Suicides complicate American Indian artifact looting case

DENVER — For 90 tense minutes last month, San Juan County Sheriff Mike Lacy tried to prevent yet another one of his constituents from committing suicide over the case of the American Indian artifacts.

Two defendants had already taken their own lives after federal authorities charged 24 people last June with looting American Indian sites in the West.

Now a despondent relative of a third defendant had called Lacy. The sheriff kept the caller on the phone until deputies could arrive and make sure everything was OK.

But there was still another suicide to come.

Last week, Ted Gardiner, a 52-year-old antiquities dealer who worked as an FBI informant on the case, shot himself in a Salt Lake City suburb. Relatives said the two previous suicides had affected him greatly.

Gardiner's death has left the case, once touted as the largest prosecution of looters of American Indian artifacts, in limbo. A federal judge in Denver has pushed back the first trial, slated to start later this month, to allow federal prosecutors to see whether they can use videotaped testimony from their now-deceased star witness.

Defense attorneys are expected to argue that evidence recorded by Gardiner should be disallowed because he can no longer be cross-examined. Nonetheless, at a hearing in Salt Lake City on Monday, federal prosecutors insisted the case could go forward.

To critics, Gardiner's suicide — which followed those of a beloved physician in southwestern Utah and a Santa Fe, N.M., antiquities dealer last year — is yet another indication that the full weight of the U.S. government was not needed to deal with what many residents of the Four Corners area believe is just a local pastime known as pot-hunting.

"Nobody's above the law," said Bruce Adams, a San Juan County commissioner. "But what value do we place on artifacts versus people's lives?"

He added: "I would imagine that the federal prosecutors are now at their wits' end."

The U.S. attorney's office in Salt Lake City, which is overseeing most of the cases, declined to comment. But Gardiner's family said that despite the tragedy associated with the case, the prosecutions had to happen.

"These people were digging up grave sites. They were taking artifacts off Native American bodies," said Gardiner's 23-year-old son, Dustin. "This history needed to be preserved."

The case seems to have largely begun with Gardiner, according to court records and interviews.