F a m i l y F e s t i v a l s &

VIVA LAS AESTHETIC!

OCT. 4-7

››› If you want to know what Duck Duck Shed references, you’ll have to track down the heralded book Learning From Las Vegas (totally worth it, too). But for our purposes here, the curiously named festival — comprising several separately ticketed events — will sprawl out to various parts of the city in celebration of its architecture, design, and culture. From Debbie Reynolds and the lore of Downtown to the use of light in casinos and a tour led by architects — the beautifying and enriching of Las Vegas will be the baseline theme of this relatively new cultural institution. Locations, times, and ticket prices vary, duckduckshed.com

In The Name Of Love

OCT. 6-7

by MIKE PREVATT

››› Forty years ago, the city’s first Pride celebration mainly consisted of seminars and lectures at UNLV (and, yes, some afterparties at the local gay bars). Now, it’s a full weekender with one of the nation’s few LGBTQ nighttime parades and a Saturday festival — meant to both unite and celebrate one of the most dynamic queer communities anywhere. 4th Street in Downtown (parade), Craig Ranch Regional Park (festival); 6p (parade), 12-11p (festival); free for parade, $10-100 for festival, lasvegaspride. org

Movies Among The Mountains

OCT. 7

››› Ever see a Super Summer Theatre musical in the majestic environs of the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area? Imagine catching a few flicks in the same setting. That’s one of the major perks of attending the Wild & Scenic Film Festival, which focuses on environmental and conservation activism. There’s also food, a raffle, and a community fair that puts faces to the causes fighting for Las Vegas’ glorified — and glorious — backyard. Spring Mountain Ranch State Park, 4:30-9p, $12 in advance, nevadawilderness.org

Splendor In The Dam Grass

OCT. 7-8

››› Just how big is Boulder City Hospital’s Art in the Park? The annual creative confab (and Boulder City Hospital fundraiser) claims to draw 100,000 people a year and takes over four city parks. If you’re looking to swap out your Wayfair affirmation canvases with artwork that required a palette and a pulse, you’ll have plenty to consider here.

Wilbur, Bicentennial and Escalante Parks, Sat. 9a-5p, Sun. 9a-4p, free, bchcares.org/ art-in-the-park

Fall Into A Solar Eclipse

OCT. 12-16

››› White Pine County will celebrate being situated in the path of totality by throwing a party, the Ring of Fire Eclipse Festival. Billed as a community-wide event — enlisting businesses and local governments “from Schellbourne to Baker” — the festival promises a wide range of events, from the usual food, music, and pub crawls, to the more unexpected Tai Chi, 5K run, and … a Hip Hop dance party?

The staple will, of course, be skygazing. Locations and times vary, free, elynevada. net/ring-of-fire-eclipsefestival

Some Knave

ALL

OCT. 13-15

››› Back in ye olde family-friendly Strip days, Excalibur was as close to middle-age England as you could get this side of the Atlantic. Now that it looks more like a medieval Westfield Mall in Bethesda, the Age of Chivalry Renaissance Festival is your best bet for Anglo-Saxon reverie. The commitment to theme is unassailable; expect jousting tournaments, artisan wares, historical reenactments, and medieval surgeon demonstrations — minus any insurance preapproval tomfoolery!

Sunset Park, Fri. and Sat. 10a-10p, Sun. 10a-5p, $8-45, lvrenfair.com many violent episodes and sexual themes that adults thought twice about reading them to their kids. But time has softened the infamous stories, thus giving the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District confidence in branding its second Haunted Harvest event with the worlds and characters of the Brothers Grimm.

As for activities:

Ghosts Out To Socialize

OCT. 19-22

››› Most adults can’t handle the usual Halloween haunt attraction — you know, the makeshift mazes with Hefty trash bag walls and carny-like scare actors — let alone kiddos. That’s partially why Springs Preserve established Haunted Harvest, where the young ones can trick-or-treat, game, craft, and traverse a mellower macabre maze without the PTSD. Springs Preserve, 5-9p, $8-12, springspreserve.org

BUT WILL THEY READ ‘THE CHILDREN WHO PLAYED SLAUGHTERING’ ALOUD?

OCT. 21

››› Grimm’s Fairy Tales is a curious theme for any children-friendly event, given that the collection of stories traditionally featured so

Trunk-or-treating, face painting, and shadow puppet shows highlight this daytime Halloween alternative. Centennial Hills Library, 2-6p, free, thelibrarydistrict.org, 702-507-6100

A Little Merriment With That Mourning

NOV. 1-2

››› There’s no shortage of Dia de los Muertos festivals on the Southern Nevada calendar, but the abuelo of all of them may be Clark County’s Life in Death Festival. While attendees can simply observe the performances and art that honor the dead and poke fun at mortality, they’re encouraged to build ofrendas (altars) and read calaveras (memorial poems) made for loved ones who have passed on. This year, the county is offering a $500 stipend for each of the three best ofrendas Winchester Dondero Cultural Center, 5-9p, free, clarkcountynv.gov, 702-455-7340

Slice Of Life

NOV. 4

››› There’s a festival for everything nowadays

— many totally unasked for (see: festivals for underwater music and cheese-rolling). But this one’s a no-brainer: It’s for pizza. The one dish perfect for any hour of the day, the one nearly impossible to screw up (silenzio, pineapple despisers), the one most likely to reduce its consumer to awkward moaning sounds on sight. Your ticket to the Las Vegas Pizza Festival comes with unlimited samples of the valley’s best pies, made by a royal court of world-famous pizzaiolos residing in Las Vegas. The Industrial Event Space, 1-4p, $75-135, vegaspizzafest.com

New Vegas In An Old Saloon

NOV. 11-12

››› If playing Fallout: New Vegas in your mancave just isn’t enough anymore, the folks at the NCRArmy have an event for you. The second annual Fallout: New Vegas Festival will be a cosplay ’n’ camping Xanadu for fans of the video game. Buy a ticket, amass your prepper gear, and consider this a dry run of our post-apocalyptic future. The Pioneer Saloon, 7a-7p, facebook.com/ncrarmy

The murders of Newborn and Shersty reverberated throughout the Vegas underground scene. Things had already been getting tense for a while. Poet and artist John Emmons was shot behind Cafe Copioh in late 1994. Dancer Ginger Rios disappeared from a Maryland Parkway spy craft store in 1997, her body found months later in the Arizona desert. Heroin use ran rampant, ruining young lives — some permanently. For many local artists and musicians, even those unaffiliated with ARA or Unity Skins, Newborn and Shersty’s murders were the last straw.

“Spit had been one of these pivotal linchpins for this community,” says Meagan Angus, a Las Vegas native and active member of the Maryland Parkway coffeehouse scene. “The idea that an archetype could be snuffed out so easily freaked me out. It freaked out a lot of other people.”

Angus moved to Seattle not long after the murders, part of an exodus during the late 1990s and early 2000s that included many of her friends and acquaintances from the scene, including Keith Haubrich, a percussionist who first encountered Newborn at the Underground record store on Twain Avenue before they became regulars at area poetry readings. For Haubrich, the “dispiriting aspect of friends being murdered” was just another nail in the coffin of a scene whose touchstones — such as the beloved independent record store Benway Bop and KUNV 91.5 FM’s “Rock Avenue” programming — were rapidly disappearing.

“I never felt like Vegas was the place I’d want to grow old in, start a family in,” Haubrich says. “I knew I did not want to stay in Vegas.”

For those who were much closer to Shersty and Newborn, however, their killings were more than just representations of a cultural movement in decline. They had a more direct impact on their existence — emotionally and physically.

“There was a lot of paranoia,” Hodges says. “You didn’t know who to trust. I was fired from one job because the owner of the establishment was afraid that the violence would target his business. I left Las Vegas around six months after the murders. I just didn’t want to look over my shoulder everywhere I went.”

That sentiment was echoed by LeGere, whose last few years living in Las Vegas before relocating to Chicago in 2003 left her feeling like she “didn’t want to be out.

“I personally felt like I didn’t want to be seen. I just wanted to lay low,” LeGere says. “A lot of people, I think, felt that if something like this can happen, then no one’s safe anymore.”

Shyne says the death of Newborn, in particular, left her feeling like “the only one like me left.” After the murders, she says, she was spit at and called the N-word by a female skinhead during a show at the Huntridge Theater. Suddenly, the scene in which she’d felt refuge and comfort for so long now left her feeling “very alone.”

And Margaret Newborn, who was no stranger to casual racism merely for having grown up Black in America, experienced a new level of terror from people who otherwise, she says, she “would know nothing about.

“Within the first year of his murder, I was receiving correspondence from — we’ll call them haters,” Newborn says. “I had never experienced anything like that before. It was really, really scary. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot of them are just mouthpieces. But I know that some of them will or want to act on that hate.”

At John Butler’s murder trial, his friend Joey Justin testified that when he, Butler, and Melissa Hack encountered the ATV riders on the morning of July 4, they were, indeed, picking up incriminating evidence that had been left behind the night before. However, Butler’s attorneys claimed that their client was only aiding Ross Hack and Daniel Hartung, and that they — not Butler — planned and carried out the murders.

The jury was not convinced. They found Butler guilty of both murders and recommended the death penalty. He was formally sentenced to death in March 2003.

“I had always been a supporter of the death penalty up to that point,” LeGere says. “And I realized that no matter how much I hated this person for what they had done, they had a family and they had parents that maybe cared about them the way that I cared about Spit. I couldn’t handle knowing that I would put them through that kind of grief, the grief that I was feeling for my friend.”

Butler appealed his sentence almost immediately, based on what his legal team perceived as procedural errors in the sentencing phase of his trials — including a claim that the trial court erred in allowing the state to introduce evidence about his INS gang affiliation. In 2004, the case went to the Nevada Supreme Court, which ultimately agreed with Butler, upholding his two convictions for first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon, but vacating the death penalty sentence and remanding the case for a new sentencing trial. After a new penalty hearing, Butler’s sentence was reduced to life without the possibility of parole.

“I am disappointed that John Butler’s death sentence got overturned for a couple of reasons,” Margaret Newborn says. “One is because there’s no need for a person that can do such a thing. There’s no need. But also, I am not ashamed to say that I wanted to see him die. I wanted to see him executed. And when that all changed, I was robbed of that.”

Even after Butler’s fate was finally sealed, the murder investigation remained open. But the hope of nabbing anyone else for their involvement in the murders seemed thin. In 2008, Ross Hack returned to the United States and was arrested in a passport fraud case, ultimately convicted and sentenced in 2009 to three years in a federal prison. This put him in the sights of the grand jury investigation that the U.S. Department of Justice was running — the murders happened on Bureau of Land Management land, which falls under federal jurisdiction.

Butler, who failed to appeal his conviction again in 2010, started talking to federal investigators. This led authorities to start sniffing around other suspects again, including Leland Jones. And with the help of Ross Hack, the FBI finally had tracked down the “unknown woman” who’d aided Melissa Hack in luring Newborn and Shersty to their deaths — even if she wasn’t exactly an ideal informant.

“Mandie Abels was just a hot mess with her drug addictions and other problems,” says Kathleen Bliss, who was at the time the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case. “The FBI agents started working on her to try to see if they could get some information out of her because she was there at the time of the murders. She actually cooperated and gave statements.”

And then in the summer of 2011, Bliss received a lucky break in the form of Daniel Hartung showing up at her downtown Las Vegas office, riddled with guilt, to confess his involvement in the murder plot. They met with defense attorney Karen Winckler, and Hartung agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and testify at trial. Prosecutors also got Abels to do the same, and she was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

“It was just a matter of tenacity and piecing together information and getting some good luck,” Bliss says.

Then, that luck began to run out. In February 2012, Ross Hack, Leland Jones, and Melissa Hack were indicted on murder and firearms charges. Although Melissa Hack also ended up going the same route as Abels, pleading guilty to conspiracy and cooperating with federal prosecutors for a reduced sentence, Hartung was killed in an automobile accident in April 2012 — which meant his statements could not be used at trial because the defendants would have been deprived of their constitutional right to cross-examine.

Nonetheless, Melissa Hack, Abels, and Butler all testified at the August 2014 grand jury trial of Ross Hack and Jones. Despite their corroborating stories that detailed the events of July 3 and 4, 1998, defense attorneys convinced the jury that without physical evidence, they could not convict. Both Ross Hack and Jones were acquitted.

“In the end, the fact that the DOJ failed to make those cases, that the jury rejected them, seems to me a miscarriage of justice, frankly, and kind of shocking,” the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism’s Heidi Beirich says. “I think Melissa Hack was a pretty convincing (eye) witness ... So, what does it take to show who was involved in the situation? It’s kind of amazing that that wasn’t enough to sway the jurors.”

Before testifying at the 2014 grand jury trial, Butler was reported as having been removed from state custody — not an abnormal situation, given he was testifying in a federal murder trial against his co-conspirators. But still today — almost a decade later — his location still shows as “Out of State Confinement” in the result of an inmate search on the Nevada Department of Corrections website.

When asked about Butler’s current location or status, a Nevada Department of Corrections representative would not provide any information, stating only, “Due to inmate confidentiality, you would not be able to get an update.”

Chapman University professor Simi has a theory that Butler worked out a deal to snitch on the Aryan Warriors, a white supremacist prison gang for whom he was considered a “shot caller.” For Margaret Newborn, even the good that may come from such an arrangement does not make up for Butler’s unknown whereabouts.

“And even if that were so, then where is he?” she says. “I mean, even if they’re in prison and they’re under protection, I mean, come on now, what do you say? So, you’re saying the Aryans run the prison. You cannot control where you put someone you know you need.”

Because of Fagel’s long experience as a member of law enforcement, he’s not optimistic about Butler’s current whereabouts.

“I’ve seen the FBI check a guy out of prison and never put him back,” Fagel says. “They literally checked him out and put him in a safe house down in San Diego and then just kind of petered out on watching him and eventually he walked away from that. And that was the end of it. And even the Bureau of Prisons in Nevada, is like, yeah, once an inmate gets removed and they don’t come back, it’s like the system just boots them out eventually. So, I would not be surprised. Hopefully he’s not in the wind.”

Every year in the weeks leading up to and on the actual Fourth of July, social media timelines fill with posts commemorating the anniversary of Newborn and Shersty’s murders. Many are from those most closely impacted by their deaths — family, friends, former coworkers.

“To this day I’m still shocked and saddened and just still can’t believe that something like that could happen to such a small, underground portion of the world that I lived in,” says Chad Simmons, an artist and labor activist who documented the Vegas punk scene in the ’80s and ’90s on video tape. “What happened to Spit and Dan, it was a terrible thing, and we will forever mourn them.”

The online remembrances of the murders and their victims aren’t limited to those who knew Newborn and Shersty personally — organizations whose values are aligned with the cause for which the pair fought also spread the word each year. And as a result, every July 4 sees more people unfamiliar with the murders discover what happened. Thurston Moore of pioneering indie rock band Sonic Youth shared the story on his Instagram account in 2021.

“It’s really one of the only examples of anti-racists getting murdered by white supremacists, certainly at that time,” Beirich says, explaining the outsized impact of the killings. “And it was a pretty serious case: Two people were dragged into the desert, shot and beaten, and murdered for standing up for fairness (and) diversity. And it was scary.”

It’s hard to think about the unintended sacrifice Newborn and Shersty made fighting against racism and for a more united world, considering the turn the country’s taken in the last decade, from the rise of the “altright” and groups like the Proud Boys to anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric since 2016 that has correlated with a surge in violent hate crimes across the United States.

“I would like to think that things have changed, but I just don’t know if that’s true anymore,” LeGere says. “Things seem very cyclical. Just the current political climate and the senseless killing that goes on constantly in our country makes it seem sometimes that nothing has changed.”

When Lin Newborn was taken from this world, he left behind not only a legacy of anti-racist activism that inspires countless people to this day, but also a then-two-yearold son, Nicodemus, who Margaret Newborn calls “the spitting image” of her younger brother. Now 27 — an age his father never got to reach — Nicodemus is himself the father of a young son.

“He’s an awesome young man, but he’s deeply affected by what happened with his father,” Margaret says. “He wants to fill his father’s shoes. He wants to honor his father with his daily living. He struggles sometimes with the emotional part of what happened to his father, but he doesn’t let that stop him. It’s just too bad that he didn’t get to know his dad.” ✦