Books for the Armchair Detective in Your Life

Crime and Punishment

In the fall of 1920, two couples pulled into a campsite just off the famous Yellowstone Trail. A few weeks later, one couple drove away, while the other simply vanished. The identities and fate of the couple left behind didn’t hit newsstands until three years later. In one of the most sensational murder cases ever played out in a Montana court, Seth Orrin Danner put up a fight for his life and lost. The state executed Seth on July 18, 1924, at the Gallatin County Jail, but did he commit the crimes?

Historian Kelly Hartman follows the trail of the Danner family from Kansas to Montana and details the trial of the century, trying to decipher what truly happened in Central Park on that grisly day.

Capturing Montana’s Most Elusive Fugitive

During an intense spring blizzard in 1951, affable Clarence Pellett picked up a teenaged hitchhiker along Montana’s Hi-Line. Soon, blood from seven bullet holes in Pellett’s back stained the snow-covered prairie. Following a brief manhunt and confession, a heated debate ensued over capital punishment as Communist attorneys swooped in “to save this poor friendless boy.” Frank Dryman, twice sentenced to hang, escaped the noose when a sympathetic Montana Supreme Court stayed each execution. The “permanently insane and mentally deficient” killer was paroled into the custody of his brother in California after serving thirteen years of a life sentence. Eighteen months later, he vanished. Using a series of aliases, Dryman hid in plain sight for forty years despite state and federal warrants. Clem Pellett recounts the enthralling twists and turns of his hunt for his grandfather’s absconded murderer—the longest in state history.