permission of the federal government to begin with. so that s what ended it. fossils are land. judge batey said actually in his filing that the sale was null and void. the government took the position that he had no authority himself to enter into agreement with the black hills institute. peter realized that he could not have his fossil back. he was devastated. the judge decided that sue was real estate. sue, the fossil, was real estate.
institute officials thought their problems were over when kevin schieffer was replaced as u.s. attorney, but apparently they continue to be the target of the federal government. we have a federal search warrant issued by the u.s. district court and we re serving a search warrant. enormous amount of money the government is spending to put one person or one group of people out of business, that s so vital to a community. it s been nearly 18 months since sue was seized from this warehouse and still no charge charges have been filed against the institute. allow us some rights. charge us with something. let s go to court. let 12 people decide. i couldn t give them any information to help incriminate people at black hills institute. they thought i was going to be able to tell them all sorts of terrible things the institute did. well, they didn t do anything wrong.
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. defendant eddie coals and terry wince were not convicted on any charges. as the verdict was announced, it was almost impossible to believe that the defense had 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
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 educational for all of us, and i learned a lot from that. ever since we created that little museum on our parents ranch, it s always been our dream to have a museum here in hill city. and finding sue the tyrannosaurus rex, here s the anchor for the museum. the whole town is behind us. it s going to put hill city on the map in a way that it s never been on the map before. didn t matter how many other projects we had going on. with sue, sue took precedence. we found out all kinds of cool things a
visited the black hills institute. and they weren t pirates at all. they had techniques they taught my crew. they were better than my crew. you have academias and these in these fights and now here s these really great paleontologists who don t need that system. back in the day in the early 1900s, collectors were, quote unquote, filling museums with specimens and working hand in hand, quote, academic people. that was an okay relationship. around in the 70s and 80s, that changed. 1980s, we re already seeing this schism between professional commercial collectors versus professional research collectors. this race to discover the earth s past is a very exciting one and people want a piece of it. sue had become a living entity to me after all our work in the field and what we were finding out about her life. and i really missed her when she was gone. so one way that i was able to sort of help that was to go and visit her and to talk with her through the window, looking at