Day 3 of trial in the 2011 killing of Mike Crites highlights his final phone calls

Leon Ford is on trial for the 2011 murder of Mike Crites. The trial started in Judge Mike Menahan's court on June 1, 2023 in the Lewis and Clark County Courthouse.

Day three of the trial where Leon Michael Ford has been accused of killing John Michael "Mike" Crites started Monday with a focus on the evidence of zip ties and back garbage bags found with Crites’ remains.

Before Crites death, the area of Turk Road out by Birdseye Road has seen many disputes over road access. Disputes over property access date back to 2002 with Crites and Ford. Ford bought his property in the area in 1993 and Crites moved onto his property and built a home in about 1996. The Fords still own around 90 acres in the area today.

Ford has been charged with deliberate homicide and felony tampering with evidence.

Ralph Byars, who in 2011 was associated with Chugach, testified. Chugach was a contractor doing business on the Whidbey Island Air Force Base near Oak Harbor, Washington, where Ford was working as a safety officer in 2011.

Records showed that Ford checked out 24 specialty cable ties in February 2011, and a box of black heavy-duty 45 gallon trash bags on June 26, 2011. When asked if he knew of any reason that a safety officer would need cable ties on base Byars said, "Not really."

Byars stated that if employees didn't have a work order for the item they were checking out, it would just be billed to their department and that sometimes Byars would sign off on work orders if they were missing a supervisor signature because he was a supervisor himself. He said it wasn't uncommon for workers to take items home from the base.

Platt Electric records indicate that Chugach purchased HellermannTyton 32-inch cable ties, and Chugach records show that Ford removed them. HellermannTyton 32-inch cable ties were found with some of Crites’ remains in October 2011 and were last produced in September 2011.

Defense attorney Palmer Hoovestal argued that Byars wasn't working at the base in 2011, so how would he know what the inventory was then. The defense stated that there wasn't a way to know if the cable ties Ford checked out were HellermannTyton cable ties or 3M cable ties because the order didn't specify, but Byars disagreed.

Defense attorney Palmer Hoovestal on the first day of the Mike Crites murder trial in the Lewis and Clark County Courthouse on June 1, 2023.

"Your records show that it was not a HellermanTyton," Hoovestal said. "It doesn't specifically identify the 32-inch cable tie as a HellermannTyton cable tie like it does down below."

Byars said that even if it wasn't entered in the line description, further details are entered to identify it as HellermanTyton in the vendor's side of the warehouse. Byars said he was "pretty confident" that the ties Ford checked out were HellermanTyton ties because the base found 3M cable ties "unsatisfactory" due to them not being UV rated and not holding up as well to weather.

"The second invoice that you showed me was Tyton, and that's all we carry now. There's a record in Maximo that shows that," Byars said. "I don't have it with me. I can't prove that to you physically, but even if it was -- it couldn't have been a 3M because we issued all those 3M's out, and I wasn't there, but they were gone."

Byars noted that they didn't input orders into the system that were taken out on Fridays, which may explain why Ford was in Helena the same day the records show he checked out the trash bags on June 26, 2011.

Crites’ co-worker and friend Jesse Thomas testified he met Crites when they worked on the same project as sheet metal workers in 2007-2009. He said they kept in touch talking on the phone around two to three times a week, ranging from a half hour to a couple hours.

Crites called Thomas the morning of June 26, 2011, worried about meeting with a neighbor and asked him to write a name down. Thomas stated he didn't write down the name because Crites often called worried about conflicts with his neighbors, but he said he regretted not writing down the name upon learning of his disappearance. Thomas said he couldn't recall the name Crites told him to write down, but he mentioned hearing a noise change in the background of Crites’ call toward the end as if Crites might’ve stepped outside or gone inside.

"(Crites) was concerned that somebody was coming. He was ‘Yup, someone is coming. Somebody is here. I gotta go now, Jesse,’" Thomas said.

The other person Crites spoke to on the phone the morning of his suspected disappearance was neighbor Marc Flora.

The Floras owned about 160 acres off Turk Road in 2000 and built a house on it in 2005. One of Flora's neighbors, John Mehan, blocked access routinely to their property, so they opted to build an alternate road into their property. They sold their property and moved to Washington in March 2012 because of all the stress and threats that came from land access disputes.

Crites called Flora to ask if he would come witness a conversation around 10 or 10:30 a.m. with a neighbor that Crites was in a road access dispute with.

Flora declined because he had relatives in town for his birthday he hadn't seen in a long time and because he was having his own road access dispute problems with other neighbors blocking access to his driveway, so he didn't necessarily agree with what Crites was doing.

"I did not agree with Mike and the position he took regarding the issue that was going on there," Flora said. "... We had just filed a lawsuit because neighbors of ours were blocking our access, and I didn't feel comfortable going over to Mike's to back him up or to witness him or help him in that circumstance because he was trying to keep someone from accessing their property, and I didn't agree with that."

Flora said that he told Crites to record the conversation with the neighbor and to call him after the meeting was over. Crites never did, and Flora knew something happened to Crites when he spotted Crites’ "hybrid wolf dogs" outside his property gate trying to grab his little dog.

Flora chased the dogs and they dropped the little dog, who was OK, but he noticed one of the wolf dogs had a chain on and belonged to Crites. Flora knew the dogs because Crites asked him to take care of them when he would go out of town.

"I stopped to call Mike right away," said Flora. "I was very concerned. Mike's dogs were never out. I had been up there and around there for 11 years, and I’d never seen them out."

Crites never answered any of Flora's many calls. Later in the evening, Flora drove up to Crites’ place and the gate to his property was open and so was his front door. Crites wasn't home even though his cars were at his property.

Flora went back in the morning to Crites' property, and then called his wife, Gloria. They decided to call law enforcement and report Crites’ disappearance. When Flora was around Crites’ property with authorities on June 29, 2011, they noticed the gate across the lower road that was being disputed with Ford had been cut and thrown down the hill.

"That is obviously not something Mike would have done," Flora stated.

Judge Mike Menahan gives the jury instructions on the first day of the Mike Crites murder trial in the Lewis and Clark County Courthouse on June 1, 2023.

The trial will continue at 9 a.m. Tuesday in Lewis and Clark County 1st Judicial District Court Judge Michael Menahan's courtroom.

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Education and Crime Reporter

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