Silveria

Well, he wasn't locked up in June 1982.

This is from June 23, 1982

Haha, This was not the plan today but I definitively know what murders RS was referring to. I found them before, but it seemed like a bad match. A little more looking and I found lots of unsubstantiated stories. Richard Cowan and Benardatte Doiron were murdered by Robert "Bobby" Henry Bone and Lloyd Wilson in 1987. The stories in the newspaper state the motive as "The woman testified that, fearing for her safety, she had lied to Wilson and told him that Cowan and another man had raped her." www.havredailynews.com/story/2010/01/23/local/bone-faces-hearing-on-murder-parole-violation/419215.html
What I don't like about the official story is, why kill the girlfriend? Why add to the body count unnecessarily?
Now comes the conspiracy web. Apparently Richard Cowan was wanted for violating parole and talking about making a deal. At risk were a local Prosecuting Attorney, a prominent banker, and a family with a very large grow operation. "About that time we had a double homicide, a man by the name of Richard Cowan and his girlfriend, Benardatte Doiron. Richard had violated his probation. There was going to be a hearing over the violation. He spread around to people that he was not going to jail. He was going to rat on this big drug operation that included people in high places in Chinook and Havre. He never showed up in court. This was at the end of January. At the end of February we found out that this man and his girlfriend were buried in the crawlspace of a farmhouse in Blaine County. Circumstances led me to believe there was more to this than the sheriff's office was saying. People started calling me, and I eventually ran onto a person that I think was the last friend of Richard to see them alive, within 30 minutes of their killing. I had to interview this fellow out in the country, because he was afraid for his life. He said Richard had told him, if he gets killed, it's going to be a certain name I refuse to give."https://www.afrocubaweb.com/montananarcomurders.htm

The theory strings in the Kurth family. Ranchers severely in debt, who turned their farm into one of the biggest grow ops in order to save it. Their involvement in the murders seems the least likely of the conspiracy theories as they had no prior history in illicit trade or violence. " In 1985 a family of beef ranchers named the Kurth family in Fort Benton, Montana made a desperate decision. Due to massive drought and an already lean beef market, the Kurth family found themselves 1.2 million dollars in debt to Northwest Bank. After the bank froze their credit, the family met with a loan officer at the bank. The desperate family asked the loan officer, Floyd DeRusha, if there was anything they could do to recoup the losses. DeRusha reportedly said jokingly “other than growing marijuana, I don’t know what you can do. Why don’t you try that?”. The irony of the loan officer’s statement became self-evident only months later when Richard Kurth, the father of the family, picked up a magazine and happened on an article titled “Marijuana Savior of the Family Farm.” After reading the article in which it touted cannabis as a new cash crop, Richard made a conclusion:

“I came up with the rationalization that people who own distilleries, whose product leads to drunk-driving deaths, sleep at night. So do the people who sell cigarettes, which kill thousands of people from lung cancer. We had to believe that what we were going to do wasn’t any worse than what they did.”

Towards the end of their endeavor, the people they dealt to were shaking them down, the man who supplied their first seeds wanted a straight up cut of ongoing profits. I'd think it would be in the best interest for the dealers if the farm kept operating, even if unhappy with their cut. That's why I really don't think the dealers ratted them out, I'm a little less sure about the seed guy. Anyway this is how it ended up going down.
" In October of 1987, while Dick and Judith were away on a business trip to Spokane, Washington, five men claiming to be from the Drug Enforcement Administration showed up at the Kurth’s ranch, beat up Doug, Rhonda and Bill, the Kurths’ children, and tied them to chairs. They then proceeded to take 400 marijuana plants. The next day, after Dick and Judith’s return, a man who said he had been at the ranch the night before called and demanded $25,000 by that afternoon “or else he’d call the real DEA and have us busted.” Panicked, the Kurth Family immediately decided to destroy the rest of their crop rather than risk the chance of arrest and prosecution at the hands of the authorities. The family was still destroying the marijuana when a cloud of dust appeared over the dirt road leading up to the ranch, heralding the arrival of legitimate lawmen, a posse from the DEA and the local sheriff’s office. Dismayed, the family realized the would-be extortionist had made good on his promise, and the law was at their doorstep. “I think everyone was crying just because it was finally over and we were so relieved,” Dick said."
planet-3.org/the-peoples-plant-part-3-kurth-your-enthusiasm/

Thanks for saying that hope! I've seen several recognizable surnames in different unrelated crimes, and I'm always initially thinking, Holy crap, I gotta share this!. I find them randomly googling crimes that are mentioned specifically in the keddie case. I gotta say, these aren't that obscure of names, but still its kinda weird. Over the past week I've come across a few and don't recall which is which, but I'm thinking Spang?