The Clinton murders in Mena, AR
Resist Fascism
Nov 6, 1995
BRITISH TV EXPOSES STRING OF MURDERS NEAR MENA, ARKANSAS
A British documentary TV team has spent months near Mena,
Arkansas investigating a string of murders that leads to a gun
running and drug smuggling operation there that apparently leads
to the door of the White House.
The documentary by the prestigious Twenty Twenty program
leaves British TV viewers wondering about the state of the
American justice system.
The investigation starts with the death in 1987 of two boys,
Don Henry and Kevin Ives, on the railroad tracks near Mena. Their
death was ruled an accident by the Clinton-appointed state
medical examiner, Dr. Fahmy Malak. But Kevin's mother, Linda
Ives, knew that the official report didn't add up. After fighting
the Arkansas justice system for several years she won exhumation
and reautopsy. An out-of-state examiner said the cause of death
was clear: murder by beating and stabbing before they were placed
on the railroad tracks.
The murder case was assigned to police investigator John
Brown: "When I first reviewed the case file, I found a lot of
things missing...crime scene photographs were gone, the list of
evidence was gone, interviews were cut short. From 1987 until
1993 no one ever went out and talked to the people who lived by
the tracks. It was never intended for this case to be solved,"
John Brown told the British interviewer.
As the British narrator explains it: "What John Brown
discovered was an extraordinary trail of evidence that led from
the tracks to the Mena airport. From interviews with Mena pilots,
he pieced together a very different story of what happened to the
boys that night....They were hunting deer. They had no idea that
the tracks were used by Mena pilots as a site for dropping off
drugs and money, and that a drop had gone missing three nights
previously, causing panic at Mena."
John Brown continues: "The concern wasn't the $400,000 in the
[container]; it was the transmitter that was in the case that
everyone was concerned with because it was trackable, and it
would track them right back to Mena, Arkansas.... What these kids
walked into was a group of law enforcement officials and drug
dealers that were waiting to see who walked up onto their drop
site.... They were chased down, and they were taken to another
location. They were beaten and held. From that they were taken
and then killed. They were taken back and their bodies were
placed on the tracks in hopes that all evidence of the murder
would be distorted by the train mangling the bodies."
Brown didn't get very far with his investigation. He was
summoned to the sheriff, Judy Pridgen, and told "John, look,
you're going to have to leave this alone. We're going to...shut
it down. You will interview no one who tracks this case back to
Mena."
John Brown resigned the next morning.
Copyright (c) 1995 The Washington Weekly (http://www.federal.com)