A dead adult child, an outraged parent and a murder that wasn’t a murder according to the Elko judicial system.
While that may sound like the recent killing of James Taylor in Currie this September it also is a summary of the murder of Tina Dell that happened over 20 years ago in Carlin.
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Tina Dell with her common law husband Rickey Todd Major and their son came to Elko County in 1987 as part of a wave of unskilled and semiskilled workers that flooded western Elko County in the wake of the then booming gold mining industry. The couple settled in a Carlin mobile home and began to eke out a living from temporary and part time jobs for themselves and their one year old son.
Until the Spring of 1988, there was nothing unusual about the family, there were rumors that Majors or both Majors and Dell became involved with an outlaw biker gang. Those charges were never proven in court.
Even if true the amount of illegal activity that was said to go on inside their trailer was so insignificant relative to the explosion of crime that came with the explosion in population, it drew slight interest from the police.
All that changed in April 1988, when Major first reported Dell missing to the Carlin Police Department, two weeks after he noticed she had gone.
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According to then Carlin Police Chief Mike Kranovich, the two week delay between the woman’s disappearance and the report of it by Major put immediate suspicion on the man. That suspicion increased after investigators found blood stains in their trailer.
Police also noticed inconsistencies between Major’s first and subsequent interviews and found witnesses who said Major showed off Polaroid pictures of an allegedly dead Tina Dell to friends.
But Dell’s body was not found. Police were also hampered in charging Major by reports that the missing woman was seen in a variety of places for up to two years after she vanished. Those sightings were apparently enough to dissuade then Elko DA Mark Torvinen from pushing the matter, but not the state’s Attorney General’s office.
Spurred by the repeated calls of Tina Dell’s mother Shirley in January of 1990 the AG’s office did prepare a “No Body Homicide” warrant against Major who had long since returned to his home in Craig, Colorado.
“Yes I made a pest of myself,” said Shirley Dell in 1996. “But Rickey Todd major killed my daughter and justice had to be done.”
But less than a week before the warrant was to be served Dell’s skeleton was found just over the Eureka County line. The original warrant was dropped and the previously reluctant Torvinen now with a skeleton charged Major with Dell’s murder.
Arrested in Colorado, Major fought extradition. After losing that court battle his then attorney called for a psychiatric hearing. Those two delays took up all of 1990, which was the last year in Torvinen’s term as Elko DA, and most of 1991.
When the case finally got to its first preliminary stage in late 1991 it was Torvinen’s successor the relatively inexperienced Marshall Smith who represented the state. Major lost that first preliminary hearing in December but with less than a week before the case was to go to trial Smith unexpectedly dropped the charges.
Sources later indicated that Smith was presented with new evidence from Major’s attorney David Lockie that the real killer of Tina Dell was a mysterious man in black some identified as T.D. James. James was identified as a leader of the motorcycle gang that frequented Carlin in the late 80s that was heavily involved in the drug trade.
Shirley Dell was outraged yet again, but the woman did not give up.
“I knew I had to keep fighting,” she added.
Off the record, investigators also scoffed at the idea and the fact that Smith took it seriously. But despite police derision the case against Major was dropped and after being incarcerated for a year and a half Major was released. Smith did however leave the door open for Elko County to recharge the man in the future.
That door was almost closed in late 1993, when Smith announced he had no intention of recharging the man. Major’s freedom lasted two years. In March 1994 then Assistant Eureka DA Gary Woodbury who had been working on the case with Smith for 18 months brought murder charges against the man from Eureka County
That effort to prosecute Major hit a judicial wall when District Judge Dan Papez dismissed both counts in the murder indictment on the grounds that the Eureka County prosecutor did not have the jurisdiction to charge Major with the crime. Papez explained the reason for the dismissal was that except for the Eureka County location where Dell’s remains were found, all of the evidence in the state’s case against Major suggested that the woman was killed in her home in Carlin.
Woodbury did salvage something of the case by winning a perjury conviction based on inconsistent testimony Major gave during a pretrial hearing. And although losing the murder case on a technicality Woodbury enhanced his reputation as a tireless prosecutor. During the 1994 November’s general election for Elko DA, Woodbury cited the Dell/Major case as proof that no one no matter how insignificant, poor or powerless would be denied justice if he was District Attorney.
Matt Stermitz the same man who would later represent Major in his murder trial, tried to defuse the campaign issue by promising that if elected he too would review the case for possible prosecution.
Woodbury however won the election in a landslide and less than a year after he bested Stermitz at the polls, the dogged prosecutor beat Stermitz in the courtroom and won a conviction almost eight years to the day Tina Dell was murdered.
One person who remembers the Dell case is James Taylor father, Glenn.
“It took eight years to bring Rickey Todd Majors to justice,” the elder Taylor said. “I can fight at least that long to see Glen Mead sent to prison.”
On what would have been his son James’ 24th birthday, Currie owner Glenn Taylor offered a $1000.00 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of James Taylor killer Glen Mead.
Three weeks ago Mead’s killing of 23 year old James Taylor was ruled a justifiable homicide in an Elko County Coroner’s inquest a finding the elder Taylor vigorously disputes.
“It was an absolute miscarriage of justice from the moment deputies arrived,” Taylor said. “ With my son laying dead with five bullet holes in him, they didn’t even charge him (Mead with murder) with murder that night. The Sheriff’s office and the DA’s office did virtually no investigation in the three weeks between James’ killing and the inquest and the evidence and the testimony given in the inquest was a joke. There was no study done on the angle of the bullets. I could go on and on. They even ignored Mead’s own statements that he didn’t feel threatened and that he should not have shot James a third time.”