Aftershocks of a Murder : Homeless Man’s Brutal Killing Jars the Tranquillity of Rural Trinity County

They found Hop’s body in the woods outside this Trinity County settlement, half-buried in a small crater beneath a toppled tree stump. He had been killed in a most horrifying way--stabbed 70 times or more, with his eyes gouged out and his left ear sliced off.

Gary (Hop) Summar was by no means the first to die by the hand of another in this remote and mountainous region. But some residents say that his murder has left a mark like none before, and the aftermath has saddled the poor, thinly populated county with onerous burdens it is struggling to bear.

There was, to begin with, the terrible shock of the thing. Summar was a mild-mannered sort, friends said, a frequently homeless harmonica player whose deformed legs gave him a pronounced limp. The violence that snapped his life off at the age of 37 was so savage, one Hawkins Bar waitress said, “that it just scared the heck out of everybody for a while.”

That was 14 months ago, and now the matter of justice is at hand. Five men and three women have been charged with the killing, and--in a style befitting the region’s frontier heritage--have been dubbed the “Hawkins Bar Eight.”

Theirs will be the first death penalty trial in Trinity County history. Legal costs--$550,000 and rising--already have broken records, law enforcement authorities have been swamped by the complex investigation and every defense attorney in the county is tied up with the case.

One fourth of the jail’s beds are filled by the accused. The sheriff has had to hire extra help just to transport the eight defendants back and forth to court.

“This case has been a nightmare, one of those things you fear will happen but hope never does,” said Dist. Atty. David Cross, whose red-rimmed eyes testify to the long hours he has spent on the prosecution. “It has consumed almost all of our energy here and the trial is still ahead.”

Other consequences are less easily measured, but worrisome nonetheless. Some business owners fear that news of the murder--initially called a vigilante attack that was sparked by an accusation that Summar had molested a child--might scare off vacationers drawn by the area’s fine fishing and stunning peaks. With the timber industry on the ropes and unemployment ranging as high as 20%, tourism is the county’s last best hope for economic security.

“Tourism is all we’ve got left up here, and news like this can really hurt,” said Jeff Kohlhagen, who owns a market and bait shop in Big Bar, a wide spot in the road along the Trinity River. “It’s not like we’re Miami Beach. Things are weak already, so any decline and you’re in big trouble.”

Sheriff Paul Schmidt said such repercussions would be unfortunate--and unfair. Sure, the area is isolated and full of independent thinkers (Trinity, for example, was the only California county won by Ross Perot). But it is certainly not a lawless society.

“We’re not the Wild West or anything,” said Schmidt, whose office features a display case full of old rifles and a Bible on his desk. “This was a heinous crime that made people sick. . . . But should people stop going to Disneyland because of the riots in L.A.?”

Despite its tranquil setting in forested mountains about 200 miles north of Sacramento, Trinity County has weathered its share of ugly murders. One of the most notorious, the sheriff said, occurred around the turn of the century, when a band of gunmen hired by a cattle baron killed a particularly popular cowboy down near the Yolla Bolly Mountains.

More recently, homicides have mostly sprung from Trinity’s infamous marijuana cultivation trade, which took root here amid an expanse of rugged, hard-to-patrol wilderness.

The worst year was 1987, when there were four killings--giving the county of about 13,000 residents a murder rate three times the national average. But Schmidt said three of the four were narcotics-related--”basically growers shooting each other out in the woods.”

The murder of Hop Summar was quite different.

Detectives describe Summar as a slight, nomadic fellow who survived on disability checks and split his time between the coast and Hawkins Bar, a rustic Trinity River community of loggers, miners and retirees. Summar was known for his peculiar gait, his puka shell necklace and a colostomy bag, which he had worn since his boyhood in Illinois.

In the summer and fall of 1991, investigators said, Summar shared a trailer with two of those charged with his murder--Bernard MacCarlie and his girlfriend, Barbara Adcock. The three whiled away the warm days partying with about two dozen other people camped beneath a stand of oak trees along the river, authorities said.

“All of these guys were people who lived day to day just looking for the next party,” said Sheriff’s Sgt. Dan Kartchner, the lead investigator on the case. While the U.S. Forest Service limits overnighters to a 14-day stay, enforcement is limited and this group “had taken over this particular campground for months,” Kartchner said.

Several days before the killing, Adcock called the Sheriff’s Department and charged that Summar had molested her 5-year-old daughter. Kartchner said that two doctors found no evidence of molestation and that the girl denied it had occurred--assertions the defense will challenge. In any case, prosecutors allege that Adcock spread news of the molestation claim among others at the river camp, stirring support for a revenge killing. Adcock’s motives, prosecutors charge, were to get Summar out of the trailer and rob him of several hundred dollars from his recently cashed disability check.

“This was not a sudden impulse killing,” Dist. Atty. Cross said. “Barbara Adcock had a plan she executed over several days. She went out and solicited these other defendants to kill this man.”

William Neill, one of 10 defense attorneys in the case, said a different story will come out in court.

“The sheriff basically went out and arrested everybody in sight, without really knowing what happened,” Neill said. “Everything will shake out at trial and the truth will come out.”

The prosecution’s star witness--one of more than 50 on the list--will be Adcock’s 10-year-old son. The boy, now in protective custody, told authorities he watched the murder from the back of a pickup. If so, he observed an extraordinarily brutal crime.

Four days after Summar disappeared, his body was discovered by a woodcutter five miles from Hawkins Bar, beside an unpaved lumber road known as California 29A. In addition to the stab wounds all over his head and body, he had been beaten severely in the groin and had a broken tooth and cracked ribs. His pants pockets were turned inside-out and his money was missing.

The night of the murder, Hawkins Bar Fire Chief Jerry Flenniken received a report of an apparent stabbing behind the Hawkins Bar Store. He checked there--and down at the campground--but never found anything.

“When I heard later what had happened, I was pretty shocked,” said Flenniken, who knew most of the defendants and called them “mostly homeless, partyer” types. “Seems to me it was a vigilante thing. These people were mad, and so they said, ‘We’re gonna get this guy back.’ ”

Flenniken and most other residents condemn the grisly episode but there are those who say circumstances might have warranted a special sort of rural justice.

“If there was some sort of molesting going on, then I don’t blame those people for doing what they did to the guy,” said Bill Mineau, who mines gold upriver from Hawkins Bar. “I’ve seen plenty of times when the law doesn’t respond to these things so people just have to take matters into their own hands.”

Whatever their opinion, the people of Hawkins Bar remain preoccupied with the murder, which, among other things, prompted the closure of the river campground to overnight use. Patty Niesen, who works at the general store, said “everybody comes running in here the day the local paper comes out, just so they can find out the latest.”

Fifty miles to the east lies the county seat of Weaverville, where the defendants sit in jail, unable to afford bail. Unless the defense succeeds in winning a change of venue, a jury will convene in the town’s 1850s courthouse Feb. 17.

The strain on Trinity County ranges from secretaries who have photocopied 6,000 pages of documents for the dozen lawyers, to Trinity’s lone Superior Court judge, who must respond to myriad motions in the murder case while handling his normal workload.

Until recently, there was another worry--that trial-related costs would bankrupt the cash-strapped county. The state Legislature, however, has agreed to provide special financial help.

From her bookstore across from the courthouse, Elisabeth Hays can watch the sheriff’s van pull up and unload the defendants. Hays, however, says she doesn’t pay much attention to the upcoming trial.

“Most of the people involved in the case, both the (defendants) and the victim, were out of the mainstream,” said Hays, who moved here from Los Angeles. “I don’t want to sound blase about it, but if it had been a teacher or a family of tourists killed, you would have heard a much bigger hue and cry.”

Like other merchants, however, Hays regrets that the murder happened as civic leaders are relying more heavily on tourism to nourish their fragile economy.

“In the next five to 10 years, we expect tourism to be the county’s biggest employer and have the biggest payroll,” said Dale Lackey of the Trinity County Chamber of Commerce. Given that, “we obviously do not want people to think of our area and associate it with a brutal crime that could have happened anywhere.”

Town in Turmoil

A brutal murder in the hamlet of Hawkins Bar has upset residents and stressed the resources of small, remote Trinity County.