Grisly Accusations in Boys’ Assault, Murder Cases Rock Close Mont. Town

The three boys are ready to describe what happened in Nathaniel Bar-Jonah’s cramped, smelly apartment on the edge of the Montana plains. How the oldest one was locked in the bedroom and forced to undress. How his 9-year-old cousin had a rope put around his neck and was hoisted up on a pulley to the kitchen ceiling. How he dangled there, naked and choking, until the breath was nearly gone out of him.

But the events these boys are preparing to detail in Bar-Jonah’s sexual assault and kidnapping trial that opened here Tuesday are only part of the story. In May, another jury will hear what police found when they searched Bar-Jonah’s home, looking for clues to what happened to 10-year-old Zachary Ramsay, missing since 1996.

They found a list with the names of 23 boys, including two of the boys allegedly assaulted at his apartment, and Ramsay’s. They found human bone fragments in his garage. And they found coded, handwritten notes that often referred to--and this is where the case took a turn for the worse--food.

“Barbecued kid,” said one of them. “Little boy stew.” And, “Lunch is served on the patio with roasted child.”

There may be a day when a town like Great Falls, Mont., where Bar-Jonah sold toys at flea markets and out of his garage for nine years, is ready to deal with something like that. But it isn’t now. Certain that he would never get a fair trial in a community that barely sees a murder a year, court officials moved this week’s sexual assault trial 150 miles away to Butte.

Bar-Jonah’s other trial on charges that he killed the Ramsay boy and served the remains to his neighbors will be held in Missoula, on the other side of the Rocky Mountains.

“We’re a small, close community. We’re only 60,000 people,” said Cascade County prosecutor Brant Light, who is trying both cases. “And when you lose a child walking to school, that may be something that happens elsewhere, but it doesn’t happen in Great Falls, Mont. It really struck the heart of people.”

‘We Have a Good Defense,’ Lawyer Says

The 45-year-old fast-food cook has pleaded not guilty in both cases. “He didn’t do it,” his attorney Don Vernay said outside the courtroom Tuesday. “At this stage, we feel the case [against him] for a number of reasons is not very strong. We have a good defense, and we’re going to pursue it.”

The 213-member jury pool assembled at the county courthouse in this historic mining town is the largest ever called in a state court case in Montana. After 28 jurors were dismissed for personal hardships by District Judge Kenneth Neill, lawyers began questioning individual jurors, a process that is expected to take most of this week.

If convicted on the three counts of sexual assault, one count of aggravated kidnapping and one count of assault with a weapon, Bar Jonah could face up to 330 years in prison--a severe enough sentence that prosecutors say they may not seek the death penalty in the murder case, for which the evidence is far more circumstantial.

Gruesome Allegations From Acquaintances

The case, played out in this wind-swept prairie town in the heart of Montana wheat country, has assumed operatic proportions.

There is the acquaintance, Debbra Baker, who came forward to say that Bar-Jonah had cooked spaghetti sauce for her and her sons that he said was made with venison. “I told him I know what venison tastes like, and this was spoiled. It tasted funny. He got mad and took the whole thing out to the trash,” Baker recalled in an interview this week.

There is the man who lived next door to Bar-Jonah’s apartment, Doug McGiboney, who had to take the new next-door neighbor’s cat after the couple moved into Bar-Jonah’s unit because the cat refused to go into the residence. “They had the apartment exorcised, and . . . the cat went back in after that,” McGiboney said.

There is Bar-Jonah himself, a heavyset, sweet-faced man whose psychologists have said has violent fantasies that are behind his propensity for strangling or sitting on little boys until they can’t breathe. For years, he operated what neighbors called a child’s paradise in his garage, full of “Star Wars” action figures, trading cards and Freddy Krueger dolls.

Throughout this week’s court proceedings, Bar-Jonah sat impassively at the counsel table, dressed in khaki slacks, a blue sport coat and white athletic shoes, his double chin tucked into his blue shirt and tie.

In a last will and testament he sent to the Great Falls Tribune after his arrest, Bar-Jonah entreated the public to “celebrate my death” if prosecutors seek the death penalty against him. “I mean party on dude for I’m going to a place where there is no more pain and sorrow,” he wrote. “Gee, it sure sounds like heaven time. Ooops! You know what? It is! Silly me!”

Bar-Jonah, born as David Brown, had a long history with the Massachusetts legal system before coming to Montana. In 1975 and again in 1977, he pleaded guilty to dressing as a police officer and abducting young boys, repeatedly strangling his victims, leaving them barely alive.

“I took the larger boy into the woods,” he told police after the 1977 attack. “I started strangling this boy and after three or four seconds, he went limp. I assumed he was dead. I went back and got the smaller boy out of the car and started strangling him. I stopped strangling him because I realized the stupidness of what I was doing.”

He was sentenced to 18 to 20 years in jail, spending all but two of it in a Massachusetts treatment center for sexual offenders. He then changed his name to Nathaniel Bar-Jonah, a Jewish name, telling his therapists he wanted to know what it felt like to be persecuted.

Though doctors there at the center documented a history of torture and cannibalism fantasies, two psychologists believed in him and recommended that he be given a chance to try life on the outside.

Forty-three days after his release in July 1991, Bar-Jonah was arrested after getting into a car with a 7-year-old boy and sitting on his leg. The judge agreed to a suspended sentence, with the understanding that he would move to live with his mother in Great Falls.

Prosecutors say Bar-Jonah, who worked a variety of odd jobs, had a job shoveling snow near the alley where Zachary Ramsay walked to school. One witness says Ramsay was in the company of a man on the day he disappeared. Ramsay was crying, the witness said, and the man “seemed to be giving him a hard time.”

But there is no witness, no physical evidence, and Ramsay’s body has never been found, hence a case prosecutors admit will be difficult to prove.

That is why Light says he is focusing so many resources on this week’s trial. If convicted on the assault charges, Bar-Jonah could be facing effectively as much time as with a murder conviction.

Ramsay’s mother, Rachel Howard, is not pressing for a conviction in that case. “I still believe my son’s alive, and until otherwise proven, I will persist in that belief. God has shown me too many times, miracles can happen,” Howard said.

Baker, for her part, feels blessed that she never let her son Lucas play alone with Bar-Jonah, despite his repeated requests to take him on weekend trips. Now she is ready to testify about Bar-Jonah’s venison meal--one of several meals of spaghetti sauce, stew and “deer burgers” served to family and friends, police believe, that allowed Bar-Jonah to dispose of Ramsay’s body.

“Did I eat it? I try not to think about it,” Baker said, her voice trailing off. “Because I think it would drive me insane. Because I think it could have been Lucas.”