2 boys
© UnknownKevin Ives (foreground) and Don Henry
A federal judge is to review an unsolved 1987 murder case of 2 young boys from Arkansas who were believed to have been killed by Clinton operatives.

A mother's 30-year missions to uncover the truth about what happened to her son's in 1987 has led a federal judge to order an urgent review of several tightly guarded government documents about the Clintons and other high-level government officials.

On Au­gust 23, 1987, two boys were found dead on a rail­road tracks near Mena. The bod­ies were Kevin Ives, 17 years old and his friend, Don Henry, 16 years old. Their deaths at the time were ruled ac­ci­den­tal by Clin­ton-ap­pointed state med­ical ex­am­iner, Dr. Fahmy Malak.

In the 80's, Mena was used for one of the busiest drug smug­gling in op­er­a­tions in the world in what eventually became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Key op­er­a­tives in Iran-Con­tra were George Bush, Oliver North, Dewey Clar­ridge, John Point­dex­ter and Cas­par Wein­berger. The en­tire op­er­a­tion how­ever, would have to have bi-par­ti­san ef­forts. This would re­quire the co­op­er­a­tion of for­mer CIA op­er­a­tive and then Gov­er­nor, Bill Clin­ton.



The pre­sump­tion was, that the boys fell asleep on the tracks and the train ran over them. What ini­tially ap­peared to be a grossly in­com­pe­tent in­ves­ti­ga­tion was ac­tu­ally an or­ches­trated cover-up.

Res­i­dents re­ported small, low-fly­ing air­planes com­ing in at slow speeds over the tracks in the mid­dle of the night with their lights off just prior to revving up and fly­ing away. Linda Ives, Kev­in's mother be­came sus­pi­cious of the boys deaths with all of these ru­mors. Af­ter fight­ing the Arkansas jus­tice sys­tem for sev­eral years she won ex­huma­tion and re-au­topsy. An out-of-state ex­am­iner said the cause of death was clear: mur­der by beat­ing and stab­bing be­fore they were placed on the rail­road tracks.

The mur­der case was as­signed to po­lice in­ves­ti­ga­tor John Brown. From the get go, the case file was in sham­bles. Key crime scene pho­tographs were miss­ing. The en­tire list of any ev­i­dence was gone. It also ap­peared that no one from 1987 to 1993 had in­ter­viewed any­one of any sig­nif­i­cance in the case. John Brown's in­ves­ti­ga­tion was shut down and he re­signed, but not be­fore the fol­low­ing pieces could be put to­gether.

Ap­par­ently, the boys were deer hunt­ing that night. They had no idea that the tracks were used by Mena pi­lots as a site for drop­ping off drugs and money, and that a drop had gone miss­ing three nights pre­vi­ously, caus­ing panic at Mena.

The con­cern was not the miss­ing $400,000, but the miss­ing trans­mit­ter that was in the case with the money. If some­one found this, it would be trace­able right back to Mena. In a clas­sic case of be­ing in the wrong place at the wrong time, Kevin and Don stum­bled right into a po­lice pro­tected drug drop site, where Law en­force­ment of­fi­cials and drug smug­glers were wait­ing to see who might show up. The boys were chased down and taken to an­other lo­ca­tion. At that point they were beaten and stabbed. Then there bod­ies were placed on the track in hopes that all ev­i­dence of the mur­der would be dis­torted by the train man­gling the bod­ies.

A US Sen­ate sub­com­mit­tee in 1989 called the avail­able ev­i­dence about Mena suf­fi­cient for an in­dict­ment on money laun­der­ing charges. But the feds scraped a five year probe of Mena and in­ter­fered in lo­cal in­ves­ti­ga­tions. The state po­lice were taken off the case. Clin­ton re­fused a re­quest from one of his own pros­e­cu­tors to pur­sue the mat­ter any fur­ther.

In spite of the ev­i­dence, every in­ves­ti­ga­tor who has tried to ex­pose the crimes of Mena has been pro­fes­sion­ally de­stroyed.

Arkansasonline.com reports: The enduring mystery surrounding the boys' deaths led the mother to file a lawsuit last year seeking to force eight federal agencies and three Arkansas-based law enforcement agencies to produce any and all documents amassed over the past 30 years that may provide some answers. The lawsuit accuses the agencies of violating the federal Freedom of Information Act by failing to turn over complete documents in response to requests Ives and her Little Rock attorney, R. David Lewis, filed in 2012.

The requests sought all information the agencies may have in their archives pertaining to Kevin Ives or Barry Seal, a pilot who in 1985 testified that he smuggled tons of cocaine from Colombia to drop zones in the Louisiana swamps, and was assassinated in 1986 in his hometown of Baton Rouge.

Rumor has it that Seal, who flew regularly in and out of the Mena airport, was initially hired by the CIA to fly low over Central American countries taking photographs of rebels, and then began smuggling drugs back into the United States for extra cash.

Talk of low-flying planes in the area where the boys were run over by the train led to suspicions that their deaths might have had something to do with drug drops - and that perhaps they were killed, and then laid out on the tracks to cover up any evidence of murder, because they witnessed or tried to intercept a drop.

Ironically, the in-camera review, which is conducted by a judge in private, coincides with the recent release of a movie, American Made, that is based on the saga surrounding Seal.

Miller dismissed most of the agencies from the lawsuit in a July 25 summary judgment order. But on Nov. 15, he ordered the three remaining defendants - the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Homeland Security - to turn over to him, by Dec. 1, all the unredacted documents they say are exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

According to the government's written objections to the records requests, the documents may include the minutes or transcripts of grand jury proceedings dating back to the early 1990s; investigators' private notes to one another; the names of confidential witnesses; secret investigative techniques and theories; and possibly more recent information that has surfaced in an ongoing investigation.

Lewis said he doesn't trust the government to supply all the information that Miller wants to review privately.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Harris, whose office in the Eastern District of Arkansas is representing the federal defendants, said Wednesday that attorneys in his office are gathering all the documents in an attempt to comply with the order by the deadline, and that there is no plan to contest it.

The agencies Miller dismissed from the suit were the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Justice's Criminal Division, the State Department, the FBI, the Arkansas State Police, the Saline County sheriff's office and the Bryant Police Department.

Ives and Lewis said any documents they have obtained over the years from the various agencies in response to the Freedom of Information requests have been so heavily redacted as to be indecipherable and basically useless. They contend that after 30 years, the release of the information isn't likely to put anyone in danger or upset any current investigations.

"I'm not after any grand jury minutes," Lewis said last week.

He said he and Ives just want information that may explain how and why Kevin Ives died.

"Plaintiff is trying by this action to learn how her son was killed, by whom, and how and why, how and by whom his cause of death was covered up," the lawsuit states, complaining that the named agencies have provided "inadequate responses by virtue of no response or highly redacted responses."

The suit states that Ives "believes the only reason she has not received adequate responses is that an adequate response would show crimes by government officials and would expose them and government agencies to suits for damages."

Ives could not be reached for comment.

According to news articles shortly after the boys' deaths, the engineer of the train that couldn't stop in time to avoid running over the boys at 4:25 a.m. Aug. 3, 1987, later said the train's spotlight had illuminated them shortly before they were struck. He said they were lying on their backs, motionless and in a somewhat unnatural position, and covered by a tarp from the waist down. A rifle and a flashlight lay beside them.

The boys' friends and acquaintances from Bryant High School later told authorities they had seen the two friends together earlier that night, Kevin Ives with a bottle of whiskey, and that Ives and Henry said they planned to go "headlighting" for deer later.

Crew members of an earlier train that had passed over the same stretch of tracks at 1:30 a.m. reported seeing no one on or near the tracks.

"There are lots of accounts of the cause of death of Kevin Ives from lots of books and other sources," Lewis wrote in the lawsuit, "but the accounts support several inconsistent theories of who did what, which will be difficult to reconcile without the investigative reports from the defendants."

According to an Oct. 4 memorandum written by Assistant U.S. Attorney Stacey McCord in Little Rock, both the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys and the DEA have provided a "Vaughn index" to the court to explain their reasons for exempting some documents matching the request. The memo says an index "must adequately describe each withheld document or deletion from a released document, must state the exemption claimed for each, and explain why the exemption is relevant."

McCord said a Freedom of Information request received by the Executive Office in 2013 had been referred from the FBI, which had received the request from Lewis in 2012. The request sought all records, recordings, documents and emails, unredacted, relevant to the death of Kevin Ives and regarding Mena Airport drug trafficking as related to Seal.

In response, the FBI referred 13 pages to the Executive Office, which on Sept. 20, 2013, sent Lewis a letter saying it was withholding the 13 pages "in full," pursuant to laws prohibiting the disclosure of grand-jury material. It said Lewis appealed to the Office of Information Policy, which on Feb. 25, 2014, affirmed the exemption.

The memo says the 13 pages include an 11-page letter from the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Louisiana to an FBI agent that "discussed the investigative techniques used by law enforcement during a Grand Jury investigation of a criminal case. ... The document contains information that would reveal the identity of sources of information, the scope of the investigation and where the government is seeking its evidence. It contains names of the targets of the investigation and members of the law enforcement who were involved in the investigation."

The second document is a letter from the U.S. attorney in Louisiana to the Administrative Office of the Courts and an attachment, which McCord said discusses the scope and direction of a grand jury investigation, and constitutes attorney work product, making it exempt.

She said the two documents comprising the 13 pages also were withheld "to protect the identities of third-party individuals named in the documents, such as potential witnesses and law enforcement personnel," and because the release of the information "could subject the persons to unwarranted invasion of their personal privacy and subject them to harassment, harm, or exposure to unwarranted or derogatory publicity and inferences."

She said the Executive Office "determined that there was no countervailing public interest" that would outweigh the privacy rights.

McCord said other documents withheld include DEA reports of investigation, which memorialize investigative and intelligence activities related to a law enforcement activity and are protected by the Privacy Act, and interoffice memos, which, by revealing the identity of a confidential source, "could reasonably be expected to endanger the health and safety of individuals whose names appear in the materials or those connected with them."

The memo says the requests to Homeland Security couldn't be answered because the agency was created Jan. 24, 2003, after Ives' death, and no records responsive to the request could be found.