Original subtitles

You go out in the field and you look up in the sky

and you see the stars,

and some of that light that's coming down to your eye

has been traveling for millions of years.

So you look up and you're looking at the past,

and then you look down,

and you're looking at the past.

You know, those dinosaur bones are millions of years old,

and that light left there, maybe at the same time that you're looking.

It's just you're kind of sandwiched in that world,

and it's really... Really a wonderful place being out in a field.

It was a brilliant story,

I mean, if you didn't have to live it like the Larsons did.

It's a good American tale.

Unfortunately, it had a bad ending for a couple of real brilliant paleontologists.

What does that white line mean, Susan?

We'd been digging at the Ruth Mason Quarry since 1979.

The 1990 season, I think we were into the third month.

We'd been working north...

Actually not working at the quarry itself anymore.

We were actually prospecting and looking for fossils.

We were looking for fossils on Sharky Williams'

and his brother Maurice Williams' ranch,

and finding some pretty cool stuff.

And we get up on August 12th, look outside the tent, and it's foggy.

It's kind of a weird thing to have fog on the prairie.

So we got a little bit later start.

We weren't in any big hurry because you couldn't see very well,

and then went out to start loading up the Suburban.

We have a 1975 Suburban, all rusted out.

And I look and the tire's flat.

So I say, "Oh, crap." Well, almost flat. Still had a little bit of air in it.

So I go in the back to get the spare tire,

and the spare tire's flat.

So I pull out the tire pump,

and the tire pump hose is broken.

So we figure, "I guess we better...

"We better head into town

"while we still have enough air in the tire to get there."

We decided, "Well, we're gonna have to go to town."

You know, I'd been out there for four or five weeks.

Going to town, that's okay. I can take it easy for half an hour, an hour.

That's fine with me, but, of course, Susan...

Susan just can't handle that. You know, that's a waste of time, right?

There was the flat tire. I said, "Great.

"You guys go to town. You don't need me. I've got this place I want to look at."

Out there, you need landmarks to find your way around.

And I said, "Okay, it's foggy. You can't see. Make sure you don't walk in a circle."

And two hours later, I was right back where I started,

and I could not believe it.

I just couldn't believe it 'cause I was, like, trying so hard to walk straight.

It was like...

I felt really stupid.

I believe it was the next day when we went back with the video camera

and just kind of reenacted, you know, how I found her.

Anybody who had any idea

of what a fossil versus a rock was would have seen it

'cause there was a lot of broken bones dribbling down.

About eight foot up the side of the cliff, there were three articulated vertebrae

and a couple of other pieces of bone sticking out.

From the debris pile, I picked up scraps

that showed the hollowness and took it with,

'cause I knew if I went back to where they were working,

they wouldn't believe me.

We got back after fixing the tire and we were at the dig site.

We were just finishing up doing stuff, and Susan comes up.

And she opens her hand,

and she's got two pretty small pieces of bone,

only about this big, in her hand.

And I'd never seen the inside of a T-Rex vertebra before,

but I knew exactly that was what she had in her hand,

and I says, "Is there more of it?" She said, "There's a lot more."

So we ran, literally ran back to the site.

I crawl up on the cliff face and I see three articulated vertebrae,

and from that point on,

I'm absolutely certain this is gonna be the best thing we ever found

and it's gonna be a complete T-Rex.

He called up and said,

"Neal, I need you to bring a lot of plaster two-by-fours."

Well, it took me a day to get everything ready,

and I came up, and I got up there with all these materials,

and he took me over to this big cliff,

and he said, "Take a look."

And I looked at it, and I looked at him.

I said, "Is that T-Rex?" He said, "Yes,

"and I think it's all here."

And we haven't started digging or haven't moved anything around yet.

We've just been looking at it and taking some pictures

and trying to figure out how to proceed.

There's a real mass of bones here. Some are caught up in concretion,

but most appear to be really excellently preserved.

And I believe that the tail's going that way and the skull is going this way,

but we're just gonna have to dig it up and see.

Collecting fossils is something that's very timely.

Fossils are discovered because they're weathering out,

because the forces of nature,

rain, winds, freezing, thawing, even snowfall,

have an effect on that fossil.

Every day that it's outside is a day that it's going to destruction.

We started by picking up all these thousands of fragments of bones

and bagging them and labeling them.

Well, the plan of attack is to protect the specimen, first of all,

and then you go above the specimen and dig down to it,

so that you can get all the way around it to remove it from the cliff.

We basically used these ditch-digging tools, picks and shovels,

to dig down that 30 feet

from where I thought we could get back into the cliff face

far enough to uncover what I thought would be the limits of that skeleton.

Probably the hardest work I've ever had to do in my life.

We were doing this all in temperatures around 115 degrees every day.

It was very hard work

but it was very easy to put in a lot of energy into it

because we all wanted to see what the skeleton was going to look like.

Basically, we'd take different sections, So we weren't in each other's way,

and just kind of worked the specimen until we could start removing bones.

You know, and every time somebody found a bone or a fragment,

they just said, "The 'S' bone."

We wouldn't say, "Skull." We didn't want to jinx it.

Pretty early on,

I hit something hard, and so I stopped.

"It's the 'S' word," I said,

thinking, "I bet I hit the skull."

When I got down digging,

and then started really working with the smaller knife,

we found, as we were going down,

is the back of the skull.

And we're getting down and here's this skull taking shape,

and we get out on the side,

and I put Terry to work on cleaning the side of the skull

'cause he's really our best preparator.

Pete let me work on part of the skull in the field, which was amazing.

He's working and uncovering the teeth one by one by one.

It was spectacular.

Teeth like this just sticking right out of the skull.

We're going, "Oh, my God. Look at this thing. Look how huge it is.

"This has gotta be bigger than the one at the American Museum.

"It's huge. It's wonderful."

We had started a long time ago naming particular dinosaurs,

and the name Sue, for Susan Hendrickson, goes down in history,

and I think that's kind of a cool way

to reward those amateurs who make these discoveries.

We were all experienced diggers. You know, it was just a total focused effort.

We would just work into the specimen, remove things that we could,

protect the rest of it,

and then take it out of the ground and get it back into the laboratory,

where you can have a more controlled environment

to take care of the specimen.

The amount of new things that we found

and the amount of scientific information

that we discovered while finding Sue was enormous.

Beautifully preserved, articulated skull,

articulated vertebral column up to the pelvis

with the tail and shoulder blade and all this stuff,

and it's just like, "Holy cow." And wonderful preservation.

Just fantastic bones that were... Just beautiful surface on them.

Every time we were ready to take a bone out

or every time there was some new discovery,

Pete would take this butcher paper out,

and he mapped each and every bone, one on one,

that we found that was excavated.

Pete and I had quite a few discussions, "What would be fair?"

$5,000 is the most that anybody had ever given anyone for a dinosaur,

for any fossil in the ground.

So Pete wrote a check out for him

and a contract that he wanted Maurice to sign.

I showed it to him, and he said, "We don't need to sign anything.

"This is something... A handshake between friends,

"and the $5,000 is fine. I'm happy with that."

And, you know, that was the most that any landowner had ever gotten.

We shook hands, and he was pretty excited about seeing it set up in the museum.

Last phase of getting Sue out of the ground

we used, basically, Egyptian techniques to get this large block.

I mean, one of the blocks weighed probably something close to 10,000 pounds.

There was probably about 10 ton of material, total, that we had to load up.

Once we had the skull and pelvic block and the tail vertebrae and everything else,

we knew we could haul a lot of the stuff on our Bobcat trailer.

We had no idea how we were going to be able to get all these other things.

My brother John had built a tandem-axle trailer earlier that year.

With that and the other pickup truck that we had there,

we were able to load the fossil up.

After we had built pallets underneath the fossil,

we were able to scooch some plywood underneath 'em,

so that we could move it with chains and come-alongs

and get it into the trailers.

It was and still is today the most exciting,

the most wonderful excavation we have ever done,

the most incredible thing we have ever done.

Dinosaurs, for me, are still

one of the most amazing creatures ever to have lived on the planet.

You're touching something that was alive

65, 100, or three or more hundred million years ago.

When you pick up a fossil,

and you're the first ever human being

to touch the remains of that organism,

It's a remarkable feeling.

Dinosaurs are iconic animals.

They represent paleontology in general.

They represent science.

Dinosaurs lived for 150 million years, and they dominated the world for that long,

and yet humans have only been around for three, four, or five.

What are our chances? We seem to be approaching these big problems.

Most of what is to be learned

about the history of life is yet to be discovered.

What's still out there? What's still in the ground?

What some kids might find 100 years from now

will contribute to that greater understanding.

We know nothing about the history of the planet

unless learning it through a paleontologist.

And it's that sense of deep time, real deep time,

that gives you a sense of who you are and how you fit into the scheme of things.

I first fell in love with fossils when I was about four years old.

I picked up this small tooth down on my folks' ranch.

From then on, I just was so fascinated with fossils. I just couldn't stop.

Every day that the weather was good and every day that the weather was great

that was on a weekend, if we were going to school

or in the summertime, Dad would always say,

"Let's go out rock hunting."

We ended up starting this little museum,

and we'd charge the adults in our family five cents.

We had little displays

where we set up the things that we had collected.

Not just fossils and rocks,

but also what we thought were antiques.

We had this horrible hobby that started to captivate every part of our life.

Eventually I decided to really get into paleontology,

and so went to the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City.

Junior year, we went to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show,

and really saw how specimens are purchased by museums

and purchased by private collectors.

And by the time we graduated,

we started this business called Black Hills Minerals

as this Earth science supply house.

Eventually my younger brother Neal,

who was also a student at the School of Mines,

and Bob Farrar, one of his classmates,

started working with us as well.

With the three of us all going to the School of Mines,

we were problems there because

all of us chose not to go into industry.

The first year was terrible, the second year was not so good,

but it was sort of turning into a business.

As we kept going, we kept collecting more and more fossils

and had the idea of, "It probably would work to sell these as display specimens."

In 1978, we were going pretty strong.

We were selling mostly fossils.

We were going out and doing geological exploration.

So by 1979,

we created this new entity

called Black Hills Institute of Geological Research Incorporated

in the center of the Black Hills.

I first met Pete Larson when I was in Peru.

I was down there visiting my friend Kirby Siber,

who was about to go out in the field and collect some fossil whales and, uh...

And he had asked Pete to come down to do that,

and the three of us went.

I had known Susan Hendrickson for about 5 years

before she found the dinosaur Sue.

And Susan was one of those volunteers who came to work at the Ruth Mason Quarry

after we had met in Peru a number of years before.

My attraction to him was his expertise and his enthusiasm

or passion for fossils, which I shared.

Pete is one of the best paleontologists around.

There's a few other people that might be at his level.

There was some romantic involvement at the time

between Susan Hendrickson and I, although that was pretty much over.

That was sort of short-lived and we were, at this point, just friends.

And she was just having one more season of collecting

before she was moving back to Seattle.

He had this whole other part of him, which was the Institute,

and he had a lot of responsibilities.

And that part didn't interest me.

I tried to help him, I commended him,

but I didn't want any part of that in my life.

You know, I kept waiting for more field time,

and he didn't like it if I went in the field by myself

'cause he wanted to go so bad. He didn't want me to go.

We got Sue back to Hill City.

We moved the big blocks into the warehouse,

actually built a room around where we had put Sue.

Started working on this wonderful fossil.

When I was prepping Sue,

I was cloistered like a monk in the back corner of the back building.

Doing preparation, you just... "Just leave me alone," right?

But everybody was in there. There would be school kids in there.

Or another day, there'd be

some scientist guys coming along in there.

I mean, Pete had, like, 30 scientists

working on a major new monograph on Tyrannosaurus Rex,

so you got to suck it up. Pete wants it this way.

He wants this specimen available to everybody.

It was so beautiful.

Just the preservation was incredible. It was just, "Wow."

Everybody knew about Sue.

We hadn't made any secret of the fact that we'd collected her.

We had 2,000 visitors sign this little guest book

that went way in the back in our warehouse to see the skull of Sue.

I was just totally flabbergasted when I saw the specimen.

First of all, the size is just so imposing,

but what I was more amazed by

was what a great job they were doing preparing the specimen.

I'd heard inklings that the Black Hills Institute

boys had found something.

One of the first things I saw was actually, you know, part of the skull of Sue

still encased in matrix.

Sixty-five million years later,

this animal really had the power to give you goose bumps.

To see the look on Pete's face and Neal's face.

Those guys were just like proud papas.

They would inform you. They would go do classes at school for the kids,

so it was very educational for all of us. I learned a lot from that.

Ever since we created that little museum on our parents' ranch,

it's always been our dream to have a museum here in Hill City.

And finding Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex, here's the anchor for the museum.

The whole town is behind us.

It's going to put Hill City on the map

in a way that it's never been on the map before.

Didn't matter how many other projects we had going on.

With Sue, Sue took precedence.

We found out all kinds of cool things about this dinosaur.

Broken and healed bones all over the skeleton.

This animal had a terrible life, a terrible, rough life.

The skull of Sue actually had...

The left side of the lower jaw had been literally ripped out of the socket,

still held together here at the symphysis,

where the two ends of the lower jaw come together in the front,

but it's been torn loose from the socket,

which allows the jaw to open and close.

And the post orbital, the bone directly behind the eye,

was broken and pulled outwards and laying at sort of a weird angle.

So I think that she actually died from the attack ofanotherTyrannosaurus Rex.

That was a big job.

I mean, it took me a year, literally a year,

just to remove individual bones from around the skull, and then...

And then to take that, the giant hip bones, off of the nose.

We finally were able to lift the pelvis off of Sue's skull

in the beginning of May 1992.

Okay. Let's go.

- Up? - Let's go.

Taking that hip off of Sue's skull was critical to doing it right

because you don't have a second chance.

- You okay there, Terry? - Oh!

Okay.

If you think of two big ships, you know,

when you get those kind of weights going on,

one little movement, you don't what's going on.

It could be cracking it all the way through inside.

- Okay, go. - Go.

Go, go, go, go, go, go.

Yeah. That must be where the weight is.

- Yep. - Yep.

- Okay, it's looking good. - We're free here.

- We're free here. - Oh, God.

What am I down to?

Hey, we're loose in the front finally!

- All right. - Yeah!

That moment, when we made that separation,

that was probably the highest point of my life.

- How was that? - Champagne.

Hide it.

Hide it.

There has to be a toast. Who do we toast?

This whole... I don't know.

- Cheers. - Just, "Cheers."

- You ready? - Ready.

- To Sue. - To old Sue.

- Sue. - Sue.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's very good champagne.

Look at this.

I know.

We were riding on top of the world.

We had everything going for us.

Less than a week after that, all hell broke loose.

Bob and I were downstairs. We were both in the prep lab.

We had a buzzer on our door,

so that if anybody came in, it would buzz back in the prep lab

and we could go meet them in the front office.

It was about 7.00 in the morning when the buzzer went off.

We were met by two FBI agents

with a search warrant to take Sue and all records belonging to Sue.

They showed up expecting to seal off the building

and keep anybody from going in.

"Just wait here. We have to get Pete."

They sent me to get Pete, and I was running.

I lived in a trailer house behind the Institute.

"The FBI's here. They're all over the place."

They've got yellow police tape around the main building.

"Do not cross. Police line. Do not cross."

It was hard to know what was really happening at that point.

I go down to the office,

and there's two FBI agents sitting there.

"You've stolen this from federal land,

"and we're coming here to seize this."

I got a phone call from Peter Larson because it wasn't just the FBI.

It was personnel from South Dakota Tech,

it was personnel from other federal agencies,

and it was the National Guard.

The U.S. Attorney at the time, Kevin Schieffer,

got reporters together in the Federal Building in Rapid City

and announced that the seizure was ongoing.

The purpose of our action this morning

is to preserve...

The scientific knowledge and integrity of these fossils.

Then, of course, the entire press corps hopped in their cars,

and we drove to Hill City.

They were supposed to take things related to Sue,

but they took everything.

They went through all of our offices, all of our desks, all of our mail trays,

taking mail opened, unopened.

Somebody called me and said,

"The FBI's got crime scene tape around the Institute, and they're taking Sue."

I hung up the phone, and I went as fast as I could down to the Institute.

I don't know how many agents they had, 30-some people or whatever.

It was just insane.

I didn't even think about it. I grabbed the tape and I go under it.

I just went to the specimen. That was my concern.

I could just see these idiots,

you know, just try to pack up my dinosaur and take it away and ruin it.

How dare they? How dare these people do this?

Unconscionable. I can't imagine somebody being able to do this

here in the United States of America, in a free country.

In order to ensure that this dinosaur could be carefully packed up, we helped.

It was pretty clear that they didn't know what they were doing.

These people didn't know anything.

I mean, most of these guys hardly go out in the field at all.

What do they know about preparing a fossil or packing it or anything?

The Larsons were trying to do a little bit of negotiating.

"Put Sue under lock and key at our place to prevent damage."

I said to Kevin Schieffer,

"You just tell me, and that fossil won't go anywhere.

"It's not like it's going to disappear in a briefcase."

That request was denied.

It is clearly a violation under the Antiquities Act

to remove antiquities from United States lands

without the permission of the United States.

The federal government doesn't show up with the National Guard

and an Assistant or... Pardon me,

an Acting United States Attorney in pancake makeup...

...with the intention of working things out somewhere down the road.

After we got over the initial shock,

those of us who were packing the dinosaur

kind of went into our packing mode,

but towards the end of the day,

it became obvious that something was going on with the town.

People around town noticed.

They noticed all the cop cars. They noticed the police tape.

All of a sudden, there were people with signs

out in front of our building.

It was clear that people were not happy with what was going on.

The protest developed very quickly, so there were a lot of people on the street.

I was working for National Geographic,

and we were gonna take the skull of Sue

and put it into a CAT scan of what they use for the space shuttles

to see if we could see inside the skull of Sue.

And Terry Wentz answered the phone

and he said, "Well, I don't think so."

So I got on the next plane I could, and the place was surrounded by cops.

I mean, you thought that there was a real T. Rex loose on the property.

The next day in, they brought in reinforcements, a lot more people.

The idea was that we were going to load this stuff up

and haul it somewhere.

And when the Director of Military Support, one of the colonels, got down there,

he called and said,

"Hey, General, this is not what we expected. This is a media event.

"We got school kids out here.

"We got parents out here. What should we do?"

And I said, "Well, just go do it."

Save Sue! Don't be cruel! Save Sue!

Don't be cruel! Save Sue!

Save Sue! Save Sue!

All day long, the protestors kept arriving.

Protesting about what the government was doing.

Save Sue! Save Sue!

Save Sue! Save Sue! Save Sue!

Shame on you!

Shame on you! Shame on you!

Kids protesting, adults protesting.

It was not the sort of public-relations event

that, you know, law enforcement likes

because they're taking away this T. Rex

from a very small town that really could use it.

On the third day,

the National Guard had brought up

large equipment, including forklifts and things,

and the crowd had grown by this time.

Leave our Sue!

Leave our Sue! Leave our Sue!

People were so emotionally involved.

The amazing thing, to me, wasn't just us.

The whole town...

The entire town of Hill City

was in mourning when they took that dinosaur away.

Here was a dream that the town had.

It was our dinosaur.

It was our museum. It was our lives

that had been just torn to pieces.

I was in France when they called me.

And, you know, I thought it was a joke.

Couldn't believe it, and I cried.

I was highly emotional,

but from that moment that I heard that the specimen was going to be taken,

my focus was on the specimen.

Legally and all that other crap,

that's not my concern.

My concern was make sure that dinosaur was going to transport,

everything was going to be safe.

There's my... My, uh...

...three children that were here also.

That was very hard for them to understand.

I couldn't explain it to them.

Sue belonged here, and what happened was not right.

You know, it was like a funeral, losing a family member.

It just felt like a nightmare,

like it just wasn't really happening. Just...

The place was a mess.

We, all of a sudden, were a mess.

And they hauled Sue away.

I don't know how Peter did it.

One of the hardest things to watch and be a part of

was knowing that, literally, Peter was in love with that dinosaur.

I grew up in Hill City,

and I lived in Los Angeles at the time Sue was discovered.

In 1992, I was working at Unsolved Mysteries,

a TV show on NBC,

researching cases where people convicted of crimes

insist they were innocent.

And that first day the dinosaur was seized,

Pete called me on the phone in the middle of it all.

He said the FBI was here, and it was dramatic and scary,

and he needed coverage, he needed support.

So I thought, "Well, I'll go cover the story and take a hiatus

"and maybe move away from LA forever."

I didn't know, but I just packed up and bailed back to South Dakota

by the end of the year to cover the story and see what was gonna happen to it.

America's Indian tribes have fought the white man

over many different issues through the years,

but the newest fight is over a dinosaur.

It was a big story and a very unusual story.

To have the federal government come in and seize Sue,

everything exploded.

Controversy tonight...

Controversy surrounding the Institute and their most famous discovery.

It may be the custody battle of the century.

Scientists, Indians, the U.S. government...

You find any fossils, the government may take them away.

Not only has he taken this dinosaur away, but he's taken our research away, too,

every photograph, every record we had about this dinosaur

and the locality where she was found.

Sue was seized pursuant to a search warrant,

but there was never a crime charged.

Pat and I talked about filing suit.

We sued the federal government for return of our property.

The Black Hills Institute said it purchased the fossil from Maurice Williams.

Originally Maurice Williams said that, too, but then he changed his claim,

and he said he had not sold the fossil and that he owned it.

Mr.Williams...

Pete and Neal had made a deal with Maurice Williams for $5,000.

On that Saturday, the day before we finished getting Sue out of the ground,

we gave Maurice Williams a check for $5,000

that said, "For Theropod Sue," on the bottom of the check.

Even though $5,000 may not seem like a lot,

it was a lot of money for our company to spend,

and no one had ever paid that much for an undiscovered fossil before.

We had lots of conversations with Maurice Williams

about what was happening to the dinosaur.

He knew that we were going to bring it back to Hill City.

He was completely in favor of that.

He knew about the museum we were building.

He knew we were going to be preparing the fossil.

That's about the only ones that we have.

Well, it's not the only one.

- Almost. - Almost.

And it's not... Not completely...

I had known people who knew Maurice and Sharky,

and they were colorful and controversial figures in their own right

on the Cheyenne River Reservation.

Numerous people said, "Had we known you were on his ranch,

"we would have warned you."

There began to emerge some controversy

about Sue being collected from Indian land and the ownership issue.

You could not have discovered this Rex

in a worse and potentially legally complicated place.

It was discovered within the exterior boundaries

of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe

on land which was held in trust

for the benefit of Maurice Williams, the landowner.

It wasn't tribal land,

it wasn't federal land,

it was a really...

Sue came out from an absolute legal netherworld.

Indian people were given...

Heads of household were given 160 acres

in what we call the Allotment Acts.

And that was to try

and make people who didn't understand land ownership

be owners of land, but they really didn't own the land.

So there became this concept of trust responsibility,

and nothing ostensibly is supposed to happen to that land

without the approval of the federal government

through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

On the reservations,

the United States holds that land in trust for the individual Indian as the beneficiary.

And the United States has a fiduciary responsibility

to individual Indians and/or their families

that they get the highest and best use out of it.

All across the west, it is a patch-work quilt of laws and regulations

concerning what can and can't be harvested that's paleontological.

You can be all right in this quarter section,

but if you get off a little bit...

Remember, this is before GPS.

If you get off a little bit to the wrong place,

you might be dealing with a whole other set of regulations.

The tribe claimed that because Maurice Williams,

being a member of the tribe,

had not purchased a $100 permit to sell something,

the fossil should be forfeited and therefore they owned the fossil.

And of course the government said that it was government property

and that, that was because of the trust land issue.

The seizure and the subpoena

were the brainchild of Acting U.S. Attorney Kevin Schieffer.

He was a controversial figure as a U.S. Attorney

because he hadn't had a lot of experience practicing law.

He had the ability to drive some people crazy.

I do have a fair amount of litigation experience.

I have not had courtroom experience.

It's a little unclear

as to why Schieffer decided to seize Sue

or decided to become interested in this at all,

whether it began with Maurice Williams or a complaint from the tribe.

Ultimately the decision was Kevin Schieffer's, though,

to decide that this was something that they wanted to do.

Also was shocking from a scientific standpoint,

that anybody would behave so recklessly

with the greatest paleontological find of all time.

If that dinosaur seizure wasn't a publicity stunt,

then I don't know what is.

There could have been a gang in this town

with a warehouse holding a ton of cocaine

and human bodies hanging from the rafters,

and the federal government would not have sent

35 agents and the National Guard.

Just a few of 'em, bumper stickers.

There's some in every vehicle.

We would just like to gain public support

for our cause of getting Sue back to Hill City.

When you get the big foot of the government come in

and do something like that, you better answer

in a way that people can understand that this is wrong.

You know, they just protested for three straight days

in front of the Institute during the raid.

They weren't done. "We want to protest."

Okay. Let's go protest.

Stay back.

Everyone, stay back.

You'll be thrown to the ground and arrested.

We got everything under control here. We don't want any trouble.

We had people from all over the community,

all over the Black Hills who were trying to help,

and it was amazing, the support that we had.

We were fighting on every front that we could think of,

everything that you could think of,

everything from the Sue Freedom Run to petitions that we took to the state capital.

I would talk in front of groups anywhere.

Terry was so involved in this case. I mean, he lived it.

One of the most moving things in my life to see,

this wonderful group of people here

supported us getting Sue back.

The U.S. Attorney, Mr.Kevin Schieffer, made a terrible error

in coming that tragic day on May 14th to Hill City.

The right thing to do in this case would be to return the dinosaur to Hill City.

Whoo! Yes, yes! Whoo!

We got now over 20,000 signatures

on the one petition, the first petition to bring Sue back,

and they're from all 50 states and from 14 other countries.

A lot of people didn't have a lot of money around here,

so they wanted to contribute any way they could do that,

and so there were a lot of fund-raisers, parades, buttons, posters,

a show of maybe there's justice,

because, I think, to me, it was just a huge injustice,

the fact they could even do what they've done.

The custody battle was in full swing,

and it was very dramatic and scary for people.

And as I interviewed Pete and talked with him,

I realized at that time I'd never met anybody like him.

In his single-minded pursuit of what he believed was right,

and also, in the flurry of emotions,

I thought that meant that he was the perfect guy for me.

And so despite the fact that I was writing about him

and he should be my subject,

I broke the first rule of journalism and fell in love with my subject.

So we started dating,

and in our emotional ridiculousness,

got married really quite quickly, within months of my moving here.

But it was okay.

It was okay for what was going on there.

And so we traversed this together,

and I had created for myself

the additional burden of trying to be a journalist

and separate my personal feelings from my job.

Two federal courts have sided with the government,

saying Sue should stay in the box

because there's no proof the dinosaur is being damaged there.

In another federal court,

they're still arguing over who actually owns the bones.

The intensity of reaction while the court case was going on really surprised me.

There were people that I thought were quite reasonable people

who basically

said things about Black Hills that just were not true.

There's no question that S.V. P., the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology,

was aligned against Peter Larson and the Institute

from the beginning and all the way to the end.

I had been a member of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology since the '70s.

The S.V.P. became very active in it, in that they actually sent out two different letters.

One was fully in support of the U.S. Attorney's action

in seizing the dinosaur, and the other one, I think, was saying that,

"Yes, it was kept in a perfectly good place."

Which, you know, how can you say that if you've never seen it?

Many of them have very strong feelings

about whether or not the specimen should be commercially collected or not.

There is a difference

between the academic perspective

of fossil collecting

and the commercial perspective.

There are some people in this profession that really, truly believe that it is...

There's something morally wrong with selling a fossil.

I was indoctrinated as an undergrad

that if you don't have a PhD, you have no right to collect dinosaurs.

I heard about the BHI and Peter Larson collecting fossils,

and I was told, "These are pirates."

And I visited Pete Larson, and I visited the Black Hills Institute,

and they weren't pirates at all.

They had techniques they taught my crew. They were better than my crew.

You have academians, and they have these little fiefdoms.

They built these towers and they all surround themselves

because they're... They're dependent on money

from grants and other institutions to do their work.

And now here's these really great paleontologists

that don't need that system.

She who sold seashells on the seashore was Mary Anning.

She sold fossils. She was a dealer.

And she was one of the highest-ranked ladies in science of the time.

Back in the day, in the early 1900s,

"commercial collectors" were filling museums with specimens

and working hand-in-hand with "academic people."

That was an okay relationship.

Around in the '70s and '80s, that changed.

1980s, we're already seeing this schism

between professional commercial collectors

versus professional research collectors.

This race to discover the Earth's past

is a very exciting one, and people want a piece of it.

Through the pendency of the custody case,

Pete's way of managing stress was to work.

He also was extremely sad.

It was as if, often, he was in mourning.

Sue had become a living entity to me after all our work in the field

and what we were finding out about her life.

And I really missed her when she was gone.

So one way that I was able to

sort of help that was to go and visit her

and to talk with her through the window, looking at the container.

So I could see her, see that, that container's still there,

not moved to some other place in Timbuktu or something.

And just kind of had some little conversations with her.

It was precious. It was...

It was sweet.

She was his person,

and later I would realize she was more of his person

than any other person has ever been and ever will be.

I got to say that dinosaur and Pete Larson were made for each other.

And so he had to go talk to her,

and that was what... How it should be.

Mostly I was trying to reassure her that she wasn't going to rot in that case,

that I was gonna spring her free,

somehow I was going to get her out of there.

As that whole custody battle unfolded,

firstly the tribe lost its own case in tribal court,

which is pretty surprising, but evident that it was a bad claim.

The government actually retracted its claim

because it realized it couldn't claim trust property.

So then it comes down to two people.

Is it Maurice's fossil, or is it Black Hills Institute's fossil?

Every single filing the Institute made,

I really believed would win because it was so clear.

They had purchased it. He had accepted the check.

He had been on videotape talking about it.

It was very clear that he thought he had sold the fossil at the time.

Judge Battey held

that a fossil,

unlike an archeological find,

had become... The bones had become mineralized.

Therefore, the fossil was land.

An individual Indian cannot sell land

that the government holds in trust for him

without the permission

of the federal government to begin with.

So that's what ended it.

Fossils are land.

Judge Battey said actually in his filing

that the sale was null and void.

The federal government took the position that he had no authority himself

to enter into an agreement with the Black Hills Institute.

Peter realized that he could not have his fossil back.

He was devastated.

The judge decided that Sue was real estate.

Sue, the fossil, was real estate.

For Peter, it was uniquely heartbreaking.

Maybe we're done.

Maybe taking

from Peter Larson the sum of all his boyhood dreams

would be enough punishment

to end everything that Schieffer had began.

I first got involved in the dinosaur case, as we called it,

sometime late 1992, early 1993.

Of course they're not gonna like what we're doing.

That's the nature of what we do.

But, hopefully, in a broader spectrum, people can look at it and say,

"Well, I'm glad people can't just go out into the forest or go out onto the parks

"and take these fossils or..."

In this particular case, "Or steal stuff off some land,

"and somebody's going to do something about it."

Well, we're the somebody that does something about it.

After the seizure of the Sue specimen,

we continued to look at this issue

not from a Park Service jurisdiction perspective,

but more from the circumstances of business practices

in terms of collecting on public lands.

You really can't do anything in any kind of a business without money.

What monetary transactions happened

during the time that this enterprise had that fossil,

and then what did they do with that fossil?

Sell it? What happened to that money?

And then how we could assemble the evidence around that fossil

to see whether there's something there that's wrong,

chargeable, what more needs to be investigated.

FBI agents arrived here in Hill City.

They presented the Black Hills Institute with a court order.

That order demanded the release of more information.

But the people at the Institute have another name for it.

They call it harassment.

This should not be allowed to happen.

This is the United States of America.

So far, no criminal charges have been filed in the case.

Members of the Institute say they're innocent

and are hoping that a new administration

will put an end to their legal fight over Sue.

Institute officials thought their problems were over

when Kevin Schieffer was replaced as U.S. Attorney,

but apparently they continue to be the target of the federal government.

We have a federal search warrant issued by the U.S. District Court,

and we're serving a search warrant.

Enormous amount of money that the government's spending

to put one person out...

One group of people out of business that's so vital to a community.

It's been nearly 18 months since Sue was seized from this warehouse,

and still no charges have been filed against the Institute.

Allow us some rights. Charge us with something,

and let's go to court. Let 12 people decide.

I couldn't give them any information

to help incriminate people at Black Hills Institute.

They thought I was going to be able tell them

all sorts of terrible things the Institute did.

Well, they didn't do anything wrong.

They talked to my attorney about,

"You better get your guy in and bring him on in,

"or, you know, last chance happening pretty soon."

And my attorney says, "He just doesn't have anything to tell you."

For 3 years, I had no contact with the Institute.

That's horrible. I mean, I considered them best friends,

and I couldn't call them up.

Sue was probably the impetus

for the government following up with a criminal prosecution.

Sue wasn't a part of what we were looking at or what was being looked at

as far as potential criminal violations.

There were so many bones,

so many animals, so many invertebrates

that were taken off from public lands,

taken internationally, sold internationally.

There was way more than we could have ever investigated.

The case was never wanting for not having Sue.

Because so much material had been seized,

I think everybody thought that there would be a massive indictment.

Tell me a little bit about today's indictment.

What alleged activity are we exactly talking about?

This indictment charges the theft of fossils

off a number of different types of federal land.

There are also charges in there that pertain to money laundering,

structuring of currency transactions,

false statements made to various government agencies.

The indictments were an avalanche of charges,

and it was just a massive document,

and it looked like a deathblow to the Institute.

The government went just nuts or something, you know?

I mean, they tried...

I guess they just threw everything in and hoped something would stick.

If you add up the time to serve for each of those counts,

it comes to 353 years for me,

which is longer than Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced to prison for,

and he killed and ate, like, 13 people.

You know, it doesn't make sense.

A lot of these accusations are things that we know were legal.

Thirty-eight felony indictments for collecting fossils?

It totally blew me apart.

I'm used to fixing things, and this was unfixable,

and it was so stupid.

Once you start to understand the indictments,

basically this is what they said.

Pretend we're in Wyoming

and we're standing in the middle of the prairie,

and let's assume for a moment

that the fence is in the right place.

You're standing on this side of the fence. The government says right over there,

on the other side of the fence, is this fabulous fossil,

and they're basically saying

that Pete and Neal and Bob and whoever was out there would go,

step over the fence,

wrongly, knowingly pick up the fossil that they're not supposed to pick up,

carry it back over the fence, put it in their car.

When they drive from Wyoming to South Dakota,

they then have conducted an illegal act, which is called

the interstate transportation of stolen property.

They get back to the Institute.

They would make a phone call, send a fax, maybe to Japan, and say,

"We found the thing that you were looking for.

"Do you want to buy it?"

Well, that's wire fraud.

And then if the Japanese museum were to purchase that fossil

and the guys would put that money in the bank, that's money laundering.

So basically the guys were called conspirators

who were creating this very elaborate scheme

to intentionally steal things and sell them illegally.

Mafioso master criminals, Pete, Neal, and Bob.

Yeah, they tried to paint a picture that was...

I mean, you know, they're...

Pete and Neal are a couple of kids

that learned how to love fossil collecting as kids on the ranch.

To think that all of a sudden they decided

to become thieves or something is just insane.

As the months went by,

things seemed to get darker and darker and darker.

For quite a while, we'd hoped that they'll gain their senses

and this'll just go away.

Because it was so hotly contested along the way,

I didn't think there would be any chance that this case would settle before trial.

By late summer of '94, there were serious discussions

that were going on with the U.S. Attorney's office

for a possible resolution.

I go out on my step one morning

and bring the Rapid City Journal in

and have a cup of coffee, and right on the front page

is the plea agreement announced.

Somebody spilled their guts in front of Hugh O'Gara,

and he might as well have taken a gun and shot us.

The article itself suggested capitulation

on the part of the government.

You never get a good deal done

if somebody is going to be cast as having folded their tent.

Anybody who would publish that should know better.

So I called Hugh O'Gara, and I just said, "What were you thinking?

"How could you do that?"

And he was near tears on the phone.

He would not answer me.

Hugh would never... Obviously, would not tell me who that source was.

I wouldn't even ask him.

The next morning,

the judge called all the attorneys into chambers.

He went down the line and made each of us say

that we were not responsible for the leak.

He felt that the principals at least deserved to go to jail.

He said that he would not accept the plea.

He had prejudged the case, and under two federal statutes

a judge is obligated to remove themselves

from sitting and hearing the rest of the case.

So we filed immediately

our second recusal motion, asking the judge to step down.

The thing that seems to upset Judge Battey the most

is not whether he's fair,

but to be challenged that he's not being fair.

So he immediately denied that motion.

I knew this case was going to trial

the day the Hugh O'Gara article was published in the Rapid City Journal.

I'm not afraid of 12 people, a jury of 12 people of our peers.

I know that they'll look at this case and they'll see the ridiculous way

in which the government is behaving, and they will vindicate us.

We're innocent of all the things that we're charged with.

So in the courtroom,

of course, right in front is Judge Battey in the bench.

Off to the left is the jury, 12 jurors, two alternates,

a large space in between where the lawyers

get to pace and walk and show exhibits and things,

and then we have the prosecution, which had at times two or three lawyers.

On our side, there was a lawyer for each defendant,

so there are six lawyers and five defendants.

The sixth defendant, of course, being the Black Hills Institute.

Our trial was, and still is, the largest criminal case

that's ever been tried in South Dakota.

You cannot say the word "Sue" in the trial.

I mean, the jurors were going, "What happened to Sue?

"That's why they got these guys in the court system, right?"

The logistics of this trial were incomprehensible.

The Institute has collected maybe a million fossils.

This indictment covers 14 of them,

and those 14 fossils were collected from seven sites.

In seven cases,

in all the years these guys have been out in the field,

they are accused of being in the wrong place.

The government would simply have their officials come in

of whatever agency was going to be taking the lead for that particular site

and would say, "I found where the specimen was collected.

"I knew, therefore, it was on government land."

To me, it just emphasized the ridiculous nature of this whole thing.

You know, I mean, if it's 200 feet over

and you don't know where you are, it would have been okay?

His job had been to appraise the fossils that had been seized in the case,

and his evaluations would be incredibly important

because they determined whether a given count was a misdemeanor or a felony.

It was pretty easy in cross-examination

to discover that the man had not opened the field jackets.

He was telling us the values of things he had not even looked at.

Pete and I, on one of our trips to Peru, We were taking $15,000 in cash

because down there you can't use credit cards or anything else.

And he withdrew $15,000 from the bank, and we split it up.

Just in case one person got robbed, at least they wouldn't lose everything.

Susan Hendrickson carried 8,000

and I carried $7,000 down one of the trips, of cash.

We were building a museum, paying for the bricks and mortar

and doing the work ourselves with our Swiss colleagues.

In Japan, they.. The museums pay in cash.

They always have. Didn't want to carry bundles of cash on the plane,

so we went to a bank and put it in traveler's checks.

They were all restrictively endorsed traveler's checks,

all stamped for deposit only, deposited in the bank. Paid taxes on them.

Prosecution had four different witnesses,

all of whom testified that restrictively endorsed traveler's checks

do not need to be declared.

What struck me about the prosecution's case

was how complex it was.

People had to understand the arcane ins and outs

of bringing traveler's checks into the country

and latitudes and longitudes on public lands.

And I think they did it in an organized way,

but it was a very, very complicated argument.

When the prosecution rested,

I felt we had put on the evidence that we had.

We had their own pictures of them taking these fossils.

We had their own field notes of them collecting these fossils.

We had given it 100% of our effort to show what they did.

As the defense proceeded to present

many fewer witnesses to say,

"Look, it's not that complicated.

"We were collecting fossils. We thought we had permission to be there.

"In this case, we weren't where you thought we were.

"In this case, we were. It's that simple."

As we were approaching the end of the trial, Neal and I both felt

that it was important for him to testify.

Three-and-a-half days, I was on the witness stand,

and for three-and-a-half days,

I swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

Pete ended up not testifying.

State had not proven its case.

The state doesn't prove their case, your client doesn't take the stand, period.

And so on the advice of counsel, I did not testify.

The jury came back today

in the Hill City fossil hunter federal criminal trial.

The jury said over and over again

either not guilty or no unanimous verdict could be reached.

Of over 150 charges,

the jury agreed to convict only 13 times,

and five of those convictions are for misdemeanor crimes.

So here is how the convictions break down.

Pete Larson, co-owner and founder of the Institute,

is convicted on two counts of misdemeanor thefts

and two felony counts of illegally transporting money

in and out of the country.

Brother Neal Larson found guilty of one misdemeanor theft.

The jury either acquitted Neal or couldn't agree on a verdict for the others.

Bob Farrar, a third co-owner of the Institute,

convicted of two felonies,

making false statements to customs officials.

And the Black Hills Institute as a corporation

is convicted of two misdemeanor thefts, a felony theft,

and twice making false statements to customs officials.

The jury also found the Institute

guilty of bringing goods into the States by making a false statement.

Defendants Eddie Cole and Terry Wentz were not convicted on any charges.

As the verdict was announced, it was almost impossible to believe

that the defense hadn't scored a great victory.

However, there were some fairly significant felony convictions.

The expression, "You could have knocked me over with a feather..."

You could have knocked me over with a feather.

Four times guilty,

and I'm trying to look and see, what is Pat saying?

"Don't look at it." Then he says,

"You follow me out of this courtroom, and I don't want you to say one word."

We got on the elevator, just me and Pete.

Hit one. Started to go down. Pete said, "I'm finished."

He said, "These convictions will completely destroy the Institute."

I opened up my suit and I said, "I got the best prop in the entire world."

Duffy, as soon as he hit the door, had a big ol' cigar in his mouth,

and as he's kind of holding fort with the media,

he's puffing away on his cigar, saying

that he had won the case, when he pretty much had to know,

at that moment in time, that at least his defendant

was gonna be going to jail for a time

and was gonna come away from it a convicted felon.

What I think the cigar did

was just provide a graphic representation,

easy for anyone to understand, that all was not lost,

that the word "guilty" did not mean the end of the world,

and that the town's, you know, favorite paleontologists were okay.

I talked to some jurors after the trail.

Some of them were near tears

when I interviewed them, about how they had hoped

they could acquit on every single charge.

I believed they had to have something to take this to trial,

and I spend the whole trial waiting for that something.

Without a doubt,

the majority of the jurors

wanted this whole case dropped and put away.

Maurice Williams, the rancher who found Sue,

has received at least six offers to purchase the T-Rex.

Since the courts determined that the fossil is part of Williams' trust property,

any purchase must be approved by the federal government.

Since Sue was seized by federal agents in 1992,

the fossil has been stored at the School of Mines.

My first contact with Mr.Maurice Williams

was when he came to Aberdeen for a series of meetings

to discuss what he should do with this fossil.

The idea that I had was to convene,

like, a panel of paleontologists

to do an in-depth study of this fossil

with the hope that it would end up in a museum somewhere.

But in the meantime, while this was being discussed,

Mr.Williams decided that he would rather sell the fossil.

Maurice Williams had a stack of proposals

from all sorts of people all over the place.

I mean, everybody wanted it.

I called up Maurice and I said,

"I'm going to come out to South Dakota if you want,

"and I'll visit with you," and he said, "Great."

And I actually visited the boxes in which Sue was located

in the South Dakota School of Mines

with Maurice's family, who had never actually been there.

This was the first time they'd actually seen Sue.

What one really saw inside that sort of garage area

was this extraordinary,

almost Citizen Kane vision of boxes and boxes and boxes.

Maurice and I had numerous conversations.

We talked about the responsibility involved

in dealing with this extraordinary fossil.

Nothing quite like it had ever been sold before.

It had to go to the right place,

but adjudicating which place was the right place was complicated,

and the auction process, in fact, could help resolve that.

We're going into court. We'd already had an indication

that the judge wasn't too pleased with us because we asked him to recuse himself.

It was pretty clear that Judge Battey was irritated by the defense.

We had to go back to the same tables

with our attorneys and sit there, and then stand up

as Judge Battey sentenced us.

He also wanted to hear that we were sorry for what we had done.

For Peter Larson,

recommended guideline range

for the two felonies of which he was convicted

was zero to six months.

It really looked like the sentence would be minimal, probably probation.

When he did come down with his sentence,

he enhanced it, so instead of zero to six months,

he sentenced me to two years in prison and two years probation.

To send him to jail, to prison for two years for this offense

was absolutely no justification for it.

Indefensible, ugly behavior.

This is justice? This is, you know, the country we live in?

Every geographic photographer in the last 30 years would be in jail.

You know, you're coming back with $10,000.

Well, you reported it going in. You come back out.

Do you report it? No, because they're not countersigned.

The reason the judge did is because

he had been urged, he had been convinced by guys with PhDs

at university museums that it had to be done,

for the safety of our science and our fossils, and that was so totally wrong.

Peter Larson was made an example...

...with that sentence.

I don't have a real good recollection of those...

Those next few hours, I guess you might say.

A federal judge in Rapid City today sentenced Peter Larson

to two years in prison and a $5,000 fine.

Larson was found guilty last year of charges

connected to his commercial fossil-hunting business in Hill City.

It's the final chapter in the case that began

with the discovery of Sue, the most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex.

I was to turn myself in at the gate,

the same prison that Timothy McVeigh was and John Gotti.

And I was using a cane. I could barely walk.

Just a few months before that, broken my leg quite badly.

When I surrendered at the gate, they said, "We're gonna take your cane."

I said, "If you take my cane, I'm going to fall over."

Because I really couldn't stand without my cane.

And they would say, "Well, let me see."

And so he's stumbling around, and it was pitiful.

It was so insulting. I just felt so bad for him.

And I was totally powerless.

There's nothing you can do.

She was not next to tears.

She was way past that.

I just... It broke my heart.

There was finally a time when the man said, "Get out of here."

So I drove around him,

and then I couldn't see him anymore.

And the only choice you have is to go out the driveway

and turn on the desolate road

and drive 10 hours,

you know, home.

I think I screamed for about 10 minutes,

driving.

It was wild. I didn't have any other choice.

I had to get it out. It was hard.

It was the hardest thing I ever did.

Ever.

The guard who was there filling out the paperwork

said, "Have you seen this?"

And I said, "Seen what?" And he said,

"Come here." And he looked at the piece of paper,

and it said, "Reason for incarceration, failure to fill out forms."

And he said, "Man, you must have really pissed somebody off."

Prison was very surreal.

Um...

The thing about prison is not the fact that you're in prison,

so much as you are kept from your family and your friends.

After a couple of weeks,

I said, "I have an idea.

"They used to have a little thing here that they called Saturday morning lectures

"and people who would give lectures.

"They aren't doing that anymore. I'd like to start that up again.

"We've got lawyers. We've got doctors.

"We've got physical therapists. We've got realtors.

"We've got drug dealers, too, and counterfeiters

"and all kinds of things like that,

"but these drug dealers,

"who've never had a different job in their life,

"I think it would be helpful

"for them to learn how to do these other things."

We went down there. You have to get clearance,

and, you know, it's like you're surrounded by all these...

You know, he's got a uniform with the, you know, numbers on it and stuff.

He says, "Well, I'm leading the debate club,

"and I have a paleontological club that I'm working on.

"They have some great, you know, minerals around here."

He was teaching the prisoners how to, you know, do paleontology

right there on the prison grounds.

That's what it's like with Pete.

I mean, he will find the beauty in everything around him.

The other inmates loved him,

and it was very clear that they protected him.

Not like in a movie, where they beat people up for him,

but just they took care of him in some way,

like they just felt a proprietary interest

for him, like he was special,

and it was very sweet to see that they saw who he was.

When finally the day came,

I'm riding all night long on this bus that stops every five minutes.

I couldn't go pick up Pete.

He had to get on a bus, a public bus.

'Cause you're still technically in prison.

I'm still serving my sentence.

Riding in the bus,

even though it was driving all night long,

was great.

It was my first taste of freedom for 1 8 months, where I'm out of this prison.

And finally, in the morning of the next day, I arrive in Rapid City.

Kristin was standing there, and she just told everybody,

"Stand back because this is gonna take some time."

It was great. It was great. He was back home.

I mean, he was under house arrest, but he was back home. We could see him.

Eventually I'm released from the halfway house

to home confinement, where I can only go from home to work,

so I get to walk across the alley every morning

and across the alley back home at night, and that's it.

When Pete got out of prison, he was not the person he was when he left.

He was very reclusive. He was very withdrawn.

He had to reorient

to normal interactions with people.

The Institute was not the happy place that it sometimes is.

Things were a little gloomier. We didn't...

Still didn't know how the long-term effects of this would leave us.

We just had to keep plugging along

and try to cope as well as we could.

While I was in prison, Sue was also still in prison,

and there were rumors

that Sue was gonna be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

It really was obvious to me by that time

that the only way to get her away from Maurice Williams

was through Sotheby's.

All of us were aware that the auction was taking place.

It would probably sell for $1 or $2 million.

The big fear was that it was going to be sold to some private individual.

I know there were a lot of people concerned that it might be bought

by an institution in a foreign country.

That was a big concern with the media,

was that it was gonna be sold and lost to science

and sold and put in a private room someplace.

We always felt an extraordinary obligation to get this fossil to the right home.

Clearly there were a lot of really interested parties

that were hoping and praying they had a shot.

We had dreams after the auction started developing

that perhaps we could buy her back.

A wonderful philanthropist from our area, Stan Adelstein,

really wanted to help get Sue back to South Dakota.

In visiting with Pete, I was fascinated with the possibility

that we'd have this fantastic dinosaur back in the state where she belonged.

Stan came ready and willing to spend

1.2 million of his own money.

I just had hopes we could make it work.

There's still hope Sue will make it back home.

Stanford Adelstein will bid on Sue and try to bring her home to the Black Hills.

Sue, the dinosaur that goes on the auction block tomorrow,

has traveled a rocky road since she was found.

Right now, Larson's heart is broken.

He's lost his most important find and cannot even see her sold

because Larson is under house arrest.

And I'm still only on work release.

So they asked me to go out there.

So they flew me out to New York,

and I helped them, kind of, unpack some of the bones.

So much was still in jackets.

We left those in jackets. We thought that was,

first of all, the right thing to do scientifically,

but also it looked fascinating, absolutely fascinating,

and, of course, the centerpiece of it all

was that astonishing skull, absolutely amazing.

Kristin and Stan Adelstein are there.

They're going to try to buy the dinosaur for us.

And Terry Wentz is there, you know,

the guy who fought for this dinosaur forever.

Susan Hendrickson is there.

Everybody's anticipating this auction.

I'm thinking, "We have a chance. We have a chance."

The day of the auction,

the place is just absolutely full of excitement.

Television cameras everywhere.

A lot of reporters. The room was completely full.

Maurice Williams was in a private room

up above the auction area, so he could watch everything going on.

Sotheby's had arranged for one of the people

who would normally be taking bids

to give me a running detail on the telephone

about what was happening at the auction.

I was at the Institute, too.

I could not bear to listen to the phone.

It was too much.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Sotheby's.

We have for auction today the fossil of a Tyrannosaurus Rex

known as Sue...

...the property of the United States of America

in trust of Maurice Williams of Faith, South Dakota.

And now let us, if we're all ready, begin competition

for Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

And I begin with a bid of $500,000.

Now bidding at $500,000.

Now bidding at 500... $600,000.

$700,000. Now at seven, at $700,000.

Now bidding $800,000. Now bidding eight.

$900,000. Now bidding at nine.

At $900,000. Now bidding at nine.

At $900,000 now.

Two bids at $1 million,

one in the center, one in the back.

It's in the center halfway up

at $1 million. Now bidding at one million.

At $1 million. Now bidding at $1 million.

Now 1.1 million...

...on the telephone up here.

At 7.4.

Is there any advance over 7.4?

$7,400,000 on the telephone up front then.

$7,400,000 then.

Fair warning.

- Seven million... - 7.5.

$7,500,000.

$7,600,000.

Seven million, six.

$7,600,000.

Fair warning then

at $7,600,000 up here.

$7.6 million.

Once the bidding was done, you didn't know immediately who it was.

Everybody's looking around, saying, "Okay, who's gonna come forward?"

The bidding was exciting

despite the fact that I was horrified that it was happening.

Raised my paddle twice, and then I was out of it.

There it went. Pssh.

Completely shocking.

Sue sold that fast and the price went that high.

I wasn't shocked that it went that high.

I think it's worth more than that.

It's the most by far any fossil had ever sold for,

and although I'm sad, I'm very sad we couldn't get it,

I'm thinking, "Okay, this...

"This is a statement about Black Hills Institute and the people.

"You guys did a good job."

...your new home on the shores of Lake Michigan.

That is, of course, in Chicago

at the renowned Field Museum of Natural History.

Sue's bones went on the auction block

at Sotheby's auction house in New York.

Bidding started at 500,000

and ended at 7.6 million, but totaled 8.4 million

after a fee to the auction house.

McDonald's and the Walt Disney Company helped foot the bill,

and the Field Museum of Natural History reaps the benefits.

South Dakotans say she should have stayed here.

Maurice Williams was there in the building,

and I glanced up at him, this man, supported by our government

in receiving seven-point-whatever-it-was million dollars,

but that fossil should have stayed in her hometown museum.

If she wasn't going to be in Black Hills,

where she morally should be, Field Museum was a good place.

This was just the kind of place

that we felt Sue had to go to.

My reaction was relief that, that specimen

wound up where the public and the scientific community will have access to it.

I think it's, you know, probably the second-best place she could have been.

It's going to go where millions of people will see her.

She's not gonna be in prison anymore.

Sue is free, and people can see her,

and they can get the same excitement that I have for her

and they can love her just like I do.

To me, that dinosaur still belongs in Hill City.

Pete's the kind of guy that can go out

and then find another half-a-dozen more T. rexes,

but there was only one Sue.

In your lifetime, you don't hope to find something that good,

but we did, and it's still unbelievable to me.

It was time for Sue's unveiling finally, which, of course, you can imagine,

Pete's most exciting moment, to be able to be reunited with Sue.

He wasn't invited.

Six, five, four, three,

two, one!

We go through what happened and the negative of that,

but there's another negative.

It's the negative of what never happened and what could have happened,

and it's a damn shame.

Chicago has a wonderful dinosaur. They love it, but they don't love it

the way South Dakotans would have loved that dinosaur.