When Scot Key retired in 2008 after serving 12 years as district attorney, he said of Lincoln County, “In the decades prior, the county was ridiculed as the unsolved murder capital of the world.”
One of those unsolved murders was that of 16-year-old Katrina Chavez. She was a star at Hondo High School, a cheerleader, a volleyball player and a basketball player. “She ran everywhere,” one of her friends recalled. On the afternoon of her death she was supposed to drive to Cloudcroft to receive her second consecutive all-district basketball award. But instead, on February 20, 1988, she was strangled and drowned in the Hondo River near her home.
The account of that unsolved and forgotten killing (I could find no reference to it during a lengthy internet search) forms the most intense section of, The Enchantment of New Mexico, a new book by Dixie Boyle, a former writer for The Independent.
Doyle’s day job is as a ranger for the Cibola National Forest. She spends much of her time, from spring to fall, in fire towers, especially the one at Capilla Peak in the Manzano Mountains.
There is nothing like having months of solitude to fire up the creative imagination, and that’s exactly what Dixie Boyle has had for many years. This new book, her second, is the product of solitude, contemplation, research and experience, backed up by interviews with colleagues and old-timers.
Eleven of the 13 chapters in this book derive from her research into the fascinating oddities of New Mexico’s past, including biographies of local luminaries such as Robert J. Saul, histories of villages in the Manzano Mountains, and legends of gold and ghosts.
But the two most dramatic segments come right from her heart as well as from her life. One chapter describes her work as a fire watcher at Capilla Peak, where she came within harrowing minutes of being incinerated alive.
The other moving and powerful segment recounts the unsolved murder of Katrina Chavez, one of her students when she was teaching and coaching volleyball in the high school in the Lincoln County village of Hondo. “Her murder has haunted me all these years,” Doyle writes.
Boyle follows the Chavez section with a description of another unsolved local murder, this one of Steve Sandlin, an honest policeman in Mountainair. He was shot to death inside the police station in 1988, a death that was featured on the TV show “Unsolved Mysteries.”
“In the 1980s, it has been proven that the Mountainair Police Department was corrupt and allowed many crimes to pass with no prosecution of those who were guilty,” Doyle comments. “The ‘hippie era’ was winding down, but there were still those who grew marijuana in the foothills of the Manzano Mountains. More than one person had extensive marijuana fields. Some of these men were not opposed to violence when protecting their fields. They would hang out at the Rosebud Saloon on Main street and openly discuss their crops.”
Doyle’s personal relationship to the dramatic narratives of the chapters on wildfire and unsolved murders makes them vitally affecting, giving an added dimension to her accounts of the strangeness of enchantment, New Mexico style.
The Enchantment of New Mexico is available at Amazon.com for $12.99 in paperback and $2.99 in ebook. Doyle will sign her book Aug. 23 at the Sunflower Festival in Mountainair.
August 12, 2014