Coyote Hunt

In the empty, rolling sand hills of northwest Nebraska, where most roads are simply twin ruts and a 10,000-acre ranch is small, some cattlemen hunt down predatory coyotes with their airplanes. When a 32-year-old ranch hand named Elaine Ellis ran wild with a shotgun and a revolver one night last week, he got the same treatment.

Ellis struck first at midnight. He drove his sedan to the George Mensinger ranch near Merriman on the Niobrara River, got out, walked to the house and hammered on the door. When Mensinger opened it, Ellis killed him with a shotgun blast, pumped out three more shots and then circled around to a kitchen window. Mensinger's 24-year-old wife was at the telephone, baby cradled in one arm, sending an alarm over the party line. Ellis fired again, killed her and wounded the baby.

The Chase. As he drove off, he was stopped by a neighbor named Clifford McDonnell, who had heard the telephone alarm. Ellis fired again and left McDonnell bleeding from a wound in the neck. A few minutes later his car stalled and another neighbor named Deo Gardner and two men drove up beside him in the dark. Answering a question, Ellis shouted: "I hear there's been somebody murdered back up the river." Then he shot and killed Gardner.

By dawn, deputies were blocking the roads, and rancher pilots for miles around were taking to the air to drop warning messages at houses without telephones, and to search roads and back trails. Later in the morning Ellis' car came bumping up the rough trail to the Andy Andersen ranch, 60 miles from the scene of his last killing. The owner, who was reading a note dropped from the air, got into his own car and skidded off to telephone the law as Ellis took refuge in Andersen's barn. Soon airplanes began landing on Andersen's sloping fields, sending cattle scurrying in all directions. By noon 100 heavily armed ranchers had the killer surrounded and at bay.

The Capture. The posse settled down warily to wait for the law. But Ellis set the barn on fire. It burned to smoldering ruins. When the ranchers discovered that Ellis had taken refuge in a tool shed behind it, they opened up with volleys from deer rifles, pistols, shotguns and .225. Six hundred rounds were fired. "Come out!" a rancher yelled. There was no answer. Several hundred more rounds cracked into the shack. Then Ellis, hit by six bullets, and dying, called "I'm through. Come and get me."

He was dragged into the open just as the law arrived. "Did you kill the Mensingers?" he was asked.

"Yes."

"Why did you do it?"

"He bawled me out a few times. I don't know. Just the meanness in me. I've been a bad boy."

Asked if he knew Mrs. Mensinger, he said, "She was a nice kid. She threw a bucket of water over me once, but I wasn't really mad at her."

The Rev. Neal Phipps--who had joined in the shooting--laid aside his shotgun, knelt beside the dying ranch hand and said: "Son, make your peace with God."

Ellis only grunted and turned his head. Straw was piled into Rancher Don Higgens' plane to protect it from bloodstains, and the wounded killer was placed inside. He died shortly after Higgens landed at Valentine, 121 miles away.

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