Jury hears Eureka murder trial

By BRENT SHRUM Western News Reporter

A local jury is hearing the case of a Eureka man accused of shooting his neighbor to death with a shotgun last spring following an ongoing boundary dispute.

Wayne Hixon, 52, is charged with deliberate homicide and evidence tampering in connection with the death of 42-year-old Bob Mast and faces a possible life sentence. He was arrested last April 30 by a Eureka police officer who had pulled him over for speeding while a few miles away a county deputy had just discovered Mast's body.

Mast died of a gunshot wound to the neck, apparently inflicted by a shotgun firing buckshot. His body was found in his driveway about 50 feet from his cabin, which was located about 200 yards from Hixon's home.

Hixon's trial began with jury selection last Thursday morning with opening statements from attorneys and testimony from the first witnesses for the prosecution offered that afternoon. Proceedings resumed in district court on Monday following a three-day Veterans Day weekend.

According to Deputy County Attorney Bob Slomski, who is leading the prosecution of the case, the shooting was the result of a long-standing animosity between Hixon and Mast. During opening statements on Thursday, Slomski argued that Hixon was prejudiced against Mast from the start because he believed that he had been promised the first chance to buy the 5-acre parcel on which Mast had built his cabin. Hixon had bought his tract near the Canadian border about four years ago — two years

before Mast bought his — and resented no longer having the only residence served by the access road he now shared, Slomski said. Hixon also kept his property neat and tidy while Mast was "by comparison pretty messy," Slomski said.

Several witnesses testified that Hixon had often complained about Mast's dogs and horses wandering onto his property. Earlier in the day of the shooting, Hixon called Jim Roberts, a state game warden, and reported that he thought Mast had just illegally killed a bighorn sheep.

Roberts testified that he had been off duty that Saturday afternoon and was outside his home splitting wood when Hixon left two messages on his answering machine regarding the sheep. He said Hixon sounded "pretty rude" on his answering machine. The messages, which Roberts had transferred to a cassette tape, were played to the jury, as was a recording of a follow-up phone conversation between Roberts and Hixon.

In the conversation, Hixon told Roberts he had seen six sheep headed across his property to Mast's and then heard a gunshot. He said Mast "has a rifle with him at all times."

Hixon offered directions to the property and told Roberts how he could tell which place was Mast's.

"My place is a nice looking place," he said. "His is a pig pen."

Hixon went on to complain about Mast's horses, which he said broke the covenants to which the property owners had agreed when they bought their land, and said he didn't have the money to file a civil suit against Mast. Roberts told Hixon he had no jurisdiction over livestock issues and admonished Hixon for the rude tone of the message he had left. Hixon apologized and told Roberts he was suffering from cancer and was under stress from his situation with Mast.

When Roberts responded to the scene, he talked to Hixon before going to see Mast. Hixon asked him not to tell Mast he had made the complaint and said Mast had threatened to kill him in the past, Roberts recalled. When he went to talk to Mast, he told him a complaint had come "from down below," gesturing down the hill in the direction of the nearby port of entry on U.S. Highway 93.

"I was going to kind of put it off on U.S. Customs," Roberts said.

Roberts said he talked with Mast and a friend who had been helping him trim his horses' hooves. Both said they hadn't heard any shots or seen any sheep. The friend left, and Roberts took a walk around the property with Mast, looking for any evidence a sheep had been killed. He said he found none.

During the tour of the property, Roberts commented on the apparent difficulty of getting fence posts for a horse corral into the rocky ground. Mast said he was having a hard time with it and that the horses kept getting loose, which led to problems with his neighbor. He said they didn't get along, Roberts remembered.

When Roberts left the scene, a few minutes after 6 p.m., and got back to the highway, he saw county sheriff's deputy Marc Gray heading for the border. Gray testified that he was going across to discuss an unrelated issue with Canadian law enforcement officials. Roberts headed back to Eureka and then to the Glen Lake area to investigate a report of a dead deer in someone's yard.

Around 6:30, while Gray was still on the Canadian side, Customs officers on the U.S. side of the border crossing heard a gunshot that they at first believed was directed at them. Officer Christopher Schrable testified that he and his partner heard a loud report coming from the hillside where Hixon and Mast lived.

"Something impacted within 20 yards of myself and my partner," he said.

The officers took cover and closed down the border. They looked for a possible shooter but saw nothing. Witnesses testified that while the officers could see one of the exits from the subdivision to the highway, another exit connected to the highway farther to the south and could not be seen from the border station.

When Gray came back across the border a few minutes later, he was told about the shot and went to investigate. He testified that he saw no one at Hixon's residence and two other residences on another road higher up on the hill. The Mast residence was the last one to check, and when he got there he saw the body in the driveway. Gray reported to the Eureka dispatcher that he had found the body, dead of an apparent gunshot wound, and that he had not found a weapon nearby. Finding a weapon close to the body might have indicated suicide, he said.

Gray said he took cover in his patrol vehicle and waited for a backup officer from the U.S. Border Patrol to arrive. Around the same time — 6:51 p.m. — Eureka police officer Ian Jeffcock stopped Hixon's truck on U.S. Highway 93 just south of Eureka after clocking it on radar at 51 mph in a 35 zone.

Jeffock said he smelled alcohol on Hixon but after hearing on his radio that a body had been found initially planned to let Hixon go with a speeding citation so he could leave the scene to back up Gray. But Hixon began to arouse suspicion when he started asking numerous questions about the ticket, some of them unusual, Jeffcock said. The officer testified that he started to suspect that Hixon was more intoxicated than he had thought, so he decided to ask him some more questions and to administer a field sobriety test.

Hixon told him he had come from "up by the border," Jeffcock said, later giving his address.

"I asked him how long ago he left there and he said, 'the time it took me to get from there to here,'" Jeffcock said.

Gray testified that he timed the drive from Hixon's residence to the location of the traffic stop, traveling at the speed limit, and that it took 23 minutes.

Hixon agreed to provide a breath sample, which indicated a blood alcohol concentration of .262 percent — more than three times the legal limit, Jeffcock said. He was placed under arrest for DUI, handcuffed and put in the back of Jeffcock's car.

Jeffcock said he had noticed while talking to Hixon that Hixon was wearing socks but no shoes. When asked, Hixon told him something about having smelly feet and declined having Jeffcock retrieve his shoes from his truck. A pair of white athletic shoes were visible behind the seat of the extended cab truck, Jeffcock said.

While Jeffcock, with Hixon, waited at the scene for a wrecker to arrive, Roberts showed up. He testified that while taking care of the dead deer he had heard over his radio "bits and pieces" about a body being found, and then he heard Jeffcock calling in a traffic stop on Hixon. He thought he should share his information about the earlier incident with Jeffcock.

"I said, 'If the dead guy up on the hill is Bob Mast, then Hixon is a potential suspect in a homicide,'" Roberts testified. "As soon as I opened my mouth, I could tell that Ian had already put it together."

Roberts went to the scene of the shooting while Jeffcock took Hixon to the Eureka police station. Jeffcock testified that before being read his Miranda rights, Hixon had volunteered that he had been traveling to a friend's home and that he was going to go fishing.

The friend, Steve Harsh, testified that he had known Hixon for about eight years and that they had occasionally gone fishing and done other things together and that he had been to Hixon's home a couple of times. Around supper time — 6 or 6:30 p.m., Harsh recalled — on April 30, Hixon called him and suggested that he come over to spend the night with Harsh and that the two go fishing in the morning. Hixon had called earlier in the afternoon and left a message about seeing some bighorn sheep and wondering if he could get a hunting tag for them, but the proposal to spend the night and go fishing was unexpected on such short notice, Harsh said. The conversation was short and his reply lukewarm, Harsh indicated.

"Basically it was, 'whatever,'" he testified.

At the scene of the shooting, Roberts helped Gray and other officers look for evidence. Roberts spotted what appeared to be a buckshot pellet near the body, and officers found a number of suspicious shoe prints.

"It was a tennis shoe type characteristic, and everyone I knew that had been up there had boots on," Roberts said.

Prints were found going both directions in Mast's driveway, between the body and Hixon's cabin, Roberts testified. More were found on Hixon's property itself. Roberts testified that one of the prints was on top of a track made by his truck tires during his earlier visit.

"I know my truck tires, and that print was on top of mine," he said. "It told me that print was there after I had driven on the road."

Jurors were shown photographs of some of the prints but not of the print on top of the tire track. Under cross examination, defense attorney John Putikka asked Roberts why he didn't mention the shoe print on top of the tire track in a report he wrote later on the night of the shooting. Roberts said he assumed the investigating officers from the sheriff's officer would be taking individual photographs of each of the prints he had helped find and mark.

Also under cross examination by Putikka, Roberts acknowledged that he could not identify two different tire tracks shown in one photograph of the crime scene and that he did not know what other vehicles might have been there after he left from his initial visit.

Slomski told Judge Michael Prezeau at the end of proceedings on Monday that he hoped to have his side of the testimony wrapped up by the end of the day on Tuesday. Additional evidence alluded to by Slomski during his opening statements but not yet testified to by witnesses includes details of a shotgun and shells found at Hixon's residence, including a fired shell that had been partially destroyed by burning in a wood stove.

After the prosecution calls all its witnesses, the defense will call its witnesses. Putikka pointed out to the jurors previously that Hixon is not required to testify and may choose not to. He stressed that the prosecution's case rests on circumstantial evidence that can lead to more than one conclusion, and he promised during his opening statements to give the jury "nine separate reasons" to find Hixon not guilty.