Mass Murder in California's Empty Quarter

July 15, 2020
True-crime yarn about an explosion of violence in a particularly obscure corner of northeastern California. Journalist March, hitherto known for books about golf and environmental matters, turns his eye toward a horrific crime committed on Feb. 20, 2014, when Cherie Rhoades, the ousted president of the tribal council at the Cedarville Rancheria, killed four people during a legal hearing. One was Rhoades' brother, with whom she had been at odds. "She was well known as a bully," writes March. "She had a sneak-attack temper that could quickly turn violent. At five feet, six inches and 185 pounds she looked like a middle guard." She also had little connection to the Northern Paiute people: She had grown up White in fairly horrible circumstances, but enrolling in the tribe allowed her to take a share of the casino-profits distribution to Native people and, soon enough, to move enough family members to Cedarville, with only some 35 residents, to gain control. Soon enough, too, her brother, who "could be kind and he could be vengeful," accused her of embezzling tribal funds. March condemns not only Rhoades, who was sentenced to death, but also a system of Indian governance without much oversight--and what oversight there is comes by way of the notoriously inept federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. March's attention to these matters sometimes comes spilling out without much apparent concern for transitions or the niceties of organization. However, despite his tendency to dart from topic to topic, the narrative hits on some centrally important questions: Who is an Indian? Who decides? And "to what extent is tribal dysfunction and the dysfunction present in contemporary Native American culture something that state and federal policy, especially gambling policy, incentivizes?" A story that moves from murder to larger issues of identity, cultural genocide, and Native American life.

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August 31, 2020
March (River in Ruin: The Story of the Carmel River) details in this searing account the case of Cherie Rhoades, the first woman tried for mass murder in the United States. Rhoades, who met the legal requirements to be considered a Native American but was not raised as one, was 24 in 1969 when she and some relatives took up the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ invitation to move to Cedarville Rancheria in Northern California, a reservation for the Northern Paiutes, whose traditions they knew nothing about. Rhoades, who received free housing and a quarterly payment from the tribe’s casino profits, soon gained a reputation as a bully. She joined the Northern Paiute executive committee, from which she was kicked off after being accused of embezzling tribal funds. The tribe voted to evict her from her home, but, at the hearing on Feb. 19, 2014, Rhoades showed up with two pistols and opened fire, killing four people, three of them relatives. In 2017, she was found guilty of murder and attempted murder, and sentenced to death. After a moratorium on executions in 2019, she sits on death row today. This portrait of a flawed woman driven to commit a heinous crime makes for fascinating reading.