50 Years Ago: Nevada official's death remains a mystery

Posted by Bill Donovan | Jun 25, 2015 | 50 Years Ago |

It was a mystery that would play out in the Navajo Times throughout the summer, fall and winter of 1965 – just what happened to Delbert Howard?
It began with a headline on the front page of the Navajo Times that read, “Vice Chairman Reported Missing.” The story itself concerned efforts to find Howard, a member of the Shoshone Indian Tribe, chairman of the Winnemucca Colony Tribal Council and Vice Chairman of the Nevada Inter-Tribal Council.
The fact that he wasn’t Navajo didn’t matter because this was a mystery that engulfed all Native Americans. A prominent Native leader just went missing one morning early in July and as the days went by being missing, the mystery only got bigger and bigger.
Police in Nevada said they suspected foul play since four days after he was first reported missing, as the Navajo Times reported, “A man went to the Las Vegas bank where Howard does business in Winnemucca, carrying Howard’s identification papers and asked to close his account.”
The man was asked for his driver’s license (and) when he was questioned by bank officials, he bolted from the building,” according to the Times article.
Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai said he knew the 30-year-old tribal leader, not well, but in his talks with Indian leaders from throughout the country on ways to improve business opportunities on the Navajo Reservation, he would, on occasion, speak to Howard about what tribes in Nevada were doing to spur economic development.
Officials for the Nevada State Highway Patrol said they had more than 100 people working on the case and promised that there would be a breakthrough any day.
The trail may have gotten cold in Nevada but law enforcement officers in Florida began putting two and two together and coming up with an idea about what happened to Howard.
Clyde George Ibsen, the Times reported, was arrested on July 20 in Sarasota, Fla. where he was arrested for vagrancy. No one at first linked him to the disappearance of Howard but Florida police soon found that he had been using a car and the vehicle was registered to a Delbert Howard.
Also in Ibsen’s possession were some of Howard’s personal effects. Added to this was the fact that there was blood in the car, suspected to be Howard’s.
But his arrest was only the beginning of a court battle that would last for years, a portion of which was covered by the Times as readers of the paper would, on occasion ask the paper for updates, including whatever happened to Howard.
The Times reported that for the first several weeks after Ibsen’s arrest, he would be interviewed by FBI agents both in Florida and in Nevada.
Finally, on August 1, 1965, he told FBI officials in Nevada that he killed Howard with a coke bottle and threw the body in the Pacific Ocean but the FBI immediately questioned the accuracy of this confession.
On September 8, two of his cellmates told law enforcement officers that they managed to get Ibsen to draw a map for them where he actually buried the body. They turned over the map to the FBI and that mystery was solved.
But his whole confession was thrown into doubt because of the actions of a justice of the peace when he was brought back to Nevada.
At each of the seven times he was interviewed by the FBI, he was told he didn’t have to speak and that he could get an attorney and on September 7 and 15, when he was brought before a justice of the peace, he was told that he was not eligible for a court-appointed attorney.
It turned out that the justice of the peace was wrong because the state legislature, just five months before, had set up procedures for indignant clients to get court-appointed attorneys.
After he was convicted and given a life sentence, his appeals attorneys pointed out that he was not provided an attorney until after he was charged with murder on September 9.
Ibsen testified at the trial and deviated from his confessions by saying Howard’s death was self-defense against an alleged homosexual attack.
The Times reported that the original conviction was reversed and the case remanded back to the district court for another trial.
And that’s where the Times stopped tracking the story so readers of the paper never did get the full story and since it happened so long ago, the mystery of what happened to Howard’s killer remains just that – a mystery.