BENTON - Kirk Lane, Benton's newly appointed police chief, kept his job Monday night after the City Council heard impassioned pleas from several residents who pointed to claims that he was involved in the suspicious deaths of two teenagers in 1987.
In a rare move, the council met in executive session to discuss Lane's employment. The vote to overturn his appointment was five to five, with a two-thirds majority needed for action. The fifth vote against recalling Lane's appointment was registered because one alderman was absent.
Several area residents, including the mother of one of the boys whose bodies was found on the railroad tracks, told City Council members they can't trust Lane and that his appointment threatens the credibility of the Police Department and the city. Some of the residents carried yellow signs with a slash through Lane's name.
A retired police sergeant and two attorneys with experience as prosecutors praised Lane as an exemplary lawman who doesn't deserve to face such false accusations.
Lane, who was a captain overseeing criminal investigations in the Pulaski County sheriff's office before Mayor Rick Holland named him chief last month, said in an interview that he was shaken by the persistent claims that he was involved in the deaths of Kevin Ives, 17, and Don Henry, 16.
He said he would like the case to be reviewed again so he and everyone else involved could get closure.
"This investigation really needs to be looked into," Lane, 47, said about what has been dubbed the "boys on the tracks" case.
He expressed sympathy forLinda Ives, the mother of one of the boys, who has long believed Lane and another lawman killed the boys. Lane said she believed the worst about him because the investigation "never gave her anything else."
The boys' deaths remain a mystery that continues to spawn new theories and open old wounds.
Initially, investigators believed the two fell asleep on the tracks in a drug-induced stupor. A grand jury investigation later determined they had been victims of homicide.
No suspects were ever named, and no arrests were made.
Ives has maintained that the pair were killed in a drug-smuggling cover-up, a notion she promoted in a 1996 movie she was involved with that named Lane and others as possible suspects.
Lane has denied any involvement and took the filmmaker to federal court to defend against charges made in the movie. He and Jay Campbell, a former lawman now in prison over an unrelated crime, won the defamation suit, but it was overturned on appeal.
On Monday, Ives told the City Council she wanted Lane'sname in that movie, Obstruction of Justice: The Mena Connection, because her review of case files convinced her he was involved.
She urged the aldermen to overturn Lane's appointment out of "decency" even if they did not believe, as she does, that he was a murder suspect.
"I have no [illusions] that anybody is here tonight going to determine whether Kirk Lane is guilty of anything," she said before laying out a case on why the City Council should believe he was involved in the case.
Holland, who is a friend of Lane's and has praised his credentials and shrugged off any implication in the decades-old case, offered no input during Monday's meeting.
Arkansas, Pages 9, 14 on 01/13/2009