How Not to Deal With Murder in Space
A bizarre 1970 Arctic killing over a jug of raisin wine shows that we need to think about crime outside our atmosphere now.
Mario Escamilla was furious. A colleague of his, nicknamed Porky, had just stolen his jug of raisin wine. So the 33-year-old Escamilla grabbed a rifle and set out to reclaim it. He had no idea he was about to get tangled up in one of the knottiest homicides in history—a killing that also raises serious questions about how humankind should handle the first, inevitable murder in outer space.
Escamilla worked on T-3, also known as Fletcher’s ice island, a Manhattan-size hunk of ice that at the time was floating north of Canada in the Arctic Ocean, roughly 350 miles from the North Pole. T-3 had been occupied off and on since the 1950s, and 19 scientists and technicians were stationed there during the summer of 1970, studying ocean currents and wind and weather patterns.Despite the constant polar sunshine in the summer, the weather could be harsh, with temperatures dipping down to minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit sometimes and winds reaching 160 miles per hour. But the worst thing the scientists faced was boredom: Besides work, there was almost nothing to do. For movies, they had a few 16-millimeter reels they’d seen a dozen times each. For music, they had two eight tracks. One was Jefferson Airplane.
To compound the problem, the scientists had virtually no contact with the outside world. Satellite communication was iffy and often failed. And planes couldn’t land on T-3 most of the summer, since the surface of the ice turned mushy under the sun. So after the initial arrival of people in the spring, that was it. Just 19 smelly dudes, with little to do but stare at one another and drink.As a result, T-3 attracted some real misfits at times, including alcoholics and weirdos. And all that angry, bored energy finally came to a head exactly 50 years ago—on July 16, 1970.If contemporary accounts can be believed, Donald “Porky” Leavitt was a drunk, and a mean one. Three separate times on T-3, after running low on liquor, he attacked people with a meat cleaver to get his hands on their booze. On the night of July 16, Porky targeted electronics technician Mario Escamilla, breaking into Escamilla’s trailer and stealing a prized jug of homemade raisin hooch.
When Escamilla found out, something snapped. He was actually an unlikely vigilante. He was pudgy and wore glasses, and was considered quiet, even wimpy. But when he heard about the theft, he grabbed the base rifle and marched over to confront Porky. It was nearly 11 p.m., but the arctic sun was blazing like a Wild West high-noon showdown.Unfortunately, Escamilla didn’t know that the rifle he’d grabbed was faulty. One hard bump—even without pulling the trigger—and it would fire.Escamilla found Porky in a trailer with a meteorological technician named Bennie Lightsy, a 31-year-old from Louisville, Kentucky, who was Escamilla’s boss on T-3. Porky and Lightsy were, to put it mildly, shitfaced. They’d been drinking a truly foul mix of raisin wine, grain alcohol, and grape juice; Lightsy’s blood-alcohol level was later estimated to be 0.26.A struggle for the raisin wine ensued, and in the confrontation that followed, Escamilla shot not Porky Leavitt, but his boss, Bennie Lightsy, square in the chest. He bled out moments later. With the help of newspaper articles, court transcripts, and online reminiscing from people who were there, I’ve laid out more details about the killing in my new podcast—along with many more details about life on the impossibly remote T-3 (including, because I know you’re curious, how they went to the bathroom). But here I’d like to focus on what happened after Lightsy’s death, because that’s when the real chaos started—the legal mess.T-3 was technically run by the U.S. Air Force, but Escamilla was a civilian, so they couldn’t court-martial him. The nearest land mass was Canada, but T-3 lay well outside Canada’s territorial waters, so it had no jurisdiction there. Perhaps the United States could have claimed the ice island—similar to the many uninhabited “Guano Islands” full of rich, natural fertilizer that the U.S. government seized during the 1800s. But unlike the Guano Islands, T-3 was temporary—it would melt away in the 1980s—so under international law, no nation could claim it. Perhaps the law of the sea applied? After all, T-3 was in some sense the literal high seas, being high-latitude frozen seawater. Except, the law of the sea applies only to navigable areas, and T-3 wasn’t navigable....
....MUCH MORE
And no, I'm not researching anything in particular.
