Sheriff’s divers troll Fish Lake to find EWU’s Sacajawea

Like Jimmy Hoffa; Amelia Earhart; and Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, the abduction of Eastern Washington University’s Sacajawea statue has remained one of those nagging mysteries that defied solution.

But stoolies are talking now. The truth is being told on what happened to the 6-foot metal sculpture after it was sawed off at the ankles and hauled out of the university president’s rose garden one dark March night in 1997.

Here is what these nameless informants say:

Sacajawea sleeps with the fishes a few feet off the dock in the murky waters of Fish Lake.

That’s where a pack of (presumably beered-up) pranksters sunk the evidence – or so the tale goes.

This copper and brass corpse didn’t need concrete shoes to make like the Titanic.

Tom McGill, Eastern’s chief of police, is convinced this is precisely what happened. Even so, locating a statue’s resting place in a muck-filled lake bottom after a nine-year burial is no day at the beach.

On Wednesday afternoon, a team of volunteer Spokane County sheriff’s divers tried but failed to come up with the goods. They did, however, find three beer cans, a 7Up bottle and a rock.

These aquamen are total pros, however. They don’t know the meaning of quit. Word has it the quest will continue off and on during the summer until Sacajawea is happily enrolled back at Eastern.

“It’s like anything else in the business,” offered McGill, a burly 61-year-old who retires in the fall. “You want to have a clean slate.”

McGill remembers that fateful night. One of his officers noticed something mighty curious while patrolling the campus.

Sacajawea had taken a powder from her rose garden rock perch.

Only her feet remained.

The chief is no dolt. The man spent 25 years with the Washington State Patrol before retiring from that job and signing on as the university’s top cop.

This smelled like an “Animal House” stunt pulled by frat rats who were either: 1. drunk and bored; or 2. drunk and really hard up for a date.

McGill launched an investigation. To his surprise, nobody cracked.

The silence was highly unusual. In McGill’s mind, anyone brazen enough to amputate Sacajawea would probably want to brag about it.

I know I would.

Besides, conspiracies hold together only in movies. These are college students – college students who drink beer and blab.

But they didn’t. McGill was mystified. It looked like he would shuffle off into retirement with one very annoying cold case on the books.

Then the Eastern alumni magazine decided to profile this nine-year-old puzzle in its spring/summer issue.

Once that happened, the dominoes began to tumble.

“Have you seen this statue?” asked the headline above a photograph of the missing legendary Indian guide.

The article told the tale of the Sac-napping as well as how the artwork, a piece created by celebrated sculptor Harold Balazs, came to Eastern. According to the story, he made it in 1960 to replace a beat-up plaster Sacajawea given to the college by the Class of 1916. Balazs’ Sacajawea was relocated to the rose garden in 1986. There it remained until, well, let’s not go through all that again.

In the magazine, McGill offered amnesty for information – no questions asked.

Sure enough, the phone began to ring. Every finger pointed to that dock at Fish Lake, a short drive from the Cheney-based campus.

With persistence and enough compressed air, I believe Chief McGill will get his wish.

Sacajawea will come home. The case will be closed.

I know what the culprits did was wrong. But as a former Eastern slacker who once wrestled to a tie in a Pearce Hall pudding fight, I admire these fiends for getting away clean. Of course, even if they were rounded up and charged with a crime they’d have nothing to fear.

Unlike what happened to Hoffa, the statue of limitations has long passed.