The Crusade

In March 1990,  Saline County deputy prosecutor, Jean Duffey, was assigned to lead a drug task force to investigate drug smuggling in Saline County.

According to ID files, the day Duffey was hired, her boss, Gary Arnold, instructed her not to investigate any public officials. Almost immediately, however, Duffey’s undercover officers discovered that there were a number of public officials involved in drug trafficking.

Afraid to go against Arnold’s orders because he might’ve been one of the public officials involved in drugs, Duffey brought the information to Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob Govar, who was in charge of a federal investigation of corruption in Saline County.

The task force obtained information that tied public officials, including Richard Garrett and Dan Harmon, to drugs and the murders of Kevin Ives and Don Henry. This is when Linda Ives realized that Harmon and Garrett had been lying to her and using her for nearly four years.

Fearing for his reputation, Harmon used the local newspapers to destroy Jean Duffey’s character.

Duffey wrote in ID files, “Lynda Hollenbeck wrote for the Benton Courier and Doug Thompson wrote for Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Hollenbeck and Thompson were willing participants in Harmon’s smear campaign against me and my task force, and neither reporter bothered to verify anything Harmon said; they just printed it — lie after lie, article after article — even when they knew Harmon was lying.”

Duffey’s boss, U.S. Attorney Chuck Banks, concluded that the media whirlwind created by Harmon had made her ineffective, and decided to fire her.

Although she was no longer head of the task force, Duffey and another officer of the task force dug deeper into the “train deaths” case and eventually brought information to U.S. Attorney Chuck Banks, who promised that they would be able to testify with the information.

However, this never happened, and the federal investigation regarding corruption in Saline County was unexpectedly terminated. All public officials who had indictments against them were cleared of all wrongdoings.
“I finally understood,” Duffey wrote in a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal in 1997, “To solve the train deaths case would be to expose the crimes of Mena, and no government agent who has come close to doing either has survived professionally.”