Copyright 2006 Denver Publishing Company
By TODD HARTMAN and JULIE POPPEN
Rocky Mountain News (Denver)
A federal grand jury has indicted four people in the infamous 1998 arsons atop Vail Mountain, a crime that stunned Colorado for its audacity and pumped up the rag-tag profile of a shadowy class of vandals branded as eco-terrorists.
The indictment, unsealed Friday by prosecutors in Denver, may begin to close the book on one of the state’s most baffling mysteries, one that drew national attention for its strike at one of the country’s glitziest locales, in the heart of Colorado’s high country.
The names identified by the Denver grand jury weren’t a big surprise. Three of them already had been tied to the Vail arsons by an indictment issued in January. That document charged 11 people with conspiring to commit a series of eco-attacks across the West over a five-year span.
The four people specifically charged with burning down Vail’s Two Elk Lodge and seven other buildings in a torching that brought $12 million in losses were Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, 29; Stanislas Gregory Meyerhoff, 28; Josephine Sunshine Overaker, 31; and Rebecca Jeanette Rubin, 33.
None of them has any Colorado ties. Two of the four, Gerlach and Meyerhoff, were arrested last year. Gerlach lived in and around Eugene, Ore. Meyerhoff, who went to high school with Gerlach, had moved away to Charlottesville, Va., and appears by recent court statements to have moved on with his life.
Two others, Overaker and Rubin, are at large. The FBI’s special agent in charge in Denver, Richard C. Powers, said, “We are certain they will be brought forward to face their charges.”
Overaker is a Canadian citizen, according to the FBI, and Rubin also may have Canadian citizenship.
A fifth man, once described by prosecutors as the “mastermind” behind the Vail attacks, committed suicide in an Arizona jail in December. William C. Rodgers, a used bookstore owner in Prescott, Ariz., was arrested Dec. 7 as part of the federal government’s sweep of suspected eco-terrorists late last year.
The Vail arson marked a watershed event in the decades-long history of modern eco-sabotage, raising the bar for a movement dating to the writings of Edward Abbey and the threats of Earth First! to blow up Western dams.
Until then, most environmental sabotage had been carried out against obscure government labs, sawmills or sites known only in small cities and towns.
“What is evident,” explained Jeff Dorschner, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Denver, “is the Two Elks fire received a tremendous amount of publicity because of its magnitude.”
For years, it appeared that law enforcement might never crack the case of who orchestrated and carried out the overnight inferno atop Vail Mountain, an act that for five years stood as the costliest act of eco-terrorism in the country’s history.
But over the past 18 months, court documents suggest that one or two former members of a once close-knit group of eco-vandals began communicating with federal agents.
That apparently led to surreptitious recordings of past saboteurs who incriminated themselves for alleged misdeeds that may have forever remained a secret but for loose lips.
“This indictment is a result of over seven years of hard investigative work,” U.S. Attorney Bill Leone said.
“We are a nation of laws, and we are fortunate to live in a free society. No matter how strongly we feel about any issue or cause, there are peaceful ways to express our views. We simply cannot capitulate to the use of violence as a means of political discourse.”
The action against Vail came at the height of a tense standoff between Vail executives and the state’s environmental community over the resort’s plans to conduct an 885-acre expansion.
Green activists said the move threatened the habitat of the rare Canada lynx - so rare there hadn’t been a documented siting since the early 1970s.
Then, two days after flames engulfed Vail Mountain, a group known as ELF, or the Earth Liberation Front, issued a communique taking credit for the arson, indicating it was a “warning” to Vail to cancel its expansion plans.
“Putting profits ahead of Colorado’s wildlife will not be tolerated,” the ELF statement said.
The public may never know the entire story of what led to the recent indictments if the arsonists reach plea agreements with prosecutors.
Already facing charges for cases in the Pacific Northwest, the Colorado defendants could be wrapped into a global plea deal. But they could also choose to fight the charges.
Defense attorneys for Meyerhoff and Gerlach didn’t return phone calls Friday.
Three of the happiest to hear the news of the indictments were Vail Resorts, which issued a statement praising the development, the Eagle County sheriff’s office, which led the early investigation and former U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis, who reserved significant scorn for the eco-saboteurs throughout his congressional career.
“I mean these people are not Robin Hoods - they committed very aggressive acts of arson, which very easily could have cost someone their life,” he said. “They used that fire as a kind of recruitment incentive for other people to do the same thing.”
In the wake of the fire, mainstream environmental groups castigated the eco-vandals, fearful that the violent acts of extremists would paint more conventional groups with the wrong brush.
To this day, such groups still lament the arsons.
Ryan Bidwell, executive director of Colorado Wild, recalled that at the time of the fire, environmentalists and development advocates were involved in a “good, legitimate discussion” of the threat to lynx habitat.
He said the fire “took the debate away from the issues — all the discussion then was about the crime.”
Indicted by a federal grand jury
Four people have been indicted for the 1998 arsons atop Vail Mountain. A fifth man, William C. Rodgers, described as the “mastermind” of the attacks, committed suicide in December while in an Arizona jail.
* Rebecca Jeanette Rubin, 33, is still at large.
* Josephine Sunshine Overaker, 31, is being sought.
* Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, 29, arrested in ’05.
* Stanislas Gregory Meyerhoff, 28, is in custody.
The charges
A Denver grand jury handed up an eight-count indictment of four people alleged to have “maliciously damaged and destroyed by means of fire” buildings at Vail ski resort in a series of late-night arsons in 1998. The counts, one each for every structure burned, break down as follows:
* Count 1: Two Elk Lodge.
* Count 2: Camp 1 restaurant.
* Count 3: A building that included a ski patrol office and an operator’s shack for ski lift 14 (the Sourdough Lift).
* Count 4: A building that included Vail’s ski patrol headquarters and other facilities.
* Count 5: Buffalo’s restaurant.
* Count 6: A building that included an operator’s shack for ski lift 4 (Mountaintop Express Lift).
* Count 7: The lift 5 building, which also included an operator’s shack for ski lift 5 (High Noon Lift).
* Count 8: A building that included an operator’s shack for ski lift 11 (Northwoods Express Lift).
* Potential penalties: If convicted, the defendants face at least five years and not more than 20 years in federal prison, and fines up to $250,000 for each of the eight counts.
On the trail of eco-terrorists
* Oct. 19, 1998: Arsonists set seven fires atop Vail Mountain, causing $12 million damage. The Earth Liberation Front claims responsibility in an e-mail, mentioning unhappiness with the resort’s “Category III” expansion into what environmentalists called critical lynx habitat.
* January 1999: The FBI targets members of the environmental group Ancient Forest Rescue in Boulder to testify before a grand jury.
* November 1999: Prosecutors decide not to jail Ancient Forest Rescue activists who refuse to name the people who were with them on a camping trip near Vail the night before the fires. No charges are ever brought against the Boulder activists.
* January 2000: The 885-acre Category III expansion of the Vail ski area, now known as Blue Sky Basin, opens ahead of schedule.
* September 2000: A grouse hunter spots four 5-gallon gas cans hidden under a dead spruce tree near the site of the Vail arsons. An FBI spokeswoman described the find as “a break in the case.”
* 2005: People who appear to have once been members of ELF, begin talking to federal agents, according to court documents. They become informants and secretly record conversations that incriminate several others alleged to have been involved in eco-terrorism.
* December 2005: Federal investigators begin a string of arrests of suspected eco-terrorists.
* January 2006: U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales calls a news conference in Washington, D.C., to announce the indictments of 11 alleged eco-terrorists. The Vail fires are mentioned as part of a wide conspiracy in the West to burn down and sabotage government and private facilities.
* May 19, 2006: Four individuals named in the January indictment are charged specifically for the Vail arsons in a grand jury indictment handed up in Denver.