Story in the Jonesboro Sun
IMBODEN — It was a hot and humid afternoon Friday, June 3, 1983, a typical early summer day in Arkansas, with high humidity and the possibility of a stormy night.
Soon it would get hotter, much hotter, at a secluded residence off a county road between Imboden and Smithville in the foothills of the Arkansas Ozarks.
Gordon Wendall Kahl, a North Dakota farmer and member of the Posse Comitatus, along with Lawrence County Sheriff Gene Matthews, would die in a hail of bullets at a bunker-type farmhouse.
Kahl, 63, a fugitive charged with tax evasion and the murders of two U.S. marshals in Medina, N.D., was killed by law enforcement officers in a confrontation at a concrete residence covered by earth on three sides and the top. The shoot-out ensued after law enforcement officers attempted to enter the residence to serve warrants on Kahl and place him under arrest.
On Feb. 13, 1983, Kahl killed the two U.S. marshals and wounded three others when the marshals attempted to arrest him for probation violation in Medina. Kahl escaped, sparking a 4-month search.
“I kept up with the news and had a certain fascination with the Kahl situation,” said former Arkansas State Police investigator and law enforcement instructor Steve Huddleston of Imboden.
“When I heard that Kahl was here, I thought, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’”
At first, he said, it seemed inconceivable that a man as notorious as Kahl could be in Lawrence County.
On Thursday, Huddleston recalled that night when federal, state and Lawrence County police converged on the residence of Leonard and Norma Ginter — Kahl’s hideout, authorities had learned.
The incident began around 6:10 p.m., Huddleston recalled. He said federal, state and local officers encountered the Ginters, who were later taken to the Lawrence County Sheriff’s Department, at the residence. They told the officers he was going fishing; authorities asked if they could go inside the residence to look for Kahl.
“The Ginters asked if they had a search warrant,” Huddleston recalled officers at the scene telling him that day. As the warrant was being produced, instead of waiting, Matthews, U.S. Marshal Jim Hall and state police officer Ed Fitzpatrick ran inside the house.
Shots were fired. Hall retreated, Huddleston said, and out came Fitzpatrick, firing a shot into the house in the direction of the shooting.
Huddleston said when he heard the shooting he left his patrol car, which was parked at a nearby highway, and ran toward the scene.
Arkansas State Police Trooper Robert Speer, now a lieutenant of Troop 3 in Jonesboro, had been stationed near the house with an assault rifle, the former officer said. When Huddleston got to the house, Speer yelled for him to get his car and that Matthews had been shot. Huddleston drove his police car down a graveled lane behind, or atop, the residence and ran down to where the officers were.
Speer declined to talk about the incident.
Matthews, wounded, had staggered out, started up the hill beside the residence and collapsed.
Huddleston said he and Perry Webb, with the help of an FBI agent, put Matthews into Huddleston’s cruiser and drove toward Walnut Ridge.
He said Steve Jones, an Imboden firefighter and first responder, now an instructor at Black River Technical College Fire Training Academy, started to administer CPR on Matthews.
In the meantime, a Lawrence County EMS ambulance, stationed at the hospital, started toward Imboden to meet the car carrying the wounded sheriff.
After the wounded sheriff had been turned over to the ambulance crew, Webb asked who it was.
“I told him it was Gene; they were related, and he did not recognize him.” Huddleston said. “I didn’t think Gene would make it.”
The sheriff had been hit by more than one bullet or possibly shotgun pellets. One of the rounds, believed to have been the one fired by Kahl, slipped between the folds of the sheriff’s bullet resistant vest, causing the fatal wound. Several other rounds had hit the sheriff’s protective vest without penetrating.
After the officers left the scene with the wounded sheriff, Huddleston said he was told the FBI ordered everyone to open fire.
“They just shot the hell out of the place,” he said.
When he returned after turning Matthews over to the ambulance crew, Huddleston said everyone was quiet and waiting. Kahl was still inside the house as far as anyone knew, he recalled.
The FBI, which Huddleston said was in charge of the scene and the operation, ordered that gasoline be obtained to pour down a vent of the residence in an effort to “smoke Kahl out.”
Huddleston said someone obtained a can of diesel fuel, and he was told to take the fuel to the top of the earthen roof and pour it into the vent.
It is about a 6-inch pipe that leads to what appears to be a great room of the residence.
“I knocked the whirly-bird off the pipe and started pouring the fuel down it,” Huddleston said.
Former Ravenden Marshal Tom Lee, now deceased, threw a smoke grenade into the residence, he said. That’s all it took to spark a fire.
“We waited and waited,” Huddleston said.
Some thought that Kahl escaped.
It started to rain.
“Oh my God it rained hard,” Huddleston recalled.
The fire inside the residence blazed, and soon it was almost an inferno.
Huddleston said the officers pulled back and waited more than three hours before going into the residence. At the time it was raining hard and lightning was striking all around.
As the inferno inside the residence blazed, the officer said, thousands of rounds of ammunition were going off, sounding like a war zone.
As the fire burned, Dan Matthews and Jim Jones, Imboden firefighters and first responders, were nearby waiting with a fire truck, Huddleston said.
Someone told Matthews, who Huddleston said is not related to the former sheriff, to go down there and put out the fire, Huddleston said. He had heard all of the shots and told the person to take it down himself.
After the fire had burned out, Huddleston recalled going inside and seeing Kahl’s charred remains.
“You could see where the bullet had gone in his head,” he said. Kahl had been dead all along, probably struck by the sheriff’s bullet when the two confronted each other inside the residence, he said.
He said the man’s extremities had been burned off by the intense fire, which Huddleston believed led to some erroneous rumors that officers had chopped the man’s limbs off.
“This brings back a lot of memories,” Huddleston said, talking about the incident last Thursday.
Huddleston said he believes the officers who ran into the house and confronted Kahl should have waited for a plan to be devised for entry. The whole situation could have been handled differently. But it wasn’t.
“We don’t know what would have happened otherwise,” Huddleston said. “It was obvious that Kahl wasn’t going anywhere; he couldn’t have gotten out,” he said. All of the known entrances to the residence were at the front and covered by armed officers.
Some thought there might have been tunnels, but none were found.
“He (Kahl) was apparently on a death mission,” the former officer said. “He was a World War II hero; his mindset is confusing to me.”
For months after the standoff, Huddleston said, signs were posted around the area asking the question, “Did Huddleston burn this house?”
“I collected a bunch of them,” he said. “I should have had them autographed. I was told who had them printed.”
Huddleston said he had been told that an area resident picked Kahl up at the Mountain Home airport and took him to the residence where the gunbattle occurred.
Many of the people involved in the situation, on both sides, have died since 1983. A few still live, and most don’t want to talk about it.
The former officer said both federal and state officials learned a lesson from the confrontation.
“You always do learn from incidents — the good and bad things that happen — and correct them for the next operation,” Huddleston said. “This was quite a learning experience.”
“That place had a lot of valuable information in it about the (Posse Comitatus) organization, but it was all burned up,” he said.
A Posse Comitatus may come in many variations but is usually an organization of people who believe in local governmental control and reject the federal government and taxes. Some are affiliated with militias or survivalists.
Kahl was viewed by some as a folk hero for his views on taxes.
Huddleston said he believes there was a lot of information in the house that was lost in the fire.
“I wish we could have gone in there and gotten that information,” he said.
The Ginters were both convicted on crimes related to the incident |
One of the bigger events in NEA in the past....Lord knows how long, and most people don't even know about it.
RIP Sheriff Matthews 
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