making and unmaking of a folk hero: The Ellie Nesler story, The

Western Folklore, Summer 2000 by Frank, Russell

Thanks to Ellie Nesler, God bless her, There's one less molester around. (Delacy and Cole 1994)

Jamestown, Calif., April 2, 1993: I am twiddling my thumbs in the Tuolumne County bureau of the Modesto Bee, waiting for news to happen, when I hear traffic on the scanner about a shooting in the Jamestown court. I grab a camera and notebook and run down the street. Moments later, a woman in handcuffs, flanked by two sheriff's deputies, emerges from Jamestown Community Hall. I hold my camera in my palm, ready to shoot. Then I recognize the woman.

I met Ellie Nesler in 1984. I had just arrived in Tuolumne County after a two-year stint as a graduate student in Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. My plan was to write my dissertation about the conversations I would record among the old-timers who stopped by Bub Dambacher's mobile home every day to drink coffee and talk about the past. One of Bub's regulars was a skinny old joker named Ellsworth Starr. Among the occasional visitors were Ellsworth's three married daughters, Jan Martinez, Marrietta Adams and Ellie Nesler.

That fall of 1984, Ellie, her husband and her young son left for Liberia to mine gold. As evidence of the gold fever that was sweeping the Mother Lode during those years of soaring gold prices, I mentioned the Liberia bound Neslers in my dissertation.

The following spring, still dissertating, so running low on dough, I went to work for the local newspaper, liked it, and stayed with it. As a result, I continued stopping for coffee at Bub's long after I finished my research.

I don't think I "went native," exactly. But to see people every day for a year and more, and then suddenly stop seeing them, was to admit, if only to myself, that "establishing rapport" was wholly a matter of fieldwork strategy, that there was a sunset provision on my interest in my "sources"-a journalist's word that I prefer to the folklorist's "informants"-that having done with them, I had no reason to go on seeing them. And so, out of habit, out of fondness, out of an unwillingness to confront and confirm the exploitative dimension of fieldwork, I kept visiting, kept running into Ellie's father until he died, kept seeing Ellie's sisters and, when she came back from Africa, occasionally met up with Ellie herself.

And that is why, when I saw a shackled Ellie Nesler flash me a rueful smile as she slid into the backseat of the patrol car, I could not take her picture, though I had no trouble clicking off a few shots moments later when they brought out the body of Daniel Driver on a gurney.1

That day, and in the days, weeks and months that followed, I found myself in the awkward position of trying to get information from family members who were trusting me, as a friend of the family, not to write anything that would harm Ellie, the woman who carried a gun into a court of law and killed the man accused of molesting her son.

Sometimes during my frequent telephone and face-to-face conversations with Ellie's sisters they would reveal tantalizing details about the case, only to say, at the end, "But don't put any of that in the paper," or, "Save that for the book." And we would have to go back over the conversation and figure out just which bits could be printed and which could not. On several occasions Ellie herself made astonishing revelations only to touch me on the arm and say that what she had told me was "friend to friend." Worse still were the eye-popping conversations I had with Ellie or her sisters where nothing whatever was said about what was on or off the record but it was just assumed that I would "use my own judgment" and somehow know what was and was not suitable for publication.

My editors at The Bee felt just as uncomfortable with the situation as I did. On one hand, they knew my relationship with the family was giving me precious access to key players that other reporters did not have. On the other hand, they feared that my relationship with the family would compromise my journalistic objectivity.

All my access and on-the-record/off-the-record conversations came back to haunt me and my editors during Ellie's trial: I was subpoenaed to testify. So there I was, a folklorist transmuted by fieldwork into family friend, by economic necessity into a reporter covering the trial, and by subpoena, into a reluctant witness for the prosecution. The Bee didn't want me covering the trial after that. I went on attending, but, sprung from the daily reporting grind, I began looking at the big picture. As a folklorist, I saw Ellie Nesler as a living outlaw hero, worthy of a ballad cycle. As a journalist, I saw the press assuming the ballad singer's role.

This article is my first attempt, as a folklorist working out of a Department of Journalism, to come to terms with the folkloristic and journalistic implications of the Ellie Nesler story. An earlier draft plunged directly into a third-person telling of the tale, with my role in the newspaper coverage of the case boiled down to a footnote. I scrapped that approach because I thought it was deceptive. Just as everything I wrote about the Nesler case as a reporter reflected my involvement in it as a folklorist, anything I write about it now as a folklorist must reflect my involvement in it as a reporter.