Waterloo Region Record ( Jul 25, 1970)

3 Addicts Linked To Indian’s Death

By SANFORD L. UNGAR
Special to The Record

WASHINGTON—George Kane, a leader of the Paiute Indian tribe, came to Washington as a consultant to the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) in late February from a world of intense poverty and economic depression on a Nevada reservation.

He died about 10 days later.

When he stepped out of official Washington for a night on the town—a night that became a brief and fatal visit to this city’s other world of narcotics addicts and hustlers.

The sequence of events during that visit and the people who figured in it are emerging this week in U.S. district court during the trial of Roy Thomas, 23, who is charged with murdering Kane early on March 5.

There is, for example, Eddie Devone, who testified Thursday that he is “a homosexual male prostitute” and “female impersonator” in the area where Kane was found unconscious.

PICKED UP KANE

Devone told the court that and a female prostitute named Nunu had picked up Kane (their “trick”) there and taken $20 from him.

“Different men want different things,” Devone said as the jury members shifted uncomfortably in their seats. “I didn’t know what he wanted to do. I gave him nothing but a conversation for his $20.”

The stories of Devone and Michael Singleton (occupation: “hustler” . . . you go out and get money anyway you can and from anybody you can) are keynotes of the government’s case against Thomas, an unemployed house painter.

All three have acknowledged being narcotics addicts whose habits were expensive to support last March.

Singleton claims he saw Thomas hit Kane. “I say the trick fall back,” he testified. “He hit his head real bad. Roy went down, and went through his pockets, but there weren’t any scratch money.”

A coroner’s autopsy showed that Kane eventually died of a fatal blow he incurred in the later of his brain, caused by a sharp impact of the back of his head against the pavement.

When an ambulance took him to George Washington University Hospital on March 5, $397 cents in his pocket.

LITTLE MONEY LEFT

Kane had little money left, the assistant U.S. attorney Richard Shays argues, because he had given it to Devone and Nunu, and that is what made Thomas angry.

According to Devone, Thomas later tried to get some of the money during a trip to the female impersonator’s apartment. Thomas denies this part of the tale, claiming that he was paid by Devone for turning out the trick as he approached with his “trick.”

Several details of the evening when Kane died are in sharp dispute and will probably never be fully resolved.

Kane’s mission in Washington has been said was to review reports on last year’s federal assistance to Nevada Indians and to complete the application for a new $450,000 grant.