered to be in the station by his police chief.

Earlier in the day, Sandlin’s police chief, David Carson, started yelling at him for writing too many tickets. Carson said Sandlin was “burning out” and needed to slow down. He then ordered Sandlin back to the station. Sandlin called his girlfriend, Michelle Sturtevant, and bemoaned the lack of respect with which his chief treated him. He said that he felt more like a security guard than a respected police officer. However, the conversation seemed normal to Michelle.

Then an unidentified female voice interrupted Sandlin, yelling. He covered the receiver to talk to the lady in what Michelle thought was a defensive tone. He uncovered the receiver and told his girlfriend that it was no big deal, the lady just wanted directions to Town Hall, and he would talk to Michelle later.

Forty-five minutes later, he was dead.

What happened that evening is still unknown. But it appears that someone entered the police station and coldly executed him with .357 handgun, which matched his service revolver. The revolver was lying by Sandlin’s head and was the presumed murder weapon, though we’ll get to that in a minute. He was shot sometime before 7:30 pm. Before 7:30 pm in May, it was still light out, so anyone could have easily seen the murder through the wide-open windows. This suggests the killer didn’t care about being seen because they knew nothing would be done.

Eugene Butch Wright, a Fort Hood soldier who was friends with David Carson’s son, entered the police station around 7:30 pm and discovered Sandlin lying unconscious on the hardwood floor in a pool of his own blood. The soldier called in David Carson, the police chief. The police chief claimed he got the call around 7:45 pm and he raced to the station and entered it with his gun drawn, unsure if Wright’s call had been a prank or if he was walking into something terrible. He promptly called paramedics when he saw Sandlin’s near-dead body. Though they tried to save him, they were unsuccessful. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Sandlin’s .357 magnum service revolver lay mere inches from his head. Based on where his gun lay, it was surmised that Sandlin had killed himself or been shot by accident after playing around with the weapon. But his family knew better. They knew that he had been murdered – possibly by one of his own colleagues.

That’s because Sandlin had vaguely told them things in the past two months about how he didn’t care for his job. His enthusiasm for law enforcement was waning as he realized something was wrong in the Mountainair police department – though he didn’t elaborate on what he thought was wrong. Sandlin also felt disrespected by David Carson, and he was disturbed by the lawlessness of Mountainair people. He was also disturbed by the anonymous threatening notes and phone calls he had been harassed with since he had first arrived in Mountainair in March.

The office of the medical examiner determined that there were no gunpowder traces on Sandlin’s hand and the gun had been fired about two feet away from his head while he was in a kneeling position. The killer may have also moved his body, because Sandlin was shot on the right side of his head, yet blood and bone fragments were found on the wall to his right. They should have been on the left side of his body, given the way he was shot. The crime lab felt that Sandlin may have ducked from the oncoming bullet. But the office also listed his manner of death as undetermined and didn’t officially rule out suicide. The Attorney General treated his death as “an unexplained shooting” and never treated it officially as a homicide.

Sandlin just didn’t act like someone who was about to commit suicide, though, and people integral to the case said they felt it was homicide. Witnesses said he was in a good mood, joking around and smiling, just hours before his death. Sandlin had told his girlfriend and the mother of his infant son, Michelle Sturtevant, that he planned to go to Bosque Farms to see her and his mom, Eileen, for Mother’s Day. He had already ordered Mother’s Day flowers to take to his mom. This further makes suicide seem unlikely. The accident theory is also ludicrous, considering that Sandlin was very proficient with weapons and a master target shooter. David Carson later stated that Sandlin “was prone to playing with guns.” But I really can’t imagine the son of an Albuquerque cop growing up to be irresponsible and careless around guns.

The Suspicious Circumstances of Stephen Sandlin’s Death

As soon as Sandlin joined the Mountainair police force, he moved in with fellow officer Frank Piehler at a trailer in Mountainair. The two began to receive threatening notes, saying that they were not liked and they would die soon. Harassing phone calls started coming into the police station, as well. Sandlin soon moved into his own rental house, where he found the same threatening notes stuck to his door. Three days before he was murdered, Sandlin had an eighteen-year-old man named Ernie Lopez stay at his house because he was afraid to sleep there alone. People reported that he had been scared to stay at his house from Day One.

It is not a complete mystery why Sandlin was disliked. He was an honest cop who didn’t let anything slide. He joined the police force just as Police Chief David Carson and Mayor Richard Shovelin started to crack down on crime in Mountainair, which brewed a lot of hatred among locals.

Just four weeks before his murder, Sandlin had been waiting outside of the Rosebud Saloon, where he pulled over Melvin King, whom he suspected of driving under the influence. He found a little bag of marijuana on King’s truck floor. He then obtained a warrant and searched King’s home, discovering over 54 pounds of marijuana and 117 plants, which had a street value of about $25,000 or more. Some reports even claim the seizure was worth up to $100,000. Seizing that crop definitely hurt some people financially and undoubtedly earned Sandlin some enemies.

King was arrested, as was his girlfriend, Susan Sprague, who had drugs, paraphernalia, and evidence of drug distribution found in her home as well. They were both out of bond at the time of Sandlin’s murder and were considered prime suspects. I wonder if the female yelling at Sandlin in the police station was Susan Sprague?

A detective in Albuquerque received a weird tip a few weeks before Sandlin was murdered. Someone anonymously called him and said that a gringo cop was going to be murdered in the mountains because he wouldn’t accept drug money as a bribe. The tipster claimed he didn’t trust cops in the mountains, which was why he decided to call the Albuquerque PD instead. The detective didn’t act on the tip because it was so vague. He really couldn’t do much with it. But when Sandlin’s death was reported in the newspaper days later, the detective realized he had something valuable to the investigation and he called it into the State Police. The State Police never relayed this information to the Attorney General when the AG started handling the case. The APD detective who received the tip eventually called it into the AG himself in October of 1988 because he read in the paper that they were the ones handling Sandlin’s death investigation. However, Attorney General investigators dismissed the tip because Sandlin’s death was initially thought to be a suicide. There was also very little to substantiate the tip – no physical evidence or details about who the tipster was. It does seem like a pretty interesting tip, though, particularly considering the recent history Sandlin had with Melvin King.

Just four days before his murder, Sandlin and the entire police force of Mountainair (which consisted of three other officers) was put under investigation by the State Attorney General, Tom Gillespie. Citizens of Mountainair complained that the local cops were mishandling evidence. So State officers descended on the Mountainair Police Department, interrogating the officers. Gillespie told Sandlin he would be back to conduct more interviews and searches – but then Sandlin was killed.

Stephen Sandlin’s crime scene was handled haphazardly. Police assumed it was a suicide at first and made very little attempt to preserve the crime scene. Hence, a lot of critical evidence was lost. This may have complicated the investigation beyond hope. Later, assistant Attorney General Jim Scarantino claimed that the investigation was rife with mistakes that would prevent it from ever being closed.

Fingerprints were never taken from the scene because the police station was considered a public place. Of note, however, was the fact that a magazine lay on the table near Sandlin’s body. It had been opened to an article about the recent death of State Police Officer, Sherman L. Toler, who had been shot in a traffic stop near Tucumcari. Toler’s killer was arrested and convicted. The article described his funeral and his hero status as a fallen officer. Some people think that the article was placed there as a warning to other cops in the Mountainair police department – or a sloppy attempt to make Sandlin’s death look like a suicide as Sandlin may have wanted to attain the same hero status. Fingerprints could have been taken from this magazine, but they never were.

The Missing Marijuana

Within hours of Sandlin’s death, State police officers searched Sandlin’s house. They reported finding nothing out of the ordinary. Then, the very next day, a Sunday, David Carson called the family for permission to enter the residence with Gary Watts, the Torrance County undersheriff, and Richard Shovelin, the mayor of Mountainair. They said they were entering the home to check for guns and to care for Sandlin’s pets.

On Tuesday May 10, Michelle Sturtevant and Eileen Sandlin, Stephen Sandlin’s mother, entered his home to gather his things. They uncovered several bags of marijuana stashed sloppily in his kitchen. The marijuana was in freezer bags, sealed with red and white police evidence tape. The two women just couldn’t believe that the investigators did not find these bags, given that they were just stuffed in Sandlin’s kitchen drawers and not concealed at all. Did someone stash that marijuana in Sandlin’s house after the initial search, in an attempt to tarnish his reputation? That’s what the Attorney General thinks.

The marijuana from Melvin King’s arrest was discovered missing after Sandlin died. When the marijuana was originally seized from King in April 1988, the Mountainair police department didn’t have anywhere secure to store it, so they left it on the police station floor for five days. Then Sandlin brought it to the Torrance County sheriffs in four large garbage bags on April 17. The sheriffs stored it in a locker at the Torrance County Jail in Estancia. Undersheriff Gary Watts said that they needed to make room for a juvenile holding area; that’s when the marijuana was moved to an unsecured trailer in an impound lot on May 13, just six days after Sandlin died. It was later, after this move, that sheriffs realized most of it was missing. However, the marijuana planted in Sandlin’s house was found four days after he died and the marijuana evidence was moved by sheriffs six days after he died – indicating that someone took the bags from the Estancia Jail rather than the unsupervised trailer. This tells me the person who stole the evidence and planted it in Sandlin’s house was likely in law enforcement or friends with law enforcement officers because they had to have been able to get into the evidence storage areas at the jail.

Another interesting detail is that Sandlin kept tape recordings of his traffic stops in his rental house. Those were conspicuously absent when his mom and girlfriend cleaned out his house. The tape recorder was there, just not the mini cassettes. Eileen wrote to the Mountainair city council and the Attorney General about the missing possessions, and both parties denied having them. That indicates to me that Sandlin had arrested someone who was involved in his death – which further implicates Melvin King and Susan Sprague. Whoever stashed the marijuana in Sandlin’s house probably nabbed that evidence to protect someone – most likely him- or herself.

When you consider that Gary Watts oversaw the confiscated marijuana and was also one of the people who went into Sandlin’s home after he was murdered, it definitely looks bad for him. It looks even worse when you consider that Watts was also being prosecuted for burglary for items that went missing in 1988 warrant searches that Watts was part of. Yet Watts vehemently denied any wrongdoing to the Attorney General and was never convicted, despite being charged with burglary and larceny of the marijuana in September of 1989. He claimed that he wasn’t sure why he had been asked to accompany Shovelin and Carson to the house and that he wished he had used better sense because of the accusations that emerged against him afterward. He denies removing anything from the home or even searching it with Carson and Shovelin. He also claims that he just made a stupid mistake when he moved the marijuana from the Estancia Jail to the trailer in the impound lot and he didn’t think it would be stolen, which seems pretty unbelievable.

A neighbor named Ivan Riley reported seeing a pickup truck parked at the trailer early Sunday morning, hours before Carson, Shovelin, and Watts entered the home. He had never seen the truck around town, so he assumed it belonged to Sandlin’s family. But it did not; Sandlin’s family did not come to his home until Tuesday May 10. Someone may have gone to the house on May 8, ransacked it for the arrest records, and possibly planted the marijuana. Then Carson, Shovelin, and Watts showed up. Were they there to ensure that the individual had done what they were supposed to do?

Melvin King also got his charges dropped. There was hard evidence that he had been trafficking marijuana and had been in possession of 54 pounds and 117 plants – yet his charges magically went away when the evidence disappeared. Sandlin also wasn’t able to testify as his arresting officer, since he was dead. King really benefited from the missing evidence and Sandlin’s death!

When the FBI later seized King’s Manzano house for forfeiture proceedings in relation to the drugs found inside it, someone set it on fire on September 26, 1988. The seizure of the house was requested by David Carson and the FBI handled it since New Mexico did not have a seizure law in place. Once the house burned down, the FBI began to investigate the arson. They never charged anyone, though it is rather obvious who probably did it. King and Sprague both got away with everything.

It is not clear just how much of the seized marijuana was found in Sandlin’s house, but newspaper reports in the Albuquerque Journal state the bags were small. Undersheriff Gary Watts claims that most of the confiscated marijuana was missing from the evidence trailer in the impound lot. I’m willing to bet a lot of it went back into King’s possession for sale and just some was left in Sandlin’s house to besmirch his reputation as a good cop. King was not likely to just let thousands of dollars go.

The Prime Suspects

Investigators considered Melvin King the prime suspect. After all, he was the one person with the most reason to hate and kill Stephen Sandlin. He also likely got his marijuana back after it came up missing from the impound lot. King was believed to be involved in the arson of his own house, as well. His girlfriend, Susan Sprague, was also charged with selling marijuana with King and had reason to kill Sandlin. Since a female had been yelling at him in the police station on the night he died, Sprague does look suspicious.

David Carson also came under suspicion. His alibi was that he was at a high school talent show when Sandlin died and that he had picked up another officer at his home before receiving the radio call from Wright that Sandlin was dead. He claimed that he had not arrived at the police station until 7:45 pm, when Sandlin had already been found shot by Wright. But witnesses report that Carson’s patrol unit was parked at the police station earlier than 7:45. Carson could not account for the time between 7:05 and 7:45. But he passed a polygraph and was subsequently cleared. If anyone knows how to beat a polygraph, it would be a police chief.

Eugene Butch Wright, the soldier who found Sandlin shot on the floor, was questioned by an Army investigator. He said he wouldn’t talk because he would go to jail for telling the truth. He also failed two polygraphs and gave conflicting statements. This seems like such an obvious red flag. When the Assistant Attorney General, Jim Scarantino, tried to interview the Army intelligence officer who was interrogating Wright, he was told to back off by the Attorney General, Tom Gillespie. He also tried to travel out of state to interview Wright’s girlfriend, but he was not allowed to by Westheimer.

Eugene Wright had been vacationing in Mountainair with David Carson’s son, who was stationed with Wright in Fort Hood. Wright was part of military intelligence and had a ridealong planned with Sandlin later the evening of the 7, probably to learn how police worked. That’s supposedly why he walked into the police station and found Sandlin, unconscious but still breathing. Wright told the Albuquerque Journal that he felt he was being interrogated as a prime suspect because he was not local, he left back to Fort Hood shortly after the murder, and “a lot of other things” that he didn’t want to disclose to the newspaper.

All of these things seem really strange. It seems that Wright was a key witness, the first on the scene, and he may have seen something he didn’t want to disclose. Maybe he felt the need to protect the killer. Considering the fact he was Carson’s son’s friend, he undoubtedly felt some sort of loyalty to the Carsons.

There was an unnamed cop from Mountainair who even confessed to killing Sandlin. He claimed he did it because Sandlin needed to mind his own business and stay out of things. But when Assistant Attorney General Jim Scarantino tried to investigate this lead, he was fired. His predecessor, James Yontz, faced a lot of resistance in relation to the Sandlin case and resigned as a result. Two other men in the Attorney General’s office were also reassigned to other cases when they began to look closely into the lead. Scarantino and Yontz sent the Albuquerque Journal a two-page signed statement that they had been “driven off the case.” They both felt that whenever they got close to solving the case, Attorney General Tom Gillespie or Deputy Attorney General, Steve Westheimer, would take over and prevent their progress forward. They were blocked from digging into Wright’s ever-changing story. They were also denied the go-ahead to look into known drug dealers and weed farmers in Mountainair.

The FBI in Albuquerque then began to express interest in the case after these allegations of corruption. However, they were not sure they believed Scarantino had been wrongfully fired for pursuing the lead and they did not feel that they had enough money in the budget to start a corruption probe in the State Attorney General’s office. Apparently the probe never happened.

Shortly before Stephen Sandlin joined the Mountainair police department, he had told his girlfriend about having a nightmare wherein he was shot in the head. He said he knew who shot him but couldn’t make out the face in his nightmare. The nightmare scared him – and it turned out to be a premonition. It is chilling to me how many of the victims I write about spoke of premonitions of their deaths long before they were killed. Jean Abla, whom I wrote about last week, also had such a premonition.

Many people thought that Sandlin was too good of an officer to just let someone come into the station and shoot him. He might have known – and trusted – his killer. The fact he was shot with his own service revolver while kneeling may reinforce that theory. Because how did someone get to his service revolver? Maybe Sandlin felt comfortable enough to set it down on a desk while talking to someone, which allowed the killer to grab it. The killer then threatened him with the gun, which was why Sandlin started kneeling.

Then there is the matter of the “second gun” tip. A man called the Albuquerque Journal and claimed that he had received an anonymous call to go to a gas station in the Northeast Heights of Albuquerque. He arrived at 11:00 pm and waited thirty minutes, when he decided to make a call using the pay phone. That’s where he found a note with his name, directing him to a remote spot near Estancia. It was at this spot that he found a .357 magnum, the same gun that had shot Sandlin. He claimed that he sent the gun by mail to the Attorney General. The police and the AG both stated they never received any gun in the mail.

This tip seems weird and unlikely. Who was this random tipster? Why was he given the location of the second gun, in such a mysterious scavenger-hunt-style way? Was he some busybody who watched too many movies, and who was trying to feel important by interjecting himself in the case? While I’m not sure of the credibility of this tip, I do think a second gun could explain what happened to Sandlin. Someone held a gun to him so that he surrendered his service revolver or someone killed him with another gun matching his revolver’s caliber. The Attorney General refuses to disclose if his service revolver was tested and officially determined to be the weapon that killed him.

While I think the female yelling at Sandlin may have been Susan Sprague, and that she may have even been his killer or an accomplice in his murder, I can’t imagine that Sandlin would have felt safe enough to set down his revolver while the disgruntled subject of his recent narcotics arrest confronted him. Maybe his killer knocked him out or overpowered him somehow, but nowhere in my readings did anything state Sandlin had any injuries beyond the fatal gunshot wound to his head, and there were no reports of signs of a struggle in the station. The use of a second gun would explain things so much better.

Another possibility is that David Carson asked Sandlin to surrender his revolver as they discussed their fight from earlier. That would have given Carson easy access to the weapon. Alternatively, Sandlin set down his service revolver while talking to Carson because he trusted Carson. What kind of service revolver did Carson carry? A .357 too?

Carson certainly seems like a strong suspect. He was seen at the station when he claimed he wasn’t there. He had been fighting with Sandlin earlier that day – though he denied that in later interviews and claimed he had simply had a conversation with Sandlin about writing too many traffic tickets. He had been in Sandlin’s house between the initial search by authorities and the arrival of his family – the time period when the marijuana was planted in his house and the tape recordings vanished. And the person who found Sandlin dead, and claimed he couldn’t talk about it without going to jail, happened to be Carson’s son’s buddy.

However, the one thing that may clear Carson is the fact that he was not part of the Mountainair good ole boys’ club, at least not on the surface. Carson was actually from Aztec. He and his officers began to crack down on crime in Mountainair, leading to a lot of controversy and clapback from some of the townspeople. Carson told the Albuquerque Journal that Mountainair people “were used to Mountainair law, which is no law at all.” So if Carson was in cahoots with King and Sprague and other drug traffickers, he hid it pretty well behind a carefully crafted veneer of zero-tolerance.

My Thoughts on Stephen Sandlin’s Murder

At first I thought David Carson sounded like a really strong suspect – and he is on paper. But after watching him on Unsolved Mysteries, I saw what I thought was a genuine flash of grief in his eyes when he recounted the day he found Sandlin shot on the police station floor. Maybe he is just a really good actor, but I don’t believe he was the murderer. His alibi is too easy to prove – many people can place him at the high school function that night, during the time of Sandlin’s murder. The witnesses who said he was outside the police station when Sandlin was shot may have been some of the disgruntled Mountainair citizens who disliked Carson for cracking down on crime with Mayor Shovelin. They wanted him to get removed from his position as police chief and their lies succeeded in tarnishing his reputation. However, I also think that Carson probably knows who did it – and so does Eugene Wright. They won’t talk, probably out of fear. Carson likely either accepted money from scary drug dealers around town to turn the other cheek to marijuana cultivation, or he knew his police brothers did and he didn’t want to betray them.

In my opinion, the most likely people behind Stephen Sandlin’s homicide were members of a ring of disgruntled drug dealers and marijuana farmers, including Melvin King and Susan Sprague. King was not the only one affected by Sandlin’s drug bust; he was likely one of many people involved in the sale of marijuana in the area who were negatively impacted by the confiscation of the thousands of dollars in marijuana. Any one of those people may have wanted Sandlin out of the way. Not only did they get their marijuana back from the sheriff’s impound lot in Estancia, but they also eliminated the biggest threat to their booming business. No one lets $25,000+ go that easily.

Most disturbingly, though, is the fact that at least one of these people had to be in thick with the local sheriffs and possibly the Mountainair police in order to get access to the marijuana and commit the killing in a police station with wide-open windows. The sheriffs put the marijuana in a very stupid location at the benefit of King and others involved. They pretended to be dumb to the fact it would likely get stolen, and maybe they really were that dumb, but it seems possible that they put the marijuana there deliberately. Then someone in the office must have let interested parties know where it was, because how else would they know to look in a trailer in the impound lot? Some of the local law enforcement probably got a cut of the marijuana sales in exchange for turning a blind eye to the drug activity.

I think Susan Sprague was the woman in the police station that night. Sandlin didn’t think she would hurt him, so he acted like it was no big deal and lied to his girlfriend about what the woman wanted to keep from bothering her with his work problems. Then King or someone else involved in the marijuana trade came in after Sandlin hung up with Michlle, and subdued Sandlin somehow to get his service revolver and kill him. Mountainair locals, including the local police, probably knew exactly who was involved but they didn’t want to get killed themselves – or lose out on their financial stake in the marijuana trade. Carson and others may have even helped clean up evidence and steal the tape recordings from Sandlin’s residence to protect their own hides. They may not have been behind the trigger, but they still played a hand in his homicide.

The Funeral and 2013 Memorial

No one from the Mountainair police force attended Sandlin’s funeral. His three fellow officers were supposed to be pallbearers, but they didn’t show up. Mayor Richard Shovelin and the Mountainair Town Council did show and made excuses that the absent officers were just too shaken over the death to come. David Carson’s excuse was that he was waiting to speak to investigators about Sandlin’s death. I wonder if guilt, and maybe fear, kept them away.

Frank Piehler resigned from the police force a week after Sandlin’s death. He was accused of giving a minor alcohol but he was never charged. He moved away from Mountainair shortly after quitting the police force. I wonder what he saw and knew? I also wonder if the “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” charge was fabricated to discredit him and drive him away.

Stephen Sandlin didn’t have a proper police memorial service until 2013. That’s when a new chief, a former New York City police sergeant, hosted a memorial service for Sandlin as an officer shot in the line of duty. Sandlin’s dad and his 26-year-old son, Robbie, both attended. The police force erected a four-foot monument commemorating Sandlin outside the door of the police station where he was murdered.

An unidentified man was seen bawling his eyes out at the memorial; a few days later, the police chief noticed someone parked in front of the monument crying. They hold out hope that someone may come forward out of guilt after seeing the monument, though that still hasn’t happened, ten years later.

An Outsider

Sandlin was not native to Mountainair. He was from Albuquerque, and he was renting a house in Mountainair to put him close to work. He often went back to Bosque Farms to see his parents, his girlfriend, and his infant son.

Sandlin was just one of four men working at the Mountainair Police Station. The way he had been raised by another law enforcement officer, he believed in adhering to the law and coloring within the lines. Sandlin was actually an upstanding officer but Mountainair wasn’t having it.

Sandlin was just one of many people who were hated in Mountainair. Mayor Shovelin and David Carson were under fire for cracking down on crime in the town. Half of Mountainair’s people loved the new crackdown; the other half wanted these men out. The main critic of Shovelin’s administration was Forrest Turnage, the former Mountainair mayor who had lost re-election to Shovelin. Turnage led others in speaking up against Shovelin in town council meetings, for which Shovelin had them thrown out. They also claimed that Shovelin had cops harass his opponents. Controversy boiled over when the police arrested Eddie Otero on animal cruelty charges for letting his horses run wild through town. Shovelin began receiving death threats – just like Sandlin had when he first moved to Mountainair. Two hundred people signed a grand jury petition to get Shovelin removed from office, but the grand jury found no grounds for his removal in December of 1988. The grand jury did not review the death of Stephen Sandlin or the missing marijuana. The group led by Turnage also filed a civil rights lawsuit but I found no record of its results.

Stephen Sandlin’s death is now classified as a homicide. But it took a long time for that to happen; the death was always treated as an “unexplained shooting.” When Jim Scarantino wrote Michelle Sturtevant a letter in 1989 about how Sandlin was definitely murdered, she was able to use that to earn a worker’s compensation claim to help raise Robbie. Worker’s compensation would not pay out for a suicide.

The case is still cold and will probably remain that way forever. Someone doesn’t want this case solved. Actually, probably several people don’t want it solved. They knew Sandlin was bad for the local marijuana business and they wanted him out of the way. Mountainair is a small town; multiple people undoubtedly know what really happened because secrets don’t stay secret in small towns for longer than a millisecond. But certain people have maintained a reign of fear that has kept people silent for years. That silence will likely continue. By the time the people directly involved pass away, all witnesses will also have passed, and this secret will have died along with them.

Melvin King already died in 2004. His cause of death was determined to be from swallowing antifreeze while high on meth. Yet his official cause of death on the police report claims that he accidentally overdosed on Tylenol. Tom Gillespie, the Attorney General overseeing Sandlin’s death investigation and the investigation into the Mountainair Police Department, also died in 2004 of cancer, taking what he knew about a possible cover-up to the grave. Richard Shovelin died in 2020 and Gary Watts died in 2022. They both probably knew things, especially about what really happened in Sandlin’s house the day after he died. Carson is still alive and living in Louisiana – but at the time of this writing, he is 79 and may die before anything new can be learned from him.

Nevertheless, I still hope someone out there shares what they know so that Sandlin can get justice. His parents, his son, and the mother of his child deserve to know the truth. Stephen Sandlin was just doing his job and he didn’t deserve to die. He had his whole life ahead of him and he could have eventually advanced in law enforcement to get the respect he sought. This town’s creepy drug ring prevented that from ever happening. They also kept his son from ever knowing his father. Stephen Sandlin’s death was a true tragedy that needs to be solved, once and for all.