Regional Industry & News

FORT BERTHOLD, N.D. — From day one, nothing went right at Blackstone Trucking.

And when things went wrong, James Terry Henrikson — the owner in all but name — got angry. Then he got violent.

The oil transportation company was born in bloodshed, and left a trail of death from the Fort Berthold Reservation to Spokane, Washington. Henrikson’s reign of terror from 2011 until 2014 left two people dead and other business associates — including his estranged wife — on a hit list that never succeeded.

‘James Henrikson did it’

Newly released from jail in 2011, Henrikson, a five-time convicted felon, set his sights on finding “liquid gold” in the booming Bakken oil fields of western North Daktoa. Instead of using his name to set up the company, he used the name of his girlfriend and future wife, Sarah Creveling, and persuaded investors to set the company up with trucks for a high return on their money.

North Dakota’s oil boom brought in thousands of people from across the country, including Henrikson, Creveling and Kristopher “KC” Clarke, a 29-year-old who bore the scars of motorcycle accidents and traveled from Washington to the oil patch, settling down near Watford City, North Dakota, according to the Seattle Times.

In 2012, Clarke and a co-worker from Wyoming, Rick Arey, decided to leave Henrikson’s employ for a rival company, convincing some truckers to go with them. Henrikson called Clarke into the shop — which operated out of the Three Affiliated Tribe’s Chairman Tex Hall’s garage — to talk and return a company credit card.

The talk was a ruse. Timothy E. Suckow, a hitman that Henrikson hired for $20,000, lay in wait. While Henrikson distracted Clark, Suckow hit him repeatedly from behind with a tire jack, according to court records.

Suckow then cleaned the shop with bleach and oil, ridding all evidence of the crime, and said he buried his body in North Dakota’s Badlands National Park, according to KREM 2, a CBS-affiliated television station in Spokane, WA.

A year later, Henrikson formed a new company, but once again used a business partner, Doug Carlile, to register Kingdom Dynamic Enterprises under his name, according to court documents.

When financial troubles hit, Henrikson asked Carlile to sell back his part of the investment, worth $1.88 million, but Carlile refused.

The rift between the two men began, and grew deeper after Carlile announced to Henrikson and a room full of investors that Pamp Maiers, a former real estate mogul in Washington, wanted to invest in Henrikson’s company.

But Maiers had previously lent money to Carlile, a father of six children and grandfather of 20, and he wanted no part of any deal with Henrikson as long as Carlile was involved, according to court documents.

The threats began. At night, Carlile stayed up with a gun in his hands.

At one point, Carlile told his son: “If I disappear or wake up with bullets in my back, promise me you will let everyone know that James Henrikson did it,” court documents stated.

Home invasion

Dressed in all black, gloves and face mask, Suckow stalked 63-year-old Carlile and his wife of 42 years, Elberta, from church to their Spokane home on Dec. 15, 2013.

Elberta, who had been upstairs but returned downstairs when she heard talking, saw a white man she did not recognize wearing all black, pointing a gun at her husband, according to HeraldNet. She ran back upstairs to hide in a closet as the gunshots rang out and called 911.

Suckow dropped a glove in the yard, and DNA testing led investigators to him, where they found the face mask stashed in Suckow’s car.

Law enforcement arrested Suckow a month later. He was paid another $20,000 for the crime by Henrikson, investigators later discovered.

A perfect alibi

Henrikson had a perfect alibi. He was nearly 900 miles away in North Dakota when Carlile was killed. On that same night, Creveling was asleep in their Watford City bedroom.

Her husband burst through the door, and told her the news.

“Doug is dead. Someone shot him. It must have been personal, he got shot six times,” court documents reported Creveling testified.

His alibi, however, quickly dissolved. Investigators found his name listed as “James ND” in Suckow’s cell phone and learned that Carlile had been involved with Henrikson in a failing $2 million oil development project in North Dakota.

On the same day Suckow was arrested, federal authorities raided Henrikson’s North Dakota house and discovered firearms, leading to Henrikson's arrest as a felon in possession of firearms.

More than business

The once “untouchable” three-term tribal chairman, Hall, knew his grip on power was slipping in April 2014, according to the Financial Post.

Years of rapid oil development on Fort Berthold Reservation, which sits atop the Bakken and Three Forks shale oil formations, had brought uncomfortable questions to his desk.

Henrikson’s company, Blackstone, linked with a Native American partner soon after they arrived and began working primarily for Hall’s private oil field company, Maheshu Energy, earning $570,000 for a job watering road dust that was never put out to bid, according to the Financial Post.

It was a small cost for Hall, who along with oil drillers were pumping more than 386,000 barrels of oil a day, a third of the state’s output, according to the Financial Post.

Pressure on Hall mounted. He described Henrikson as a “professional con” who cemented the original contract deal with flowers while he was ill and distracted, according to the Financial Post.

But Hall’s friendship with Henrikson exceeded business. His stepdaughter, Peyton Martin, became Henrikson’s mistress after a Christmas dinner at Hall’s home, according to KREM 2's coverage of the trial.

The couple, who had a son together, planned to get married on a yacht in Brazil and leave the United States around the time that Carlile was murdered, KREM 2 reported.

In February 2016, Martin took the stand against Henrikson in federal court.

“Martin said her relationship with Henrikson turned romantic when he was still married and said the two were together when she learned KC Clarke had disappeared,” KREM 2 reported.

The business relationship between Hall and Blackstone didn’t end when Clarke’s missing person’s posters began showing up, distributed largely by Lissa Yellow Bird-Chase, founder of the Sahnish Scouts, a volunteer group that searches for missing and murdered people.

The aftermath

By 2012, Creveling was operating Maheshu Energy for Hall, and later testified profits were up to $2 million in one year, according to Indianz.com, a Native American news platform. She spent hundreds of thousands on personal property, including a house in Watford City, expensive jewelry and a luxury car.

As the money poured in, Henrikson began plotting on how to kill his competition, and the hit list grew to eventually include Creveling, Hall and others, according to KREM 2 and also from court records.

Because Yellow Bird-Chase was one of the earlier voices raising awareness about Clarke's disappearance, she believes that she was on Henrikson's hit list as well. Within two days in 2014, the wheel of her brother's vehicle fell off, causing him significant injury. Then, while she was driving him to surgery, the wheel on her car fell off, and shortly after, the wheel on her daughter's car fell off as well. They all survived.

A total of five people were convicted of crimes related to the murder-for-hire schemes. The hitman, Suckow “made honest and sincere efforts to find Clarke,” according to a KREM 2 published in 2016.

Suckow, now 62, pleaded guilty and received a 30-year prison sentence at Fairton, a medium-security federal penitentiary in New Jersey, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Henrikson, the ring leader and now 47 years old, was ordered to life in prison for 11 crimes related to his murder-for-hire scheme, and is serving time at a high security federal prison in Atw