Transcripts for CNN Dinosaur 13 20141221 03:05:15 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
and show exhibits and things. and then we had the prosecution, which had at times had two or three lawyers. on our side, there was a lawyer for each defendant, so there were six lawyers, and five defendants. the sixth defendant, of course, being the black hills institute. our trial was, and still is, the largest criminal case that s ever been tried in south dakota. you cannot say the word sue in the trial. i mean, the jurors were going, what happened to sue? that s why they got these guys in the court system, right? the logistics of this trial were incomprehensible. the institute has collected maybe a million fossils. this indictment covers 14 of them and those 14 fossils were collected from seven sites, in seven cases, in all the years these guys have been out in the field, they are accused of being in the wrong place. the government would simply have their officials come in,
two felonies, making false statements to customs officials. and the black hills institute as a corporation is convicted of two misdemeanor thefts, a felony theft and twice making false statements to customs officials. they also found them guilty of bringing goods into the states by making a false statement. defendants eddie cole and terry wentz were not convicted on any charges. as the verdict was announced, it was almost impossible to believe that the defense hadn t scored a great victory. however, there were some fairly significant felony convictions. the expression, you could have knocked me over with a feather, you could have knocked me over with a feather. i talked to some jurors after the trial. some of them were near tears when i interviewed them about how they had hoped they could acquit on every single charge. i believe they had to have something to take this to trial, and i spent the whole trial waiting for that something. without a doubt, the majority of the jurors w
suit. you know, we sued the federal government for return of our property. the black hills institute said it purchased the fossil from maurice williams. originally maurice williams said that too, but then he changed his claim, and he said he had not sold the fossil and that he owned it. mr. williams. pete and neal had made a deal with maurice williams for $5,000. on that saturday, the day before we finished getting sue out of the ground, that we gave maurice williams a check for $5,000, that said for theropod sue on the bottom of the check. even though $5,000 may not seem like a lot, it was a lot of money for our company to spend, and no one had ever paid that much for an undiscovered fossil before. we had lots of conversations with maurice williams about what was happening to the dinosaur. he knew that we were going to bring it back to hill city. he was completely in favor of that. he knew about the museum we were building. he knew we were going to be
pete wants it this way. he wants this specimen available to everybody. it was so beautiful. just the preservation was incredible. it was just, wow. everybody knew about sue. we hadn t made any secret of the fact that we d collected her. we had 2,000 visitors sign this little guest book that went way in the back in our warehouse to see the skull of sue. i was just totally flaber gasted when i saw the specimen. first of all, the size is just so imposing. but what i was more amazed by was what a great job they were doing preparing the specimen. i d heard inklings that the black hills institute boys had found something. one of the first things i saw was actually, you know, part of the skull of sue still encased in matrix. 65 million years later, this animal really had the power to give you goose bumps. to see the look on pete s face and neil s, those guys were just like proud papas. they would inform you. they would go do classes at school for the kids, so it was very education