Today’s Wyoming sunrise was captured at Glendo by Rob Dickerson. Rob writes, “Beautiful sunrise at Glendo. Running out of summer pretty fast…..it’s all downhill from here.”

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In some far reaches of rural America, Democrats are flirting with extinction. In Niobrara County, Wyoming, the least-populated county in the least-populated state, Becky Blackburn is one of just 32 left.

Her neighbors call her “the crazy Democrat,” although it’s more a term of endearment than derision.

Some less populated counties have fewer. There are 21 Democrats in Clark County, Idaho, and 20 in Blaine County, Nebraska. But Niobrara County’s Democrats, who account for just 2.6% of registered voters, are the most outnumbered by Republicans in the 30 states that track local party affiliation, according to Associated Press election data.

In Wyoming, the state that has voted for Donald Trump by a wider margin than any other, overwhelming Republican dominance may be even more cemented-in now that the state has passed a law that makes changing party affiliation much more difficult.

Tuesday’s primary will be the first election since the law took effect.

In Niobrara County’s grassy rangelands and pine-spattered hills adjoining Nebraska and South Dakota, it’s not easy being blue.

A paralegal for the Republican county attorney, Blackburn hears a lot of right-wing views around town.

“Normally I just roll my eyes and walk away because I’m fighting a losing battle and I’m fully aware of that,” she said. “Maybe that is why I’m well-liked, because I keep my mouth shut 10 times more than I want to.”

Not that she’s politically shy. She flies an LGBTQ+ flag in support of her lesbian daughter at her house in Lusk, a ranching town of 1,500 and the Niobrara County seat.

In political season, Blackburn stocks up on Democratic political signs to replace those that get swiped. She speaks approvingly of policing reform, taxation for government services and the transgender social media celebrity Dylan Mulvaney.

Maybe because she’s open about those views — and far too outnumbered to put them into action — Blackburn really does seem well-liked in Lusk, where she recently served nine years on the Town Council.

“I won two elections here. Even though that’s nonpartisan, people still knew I had left-leaning values,” she said.

Nationwide, Democrats account for fewer than 3% of voters in three counties this year, up from one county in 2020 but down from seven in 2016. There were none with such a low percentage of Democratic registrations in the presidential election years of 2012, 2008 and 2004, according to the AP data.

The most Republican counties in recent years are concentrated in Idaho, Utah and Wyoming. The most Democratic areas, meanwhile, are much less one-party-dominant.

The District of Columbia, where 77% of voters are Democrats, ranks second for Democratic dominance. First is Breathitt County, Kentucky, which through tradition is 79% Democratic but not to the core. Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has family there and in 2020 the county went 75% for former President Donald Trump.

Niobrara County was not always quite so Republican. It had more than twice as many Democrats, 83, in 2012, and in 2004 there were more than four times as many, 139.

The Democrats’ struggle in Wyoming mirrors the party’s challenges across rural America, where the party has been losing ground for years.

It wasn’t always this way. Seventy years ago, Democrats were a political force across southern Wyoming, where union mining and railroad jobs were abundant. Now, the party’s only strongholds are in the university town of Laramie and resort town of Jackson.

Meanwhile, as Wyoming Democrats face difficulty fielding viable candidates at all levels, many Democrats have been switching their registration to vote in more competitive Republican primaries, then changing back for the general election.

“You feel skeevy and dirty when you do it. But you do it anyway and you change it back as soon as you can, because you don’t want to start getting the Republican mailings,” Blackburn said.

Republicans decided they’d had enough. The Wyoming Legislature, where the GOP controls over 90% of the seats, passed legislation last year banning voters from changing their party registration in the three months before the August primary.

Party-switching had “undermined the sanctity of Wyoming’s primary process,” Wyoming’s Republican secretary of state, Chuck Gray, said in a statement of approval.

Wyoming’s Republican and Democratic primaries on Tuesday will be the first in modern memory where voters won’t be able to change party affiliation at the polls.

For Democrats, it will be slim pickings. Statewide, obscure candidates who have done little campaigning are unopposed for the Democratic nomination for U.S. House and Senate.

In Niobrara County, no Democrats are running. They aren’t contesting a seat in the Wyoming House of Representatives or an open seat on the county commission, the two major races, or even running for local party positions.

Yet the area had a Democratic state representative not too long ago: Ross Diercks, who is recognized and warmly greeted at the Outpost Cafe, a homey breakfast and lunch spot in Lusk.

A former middle school English teacher, Diercks was a Republican before deciding the GOP didn’t do enough to support public education. He beat a Republican incumbent in 1992 to launch an 18-year run in the Legislature.

Knowing voters personally and keeping up on issues helped him hold office. When he got a C-minus on a National Rifle Association questionnaire, for example, he resolved to improve. For subsequent elections, he scored A’s on the survey.

Many Republican lawmakers are friends. When one from just down the road died, he sang at his funeral.

Then in 2022, Diercks temporarily switched parties to vote in the GOP primary against Harriet Hageman, who was challenging then-Rep. Liz Cheney for the state’s lone House seat. How many other Democrats did the same is hard to count, but Diercks was far from alone. Hageman, the daughter of the lawmaker he sang for at his funeral, nonetheless won the race by a wide margin.

The new law keeping Diercks and others from switching their registration so easily has him exasperated with the GOP.

“How far are they going to go to limit one’s ability to vote? If it really comes down to purifying the party, on a voting level all the way up to the elected officials, pretty soon there isn’t going to be anyone left who’s pure enough to be in the party,” Diercks said.

Truck driver Pat Jordan supports many left-leaning goals, including universal healthcare, but said he only registers as a Republican.

“The best way to participate in meaningful change is to try to sway the dominant party,” said Jordan, who lives in Niobrara County. “You know, we need to have a government that serves the people, all of them, not just Republicans and not just rural and not just urban and not just Democrats — and definitely not just the rich and the wealthy.”

Last winter, dozens of locals gathered outside to honk and cheer as one Democrat left town. But they weren’t cheering as Ed Fullmer was headed off for good.

Fullmer was on the high school boys basketball team bus as they left for the state championship. They lost, but Fullmer coached the Tigers to their best record in a decade, 20-8.

He said people know his views but rarely put him on the spot about politics.

“Most people don’t want to dive into those type of discussions,” he said. “They respect you for what you do, how you work.”

Blackburn, for one, intends to hold her political ground, even as it shrinks around her.

“I am who I am, and I have the views that I have,” she said. “And I don’t care if it bothers people or not.”

Larry Marvin Morris was just wrapping up a temporary stint as a seismograph worker in Riverton, Wyoming, when he mysteriously disappeared.

The 24-year-old Tulsa, Oklahoma, college student had planned a stop in Yellowstone National Park before heading home. Morris never made it to either destination and was reported missing April 24, 1974.

Since the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation started tracking missing persons cases, the disappearance of Morris remains the oldest and coldest of those in the agency’s missing person database.

Although it’s been 50 years, it’s a case that former Riverton Police Department detective and Fremont County Coroner Ed McAuslan knows well and continues to ponder well into retirement.

In fact, it had been McAuslan’s first missing person investigation as rookie detective.

He’d joined the department in 1973, and two years later was also hired as deputy coroner. In 1998, he was elected coroner and held the post for 16 years. McAuslan retired in 2014 after nearly 28 years with the police and 40 as coroner.

Over the course of his career, McAuslan never stopped thinking about Morris or trying to solve what he firmly believes was a homicide.

He’s also stayed in contact with Morris’ sister, who did not respond to Cowboy State Daily’s request for an interview.

Unfortunately, McAuslan said, the two men who were likely responsible for Morris’ murder have also long since died despite his repeated attempts to get them prosecuted.

“Every time we’d get a new county attorney in office, I would present the case to them,” he said. “Nobody would take it and prosecute it.”

Assumed Identity

After failing to show up at work the following Monday, Morris was reported missing by his boss.

A search of Morris’ Riverton apartment showed no signs of foul play, suggesting that he met with foul play somewhere between Riverton and Jackson.

“At that particular point, we didn’t have a whole lot to go on,” McAuslan said.

He sent out inquiries with Morris’ description and that of his car to police agencies in surrounding states, McAuslan recalled, and within a couple of weeks received a call from the sheriff’s office in Twin Falls, Idaho.

The sheriff had detained a man identifying as Larry Marvin Morris, McAuslan was told, who was being held on suspicion of armed burglary.

McAuslan immediately headed to Twin Falls, where he and the FBI interviewed a man who was determined not to be Morris. Instead, he was 36-year-old Jack Raymond Lincoln, who turned out to be an escapee from the Colorado State Penitentiary’s pre-parole center.

According to reporting by the Fort Collins Coloradoan, Lincoln had just completed an 11- to 18-year sentence for receiving stolen goods and larceny. At the time he escaped, he’d been serving an additional three to seven years for conspiring to escape from the Camp George West honor farm near Golden.

Lincoln was arrested with another ex-felon, James Franklin Jagers, 26, who had been Lincoln’s cellmate in the Colorado penitentiary.

Overdue Rental Car

The men had Morris’ driver’s license and credit cards, where McAuslen had traced them from Wyoming, Utah and Nevada to California, Oregon and Idaho, where they’d been arrested for breaking into a country store.

At the time of their arrest, Jagers and Lincoln were driving an overdue rental car from San Francisco that had been reserved under Morris’ name.

In the car, police found “guns and frozen meat” that likely tied them to an additional burglary at a rural home, according to a May 9, 1974, story in the Twin Falls Times-News.

The men had been arrested the same night robbing a country store in Hollister, Idaho. The store owner had caught them in the act after a woman saw the men entering the closed store, according to reporting by the Twin Falls Times-News.

Both were sentenced to a maximum of 15 years in the Idaho State Penitentiary.

Uncooperative

When questioned by McAuslan, both denied having anything to do with Morris’ disappearance and were uncooperative, he said.

“Their basic attitude was, ‘That’s a damn lie and that’s all I’m going to tell you,’” McAuslan said. “We didn’t get anywhere in our interviews, even though when they were arrested, they had all of Larry’s identification.”

Days after their arrest, Morris’ 1966 Ford LTD pickup with Oklahoma license plates was found abandoned at a car repair shop in San Francisco, where they had rented a car using Morris’ credit card and personal information.

To McAuslan’s knowledge, Morris’ family paid for the repairs and took his pickup back with them to Oklahoma.

No Trace

McAuslan is convinced that the men, both of whom have since died, were responsible for Morris’ death and suspects they dumped his body somewhere off the highway between Riverton and Dubois.

The area had been hit with heavy spring snow at the time Morris disappeared, which would have limited how far they could have gotten off the road to ditch the body, he said.

“We did a lot of groundwork,” McAuslan said, including searches with Morris’ family. Over the years, he speculates they’ve searched the entire terrain between the two cities.

“He [Morris] never did turn up,” McAuslan said, “so when they disposed of the body, they did a good job of it.”

McAuslan speculated that Morris may have seen the two hitchhiking along the highway and picked them up or ran into them at a gas station or other location in town because they had just ditched the car they’d stolen out of Colorado.

This was the early 1970s, McAuslan noted, where it would have been normal to give a person a lift.

No DNA was taken from the car because it wasn’t introduced as evidence in a court until 1986, according to the National Institute for Justice.

McAuslan is under no misconception that Morris is still alive.

“My perspective was, well, they’ve got everything else and he’s [Morris] never been seen again,” McAuslan said. “You can make an assumption that he has to be dead.”

Deal, No Deal

McAuslan kept close tabs on the men over the decade-plus that he worked the case and stayed in constant contact with Morris’ family.

Anytime an unidentified body was found close to Morris’ description, McAuslan would investigate it further.

“We looked at a lot of dead bodies,” he said.

And despite the relatively strong tangential evidence of being caught with Morris’ identification, credit cards and other possessions, neither man was ever arrested in connection with the disappearance.

Jagers, however, came close to a confession in 1983, when he attempted to negotiate a move from the Idaho penitentiary to a Wyoming prison in exchange for information.

Jagers allegedly told authorities that Morris was indeed dead and he knew where the body was.

The deal never went anywhere, McAuslan said.

Ryan Cox, DCI commander and head of cold cases, confirmed a deal had been discussed, though in the end, the “inmate did not agree to cooperate with Wyoming law enforcement.”

Jagers died in 2014 at age 68, according to his obituary in the Tribune Chronicle. Lincoln died years earlier, McAuslan said, though Cowboy State Daily could not locate his obituary.

As such, they took their secrets to the grave, McAuslan said.

No other suspects apart from the two men were identified, McAuslan said, despite extensive interviews and groundwork.

To date, the case remains unsolved pending new information or the discovery of Morris’ body. Despite the odds of actually finding answers, McAuslan refuses to write it off.

“You never want to say something’s unsolvable, because sometimes something can turn up,” he said.

Anyone with any information is asked to contact the Riverton Police Department at 307-856-4891 or the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation at 307-777-7181.

Jen Kocher can be reached at jen@cowboystatedaily.com.