'I'm a cannibal': Looking back at 1970 murder





EDITOR'S NOTE: On the 45th anniversary of the death of James Schlosser of Great Falls, Claire Baiz, a neighbor of the victim, seeks closure. Please note, this story contains graphic information.

On July 10, 45 years to the day after James Schlosser was murdered, dismembered and partially eaten, the murderer's sidekick will be set free.

Harry Alan Stroup, 65, isn't serving time for murder. He's serving eight years for intent to distribute methamphetamine. For his role in killing the kid who lived down the street from me, he served just two years.

Stroup was not the mastermind of this horrific murder. Stroup's partner, Stanley Dean Baker, claimed he wreaked all this havoc by himself.

In a Livingston courtroom in 1970, the jury didn't swallow Baker's claim. They found Stroup guilty of manslaughter.

A bad fishing trip

On Saturday, July 11,1970, the Park County Sheriff's Office received a call from a fisherman near Gardiner. He'd just pulled up the scariest snag of his life: a waterlogged human torso.

By Monday, that mutilated torso was on a table in the Park County Sheriff's Office, being examined by the FBI. The head and arms had been cut off. The legs were gone below the knee. On the chest, amid stab wounds, there was a T-shaped cut where the killer had opened his body to get to his innards.

Two things were clear: the victim was without a heart — and his murderer was heartless.

Corpse, crash and cannibals

Through a bizarre string of events, a quick connection was made between the corpse, a California car crash and the cannibal. By Wednesday, July 15, the Montana murder was national news.

Far away tragedy is one thing. When the victim is someone you know, it's something else.

The Great Falls Tribune described James Schlosser as a "Great Falls man." I remember thinking, hey ... that's not right. James was my brother's high school classmate. He wasn't a man, he was 22.

Schlosser's college graduation picture became his obituary photo. His hair was Brylcreemed back. James was wearing a starched shirt and black tie and one of those smiles that a shy person gets when a photographer cracks a lame joke.

My mother held the newspaper and cried.

Baker's and Stroup's booking photos showed raised chins, scraggly beards, open collars, unkempt long hair and an aura of obstinate indifference. Baker looked stoned.

The juxtaposition of these front-page photos said it all: a clean-cut kid picked up a couple of crazed hippie hitchhikers.

Two days after the murder, I turned 13. My friends looked more like the killers than the victim. I resented these guys masquerading as hippies, giving everyone with flowers in their hair a bad name.

Schlosser's story

The toughest thing about murder stories is that the victim is written out in the first few paragraphs.

James Schlosser deserves more than a few kind words. He was a big, quiet doughy kid with a quiet demeanor and thick eyeglasses. He was the kind of son who called his dad on a Friday afternoon to say, "Don't worry. I'm going fishing."

Schlosser's grocery store was two blocks from the house where my mom still lives, in Great Falls' modest lower southside. The outside was thin, barn red lath. Inside, dark aisles were packed tight with tiny cans and jars, barely wide enough for one narrow shopping cart. On Fridays, it smelled like fish.

James and his siblings helped their parents stocking shelves.

Elizabeth Schlosser, James' mom, operated the cash register, with her hawk eyes on quick-fingered 7-year-olds who loitered around the candy counter.

Pius, James' dad, was a rotund, bald fellow who faced the aisles in the back of the store behind a raised glass and enamel refrigerator case. The father of the boy who would be cut up and cannibalized was a butcher.

While Schlosser was growing up in Great Falls, Baker grew up in Sheridan, Wyo. Like Schlosser, Baker graduated in 1966. Baker had never been in trouble — not even a parking ticket. Stroup, two years younger, hung out with drug offenders in Sheridan, but neither young man gave any indication of the crime they would commit.

Let's picnic with cannibals

Baker and Stroup had left Sheridan in early June 1970 to "hitchhike around the West." On Thursday, July 9, the day before James Schlosser's murder, they'd made it as far as White Sulphur Springs, thanks in part to a ride from a Great Falls family.

The Scotts shared their picnic and talked about trains with Stroup, whose father was a railroad man. Mrs. Scott, whose 13-year-old son had fished out of sight with Baker, told the Tribune that she and her husband had picked up hitchhikers before, "But I don't think we will any more."

One murder/two stories

The afternoon of the murder, Friday, July 10, James Schlosser left work at the Musselshell County Welfare Office, headed for a fishing spot. On the way, he picked up two scruffy hitchhikers.

Baker insisted he was camping alone with Schlosser when a storm struck. Heat, thunder, lightning and LSD created a murderous mix. He said he shot the sleeping Schlosser in the head with a .22 caliber rifle, cut out the victim's heart and ate it, raw. Baker said he dismembered James and tossed the parts into the river. After this bloody mayhem, he testified he met up with Stroup and the two drove to Yellowstone Park, where they were turned away because the campgrounds were full.

The guard at Yellowstone Park claimed he turned away three people in Schlosser's car, which would mean Schlosser was still alive and both Baker and Stroup were with him. Later, the odometer on Schlosser's stolen Opel Kadett showed no detours for Baker to pick up his companion. Most important, Stroup's jury was unconvinced that Baker could butcher the 220-pound Schlosser by himself, let alone heave the torso into the Yellowstone river.

There may be some doubt about the murder, but no question what happened next.

'I have a problem. I'm a cannibal'

The dangerous duo got as far as Big Sur, Calif., in Schlosser's stolen car before they were in a hit-and-run crash. The other driver, a tourist from Detroit, drove the disheveled yet polite duo to a pay phone to call the cops. When he stopped, Baker and Stroup took off at a dead run.

California Highway Patrol Officer Randy Newton soon caught up with them on foot, on a dirt road.

"I have a problem," Baker said calmly, brandishing finger bones. "I'm a cannibal."

Whether the victim's fingers were snacks or morbid mementos, yes, Mr. Baker, you have a problem. You've given me one, too. I drive by the corner where Schlosser's grocery store stood and I can't help it: I see James, cut up with pieces missing, a gruesome version of a toddler's wood puzzle.

Big charges in Big Sky Country

Within 10 days of the murder, Baker and Stroup were extradited to jail in Livingston. Baker, unrepentant, underwent a mental evaluation. Stroup pleaded innocent.

On Oct. 20, while Park County prepared to try Stroup for murder, District Judge Jack Shanstrom sentenced Stanley Dean Baker to life in prison.

Montana locked Baker up but did not throw away the key.

'True friends are hard to find'

According to Bill Winter, The Associated Press reporter who covered Stroup's trial, there was local concern that bands of hippies might converge on Livingston for the trial. Turns out the only groupies that crowded the 75-seat courtroom were "elderly ladies bringing their lunches, as if attending a church picnic."

Winter wrote, "The star of the trial was not the defendant, but the sullen, sarcastic Baker ... who made a bit player of the thin, pale fellow who stood on trial for his life."

Baker put on quite a show. He claimed he was Jesus. He took responsibility, by sheer mind control from his prison cell in Montana, of causing the death of Jimi Hendrix via drug overdose, in faraway England. Baker even admitted that he considered killing Stroup several times, but decided against it because, "True friends are hard to find."

When asked about the murder of Robert Salem though, Stanley Dean Baker smiled and said under oath, "I respectfully refuse to answer on the grounds that it might incriminate me." Salem, a San Francisco lamp designer, was stabbed, mutilated and nearly decapitated in his posh San Francisco apartment in April 1970. The murder was attributed to a Zodiac killer copycat. It is still unsolved. Baker was in the Bay area at the time.

Shanstrom, who presided at Stroup's murder trial, remembers Baker as "a very proud, intelligent individual who could make a good impression — if you didn't know his background."

Baker did have one outburst on the witness stand. He told Shanstrom,"Go (expletive) yourself." Shanstrom, now a retired federal judge, reprimanded him.

The sly murderer replied, "What are you going to do? I'm already sentenced to life in prison."

Shanstrom halted proceedings long enough to increase Baker's sentence to "life plus 10 days."

Man slaughter

On Thanksgiving Day 1970, after 37 hours and 24 minutes of deliberation, a Park County jury convicted Harry Alan Stroup of manslaughter.

The verdict surprised observers, including AP reporter Winter and Shanstrom. More commonly reached in cases of auto crashes or hunting mishaps, Stroup's manslaughter conviction seemed to be "a compromise."

On Dec. 15, 1970, the 20-year-old was sentenced to 10 years.

Stroup was out in two.

The meaning of life (sentences)

The meaning of "life" evolves. It's also different in every state.

In 1970, Montana "lifers" could apply for parole in 12 years. Now Montana's minimum life sentence, according to Shanstrom, is 30 years.

Baker was out by Christmas 1986. That's 16 years.

In a Great Falls Tribune interview late that year, the victim's father spoke with simple resignation about Baker's parole. Pius Schlosser didn't think people who committed such heinous crimes should ever be released. The 82-year-old said, "I don't want to see him, anyway, that's for sure ..."

No Montanan wanted Baker here. He was released under the supervision of the Anoka County Corrections Department in Minnesota between 1986 and 1991.

That's when Baker was ambushed — by a TV camera.

The show was "A Current Affair," the television equivalent of those true crime magazines of the 1950s — and yeah, you got me: I was watching. It made me woozy, seeing Baker on TV, knowing he was on the loose.

Where are they now?

According to a 2009 story by Ruben Rosario in the St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper, when "A Current Affair" caught up with Baker, he was a top salesman at a sporting goods store.

After the television expose, Baker lost his job. Rosario reported that Baker died of liver cancer in Bemidji, Minn., on July 22, 1994.

If Baker was alive today, like Schlosser, he'd be 67.

Not-so-happy anniversary

This may be an old case, but it's not cold. In June 2015, Stanley Dean "Fingers" Baker was featured on the cover of True Crime Library magazine. Google "Stanley Dean Baker." There are more than 1,650 results.

After a pre-sentence mental evaluation in 1970, Baker was deemed competent enough to be sentenced to life in prison. By 1986, a parole board determined he was rehabilitated enough to be released.

Baker also had a nice picnic with a family of four the day before he cannibalized the kid who lived down the street from me.

On the 45th anniversary of James Schlosser's murder, when Harry Stroup walks out of a Wyoming halfway house for at least the second time in his life, a door will slam behind him.

For a few relatives, friends and neighbors of James Schlosser, it doesn't matter if that door is dusty or the crypts of the killers are rusted shut: In our hearts, this case will never quite close.